Month: July 2008

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.

We only have to spend two hours with her.

When I saw a trailer for Happy-Go-Lucky many moons ago (I believe it was when I saw The Counterfeiters, which I would recommend to all and sundry), it appeared to me a movie about an insufferably cheerful woman. When I finally went and saw it, I was proven 100% correct! I mean, I went into it expecting to see an insufferably cheerful woman, that’s what I got, and that’s not what I’m complaining about. This is a weird little film, and I believe it’s “film by committee” – but the committee is that of the director and actors, rather than any studio. A strange experience to be sure.

My initial impressions of Mass Effect‘s overall package:

Prologue planet: This isn’t a war, it’s a moider.
Citadel incursion: Politics, eh? You’d better give me some of those.
Planet the first: Save the Diva Plavalaguna!
Planet the second: Protect the fidgety colonists from themselves!
Planet the third: Deal with red tape, then slaughter … Zerg? … yeah, okay.
Planet the fourth: WE WILL TAKE THEM ON THE BEACHES

Cue POLITICS and SEX

Planet the Fifth: ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

Epilogue!

Council: You are charged with having saved the galaxy and rendering the threat to our continued existence moot. How do you plead?
Shepard: Awesome.

Shepard dons sunglasses and walks away as explosions go off behind her.

Roll credits.

Yeah; it was worth it in the end.

“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.