'John Wick': A Hitman to Remember

by Brett Parker

 

While I’ve certainly gotten plenty of popcorn enjoyment out of recent action hits, part of me can’t help but wonder if some of them have given a serious beating to classical action formalism.  While the quick-cutting grittiness of the Jason Bourne pictures were an exciting jolt, it annoys me how lesser directors have watered-down that style into generic complacency that lacks visual coherence.  And while I was thrilled as most people to see Liam Neeson awaken his inner-skull-basher in Taken, it’s troubling how the film’s perverse formula inspired producers to favor macho sensationalism over intricate screenwriting.  Perhaps that’s why I’m so bowled over by John Wick, a stylish piece of bang-bang that brings smart precision to every aspect of its formula, making it a gorgeous pleasure.  The first time directing and producing team of David Leitch and Chad Stahelski are clearly trying to get their John Woo on, but young bucks trying to honor John Woo is miles more compelling than a Hollywood hack pushing Liam Neeson back into a bad Taken rehash.  And this film further confirms for me something I’ve been convinced of for a long time: Keanu Reeves is a real treasure in Hollywood action films.

As the film opens, we witness a sad man named John Wick (Keanu Reeves) as he sulks about an empty house in a miserable trance.  Flashbacks reveal that his wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan), passed away days earlier from cancer.  Knowing that she was facing the end of her life, she arranged for John to receive a surprise present after her demise: a puppy named Daisy that is meant to help him cope with her loss.  As John tries to warm up to the new dog in the house, he is soon the victim of a home invasion at the hands of violent punks.  John was spotted driving around the neighborhood in a vintage 1969 Mustang, and the young thugs beat him senseless before taking his car keys.  Before he is knocked unconscious, the thieves make him witness the viscious killing of Daisy, an act that sets off a deep-rooted and terrifying bloodlust within.  

It turns out the leader of the thieves is no random punk, but Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the son of Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), who just happens to be John’s former employer.  Once Viggo learns of his son’s violent act, he informs him that he not only violated a retirement truce between the two, but set off a nightmarish killing machine who has nothing to lose.  John was once the most notorious hitman in the business, a black angel of death who had a scary talent for killing any target with superhuman precision.  “I once saw him kill three men in a bar with a pencil,” Viggo recalls.  That means it’s only a matter of time before Iosef ends up with bullets in his head, for John is now set off on a violent rampage where the bodies of Viggo’s men pile up endlessly and a tornado of chaos is heading straight for the Russian crime family’s doorstep.  

If the frantic, herky-jerky camera style that passes for action scenes these days has gotten on your nerves, then the ballet-style execution of John Wick’s fight scenes is bound to impress you.  The camera placements and movements of the actors evoke the formal excitement of a Fred Astaire dance number and these coordinated bursts of violence can’t help but dazzle.  Instead of choosing between bare-knuckle brawling or gunplay, the filmmakers have shrewdly found a way to blend both ideals into a fierce fighting style.  Reeves moves about the frame dishing out a visceral and intimate hail of bullets, working a pistol the way Astaire used to work a top hat and cane.  While the spoiled film snob inside wishes these fights pushed themselves to be way more elaborate and transcendent, you delight in knowing these scenes lay waste to most half-assed battles stuffing up the genre.

 

Keanu Reeves is one of those Hollywood stars who gets riddled with jokes about his acting abilities, mainly for the way his stoicism tends to be misused in the occasional drama.  Yet in a less confused world, moviegoers would be drooling over the fact that his zen focus makes him quite the modern day Clint Eastwood whenever he shows up in an action vehicle (hence why The Wachowskis channeling his warrior coolness into a philosophical Christ figure felt like a stroke of cinematic genius).  His lived-in physique and thoughtful calmness proves fantastic in fleshing out Wick’s existential weariness and lethal focus.  Plus after the ultimate effort of dishing out the physical goods in The Matrix movies, Reeves tears through the action scenes here like an accomplished olympian who can vanquish the younger competition around him at will.  In the past few years, it’s been observed how Reeves has had difficulty getting certain passion projects off the ground, all while generic flicks have welcomed him with open arms.  So perhaps the whole “hitman-getting-back-in-the-game” angle is meant to show how true Hollywood players can’t escape the whole box office game.  This is strongly felt through The Continental, the film’s dreamlike Manhattan hotel that serves as a neutral ground for assassins.  From the Casablanca vibe drowning the atmosphere to the too-cool-for-school interplay among the inner-industry operators, this fabulous location convinces us that Reeves is immersed in the Hollywood universe to his very core.

While Nyqvist could simply show up and look intimidating as a villain, the role of Tarasov  gives him hopelessly cynical philosophies to dish out and the deliciously casual way he does so is a nice counterpoint to Wick’s laser beam focus.  Plus I give Nyqvist props for bringing dignity to the fact that Russians are once again being rolled out as the foreign villains of the season.  U.S. and Russian relations are getting testy again these days, giving Hollywood the rapid cue to make Soviet souls an evil empire our American heroes can battle endlessly with.  In a bizarre way, I don’t think it’s entirely far-fetched to read the film as a cockeyed meditation on U.S. & Russia’s rocky relationship.  For our rugged U.S. boy and his Russian counterpart try to respect each other’s boundaries, but end up trying to blow each other to smithereens anyways because, as Viggo observes, there’s too much adversarial hostility in their blood to be ignored.  That may sound crazy, but I’m convinced that U.S. and Russian leaders have secretly fantasized about having a bloody brawl in the rain just like the one depicted in the climax.

While speaking about John Wick’s myth, Viggo says “he’s not the boogyman.  He’s the one you send to kill the f-----g boogyman!”  In a way, that could be the perfect metaphor for what moviegoers are crying out for in their action products.  We get impatient with vapid trends and empty hulks, causing us to yearn for an expert to walk in and clean up all the nonsense.  John Wick proves that Keanu Reeves is a hell of an expert to get the job done.  Just ponder the fact that his character is out to avenge a dog and you can’t help but buy it wholesale.  Sure, the plot point syncs up perfectly with America’s fetishistic obsession with pets these days, but thanks to a fierce monologue delivered halfway through the film, Reeves convinces us that fighting for dogs is as worthy as fighting for your country.  

