Archive for April, 2012|Monthly archive page

Baseball.

Baseball.

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from Like a Detuned RadioApril 25, 2012 at 02:14PM

Dear IT Departments of the World: Rebooting doesn’t always solve all the problems. I promise.

@ironsoapApril 20, 2012 at 11:42AM

Captain America and Thor (2011)

Captain America: The First Avenger

★★★★☆

Directed by: Joe Johnston

Written by: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Based on the Comic Book Created by: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon

Thor

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Kenneth Branagh

Written by: Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne, J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich

Based on the Comic Book Created by: Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby

I mentioned in my review of Iron Man 2 that Tony Stark and his alter ego were underdog favorites of mine as a kid. The same cannot be said of Captain America or Thor. Something about Captain America’s pseudo-sissy non-weapon of choice and his principal focus of patriotism made him a big yawn for me. Thor on the other hand, I just didn’t get. His costume was lame, he was based on Norse mythology which was kind of cool but then he was somehow involved in the rest of the Marvel continuity and he just felt like a Superman ripoff somehow. I dunno, I guess I’m funny about superheroes.

But the thing is, the characters themselves don’t really matter. What makes a comic book story interesting is not the origin story or the costume or the powers, it’s the story and what you do with the character that makes the difference. And from everything I ever tried, Thor and Cap always had boring books. However, as I also mentioned in my Iron Man 2 review, I’ve gotten pretty amped for the upcoming Avengers movie so I felt it my duty as an occasional comic book nerd and frequent movie dork to “catch up” as it were with the in-movie continuity. I rented both and watched them back to back.

What struck me initially was the difference in quality between the two flicks. Had you asked before I watched them both which I was likely to enjoy more, I’d have probably put my money on Thor as being the better of the two. The surprising thing is, I enjoyed Captain America immensely more than Thor.

This is a double review so let’s start with the weaker of the two. The principal problem with Thor is that it had way too many writers involved. Any time you see more than one or two names on a writer’s byline, it’s worth being cautious. Thor is a mess because it has too many characters, tries to cover too much ground and can’t possibly cram everything into its two hour running time. Now, lots of characters aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but lots of characters who have to portray believable relationships with themselves and lots of characters that need compelling arcs means you have to be laser focused to get it all into a standard length film. Consider: We have our title protagonist, Thor, who must have a principal arc himself, plus he needs relationship arcs with each of the following: His father Odin, his brother Loki, his band of warrior-friends (ideally this would be individual, with so much else going on it has to be collective, which means these characters ought to be combined into one or two at the most; here there are four) and his Earthly love interest, Jane. There is also the matter of his mother, Frigga, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Coulson, the transporter guardian Heimdall and the leader of the sworn enemies of Asgard, frost giant King Laufey, each of whom should have some kind of purpose in the film but whom for various reasons can’t possibly get enough development to ever matter.

There is enough story inherent in the Thor/Loki/Odin dynamic, along with the frost giant threat and King Laufey, to make for a full and complete movie. There is also enough story in the dynamic of Thor losing his power, being cast to Earth and having to prove himself while he learns to love humans through the proxy in Jane for a complete movie. What you can’t do is take two entire arcs and try to interweave them or overlap them and hope that somehow, magically, they end up being complete as the sum of their parts. It’s too much to ask of everyone involved. Some of the things that get lost in this particular shuffle: a believable relationship between Thor and Jane; a believable character arc for Loki; a purpose for the frost giants and/or King Laufey; a coherent connection to S.H.I.E.L.D.; an explanation for why Heimdall has so damn much screen time and development when other characters like, say, Odin or Loki, do not.

