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Cowboys And Aliens

★★★☆☆

Directed by: Jon Favreau

Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Steve Oedekerk and Hawk Ostby

Based on the Graphic Novel by: Scott Mitchell Rosenberg

I like the premise of Cowboys And Aliens: Take a fairly stock alien invasion story and set it in an unexpected historical timeframe and watch the sparks fly. Of course, the movie isn’t as straightforward as that, and it seems to suffer badly from too many writers syndrome. Included in the fairly simple, promising premise is an amnesic hero, a mystery woman who can handle herself, a grizzled war veteran with a grudge against the hero, an unlikely buddy-cop formula, a young boy in a coming of age tale, several different rescue-the-beloved-family-member subplots, a proxy-son/proxy-father dynamic coupled with a real-son-who-is-a-disappointment and a burgeoning love story. If it sounds like a ridiculously over-complicated plot, it is, unequivocally.

It’s not that Cowboys And Aliens is bad, it’s just that with so many secondary characters and overlapping plot lines, the movie spends an insane amount of the two full hour running time dealing with backstories and relationship hassles and standoffs and squabbles that the titular aliens only seem to ever show up when the writers didn’t want to have to sort any of it out for real. As such, the aliens become sort of a plot macguffin, conveniently timing their attack at market-research-driven intervals when the audience starts to get bored realizing that there isn’t all that much mystery to Jake Lonergan (played with full-on damaged hero solemnity by Daniel Craig) and there’s not that much interesting about Colonel Dolarhyde (played with gruff, Air Force One stateliness by Harrison Ford). As in Tron Legacy, the standout is the surprisingly watchable Ella Swenson (played close to the vest by a confident Olivia Wilde) and Sam Rockwell makes the best of a necessarily under-developed Doc in his few real scenes, but by the time we learn the truth about Lonergan and find out the secrets Ella is hiding, the movie has started to wear out its welcome and I found myself slipping into impatient summer blockbuster watcher mode, hoping for something to explode again so I could stop pretending to truly care about it.

In the visceral, violent, special effects department, Cowboys And Aliens delivers eventually, but it’s only in aggregate until the final confrontation. The real problem is that Cowboys And Aliens misses the mark on two key points that it could have focused on to much better effect. One is that the film takes itself too seriously. I realize that with a semi-campy premise the risk of becoming a big, stupid action movie like Men In Black is high, but Cowboys And Aliens is far too somber for its own good. It’s hard to have fun watching a movie that isn’t itself a lot of fun. The other is suspense, which the film comes close to generating a couple of times but mostly sidesteps in favor of ever more inclusions from the vast database over at TV Tropes.

In the end, Cowboys And Aliens was okay. It wasn’t great, it was definitely overwrought and missed the mark a bit, but it has potential as a franchise and a follow up with less talking heads and more Shootout At The OK Corona would be something I’d love to watch.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — March 26, 2012 at 09:22AM

The Hunger Games

★★★★★

Directed by: Gary Ross

Written by: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray

Based on the Novel by: Suzanne Collins

I read Suzanne Collins’s trilogy early last year after hearing about them from an article decrying the violence and depravity depicted in them as evidence of our eroding moral character. “This is in a book meant for teens!” I found it ironic that the won’t-somone-think-of-the-children line was what lured me in, considering my biggest complaint with the first book was that it didn’t do a good enough job of explaining how a society could ever allow a contest like The Hunger Games to exist. To willfully sacrifice children in this way, to have an elite class so detuned and desensitized as to find sport in the brutal carnage televised for all to see, stretched my suspension of disbelief enough that I forgave Collins’s book only because its strengths of plotting and social commentary and characterization were strong enough to overcome what I felt was a sort of obvious exaggeration.

Eventually, in the sequel, Collins manages to rectify the situation by detailing that this is not a uniformly accepted occurrence and that there are morally outraged people in the fictional country of Panem who fight against the oppressive regime of The Capitol. By the time I finished that book, I was loving The Hunger Games trilogy and shortly after that I found out they were filming adaptations of the books. I knew that I had to see what they could do with the story on the big screen.