A 'Hercules' Who Can't Even Lift Audiences

by Brett Parker

In an age where intelligent discussions about TV producing more sophisticated content than movies these days are becoming some kind of norm, Brett Ratner's Hercules doesn't do the movies at large any favors.  The popularity of Game of Thrones has the mainstream getting used to nitty-gritty old-world dealings drenched in ultraviolent bloodshed, delightfully gratuitous sex, and a sharp medieval wit that could (literally) slice heads.  By inevitable comparison, the classical numbskull cheesiness of the new Hercules is left looking incredibly dull and embarrassing.  The new film makes zero attempt to dish out any kind of modern day edge or brains, making contemporary audiences genuinely confused as to why the producers didn't think no-holds-barred barbarianism was the way to go with this one.  If you have to feel sorry for anyone, then do so for Dwayne Johnson, who is damagingly hindered by a cornball script and inept directing as his boyhood dream of embodying a mythical hero goes unfortunately ill-served.

The film introduces us to the Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) of ancient myth: the half-human, half-god son of Zeus who endured 12 mythic labors which included defeating a gigantic boar and going head-to-head with a seemingly indestructible lion.  Yet we are quickly told that Hercules' myth is simply a yarn carefully curated by the man himself, with great assistance from the storytelling theatrics of his nephew, Iolaus (Reece Ritchie).  The truth is that Hercules is an embittered warrior who lost his family in a mysterious act of violence.  He is now a lost soul reduced to offering his fighting skills and loyal band-of-warriors up to whoever is willing to pay large chunks of gold.  The hulking sword-for-hire comes into a lucrative deal when he is told that a kingdom in Thrace needs help warding off a fearsome army trying to overthrow the land.  The kingdom is ruled by Lord Cotys (John Hurt), a wealthy king who instructs Hercules to teach his people how to fight like an army to defend their own turf.  Yet as Hercules goes through the motions of his heroic myth, he realizes that not all is what it seems and that he may be fighting for the wrong side.  This causes our hero to ponder the depths of his damaged soul to see if he can gather enough fire within his will to find something truly worth fighting for outside of mythic lore.  

Director Brett Ratner tends to fall into that camp somewhere next to Michael Bay representing everything that makes most smart people groan about Hollywood filmmaking.  You'd have to be an unimaginative teenager not to grasp his heavy reliance of old-school Hollywood complacency which bare scarce inklings of sophistication.  For my money, his one virtue is sometimes capturing the great humor that arises when shrewd movie stars meet preposterous genre situations, which explains Chris Tucker & Jackie Chan milking the Rush Hour franchise for gold and the affection moviegoers recall for Nicolas Cage's epic temper-tantrums in The Family Man.  To me, the most original thing he ever dished out to the movies is the masterstroke of having Pierce Brosnan's master thief and Woody Harrelson's determined FBI agent becoming peculiar buddies in the fluff-minded After the Sunset.  Yet this time, Ratner shows his incompetence with a callow script and dated-looking action scenes that are completely oblivious to every advancement made in the swords-and-sandals epics since Spartacus.  While genre purists may be delighted by the dusty formalities on display, they'll quickly be bored once they realize there's no intelligent bits to latch onto.  And while an argument can be made that this film was engineered simply for 12-year-old boys, such an audience will seriously wonder where the gleeful style and ferocious energy of 300 is at.

Dwayne Johnson has stated in several interviews that he was born to play Hercules, and considering what an intense and humorous muscle man image he's crafted throughout his Hollywood career, it wasn't hard to agree with him.  That's why it's a rather bruising disappointment that Johnson doesn't have the hyperbolic grandeur the role cries out for.  In practice, his performance is somewhere between an advanced-thespian Sylvester Stallone and a puffed-up Keanu Reeves.  Perhaps a more bad-ass script and hard-R tone would've brought out a hero worth rooting for, but Johnson comes across rather bland in such a fangless vehicle.  Say what you will about Arnold Schwarzenegger in his old man-mountain days, but he could play to the camera like nobody's business and his voice could match Bogart's in terms of incongruent pizazz.  Arnold's mission in life was to energize cheese towards some kind of bizarre holiness while Johnson makes the mistake of trying to retain some kind of dignity.  The only moment of any real excitement comes towards the end, where a shirtless and raging Johnson, looking like a caveman Rambo, freaks out and starts smashing things while all his muscles get ample camera time.  It's the only moment that appropriately grasps why such movies exist in the first place: to glamorize the strongman ideal as they conquer their surroundings through brutal force of will.

It's too bad the final product is so dim-witted, for sprinkles of a shrewd subtext aren't too hard to suspect.  The script by Ryan Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos suggests how Lord Cotys' dealings could represent the American Goverment in all it's ego and duplicity, but the tinsletown-loving Ratner surely tilted the material into representing the Hollywood studio system, with Hercules himself as the stand-in for every muscle-bound action star.  It's not entirely difficult to see the plights of mainstream filmmaking peaking out as success-obsessed Cotys wants to play up Hercules' triumphs and myth to sway his people towards a military-minded mentality, although the peasants sway our hero into finding what is real within his heart to fight for more honest virtues.  Yet in the end, all these allusions turn out pretty hollow because Ratner's heart really isn't into it and you'd have to be a fool not to see how Ratner is more on the side of the studios than the independent-minded people.  