It’s not easy to pinpoint the exact source of the problem, apart from an overly ambitious script. Chris Hemsworth—well, he certainly looks like Thor, I’ll give him that. He’s pretty good at portraying the cocky bravado of the pre-exile Thor, but he struggles to convincingly display character growth so that when he inevitably learns to deserve his powers it kid of feels like, “Uh, yeah, sure. Okay.” And bless Natalie Portman’s pretty heart: she is one of the most inconsistent actresses around. Given challenging, dynamic, expectation-busting roles (Closer, Black Swan, The Professional) and she can stand up with the best in the biz. But she advertises her satisfaction with the shoot and the script on her sleeve, and if she’s asked to come across as the girl next door, or she’s asked to put impact into flat dialogue, she struggles to even be believable as a human (Star Wars, Mars Attacks). Anthony Hopkins and Renee Russo are wasted as Odin and Frigga, and Tom Hiddleston gamely gives his Loki what he has, but he’s no match for a script that can’t seem to decide what he’s supposed to be from one minute to the next.

What really frustrates about Thor is that it gets so caught up in its story that it forgets to even be big dumb fun. There are precious few special effects-laden action sequences, though there are an awful lot of scenes of people getting teleported in the Bifrost portal. I mean, there are so many that it starts to get funny. The Bifrost ends up being the most well-rounded character in the whole film, and its demise is the one that had the most emotional impact. Actually, I take that back because excepting King Laufey and the non- or semi-sentient Destroyer robot thing that Thor and friends fight at the end, everyone else makes it out alive. Not exactly high stakes for the good guys, you know? One early battle sequence between Thor’s warriors and the frost giants is pretty visually stimulating, but after that all the action is far inferior to even the Black Widow infiltration scene from Iron Man 2. If you can’t outdo Scarlett Johansson in spandex and you’re a friggin’ GOD—

Well, actually, I can see how that would be hard to stack up against. Anyhow.

So after Thor, I wasn’t really having high hopes for Captain America. But I was amazed to find that it was actually much, much better than Thor. The main thing Captain America does right that Thor doesn’t is it sets up the Rip Van Winkle bit at the very beginning and very end of the movie, but 98% of it is all origin story set in World War II. Now, I’ll grant that the set up of Steve Rogers being this wimpy little pencilneck and having beefcake Chris Evans play him with CGI kind of like a reverse Hulk effect is a bit transparent sometimes. But, I’ll be honest. You can tell in The Hulk that they got away with some cartoony effects because typically when the big green guy is onscreen, he’s jumping around, flinging Mack trucks and dodging tank shells. These are action scenes and we’ve trained ourselves as the audience to let go of some of our visual disbelief when the fightin’ starts. So it’s impressive that nearly every effects shot of Steve Rogers is a slow, lingering, well-lit shot and it almost always works.

The story follows über-patriot Rogers as he tries to enlist in the army but is constantly thwarted by the bad genetic hand he was dealt. A German expat, Dr. Erskine, working with the US Army against the Nazis, selects Rogers to be part of an experimental program to make super soldiers. The result of the serum and some tech help from a young Howard Stark (father of Iron Man’s Tony), the transform the scrawny Rogers into a muscle-bound badass with strength, speed, agility and stamina beyond any normal human. A saboteur from a fringe occult research branch of the Nazi party, Hydra, infiltrates the experiment and tries to steal Erskine’s serum. Rodgers stops him, but Erskine dies in the process, setting the program back. Rogers is then facing two options: settle for life as a professional lab rat, or try to do something to help. He agrees to become a pitchman for the Army, doing traveling bond promotional shows, and seems to be more or less into it until he goes to do a show for some actual front line troops who are disgusted by his phony showboating and boo him off the stage. When he realizes they’re so hostile because he’s a pretend soldier while they just got practically wiped out by Hydra, Rogers, aided by skeptical love interest Peggy Carter (played with smooth British charm by Hayley Atwell, channeling Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale), stages a daring rescue.

Rogers begins to embrace his abilities and the Army falls in line, granting him leadership over many of the rescued POWs to form a task force specifically designed to combat Hydra, who are growing immensely powerful under the leadership of Johann Schmidt, also known as Red Skull. Red Skull happens to be the only other person to have received the serum, albeit in an earlier form that left him deformed with a blazing red, skull-like visage.

