2007

Shoot 'Em Up

dir: Michael Davis
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Imagine a film where the hero shoots hundreds if not thousands of people. Imagine that same film actually has an anti-gun agenda as its plot.

Collect the pieces of your head after it’s exploded all over the place, and then try not to think about it again. Or about how truly loopy this movie is.

If you’re a fan of utterly mad gunfest actions films, especially the kind of stuff John Woo used to be able to produce back before whatever talent he possessed was drained out of him by Hollywood, then this insane flick is for you.

As my Canadian friend said of the film, he stopped watching it when, in the film’s first few minutes, the hero kills a bad guy with a carrot.

A few minutes later, he’s cutting a newborn baby’s umbilical by shooting it. That’s the insane level this flick is operating on. And it either gets better or worse, dependent upon your sensibilities.

Smith (Clive Owen), who looks like little more than a carrot-chewing homeless person, steps in to a situation not of his making. A heavily pregnant woman is being chased by goons intent on killing her, and he reluctantly steps in to save her. This sets him on a path of conflict with some progressively nastier men.

Rating: 
7 stars

A Mighty Heart

dir: Michael Winterbottom
[img_assist|nid=97|title=The man himself on his wedding day|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=240|height=360]
Daniel Pearl was a journalist working in Pakistan when he was kidnapped by terrorists in 2002. He was held for several days, as his six-month’s pregnant wife Mariane Pearl, their friends, colleagues, fellow journalists and the Pakistani police and ISI security forces, US Embassy staff, FBI, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell and probably Batman as well all tried to secure his release.

If you never heard the story in the media because you were too busy downloading pirated media of all sorts and purposes, or you were watching slack-jawed and mouth agape at the antics of the latest reality television contestants instead, then perhaps the events depicted in A Mighty Heart will be exciting and new. Perhaps then the flick’s structure as an investigative thriller might thrill you.
Of course, if that was the case you’re also probably not likely to give a damn over the fate of a journalist, loathsome creatures that they are.

If you know what Daniel’s fate was at the hands of these vile bastards, then the question this flick might satisfy for you won’t be ‘what happened?’ so much as the how and the why of it.

Rating: 
8 stars

There Will Be Blood

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
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Oh, there most definitely will be blood. But the blood will be pouring from the eyes and ears of the audience members at the horror perpetrated by the ending of this movie.

For the majority of the flick’s length, I was pretty sure it was a masterpiece, even if the persistently annoying score was getting on my nerves with how busy it was. But about fifteen minutes from the end it completely, gut-wrenchingly falls apart. It’s one of those endings that’s so awful that it makes you feel like having watched the preceding two and a half hours of film was a total waste of your goddamn time.

But still, I should give it credit for what it does achieve up until then.Very loosely adapted from the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, There Will Be Blood starts off at the beginning of the 20th century and concerns itself with the origins of the oil industry in America. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a very determined, very driven man. We watch him prospecting for gold and doing it the hard way, the hardest way it can be. Even a broken leg can’t stop him from getting his few lumps of gold to the surveyor’s office.

Rating: 
7 stars

Brave One, The

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Jodie Foster doing Death Wish. That’s all you need to know.

If only that was the case, for your collective sakes

Foster, being Foster, of course, has to have the flick be all important and pretentious around her. It can’t just be a film about a woman pushed too far who decides to take out the trash with handgun and crowbar at hand. It has to be about how a person can lose their soul, even when they feel like they’re doing the right thing in trying to claw their way back to the person they used to be.

Jeez, doesn’t Foster ever lighten up?

Look, as a fan of hers and many of the movies she’s been in, I have to say the simple fact that Foster would choose to be in any film is usually enough of an incentive to get me to watch it. Unless you’re talking Nell, a flick I’m never going to mention again, and you’ll never bring up again, if you know what’s good for you. I mean it, I’ll go all Jodie Foster on your arse.

But the thing is, had some other actress been cast in the role, the flick probably wouldn’t have gotten as many critical plaudits or notice, and would probably have slipped into direct-to-DVD oblivion unlamented and unmissed.

Hitman

dir: Xavier Gens
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It’s called Hitman. Use your imagination as to what it’s about, go on. I dare you, I double dare you.

It’s about a guy called 47 (Timothy Olyphant), bald and with a barcode on the back of his head, who travels the world at the behest of The Organisation, killing people for money. He’s very good at his job, as one would expect, since centring an action movie and a game franchise around a hitman who’s actually quite lazy and sloppy would seem to be counter-productive.

Varying from the game, 47’s origins are such that he was picked up as an orphan and trained ruthlessly by some macabre monk types before being unleashed upon the world. Orphans just cop it the worst every time, don’t they?

He is hired to take out the current Russian president, and does so, only to find that he is now a target, and that the Russian president seems to be fine despite having had his head JFKed with a high-powered sniper round.

Rating: 
6 stars

Next

dir: Lee Tamahori
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Are you fucking kidding me?

This flick is terrible by any of the standards you care to think of to apply. Except maybe that someone didn’t leave the lens cap on the camera. Maybe that’s the only bit they got right.

Everything else is, not to exaggerate too much, so fucking awful that it renders the film a crime against humanity. I’m amazed the film prints didn’t fall apart on the subatomic level and cause black hole singularities from the weight of their crapulousness. Destroying projectors, creating gaping holes of nothingness in the fabric of space/time, drawing in and disintegrating countless foolish movie patrons.