More than one bulked-up movie star on occasion, Johnson included, has noted how the Steve Reeves incarnation of the Hercules myth inspired them to pump the iron and become Hollywood warriors in their own right.  So the highest compliment that can be paid to the latest Hercules is that it may inspire 12-year-olds everywhere to hit the gym with the hopes of becoming one of the future Expendables someday.  For the rest of us, you'll be seriously jonesing for a Ridley Scott epic just to see this kind of material done right.  As the credits began to roll, I never had more of a craving to watch Gladiator in all my life.  In an era obsessed with Game of Thrones, and true grit in general, it's shocking that Hollywood didn't feel a calculated need to give us a brooding, bloodthirsty, almost nightmarish Hercules that could truly illuminate harrowed heroism most disillusioned stiffs can relate to these days.  Yet as it is, this Hercules is vapid, forgettable, and will be mighty hard to distinguish from all the other low-level B-flicks from this genre. 

'Maleficent': Shedding Light on a Dark Woman

by Brett Parker

 

You really gotta hand it to Disney: they’ve always been monumentally shrewd about making truckloads of money and they’ve figured out a brilliant new way to do so with Maleficent.  The big idea is to not only reconstruct a classically animated Disney gem in painstaking CGI hyperrealism, but to put an ironical modernist twist on the beloved tale.  So not only does it transform Sleeping Beauty into a living, breathing entity, but it recasts its gothic villainess as a sympathetic feminist heroine.  Could you imagine if Disney pulled this trick with its entire animated catalog?  What if The Little Mermaid’s Ursula was just a neglected diva who didn’t fit in with the rigid beauty standards of her world?  What if The Lion King’s Scar was just a self-reliant lion driven to alienation by his family’s self-absorption?  Maleficent may be too much frosting and not enough cake, but you have to admit that thinking up such a recipe in the first place is pretty ingenious.

Sleeping Beauty is one of those engrained children’s classics that just about everyone knows by heart: the young Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) falls under a spell cast upon her by the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) that sends her into a deadly deep sleep in which she can only be awaken by true love.  Maleficent re-imagines this story from the villainess’s point-of-view and discovers an astonishing amount of sympathy for her we may not have sensed before.  We first meet Maleficent as a proud and head-strong fairy living in The Moors, a mythical land which borders on a human kingdom.  She begins a fragile courtship with Prince Stefan (Sharlto Copley), a royal from the human world she falls hard for, but the feelings aren’t fully reciprocated.  Being with a non-human threatens his reign on the throne, and he is soon ordered by his kingdom to murder Maleficent as a sign of loyalty.  Instead, he drugs her one night and cuts off her fairy wings to make it look like he carried out the murderous deed without actually doing so.  

Mutilated and heartbroken, Maleficent casts herself off into the darker realms of her world and plots revenge.  On the day his royal baby is born, Stefan encounters Maleficent again when she appears in his court to place that fateful curse on his newborn that will send her into a deep sleep on her sixteenth birthday.  Fearing for his daughter’s life, Stefan hides her deep in the woods where she is raised by three bumbling fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple).  Maleficent watches the princess grow up from afar and starts to grow a considerable affection for her.  When the child turns fifteen, the dark fairy even comes out of the shadows to form a surprisingly caring relationship with her.  Regretting her supernatural scorn, Maleficent tries to reverse the curse but finds that her own spells may be more powerful than her emotions.

Maleficent marks the directorial debut of Robert Stromberg, the Academy Award winning Production Designer on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, so it must be said that the grand extent to which he meticulously recreates the original film’s fairy tale landscape as we remember it is quite dazzling.  While such productions are usually doomed to resemble live actors standing in front of shabby animation, the environment here has a sort of tangible texture to it which makes it feel more like an exquisite painting than a Saturday morning cartoon.  It’s just too bad that the overall tone is more on the side of children’s entertainment instead of hyper neo-realism.  For all its lush colors and sweeping visuals, Maleficent never really brings any depth past being a really beautiful coloring book.  Snow White and the Huntsman may have been far from perfect, but at least its atmosphere held a lived-in grittiness that brought about a peculiar kind of conviction these types of movies cry out for.  

 

It’s a testament to Angelina Jolie’s image that she could play a demonic-looking, horn-endowed queen of darkness effortlessly.  Jolie’s edgy demeanor and goddess glamour has become such a mega-wattage life force in Hollywood life that she’s usually at her most convincing in hyperbolic movie atmospheres (just ponder the surprising gravitas she brought to her bad-ass babe in the outrageous Wanted).  As the ultimate case study in scary-sexy and feminine authority, Jolie and Maleficent make the perfect marriage between star image and mythic grandeur.  No other actress in the role would dare have the same earth-scorching authority and superhuman magnetism.  As for the other mortals onscreen sheepishly sharing frames with Jolie, Elle Fanning was born to play purely innocent beauties while Sharlto Copley doesn’t have the regal sensuality to compliment the sinister madness he brings to Prince Stefan.  

Maleficent may ultimately just be cinematic candy--sweet and tasty, yet empty and not quite fulfilling--but the unearthed feminist musings the filmmakers bring to the forefront are certainly nothing to sneeze at.  In our post-modern, over-analytical times, the ideologies of classical Disney movies have been called out on occasion for their sexual and sociological implications, mainly in the ways white-bred beauty is celebrated and any kind of ambiguousness is ultimately cast as evil.  So it certainly took audacity and smarts to right all the feminine wrongs that inherently had to set Maleficent off.  For any smart woman knows that being burned by romance sets off reactionary scorn, the beauty standards that are often touted around could make any woman rage with vengeance, and absolutely no evil queen truly wanted to be an evil queen by choice.  It’s a sympathetic cleverness that certainly gives this shiny CGI display verve, and we’re rather thankful that Jolie is the one delivering it to us.  Like John Wayne playing cowboys and Robert DeNiro playing gangsters, we could go on watching Jolie play fairy tale baddies until the end of time.

