CAPSULE REVIEW MEGA-POST (PAGE 4 OF 5):
Yes, indeed, it’s true: Jessica Alba looks as good in a bikini as you
thought she would. But that’s about the only thing that Into the Blue
really has going for it. For awhile, the movie manages to be pleasant—Alba
wears her swimsuit and Paul Walker lays low amidst beautiful tropical
scenery—but when the actual plot comes into play, it loses most of its
interest. Things take off when Jared (Walker), Sam (Alba), Jared’s brother
Bryce (Scott Caan), and Bryce’s girlfriend Amanda (Ashley Scott) are
searching for treasure in the ocean and stumble upon a sunken boat of full
of cocaine. Bryce wants to sell it, but the others disagree. That is,
until matters complicate and they find the Zephyr, an ancient ship
full of treasure, almost right next to it. In order to properly lay a
claim on the Zephyr, they’ll need to avoid any possible connection
with the drug-boat that the authorities might pin on them. However, doing
this becomes instantly less important to them when the dangerous drug-lord
who owned the loot on that ship hunts them down and threatens them because
he believes that they have stolen some of his illegal goods.
The movie is an unabashed mess, as it might
seem from that mere plot-description. This is really a shame, too,
considering the fact that it had a lot of potential, as far as
Fall-Blockbusters are concerned. Had screenwriter Matt Johnson ditched the
whole story-thread regarding the drug-boat, Into the Blue could’ve
been a lot more interesting and a lot less lame. Why didn’t he simply make
this an adventure about four characters on a quest to find sunken treasure
and stopped there? It could’ve been perfectly entertaining, considering
the fact that Stockton has a knack for beautiful photography and breezy
montages featuring likable stars. I suppose Johnson was overcome by the
same need that too many screenwriters are these days: to make one’s plot
far more earth-shattering than it needs to be. He never stopped to think
that Into the Blue’s generic action-sequences would be its most
boring. In the end, this is just another big-budget caper movie with
nothing more than pretty visuals to offer.
In 1938, Orson Welles terrified the entire
nation with his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. Everyday
people, who had no other news outlet to rely on at the time, believed his
dramatization of an alien-invasion of Earth to be real. Being the insane
genius that he was, Welles refused to remind listeners that it was simply
a performance. Over sixty-five-years later: enter Master-Filmmaker Steven
Spielberg’s movie-remake of War of the Worlds, starring the
couch-hopping, pill-stopping Tom Cruise.
And, boy, for its first act, the film is
pretty freakin’ terrifying. Fiddling with his uncertain audience,
Spielberg executes each scene with the utmost level of suspense. His
actors play their roles completely straight, and triumphantly so—even when
giant alien-tripods emerge from the ground of Boston. “Is it the
terrorists!?”, shouts Cruise’s daughter (a terrific Dakota Fanning) as
they run through the havoc-ridden streets, away from the tripods. At this
point, War of the Worlds is in its finest form, perfectly capturing
a modern-day tilt on old-school science-fiction.
Unfortunately, despite the contemporary flair
that Spielberg provides the movie, he and his screenwriter, David Koepp,
stay true to Welles outdated source-material in their adaptation. The
second act of War of the Worlds, despite maintaining the tenseness
and entertainment-value of the first, is full of typical Hollywood
plot-gimmicks. The third is even worse, featuring an entirely ridiculous
conclusion that puts even the most gullible of viewers’ disbelief to
shame. Had the writer and director had the guts to alter the original
plotline of the story, the result could’ve been a much better movie.
Still, it’s hard to deny the fact that the
genuine captivation and terror that War of the World’s rise of
action (and parts of its climax) provokes makes it worth seeing. The movie
may fall victim to its nonchalant conclusion, but its many stirring—and
even often horrifying—moments are hard to forget.
