Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Ever wonder why it is called “Gamera Guardian Of The Universe”?  It’s not as if he’s guarding the universe. He’s only guarding Earth, which is just one planet. Sheesh.

 Gamera came out at the same time as Godzilla Vs. Destroyah. In this movie, Gamera fights gyaos, the only monster to appear in more than 1 Gamera movie, not counting Gamera. Gyaos might not be as powerful as Destroyah, but he still packs a punch. He can fire a yellow beam from his mouth, which never fails to make Gamera bleed his greenish-blue blood. Things blow up, and monsters fight.

Even though the talking scenes are boring, this is one of those rare instances where you should watch all that talking. They could be saying something important that you will need to remember in later Gamera movies.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus

Here's another review from my 12-yr-old son, Ian, whom I suspect will take over this blog before I know it.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus was a good movie, but it had too much talking.

When will I ever learn to skip through the talking scenes? Godzilla and Megaguirus do some fighting and things blow up. What more could you want? Well there’s nothing more I want, I just want less of something. The talking!

This movie was fun to watch, so you should see it. The female main character was kind of a jerk, but not that much. 

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

The Mill and the Cross

I’ve never seen anything quite like The Mill and the Cross.  The film, a Polish production, takes us inside Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Way to Calvary (pictured, above), painted during the runup to the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands.  Not only does it take us inside the painting, an already awe inspiring undertaking; it takes us inside Bruegel’s creative process, showing us his milieu and his sketches and his ideas and his vision for this masterpiece.

It does so while casting aside the constraints of narrative film.  There’s a general flow to the picture, but it feels more like a series of tableaux vivants.  In many sections, the painting comes to life with actors, extras, and animals doing their best to stay in position.  In others, the film gives us movement and dialogue that feels painterly, with a painter’s attention to compositions of light, shadow, drapery, and overall composition.  I’m no expert on Dutch painting – like most people with liberal educations, I have only a general knowledge of the “greatest hits” – but I felt like I was walking through a gallery, soaking in the very best of the art form.

Filmmaker Lech Majewski worked with International Herald Tribune art critic Michael Francis Gibson (author of a detailed analysis of the painting entitled, shockingly, The Mill and the Cross (2001, Aucatloss, Lausanne)) to build a film around and in this work.  He cast Rutger as Breugel, Michael York as his patron, and Charlotte Rampling as both the peasant mother of a Flemish youth tortured and killed by Spanish-paid mercenaries and Mary, Mother of God.  They’re fine.  They’re just right.  But Rampling, oh, she’s everything the devastated Mary should be.  With her stately beauty and her sad, sad eyes, she creates a gaze that takes in not just her own heartbreak, but the heartbreaking panoply of human cruelty through time. 

So, what is The Mill and the Cross?  What is it, really?  It’s an illumination, a meditation.  It’s one art form exploring another, to the enrichment of both.  It is, quite simply, amazing.  You haven’t seen anything quite like it.

Destroy All Planets

Here's a review from my 12 year old son, Ian:

Destroy All Planets was a fine movie, just fast forward through the talking. There aren’t any important plot details you need to know, just watch the fighting. There’s quite a bit of stock footage, but you should watch it. It’s stock footage of monster battles, so it’s worth watching. I watched all of it and I regretted it. The talking was a waste of time. Gamera fights an alien monster who resembles a squid. Viras is the name of the alien and his main attack is to form a sharp point with the three tentacles upon his head and jump forward, stabbing Gamera, thus making Gamera bleed a large amount of bluish-green blood.

This was not as good as Attack of the Monsters(Gamera vs Guiron), but was better than War of the Monsters (Gamera vs Barugon).

The Avengers

I suspect that The Avengers is pretty much the best movie about The Avengers that it’s possible to make.  Consider this:

·      There are several Avengers, all of whom we should care about.

·      They need something to avenge, something that we in the audience feel needs avenging.  The audience needs to cry.  Then, it needs to get mad.

·      People liked Iron Man more than they liked The Hulk.  Message: make ‘em laugh; don’t make ‘em think.

·      Lots of stuff had better blow up real good.

Now, consider the following:

·      Joss Whedon is really, really good at screenwriting and directing.  His resume demonstrates an ablity to craft fully realized worlds, populate them with diverse and engaging characters, and give those characters interesting (and funny) things to say.

·      He’s not afraid to blow stuff up real good.