A Bright 'Future' for X-Men Movies

by Brett Parker

 

The X-Men universe is so vast with colorful personalities and wildly imaginative storylines that the film incarnations of this world have wheeled out decidedly varying tones.  Some of the (better) installments adhere to the solemnity of that world’s existential traumas while others were more willing to extract the pop grandeur from these superheroes’ comic book absurdity.  X-Men: Days of Future Past finds a satisfying balancing act between these two inherent yet contradictive aspects of the mythology: it’s dug firmly into comic book flights of fancy, yet its sense of ideological dread looms over every moment of this film.  The mutants on display may pummel each other with superpowers and bounce around like cartoon gods, but their plights and conflicts are undoubtedly of the highest dramatic order.  

The film opens in a dystopian future where giant robots known as Sentinels hold a terrifying sway over the world in which they capture and kill both mutants and humans who have the potential to develop mutant genes.  Most of the X-Men we’ve come to know have been slaughtered by these Sentinels and only a small band of mutants are left standing in the world.  In China, lone survivor Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is able to meet up with fellow mutants Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellan), and  Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) in hiding.  Kitty reveals how she has the power to send a mutant’s present subconscious back in time to their older body with their knowledge of the future intact.  Realizing that the Sentinel nightmare came about after shape-shifting assassin Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) murdered the inventor of the Sentinels, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), Professor X concludes that someone must travel back in time and prevent Mystique from every carrying out that murder.  Realizing his indestructible nature makes him the only one who can withstand the force of time-travel, Wolverine volunteers to be the one who goes back.

As he wakes up in the 1973 version of his body, Wolverine realizes he has no time to waste and must track down both the younger Professor X (James McAvoy) and younger Magneto (Michael Fassbender).  This proves to be endlessly complicated, for Professor X is a disillusioned soul whose telepathic powers seem to be fading as the result of an anti-paralysis drug.  Meanwhile, Magneto has been captured by the U.S. Government after being blamed for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Even in spite of the fact that the two men couldn’t hate each other more at this point in their lives, Wolverine tries effortlessly to unite the two of them to help him prevent a grim future, all while trying to track Mystique as she carries out vengeful missions of mutant freedom across the globe.  

This is the first X-Men movie Bryan Singer has helmed since 2003’s X2: X-Men United, and not only has his confidence sharpened by observing other X-Men movies not getting things quite right, but making Superman Returns and Valkyrie in the meantime surely taught him more about blending spectacle and drama.  This is perhaps the X-Men movie with the most effective imagery, doing its comic book roots proud without sacrificing its dignity.  My favorite scene involves the super-speedy mutant Quicksilver (a livewire Evan Peters) who damn near slows time down as he races to save his fellow mutants from being shot at by security guards (time is so slow to Quicksilver that he has time to listen to “Time in a Bottle” on his headphones during his attack, bringing floating beauty to a scene of violent urgency).  Thanks to loopholes in telepathy and time-travel, there’s a wonderful scene where both the young and old Professor X’s get to confront each other face-to-face, not only fulfilling a great fanboy fantasy but bringing verve to a classical sci-fi device.  The film’s most hard-hitting scene shows images of Sentinels ferociously tearing apart mutants edited over Magneto’s climactic speech about why mutants are not to be messed with.  The skillful editing by John Ottman exquisitely counterbalances the sinister nature of Magneto’s words by showing the fearsome desperation they were born out of.

 

The X-Men movies have dished out such a wide variety of characters that X-Men: Days of Future Past appears to have picked the most appealing ones and used them effectively.  At this point in the game, Hugh Jackman could dish out Wolverine’s awesomeness in his sleep, although the 70’s time period here greatly compliments the young Clint Eastwood myth within the character that’s been great fun to spot before.  Jennifer Lawrence brings a down-to-earth American girl vibe to mystique, helping to make the character more sympathetic than ever before.  James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are fantastic in the ways they call upon old-school British-flavored thespian class to flesh out their characters.  Their wonderful dedication and conviction is based around their duck-to-water understanding  that superheroes speaking hyperbole in capes and masks is a modern day update on Shakespeare's kings and warriors.  Fassbender especially has a monologue on an airplane filled with such raging command that his Old Vic grandeur literally shakes the plane.  The fact that the duo convinces you Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton would’ve fit in perfectly with this world gives the film an extra kick of excitement.  

What’s so enduring about the entire X-Men mythology is how the relentless prejudices the mutants face could be a stand-in for any oppressed minority throughout history.  Ian McKellen was drawn to the material for its allusions to gay rights while the Jewish Bryan Singer certainly is attuned to the Holocaust allegories present (after all, he did make Apt Pupil and Valkyrie).  While the future imagery of Sentinels exterminating undesirables certainly evokes Nazism, the mechanical and pitiless methodology of their attacks uncomfortably suggests drone warfare.  The chilling revelation here hints that all forms of violent regulation eventually lurches towards the same nightmarish outcome.  What’s complex about the film’s resolution is how both the virtuous mutants and the villainous ones need both of their ying-yang ideologies meshed together in order to combat a hellish society.  Ponder how the ending couldn’t have been brought about without both sincere empathy and wicked duplicity.  

By melding the X-Men’s past with their future, Bryan Singer and his confederates have finally been able to make an X-Men movie that takes all the bits you’ve loved from every installment (even the weaker ones) and combine them into a satisfying whole.  It’s a delicate balance that I think can be improved upon towards more powerhouse installments (and judging by the epic after-credits sequence, we’re in for yet another monumental adventure with our favorite mutants).  If future X-Men movies keep building on its powerful elements with cinematic wonder, then we can finally start to visualize sequels that match the scope and awe of the beloved comics.  

Old-School 'Godzilla' Meets New-School Relevance

 by Brett Parker

You really do let out a gleeful squeal the first time you see him.  The camera pans up over a skyscraper-sized reptilian body obscured by thunderous shadows while an unholy chorus wails over the soundtrack.  Once we reach the top of this scary sight, lightning strikes and we’re able to make out that the creature is Godzilla himself, and man oh man, is he ready to get down to business.  We’re certainly not talking about the confused-looking iguana from Roland Emmerich’s botched 1998 version, but the bad-ass, guy-in-a-rubber-suit mystique of Japanese fever dreams.  That demonic grin and ear-shattering roar we’ve come to maniacally cherish are both fully intact and you smile knowing that old-school monster ferociousness is ready to be served.

