Category: Film

I saw The Dark Knight tonight. It came out a day earlier than advertised, yet all of the sessions were still sold out. At the end of the experience, I had a conversation with Raymond. You must keep in mind that, upon watching Blade Runner with me, Raymond asked me what a replicant was.

Credits: In loving memory of our friend Heath Ledger.

Raymond: Why is it in memory of Heath Ledger?
Alex: Because he died six months ago. Where have you been?
Raymond: I know that he died, but why is it in his memory? Was he originally going to play Batman or something?
Alex: Heath Ledger played the Joker.
Raymond: Heath Ledger played the Joker?!
Alex: What the fuck!?
Raymond: I couldn’t tell! So they made that movie before he died?
Alex: I have no words.

The movie was insanely tense. You should watch it!

“That’s ’cause I’ve been drinking, bitch!”

Hancock is the new critical punching bag of cinema. Except for in Australia, where for some reason the Sydney Morning Herald proposed the idea that a black superhero is clearly a metaphor for Barack Obama.

The thing about Hancock is that it’s not a godawful movie. It has some good ideas. The problem is that a lot of the film, technically, is executed in a “we want to make you sick without even having Cloverfield to justify it” fashion. Seriously, the camera cannot stop moving, even for ostensibly still shots. It’s like you’re watching the movie in a storm on the high seas, and Will Smith needs to drink to steady himself.

Hancock (Will Smith) is a “super hero”, who lives the life of a derelict and causes more damage than he prevents. The public generally hates him but, after not-quite-successful PR guy Ray (Jason Bateman) has his life saved by Hancock, they decide to team up to improve his public image. Problem is that Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron) simply doesn’t like the guy. There’s some other stuff besides about hero mythology that’s pretty good, too.

This isn’t “finally” a movie about a superhero whose actions have consequences – it’s about a superhero who just does whatever the Hell he feels like. That’s entirely different to a movie in which a superhero does whatever it takes to defeat evil and the story carefully ignores the inevitable fall out of his actions (although I really don’t know what movies Roger Ebert has been watching – what superhero movie in recent times hasn’t shown a superhero desperately trying to stop a speeding train while also preventing the death of a family of ducks that stands square in the right place to set a speeding train aside?). Hancock can take off and land without destroying the pavement all around him, but he can’t be bothered to do so. He could probably be kind and polite to the general citizenry, but he doesn’t feel the need.

Which is where the film’s strength does come in: beyond all of the “I’m gonna stick your head up his ass” bravado – although it’s not really bravado considering that he follows through with the threat – he’s a nice dude with a broken trust in himself and in humanity. When he’s rude, he’s funny, but when he reveals his damaged side it’s kind of warm and fuzzy. Jason Bateman is pretty good, if a little samey, but Smith and Charlize Theron carry the movie to its mostly logical, if a little contrived, conclusion. You’d think this sort of movie wouldn’t need, or wouldn’t use, a rich and illustrious backstory, but it does and it does it well. The problem with the nature of this genre is that they need final conflicts and amped up stakes, and I probably could have done without them – but by this point I’d almost completely forgotten about how shoddy the production values had been because the rest of it had turned out pretty well.

The beauty and the curse of Hancock is that it is set up in a way that a sequel would be utterly, utterly redundant. The problem is that if it makes as much money as they want it to, a sequel is inevitable.

PS. Obama ’08. Do it.

Hey guys, remember the 11th Japanese Film Festival? Shut up! We’re in Sydney Film Festival 2008! And we start with Japanese movies … Yeah, I’ll get there.

My first movie for this year’s festival was Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django, a Japanese Western starring Japanese people, speaking exclusively in English. In Toronto, they got subtitles but we weren’t given this luxury. It’s not too hard to understand, but it can be a struggle – but a struggle that you shouldn’t regret.

A gunman arrives in a town where two rival gangs search for a treasure of legend. Each tries to woo him over to their side, but the gunman is not to be swayed: he plays his own damned side.

