I've seen a few movies this "holiday season" and while I hope to post full-sized reviews in the days to come, I'm going to at least touch on them here, before I forget/get caught up in other activities. Again.
Dan in Real Life. I saw this on a date with the new Imaginary Girlfriend. She suggested it and I didn't know anything about it, but didn't object. It's not a movie I would have seen in the past, but that's at least partially since it's not the kind of movie Malaya would have wanted to see, and since we mostly saw movies we both wanted to see when we were a couple...
Quick plot rundown of Dan in RL. Mildly spoiler, but no more so than the trailer itself. Dan's a widower and a single dad, late 30s, with daughters who are about 10, 14, and 17. His wife died 5 years ago and he's apparently not dated since. Much to his surprise, the morning of the annual family Thanksgiving weekend reunion, he's off on his own at the local coffee shop when he runs into a woman who he clicks with immediately. They have a long conversation, lose all track of time, and she has to run off when she gets a phone call from her new boyfriend, who she was on her way to spend the weekend with. Dan gets her number, but thinks he's missed a great opportunity. Back at the family compound, he meets all his brothers and their families and the parents and kids etc, and when his younger brother brings out his new girlfriend... of course it's the woman from the coffee shop.
From there various dramedy complications ensue. Dan and the woman keep stealing moments to talk, while hiding the fact that they know each other from the rest of the family, Dan's youngest daughter feels neglected, the middle daughter is going through a slut phase and is in passionate puppy love with a boy she met three weeks earlier, all his daughters and the rest of the family love the brother's new girlfriend, Dan's torn between his fatherly duty, his brotherly love, and his own reawakened desires, etc.
At the time both the IG and me enjoyed the film. Me a bit more than her, since I appreciated the cleverness of the writing. Not so much the dialogue or characters, but the plot events dovetailed nicely. Oldest daughter is dying to get more driving experience, and when Dan loses his license she is able to come to the rescue. Middle daughter is wracked with puppy love issues and Dan can't relate, until he unexpectedly falls into infatuation himself. Plus others I can't remember at this point.
The day after seeing the film though, the IG and me were trading emails, and she said she hated the movie, in retrospect. She felt it was very manipulative and that the characters were flat and one-dimensional, especially Dan's parents. She hated Juliette Binoche, Dan's love interest. She didn't like Dan's 3 daughters, who were all one-note character types.
I agree with all of her points, but they didn't bother me as much. I did feel less charitably towards the movie the day after seeing it though. To the scores:
Dan in Real Life, 2007
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: NA
Eye Candy: NA
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 5
This one boils down to expectations, as so many movies do. I had no expectations going in, and was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the film. I enjoyed it at the time, and would have given it a 7 immediately after seeing it. It rotted quickly though, and by the time I wrote these scores a couple of days later (a couple of weeks ago), a 5 seemed generous. For me the movie hinges on the writing score, and that one is so arguable. The writing for the plot, continuity, dialogue, and the main characters (Dan and the woman) was good to very good. The writing for most of the supporting characters was awful, and they were almost all thumbnails of real people, cliched stereotypes who could all be comprehensively described with one or two adjectives. Adorable youngest daughter. Responsible oldest daughter. Insightful mother. Wise father. Horndog younger brother. Etc.
Furthermore, and again in retrospect, the plot was so featherweight that it felt entirely inconsequential, and perhaps even insultingly pointless. There was no real drama or emotion. Nothing important was ever at stake. Everyone has a happy ending after a minimum of difficulty.
If you go into the movie wanting a light, non-serious, non-thought provoking, minor-conflict, happily-ever-after family reunion/love story/comedy, you'll enjoy it. If you want more, you'll sort of enjoy it, until you wake up the next day feeling like you want your $8.25 back.
