“Drive” – Full Review
01 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
Looking at the title or the cover for “Drive”, you might be tempted to think it’s an action movie in the vein of “Fast and the Furious”.
You would be dead wrong.
Ryan Gosling’s latest is far more art-house than Hollywood, with a sparse script that depends more on nuanced performances by Gosling and Carey Mulligan. If you’re grabbing a copy for the car chases, you’re going to be disappointed. Although there are a few, they are done in the traditional style of old Steve McQueen movies like “Bullit”. It’s essentially a crime film about people caught up in something against their will, and using any desperate they can to get out of it.
The more I watched of “Drive”, the more I realized how much it was recalling the late sixties and early seventies, when maverick directors like Scorcese and Peckinpah absolutely turned Hollywood on its head. The film has the burning intensity of “Taxi Driver” coupled with the explosive, visceral violence of the original “Straw Dogs”.
“Drive” teases viewers with the threads of what might be a cliché love story, but then rolls them up into a ball of knots. The characters are fascinating, but hardly likeable. And that’s what I liked about them.
There’s absolutely NOTHING tidy about this movie. None of the usual Hollywood tricks are employed here, and it will probably leave a lot of people feeling like they want more resolution. But I give the film full marks for breaking all the usual crutches that these movies depend on. It may not be the most satisfying movie you’ve seen, but the images will stay with you after the credits roll.
I’m sure not everyone will agree with me, but I think Drive is one of the most interesting and stylish films of the past year.
January 24th New Releases
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in New Releases
A couple of real surprises this week…. The Whistleblower landed without any hype; in fact I hadn’t even heard of it, but thought the premise seemed promising. It’s based on a true story of a Nebraska beat cop, played by Rachel Wiesz, who joins a private security company contracted to run crime investigations for the U.N. in post-war Bosnia. She uncovers information that her own co-workers are involved in a sex trafficking ring, and risks her own life to expose it. The movie’s heart and soul is the performance by Wiesz, and although the story can be grim at times, it’s a fantastic film.
Hugh Jackman in “Real Steel” is another one that caught me by surprise. I’m not the biggest fan of movies about “mecha” characters, in this case boxing robots, but with Steven Spielberg producing, I figured I had to give it a chance. Glad I did, because it really is a great movie. It has characters that you’ll care about, and kind of heartwarming story about an estranged father and son, and the “boxing” elements take a lot of cues from inspirational stories like Rocky. I mean, let’s be real, it’s not a film for fans of the festival circuit – it’s still about boxing robots – but I suspect that most mainstream viewers are going to watch this and find themselves really enjoying this.
50/50 was marketed at a “laugh-out-loud” comedy, but while there are some great comedic moments featuring Seth Rogan’s trademark potty-monologues, the movie’s core is a story about cancer. Not exactly a topic that evokes hilarity. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who plays Adam) is a great actor who likes to fly under the radar with roles that flirt with the indie scene, and brings that vibe to a more mainstream feature here. He and Rogan have wonderful chemistry together as a pair of shlubs who are dealing, each in their awkward way, with a disease that threatens to kill one of them. Bryce Dallas Howard, as Adam’s cold, emotionally aloof artist-girlfriend, brings the same kind of nasty charm that she brought to The Help. Great cast, great story, great movie.
January 3rd New Releases
03 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
Contagion: A pretty tight medical thriller from Steven Soderberg (Traffic) with an ensemble cast. Takes a look at the breakdown of society in the face of the worst epidemic in history. Scary stuff. Makes you worry more about the behavior of your neighbors than the prospect of getting a disease.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) wrote and produced this remake of the 1973 film (which scared the crap out of me as a kid). It’s a pretty stylish film, laced with all the opulent dread he usually delivers. Biggest issue with the film is that the director ditches any sense of build-up and starts showing us the creatures within the first 30 minutes. By that point a lot of the wind had come out of the sails, leaving a pretty rote horror movie. Still, it’s worth a watch for fans of either del Toro, or the original.
The Guard: Fantastic Irish/UK fim starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Gleeson plays a beat cop who stumbles into a murder which is part of a huge drug shipment, and has to work with Cheadle, as the American FBI agent tasked with solving the crime. If you think this sounds like a typical fish-out-of-water buddy cop movie, you couldn’t be more wrong. The movie takes just about every cliche from this genre and turns it on its head. Lots of subtle, witty jokes in typical Brit style.
Shark Night: Possibly one of the goofiest shark movies I’ve ever seen. There’s actually a scene where one of the characters, after having his arm chewed off, decides to avenge his girlfriend (who was killed by a shark) by wading into the shallow water with a spear and screaming at the shark to bring it on. Seeing this guy flailing away at a hammerhead with one arm is worth the price of a rental.
Suggestions For Using Xbox Live Beacons
30 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
When it was announced this past year that the new Xbox Live dashboard was going to include a new feature called “beacons”, they were touted as something to make gaming sessions with friends much easier to organize. In theory, it seems simple…just set your beacons to tell friends which game you’re wanting to play, and everyone would start joining your session (if you create one). However, like so many things game-related, once in the hands of humans, they never seem to work the way they’re supposed to.
Take last night for instance, when I was playing a game of NHL 12 with a friend. As soon as we put our game discs in the tray, a beacon popped up saying “So-and-So Wants Friends To Play NHL 12″. So far, so good, right? Except So-and-So wasn’t even playing NHL 12 at the time. The problem with these beacons is that if they don’t get removed when you aren’t actually playing the game, your console will spam friends with messages saying you want to play, even when you’re busy doing something else.
