Wanted (2008)

Story: Accountant Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is recruited into The Fraternity, a super secret group of assassins lead by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), by Fox (Angelina Jolie) to kill the man (Thomas Kretschmann) who killed his father (David O'Hara).

Once again we dip into the comic book adaptation well (not that I have minded), and we come up short. Don't get me wrong - I don't begrudge director Timur Bekmambetov and screenwriters Michael Brant, Derek Haas, and Chris Morgan for dropping a lot of the darker elements of the story. I doubt that many people would want to go see a movie about a guy who choose to become an evil assassin even if it did feature Jolie's bare bottom. There's plenty of other places you can see that anyway.

While this movie is amazingly fun while you are watching it, it's also silly and insane and chock a block of things that are best left unconsidered. If, for example, you find yourself wondering, "Weavers?" during the opening, don't worry. They'll get to it in Act II, and it still won't make any sense. Just forget about it. Pretty soon there will be a montage! Montage!

As far as popcorn entertainment goes, this one rates pretty high. It's faux deep, goes to unnecessary lengths to establish how much of a doormat Wesley is, and features a good balance of topless actors with curving bullets. Sure, I still got worried that Jolie might just turn around and eat McAvoy for breakfast, so great is her power (plus her cheeks looked a little gaunt in some scenes), but she also gives this fantastic "Who me?" shrug shortly after she kidnaps him that sums up the character in such a way that I wonder why we don't have her star in more action movies. At least we have wet, shirtless McAvoy and his motor mouth to keep us company in the meantime. B

Pop Culture Round Up: June 21-27

Warning! Political satire may affect your view of political candidates!

Sad.

Now Slate's in on the act? Do you want to know how much I treasure the semicolon? I once got out my white out pen and carefully altered a James Dean (shut up) poster with a comma because I felt that the semicolon was the correct punctuation. Do whatever you have to do to bring it back.

Crap. The situation just keeps getting more bleak for critics.

Oh, no, wait. Things are okay for theatre critics.

If you still want to give the impossible a try, here's some advice.

Oh, great. Now entire genres are dying. Or not. It's tough to tell with these articles.

Finally, some people are still happy about some things. Dennis Cozzalio would like to give you a primer in drive-ins, and Jack Coyle gives IMDb some props.

Sex and the City: The Movie (2008)

Note: I originally envisioned this as part of a "short take," but I abandoned the notion when I saw how long this was. Bear that in mind, as what follows is more of a rant than a traditional Feria Films review.

Spoiler-averse, take note of my lax attitude.

I love that unnecessary subtitle. It's like everything else in the movie. While Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) have been together since we last saw them and plan to move in together, an expensive 5th avenue (I think) apartment leads to a decision to get married, which leads to getting jilted, which leads to silliness. So then we backtrack over what are supposed to be Big's commitment issues, but it ends up being about Carrie's crazy self-absorption issues. This, my friends, is kind of fantastic (at least as a notion. Execution? Not so much). Since the chronically underused and under-appreciated Cynthia Nixon is the only one who gets anything resembling an emotional subplot (you know, other than Carrie), I'm going to just skip right over pretty much everything else. In the midst of my sickness, my boredom, and my annoyance at the two people who came in an hour and half (!) after the movie started and insisted on sitting directly in front of me (!!), who then had the temerity to start loudly asking questions as to what was going on (!!!), I realized a few things that I didn't already know about my feelings re: SatC (the series or the movie).

They are as follows:

1. I really dislike the way that all of these people have apparently sprung, fully formed, from the Hudson, so little do they have in the way of parents, siblings, or childhood homes. I know that it can be difficult to weave a lot of these things in without making them plot points (like the ep where Miranda's mother died or the recurring character of Steve's ma), but it's so hard to swallow that they just have no ties. It's not normal.
2. I also really dislike the over-reliance on the concept of a "good" person. Pretty much any show with no religious centre has the same kind of quasi-morality to it, so I know it seems strange to call it out this one time, but I found the scene where Charlotte (Kristin Davis) reveals that she's stopped running while pregnant because she's afraid of what might happen so ridiculous when she compares it to Big leaving Carrie and Steve (David Eigenberg) cheating on Miranda, things that shouldn't have happened in her view because they are "good" people. What is that crap? What does that even mean? How does that fit in with the world view of an Episcopalian turned Jew? Neither of those things have anything to do with the (debatable) fact that they are good people and everything to do with the fact that Carrie planned a huge wedding without consulting her husband-to-be and (not unkindly) steamrolled over him when he stated his objections plainly and that Miranda and Steve had a strained, sexless marriage. While neither of those things mean that they "deserve" to be jilted or cheated on, respectively, they also don't have anything to do with Charlotte's point.
   
