A Tale of Two Trailers

‘Tis the season and here come the trailers for next year. First up...



I want to see this film. Right. Now. While I find it unbelievable that Charlize Theron would ever feel threatened by Kristen Stewart in the looks department, I am comforted by two facts: First, presumably if the spell breaks then Theron’s evil Queen would become very ugly, very quickly. Second, the Magic Mirror doesn’t say that Stewart’s Snow White is more beautiful, he says that she will surpass the Queen. In this context, that word becomes heavy with meaning, begging the question, “Surpass in what way?”

And then they showed Stewart as warrior woman and I felt mildly ill. I am so sick of that trope. Theron doesn't dress up in battle armor and I haven't a doubt in the world that she could kick Stewart's ass. Stewart puts on all the armor and I'm not even convinced that she'd be able to move, let alone fight.

Putting that aside, the film looks gorgeous. Seriously, someone appears to have rediscovered the tripod and is at least trying to compose their shots. And the way Theron speaks as the Queen is sheer ecstasy. Even the way she says, “Mirror, mirror” is foreboding. The rest of the cast looks great, and I can’t wait to see the dwarves.

And then there’s...



I enjoyed the books, I think Jennifer Lawrence looks too perfect for words. I’ve said before that her performance in Winter’s Bone was training for this role, because I always pictured District 12 looking like backwoods Missouri and Arkansas, or even Kentucky (can we all say, “Harlan County USA”?). I’m not as taken with the rest of the cast, and while I’ve seen lots of raves for Lenny Cravitz as Cinna, I’m not convinced. I’m more forgiving of Woody Harrelson as Haymitch, and I am so not a Woody Harrelson fan.

The snippets of dialogue are the stuff of awful, awful legend.

There's also the look of the film. There’s a jiggle of the camera that makes me think shaky cam will be the order of the day, as though they’re going for that pseudo-documentary look that seldom, if ever, works. Shots are held just a tad too close; even the wide shots seem confined. The set and production designs scream "generic sci-fi." Granted that a swashbuckling fantasy gives the designers a bit more leeway, but Snow White and the Huntman kicks The Hunger Games around the block.

I desperately wanted to see a nicely composed and framed shot of Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, looking out at the expectant faces of District 12, and pronouncing those dreaded and, in context, dreadful words: “May the odds be ever in your favor.” That would have been a chilling moment that could sell the film.

Was not meant to be, though. In the end, I want to see Snow White because of Theron as the Evil Queen. And I want to see The Hunger Games because I want to see Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen. Either will make or break their film.

BD/DVD: X-Men & Thor

Let’s start with X-Men: First Class:

Short version: Great film; buy it, watch it, love it.

The story takes place in the early 1960’s, around the time (and events) of the Cuban missile crisis. The film follows the young and ambulatory Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) meeting and befriending the young and angry Eric Lehnscherr (Michael Fassbender). The man who will become Professor X hasn’t lost his hair or the use of the legs yet, and the man who will become Magneto isn’t quite yet a villain, though he is one very, very angry individual.

First and foremost, this is a film about friendship, and that makes it wonderful. Xavier wants to find and train mutants in the use of their powers and how to blend with human society. Lehnscherr, scarred both from a childhood spent in Nazi concentration camps and time spent with Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is less tolerant of humans but equally fascinated to find others like himself.

Watching McAvoy and Fassbender play off each other is a joy. Surprisingly, and pleasantly so, McAvoy doesn’t play Xavier as all clean and good and wonderful; he’s a bit of prick, truth be told. And Fassbender is staggeringly good as Lehnscherr. Indeed, the film succeeds in large measure due to the humanity Fassbender brings to the role as he portrays Lehnscherr’s journey from mutant to Magneto.

Really, I can’t say enough wonderful things about Fassbender’s work here. I’ve enjoyed him in pretty much every film I’ve ever seen him in, but his performance here even transcends the work of the great and powerful Ian McKellen (Magneto in three earlier X-Men films) and that’s no small feat.

For me, a good superhero film lives or dies on the quality of its villains. While Lehnscherr doesn’t start out as the film’s villain, you know that when he assumes his Magneto guise he’s going to be. Fassbender nails this perfectly, and in so doing elevates the entire film.

He’s helped immensely by Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw character, the villain for most of the film. Maybe it’s true, that Bacon can do no wrong; it’s certainly true here. Great villain, very well played.