For these beacons to actually work, and not end up being just some annoyance that everyone eventually ignores, they need to be used with discretion. If you come online before your friends, and really want to get people organized for a game of, say, Modern Warfare 3, then set the beacon at that point and create a party for your game. But at the end of the night, don’t forget to kill the beacon. Otherwise, it’s like leaving a text message telling everyone to meet you at the rink for some pick-up hockey, then going out for a beer instead.
Don’t get me wrong, beacons are one of many reasons that Xbox is burying the PS3 when it comes to the online and social elements of gaming. Microsoft knows what it’s doing. They understand that the convergence of social media and gaming is the hottest area of growth in entertainment, and they’ve dedicated time and money to giving people features they want. Not to say there aren’t problems with the Xbox format; they certainly have a few kinks to work out yet (account security is one). But catering to social gamers is clearly a priority. In the end, though, the success of these features will depend on the people using them.
Apollo 18: Blair Witch Project in Space
27 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Hollywood has never had a shortage of films based on conspiracy theories. Even ones about the space race. Growing up in the 70′s, one of my favorite movies was Capricorn One, which posited that moon landings had been faked by NASA and the U.S. government. Viewed today, the movie comes off as a bit forced and silly at times, but to my impressionable teenage mind, it was brilliant stuff.
Jump ahead a few decades, and Hollywood has churned out another space-themed conspiracy story involving a supposedly non-existent space mission, Apollo 18. Three astronauts are sent to the moon on what is supposed to be a routine mission to collect more rocks. With one astronaut remaining in orbit piloting the Apollo 18 craft, the other two land on the moon and begin the two day mission. Naturally, things start to go awry. Strange noises can be heard outside the ship and rock samples mysteriously find their way out of the sealed collection bags. But things get really strange when they discover the body of a dead Russian cosmonaut in a shallow crater, not far from their LEM. The fact that there is even a Russian craft not two kilometers from their landing zone makes the astronauts suspect that their government knew the Soviets had been there all along.
The rest of the film is a pastiche of suspense and horror movie cliches involving one of the astronauts getting “infected” by something they encounter in a crater, as well as a gradual descent into paranoia by both men. All of this is caught on a series of cameras which are both on board the LEM and set up and outside for routine observations. The director is clearly trying to piggyback the same style that has made the Blair Witch Project and, more recently, Paranormal Activity, so successful. They even go as far as claiming that the film was created from real, on-board footage, and direct viewers to a website called www.lunartruth.com (which doesn’t seem to be an active site anymore, if it ever was).
While the film does generate a few legitimate scares, and benefits from some creative editing, too much of the story feels forced at times. There is never much doubt about where it’s heading. Even though it tries to retain a sense of vagueness with unexplained events, this also contributes to it not making a lot of sense. The acting from the tiny cast of three is pretty average, and although a grainy style makes the film seem authentic, too many modern editing styles creep in, jarring audiences out of the sense of time and place they might otherwise have.
On the surface, the concept of this film is intriguing, but the end result falls a bit flat. At least it clocks in at 86 minutes, including credits. Brevity probably saves it from bring a complete train wreck. In the end, it’s an average horror thriller that probably won’t have a long shelf life.
“Another Earth” – Sci Fi Meets Philosophy
26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Full Movie Reviews, New Releases
Sci-fi movies and books have generally always fallen into one of two categories – the kind where hostile creatures invade and mayhem ensues, and the kind which used alternate universes to explore deeper questions about the nature of humanity. Another Earth falls into the latter. It contains very little in the way of special effects, but poses some pretty deep questions about the threads which hold our life together, for better or worse.
Relative newcomer Brit Marling (who also co-wrote the script) plays Rhoda Williams, a brilliant young student on the verge of entering MIT, whose life comes apart after a night of drunken celebrating, when she gets into a car accident kills the wife and child of a music professor named John Burroughs (played by William Mapother). All of this occurs on the night that astronomers discover a planet which is absolutely identical to Earth, right down to the people living on it. In the moments leading up to her accident, Rhoda is listening to this news on her car radio and looking into the sky. Later, scientists speculate that the moment these two “Earths” discover each other, is also the moment in which their identical histories diverge (a key element to the end of the film).
Flash forward a few years, following a prison sentence, and Rhoda is working as a janitor. She’s plagued with guilt over killing Burroughs’ family, and wants desperately to tell him how sorry she is. Burroughs, meanwhile, is living in squalor, unable to function as a human being any more, let alone continue his career as a professor. Rhoda pretends to be from a company offering free house cleaning, and slowly involves herself in his life to try and save him from the despair that is drowning him.
During the years that Rhoda was in prison, wealthy individuals from the private sector develop a plan to visit the “other” Earth, and offer to give a seat to anyone who writes an essay telling why they would be a good candidate. As you can probably guess, Rhoda enters this competition. And while this sort of story could fall over itself trying to ape just about every cliche the genre has created, it doesn’t. Instead it brings us into the story on a human level, asking audiences to imagine your own life in which everything possible has gone wrong. How would you react if you met yourself in another, parallel universe? What would you say? Would it make anything better? And in the greatest of sci-fi traditions, Another Earth makes no attempt to answer its own questions.
As the film began to wind down, I sat trying to speculate as to how they were going to pull off an ending to a story like this, without making it seem obvious and laughable. All I will say is this, the writers deserve huge kudos for executing one of the most clever conclusions I could imagine. It hearkens back to some of the brilliant Twilight Zone episodes of the golden age, and deftly uses an element of suggestion to leave the audience both satisfied, yet full of questions.