3. I really like Big. Who knew? The only boyfriend of Carrie's that I remember particularly liking was Berger, and that was only for the half a minute he wasn't a terrible boyfriend and even then mostly because he was Ron Livingston. But I feel bad for the poor guy. Yeah, sitting outside and waiting for her to get there is douchey and not trying to reach her any other way than her cell phone (get a clue, buddy! Try another line!) is similarly stupid, but so what? He realizes his mistake pretty quickly and, standing there in the the street pleading with Carrie and getting pummeled by flowers, I felt bad for him. It's like the episode where Carrie wants to meet his mother and he says no, so she stalks them in church. No wonder he doesn't want to introduce you, you selfish bint! I agree that Noth looks freakishly well rested, though.
   

So, yeah. It's too long and possibly the most exciting part was the moment when I observed that Pret A Manger exists in NYC, which fueled my hope that the chain will one day make it to Canada. The plots run the gamut from silly to ridiculous, there's approximately 80 fashion montages, and problems are often magically resolved. So, pretty much just like the series! C+

Pop Culture Round Up: June 2 - 20

Watch this trailer and get excited.

While I do agree with Sars that the Proust Questionnaire makes him look incomparably douchey, Dana Stevens has arrived on the scene once again to start turning the whole thing around. How does she do it?

Ack! Film critics are an endangered species, and it's possibly my fault.

Or maybe they're scheduled for a comeback?

First The Guardian has me worrying about the semicolon; now the Washington Post wants me to know that the sentence's days are numbered. Apparently that might be my fault, too.

Oh, sweet fancy molasses. "A new paradigm"? It's been going on for a while now, there, Fraizer.

On a positive note, I totally cannot wait to witness this development. They are going to circle each other like hungry cats, I just know it.

And, if you only read one article from this list, let it be this one. It's as passionate and as personal as anything could be, and, given that information about festivals in Calgary really doesn't apply to me, all the powerfully written to get my breath catching in my chest.

The Happening (2008)

Idea: After an assumed terrorist attack hits Central Park, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) decide to leave Philadelphia to hide out in the country with Elliot's best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). When Julian decides to ditch Jess with Moores to go find out what happened to his wife, it's up to Elliot to protect them from what's happening.

Oh, you love it.

I think I am just going to come out and tell you what the Big Bad here is. It's all over the damn intertubes these days anyway, so you might as well hear it here last: it's the plants. There you have it. The plants are pissed because of pollution or global warming or some such, so they decide to get together and rapidly evolve some toxins to kill everyone in a tight north eastern corner of the US as a warning (or something). A guy (Horace, as he'll always be to me) who runs a nursery figures it out and just straight up tells Elliot, so there's really no reason for me not to just tell you.

Given that writer-director-producer M. Night Shyamalan himself lowered my expectations going into this thing, I even can't say that the bar was set too high walking in. Even so, I found myself in minor awe over how bad it was. I spent a good chunk of the movie (you know, after we all figured out that it was evil trees), looking at how bad Sanchez was, how completely out of left field Leguizamo's line readings were, how risible Deschanel's performance was, and how wildly unconvincing Wahlberg was at every turn, and thinking about how I would like to take the opportunity to have Wahlberg in particular meet me over at Camera 3 to discuss how he, himself, is better than this and that he, himself, should know better, when it occurred to me that this was all on purpose. The tin-eared line readings, the ridiculous turns of phrase (e.g. "the town of Princeton." Oh, thanks for that. None of us have ever heard of bleeding Princeton before, so I am glad you explained that it is a town. Maybe you should have also told us that it is in New Jersey in case we forgot about the whole nor-east thing), the habit of having Wahlberg look directly into the camera and utter things like (and I am not making this up), "Why are you giving me one useless piece of information at a time? What's going on? Hey, why would you just stop?" It was all on purpose.

And when you look at it that way, it's actually a pretty good B-movie. If that's the level on which it is meant to function, it succeeds for the most part (we'll get to the other parts in a minute). It's got a good combination of camp and gore, not wholly unlikely the seriously underrated Supernatural, minus the hard bodies, deep wells of angst, and tough guy jazz hands. For that reason, it's really only Shyamalan himself that I'd like to see over at Camera 3.