There are other mutants in the film, but really, so what? All of the actors do decent work, nothing exceptional and nothing on the same level as Fassbender, Bacon, and McAvoy. This might sound like damning through faint praise; it’s not meant to be. (Well, maybe for January Jones as Emma Frost; her performance is stiff and a lost opportunity.) It’s just that they felt like filler material for the main characters to play off. As such, they do their job well.

There are a few cameos, made excellent by how they’re used. My favorite is Rebecca Romjin; don’t blink, you might miss her.

X-Men: First Class is a film that I didn’t want to see end. With an incredibly tight schedule and fast turnaround time, Matthew Vaughn has crafted a masterpiece of a superhero film. He has also made the film accessible even to those who aren’t fans of the comics and earlier films. First Class can easily stand on its own, no prior knowledge needed by the viewer.

And then there’s Thor:

This film represents what is, without a doubt, the most audacious move Marvel Studios has made in their series of superhero films. Up until now, all have struggled to remain grounded in some semblance of reality. Tony Stark is a billionaire genius who has the brains and the funding to create Iron Man. Bruce Banner is the unfortunate victim of science run amuck and thus becomes the Hulk. World War II era science manages to turn a puny runt into Captain America.

All, to one degree or another, attempt to say, “Hey, this could happen. Look, inventive humans plus money equals Science!”

Thor steps beyond this and into the realm of gods from outer space. In ancient times, an alien race known as the Frost Giants attempts to invade Norway (God knows why), but benevolent beings from Asgard intercede on the behalf of mankind and work a smackdown on the frosties. Humans look at them and create the Norse gods of legend. Behold Clarke’s Law in action: Any science sufficiently advanced will appear as magic to the less advanced.

So is this leap into outer space any good? Yes, quite. Kenneth Branagh was a curious choice for director and he does an excellent job. Not surprisingly, he brings a certain Shakespearean tone to the proceedings, eagerly and confidently working with daddy and honor issues in grand style. The result is almost operatic.

Chris Hemsworth does a great job as Thor. Who knew that Kirk’s dad could portray the Norse god of thunder? As a bonus he also has some great comic timing, not just in delivering humorous lines but in terms of physical comedy. He also does a great job delivering some lines that might otherwise have been clunkers, like addressing the omnipresent Agent Coulson as “Son of Coul.” It’s a quick moment that easily could have fallen flat, yet Hemsworth pulls it off.

Equally up to the task, and in following with my rule that these films live and die with the quality of their villain, is Tom Hiddleston as Loki. Excellent performance, complete with more nuance than you’d expect.

Not everything is perfect, though. The film sags in the middle and some of the design choices are way over the top. Some costumes work, others...meh. Asgard has awesome aspects (e.g., it’s a flat world) and awful aspects (e.g., is that pan flute thing a castle?). Most shocking, though, is that Anthony Hopkins, as Odin, is dull. I didn’t think it was was possible for Hopkins to be dull in anything, and yet...

Bottom line: Worth seeing, worth owning. As with all Marvel films, be sure to watch through the end of the credits. This time we get a hint as to who the villain will be in next year’s The Avengers. Actually, more than a hint, and one that leads nicely into the teaser at the end of Captain America.

Coming Soon: The Hunger Games

I enjoyed the books, even if the very end left me a little cold. And I was thrilled with the casting of Jennifer Lawrence after I saw what she could do in Winter's Bone. But this teaser...meh, at best. Though it is cool hearing those four notes at the end, presumably Rue's the end of the day call.



May the odds be ever in your favor, indeed.

Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Part 2

Seven novels, dozens of actors, hundreds of production personnel, 400 million book printings, millions of dollars spent, billions of dollars earned, we have reached the end of the Harry Potter line. The Hogwart’s Express is retired, the cast may finally move on with their careers.
And at the end of the day, the strongest emotion I feel is: Meh.

Reviewing a Potter film was always problematical, and became even more so as the series ground on. The first two films don’t even feel a part of the same galaxy as the next six, and the third is such a stand-out excellent production it feels as though it came from another universe.

The fourth is almost as good, but starting with the fifth the series fully committed to the goal of telling one enormous story. At the same time, it became increasingly clear that if you weren’t a Harry Potter reader than these are not the films you are looking for. If you had not read any of the Potter books, you could watch The Sorcerer’s Stone (the first film) and The Prisoner of Azkaban (the third film) and follow their stories nicely. For all of the others, you need a guide and interpreter, and the demand for such only increased as the series went along.

In large part, this is the result of J.K. Rowling’s legendary and fanatical control over her intellectual property. When the film series began, the book series was still being written and she did not share with the film producers where the story was ultimately going. Presumably this worked in the books (which I haven’t read) because she could leave little fore-shadowing details, but those same fore-shadowing details are completely absent in the films. The result is that the action on screen must periodically grind to a halt while an expository lump ensues.