The success of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla is based on the realization that we’ve really missed the “classical” big guy kicking the crap out of scaly foes while turning the world into his own sandbox of destruction.  It’s just too bad those pesky humans keep getting in the way of the camera.  The time-honored tradition of melodramatic humans being subjected to Godzilla’s wrath while themes of man-abusing-nature get tossed around are fully honored, all while being basked in the current trend of making everything gritty and gloomy.  While there isn’t too much here my inner-intellectual can really complain about, my inner-10-year-old really wishes the humans could just sit down so he could enjoy all the monster ass-kicking in peace.  Yet a popcorn thrill ride that satisfies both the college professor and kindergartner inside you is pretty much the definition of solid Hollywood filmmaking these days, so I should probably just calm down.  

The film opens as all Godzilla movies do, with mortified scientists scrambling around trying to warn everybody about alarming nuclear activity that appears to be harboring something gigantic and abnormal.  A nuclear expert named Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is obsessed with searching a quarantined plant in Japan for answers to a mysterious incident that killed his wife, Sandra (Juliette Binoche).  His naval officer son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), tries to convince him to let it go, but Joe is convinced that something fishy is still going on within the site.  His suspicions turn out to be right, for scientists are harboring a giant monster in hibernation out of the public eye.  Before Joe can tell the world, haywire ensues and a colossal winged monster emerges from the site and goes off in search of what is believed to be another MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) out in the world.

Government officials ponder how they can possibly contain and defeat two gargantuan mutant creatures intent on pure destruction.  They quickly realize that their only hope may be yet another oversized animal-beast that’s been kept hidden in secret for many years.  He’s been hiding out in the ocean for decades and has frantically been kept under-wraps by big government until the emergence of these new creatures cause him to leap into action.  They call him “Godzilla” and he sets out to directly confront the other two monsters wreaking havoc across the globe.  The humans scatter about and scheme desperately to protect themselves, for they know that when all these giant beasts clash with each other, they’ll lay a smack-down on the planet that has never been seen before in history.  

While the creatures in Godzilla are evoked with the latest in state-of-the-art CGI, their movements and behavior directly copy the hokey brawling so prominent at the dawn of this film series, and that turns out to be a popcorn blessing.  Edwards wonderfully marries the camera and effects to create alluring imagery (my favorite being a barely-conscious Ford being lured away from a nuclear blast by helicopter), but there’s no denying how the creatures are mimicking the cheesy monster movie mayhem of cinematic yesteryear.  While their movements are more agile, and Seamus McGarvey’s dark and grayish cinematography helps mask the silliness, these mutant wrestling matches deliver the jolly goods you’ve always treasured within these movies.  Godzilla’s climactic “finishing move” had me cheering out loud in the theater.

But it can’t just all be reptilian rumbles, for a Godzilla movie isn’t truly a Godzilla movie without worrisome humans around to remind us that this is all a cautionary warning about nature.  It’s a sad testament to man’s constant disrespect towards nature that a Godzilla picture has proven to be such an enduring formula, for this movie covers every ritualistic beat of the tradition--frantic scientists, booming musical score, epic metropolitan destruction---and feels as relevant today as it did in the 50’s.  Online conspiracy theorists are quick to remind us how government duplicity, incompetence, and arrogance is causing deep repercussions for our planet’s well-being and these modern day anxieties fit in perfectly with these creature-feature formalities.  Perhaps my  slight annoyance with panicky humans getting in the way of monster brutality provides the shrewdest critique of our modern world yet, for we all whine and moan about our right to live when eventually we’ll have to just get the hell out of nature’s way and let it play out the exact way it wants to.  

The actors on display prove dedicated to the stern, traumatized moods the tone demands of them, although you do find yourself wishing more silliness would creep into the membrane.  Most impressive of all is Bryan Cranston who damn near wrings out all the thespian anguish he can to deliver the most epically concerned of all concerned scientists.  The gifted Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives us a brooding and focused action figure, making you sort of yearn for the days when a quick-witted charmer was standard-issue in these kinds of proceedings.  Part of me thinks having Channing Tatum here in his 21 Jump Street glory would not only be a blast but speak bundles about how modern-day males would handle a global catastrophe.  It’s always nice to see Sally Hawkins and Elizabeth Olsen, but their roles are so beneath their skill sets that I wonder if they were secretly offended by the script.  Meanwhile, Ken Watanabe seems to enjoy his simple scientist role, probably because it’s a celebrated tradition in his country the way American actors play lawyers.  Call me crazy, but I always thought Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime would’ve been the ideal human to place in a Godzilla movie.  The most over-the-top human of all sharing the screen with the most over-the-top creature of all would’ve been such a bewildering hunk of Hollywood cheese that I’m genuinely surprised a 90’s studio head never concocted it.

With Godzilla and his debut film Monsters, it’s apparent that Edwards wants to explore a realistic spacial relationship between humans and giant creatures, and it’s a testament to his ideals that this is probably the closest to a “realistic” Godzilla flick we’ve ever gotten (maybe this is strongly felt cause it makes the grand implausibility of the 1998 Roland Emmerich version eat serious dust).  Yet somehow I still prefer Pacific Rim, the cheerful giant monster epic which built its world around an infectious Star Wars-like mythology and still ended up saying tons about nature and nationalism anyways.  The irony here is that for all the film’s dreary warnings about the crippling forces of nature, it dishes out a happy Hollywood ending filled with as much triumphant idealism as Top Gun.  As Godzilla takes his victorious final march out to sea, the film’s final message appears to be that no matter what happens, nature will come down on our side and everything is gonna turn out alright in the end.  It’s a smirking ending filled with cockeyed assuredness, the very thing the entire movie spent warning us about. 

