Life of Pi

Finally, finally I got to see this movie. I promised myself that I would after I finished writing the introduction to my thesis, but then there was the apartment hunting trip and shitting myself over getting my novella written and whoops Christmas, so it didn't happen until now.

Worth the wait. And despite the fact that it was released back in November, the theater was still pretty crowded for a noon show.

(Some spoilers.)

Life of Pi is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. Every shot of it was its own paradise, gorgeous and full of color. And the tiger. Holy shit the tiger. CGI has come a long, long way.

Beyond how visually arresting I found the film, there is a lot to love. Suraj Sharma is just fantastic as Pi. And have I mentioned the tiger? Beyond how believable the Richard Parker was, what I loved was that he never stopped being an animal, and a wild animal at that. Pi and Richard Parker achieve an understanding of sorts, but there's always that gap of understanding between animal and man. The tiger never stops being a wild animal, even at the end when it walks away from Pi and into the jungle without a backward glance.

That was the part of the movie that made me tear up, when the tiger simply walks away and Pi still desperately asserts that he saw the animal's soul and it wasn't just his own feelings reflected back at him. So much of the movie is about the gap of understanding between humans, animals, and nature in general.

And then there is the alternate story that Pi offers as to what happened, opening the possibility that the tiger is an aspect of Pi himself. I like unreliable narrator stories when they're done well, and this one definitely was. In the end, you get to decide for yourself, which story is true. For my part, I think that both are.

In the movie, they say the story will make you believe in God. I knew about that going in and was a bit curious about it, since... well, not a believer, myself. I wondered if it would be preachy, perhaps. It wasn't; you'd hardly expect a Catholic Hindu Muslim to be grinding an ax for one religion anyway. But beyond that, to me it wasn't a story about religion or even belief; it was about trying to understand the unknowable, like the tiger, looking into its eyes and never being quite certain if it's just a reflection or a reality you can't quite touch.

Some might call that religion. I would just call it life.

Django Unchained

I can't think of the last time I saw a move with this much controversy around it, which ranges from Spike Lee's criticism of the movie making light of the horrors of slavery to conservatives predictably freaking the fuck out about the bit in the movie (and Jamie Foxx later joking about it) where Django points out that getting paid to kill white people sounds like an awesome way to make a living because ow my precious persecution complex. Oh, and people complaining about the use of the N-word in a movie set shortly before the civil war and involving slavery, when obviously no one ever talked like that back then. Though I find Amanda Marcotte's take on how damn meta the film is very interesting indeed, which goes right along with a lot of what Inglorious Basterds had to say.

But anyway. At this point, the discussion about Django and its meaning beyond a movie is fascinating and way, way beyond me. I don't feel like I have anything useful I could contribute as an average white female nerd who loves action-y movies, but I sure want to keep reading what other people who have different viewpoints from me have to say.

Now, beyond the socio-political tangle of Django, how is it as a movie?

Well, I loved Inglorious Basterds to an almost ridiculous degree. It was the first Blu-ray I ever bought, before I even grabbed a copy of Thor to replace my regular DVD. I think it's safe to say that if you loved Inglorious Basterds, you will love Django as well. It's got a lot of the same things going for it - underdog revenge fantasy where a shitload of people get messily killed and you feel pretty good about cheering for each and every bit of cartoonish blood spatter because damn, those are some awful people getting shot and shot and shot.

Jamie Foxx turns in an incredible performance as the title character. He just radiates indescribable amounts of badass in every second he's on the screen. Christoph Waltz does an excellent job of being just bent enough that you can almost forget at times that Dr. King Schultz is marvelously insane until he really starts talking. And Leonardo DiCaprio, my god. I don't even know where to begin. He was so utterly disturbing. Though of course, he couldn't have managed the depths of gross he reached without Samuel L. Jackson as the head house slave. Their relationship was one of the most messed-up things in an entire movie full of utterly messed-up things. But any time a film hits the really awful relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed when it's more subtle than a man being torn apart by dogs, it should make you just squirm.

The movie is beautifully shot - some of the locations up in Wyoming are just stunning - but I wouldn't expect any less from Quentin Tarantino. It's got that same mixture of discomfort and mayhem and humor that you'd expect as well. And unlike other movies of his (Kill Bill springs instantly to mind) this one doesn't ever drag or feel as long as its nearly three hour time, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

But I'll say this - it's worth the price of admission alone for the scene with the proto-Klan bickering about their newly-made masks.

Les Miserables

Goddamnit, Anne Hathaway. Must you punch me in the heart and make me cry in every one of your scenes?

This movie has some amazing things going for it. Namely, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman. They really make the movie with beautiful singing and intense emotion. I've seen Les Mis on stage before, and Fantine never made me cry like Anne Hathaway did. Her rendition of I Dreamed a Dream was the angriest I've ever heard, and she convinced me. (And honestly, it makes sense for Fantine to be angry as well as despairing, because this wasn't how her life was supposed to be.) And I know a lot of people were side-eyeing the Hugh Jackman thing, apparently unaware of the fact that the man was in musicals on stage for years and even won a Tony. But it shows in this movie, it really does. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen do a pretty good turn as the scumbag Thenardiers as well, though HBC really just kind of felt like Mrs. Lovett revisited with a bit less cannibalism.

The rest of the movie, I had more reservations about. Russell Crowe does a technically competent job of singing, but he doesn't seem to emote very well when he does it. Which is too bad, since Javert is a character that takes a lot of conviction in song. There was only one instance in the movie (near the beginning when he fights with Jean Valjean in the hospital) that I really felt anything out of him, and the rest was... pretty flat.

I also honestly did not like the way the movie was shot. I know one of the great things about movies versus stage is that it lets us get right up there with the characters and see into their eyes. Which is great. But it would have been nice if the director had given the characters some goddamn space once in a while. I felt like 90% of the movie was closeups, and it started getting both claustrophobic and annoying after a while. Half the time I completely lost sense of place with the characters because you couldn't see anything but their face and a colorful blur for the background. I'm sure there were some nice sets and costumes in the movie, but I feel like I didn't see a hell of a lot of them. The face is important for expression, yes, but how about some arms? Some legs? For all I know, Hugh Jackman was wearing running shorts in half his scenes because we never see him below the shoulders.

Honestly, I prefer the stage production.

Is the movie worth seeing? I'd say yes. Anne Hathaway will ruin Les Mis for every other Fontine. Hugh Jackman is excellent. (You get well acquainted with the inside of his mouth considering the amount of time the camera spends staring down it, but hey, he's got nice teeth.) Is it worth showing to someone that's musical phobic that you'd never be able to drag to a stage production? Definitely.

But will the movie make you like Les Mis if you didn't before? Unless your problem was that Fontine didn't reach out from the stage and punch you directly in the emotions and you wanted a more intimate relationship with Jean Valjean's tonsils, probably not. Story and music-wise, it's just like the stage version. To quote my best friend's dad: "They sang and they died and they died and they sang and they sang and they sang and they died and they sang."

Basically that. But it does make a lovely bit of Oscar bait. If Anne Hathaway doesn't get a nomination out of this, I am going down to the award ceremony and flipping the entire goddamn stage.

Liveblog of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

So apparently this is a thing. Which I have been lucky enough to find on British television at 0200, and how can you say no to cannibal Santa Claus?

We join our show, already in progress. Any mistakes in detail, please forgive because it's early in the morning and the movie is subtitled in English with dialog in Finnish.

Catching up on movies or: My swanky trans-Atlantic flight

This was one of the most relaxing trans-Atlantic flights I've ever been on. The Lufthansa flight to Berlin may still beat it, but that's mostly because the stewardesses gave me a beer every time the drinks cart went by on that one, so I was feeling pretty good the whole time. This flight on BA, Mike and I were randomly upgraded to the Economy Plus class. We're guessing it's because the economy cabin was oversold (it sure looked packed) so we gut bumped up a class.

In my current impoverished state of grad student-ness, I don't think I could convince myself to cough up an extra $200 on a $1200 flight to get a seat that's a tiny bit wider and a significant whack of leg room. Once I'm working a real person job, though, I'm thinking a hell to the yeah. I have an outlet. For my laptop. And a foot rest. And a giant TV screen for movies. You'd be amazed how these little comforts add up on a 9 hour flight (or maybe you wouldn't).