The plot of The Hunger Games is that each of the 12 districts in Panem, once per year, must send one male and one female tribute, aged 12 to 18, to compete in a last-man-standing fight to the death. The Games are a punishment of sorts for a historical rebellion that took place some 74 years before the events in the story. These twenty-four tributes are selected randomly from a hat. Katniss Everdeen (played magnificently by Jennifer Lawrence) is a sixteen year-old from the poorest district in the land, and the sole provider for her younger sister Prim and her mother. Her father was killed in a mining accident and the shock broke her mother down until she was unable to provide, forcing Katniss to step up. She hunts with her friend and partner, Gale, illegally sneaking outside the district boundaries to catch game to eat or sell or trade for the necessities of life. Prim, now twelve, is entering her first Reaping, where the tributes are selected. Names are entered once per year so Prim with only one name in the bowl is a long odds choice, but of course she is selected. Katniss knows her sister is too sensitive, too timid to survive. Rather than see her die, Katniss volunteers to take her place in the Hunger Games. The male tribute is Peeta, a baker’s son who has a tie in his past to Katniss.

The two are whisked to the Capitol where they begin training with the one tribute from District 12 who has ever won the Games, a drunk by the name of Haymitch (Woody Harrelson, playing the part with a confident teeter), who serves as their mentor. During the pageantry of the lead-up to the Games, Katniss becomes an odds favorite to win and Peeta expresses publicly that he is in love with Katniss, an unfortunate event since the Games can have only one victor which means one or both of them will end up dead.

Okay, so disbelief aside, I knew going in that as long as they didn’t make any ridiculous changes, the plot was going to be great because the source material is excellent. The question for this movie was whether they were going to be able to capture enough of the spirit of the book and convey the tone of Katniss’s character, especially considering the books take place entirely from her perspective. The good news is, they basically nailed it on all counts. This is a movie that is incredibly close the source material, with plenty of details that fans of the book would have cried out if they had been missing. The relatively few changes that appear are either understandable (Katniss and most of the other high-district tributes appear to be much better fed than they are portrayed in the book, but these are actual human actors who had very physically demanding roles where skin and bones simply wouldn’t have worked) or actually welcome (a sequence that takes place outside of Katniss’s knowledge during the course of the Games and is revealed in book two is very welcome here to cement that sense of outrage I mentioned was missing from the first book). There are a couple of bits and pieces that might have been done a tiny bit better, such as the interactions at the very end which don’t always portray the heavy conflict of emotions that are palpable in the novel and the connection between Peeta and Katniss isn’t really given the gravity in the film that the book affords it.

Still, as a fan of the book I can’t say I walked away the least bit disappointed in the movie. Which means the only real consideration for it was how well it would do for those who hadn’t read the books. My wife went with me and in spite of me pestering her to read the books since I put them down, she never got around to them prior to watching the movie. I was happy to find then that having seen it, she was just as excited by it as I was and upon arriving home, almost immediately asked to see my Kindle so she could begin reading book two. To that end, I’d say mission accomplished for The Hunger Games. It’s a triumph. Go see it.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — March 25, 2012 at 05:49PM

30 Minutes Or Less

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer

Written by: Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan

There is a peculiar moral bankruptcy that runs through 30 Minutes Or Less, a sort of bromance/comedy/crime caper of a movie. Never mind for a moment that the ostensible protagonist, Nick (played with affable familiarity by Jesse Eisenberg), has practically zero character arc and most of the film’s character development is focused on the bungling duo who involve Nick in a hair-brained plot so convoluted that I fear even trying to explain it below. What kills most of 30 Minutes Or Less is that it allows even the supposed heroes of the story to act like socially inebriated douchebags and has the audacity to demand we root for them anyway.