So, Item One: so many Avengers, so little time.  Whedon addresses this by taking characters who had been in bad movies (Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2) and cutting those film’s weaknesses.  Consequently, he capitalizes on their strengths.  Here’s a rundown:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s comic timing is Iron Man’s whole appeal.  Too much of it, however, and you want him to just shut up already.  The Avengers uses him enough to satisfy the audience’s thirst for its favorite player, but not so much that they hope for Sam Rockwell to show up and give ‘em a break.

Thor’s problem was that the whole movie was about two things: Thor’s magical transformation from dick to hero through the power of Natalie Portman’s smile, and Loki’s descent from someone who, reasonably enough, doesn’t like the dickish Thor to full-blown villain.  Here, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor begins the film understanding justice and humility while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki radiates gleeful malevolence.  Now, I’ve got a good guy I can root for and a bad guy I can boo. 

Edward Norton is a brilliant actor, no doubt about it.  But his Bruce Banner was just plain boring.  Eric Bana’s version, on the other hand, was masterful; but everybody (except for me) hated that movie.  Whedon’s solution?  Assume his audience already knows Banner’s back story and give us a whole new guy to play the character.  Mark Ruffalo plays Banner not as a rope about to snap, but as a decent guy with issues – a guy who can tell a joke.  We sympathized with Norton and Bana, but we like Ruffalo.

Captain America suffered from being just another origin story.  Its villains, extra-evil Nazis calling themselves Hydra, were an insult to every self-respecting actual evil Nazi still hiding out in Argentina.  I mean, c’mon!  How do you top real, historic Nazis for evil?  And Illinois Nazis don’t count.  Further, if you’re Captain America and you’ve already beaten the Nazis, where are you going to go next?  That’s why Loki’s the perfect foil: he’s the villain of Norse mythology, one of the touchstones of German National Socialism.  Further, Whedon leverages the fact that Chris Evans’s Captain America is an actual Army captain, schooled in small unit tactics and experienced in leading capable people under stressful conditions.  Throw in some fish-out-water material (he had to get the character to 2012 somehow), and you are maximizing the potential of this character.

There are other Avengers, like Scarlett Johansson, whom we like because she’s Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, whom we like because we remember The Hurt Locker.  And you know what?  It all works.  Whedon takes the best, most entertaining aspects of his characters, cuts the fat, and gives us concurrent arcs in which we can believe.  Success!

Item Two:  Whedon does give them something to avenge, and it works on a personal level.  This isn’t, “Hey, you wiped out a Dunkin’ Donuts, and now we’re really mad.”  It’s, “You have gone too far, and this shall not stand.”  Going in to the details would spoil the film, I think.  But I’m comfortable telling you that Whedon surprised me, saddened me, angered me, and made me hungry for revenge.

Item Three:  The Avengers is funny.  I laughed out loud more often than I did at Bridesmaids.

Item Four:  Lots of stuff does, in fact, blow up real good.

So, there’s all that.  There’s plenty that didn’t work for me, as well.  The “Let’s fight before we team up” stage went on a little long.  I’m convinced that Tony Stark’s true nature is that of an amusingly selfish jerk, sentencing us to film after film in which he learns to not be such a jerk, only so that he can forget those lessons in time for the next outing.  I never have been able to get past the fact that a hovering aircraft carrier is a profoundly stupid idea.  But that’s ok.  By taking the best of the films that preceded it, The Avengers crafts an exciting, spectacular, fun time at the movies.

Movies like this are what popcorn is made for.  Or shawarma.  Whatever.

Clash

Clash is a terrible movie.

A Thai martial arts picture, Clash has all the earmarks of a train wreck: lazy choreography, poor blocking, wooden acting, and a story that’s just plain dull.

Let’s start with the story: it’s a Maguffin hunt, pure and simple.  The heroes don’t say much.  The villain listens to opera and wears white shoes.  There’s a shootout at the end.  Boring.

Fact is, however, that you can get away with that in your action picture so long as the set-pieces work.  Clash’s don’t.  Yes, there are a number of good stunts.  But Clash doesn’t show me anything I haven’t seen before, and the blocking ensures that I’ll notice the inch between the foot/fist/weapon of one stuntman and the face of the other.

It doesn’t help when your leads know three expressions: scowling, sullen, and cackling. 

Not for one moment did I believe I Clash was showing me real people.  Not for one moment did I feel any sense of vicarious danger.  Not for one moment did I believe.

I was hoping for so much better.