Speaking of movies. These long flights are normally my chance to catch up on movies I wanted to see but didn't have the time for (often the case this year) or movies that I thought looked amusing but would be damned if I'd pay full price for.

Premium Rush - This was a fun little movie with bike messengers as the heroes trying to keep a delivery from a crooked, malevolent, yet wonderfully inept cop. The movie is not nearly so serious as the preview would have liked you to believe, which I think is for the best. It was just fun and I enjoyed it from the perspective of a cyclist who would never in a million years be that insane. Though I do appreciate that through it all the main characters were wearing their helmets - thanks guys. Also, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has the most adorable little evil giggle, which he uses every time he skunks either the crooked cop or the world's most unlucky bike cop, and it's impossible to not giggle along with him. I think my older brother would appreciate the fact that the main character (who is apparently the best bike messenger ever or something) rides a steel-frame single speed. Though he doesn't have brakes on his, which is a sure sign of insanity if the mischievous giggle didn't tip you off already. The music for the movie was excellent by the way - it begins and ends with Baba O'Reiley, and I feel like it earns that honor.

Lawless - I have some very uncertain feelings about this one. It was either good, or boring as shit, five minutes at a time. I loved Tom Hardy (Forest) in all his understated, casual menace, and his way of liking the Woman With a Past without ever changing his facial expression or tone; it was all body language and looks. Not so sure about Shia LeBouf, but he did a better job in this than in any other movie he's ever been in I've seen, which if I'm to be honest is not saying a whole lot. I swear I tried to go into this with an open mind, but there was nothing about his performance that convinced me, let alone grabbed me. The special agent from Chicago was appropriately creepy, and the Woman With a Past was a perfect match for Forest, where it was a love affair all in looks. Now, I did appreciate the way violence was handled. Someone got punched hard, they went down, and they bled. Someone got nailed in the side of the head with a shovel? Down and stayed down. Not the usual thing that you see in more action oriented movies. I liked about half the movie in those five minute chunks, the other half I wrote things like this during because it just didn't have my attention. A lot of those five minutes were the ones where Shia LeBouf was romancing his girl.

Snow White and the Huntsman - I actually had wanted to see this when it came out, but I was just too busy because grad school blah blah whine whine my life is so hard. Anyway, I ended up liking this far, far more than I thought I would. I'm still not entirely convinced by Kristen Stewart as an actress, but there was a fairly minimal number of times where she appeared visibly incoherent and she had some very good scenes. The movie was also just so goddamn pretty. I knew it would be pretty, but I didn't expect it to be that visually arresting. Charlize Theron just stole the entire show, though. I love Chris Hemsworth, but it was her I ended up watching the movie for. (Poor Chris Hemsworth, getting his thunder [hahaha] stolen by the villain again.) Every moment she was on screen she just had me by the throat, she was so angry and menacing even when she appeared entirely calm. Charlize Theron's speech about men using women right before she kills the king? She turned it up to eleven there and kept going for the entire movie. I think what amazed me the most about the character - and Theron's performance, since she sold it mightily - was that there was so much raw pain still in her, a ragged internal wound that she has obviously kept carefully open and bleeding, yet you never had any doubt for one second that this woman was evil. If I were less of a pathetic Tom Hiddleston fangirl, Loki might have some serious competition for my favorite villain ever.

[Obligatory Loki fangirling shut up I know I have a problem.]

Speaking of Loki, I think the reason I like both him and Ravenna so much as characters is because they each have such a clear internal framework of pain and perceived wrong-doing on the part of the world at large that their villainy makes sense. They're not being evil because nyahahaha evil is fun, they're evil because they believe bone deep that they have been wronged at the world deserves whatever it is they do. And because they are both played by such good actors, for a few seconds at a time they can even convince you to feel that raw internal wound even as you're appalled by what they then use it to justify. From the outside moral perspective there is no justification for their horrible acts, but it gives them a very human emotional core that makes them wonderfully complex as characters and so much more than boring one-note villains.

Really, I think Ravenna is where Loki will soon mentally end up once he's finished completely divorcing himself from reality as we know it. He's almost there, except for those few flashes of hesitation we so in The Avengers. Which does give me hope that he could still find redemption, which was plainly impossible for Ravenna since she was invested in her own narrative twenty life-times worth.

I think I just blew my own fangirl mind.

[/Obligatory Loki fangirling]

Favorite movie for the flight was definitely Snow White and the Huntsman. If the movie list doesn't change on the way back, I'm thinking I'll catch Ruby Sparks (I was super disappointed to miss that one in theaters) and then two out of the three of Men in Black III, The Campaign, and The Watch. If I'm not entirely done with comedies by that point.

Mike, I will note, watched Battleship, and then Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. He actually liked the former better, which shocked me. Though it sounds like it wasn't gleefully bad in the same way. I don't think I'm curious enough to make myself watch it though.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I wish I could say I came out of this movie with my concerns about the book being split into a trilogy assuaged. I really do.

I'm afraid not.

I'm left wondering why this needed to be a trilogy of nearly three hour movies, and not, say, a two parter. It definitely needed to be longer than a single movie, but right now it feels really stretched out, sometimes palpably dragging. I wasn't one of the people who thought The Fellowship of the Ring dragged when it came out, but this one had me wondering just how many wooden bridges I really needed to see a pack (a hoard? a buffet?) of dwarves run across. I also wondered why the hell we needed two prologues, one of which (regarding Thorin) would have been better served by being described during the story I think.

There was a lot about the movie that I loved, though. I though Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo. I almost died of squee during the riddles in the dark sequence. While I still have no idea what half the dwarves are named, at least some of them (other than Brooding Dwarf -- I mean Thorin) really stand out and have very distinctive personalities so I could keep track of them. And shockingly I was very glad to see some of the additional scenes, such as the conversation between Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel. That was very cool, and I enjoyed seeing more character development and the foreshadowing of things to come. (Also, anyone else find themselves wondering what might be between Gandalf and Galadriel?)

One small but important thing I'm very excited about is that two of the songs from the book made it in at least. I wish there could have been more of the singing, once they got away from the hobbit hole. Songs are such a major part of the book.

Visually, it was just as pretty as the original (if that's even the right term) trilogy. I just saw it in normal 24 fps with no 3D, and I thought that was plenty. I don't do 3D anyway since it gives me headaches, and I'm not sure if a super sharp picture would have helped anything.

I laughed, I enjoyed most of the fight scenes (until they got a little too stretched out), and I'll be happy to see the next part. I'm looking forward to hearing Benedict Cumberbatch be an evil dragon. I do hope it's more dragon-y and a less draggy.

Why haven't you seen Wreck-It Ralph yet?

If you're one of the two people in the entire continental United States that hasn't seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, you really, really should.



It's definitely the best Disney movie I've seen in years. It's cute, it's funny, and it's got a lot of heart, but not in the oh god it's the after-school-special kind of way. You can tell the angle of approach from the bad guy affirmation of Bad-Anon: I am bad, and that's good. I'll never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me. But I really liked the approach taken; within the world of video games, bad guys are obviously a vital part of the ecosystem, and part of the movie is about the good guys learning that.

I've seen it twice already and definitely wouldn't mind seeing it again. (Only there's currently a brazillion movies out right now I want to see, holy shit November what's up with you.) But if you're a gamer nerd like me, the more times you see it, the more fun video game stuff you can pick out. (There's a list of video game character cameos over at the Disney Wiki.)

You don't have to be a big video game nerd to like it. Sure, those of us who have been playing since Atari will get a lot of the cameos and have some good laughs (OMG AERITH LIVES), but the main story takes place in two made-up games (Hero's Duty and Sugar Rush) and you don't even really have to be that familiar with first person shooters or racing games to get what's going on. It's all very evident from the story. (The script writers, by the way, deserve a hearty handshake.)

I loved all the main characters. Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) is definitely my favorite, though. She has the most tragic back story ever! (I'm thinking this might seem extra hilarious if you have a few RPGs under your belt.) Also Felix sounded so very, very familiar - I had to remind myself later that Jack McBrayer is Kenneth in 30 Rock and yes, Felix sounds just like that, to hilarious effect. Also, Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, which I didn't even realize until I got to the credits and was like wait a second, that's Wash?