Examples abound in TDH 7.2, none of which I can discuss without huge spoilers. Ditto my reasons for why the end product just felt…flat. I’m not alone in this. I’ve discussed the matter with my resident Potter experts, those who have read, absorbed, and adore the books, and they all agree. The entire film is a let-down after seven films of build up. Its most egregious failing is that throughout the film, its heroes fail to feel heroic.

It’s beautifully filmed; I would have preferred that Azkaban have been the style template, but the choices made here aren’t bad. I wish Azkaban could have been the template for other things, such as ensuring a feel that this is, after all, a magical world.

The music is deathly hollow and dull, though, inexplicably so given Alexandre Desplat’s other work (Birth and Lust, Caution come to mind). Some of the editing is off-putting in subtle ways, the timing of things not quite sitting right. There are scenes that should have held massive emotional heft, given what was happening to whom, and yet they aren’t given a fraction of the screen time they deserved.

Maggie Smith, though, is finally allowed to come into her own, and Alan Rickman simply shines. (He hasn’t been this much a part of the plot since, you guessed it, Azkaban.) Indeed, all of the acting is well done, with these two just being the stand-outs.

As many have said, the film is essentially one massive, rolling firefight, but so was Black Hawk Down, and in that film there was more emotional wallop than I felt at the end of this one. Which is a pity.

I reject the presumption that the book is always better than the film. I present Jaws and The Godfather as exhibits A and B, wherein the film is vastly superior to the book. And aesthetics and debate over “art” aside, there’s no excuse for requiring a viewer to have read the book in order to understand what’s going on in the film; if that’s required then you’re just being a lazy filmmaker.

Given that, the books are now done and this film series has wrapped, so I wonder if some day someone will take up the massive task of filming them again. Maybe as a seven year television series, with each season only being as long as needed to tell one given book. So the first season, being from the shortest book, would need the fewest episodes, while tomes like The Deathly Hallows, would need a full 24-26 episode arc. BBC Productions revels in this sort of thing (see Torchwood as proof).

Maybe then Harry will get the cinematic love he’s earned and deserves, and we’ll get the full story we paid for, as well as an ending that’s far better than “meh.”

Update: It would appear that the Potter fan base generally agrees, as the box office is tracking a staggering 84% drop, comparing weekend one to weekend two.

DVD: From the Earth to the Moon

By now, if you recognize that title, you’re probably going, “Gee, that’s timely.” Considering that the miniseries aired in 1998 and has been available on DVD for the better part of a decade, you’d be right. I beg forgiveness, however, because it only recently became available at a price I could afford. Also, its subject matter seems timely given changes at NASA and the US space program, i.e., bye-bye shuttle, hello...er, what replacement?

From the Earth to the Moon is a 12-part miniseries that aired on HBO. It received widespread critical acclaim at the time and holds up remarkably well. It does so because it tells a direct and accurate history, while at the same time restraining its use of visual effects. The result is a compelling, historically-accurate, and very human drama.

The miniseries essentially bridges the gap between the films The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, while also adding an addendum to bring the Moon program to its conclusion with the flight of Apollo 17. Each episode is, to a large extent, a self-contained story. While certain characters will run through other episodes, each story being told is its own entity. So, the series starts with “Can We Do This?”, a simple question posed by President John Kennedy’s call to put an American on the Moon by the end of the 1960’s. This episode simply recaps a few of the obstacles the Moon program would face, how they could be tackled one by one, and introduces the men who would eventually fly the Apollo spacecraft.

The show is an emotional treat for me because it recounts the history of my childhood. When I would walk to school in the morning, I could see the headlines of the morning newspaper (the San Francisco Chronicle) give one status check on Mercury or Gemini or Apollo. When I walked home in the afternoon, the headlines of the afternoon paper (the San Francisco Examiner) would give another. Time and again, From the Earth to the Moon had me relieving those brief news snippets, as well as what Walter Cronkite would report that evening. (Interestingly, Cronkite does not appear in the series. Lane Smith portrays Emmett Seaborn, Cronkite’s stand-in.)