The nice thing about Captain America is that it uses a straightforward, classic hero’s quest tale to give a sense that you’re really watching an old comic book come to life. The action is stylized and unrealistic, but believable despite and it never goes so far off into lunatic territory that it feels it has to somehow out-tech Iron Man, set some eighty or ninety years in the future. Hugo Weaving turns in a toothy, fun performance as the generically megalomaniacal Red Skull, and the screenwriters resist the temptation to have Captain America rewriting history by getting in a fist fight with Hitler or something. Evans as Rogers is convincingly napoleonic when necessary and does some nice physical acting work early on after getting his powers, showcasing his excitement and glee at finding out what his newly juiced body is capable of. He has legitimate chemistry with Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones turns in a classic performance that is tailor made for his brand of deadpan delivery.

The movie does bog a little right before the climax with some extended montages of Captain and his pals busting up Hydra, and the Bucky character felt kind of shoehorned into the plot to give Cap a bit of emotional turmoil, but all of it is forgivable. My one complaint is that, in spite of my appreciation for them only bookending the film with the present day connection, Evans’s acting stumbles a bit right at the end when he’s supposed to be in awe of the modern world, so different from the one he remembers. Perhaps the script is what fails here, not giving him enough time to react, but there is just something about the whole scene that doesn’t work, and I’d almost expect it to have been something that occurred early in The Avengers film, not as a sour note to leave an otherwise very good movie on.

I think, somewhere between the excellent first two Iron Man films, a half-decent Hulk movie, a very good Captain America vehicle and a mostly bad Thor, there’s enough reason to be  incredibly hopeful for the forthcoming Avengers. Maybe I’m also biased because Joss Whedon is behind the team-up flick, and I happen to think he rarely goes wrong, but Marvel Studios has been doing a lot of things right lately, and I think even though the average of these two movies is only three stars, I’m ready to pull down my fanboy goggles and line up opening weekend for The Avengers.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieApril 19, 2012 at 05:25PM

Lining my cube walls with comic books: nerdiest thing I’ve done this hour.

from InstagramApril 18, 2012 at 06:43PM

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

★★★★☆

Directed by: George Roy Hill

Written by: William Goldman

The well-deserved Oscar William Goldman received for writing Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid wouldn’t have amounted to much without the smooth, masculine chemistry between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, who sell the hell out of the roles. As an overall film, the movie is a bit measured for modern tastes, with the extended chase scene in the middle setting up a montage before skipping down to Bolivia where the third act unfolds. The subtle love triangle between Butch, Sundance and Etta Place is probably the second best part of the film, behind the cool and funny banter exchanged by the two principals.

Oddly, the thing that sits the most awkwardly, at least to my modern eyes and ears, is the Burt Bacharach score (which also won an oscar) and the 60s pop tunes that bubble and fizz over the top of the film. I guess the general cheesiness associated with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” in 2012 may not have been so freely associated in the late 60s, but it (and the other syrupy scoring) glares like a bubblegum chewing beast of a child within the context of the stylish cool of the performances and cinematography. I guess it’s simply a part of the film and you have to take it as a package (after all, its not like musical atmosphere is a new development; movies have been scored with tonally appropriate background music for decades before and since) but for me it mars an otherwise excellent film.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieApril 16, 2012 at 06:39PM

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

★★★★☆

Directed by: Sidney Lumet

Written by: Kelly Masterson

Let’s start off with the two fairly minor things that didn’t work very well for me in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. The first is the unnecessary POV-shifting, scene-revisiting, flash-back-and-forth construction of the film’s narrative. When a film like Pulp Fiction, which had lots of characters who all had individual arcs and criss-crossing story lines, fiddles with chronology, it makes sense because the narrative isn’t particularly linear or, more to the point, it isn’t as effective if told linearly. But in Before The Devil, there’s no point at which you can say, “If we already knew what was going on behind the scenes here, this would be less effective,” or “If we hadn’t gotten the other characters’ perspective on the scene with the current point of view character, we wouldn’t have as much empathy for what is happening.” The result then, is a gimmick. And there’s no need for a gimmick in a movie as riveting and powerful as this.