The basic plot is that Dwayne (played with tormented man-child bi-polar disorder by Danny McBride) wants to survive long enough to receive his inheritance from an overbearing, Lotto-winning father (played with zero originality as the overbearing military father guy by Fred Ward). A stripper convinces Dwayne that he would be better served by hastening the outcome and says she knows a guy who can help get it done, for the price of $100,000. Unwilling to put himself on the line, Dwayne recruits his pyrotechnically-inclined buddy, Travis (played with whipped puppy enthusiasm by Nick Swardson), to rig up a bomb vest and recruit some random sucker to earn their money, hire the assassin and net them with the funds to achieve their dreams.

Enter Nick, a stuck-in-neutral twentysomething who works as a pizza delivery guy, racing his car around and smoking dope. His best friend is Chet (a transplanted Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation via Aziz Ansari) is a schoolteacher, and Chet’s twin sister Kate (the one bright spot in the cast, Dilshad Vadsaria, completely and utterly underutilized here) is Nick’s dream girl/friendzoner. She reveals plans to move away, which puts backburnered Nick into panic mode and he ends up telling Chet about an old rendezvous with Kate—the catalyst, apparently, for his unrequited love—and a lot of other secrets come out and the two part on bad terms.

When Nick is lured into a trap and kidnapped by Dwayne and Travis, they strap a bomb on his chest and tell him he has less than a day to come up with $100,000 and deliver it to the hitman or they’ll blow up the bomb remotely. Nick has to face his rift with Chet and recruit him to help and eventually they decide there is no other solution but to go ahead and rob a bank. The heist goes off with only a few hiccups, but when Nick takes the money to the hitman (played with squeaky-voiced semi-menace by Michael Peña), he realizes there was no attempt to provide the code that will disarm the bomb and he ends up escaping with the money and a long sequence of people yelling at each other occurs resulting in Dwayne and Travis kidnapping Kate to force Nick’s hand.

Okay, so spoiler alert: Nick and Chet rescue Kate and wind up with the money. It’s a happy ending. Hey, this is supposed to be a comedy, right? Here’s the problem: Throughout, Chet and Nick act like giddy schoolchildren as they elude police, terrorize a bank full of innocent civilians, find time to have a heart-to-heart about their disagreements and assault a number of people with physical violence before ultimately causing someone else’s death in order to elude capture. If not for a credit cookie at the tail end, it might be inferred that they willfully killed a second person.

Look, it’s thing to have a character who is a pothead and drives recklessly while delivering pizzas, it’s another to have a guy forced into committing a bank robbery who thinks that, when things work out in his favor, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep the money. For him to also get amped and excited about high speed police chases in which cops and probably civilians are injured or even killed, and to celebrate minor physical victories like hitting a guy in the face with a crowbar, it becomes very difficult to view these as relatable characters. It doesn’t help that they don’t get much in the way of actual progress; one supposes by the end that Nick and Kate will find each other and Chet will be okay with it and Nick will, having been prompted to also quit his dead-end job, turn his life around, but none of that is a given.

Even the film’s antagonists, probably intended to be slapsticky and funny-dumb, are sociopathic (excepting Travis who is portrayed as weak and simple-minded, not just in addition to being moral but it almost seems like because he is) and also ultimately victorious. It’s not really a dark comedy, but it feels like it oscillates between depravity and lightness unintentionally, as though the writers had no idea what their choices were actually doing. Contrast this with something like Pulp Fiction, which has plenty of lighthearted moments but never once loses sight of what it is and what its characters mean. 30 Minutes Or Less is full of characters who, by benefit of being witness to their actions, we can see as being incongruent with the tone and the context of the overall story.

It doesn’t help that while 30 Minutes Or Less has a handful of genuinely funny lines and a handful of funny scenes, is a “you saw most of the good stuff in the trailer” film. That is to say, the key jokes and gags are of the sort that you can get the full effect from a three-second snippet while you fiddle with opening your Junior Mints box. In other words: Fairly lazy.