This is a genre film. As much of a wank as it seems to say, a good man to appear in a genre film is Quentin Tarantino. He shows up in the first scene, and shoots a snake out of mid-air and cuts out the egg contained within. Then he shoots a bunch of guys … then he eats sukiyaki. When he returns to the movie much, much later, he has redefined steam punk, and his English has worsened. He’s a funny addition to the movie, but the movie is supposed to be funny and he totally fails to steal the limelight from any of the main cast – which includes a multiple personalitied sheriff, an old business lady with a mysterious sharpness about her, a leader who insists on being addressed as Henry, and gangs of what can be best described as walking anachronisms.
It also has a dance scene with accompaniment by a didgeridoo.

Yeah, this is a genre film all right.

Sukiyaki Western Django is weird, but not for weirdness’ sake. It’s the sort of movie that I love but also the sort that others love to dismiss as a bunch of wank. It is a sort of labour of love, dedicated to a mixture of samurai and Western ideals – which we have learned, over the last sixty odd years, are exactly the same thing. If you want to see a bizarre amalgam that really benefits from the inclusion of subtitles (even for Tarantino!), then this is exactly the right thing to go for. Some of the gun work is deliberately stupid, some people can take insane levels of beating and shooting, but it all ends with exactly the sort of song that should end this movie – and that makes it worth anyone’s while.

Should have gone with its working title, “Indiana Jones and the Hell Yeah of Whoo”.

I’m going to be brief for now: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a pretty good movie. It is replete with communists, McCarthyism (not viewed as a good thing), and it proves something very important to all of us: Shia LaBeouf doesn’t suck, Transformers does.

It’s 1957, and Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is taken hostage by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) of the Psychic Research Branch of the KGB (seriously). After his daring escape, Indy is lumped in with the communists and is put on an extended leave – which is just as well because he is approached by the greaser “Mutt” (Shia LeBeouf), who wants Indy to find his old colleague Harold Oxley (John Hurt) and his mother Mary (“there’s been a lot of Maries”). On the run from the KGB and looking to solve a riddle left by Oxley, Indy and Mutt travel the world for a bit, fight an inexplicable blow-dart champion in an ancient graveyard, and uncover all variety of mysteries while escaping giant ants and hiding in fridges.

I’ll be honest: I don’t remember any Indiana Jones movies except for Raiders of the Lost Ark. I own the DVD set, but Raiders is as far as I’ve gotten. I remember seeing The Last Crusade at the cinema when I was a lad (I would have been three years old at the time), but the only image I have in my mind is that of young Indy on a train that had a carriage full of snakes for some reason. I’m pretty sure that’s actually in the movie.
The point of the matter is that I can’t really say how this compares, relatively, to the other movies in the series. I can tell you that I personally enjoyed it more than Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I watched again last week and which I think is missing something although what that something is I cannot say.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is little more than an adventure movie that refuses to take itself seriously. It even has a sequence set on Endor, with Ewoks swinging from tree to tree; that’s what it felt like, at least, but I mean that in the nicest possible way. It’s hard to explain what I felt during this movie: it’s just the sort of elation that I get when I see something and feel that it is, somehow, essential to the existence of humanity. It does so many things that I like so, so right. It even has Neil Flynn as a CIA agent, and Alan Dale as an army officer! It’s like this movie was made for me. It even had me tearing up at little obvious emotional things. It’s that good.

The way that the story turns out is probably going to get a lot of negative attention, but if you’d seen any vague clues as to the story behind the crystal skulls, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. I read an interview with Spielberg and Lucas where they say that the series has always featured the paranormal and the supernatural; do you really need to suspend disbelief as to what happens when you’ve already seen people’s faces melting from witnessing the opening of a box? I posit that you do not! Things that I really liked included Indy’s constant shifting of cooperation and battle, the almost complete lack of stilts in the script (except for one pretty bad line towards the end), and Indy’s general attitude not of “I’m too old for this shit” but rather “I’m not as good at this shit as I used to be, but I can still kick someone in the face.” I would have liked a bit more of Cate Blanchett as Spalko, but what we did get was pretty dang good. There’s not quite enough hubris involved (the Russkies are simply stupid), but it was a good time all up.

I really enjoyed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In my new world order, all naysayers shall be put to the death, or provided with free tickets to Don’t Mess With The Zohan. The option that will be taken has yet to be decided.

How did they secure an IMAX release for Speed Racer? Why did they keep the damned monkey in? Whose decision was it to make it not even look vaguely realistic? Who thought to bank roll this travesty? Why was this a movie that needed to be made? Why do I get the feeling that it will be played deadly serious? How did they secure such a not-terrible cast? Speed Racer, what are you thinking?