The second thing that didn’t work is Ethan Hawke. No disrespect to the actor, who does what he can, but I read that his character, Hank, was originally supposed to be a 19 year-old and was cast older to make him seem more tragic. Except it doesn’t make him seem more tragic, it makes him seem more unbelievable. Part of it is that the script, intending for Hank to be youthful, doesn’t ever have a chance to deal with the circumstances that might make a nearly forty year-old man into such a sniveling, un-worldly pantywaist. We’re just supposed to accept that Hank is this way but Hawke has too much soul in his eyes and too much natural presence in the world to sell the level of incapability he’s supposed to. Perhaps it was bad casting, perhaps Lumet just needed to leave the original script alone more, it’s hard to say.

But beyond this, we’re treated to a slow-motion train wreck of self-implosion and a study on causality that is gripping and delirious. The film follows Andy (played with an almost frightening amount of emotional range by the brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman), an exec with demons to spare who comes up with a plan to help himself, his weak-willed brother Hank and his drifting/distant wife, Gina (played for the first half of the movie by Marisa Tomei’s breasts, then for the second half by Marisa Tomei’s bitten bottom lip). He concocts a victimless, nonviolent robbery of their parent’s jewelry store and tasks Hank with executing the plan. Through a series of sloppy preparations and sheer misfortune, the robbery goes bad and the impact of Andy’s plan sends shockwaves through their extended family. As things careen wildly out of control, the movie flips back and forth between Hank, Andy and their father Charles (played with mush-mouthed ardency by Albert Finney), showcasing the top down collapse of all three.

It’s a crime film that is more about family than glorifying lawlessness. It’s a movie that is, more than anything else, about the cost of decisions people make. These are not hardened criminals, they are desperate people who don’t seem to understand Newton’s Laws apply to human behavior as well as the natural world. It’s a family drama that plays out on a whole different scale than something more subtle, like perhaps Rachel Getting Married. Not that the two films are thematically alike at all, but the dissection of darker family secrets runs a connective thread between them and similar films, but where emotive dramas culminate in characters that rise above or grow beyond or simply take their leave, Before The Devil climaxes with the most complete depiction of a man pushed over the edge as I can recall seeing. Hoffman owns the last fifteen minutes of this movie, if he doesn’t own the entirety of it.

This is worth watching for his performance alone, and the rest of the movie is pretty good as well. I do wish they had made a couple of better decisions on the directorial end, but I can’t help but recommend watching, especially if you need to remind yourself that no matter how insane your family may be, it always could be worse.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieApril 16, 2012 at 06:12PM

Red State (2011)

Red State

★★★☆☆

Directed by: Kevin Smith

Written by: Kevin Smith

I decided to watch Red State after finishing Writer/Director Kevin Smith’s book, “Tough S—t.” It’s a bit difficult to know whether it would have been a different experience to see Red State without the contextual framework provided by the discussion in the book. And, to be honest, some of that is even dependent on the facts of my familiarity with Smith’s other work, because I was a big fan of Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and to an extent Dogma, but starting with Jay and Silent Bob Strike back, I haven’t been as adamant about following along with Smith. I did get around to seeing Clerks II and Zack And Miri Make A Porno, but unlike the previous films which I practically saw on opening weekends, they were grudging, not-in-the-new-releases rentals. I never did see Jersey Girl or Cop Out. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered with Red State either, except Smith, in his book, describes it as his homage to Quentin Tarantino. And, well, I sort of masochistically wanted to see what a Smith-does-Tarantino flick would look like.

But this is why I think if I didn’t know that’s what Smith was doing, I wouldn’t have had the same reaction. Because Red State is a very different kind of movie from anything else he’s done. Oh, sure, Dogma had its scenes of intense violence and religious themes, but it was still essentially Mallrats with a much grander concept. Gone are a lot of the aimless asides and the shock-schlocky, replaced instead by a script that is curiously focused while at the same time never quite being pinpoint. It’s never easy to tell who the protagonist is in the story, though the villain is sort of obvious, except that it is really circumstance that propels most of the deplorable actions, not all of which are done at the hands of the “bad guy.”