As a note for people with kids, the movie has a PG rating, and I think it's mostly inoffensive stuff, cartoonish violence and the like. However, the bit of the movie in Hero's Duty could be scary for little kids, since it's got the space-marine-bug-invasion-first-person-shooter thing going on, and at the very end the bad guy looks seriously creepy to the point that my first thought was how much he would probably scare the pants off my niece. So just be aware of that.

There's also an animated short before the movie called Paperman. It's probably the cutest short I've seen in a while, and it's about paper airplanes and love.

Nicely done, Disney.

Silent Hill: Revelation

This will come as no surprise since hey, it's a video game movie, but Silent Hill: Revelation is a bad movie. And it's not even gleefully bad like The Man With the Iron Fists. It's just really... plodding and inadequate and hey look I guess Sean Bean got a paycheck, good for him.

(Spoilers of course, but trust me, you don't care.)

The setting was nice, the monsters mostly well done (though a bit too obviously CGI for my taste, though the mannequin monster feeling up the boob of the newly made plastic lady was nicely creepy), and the musical score was excellent. The room scene with the nurse demons was nicely creepy, even if all of us were left wondering what made the two dumbest cultist foot soldiers ever decide that a room full of nurse demons was the place to go. But that's all I can really say that's positive, and that does not a decent movie make. The makeup on several of the characters, by the way, is utterly awful. And the story itself is completely incoherent, with all of the explanatory scenes a word salad of cultist terms that don't actually make sense even if you have played the games.

Really, the inexplicable scene with the nurse demons points to one of the movie's most major flaws. In these games, you do a lot of running into random places, herded by monsters, and you simply accept that sure I'm going to pick up the wax doll and the horseshoe so I can later make a handle for a trap door because that's how I get to the next area and I want to beat the game. (For the record, that is actually a thing you do in Silent Hill 2.) That doesn't work so well in a movie because you're not participating. Instead you're forced to just watch other people to nonsensical things and wonder just who the hell would even think that was a good idea.

Silent Hill: Revelation is actually an uncomfortable mix of Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Homecoming. It's got a lot of plot elements from SH3, but more of the monsters and setting are straight out of Homecoming, which makes it weird if you're a dedicated fan of the games. There was also a lot of twisting of the SH3 plot, combining elements that it really made no sense to combine, and then the wheels just really come off at the end when suddenly Heather and Alessa basically hug it out as their epic finally battle and Claudia is actually a boss monster called the Missionary.

Also, Victor is inexplicably Heather's teenaged love interest, and Kit Harrington can't figure out what the hell his accent is, which doesn't help matters.

There are a lot of things in this movie that left me wondering why these choices were made. Look, if you want to make Silent Hill 3 into a movie, it had a perfectly serviceable plot that could have worked, I think. If you want to make your own original movie set in Silent Hill because it's an interesting setting with a lot of potential stories, I think that would actually be amazing and way more interesting than just remaking a video game. But trying to combine the two by not quite telling the story of Silent Hill 3 is really not the way to go. It confuses the fans of the series (or out and out pisses them off) and just makes for a story that has no internal logic.

For example, Claudia. She was a scary character on her own. She didn't need to be transformed into the Missionary (one of the boss monsters). It's not a nod to the game that Silent Hill fans would really want, since Claudia was Claudia and the Missionary was the Missionary and they were both very frightening on their own; adding them together does not multiply the scares, trust me. It also means that Heather loses much of her badassery because instead of defeating Claudia and getting closure from that woman's manipulations, she goes on to not personally defeat the Missionary (more on this later).

To be honest, what I disliked most about the movie was what they did with Pyramid Head. I was right to be worried. Suddenly he's been transformed from Sir Not Appearing In This Game (though arguably the monster Valtiel in SH3 has similarities) to Heather's protector. No, really. He shows up twice to save her, once so he can chop off the arms of all the people in the asylum because they're trying to pull Heather's hair and scaring her, and once so he can fight the Missionary for her. The movie ends not with Heather being a badass and saving herself, but with what is basically a clash of the Titans where the audience is put in the strange position of cheering for Pyramid Head.

I'm guessing perhaps this has something to do with Pyramid Head's popularity with the fans, but turning him into something quasi-good is really not the way to reward that.

I will note that I found the ending of the movie the most entertaining part, by the way. After Heather and Victor (sigh) escape Silent Hill (Sean Bean inexplicably decides to stay behind, I guess he just wanted the hell out of this franchise) they get picked up by a trucker... named Travis. And then pass by a prison bus being escorted by the police in the opposite direction. So that was amusing.

If you're a fan of Silent Hill, don't waste your money seeing this in the theater. And if you're not a fan, really don't waste your money.

Bad Movie Science (2)

So on Friday, I risked getting my geek card taken away by saying that, for the most part, I don't care if the science in a movie is bad so long as it tells me a sufficiently good story. This was a point I tried to make at one of the Mile Hi Con panels I was on, actually. And at that panel, someone in the audience asked a very pertinent question - but don't you think it's the responsibility of a movie to present good science?

No, actually. I don't.

But people see things in movies and think they're true! What about all of the stupid shit about 2012? And so on!

The responsibility of a movie, as I said before, is to tell me a good story and make sure I don't leave the theater feeling like I just got fucked out of the $10 I paid for my ticket.

Movies are supposed to entertain, not educate. And I think most of us are damn glad for that. While I enjoy a good episode of Nova as much as the next person, you'll notice that's not where my primary consumption of media lies.

If someone goes into a movie and comes out with the misconception that the world is ending in 2012 or geologists wear white labcoats or exposing someone to a lot of gamma radiation is going to do anything but kill them, I frankly do not consider that the fault of the movie. I consider it a fault of the education that person received, and to a lesser extent the fault of media that actually has the responsibility of being truthful rather than entertaining.

Critical thinking skills have always gotten short shrift in education, and in the US that's only become worse with the advent of No Child Left Behind and the emphasis on gross skills such as reading speed uncoupled from the ability to process and critically assess what has been read. (Because those things are much harder to assess with a standardized test, I suppose.) Teaching kids science (something that low income schools particularly struggle to do), how to tell good data from bad, how to tell who is an expert who probably knows what they're talking about and who is just some jackass that the local TV station dug up in the pursuit of false balance would go a long, long way to closing that gap.

And that's not even touching on things like, say, the Texas GOP platform attacking the teaching of critical thinking skills.

The problem is not that a movie includes a ridiculous scene where the spaceships make noise and turn like airplanes instead of spaceships. The problem is that the audience lacks the necessary basis to question the truth of that statement.

And frankly, fixing this problem has nothing to do with requiring those who make their living in the arts to hew to scientific fact and never deviate. (We won't even touch on the question of how the hell you'd begin to enforce that, free speech issues, etc.) Ultimately, enforcing scientific fact through the arts still does nothing to fix the base problem. You are still presenting entertainment as a fact that should be accepted unquestioningly upon its consumption by a passive audience.

The real answer is simple to state and difficult to execute. We need to teach people to think critically and question and understand the difference in data quality depending upon the source. We need to stop pretending that education is only about reciting times tables and reading X number of words per minute.

We need to stop failing the education system and the kids who rely upon it.

Because yes, it is us failing the schools, not the other way around. It's us refusing to pass bond issues, and us obsessing about standardized testing, and us not paying attention to who the hell we're electing to the board of education for our county or state, and us allowing political affiliation to interfere with objective scientific truth, and even some wacky part of us actively fighting against teaching kids how to even think to begin with.

Us. We did this. Not the people who make movies.

The Man With the Iron Fists

This should come as no surprise, but The Man With the Iron Fists is a bad movie. A very, very bad movie. But it revels gleefully in its badness, a hodgepodge of one-liners glued together with endlessly spurting, ruby-red fake blood. This is not a movie that you see because you want martial arts or a decent action flick. This is a movie you see because you went to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and thought well yes, but what this movie needs is more obviously fake gore and bad Elvira wigs.

There's really nothing to this movie but fight scenes that are comedic in their brutality and groan-worthy one-liners that are held together by weirdly laconic exposition by RZA, who informs you periodically what the plot is doing. But let's be clear. There isn't really plot to this movie. It's a fabrication that exists so that characters can move from point A to point B and then throw around a lot of blood. While the movie itself has an impressive color palette (particularly the whore house, where everything is in a highly disturbing shade of pink) everything potentially emotional is flat and muted because feelings are really just there as a reason to punch someone's goddamn head off.