Camera 3: Dude, wtf? You think this is a B-movie? Have you seen a B-movie? Do you know why this doesn't cut it as a B-movie? Because it has moments of legitimately good filmmaking, which makes the rest of the laughably bad running time all the more difficult to bear. It's mean. You know, I get that it must be hard to be you, that you don't want to be the guy who does the movies with the twists nor do you want to be the golden child gone to seed. There's something almost Welles-ian about what's become of you, and that must suck. Too bad, so sad, let's move on already. First off, if you are going to make a B-movie, I would recommend that you go for broke, Grindhouse-style. Make the gore ridiculous instead of horrifyingly gross. Don't give us occasional sequences of genuine terror, like when the bodies come raining down on poor Richard. It should be silly. The bodies should have, I don't know, bounced or something. Do me a favour. Watch that scene where Elliot tries to talk a houseplant into not killing his family. Watch it again. Watch it a third time. That scene is funny. We weren't laughing because it was bad. We were laughing because it achieved its goal of being funny. Build from there. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until you listen: find a writing partner. Heck, find a story partner. Find someone whose opinion you trust and you'll listen to, and stick with that person. I have every confidence that you'll get richer rewards if you do.

As for the rest of you, if mostly laughing at a crappy movie and sometimes having to cover your eyes appeals to you, go for it. C-

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Story: After five years in hiding, an on-the-run Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) heads back to Culver University, site of his gamma radiation poisoning, to gather data that may help him find a cure. His plan puts him in Betty's (Liv Tyler) path and gets General Ross' (William Hurt) attention. Ross brings Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) onto his team to help bring Bruce in and is so impressed that he decides it might be time to revive the ol' super solider experiment.

Full disclosure: I never saw Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk. You no doubt already know that this movie isn't supposed to be particularly related to that one, although there are little bits here and there that suggest that having knowledge of the ins and outs of that movie wouldn't hurt. I've wanted to see the other version for some time now, especially given its latter day critical revival, but I've never quite gotten around to it. Now that I've seen this one, I just might.

Which isn't too say that this one is bad. It's not at all. I do wonder what kind of movie it would have been if Norton had been allowed to edit as well as do extensive, uncredited re-writes. Then he went a pitched what I now consider a classic Norton public pissy fit.* I suppose it's no different than an Alan Smithee film.

*He's the kind of guy that I like, but I wonder if he must difficult to get along with in real life. I don't mean to unfairly malign his character. He seems the it's-so-hard-to-be-this-smart sort, but I can't tell to what extent that comment should be sarcastic and to what extent it should be serious. Dude, maybe it is really hard to be Edward Norton.

I begrudge this movie for being so tight lipped. Banner's initial exposure, first Hulk attack, and subsequent life on the run are over and done with inside of an opening credits montage. We get a few snippets of exposition here and there, and it's obvious at several points that they are being deliberate obtuse in order to furnish further sequels. It wasn't even in the usual way, where something is left dangling shortly before the climax, and all of us who have seen a movie before know that that's going to be the basis of the sequel (although that happened as well), but several times in each of the acts did conversations and ideas worth exploring come to abrupt end instead of a conclusion. More true to life, I suppose, but this movie could have been improved by following even one of them through. Mostly I would one day like to know how Banner could be so stupid as to not realize what he was really working on and to test it on himself without having first tested it on, say, some sort of laboratory animal or similar.

Not that Norton makes Banner seem stupid. As Bruce, he's hemmed in on all sides by something he can't control and doesn't wish to, and Norton makes that play heartbreakingly without ever once being two-dimensional. Inside of Bruce is something that wants out, and he wants out of that contract, and neither one of them knows how to make that work.

Hurt is wonderfully gruff and arrogant as the General, and Roth makes a fantastic villain, largely because there's nothing all that villainous about Blonsky. He's a lifelong solider who wants to solider better. But it's really Tyler who shines as the fearless and devoted Dr. Elizabeth Ross. More so than anyone I've seen before, she creates a completely believable and touching relationship with mostly CGI creation. It's something other actors would do well to study.