Let me give you an example of one of the many unusual decisions Smith makes in the construction of this film: Following the initial set up and the introduction of a few key characters, Smith films almost the entirety of a sermon, delivered by Abin Cooper (played with a pitched charisma by Michael Parks) that starts off as a genial, inviting, small-congregation fireside chat but slowly—almost laboriously—descends into a seething roil of hate and hellfire, culminating in an uncomfortably unflinching ritual murder. Smith describes in his book a desire to never take the obvious path with his story and this comes through as the winding narrative feints this way and that, suggesting at various stages a campy sex romp, a torture porn thriller, a straight up horror slasher, a cop siege procedural, a dark morality tale, a supernatural allegory and a political potboiler. It’s sort of all and none of those things.

What it definitely adds up to is a Tarantino-esque indie shootout talker. On that level, knowing that’s what Smith wanted, it succeeds. From a pure storytelling standpoint, Red State is gripping and unpredictable, which is what I liked most about it. On the other hand, Red State also struggles in its effort to be unexpected, to have a sense of purpose. It seems like it might be fairly obvious that Smith is demonizing hate-in-God’s-name publicity morons like the Westboro Baptist Church (or any other unpleasant organization using warped ideals to judge or detest others) but aside from a base despicable-ness to their convictions, the Five Points Church (led by Cooper) respond to the circumstances the film throws them into with a peculiarly understandable motive. The “good guys” of the ATF, led by Joseph Keenan (played with superb, nuanced inner conflict by John Goodman), are the ones who, though ostensibly in the right, often make the most unconscionable decisions.

Most of the neutral parties caught in the middle are never really given a place in the theme, which means they become expendable to the script. Smith tries to make a certain amount of sense of it in retrospect with an overly expository interview scene. To an extent I like this choice because it cements the fact that tense, adrenaline-fueled scenarios like this only ever have context after the fact, but the highlight passage from the script in this scene suggests that Smith’s moral is the same as he leveled in Dogma: be wary of faith without reason.

And then the part that ultimately dropped the film an entire star for me comes in the epilogue. Note, this is (I guess) spoiler territory, but understand that the linear construct of Red State isn’t really that important; in any case, you can skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. Anyway, the final scene in the film is Cooper in prison, wearing an orange jumpsuit and singing a hymn in his cell. It’s a long, intentionally ponderous shot and then finally, just before the credits roll, someone off camera (presumably a fellow inmate) hollers, “Shut the f—k up!” My problem with this is that it seems to be a semi-symbolic part of Smith’s message, hinting strongly that what he really has to say to misguided faith-based lunatics is “just go away.” I have a big problem with a film that is as thoughtful as Red State going for either a laugh or a frustrated outburst or both as its closing statement, especially coming from a guy who has made a career out of being overly honest, whether that’s with his character mouthpieces in his films or his podcasts or his spoken word public speaking or his book. It’s so simplistic and glib and counter-productive to summarize an issue like reconciling the troublesome nature of deplorable ideas that are so easily translated into antisocial actions with a simple gag order, even played for (non) laughs. The film, sadly, would have been at least 20% better without this final, 30-60 second scene.

All told, Red State is a promising new direction for Smith. Unfortunately, if you believe what he says in his Tough S—t book, it will be his penultimate film. Smith has been uneven as a filmmaker, even from the start, often accidentally achieving greatness. Here, he accidentally misses greatness and showcases a potential for something grittier and different from what others might say with similar material. And that’s exactly what you want from a filmmaker, I think.

from No Thief Like a Bad MovieApril 16, 2012 at 05:35PM

Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good

Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
author: Kevin Smith
name: Paul
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2012/04/16
date added: 2012/04/16
shelves: memoir, humor, non-fiction, new-in-2012
review:
Talk about unusual: I just finished Kevin Smith‘s sort of memoir-meets-motivational-self-help-vanity-project in one sitting. This is unusual primarily because having the time to read nearly 250 pages in an evening almost never happens, but it’s also unusual because you might expect that I’d only devour a book this way if it was amazing.