And to add insult to injury, it’s awful even by the standards of most Nicolas Cage films. Now, don’t get me wrong, Cage has starred in some movies that haven’t sucked completely and utterly. But he has starred in many that have sucked more than the infinite gravity of the aforementioned theoretical black holes. Such monumental powers of sucking necessarily make me wary whenever his name and creepy hairpieces appear onscreen.

Rating: 
0 stars

Resident Evil: Extinction

dir: Russell Mulcahy
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The first flick in this franchise, based on the popular survival horror game, achieved the remarkable by not being an absolute piece of shit. The basic premise involved a poster child for genetic engineering, Alice (Milla Jovovich), squaring off against legions of zombies and the machinations of the evil Umbrella Corporation that created her.

Had a few stunts, few gory parts, the requisite rip-offs from better flicks like Aliens, plenty of references and in-jokes for the alleged gamer fans, and all in all didn’t represent a completely excruciating experience, despite being directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

The second flick, RE: Apocalypse, achieved the unremarkable by being a complete piece of shit that made no fucking sense and defied all laws of knowledge, gravity and common decency by being an aggressively, relentlessly stupid experience for all concerned. I’m sure it made audiences dumber just with partial viewings.

This third one, Extinction, is directed by Australia’s own Russell Mulcahy. Russell Mulcahy is a hack of the first order and top rank, so imagine my non-existent surprise when this managed to find an happy medium between the mediocrity of the first film and the utter shiteness of the second.

Rating: 
3 stars

Lucky You

dir: Curtis Hanson
[img_assist|nid=734|title=I bet you $500 that I'm going to sleep with you eventually|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=375]
I have, as a film geek obsessive, certain film obsessions that trump even all the others I posses (beyond samurai flicks, heist flicks, flicks with zombies, boobs or explosions, of course). For reasons not immediately apparent to me, flicks about gambling and gamblers appeal to me immensely.

I’ve never been a gambler myself, but only because I know I have an addictive personality (hence the film geekdom), and because I’ve barely got enough money to waste on food, booze, rent and childcare, let alone to lose at the poker tables. It is perhaps the high-stakes tension that appeals, or the self-destructive characters these stories inevitably conjure with. Whatever the elements, I dig them big time, and am a keen watcher of films about these chronic fuckups.

Rating: 
7 stars

Lust, Caution

Lust, Caution

Who wouldn't betray some country for her?

dir: Ang Lee

2007

You could say that the subject matter of Lust, Caution was a strange choice for Ang Lee, if it really was possible to contend such a thing. But he’s never been consistent in his film choices or in their content, so it really isn’t that strange, is it?

I mean, look at this CV: The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hulk and Brokeback Mountain.

If there is one consistency to point to, it's that these aren't superficial films. Clearly, he makes films about whatever he wants, and he is not bound by any genre or convention. For this he has loyal fans but an unpredictable output.

Lust, Caution looks at the blossoming, in more ways than one, of a young patriotic lass called Wong Jiazhi (Wei Tang), whose fateful job it is to infiltrate the affections and bed of a very bad man, being Mr Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). The film begins when she is already in place, and then flashes back to four years in the past, to show how she got to this precarious place in her life.

It’s the 1930s. Japan has kindly invaded China and is gently raping and pillaging the country and the populace. To facilitate their benevolent leadership, the Japanese use people like Mr Yee as local enforcers with the illusion of bureaucratic respectability deriving from the puppet Kuomintang government. He runs a form of secret police, whose job it is to find and torture confessions out of suspected rebels and patriots, who, for some crazy reason, don’t relish being crushed beneath the boot of Japanese rule.

If this was the classic Jet Li anti-Japanese Occupation flick Fist of Legend, Jet Li would simply beat the absolute crap out of all the Japanese in order to get them to flee the country with their katana and wakizashi swords between their legs. Lust, Caution is, fortunately or unfortunately, more grounded in some kind of reality.

Jiazhi, who is initially the kind of poster child for Chinese female wholesomeness, is a student at university in 1939. She comes alive when she performs in a patriotic play riddled with anti-Japaneseness, all for the love (or probably schoolgirl crush) of one of the boys in the cast, who reveals himself to be a rebel. Filled with patriotic fervour, and a desire to win this guy’s affections, she undergoes some rudimentary training in order to be able to embrace the life of a spy.

Rating: 
8 stars

Kingdom, The

dir: Peter Berg
[img_assist|nid=737|title=He thinks he's so cool. Who are you to disagree?|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=300]
No, not the Danish tv series by Lars Von Triers set in a monstrous hospital, no, not the US remake with a script by shitemeister Stephen King, which was marketed as Stephen King’s The Kingdom, which compounds the unnecessariness. This The Kingdom is an attempt to be current, to show Americans what America is dealing with overseas, to make themselves feel powerful in the pants about their efforts spreading freedom and democracy in other countries, and to act as a sterling appraisal of just what the origin of the problems are that the US faces against the Dar al-Islam, or the Islamic world.

Suffice to say that if that’s an accurate summation of where the flick tries to go, it fails miserably in its intentions and in its execution.

Execution is probably a tactless word to use in this instance. The plot of the thing is as follows: an American-hating, freedom-loathing group of Islamic terrorists in Saudi Arabia orchestrates a horrific terrorist attack upon the American expat residents of an enclave compound where they all thought they’d be safe from the predations of the outside world. Many hundreds of Americans die, and the House of Saud makes solicitous sounds to the Americans working in the oil industry, but doesn’t show any willingness to pursue the perpetrators.

Rating: 
4 stars

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