I've almost completely forgotten this movie already. I will have totally forgotten it by February, and will one day look at this review like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise; turning my head from side to side as I try to remember the movie in question, or the act of writing about it. At this point my most vivid memory of the movie was the really good bowl of stir fried noodles I ate beforehand, and the fact that the IG and me were the only two people in the theater during an early afternoon showing, and were thus able to discuss it in our normal speaking voices as though one of us lived in a great mansion with a hell of a private theater.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I saw this one with Malaya and a mutual friend in mid-December and wasn't real impressed. I knew almost nothing about it going in; Malaya wanted to see it after hearing a co-worker talk about how awful and dark and unredeemable the characters and events depicted in the film were. So off we went, and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to be the nasty noir it aspired to be. It's got lots of interesting characters doing awful things, but that sort of works against it since the performances and especially the writing isn't good enough to sustain the levels it sometimes hits. So it's uneven, but also it's like a good movie trapped inside a great concept, like two men in a horse suit impersonating a thoroughbred.
My view on this one, I must note, is far from the consensus. This is one of the year's best reviewed films, with tons of 4-star scores, and a very high average on RT and
Metacritic. To my scores:
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Eye Candy: 2
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 3
Overall: 6
Lots of reviews compare it to Tarentino, to his incomparably brilliant
Pulp Fiction, presumably, but I don't feel that's a very fruitful comparison.
Before makes liberal use of non-chronological scenes,
Pulp Fiction style, but they feel showy for the sake of being showy, rather than like they're an integral aspect of the picture. There's sort of a mystery that's unfolded during the flashbacks and forwards, but you know the whole story almost immediately, and the flashbacks don't present different takes on the same scene from different POVs, or give you info that's only explained/elaborated on by later (in the movie) earlier (chronologically) scenes. Furthermore,
BtDKYD has a lot of colorful characters, but they're pale shadows of the wildly-engaging, almost mythological individuals who populate
Pulp Fiction, and there's not a line of dialogue in the whole film that's as snappy or funny or catchy or intriguing as Tarentino's verbal ballet in Pulp Fiction.
The film
BtDKYD most reminded me of was
Fargo. It's nowhere near as good as that very dark bit of noir, but it aspires to be. The similarities come in with small time, incompetent crooks who plan a minor caper that painfully involves family members, which then spins wildly out of control. Avenging senior citizen fathers feature prominently in both films, losers trying to pull fast ones fail in every direction, etc.
BtDKYD lacks the humor of
Fargo, or shocking moments of sudden violence and pathos, and none of the characters are as detailed or interesting, and the plot isn't as surprising, but it's much more like weak Coen Brothers than weak Tarentino.
Much of the praise for the film seems to stem from the fact that its director, Sidney Lumet, is old and esteemed. Ebert, in his 4-star ode,
says, "[Lumet] has made more great pictures than most directors have made pictures..." That's fine, and I thought
Twelve Angry Men was brilliant the one time I saw it like 15 years ago, but don't let the fact that you admire the guy who made this film blind you to the fact that it's merely an adequate film with pretensions of brilliance.
National Treasure 2. I saw this with my mom and stepdad earlier this week, while vacationing in San Diego. It's essentially the first movie, which was surprisingly fun, with the plot slightly tweaked and the suspension of disbelief made far more difficult. Like National Treasure, this one will collapse like a house of cards in a high wind if you give the plot any real thought, so I recommend you don't dwell on it.
The history is wonky, the hidden treasures are unbelievable, the character actions and motivations are absurd, the bad guys are comical and non-threatening, the comic relief characters know their place, the riddles and mysteries are always unraveled in five minutes or less, the dialogue is stilted, and so forth. That's true of every Bruckheimer movie, though. I could overlook most of that. What tripped me up on enjoying this one was how cheesy it all felt.
In NT1: Cage's hero character was vulnerable and driven, and that made him sympathetic and likable. The bad guys were believably nasty and dangerous. The budding romance was fun to watch and semi-believable. The treasure was borderline believable and mysterious. The history was well-integrated, and the mysteries were fun and tricky, but still believably solvable.