      

'Rise' of a Sexy Warrior Queen

by Brett Parker

The most striking thing about 300: Rise of an Empire is how in a blockbuster franchise that celebrates loutish macho-man testosterone, a woman turns out to have the biggest balls (metaphorically speaking) throughout the entire movie.  As this sequel aims to dish out more images of bare-chested ancient warriors spilling blood in a CGI-on-acid landscape, sexy brunette goddess Eva Green shows up to not only steal the entire film but become the only good reason for it’s existence.   Clad in all-black-everything with fishnet stockings and golden stegosaurus spikes on her back, Green’s Artemisia of Caria is the kind of sword-wielding, blood-thirsty, porcelain-skinned goth babe that would make Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton reach for a cigarette.  Maybe if she had a better movie to play off of, I wouldn’t be gushing so hard, but this is like watching Cleopatra slashing her way through Oompa-Loompa Land.

300 was the tale of a small army of Spartans who stood their ground against the armies of the vast Persian empire in a last stand to protect their homeland.  They were crushed and defeated, but the brave tenaciousness they showed in the face of adversity promised to be echoed throughout the ages.  It’s that very tenaciousness that the Athenian army hopes to cling onto in this sequel as the Persian army sets their sights on all of Greece.  As the merciless force pulling the strings behind the scenes for King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green) takes command of a naval fleet to crush the remainder of Greece with a fearsome army.  The only thing standing in her way is Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), a noble Athenian who rallies his level-headed countrymen and motivates them to hold off their enemies at sea.  This sparks an all-out nautical attack, in which boats clash into each other and armies slice-and-dice their opponents until only one nation is left standing.

300: Rise of an Empire wants to build on the first film’s poetry for neanderthals, but it lacks the brutish electricity and deranged philosophies that bewildered us the first time.  I enjoyed the first 300 on a (very) simple-minded level, mostly for the way it aspired to bring cinematic beauty to Frank Miller’s ultraviolent graphic novel panels and for the way it barbarically skewered simple philosophies, like Field of Dreams for cavemen.  Everything in the sequel feels watered down and doesn’t have the same sense of thuggish hysteria that proved surprisingly gripping the first time around.  The biggest difference in terms of action is how the battle scenes here are naval fights at sea as opposed to the land combat of the first one.  Instead of strategic blood-battles across a bare land-scape, warriors take impossible leaps across wooden sea vessels to beat the pulp out of whatever mariner-warriors stand in their way.  While both films deal in over-the-top CGI, the actions feels more incoherent this time around, denying us the fluid beauty-meets-the beast visuals the first one had quite a handle on.

It also doesn’t help matters that none of the male characters on display register at all.  They all fit the description of handsome-yet-generic Troy leftovers, but there’s nothing memorable about them at all.  The only one you can really single out is Sullivan Stapleton, but that’s because he’s been forced into the franchise’s leading spot since Gerard Butler ate dust in the first one.  Say what you will about Butler, but his virtue is to bring magnetism to burly, baroque lunkheads in the same vein in which we recall fondness for Big Moose from the Archie comics.  Stapleton wouldn’t even pass muster starring in a made-for-basic-cable gladiator movie on the Family Channel.  Considering how disgruntled moviegoers found alarming political ideologies the first time around, I wonder if the casting of more “simple” actors is supposed to be a pointed political statement.  If the first 300 is meant to represent the cockeyed war-mongering of the George W. Bush era, then perhaps the sequel is meant to reflect the Obama era: blue-clad warriors trying to be clear-headed about democracy....and ending up in chaos anyways.  It’s sort of worth noting how the heroes on display here aren’t as muscular as the ones from last time around.

You really do find yourself just marking the time until Eva Green shows up on screen.  She really does lay waste to every other performer and visual around her.  Even King Xerxes, the flamboyant, glowing god-king who seemed so fascinating in the first film, is reduced to a side-show clown in Artemisia’s presence.  Green proved to be one of the most powerful of Bond Girls in Casino Royale and was able to spoof seductresses while staying seductive in Dark Shadows, but putting her beauty in an action-princess light catapults her to a whole new stratosphere.  The film’s only memorable and powerful moments are the ones in which her royal gravitational pull yanks the entire movie into her orbit.  The most fierce image comes when she kneels before a king wielding several dismembered heads with her face covered in blood.  The scariest part of the whole moment is the killer determination in her eyes that could damn near set the screen on fire.  In a movie filled wall-to-wall with over-the-top violence, the only heart-stopping moment comes when Artemisia begins having aggressive sex with Themistocles in an attempt to get him to join her side.  As her body gyrates away, the demonic intensity in her face puts everyone else’s war-faces to shame and her nude body reminds us that it’s been a long time since an R-Rated Hollywood product treated us to an all-out sex scene just for the hell of it.  Between Cameron Diaz getting it on with a car in The Counselor and Eva Green commanding the screen in the buff, maybe Hollywood is finally getting it’s sexual mojo back.  

Look, there’s two camps of people in this world: those who thought 300 was an awesome display of bad-ass-ness or those who thought it was a complete waste of time.  If you’re in the former, then you’ll be disappointed to find that this sequel isn’t nearly as good as the first, and if you’re in the latter, then you knew since the first trailer dropped to stay far, far away from this one, so that’s settled.  But if you’re a fan of super-sexy, action heroines fully prepared to take over your fantasies, then 300: Rise of an Empire has a really awesome prize hidden for you within an awful box of cereal.  I can’t remember the last time such a fantastic female character was trapped in such a worthless movie.  The most positive thing I can say about this flick is that it had me pointing to Eva Green’s poster in the lobby afterwards while shouting “THIS....IS....SEXY!”