More than nostalgia, the series presents the stories of the scientists, researchers, mechanics, engineers, etc., that made the entire endeavor possible. For example, the episode covering the Apollo 1 disaster brought to life the horror felt by those involved, especially the men who designed the capsule that would eventually kill Grissom, White, and Chaffee. It is as uncynical a view as you are likely to find, a straight and direct presentation of people whose lives are destroyed by the failure of a tool they designed and built. It culminates in a fictionalized presentation by Frank Borman to the US Senate committee investigating the disaster, which presents in the clearest possible way that sometimes accidents happen for no other reason than “a failure of imagination.” Everyone knew the risks, everyone new the dangers, but no one could imagine just this type of failure...until it happened.

My favorite episode is a toss-up between “Spider” and “Is That All There Is?”. Spider tells the story of how Grumman designed and built the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM. I would have never believed that a one-hour story about nothing more than rocket scientists doing what rocket scientists do could be so emotional and absorbing. It’s brilliant.

Also brilliant is “Is That All There Is?”, about the flight of Apollo 12. The crew of Apollo 12 was the most close-knit of any of the Apollo crews, and the episode captures that to perfection. The sheer glee that they all evince during the entire mission is a wonder to behold.

Again and again, the series reaches for brilliance and succeeds. The episode chronicling the geology training the astronauts received is, in and of itself, the perfect argument for manned space flight.

And this is where I begin to get a little depressed, because all of the energy and enthusiasm and exuberance that went into making Apollo possible seems...gone. I watch the new NASA administrator say that one of NASA’s prime missions is to reach out to the Muslim world and I wonder what in the hell does that have to do with the exploration of space. In terms of space exploration, the current administration seems to have all the vision of a blind man, with his head in a sack, locked in a dark closet, down in an unlit basement, at night.

The naysayers, as illustrated by the portrayal of Walter Mondale in the series, have won. Their priorities have taken the lead and achieved...nothing. We have willfully closed our eyes to space and gained, on earth, not a thing. We have fallen backwards, into a deep belief that such things as traveling in space are impossible.

The claim that no single nation, including America, can send men to the Moon, Mars, and beyond is proven wrong by a simple fact: We’ve already done it. Alone. All it takes is the will, driven by a dream and determination. From the Earth to the Moon presents the drive and will that got us there on July 20, 1969.

Do we really want to inspire a new generation of mathematicians and scientists? We could do a lot worse than make elementary school viewing of From the Earth to the Moon mandatory. And then, perhaps inspired by little more than “we did it before, and we can do it again, and we will do it again,” we will return to the stars.

BD/DVD: Winter’s Bone

I don’t believe this film ever played in my area, and the first time I heard of it was when it popped up with several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence). So into my Netflix queue it went, and in Blu-Ray format it arrived, and...

Wow. Winter’s Bone is a tense story about a teenage girl pushed into danger by the acts of her father. Living in the backwoods of Missouri can be challenging enough, but for Ree (Lawrence) things go from hard to bad to worse. The eldest of three children, it’s fallen to her to be both mother and father. Mother because her actual mother has lost her mind, and father because he has simply disappeared.

This last is the drive behind the film’s plot. Ree’s dad was one of the best crystal meth cooks in the area. He was out of bail. To secure his bail, he put his property up as collateral. Now he’s vanished and if he doesn’t show for court he’ll forfeit bail. Which means Ree will lose the house, the property, and have nowhere to take care of mother and brother and sister.

Ree’s desperation to avoid this drives her to ask questions that maybe she shouldn’t, to go places where she’s not wanted, to risk her own life in order to save the lives of her siblings.

Winter’s Bone doesn’t revel in false leads or misleading tricks. Yet at the same time it’s unpredictable and engrossing. If you consider yourself a law-abiding citizen, Winter’s Bone is a small window into a world you might never understand. It is essentially a modern version of bootleggers versus revenuers, in this case meth producers versus the sheriff. Notions of good and bad don’t exist in this world. And while lip service is paid to blood, to family, it’s clear that the business takes priority over all. Antipathy underscores everything.

The film is rife with excellent and moving performances. Jennifer Lawrence should have taken the statuette that Natalie Portman didn’t deserve (because let’s face it, Black Swan was terrible and Portman’s performance was dreadful). Lawrence’s performance as Ree is a revelation and makes me excited to see how she’ll do as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. (In many ways, Winter’s Bone feels like a training camp for parts of The Hunger Games; it feels like District 12.)

As much as I enjoyed her performance, though, I was taken away by John Hawkes as Teardrop, her uncle. His personal journey is as arduous as hers, maybe more so because he has no illusions as to where it may lead. He reeks of a fatalistic air, accepting his fate without surrendering to it, and this lends him such power and presence. Very well done, indeed.

At any time the film could have gone in any direction, and any of them would have felt right. As such, Winter’s Bone mimics life to perfection. Great film, well worth the effort to see.