Near the beginning, Yen Zi (the X-blade) gets a note that reads: Your father is dead. The circumstances of this caused everyone in the theater to laugh. This is the kind of experience you have throughout the entire movie.

According to IMDB, the original cut of the movie was 4 hours long, and then it was reduced to 90 minutes. I'm forced to wonder, had it been left at the original, epic length would it:
a) have made sense
b) not been a comedy

The plot, such as it is, is fairly straightforward. I think. There are a bunch of clans, inexplicably named after animals. The Lion Clan (extra hilarious if you've ever played L5R) has a coup occur within it when The Artist Formerly Known a Prince Silver Lion kills daddy Gold Lion and then tries to have his son Yen Zi murdered too. Then kills a lot of other people because... reasons, including at least one other clan. He also seems very concerned about the Hyena Clan which, to my memory, never actually appears so perhaps it's some sort of hallucination on his part. He also steals a shipment of gold from the governor (a stern man with large eyebrows who has no actual lines and just poses on an enormous golden throne) and hides it under the whore house.

Yen Zi thinks all of this is a bad idea and tries to stop it, which means Brass Body (pro wrestler Dave Bautista) beats the snot out of him. The Blacksmith (RZA) who is incidentally the only black guy in the village, saves Yen Zi, nurses him back to health, and gets his arms chopped off for his trouble. Jack Knife (Russell Crowe), who has been hanging around chewing on the scenery and being weird, oversexed and not nearly as fabulous as Silver Lion, then saves the Blacksmith and helps him make some metal arms - and thus the movie gains its title. Together, Yen Zi, Jack, and the Blacksmith team up and kill... everyone. Basically. Well, Ultra Fabulous Lion kills Madam Blossom (Lucy Liu) as she tries to save a child for a reason none of us could figure out. Then Russell Crowe as Jack rides off into the sunset still reminding the audience that yes I am totally a British guy trust me and the Blacksmith swears off making weapons forever because violence is bad, that's why we just sat through 90 minutes of nothing but.

The martial arts scenes are fairly unimpressive. There's a lot of wire work  that's all right, if you're in to wire work. See it if you want a movie that feels like it's having fun with all the tropes of bad martial arts movies. See it if you want to witness Russell Crowe hilariously sneaking around the village in disguise as obviously the only white guy in the entire county (who also has a prominent and easily identified facial scar). See it so you can witness Byron Mann in a bad wig being a fabulous bastard and Daniel Wu with hilariously overdone eyebrows. See it so you can witness Dave Bautista, with apparent seriousness answer the line "I thought all the tiger were dead!" with "Yes, because I killed them!"

I laughed more in this movie than I had in the last comedy I went to. If you're the sort of person that likes MST3K and was willing to pay real money for a ticket to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, go for it, get some popcorn, and enjoy. If you demand that your movies do things like, I don't know, make sense, this is not for you.

If you do go, just wait until you get to the (gasp) Gemini Stance! And then imagine an entire row of students from a kung fu school laughing hysterically. Because that's exactly what happened.

Bad Movie Science (1)

This might get my geek card taken away, I realize. Oh wait, no, you can't take my geek card. John Scalzi says so.

But this is the thing. For the most part, I actually don't care about bad science in movies. Sure, there's the occasional face-clutching howler (red matter? a black hole that's going to destroy an entire galaxy? Wow, Star Trek, just wow.) but outside of that, 98% of the time, I seriously don't care. Spaceships that don't fly like spaceships should fly and make noise in space? Meh.

What I want a movie to do is tell me a good story. Or failing that tell me a really fun one. If the movie is doing its job at that, then I'm probably not even going to notice the shitty excuse for science. I'm going to be too busy watching villains get punched in the face or clutching the edge of my seat because oh god are these people going to make it or grow up or get back together I need to know.

I do think there are times (cough Total Recall cough) when the MacGuffin is too ridiculous to just accept, or when if the writers had actually spent five minutes on the internet and taken a look at the real science, it would have made the story stronger. But for the most part, the point is the story, not a technical lesson in how spaceships should really fly.

And frankly, I think if you or I can spend our entire time complaining bitterly about all the tortured science, that shows that the movie (or television show, etc) has failed at telling us that story and making us care. Because that means we're so bored or annoyed or overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of the base concept that we'd rather pick apart the technical details than pay attention to what the characters are doing. I'd argue that the problem at the base of those movies isn't the bad science, it's the failure of the story itself to engage.

Prometheus is an excellent example of this, I think. If I'd actually given two shits about any of those characters and hadn't found their decisions inexplicable and stupid, I wouldn't have cared about how grossly ridiculous the more technical details of the story were. (eg: I just had major abdominal surgery and now I'm going to basically run a triathlon. I rolled my eyes until I strained something.) For goodness sake, I loved the hell out of Looper even though if I wanted to I probably could have just gone to town on the way the time travel was handled. But I didn't care at the time and still don't because any mistakes (intentional or not) that were made occurred in the service of a damn good, engaging story.

Remember, you can't take my geek card.

I've often heard Contact held up as a paragon to all nerddom because the science was done right. I know some people that really, really liked that movie. If you're one of them, good on you. I thought it was all right, but I've seen it a grand total of once and have never felt compelled to watch it again, which is a strange thing for me since I'm a compulsive movie re-watcher at my heart. (Don't ask how many times I've watched Avengers. Just. Don't.) I think that highlights that as far as I'm concerned, the correctness of the technical background really has no meaning unless the story grabs me and won't let me go.

I would further argue that, if it is in the service of a good story, rules should be bent and broken.

(Next: yes, but is it the responsibility of a movie to have good science?)

Looper (and the most unintentionally[?] hilarious preview ever)

Saw Looper today with my best friend and it was seventeen kinds of awesome, but first, this:

Have you seen this? Has there ever been a more unintentionally(?) hilarious trailer in the history of the US with the possible exception of the one for Battleship?

The first Red Dawn was an intensely silly movie, but at least it kind of made more sense, being toward the end of the Cold War and all when Russia was still pretty scary. Obviously, remaking it can't involve Russia any more because they're sort of our friend (except for the part where they cockblock everything we do ever in the UN Security Council but wevs) so what are we picking instead?

North Korea? Just... North Korea?

That realization makes the trailer utterly hilarious. Come on people. North Korea can't even manage to hit Japan with a single missile. Shots of squadrons of airplanes and tanks rolling down highways? What is this even? Plus some kind of magical secret weapon operated by a very serious Asian man in a nice set of fatigues. (You can tell he's North Korean because he has only one facial expression; that's a country that can't support fripperies like soldiers that can be both stoic and angry.) Also, I can't help but wonder why the hell North Korea, if we lived in a magical world where they had these kind of resources, would be invading the United States instead of, gosh I don't know, South Korea.

It's ridiculous. I'm guessing that's why never once in the trailer do they say it's North Korea, because it's such a howler. Instead, it's just a giant army of scary Asian guys invading part of America because... reasons. One can only surmise that they hate our freedom. PFFFFFFT.

Bonus points if you imagine Chris Hemsworth dressed as Thor while he's doing this, by the way.

But anyway. Looper. This is without a doubt the best science fiction movie I have seen in years. While I'm sure you could spend ages nitpicking apart the time travel fuckery that is central to it, that doesn't change the fact that it is a good story, told about fascinating characters.

If nothing else, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis make an intense team showing how much a man can change in thirty years, and also how little. The character of Joe is still capable of the same kind of horrific brutality in the before and after, but for incredibly different reasons. It leaves you wondering just how much the reasons even matter, however.

Pierce Gagnon is excellent as Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed on film outside of a horror movie. And Jeff Daniels as Abe makes a wonderful mob boss. He's so weirdly avuncular that you can't quite understand why anyone is afraid of him up until he cheerful breaks a fuck-up's hand with a hammer. Then you realize that he can be that jolly because he's an absolutely horrific person.

Abe: I'm from the future. I'm telling you to go to Shanghai.
Joe: I'm going to France.

It's a wonderful exchange.

The only complaint I really have about the movie is that it's 2044, and apparently women still only exist as strippers and waitresses. Or the embodiment of redemption for the grizzled hero in the form of ladies they sex up. That, I find exceedingly disappointing. I would have been happy if there'd just been a few female extras in long black coats wielding ludicrously huge handguns for Bruce Willis to mow down toward the end of the movie.

Go see it. It's excellent.