A 'Night' to Remember

by Brett Parker

One of my biggest pet peeves about cinema is movies about dating that ring completely false and toss around contrivances like grenades.  So what was so noteworthy about Edward Zwick’s About Last Night from 1986 was how much it got right in the love department.  As the film follows the trajectory of a big city romance from uneasy beginning to bittersweet end, you realize there’s enough real world stresses and recognizable complications to satisfy romantic matters at hand.  Rob Lowe and Demi Moore deliver their most engaging and tender of performances while Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins dish out unique comic angles within their personas.  Most people nowadays remember the film for it’s tantalizing sex and nudity, making one nostalgic for a time when Hollywood felt more open to things like that.  While it may have strayed considerably from David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago on which its based, you must admit that watered-down David Mamet is still better than most Hollywood products out there.

As the ceremonial go-to Valentine’s Day flick of this year, About Last Night has been given the remake treatment and fans of the original will be happy to know that the newer version is as smart and sustainable as the original.  The big differences this time is the use of predominantly black leads and plenty of leeway for Kevin Hart, the Aladdin’s Genie of modern comedies, to let loose with manic energy.  I must admit that I prefer the latest version to the original, for it’s more nuanced, technically astute, charismatic, funny, and sincere in its steps.

The film follows Danny (Michael Ealy) and Debbie (Joy Bryant), two attractive Los Angeles natives who begin dating after being awkwardly set-up by Bernie (Kevin Hart) and Joan (Regina Hall), their best friends who are conducting a roller-coaster relationship of their own.  They begin a sunny courtship filled with affection and intimacy that eventually leads them down the path to a real relationship.  Even as Bernie and Joan begin to fall apart in a disastrous fashion, Danny and Debbie decide to take the next step and move in together.

As soon as the duo take the plunge and end up in the same apartment, tensions between the sexes begin to flare.  Little quirks and underlying judgements boil to the surface, and Danny and Debbie both realize that relationships take way more work than the singles-bar scene would suggest.  Does the couple have a strong enough love to overcome hardships or are they doomed to end up as troubled as Bernie and Joan?

Like the earlier film, the main objective here is to examine the trials and tribulations of a modern day couple living together, giving apt attention to the “what now?” phase that occurs just after the courtship.  While the story has the rhythms of a romantic comedy, it shows its smarts by focusing on occupational resentments, dog-owner plights, hermetic bickering, and Mars-Venus relations everyday couples can surely relate to.  Satisfaction comes in the way this remake proves to be cooler and more alluring in its distinctions, as if Prince did a cover of a Bruce Springsteen ballad.  

The challenge for actors in a glossy romantic comedy is to be be both magnetically charming and calmly relatable, two ideals which can put a peculiar hindrance on each other.  Yet this cast proves to be winning personalities that are a pleasure to spend two hours with.  Michael Ealy is an impressive star with such mega-wattage leading man qualities that it’s kind of frustrating that Hollywood hasn’t yet figured out that he could be the next Steve McQueen.  Even though he looks like a supercool movie star, he still proves effective at being a warm and sympathetic everyman.  Joy Bryant may lack the powerful beauty of Demi Moore, but she’s better at conveying everyday-female soulfulness.  Regina Hall proves to be more of a comedic live-wire than Elizabeth Perkins and she’s often hilarious in her feminine musings (her chicken mask scene is one for the ages).  And at this point in life, you’ve made up your mind about Kevin Hart: you either love this clownish tornado or you don’t.  As for me, I can’t help but be charmed by the little guy.  Instead of being weighed down by his shortcomings, Hart pushes a refreshing joy through his elfish frame.  In most of his movies, especially here, he touches on male epiphanies with such goofball sincerity that I can’t help but be touched by it.

Even with its smart perceptions, About Last Night still falls into that category of movies about pretty people in a pretty city who can easily tidy up all the messy things in their lives.  Yet its ultimate triumph is how most couples may recognize themselves through these characters and might even find a few helpful ways to deal with their own anxieties.  Plus the movie is a fine excuse for Ealy and Hart to work their cinematic muscle and further prove that they’re ready for bigger cinematic game.  Hopefully David Mamet watches (even though he’ll undoubtedly shake his head a bit) and grows a burning desire to work with both those gents.  

The Top 10 Movies of 2013

by Brett Parker

There was a time when people would tell you all about everything that’s wrong in this world with a certain amount of hysteria in their voices.  If you were alive and present in 2013, you probably talked about such things with the same sanitized calmness you’d use to read off a grocery list.  A gaze through the news and social media nowadays would prove to anyone that the freaks are out in full force and have plenty to work with.  We have political uncertainty, a troubled economy, alarming violence, shameless dating catastrophes, and a zombie-like reliance on technology that would make Johnny Five raise an eyebrow.  But the most troubling thing of all may just be how people have grown an uneasy complacency with all of this.  Chaos has become the new normal.  In a world gone completely out-of-whack, accepting the out-of-whackness has become a rational coping mechanism.

Looking over the films of 2013, you can’t help but notice that keeping calm amongst suffocating madness and carrying on was some kind of unifying theme.  Whether facing environments of alien robots, sinister science experiments, rampant greediness, suicidal car races, elaborate con games, or violent battles to the death, movie characters did their damnedest to survive.  Watching these compelling folks keep their cool amongst bewildering circumstances certainly gave me a lot to connect with and helped me flesh out my Top 10 Movies of 2013:

1) The Wolf of Wall Street

The Catholic Martin Scorsese has always been a filmmaker who shows us the temptations and darkness involved with sin, and the Wall Street Satan he focuses his camera on this time revels in sinful temptations that are stunningly fascinating.  Through the true life tale of infamous penny stock huckster Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio, a man possessed), Scorsese not only transplants ancient Roman decadence to modern-day New York, but also gives slimy stock traders the Goodfellas treatment.  The result is a hypnotic portrait of shameless wealth, sexual depravity, and alarming drug use that makes Wall Street look like Sesame Street.  But this isn’t just lunacy for lunacy sake, for you’d have to be a fool to miss the morals and decency that become serious collateral damage in the process.  Most chilling of all is the film’s final scene which shows that in the religion of money, a business Beelzebub can be recast as the Christ of cash.