Super 8

Part of the reason I blog at all is to maintain some practice with writing. This hasn’t worked well since by the time I’m done with the work day, I never want to type again. But there’s this old manuscript that wants to finish its digital conversion (from analog Smith-Corona original to digital Word) so that I can revive the 1988 published novel (Derelict, ah I remember it fondly). And then I can polish the new one, and get on with the next one. Kindle, I have stuff coming to Kindle!

In the meanwhile, I’m not sure what to make of Super 8. I know, it’s been out a few weeks already, but I don’t want to write about Transformers: Dark of the Moon because it was just loud and silly, the motion picture equivalent of a decent Fourth of July fireworks display (i.e., all flash, less than zero substance). So I took a moment to catch Super 8 and I’m left with this overall feeling of meh.

It is by no means a bad film, it’s just...lacking.

Super 8 is J.J. Abrams’ homage to Steven Spielberg, specifically Spielberg’s films of the late 1970’s, early 1980’s. As such, it is set in 1979 and tells the tale of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his band of early teen buddies. This band of buddies are budding filmmakers, filming a zombie epic in their small, Ohio town. During a late-night shoot at a train station, they witness the deliberate derailment of an Air Force freight train. They flee as the military comes sweeping in to secure the area, and thus is the film’s central mystery launched because something seems to have fled the scene of the crash, something not of this earth (cue eerie and suspenseful music cue).

And as the central plot is launched, the film begins to unravel. Not the least of its problems is its utter predictability. If you were to pause the film immediately after the train wreck, and then sketch out the plot points you know about and those you might speculate about, you’d discover you were right and, worse, your guesses as to how all would be handled would be spot on. “Predictable” is such an understatement as applied to this film.

Super 8 is also vaguely nasty and cynical. While it’s trying to be an homage to early Spielberg, it is clearly a product of our times. The film can be directly compared to E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. From E.T. comes the notion of a young kid encountering an extraterrestrial, and from CE3K comes the more adult contact and the government’s reaction.

Yet, both Spielberg films are utterly devoid of cynicism. Rather, they revel in wonderment (something that livens most Spielberg films). Even when the government is perceived as acting poorly, they do so with honorable intent. They may be blundering and stupid, as in E.T., but their ultimate goal is peaceful contact, to learn and understand rather than be fearful and destroy. They are never evil.

Consider the scene and line in E.T. that makes me gasp and tear-up every time I see it. E.T. is captured and dying, Elliot (Henry Thomas) is dying right along with him, and everyone is afraid of everything. And in that dark moment, Keys (Peter Coyote) tries to reassure Elliot. How? “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was eleven years old.” This is a moment void of cynicism and deception; it is a moment of connection and honesty.

Super 8 has nothing even close to this. Instead, adults are almost universally stupid, the military is simply evil, the kids are almost universally the good guys, and the alien is just an innocent. Yes, there is a moment near the end where Abrams attempts to make a connection between events in Joe’s life and what’s been happening to the alien. But it is done in such obvious fashion, is so utterly predictable, that its pay off is more “you have got to be kidding me” than “wow.”

The film does have its positive aspects. Joel Courtney is impressive as Joe and Kyle Chandler does his standard excellent bit as Joel’s father, but the stand out is Elle Fanning as one of the band of buddies newest member. Her performance is a stand-out.

The look and feel of the film capture perfectly those early Spielberg films, except for Abrams continued affection for lens flare. Really, J.J., it just sucks. Maybe not as bad as shaky-skaky cam, which this film completely rejects, but damn near. The special effects are good enough, even if the alien looks like a tiny version of Clovie from Cloverfield.

Michael Giacchino’s music deserves a quick comment. Like several other film composers in recent years, Giacchino is coming into his own. One of the things he is truly excellent at is capturing the tone and feel of other era’s and other composers, and doing so in such a way that it feels fresh rather than rehash. Here, he channels Spielberg’s go-to composer, John Williams, and some of the music captures precisely the early wonder that came from Williams, and that Williams himself seems to have lost the ability to recreate. Picasso said that a good artist borrows, while a great artist steals. Giacchino is a great thief on his way to becoming a great artist.

In the end, Super 8 is all set-up with no pay-off. All the first act effort goes precisely nowhere. And because of that, as an homage it’s a failure. Spielberg films always had a superb pay-off, be it as spectacular as an alien mothership lifting into the heavens, or as simple as the face of a little boy watching as his alien friend heads home. Comparatively speaking, Abrams hasn’t even found Spielberg’s shadow.