SPOILERS NOW YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

One of the things I liked most about the movie is that it chose the right moments to surprise me. There were some plot elements that were easy to call (like Cid, the creepiest child that has ever existed, being the future Rainmaker) and others that just took me off guard. I didn't really think Old Joe was going to go around mowing down kids until he actually did. I didn't think Young Joe would break the cycle by killing himself until the very end, when he started his final, short monologue. In fact, I thought the end of the movie would be Old Joe killing Cid's mom, and thus the future and this endless loop of violence being preserved. (Making the movie more like 12 Monkeys and infinitely more depressing.)

Okay, and yes, now you can argue about how in the context of time travel and causality it doesn't really make sense as a solution and then the plot continuing forward but shut up it was an excellent story.

It was obvious that Cid was going to be the Rainmaker, but the answer as to why he could be a one man wrecking crew was unexpected and a bit scary. As was the revelation that he'd made his adopted mother explode, I thought. Seeing Young Joe hug the blood-covered little terror was a turning point I didn't expect, because he didn't even point his gun at the kid. It was all incredibly well done, I thought. It was a good counterpoint to earlier, when Joe sells his best friend out so he can keep his hoard of money.

That sequence, by the way, was utterly horrifying, seeing what happened to Old Seth once the "doctor" had his hands on Young Seth. It certainly added to the suspense of Young Joe having to escape from Abe.

The other part of the setup I really liked was in the first loop, where Old Joe escapes and then Young Joe potentially dies. Then in the second loop, we see how Old Joe gets to the place he's at, see why he's doing what he's doing and why he's also such a giant badass. Then the real loop starts, to be finally broken at the end by Young Joe.

Good, good writing. Good, good acting. Loved it. I'm happy to give up on accuracy about the time travel if it'll be used to tell a story this intense.

Total Recall: An Inexplicable Obsession With Elevators

I tried to go in to this movie with an open mind. I really did, I swear.

Then Total Recall told me: So yeah. Elevator through the center of the Earth.

Well. If you're not going to take this seriously, neither am I.

And no, I don't count that as a spoiler, because the damn movie slaps you with that facepalm-inducing concept within five seconds of the opening credits starting. (If that revelation stops you from seeing this movie in the theater, I'd appreciate it if you use some of the money you saved to send me a cookie.) That's right. The grandeur of possibly fake saving an entire planet has been replaced with a giant elevator that somehow goes through the center of the Earth.

It's a sad, sad day when you manage to come up with a concept that makes even less scientific sense than the original Total Recall. And here's the thing: the elevator through the center of the Earth is actually the least aneurysm-inducing part of the world build. Don't even get me started on how the societal set up itself makes no damn sense. (Everything is a chemical cesspit except Europe and Australia so every day all the people from Australia get shipped to the other side of the world via the elevator to go to work WHAT okay I need to lay down now.)

I'm kind of wondering if the script writer was perhaps savaged by an elevator as a child. Because there is a lot of elevator action going on in this movie. Large chunks of it, action scenes and chase scenes, take place in elevators. I don't know, is there a Jungian archetype for this? I suppose we could get all Freudian and boil it down to sex because HEY A THING GOES INTO ANOTHER THING, only I can think of nothing potentially less sexy than Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel looking vaguely uncomfortable at each other in a giant elevator.

That, and this new version of Total Recall was so infested with lens flares that I had this crazy moment where I wondered if JJ Abrams had punched Len Wiseman in the head and taken over, only then it would have been a much more interesting and suspenseful movie. I'm not really a fan of the Abrams love affair with lens flares, but at least he manages to do it in a way that's not actively annoying. Here, I got very, very tired of seeing ghostly blue streaks over Jessica Biel's face. As far as I can tell, her only purpose in the movie was to look pretty, and that sure didn't help.

The original Total Recall wasn't exactly a festival of logic, but I think I was more willing to go with it because the movie so obviously didn't take itself seriously. I'm more than capable of enjoying movies that have a certain sort of gleeful badness - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter anyone? - but with this one I just spent a lot of time rolling my eyes. Total Recall took the concepts of the old movie (loosely based as it was on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) and sucked all the joyful, ridiculous mayhem out of it. So instead, it feels ponderous, silly in a squirm-inducing way, and you don't even get copious blood spatter as a reward.

Blah.

I did find it amusing that in the future:

• Great Britain apparently becomes the Empire, complete with stormtroopers and battle droids. Glad to see that they're keeping up with their glorious tradition of being cartoonish villains in American-made movies.
• Enormous guns on combat helicopter things can only fire two second bursts and then have to reload themselves, which takes just long enough that they are basically useless.
• Collin Farrell gets his ass thoroughly kicked by a suit-wearing politician. 
• Stabbing someone in the intestines kills them instantly, except that it doesn't because they subsequently come back to life just in time to be blown up.
• Bill Nighy is the leader of the resistance. (If I had somehow managed to keep it together after the ELEVATOR THROUGH THE CENTER OF THE EARTH thing, to be honest that would have killed it for me. Sorry, Mr. Nighy.)

There were precisely three things that I liked about this movie. One, the sets and backgrounds were done really well. I liked the sprawling multi-level dystopian metropolis. It looked intense, wonderful, and at times downright Blade Runner-esque, and that hits all the right geek buttons with me.

There were some great little nods to the original Total Recall that I appreciated, as someone who loves that movie in all its silly glory. There was the hooker with three breasts, the woman in the ugly yellow coat at security, and a lot of other little nods in lines. Spotting those Easter eggs were some of the only truly fun moments in the movie.

Third and most important, Kate Beckinsale almost managed to salvage the entire movie by being unbelievably badass in every single scene in which she appeared. I found myself hoping she'd show up even more often to punch the good guys repeatedly in the face. She also does the amazing Natasha Romanov-style crotch punch, which I will never get tired of seeing. The only regret I have is that at the end she gets killed by Collin Farrell. In the original movie, Quaid's not-wife gets taken out by his girlfriend, and it's quite satisfying. But as far as I can tell Jessica Biel's character was basically just there to look worried and get punched, so I suppose she didn't have the necessary reservoir of awesomeness to even penetrate Kate Beckinsale's BAMF field.

In the contest of which movie is a better homage to We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, neither Total Recall wins. They're based on the story, but it really should be "based" complete with scare quotes. I think I do have to reward the 1990 movie with a slight edge, though. Douglas Quail never goes to Mars in the short story, but the red planet is there, and aliens come up as well. And frankly, the 1990 movie does a much, much better job of creating that lingering, uncomfortable feeling about whether or not this entire thing was real, or just an insane fantasy.

Because let's be honest. If you're going for insane fantasies, standing on top of a mountain on miraculously terraformed Mars while kissing your girlfriend in a pose off a pulp fiction cover wins over celebrating blowing up the big, mean elevator by being wrapped in a blanket.

Go big or go home. You're better off getting your ass to Mars.

Waiting for Jason Bourne

I've got some mixed feelings about The Bourne Legacy. There was actually a lot that I liked about it. But there were certain choices that were made in the movie that I feel made it weaker, and I'm not really sure why they were done.

The non-spoiler summary:

Generally, it was a fun Bourne-style action movie. There was some suspense, interesting and wonderfully grimy settings, lots of improvised weapons. There were chase scenes where, as usual, I had absolutely no clue what the hell was going on, but I thought maybe we were winning. It was a fun way to spend my evening, though I don't know if my opinion would be the same if I'd gone in cold.

Jeremy Renner was likeable, Rachel Weisz was actually really interesting, and Edward Norton was a standard amoral government guy in a suit. There were a lot of missed plot opportunities that could have gone for some great character development and raised Renner's character Aaron Cross toward the level of Jason Bourne. I think instead, those opportunities got blown on making the chase scenes just a little more incoherent and shaky.

I don't feel like I wasted my time at the movie, and if there's a sequel (and I'm sure there will be) I'll definitely go see it. But I hope next time they give us more. The original Bourne movies really raised the bar on spy-fi in a lot of ways - internal drama to go with all the action, for one - and I'd like to see that legacy continue in truth. 

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA WITH SPOILERS BELOW:

To begin with, there was the entire choice of making the events of the movie basically concurrent with The Bourne Ultimatum. I haven't had a chance to watch that movie in a while, but I remembered enough that I at least knew who Pamela Landy was and why a bunch of older white guys in suits were saying "My god," in deep, serious tones. I really don't know what the experience would have been like for someone who hadn't seen the original Bourne trilogy.