Yes, it’s true: The Sisterhood of the
Traveling Pants is more than just your average pre-teen
chick-flick. The movie is genuine, sincere, and often poignant. Centering
on the lives of four teenage friends during a summer they spend away from
each other, connected by a pair of Fed-Exed jeans that strangely fit them
all, it surprisingly avoids most of the typical conventions that plague
this type of material. However, this turns out to be both a blessing and a
burden. Despite being original, the director of The Sisterhood of the
Traveling Pants, Ken Kwapis, frankly doesn’t know how to manage all
four stories well on a linear thread. The material is ingenious and
effective by itself, but it isn’t presented in a balanced enough way to
form a polished product. The film goes on for a half hour longer than it
needs to and dwells on its most ineffective passages (especially those
which feature the love interest in Blake Lively’s story or America
Ferrera’s melodramatic overacting). The only story-thread that completely
worked for me was that which featured Alexis Bledel’s Lena, who moves to
Greece for the summer to spend some time with family and ends up falling
for the grandson of a man that they have had a grudge against for years.
Still, I also deeply enjoyed that of Amber Tamblyn’s Tibby as well, if
only for the “Joan of Arcadia” star’s humorous, wry wit. Had The
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants been able to be as consistent as it
is when it features these two characters, it could’ve actually been rather
great. As it stands, the movie has too much to offer to be called
“disposable”, but it’s also too flawed to be called “exceptional”. I’ll
settle for “noteworthy”.
Walk the Line will inevitably be
compared to last year’s Ray because of its status as a
musical-biopic, but hopefully the fact that it’s a much better movie is
not ignored, either. Instead of just being about Johnny Cash the musician,
as the former effort did for Ray Charles, the film focuses much more on
the psychological workings of stardom. Director James Mangold isn’t nearly
as concerned with explaining point-for-point what happened in Cash’s
career as he is with using his lead actor, Joaquin Phoenix, to embody a
juxtaposition between the music-icon’s persona and his inner-self. And
what a performance it is. Phoenix takes a role that could’ve been given a
straightforward treatment and turns it into a lyrical, soulful piece that
commentates both on human-nature and the celebrity’s impact on society.
Even better, surprisingly, is his co-star Reese Witherspoon, who gives the
best female performance of the year as Cash’s object of affection and
eventual wife, June. Brilliantly layering on a simple, but effective
execution by Mangold, the two are both at the heights of their careers,
especially when they perform in the film’s musical numbers, which are
equally dramatically expressive as they are toe-tappers. Walk the Line
is exactly what good entertainment should be: fascinating, captivating,
and historically relevant. It is a solid reminder of the often-forgotten
fact that when Hollywood actually musters up enough gusto to make
something of significance, the outcome can be just as successful as that
of anything playing exclusively in New York and LA.
What? Brokeback Mountain wasn’t enough
for ‘ya? Call it the year of the homo-/trans-/insert controversial
prefix here-sexual film, but the fact remains that the
newly-recognized sub-genre has not yet failed to disappoint audiences. “My
body may be a work-in-progress, but there is nothing wrong with my soul,”
rattles off Felicity Huffman’s Bree Osbourne early on in Transamerica,
in role that is simultaneously humorous, tragic, and touching. This
wonderful little blend is not captured at all because the fact that the
film has a transsexual protagonist, but rather because of the way it
recognizes the amusing beauty of the subtleties of life through its
characters. A lot has been said about Huffman’s performance, but the
actress remains strikingly brave throughout the duration of the film,
despite the intensity and audacity of the material. Only in the second
act, which embraces typical road-movie clichés as Bree and her long-lost
son (who doesn’t have a clue she is his father) spontaneously travel
across the United States, does the viewer stray from being entirely
immersed in the material. Otherwise, no matter how tiny its budget or
quiet its delivery, Transamerica is a gem of a film.
The Internet Movie Database summarizes the plot
of Stay Alive as such: “For a group of teens, the answer to the
mysterious death of their old friend lies within the world of an online
video game based on the true story of an ancient noblewoman known as the
Blood Countess.” If casually browsing through movie listings on the
webpage, one might be inclined to believe that the ridiculous description
was written by a misinformed internet-hack. But that’s not the case:
Stay Alive is, indeed, about a group of gamers whose characters in a
video-game work like voo-doo dolls. “Game Over” means much more than the
sacrifice of a player’s ability to frantically move a toggle-button; it
also means the loss of their life. Sounds lame, eh? Well, as if the
premise wasn’t dopey enough, adding insult to injury are the animated
video-game sequences which stretch up to three or four minutes a piece.