2) The World's End
Edgar Wright is quickly becoming one of my favorite filmmakers for the way he sets out to spoof a beloved genre of cinema and ends up churning out a superior work that can stand with any film in said genre.  So it’s damn near mind-blowing how The World’s End shrewdly marries an alien bodysnatcher flick with a midlife reunion tale and teaches both types of film a serious thing or two.  After grappling with a zombie apocalypse and super-cop gunplay, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost once again hurl their friendship into a movie-mad playground, although this trip takes their bromance to surprisingly painful depths.  Even though this movie supposedly caps the end of the duo’s “Cornetto Trilogy,” The World’s End will make you wish they’d keep bringing their cheeky touch to every film genre ever.

3) The Great Gatsby
Literary purists scoffed and guardians of subtlety are still shaking their heads, but Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation is a grand explosion of colors and sounds I find damn near impossible to resist.  Armed with a cast that delivers the best acted film version of the novel yet, Luhrmann plays fast and loose with historical accuracy to deliver the Gatsby of our teenage fever dreams: a frisky, candy-coated world that’s just as grand and delusional as the title character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio with commanding insight).  It’s only when we apply our modern minds to the giddy dream world on display that we see the emotional cracks in the foundation, bringing great illumination to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bittersweet truths and heartbreaking disillusionment.  

4) Upstream Color
I’m not entirely sure about everything that happens in Upstream Color, only that it’s certainly a difficult and beautiful mediation on the human spirit.  As brainy auteur Shane Carruth guides us through an elaborate and creepy experiment that hijacks the souls of two innocent people (Carruth and Amy Seimetz) through a strange osmosis, we are left to ponder the hidden terrors of our own emotions and the thriving perseverance inherent in humanity.  As these two damaged souls struggle to get to the bottom of their victimization, we see the colorful and challenging ways Carruth pits science against heart, with heart dealing the final winning blow.  

5) Rush
Ron Howard once again displays his fascination with mythic men in high-risk occupations by focusing on the real life story of James Hunt (a lively Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (a masterful Daniel Bruhl), two Formula One drivers who carried out an intense rivalry in the 1976 racing season.  Rush is one of the best movies about racing ever made thanks to its understanding that the sport is a platform for the ego to taunt various men and push them towards transcendence.  As Howard shows off some of the sexiest and vibrant filmmaking of his career, it’s his focus on the peculiar drama just outside the cars that pushes this manly-man’s tale towards poetry.

6) Don Jon
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut plunges headfirst into some very uncomfortable truths about our cultural expectations, but it offers up a sweet hope for even the most delusional of modern-day people.  Levitt himself wonderfully plays Jon, a lothario who realizes his porn addiction may be threatening the “perfect relationship” plans of his girlfriend, Barbara (a funny Scarlett Johansson).  Levitt shows the strikingly funny and sad ways the dreamy idealism of our media consumption can seriously distort the real things we should be looking for in human relationships.  As Jon goes from championing the superficial to appreciating soulfulness, you realize that Levitt’s film may just be the perfect wake-up call for plenty of human sheep out there.

7) American Hustle
Most cinematic con games excite us with plenty of visual razzle-dazzle, yet David O. Russell brings such a tale to his level of freewheeling oddness to show us just how maniacal a con game actually looks.  As Russell veterans Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence push themselves to comic and sleazy extremes, American Hustle puts us in a hypnotic trance with the fast flashiness of the 70s and the mind-boggling complications of con artistry.  We’re used to seeing players in cinematic hustles acting ultra-slick and too-cool-for-school, but Russell’s love of screwy outsiders pushes such characters to beautiful depths of ridiculousness and poignancy we may not have sensed before.

8) Much Ado About Nothing
The Joss Whedon touch involves taking overly-familiar pop archetypes and giving them fresh new angles of humor, heart, and pathos.  Here he takes stuffy Shakespearean types we’ve been seeing our whole lives and fills them with modern day jitters and California sunniness.  Filmed on a break from shooting The Avengers at his own house, Whedon’s black and white adaptation of the William Shakespeare comedy assembles bit players and friends from throughout his work and the result perfectly nails the play’s slapstick humor and romantic yearning.  It’s rare for a Hollywood director to film a classical work in his own backyard, so it’s some kind of miracle that this turns out to be one of the best adaptations ever of said work.

9) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
When you ponder that one of last year’s most scathing critiques of American society came in the form of a young adult sci-fi adventure, you realize that Catching Fire is no ordinary pop ride.  With devilish insights into the ways pop culture distracts the people from terrifying government truths, Catching Fire gave youngsters plenty of unwelcome thoughts to grasp about the real world.  But it wasn’t all bleakness, for this sequel dished out an irresistible Empire Strikes Back vibe with thrilling sets, ace supporting roles (Sam Claflin and Jena Malone are dynamite), killer make-up and costumes, and a plunge into darkness that punched up the alertness to exciting new heights.  Respect must be paid to a sequel that smokes the original and gets you all-kinds-of-fired up for the next installment in ways you never expected.

10) Her
Our heavy reliance on ever-expanding technology has always walked a fine line between hopefulness and horror, and no modern film better understands that than Spike Jonze’s Her.  This futuristic story of a lonely writer (a wonderfully heartfelt Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his advanced computer system (Scarlett Johansson is the lovely voice of the romantic ghost in the machine) challenges the audience to decide if such a development is supreme insanity or an exhilarating new angle on romantic love.  What’s remarkable is how it makes a very persuasive argument for the latter.  Filled with lush colors, a soothing score from Arcade Fire, and delicate acting, Jonze just may have convinced us that surrendering to technology could be more Woody Allen than The Terminator.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

-Gravity

-The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug 

-Pacific Rim

-Saving Mr. Banks

-12 Years a Slave