And of course, they kept bringing up Jason Bourne. The serious white guys in suits mention him constantly. Aaron sees his name carved in the bunk bed at the way house he stays at. We see a photo of him flashed during a newscast. But it feels like a plot point that never delivers because not once in the movie do we actually see Jason Bourne. Aaron doesn't meet him, or really seem to have any kind of attachment to him as anything but  a name. This makes Bourne feel like something that got added in at the last moment as a way to keep his name in the title. He becomes the movie's Godot, where he never shows up even as he provides the necessary fig leaf to explain why the characters are talking. Though at least he never triggers a serious discussion about suicide being better than waiting any longer.

I understand if they couldn't get Matt Damon. But I think if they wanted to keep the connection between the original three movies and this one, they needed to find a better way to connect the character of Jason Bourne to the new guy, Aaron Cross. Maybe they met once in the back story. Maybe Bourne is a legend in the program and his defection has a real psychological effect on its last living lab rat. Maybe Aaron could have found out more about Bourne and taken some kind of direction or inspiration from the way that he went rogue and remade himself. (Actually, I think that would have been really interesting...)

Then there's the issue of LARX-3. He has no name other than that. He also, to the best of my memory, has no dialog, and only two facial expressions - cold and grrrrr. He also feels like an afterthought to the plot - an oh shit we're in the third act and the boss fight music just cued up, send in the plot device! Part of what made the original Bourne movies so interesting was that anyone significant Jason Bourne faced had at least some kind of internal life - which made his killing them more meaningful, both to the audience and to him as a character. The way the end battle with LARX-3 played out, it was really like Aaron versus the drone part two. It was another missed opportunity, I think. Even if the point of LARX-3 was that he's a human with the humanity removed, that would have been great food for thought for Aaron had he known, I would think. Hey dude, that's the new model, see where we're going with this?

I really loathed what they did with the wolves while Aaron was up in Alaska. I'll just say here that I am anti-shooting and blowing up wolves, even if it's in movies. And the way the wolves were acting made absolutely no sense anyway, which just makes it a bit more annoying.

Otherwise I found the movie pretty enjoyable, though inferior to the original Bourne trilogy. Aaron Cross was a likable character, though he lacks what made Jason Bourne so interesting. Bourne's character development was really about him figuring out who and what he was, wrestling with the sins of his past, and then deciding to remake himself. Aaron's struggle is never really that visceral. While he mentions several times that he's done bad things (and thus they seem to bother him) he obviously kept going with the program and doesn't seem to struggle with it all that much.

His real motivation is to keep his enhanced mental capabilities because he doesn't want to regress to being an idiot, and it sounds like that regression process is really horrible. That's something that is sympathetic, but it lacks the punch of the "who was I? who will I be?" that we learned to expect from the Jason Bourne movies. There were a few tantalizing lines thrown in there - maybe predators don't think Aaron is human any more - but that incredibly interesting question never really seems to cross his mind.

I was actually far more interested in Dr Marta Shearing, the character played by Rachel Weisz. She does go through a really good character arc, where she starts out as someone who was "just doing science" without any real thought to the ethics, and has that come home to roost. She does struggle with that, and grows. Unlike Aaron, I think she comes to accept responsibility for her involvement, realizing how pathetic her own sacrifices (I didn't get to go to conferences! I couldn't talk to people about my work!) really were in light of the much larger, darker picture.

You weren't bad, Bourne Ultimatum. But I want more. Give me more. I expect better of you.

Gotta Dance

This movie was on instant play on Netflix and I had some time to kill while I ate dinner, so I thought I'd just put it on for a bit. I'm not normally one for documentaries or cute, but I actually ended up watching it all the way through to the end and enjoyed it quite a bit.

The film is about the 2007 senior hip-hop dance team for the New Jersey Nets. If ever there was a movie designed to make you feel better about getting older, that would be it. Initially, you sort of feel like it's a thing that might be played for laughs, but that definitely isn't the case. They train hard, and actually face being not allowed to perform at one point because their run through isn't good enough.The oldest member of the team is a 80-year-old lady named Fanny, and I'm pretty sure she dances better than I'll ever manage.

I think it also definitely makes the point that the key to staying young at heart is finding something you love and not being afraid to do it. I wish I was even half as fearless as that when it came to things that didn't let me hide behind my keyboard.

Though I think my favorite bits were watching the team hang out together, going dancing or shopping for clothes to suit up Betsy, one of the team members who had grown a lot of confidence from the experience. Heartwarming is a word I'll happily apply, and not in a sneering hipster way. It made me feel happy and right with the world, and it's nice to have movies like that on occasion.

It also made me want to dance.

Still attempting to get excited about the remake of Total Recall, coming out this weekend. I'll go see it anyway, I promise. And maybe I'll have nice things to say about it. Maybe I won't. Time will tell.

Silent Hill: Revelation and Pyramid Head

io9 has posted the new trailer for Silent Hill: Revelation.

It looks like it's based off of the third game of the Silent Hill series, which is probably my second favorite. Honestly, it should probably my favorite, but I played Silent Hill 2 first and it's just kind of stuck with me. James is just so wonderfully ineffectual as a hero, I can't quite get over it.

Heather, the heroine of Silent Hill 3, is infinitely more badass and has a lot of snappy dialog. I'm really hoping that'll come through in the movie, since she isn't one to just stare in horror and make the 'I'm just about to vomit from an overload of fear' face that seems to be the way most women emote in horror movies. She's competent.

Though of course, who knows how close this will come to the game. I've already got a bad feeling, here, considering it sounds like Heather calls the Kit Harrington character "Vincent." He sure as hell doesn't look like a priest in the evil cult of Silent Hill. I'm getting a horror movie teen romance vibe from it, and that really misses the point of the entire story being about Heather through and through. There's no room for a love story; it would be unnecessary and distracting from how cool the character is, even if the guy gets to be the damsel in distress for once. (And if he's not, expect ranting.)

Perhaps unusually, I didn't hate the first Silent Hill movie. It didn't make an enormous impression on me - I can barely remember most of it - and it's not as if I own a copy or have gone out of my way to see it more than once. But I remember it had some style, and I appreciated that there were certain things done incredibly well, like the nurses, Pyramid Head, and the creepy air raid siren. From the brief glimpses in the trailer, the nurses still look great. I'm reserving judgment on Pyramid Head, since I'm always worried he's going to get overused or have his menace sapped by doing un-Pyramid-Head-like things. (Such as the bit where he seems to be driving some kind of machinery in the trailer.)

Because this is the thing about Pyramid Head. He's terrifying in the same way old school, shambling zombies are terrifying. He's not in a rush. He's virtually indestructible. And you know no matter how fast you run, he's going to eventually catch up and then you're going to end up cut in half by a sword longer than you are tall. He doesn't really make any sound, either. It's all just the scrape of the sword on the ground, screeee screee.

True story: I'm too much of a weenie to play horror games. So when I say that I played one, what I actually mean is that my best friend Kat actually played it, while I sat behind her and offered frantic, helpful advice like, "Run! Run! Why aren't you running? Shoot it! Shoot!" etc.

The first time we played Silent Hill 2, we were stuck on the roof of the hospital. I went and looked at a gamefaq to figure out what we were missing. Well, we were just supposed to go to one part of the roof, look at the diary pages there, and then we'd get a cut scene with Pyramid Head but it was okay because he wouldn't actually hurt us.

Okay, there were the diary pages. Cut scene any moment now. Any moment... now. Any moment... now?

screeeeeee screeeeeee

At which point I screamed, perhaps louder than I had screamed in my entire life as the game camera whipped around to face Pyramid Head. Loud enough that I scared Kat into throwing the controller and jumping over the back of the couch.

I don't know what it is about that monster. He still scares the hell out of me even when I know he's coming. He's a force of nature. Evil, horrifying nature that involves wearing a leather apron that is, for all I know, made out of human skin. And has a giant metal pyramid obscuring his entire head, which you'd think would be hilarious only it not.

So we'll see. I imagine that I'll end up seeing this movie, hopefully with Kat. But not in 3D.

Because of course, like all things today, the movie is going to be in 3D. Though apparently it was actually filmed in 3D rather than given a computer shop job. Fascinating, but not enough to make me want to endure having glasses perched over my glasses, or spending an hour and a half feeling like I'm going to vomit into my hat.