Not to mention: throughout the duration, the viewer couldn’t care less
about the lives of the characters due to the cast’s nonchalant
performances. In its entirety, Stay Alive is a piece of trash that
raises a question that marks a new low in uninspired filmmaking: when is a
movie no longer a cash-in byproduct of Hollywood and actually a means for
a studio to steal the mass public’s hard-earned money?
Lucky Number Slevin is less than
original in many ways; it tells us of a con-like mix-up from the
point-of-view of an unreliable first-person narrator and then sets the
record straight by telling us of the same mix-up in the third-person.
While the film’s contents aren’t entirely predictable—a distinguishing
element from its genre-counterparts—its structure is admittedly bland.
However, that’s not to say that it doesn’t contain more than its fair
share of redeeming factors; from its off-the-wall performances to its
vibrant set-design to its delicious dialogue, Lucky Number Slevin
is certainly admirable in more than one way. Headlining the cast as the
title-character is the criminally-underrated Josh Harnett, and supporting
him are Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu, and Stanley
Tucci. From one perspective, it’s a shame that the same cast couldn’t have
gathered to bring a better script to life. However, their presence here
represents one of the reasons audiences didn’t have to sit through a much
blander version of Lucky Number Slevin. As it is, the movie is
worth seeing for its good qualities, as its less impressive ones can be,
for the most part, ignored. I enjoyed it.
A wall-to-wall satire, Thank You for Smoking
is amusing and efficient, if not groundbreaking. Told from the
first-person point-of-view of Big Tobacco spokesman Nick Naylor (Aaron
Eckhart), the movie is, as its title suggests, a sarcastic look at the
tactics of cigarette-company lobbyists and those of their
government-opposition. It functions well as such; the script and
performances are both smart and funny. In the lead role, Aaron Eckhart,
especially, is absolutely terrific at sympathetically and empathetically
capturing a man who rallies for a rather horrible cause. However, his
performance is one of the few aspects of the movie that transcend the
level of the well-oiled and well-assembled, if not particularly daring,
machine that Thank You for Smoking represents. While humorous and
occasionally shocking, the movie is rarely able to reach a status beyond
mere proficiency because it never reveals anything to the audience that it
doesn’t already know. In order to be a great satire, a picture needs to
have a stronger punch-line than the mere “cigarettes are bad for you” that
this one tries to jab at the viewer with. Still, Thank You for Smoking
never overstays its welcome at a short ninety-two minutes and, for what it
does do, it does effectively.
I’ve never been much of a camper or a hiker,
but before Terrence Malick’s latest bore-a-palooza, The New World,
I was never actually disdainful towards nature. There’s no doubt the
British locales the writer/director uses to double for Jamestown, U.S.A.
are beautiful—the movie tells a version of the Pilgrim’s settlement of
America/the John Smith and Pocahontas story—but that doesn’t excuse the
fact that he is far too obsessed with them for his own good. During The
New World’s duration, the audience will spend a given two-minute
period listening to a random character’s voice-over as trees sway in the
wind onscreen. And that’s if their lucky. Sometimes Malick’s infatuations
overcome him so much that he takes the liberty of showing us the
oh-so-delightful sight of a pool of water forming ripples as a character
dips their foot into it. Let’s be honest here: I’m all for experimental,
challenging art as much as the next guy, but there’s a line in which the
pretensions of such become nothing but pretentious, rather than at all
thought-provoking. Malick doesn’t just cross this line; he leaps over it.
For all I know, he could have more profound ideas than any other living
filmmaker, but The New World has left me no choice but to dismiss
them because of his drying-paint-style execution.
In all fairness, the film does have one
remarkable element, the performance of sixteen-year-old Q'Orianka Kilcher.
She injects an amazing amount of life into the movie as Pocahontas, giving
a near-perfect performance to encapsulate the love-triangle that forms
between her character, John Smith (Colin Farrell), and John Rolfe
(Christian Bale). Kilcher’s passionate work actually keeps the film afloat
long enough for the viewer to immerse their self in the first act or so,
before tiring of Malick’s obsessive filmmaking tendencies. However, after
135 minutes of sheer disregard for the audience’s senses, she’s
unfortunately the last thing that the audience is left thinking about. Mr.
Malick: I love to watch the filmmaker break the rules of traditional
storytelling, but if you’re going to keep doing so, at least learn to do
it right.
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