… Why do I know that I’ll go and see it?

And tangentially, am I the only one not overly impressed by the new The Incredible Hulk?

But is it even possible to be worse than Ang Lee’s Hulk?

“That’s how dad did it, that’s how America does it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.”

I had a physically positive reaction to Iron Man. It admittedly didn’t come until after the credits, but it was there. The rest of the movie was enjoyable but it really felt like an origin story, which brings to mind what is frequently off about the pacing in comic book movies. What this amounts to is essentially three action scenes where Iron Man is actively fighting someone, and a few more where he’s just flying around and testing his creation.

I’m going to do this a little differently to normal, and I’m just going to keep everything up top, put spoilers in the back seat.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is a right bastard. He chairs Stark Industries and he sells weapons of war. On his way back from a demonstration of the new Jericho missile in Afghanistan, Stark is captured by an equal opportunities terrorist group called The Ten Rings (they speak every language except for English – they could be anyone and everyone!) and charged with building them their own missile. Instead, Stark builds an armoured suit replete with flame throwers and blasts his way to freedom! Back in America, he decides that weapons don’t really choose which side uses them – and that perhaps he could become the one man army to end all killing in his name. Unlike most vigilante justices, though, Iron Man doesn’t become a city hero and get enthused over by Lucy Lawless: this is just baby steps.

Being the first in a projected trilogy, and with the actors already signed on for the next one, it’s no real surprise that Iron Man seems to be just a heck of a lot of build up, peppered with a lot of good scenes and a compelling performance from Robert Downey Jr. While everyone can admit that Spider-Man 3 flat out sucked, the other two weren’t without their pacing faults. Iron Man doesn’t even try to build up a crazy arse Willem Defoe equivalent, it just goes for it. I predict that, with its “Big Weapon” targets, that it might not be very popular with conservative audiences. I mean, who doesn’t want war? Well, not Tony Stark anymore!

Given the intro structure, it’s hard to analyse how the movie is built. I couldn’t decide whether it was three acts or simply two and a half. I couldn’t decide whether instant translation of a video by a computer was clever or stupid. It was also difficult to see whether Terrence Howard’s Jimmy Rhodes had much purpose being there were it not for his projected outcome in future movies as “supporting character becoming a superhero in his own right”.

But that’s a quibble, and I’m good at that. While Tony Stark is no Bruce Wayne, I will profess a certain fondness for super heroes whose “powers” come from their own ingenuity and technological assistance than from any accident of birth, spider-bite or solar flares. Stark is a flawed character, and the time leading up to his imprisonment shows that: mercenary, unconcerned about other people, alcoholic and, if not misogynistic, then definitely sexist (I mean, come on, the flight attendants on his private jet get his drunk and dance around and then a pole emerges from the ground. I don’t think I’m wrong in reading that).

The time in captivity is a good showcase of Stark’s intelligence and his improbable developmental skills. It’s not until the end of the process that you realise he’s had a laptop to work with all along, but the suspension of disbelief is something that is absolutely needed to be able to swallow any of this movie at all. On the outside, Stark partakes in a spot of product placement and then essentially goes into hermitage to build a Mark II of the suit. While this is interesting enough, Stark almost has only himself to bounce off; Downey Jr. carries the movie not because his acting is better than everyone else’s, but because no one else is actually in it for the majority of the time. He has a dang sight of a good time doing it, though.

What it boils down to is this: Iron Man is good, but it needed a smidge more Iron Man. If the movie performs well, then I look forward to a sequel I can embrace with no qualms because they can just go “Hey! Iron Man! Whooooo!”, skip all exposition, and cut right to the picking things up, throwing them, and exploding them. The ending leaves you hungry for more, because it’s that second that it totally kicks into gear – and then, sadly, it’s over. Still, I strongly advise that you stay until the end of the credits.

Hey, what’s this? Spoilers after the cut? Well, guess I’d better steer clear then if’n I don’t want to be spoiled.

With only one win revealed to me, I’m ready to begin the descent into boredom following early enthusiasm that is The Oscars!

Post-game: A satisfactory ceremony that failed to piss me off. Now that the internet is safe, Mark’s take is here.