There’s no reason for me to loathe 30 Minutes Or Less, and I don’t hate it at all, but I don’t like it either. I don’t like that I was annoyed by all the characters and that the contrivance of the plot took more work to set up than it did to resolve (did no one think of cutting the vest at a different section than the rigged front?), nor do I like that a goofy comedy caper made me think more about the morality of writing than I intended to at midnight before a Monday morning. I do like that I didn’t pay any more than my regular Netflix subscription for it, though. So I guess it had one thing going for it.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — March 19, 2012 at 04:47PM

The Lorax

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Chris Renaud, Kyle Balda

Written by: Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul

Based on the Book by: Dr. Seuss

Since Hollywood started adapting Dr. Seuss books to screen, starting back with the live-action How The Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, I’ve felt most of the efforts have been pretty weak. In large part this is because the brilliance of the Chick Jones classic holiday cartoon starring the vocal work of Boris Karloff lie in the way it simply created a moving, breathing version of exactly what appears on the pages of the beloved book. Other than some silly slapstick animation-only sequences and a couple of musical numbers, the Grinch cartoon is 100% faithful to the source material.

Of course, Dr. Seuess’ books aren’t particularly long (though I’ve noticed they are rather long by today’s children’s picture book standards), so a 30-minute cartoon can get away with it but a 90 minute feature film needs some padding. And it is in this padding that I typically see the films unravel.

That said, I think The Lorax is perhaps the best of the bunch, including the previously animated efforts of Horton Hears a Who as well as the live-action Cat In The Hat and the aforementioned Grinch remake. The addition of Thneedville and the bookending storylines that put a name to the reader-stand in from the original story are perfectly suitable for children’s animated feature fare. The animation is cheerful and correctly captures the peculiar whimsy of Seuss’ drawings and the voice work is all nicely done as well as them happily including a number of semi-memorable songs. So far, so good.

The main problem I had with The Lorax is that the book itself, as is and as designed, is not well suited for adaptation to a kid’s movie. And by “not well suited” I mean “not suited at all.” Because the strength of the original story is in its melancholy, unresolved ending, the ending that is intentionally bleak and leaves but the barest glimmer of hope so that it serves as a sort of call to action and a socially poignant morality tale.

Obviously, this won’t do at all for a movie aimed at kids. So the screenwriters tack on a happy ending where the bad guy gets his comeuppance, the boy gets the girl, everybody learns something and we get just a little tease of the environmental message inherent in the classic story as a pullquote just before the credits. Hardly energizing stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I understand completely why they did this and I don’t know that there was ever really any choice in the matter. I’m not sure why it seems like a book can get away with this but a movie cannot, but there you go. Perhaps it has something to do with Seuss’s ability to hit the perfect note of finality but promise that comes across as worrisome but not oppressive and I think even genius level filmmakers creating a film for a highly sophisticated audience would struggle with that. The team behind The Lorax likely had no delusions.

In a way, that makes me want to say that this is a decent movie that just simply should never have been made. And there are a lot of little flubs and flaws along the way that cement this notion, too. For example, you have two young principal actors in Taylor Swift and Zac Effron, both of whom can sing. And yet at no point are either given a song to perform—in a musical feature! Instead we’re treated to several songs by the capable but unremarkable Ed Helms who plays the Once-ler. And speaking of the Once-ler, the screenwriters decided that instead of making him a remorseful but genuine villain, they would supplant him with an all-new villain and re-cast his character as more of a manipulated loser who succumbs (and the movie strangely seems to make this seem almost understandable) to crippling greed.

There’s sort of a half-hearted anti-commercialism message in there somewhere but it gets blurred; aside from being retrofitted into the new story, the Once-ler also loses his memorable anonymity from the original story (his face is revealed both in the flashback sequences as well as in his current, aged form) and the Lorax himself is given no real additional development beyond what was in the book (and he is, strangely, the only character to get this kind of treatment). Probably the biggest overall criticism is that the movie just isn’t very funny most of the time. From the studio that produced the often hilarious Despicable Me, that’s a big disappointment.

In the end, I stand by my assessment that this movie shouldn’t have been made. I mean, I could see a spin off movie or a different take on a Seuss-inspired tale with an environmentally-conscious hook, but trying to adapt the classic directly was never going to be successful, and I wish someone had realized that at some point and taken a different approach. As it is, though, I can’t really recommend this.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — March 19, 2012 at 12:53PM