Well, Tough Sh*t isn’t amazing. It’s kind of repetitive, honestly: Smith has an analogy about Wayne Gretzky that he references a half dozen times; he talks a lot about how amazing his wife is; he frequently describes his up-and-down relationship with Harvey Weinstein. Sometimes it feels like the individual chapters were written separately and he’s refreshing readers who are perhaps not privy to earlier discussions about his pet concepts or jokes, but then he’ll do it within pages of each other as well so maybe he just doesn’t have a great editor?

The book is funny, but not in the way that generates actual real-world laughter. It’s sort of effective as a motivational tome, except that he branches off into über-digression an awful lot so the point gets muddled and spread around. There’s some interesting anecdotes, but it’s not riveting.

What Tough Sh*t does do well is capture a tone that set me at ease, coming across like listening to a friend sit in your living room and tell stories. Smith is sort of a strange person to write something akin to self-help because his success seems a bit accidental and he spends so much of the book kind of justifying his work that one gets the impression that even he isn’t quite sure how it all works out for him. He’s smart but he seems to suffer from the same affliction as a lot of people who had just the right mix of serendipity and skill: He assumes that the same lighting can strike for everyone.

Granted, Smith is bright enough to know that’s not the case so he tempers the message a lot and comes up with the core concept that action is king. It’s a bit Nike in its core motivational strategy: Just do it. Of course, it’s easy to say that when the one time he Just Did It without any kind of fallback or failsafe he ended up with the indie hit Clerks. Not everyone is going to do that, so he mumbles something about how success doesn’t matter and skims over the fact that he writes about spending money with the casual nonchalance only someone with plenty of it can afford. I’m not saying its disingenuous, but the book wears enough of its author’s bais and “if I can do it, obviously anyone can” over-simplicity on its sleeve to not ever be in contention for a legitimate life manual.

Which is not to say there isn’t some valuable insight here. The opening chapter, a crassly told case study in how, from a biological perspective, every living human is the result of astronomic odds, is strangely effective in giving perspective on the moral imperative Smith seems to ascribe dream-chasing. He also makes a semi-convincing case for art as a legitimate pursuit and offers some reasonable-sounding practical advice for tempering expectations when pursuing lofty ambition. The biggest thing the book made me reconsider was criticism, which is a bit of a funny thing to say in a critique of his book.

Smith decries criticism, then blasts critics for getting understandably haughty when he stabs at their means of expression, but there’s circular logic going on somewhere (I suspect both sides have valid points). Obviously Smith himself isn’t exempt from criticism: He spends a lengthy chapter describing his run-in on Southwest airlines over his weight and seat accommodations which amounts to a very pointed criticism of that company. He is also unshy about criticizing actors, other movies and business execs in Hollywood, so the sword kind of cuts both ways. But he did make me think about what I do when I review books and movies online. Granted, I don’t get paid to do it and I’m no authority nor do I even have much of a voice, but it does pay to be reminded sometimes that I am publishing my thoughts and opinions online where anyone, including the creative forces behind those works, can see them. Potentially, me saying negative things could be hurtful and it’s worth remembering that while I have every right and justified intention to describe what I personally thought of something or what it made me think about, it’s not really worthwhile or even accurate for me to judge the artistic value of someone else’s work.

That doesn’t mean I should just avoid writing with an empirical tone, only that it’s worth it to remind myself as I discuss what other people are doing by way of self-expression, perhaps some day I may be the target of people like myself who are dissecting what I’m expressing. I would expect those people to be honest about what they think or felt about something creative I did, but much as I wouldn’t want them declaring whether my work is worthy or not, it’s not my place to do so either.

In that spirit, my opinion of Tough Sh*t is that it was half-successful at doing what I suspect it was trying to do. It did make me think some, it was easy to read but ultimately it was probably more for people who are much bigger fans of Mr. Smith than I am. I’m certainly not sorry I read it, but I probably won’t go searching for more.

from Paul’s bookshelf: readApril 16, 2012 at 12:39AM

Book Igloo by Miler Lagos.

Book Igloo by Miler Lagos.

#books

from Like a Detuned RadioApril 14, 2012 at 08:33AM

Blue Marble seasons.

Blue Marble seasons.

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from Like a Detuned RadioApril 14, 2012 at 08:30AM