Though for the life of me, every time I see Silent Hill: Revelation IN 3D all I can think is this:

(Weird Al Yankovic: Nature Trail to Hell in 3D)

Threat level: Pyramidalicious (pessimistic but willing to be surprised)

Related: I've been to Centralia, the town that inspired Silent Hill.

The Dark Knight Rises

Tragedy or no, of course I had to see this movie. I love Christopher Nolan. I loved the other two movies in the trilogy.I'm a nerd. Duh.

(Oh, and in case you missed the news? Christian Bale is a fucking superhero. For reals.)

I liked The Dark Knight Rises, quite a bit. Though I didn't like it as much as The Dark Knight. I think it felt like it was just a bit too long, and a few of the expository points were a bit too heavy-handed. Which is to say it was still an excellent movie and you should definitely go see it. It was dark and moody and a fitting end to the trilogy, action and suspense and more bat toys than you can shake a stick at. All of the actors did great work. Anne Hathaway has now fully erased the horrors of Halle Berry and her CGI butt from my mind. Tom Hardy deserves a medal for managing to convey so much emotion with most of his face obscured by a ridiculous mask.

Really, Michael Caine stole the show as Alfred, though. That man made me cry. Twice. Best Alfred ever. He puts so much depth into everything, and just the weight of the relationship between Alfred and Bruce is crushing.

Of course, I never get tired of Christian Bale doing the Batman voice. I admit it.

And then there will be some spoilers.

SPOILERS BELOW

Honestly, there were a couple of things that did kind of bug me about the movie. First and foremost was Bruce Wayne sleeping with Miranda. It just seemed very out of the blue, particularly considering all the real chemistry there was in that movie was between him and Selina. Pretty much at the time that happened, I remember thinking, "...what?" Then by the end it just feels like a cheap trick to squeeze a little more impact from Miranda's betrayal, when she really wasn't enough of a character to even begin with. I didn't feel all that shocked at the big reveal, because there just hadn't been quite enough time setting her up.

I think the problem really was the movie wanted to have only one interest.Catwoman really crowded whatever development there might have been to build up Miranda. Or at least to get me to care about Miranda at all.

The other thing that bothers me a little is the setup for the "rabble" taking over Gotham. Now, on one hand I really don't get all the bitching that I've seen on Twitter about this movie being quasi-fascist, or about fearing the mob, or anti-99% or whatever. I don't think that was the point at all. The way the upper classes of Gotham were presented there was nothing to sympathize with, and the plight of the poor was made pretty damn clear. Rather, I easily saw the parallels to A Tale of Two Cities as soon as that plot line ramped up. My god, the first time you ever see the court room, it should smack you in the face.

But then the problem becomes that it's not a real revolution or a good parallel to the Reign of Terror, because it's something that was imposed top down by Bane. It wasn't the underclass rising up against the worthless rich; it was Bane telling everyone he was going to turn the city into a sea of glass if people didn't play by his rules.

So that setup didn't quite work for me. I'm not sure I buy Gotham falling apart quite like it did. Though I can buy that once things have gone totally to shit, people who have nothing to lose probably wouldn't feel too bad about seeing the decadent get their comeuppance.

I will tell you this. The Dark Knight Rises managed to do the impossible. I'm actually thinking of reading A Tale of Two Cities again. That's even more amazing than the level of emoting Tom Hardy managed with just his eyebrows.

The Hollow Crown 4: Henry V

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start.

This. The Saturday I've been waiting for! Favorite play ever, favorite actor ever, go!

Rather than start this review with seven pages of frantic keysmashing, allow me to just say: Fuck yeah. With bells on.

There was everything to love about the performances turned in for this version of Henry V. Tom Hiddleston was superb. I've already gushed and gushed about him as Hal in Henry IV part 1 and part 2. At this point all I can really add is chocolate sprinkles delivered by a magical sparkling unicorn of pure badassery. Which is to say I thought he made a darn good Henry V.

What I noticed most about this Henry V was a pronounced somberness. Hiddleston shows clearly that Henry feels the weight of all his decisions. At the same time, there were lovely moments of supreme temper (such as in Act I scene 2 when he receives the Dauphin's mocking present) and at the end of the battle of Agincourt with the enraged delivery of:

I was not angry since I came to France
Until this instant.

And then there was the end of the siege of Harfleur:

What is't to me, when you yourselves are the cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?

That is one scary as hell speech, and Hiddleston delivers it with terrifying implacability. (And achieves a wonderfully disbelieving look from Anton Lesser's Exeter, but more on that later.) I also was pleased that he still preserved the hints of playfulness that live on in the more responsible Henry. When he confronts the soldier who picked a fight with him when he was in disguise, and later tries to woo Katharine, we're reminded that there's much more to Henry than a stern and bloody soldier.

There's just so much complexity to the character, so many tones and notes, and it was all there. Of course, I can't go on without mentioning the two greatest speeches. I actually watched the "Once more unto the breach" speech three times, since the first time the delivery was so different from what I'd been expecting that   I needed another view. The tone was much less bombastic than what I'm used to seeing, which I think is ultimately for the good. It suited Hiddleston's take on Henry well.

And the Saint Crispin's day speech. My god. Tears. Perfect.

What really sold Henry's more scary moments was actually the presence of Anton Lesser as the Duke of Exeter. His reaction to Henry at Harfleur, his confidence in his king, his shock when Henry orders the prisoners to be killed at Agincourt all add up to show even the court didn't quite understand what they'd get by awakening Henry's "sleeping sword of war."

I honestly didn't feel all that enthused about Lesser as Exeter in Act I scene 2, but by the time we get to Act II scene 4, I was sold:

Dispatch us with all speed, lest that our king
Come here himself to question our delay...

At which point I realized that Exeter is a soft-spoken, fearless badass. I was rather amused in Agincourt as well, when he's speaking with Henry on the battlefield. Everyone is just coated in blood and mud, and Exeter is clean except for some splashes around his hem. Because he is just too much of a badass for dirt.

Paterson Joesph did very well as the Duke of York, and I was extremely charmed by Melanie Thierry as Katharine. Really, I liked the whole cast, but those are the ones that really stood out to me.

Also, while there was a bit of shaky cam in the battle, I have no objections to it this time. It didn't make me feel motion sick, and I could actually tell what was going on. I was surprised that there were bits of the battle in slow-motion as well. Overall, I thought it was all right, particularly for a BBC production. Tom Hiddleston, Paterson Joseph, and Owen Teale (hope I'm spelling that right, the credits were kind of blurry) as Captain Fluellen were the ones that really did the heavy lifting on the battle. They all had some serious crazy eyes going.

The acting was good. That's going to guarantee I'll be regularly re-watching this when I need a Henry V fix. Some things, I didn't like so much. The score, for one. I found it intrusive in Henry IV part 2 and even moreso here.

I'm also fairly stunned by just how much they cut from the play. Obviously, this was for time constraints, but it was jarring nonetheless. I actually watched the movie with my pocket Henry V in hand so I could follow along, because I'm just that kind of nerd. It meant that I felt like I was tripping over a rock when something was missing.

Several characters didn't even make it in, notably Gower and Henry's two brothers, Gloucester and Bedford. Which seemed particularly strange to me, since they were present in the two parts of Henry IV. I guess this time around they had something better to do than go murder the shit out of the French with their big brother. Or maybe they just got stuck in the pre-Olympic traffic in London. We'll never know.

With the loss of Gower as a character, that meant we lost most of the character development scenes with Fluellen, which I think are a shame since Fluellen's quite fun, and he has an excellent enmity with Pistol that doesn't get nearly as much play because of the deleted scenes. Act II scene 2, where the traitors are revealed and taken away was eliminated.

Now, I can understand doing away with it for time constraints, but it's a really good scene for Henry:

The mercy that was quick in us but late,
By your own counsel is suppress'd and kill'd:
You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy...

If nothing else, it's another big point in his development as being so merciless as we see him later.

Also missing is Act V scene 1, where we find out the sad fate of Pistol (his friends are dead, his wife is dead, he's going back to England to be a thief). While again this isn't important to Henry, sine we've had Pistol throughout the play it does bother me that he's just left without any kind of conclusion.