In NT2: Cage's hero character is smirky and cloyingly noble and lecture-y. The bad guys are initially identical to the ones from NT1, but quickly fade in menace and become merely misunderstood (and in some ways, more sympathetic than the alleged "good guys") by the end. There are two budding romances, neither of which are very believable or compelling. The treasure is initially interesting, but quickly becomes absurd. The history is slapdash and about as well-researched as a wikipedia pop culture entry. The mysteries are very easy to solve once discovered, but getting to them requires unbelievable coincidences and conveniences.
To the scores:
National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, 2007
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: NA
Eye Candy: NA
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 5
It's not a bad movie, if you don't take it too seriously or expect too much from it. It does what it sets out to do, and is about as good as you might expect if you were mildly pleased by the first one, and have seen the trailer for this one. My biggest objection in the end was how cheesy and faux-noble everything is. There were some interesting twists and turns, but every time Cage's character opens his mouth, out comes an impassioned, noble, modest, decent, appealing to higher values, monologue that brings the movie to a screeching halt. His speeches might as well have subtitles reading, "How a good, civic-minded American would feel about this turn of events."
Speaking of turns of events, and movie reactions, I must mention the downfall of Roger Ebert. On Ebert's site
there's a link to his newest book, Roger Ebert's Four-Star Reviews, 1967-2007. The forty year time frame (41, actually) gives the title a nice symmetry, but with that 40 year span in mind, it's lucky Ebert didn't start writing reviews a couple of years earlier. If he had, and this book was 1965-1995, they'd damn near have a second volume ready to go, with the scores he's been passing out since narrowly surviving his lengthy illness.
His reviews are still well-written and entertaining and informative, but when he likes every movie, (he's got
six reviews up this week; four are 4-star and the other two are 3.5 star.) his opinion becomes a lot less valuable to me. True, he's only reviewing movies he wants to, and he's posting a lot of reviews of films he saw when he was too sick to write about them, and only bothering to write reviews of ones he saw and enjoyed, but must he like everything? Didn't he see any movies when he was sick that he thought sucked badly enough that he wanted to go back and vivisect them now that he's got the strength to wield his scalpel?
It's the man's prerogative to want to write about movies he loves, but as someone who much prefers reading 0-star reviews to 4-star reviews, especially when they're of movies I'll never see anyway, I must respectfully register my disappointment with and disagreement towards Ebert's altered career path. I must also point out that Ebert's approval of a film has now become essentially irrelevant. Since he likes everything, on one level or another, I can't take his opinion seriously. It's like judging tennis ball quality by timing the speed with which a golden retriever runs them down.
Case in point:
Sweeney Todd. I've not seen it, and I'm very unlikely to do so. Malaya did see it, while I was in San Diego, after a friend talked her into it. She didn't think she'd like it; she
was not enraptured by any of the previous Tim Burton/Johnny Depp musicals, and while she enjoys horror movies and Johnny Depp, she didn't want to see this one with the singing. She went anyway, and said she only kept from walking out on several occasions by exercising the utmost self control.
Unsurprisingly,
Sweeney Todd's
getting rave reviews. Critics always like movies that do things differently and originally, even if they're not actually any fun to watch. You'd feel that way too if you saw 120 mediocre formulaic crapfests a year. That's not very useful to us in the general public though, since we don't see 100+ mainstream Hollywood films, and therefore are not primed to enjoy anything that provides some novelty value.
On the other hand, Malaya absolutely loved Alien vs. Predator 2, which she also saw with a mutual friend while I was in San Diego. Awesome action, great battle scenes and a huge body count. What the first AvP movie should have been if it hadn't been written like it was some sort of very stupid videogame adaptation. She liked it enough that she says she wants to see it again, so we just might do that. Plus, AvP2 is not a movie the IG would be interested in, so there's no conflict there. We don't have any pending movie plans, with her out of town for another week+, but we both want to see Juno at the very least, so that should happen sometime early next year. Hopefully by then we'll have come up with a proper nickname for her! I could use a new one too, for that matter. I've been sick of "Flux" for years, but haven't cared enough to think up something new, or to simply transition to something eponymous. It seems a bit absurd to inaugurate a new online alias past the age of 30 anyway. Although, since this June I will be 29, again, I don't see why that should apply to me?
Labels: movie review, movies