Louis Leterrier's direction, while not particularly personalized, gets the job done. That's the movie in a nutshell. It gets the job done, doesn't screw anything up, and gives you more to go on in the future. Mind you, I could be biased because I'm pretty sure that anything with a Tony Stark cameo is going to look good to me. B

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Idea: After Harold Oxley (John Hurt) is kidnapped, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) teams up with Mutt Williams (Shai LaBeouf) to rescue Ox and, it turns out, Marion (Karen Allen) from the Soviets led by Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). They are all after the crystal skull believed to be the key to finding El Dorado.

Man, that was hard to write. Listen, for a straight forward action movie, there's a lot going on, and I don't want to give too much away. Actually, I want to give the entire movie away, which is why I should probably warn you know that there are spoilers ahead.

Okay, we good? People who don't want to spoiled about a movie that came out nearly a month ago have flown the coup? Great.

Aliens? Aliens? They went there? Oh, pardon me, "interdimensional beings." There's an extent to which I realize that maybe I shouldn't hold any of this against them, that I recognize that the movies are supposed to be this silly comic book-B movie hybrid adventure, and that I can forgive a fair number of flaws because Steven Spielberg remains an exciting director, at least visually. Even the concept of Mutt, Indy's long lost son, with the self chosen dog name and the Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones costume, works.

Now, I like LaBeouf. At least I think I do. I can see how he's poised to become a big star and the idea of churning out summer blockbusters for the next few years with a handful of other smaller, more serious pictures in between must be appealing to a young actor. I gave him props for making Transformers a lot more fun than it would have been with pretty much any one else in the role. But while he brings great energy to this picture, as he did with that one, there's something the matter with him. You know, besides his weird head. He lacks chemistry with pretty much anyone, and he doesn't have a lot going in the way of charisma either. Still, he's likable. Even so, I'm not sure I would want to see, as was so obviously suggested in this movie, a new version of the franchise with Mutt at the helm. I mean, would you really go see movies called Mutt Jones and the [whatever you go to after you already went there]?

Alright, I suppose previewing movies that don't even exist is beside the point. This movie's alright. It's fun and funny, making sure to poke fun at Indy's age without taking it too far. It does itself a favour by reviving Marion instead of sticking Indy with some age inappropriate partner. Mutt the concept works better than Mutt the actual character, particularly when he goes swinging through the jungle with the help of some rather kind primates, but it's not something that can't be improved with time.

Basically, it's not so bad that you that you'll ever find yourself wondering, "They restarted the franchise for that?" but not so good that you'll be able to stop yourself from wondering why they couldn't have come up with something just a little better in the intervening decades. At least John Williams' score is just as fun and as rousing as ever. B-

"So here's some advice I wish I would have got when I was your age: Live every week like it's shark week."

Hey, remember that time when you were like, "Hey, guys, don't you think Actor X is so hot?" and your friends were like, "Ew, dude." That time sucked. I know the feeling. Check it out five times over in my latest Culture article.

Also, sure, I talk a good game when it comes to movies, but what else can I do for you? Glad you asked. Starting this month, I will take on your problems, issues, and grammatical confusion in brand new advice column. Boy-girl stuff? I've got an opinion about it. Forgot what happened in that movie that time? I’ll figure it out. Can’t remember if “between you and me” or “between you and I” is grammatically correct? I’ll tell you, and I’ll probably make fun of you. Just don’t come at me with that damn “try and [verb]” construction. You either try or you do. Not both. It really gets my goat. Send your issues to advice@culturemagazine.ca, and check back in the Advice Tab.

Also also, since we are here, let's do some other little housekeeping things. I did go see Iron Man again, and it was just as awesome the second time around. The second act drags a bit the second time, but I still think the first is one of the best I've seen, so the grade stands. I've been thinking some more about Robert Downey Jr., and I think that perhaps his yell is akin to Joaquin Phoenix's whisper. You know how Phoenix plays all this different characters who mumble, smooth talk, and yell, but only once or twice a picture does he drop down to a whisper? And you just know that whatever is said in the whisper is the best insight you are going to get into the character, so you hotly anticipate it and keep it close in your mind for the rest of the film. RDJ's yell, specifically of another character's name, is like that in that it has the power to change your mind. Again, I know I sound crazy re: RDJ (although Sarah agreed with me about the thing we never heard!), but I'll tell you this. I've watched movies before. Like the rest of you, I've got a pretty good sense of what characters will live or die when it comes down to it. Still, even when I am assured of the outcome, RDJ's yell can make me think that that person might be in mortal danger after all. That's good stuff.