Act III scene 7 is also mostly absent, which I was disappointed by. It's the French camp scene, which always seemed to me to be important setup for the battle at Agincourt - it shows how overconfident the French were, how outgunned the underdog English seemed. That also takes a lot of development away from the French characters, since they really only have a couple of scenes, so seeing them die in the battle later has a lot less impact I think.

I'm also puzzled about the choice to leave out the bit where the French kill all the boys at the English camp and set fire to the baggage. While Henry does order the English to kill their prisoners before that, it's actually the catalyst for him screaming about how utterly enraged he is. ("I was not angry since I came to France...") This has the effect of making what was previously Henry's reiteration to kill the prisoners seem much less justified. So I suppose if the point was to remind us that the man is absolutely brutal when he feels he needs to be, it does do that.

Anyway. I wonder if those scenes are gone entirely, or if maybe some might have been filmed and we'll get to see them when there's not the time constraints of television. I guess we'll find out.

And of course, the inevitable comparison to Kenneth Branagh's 1989 Henry V. That movie was my first love, so to speak, so it's not really fair to compare the two. I'll be watching both movies when I want a Henry fix. I hope they can manage to take turns and not fight, because I do love them both and they have very different qualities.

But I will tell you this. Man, I miss Patrick Doyle's score for the movie. (And sorry, John Hurt. Derek Jacobi wins. He will always be Chorus in my heart.)

If you want to watch this wonderful Henry V, here's a recorded livestream, which has something like 10 minutes of sports in front of it. Also a direct download. And you can still watch it on the BBC iPlayer if you get Expat Shield, which is how I did it. (I actually started watching an hour late - shame on me! - because I was out carb loading for tomorrow at a Chinese Buffet.)

As of this writing, by the way, Branagh's Henry V is available on instant play for Netflix. If you haven't gotten to watch it, you should. It's 23 years old but still fantastic.

Henry V is probably the most straightforward of the history plays (less politics, really, more Henry being a shiny badass on a horse) but if you had trouble following it here's a quick synopsis.

The Hollow Crown 3: Henry IV Part 2

Finally got to watch this, and not a moment to soon! Darn field work for standing between me and Shakespeare anyway. It's okay, baby, I'm here for you now. I'll never let them tear us apart again.

Henry IV Part 2 starts off with scene 1 and 2 being intercut again, as it was in Part 1. This, I like less than I did. It made more sense in Part 1 so we could understand a bit better why Henry IV is having such problems with his son. In this, it's making Falstaff being, well, Falstaff with what is the setup for the political conflict for this play, and it seems really unnecessary. They also trimmed a bit off the start of scene 1, including the opening monologue of Rumor. Which is a nice speech that's fun to read aloud, but its loss doesn't bother me so much, particularly since we only see Rumor once. (It did give me a moment of concern about Chorus in Henry V, but considering John Hurt is on the cast list in that role, I think we're safe.)

Anyway, little tweaks (and they did exist here and there, probably many more than I realized since I don't know this play nearly as well as Henry V) like this are normally necessary. I just mentioned the first one because it struck me rather wrongly.

And while I sound like I'm complaining, the only other potential complaint I've got is that for some reason the score felt very intrusive in this one, far more than in the previous two plays. I already felt incredibly moved by  Hal's final scene with his father; I didn't need all the strings to tell me I ought to be. The music for the coronation scene also made me cringe slightly; I half expected the classic record scratch news when Falstaff breaks through the crowd and stops Hal. Oof.

But other than those minor quibbles? Perfect, perfect, perfect.

While I already gushed about Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston in Part 1, this performance requires even more glee and sparkles. Jeremy Irons was incredible. There is so much pain and marrow in that performance: all the guilt that Henry feels about his acquisition of the crown, all his conflicts with his son, the weight of the crown bearing down on him, his palpable worries that his death might hand the throne to someone who will never be ready for it. The last moment when he reconciles with his son was beyond beautiful.

And of course, his entire monologue:

...Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

The delivery was wonderful. Though there was part of me that found it disturbingly cute to see Henry wandering around in his pajamas.

I feel as if Tom Hiddleston's performance in Part 1 was really just the teaser for this. Hal lets go of his wild days and finally grows up, when it's almost too late. It comes back to act iv scene 4, when Henry IV is on his death bed. Hiddleston does an amazing job of taking us through Hal's grief. It's that realization that's unfortunately common to so many of us, that we spurned and insufficiently loved those closest and dearest to us because we thought they would always be there tomorrow.

...And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold:
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honour'd: most renown'd,
Hast eat thy bearer up.' 

The words are powerful enough on their own. The delivery killed. I cried. Not ashamed to admit it in the slightest.

Though if I thought that was the best, then there was the final scene, where the newly crowned King Henry V officially turns his back on Falstaff and the life he once knew. I always thought, "I know thee not, old man," would be the most powerful line. But in this rendition, I found:

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. The more subtle expressions from Hiddleston (showing this isn't all that easy for Henry) and the stunned disbelief from Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff just sells this. Of course, a lot of the play focuses on Falstaff being old and his impending death - paralleling the mortality of Henry IV, the father that Hal ultimately chooses. Falstaff and Hal are only in two scenes together; I think even in the first one, there's a sense of Hal already distancing himself from Falstaff, continuing the process that started in the previous play.

Beale makes Falstaff complex through the end. I was never quite certain if the majority of Falstaff's upset at the end was because he lost someone he actually cared about, or if he saw his long-cultivated meal ticket walk away without so much as a backward glance. That I'm still not sure reflects incredibly well on the performance, I think.

Also, a shout-out to Alun Armstrong as Northumberland. While the political setting of the play is very much overshadowed by the family drama aspect of it, he turned in a good performance at the grieving father of Henry Percy.

This was excellent, and I recommend it heartily, though you should watch Part 1 of the play first so you can get the full arc of Hal's character development. It's definitely worth the time investment.

I watched this and Part 1 on the BBC2 iPlayer with the use of a little program called Expat Shield. If you don't want to go that route, there's the whole episode on youtube as of this writing. There's also an upload of Part 1 on  youtube, but it's cut into 15 minute sections. You can watch it via playlist here.

Henry V tomorrow. My favorite Shakespeare play ever. I can't even. I can't begin to say how excited I am.

...yeah, something like that.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

I've owned the soundtrack for this movie since it came out, actually, and I never bothered to watch the movie itself. I actually liked the first Transformers movie all right, in that sort of well it's got explosions and giant robots and it makes okay background noise kind of way. Revenge of the Fallen left me in an underwhelmed place of slow-motion explosions that I didn't manage to return to again until I had the misfortune of watching Ghost Rider 2.

Though as an aside, I'd still rather watch Nic Cage chew the scenery any day than Shia LeBouf whine.

The thing is, I actually really like the soundtracks for these movies. They make excellent writing music even if the movies themselves make me hope for a nuclear winter. What I'd like to know is how did movies this incoherent manage to have such nice music?

It's a zen riddle.

I decided to watch Dark of the Moon tonight, just because why not, I had some braincells to kill.

Well. It sure was a thing.

I wish I could write a mocking examination of the reality-bending badness of this movie, the way io9 did back when it came out. But I've been working 10+ hour days all week and spending most of my time having my neurons slowly drilled into submission by Microsoft Powerpoint. I just don't have it in me.

I am as incoherent as Dark of the Moon.

The movie can't decide if it's a romantic comedy, a stupid buddy comedy, an action movie, or something else entirely and I don't even care. I don't know who Leonard Nimoy owed money to, but I can't fathom why he got within a thousand miles of this pulsating mass of disagreeing plotlines. Shia LeBouf seems to be a three-year old trapped in a man's body, vacillating between soulful eyes and quivering lower lip and incoherent tantrums of petulant rage. And how the hell could something make me miss Megan Fox? How is such a thing possible unless we truly do exist in a godless universe of pain?

I never thought a movie could make me long for the smooth and logical plotline of Ghost Rider 2, but Dark of the Moon managed it. It would be a better movie, and more coherent, if you just cut together all the scenes of the Transformers fighting and just enjoyed the pure, explosion-laden eye candy. It would also be shorter, which I consider a good thing, considering every scene involving the human characters is approximately seventeen years long.

The good news is, I will still be able to listen to the glorious soundtrack without having it ruined for me, because nothing in this movie made any kind of impact beyond a vague existential discomfort caused every time Shia LeBouf screamed like an eight-year-old girl.

Next time, self, remember that curiosity caused the cat to watch really terrible movies.