Category: Film

“Don’t need no credit card to ride this train.”

Easily the best thing about Pineapple Express is that the title song is written and performed by Huey Lewis and the News. Now, it’s no “The Power of Love” but it’s pretty good. The rest of the movie? Not so good. That’s not to say that it’s not without its moments, and I have no idea if it would be a better movie for a stoner to enjoy. I’ve never stoned, and I’m guessing that I never will – it just doesn’t interest me in the slightest. This is a stoner action movie from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the same team who wrote Superbad. Among the many good aspects of that film, one that particularly stood out was that it had no reference to marijuana at all – which had always been an important aspect of Rogen’s characters in other Apatow productions.
Pineapple Express is pretty much all of the violence and marijuana that wasn’t in Superbad, although it retains some of the homoeroticism (and adds to it bizarrely: “I want you inside me, Holmes.”), the theme of BFFF, and also involves a man saving another man by carrying him away from a scene of carnage. It basically turns into a stoner version of Hot Fuzz, deliberately styled after bad seventies movies, and isn’t particularly good in itself.

That said, it’s probably going to become some sort of huge cult movie, but not one for me.

Dale (Rogen) is a Process Server who spends his days disguising himself, serving subpoenas, and getting high. He goes to visit his dealer, Saul (James Franco, infinitely better here than in Spider-Man 3), and gets Pineapple Express, a weed so rare that it’s almost a shame to smoke it: “like killing a unicorn”. Joint in hand, Dale goes to deliver a subpoena only to witness a murder committed by Gary Cole and Lady Cop Rosie Perez – problem is Gary Cole recognises the taste of Pineapple Express and track its use down to Saul and, by connection, Dale – who go on the run and … uh, stone, and steal a car, and have a guy shot several times, and general violence ensues.

Pineapple Express has quite a few funny things in it but it’s really an awkward and unwieldy beast. I think a lot of this is quite deliberate, particularly the scenes between Cole and Perez – set in a very seventies style mansion, no less – but it’s not as fun as it should be when it tries to tackle genre (“Asian Commandoes! Check these explosions out!”) and the heart seems much more faked than it ever was in Superbad. The handling of Dale’s relationship with an eighteen year old is pretty good and realistic, and Cole’s henchmen are pretty funny as well … it’s just the movie doesn’t really click: it’s a collection of scenes that service a story but it’s not very easy to care about any of it. It’s certainly better than Drillbit Taylor, but frankly not a lot isn’t.

In many ways, it’s good that Pineapple Express got made. It’s a little smarter than other stoner fare like Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, and it hopefully means that Seth Rogen has got a very important message out to the world: he likes weed, he doesn’t care who knows it – and, dangit, now he can move onto something else.

Raymond verb:
To completely miss the point in an hilarious or embarrassing way.

Example of Raymonding, during the credits of The Dark Knight : “Why was that movie dedicated to Heath Ledger? … Was he originally going to play Batman or something?
… Heath Ledger played The Joker!?”

My friend Raymond is the world’s chief committer of the act of Raymonding, but I am not above admitting that I have Raymonded a movie or two in my time. My most recent example is The Counterfeiters, which won Best Foreign Movie at the Academy Awards this year.

The Counterfeiters is the story of a group of Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany who are forced to counterfeit various currencies for the war effort. The movie has a master counterfeiter serving as the protagonist, and he has an antagonist in the film in the form of a man who was a vocal protestor in his days on the outside – and who is trying to sabotage the operation from the inside. I found myself thinking during the movie that this guy was just endangering the lives of the other prisoners with his sabotage efforts, and I got very frustrated with him. My explicit thought was “Just counterfeit the damned bills, they’re going to lose anyway.”

You may have noticed the flaws in my argument, these being: the prisoners did not know that Germany was going to lose the war; that, in sabotaging the progress of the counterfeit operation, they actually contributed to the weakening of the Nazi war effort, which may have been part of the difference between victory and defeat.

I did not vocalise these thoughts, so there was no one around to keep me in check. It was not until halfway through the following day that I realised that I was an idiot. At that point, I came to the conclusion that not even I can be protected from Raymonding.

Post-script: I don’t think that I spoiled The Counterfeiters by telling you that Germany suffered defeat in World War II. If you want to correct me, though … I’ll actually be pretty worried, in fact.

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?