The Connection

Alternate Title:  The French French Connection

One sentence synopsis:     A crusading magistrate in 1970s Marseille fights organized drug gangs despite corruption and violence.


Things Havoc liked:  William Friedman's 1971 film, The French Connection, was a landmark of American cinema, the first R-rated movie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and the source of one of the greatest car chases ever filmed. While a great many of you, being persons of sufficient wit and culture to appreciate my reviews, will have obviously seen this movie at some point in your lives, I would guess that the majority of you do not know that it was based entirely on a true story, of a very real heroin trafficking route which ran from Turkey to New York by way of Marseille, one which was indeed called The French Connection, and was run primarily by a network of organized Corsico-Italian gangsters for several decades. While the NYPD and the DEA both labored to destroy the French Connection, it was, in reality, the efforts of a series of French anti-organized-crime task forces under the command of a number of crusading magistrates who finally put an end to the French Connection once and for all. And so, rather than wait for Hollywood to tell the story properly (pause for laughter), French thriller director Cédric Jimenez has brought us France's version of the famous tale, some forty-five years after the original.

I normally like to cite actors in these reviews, be they the reason the film is good or bad, but as The Connection is a French film, the only actor any of you are liable to have heard of before is Jean Dujardin, of The Artist, of Monuments Men, and of many, many other things in France itself. I understand Dujardin to be an excellent actor, at least in theory, but his work in the films I've seen so far has been... decent at best. The Connection however puts him in the role of real French judge Pierre Michel and lets him play around with a character concept we've seen before (the justice-obsessed cop who won't play by the rules) in a setting we generally have not (reality). With a background in juvenile court, where he has clearly seen the ravages of drugs first-hand, Michel is not a perfectly clean cop. Hints of a gambling addiction are dropped periodically, and his efforts to break down the resolves of the omerta-coded gangsters that he interrogates are probably the best parts of the film. One memorable scene has him confront a mouthy gangster who denies that he has anything on him, by throwing the gangster an empty pistol, and when he catches it by surprise, telling his secretary in the same room to run the gun (a murder weapon) for fingerprints. It's a nice change from Batman beating the Joker with his fists, and leads logically to circumstances such as the one where Michel flies all the way to New York to interrogate a DEA-apprehended drug lord, who in turn takes one look at the Judge entering the room, and exclaims "Oh fuck, it's you..."

The other half of the drama is veteran actor-director Gilles Lellouche, of nothing I've ever seen before, playing real-life gang lord Gaëtan "Tany" Zampa, a man whom you can read more about here if you should happen to speak French. Zampa is Michel's foil, or vice versa, or however these things are supposed to work, but his characterization is excellent. Not a screaming Scarface-inspired maniac but a careful, menacing presence, whether executing a rival gangster in broad daylight or forcing a poorly-performing minion to overdose on cocaine, Zampa manages to get across the sheer, unremitting pressure of being a criminal boss must be, constantly looking out for any one of ten thousand things which could instantly end his tenure and position, from rival gangsters' bullets to a crusading magistrate with a chip on his shoulder. He gives the usual excuses on occasion, that he's just a businessman and job creator who sells a necessary product but nobody, including Zampa himself, seems to believe it. Above all, however, he is a man obsessed with not screwing everything up by hitting back at the police and lawyers who are after him, cognizant of what kind of heat a shootout with the cops can bring down. This renders his character reasonably unpredictable, as he may be the first mob boss I've ever seen to confront an underling who has failed him in a borderline-treasonous way, re-assure him that if he tells him everything, he won't be harmed, and then actually let the man go.

And that's... really all there is to the Connection, a dance between these two men, one which covers the better part of a decade, as Michel tries to bust Zampa and Zampa tries to avoid being busted while also staying alive. Director Jimenez films all this in a very 70s style of filmmaking, with lots of handheld cameras dragged along for the fun on police raids and gangster hits, and bleached, oversaturated color schemes as the characters bask in the sun of southern France. The effect is actually fairly similar to a film by Tarantino, which makes sense when you consider that it was movies like this one that he memorized and modeled his own style after when he made stuff like Reservoir Dogs. Complete with a wonderful period soundtrack, the film is simply what it claims to be, a New Wave-style cops-and-gangsters flick, the sort of film that would fit in just perfectly in the period it's supposedly about.

Things Havoc disliked: Handheld camera work is always a gamble, as it can easily translate into dreaded shakey-cam, and while The Connection isn't an action movie, it has its share of raids and gunfire like any good cop movie must. Obscuring all of that behind motion sickness may serve some stylistic point on occasion, but I've never been a fan of it.

Otherwise though, the film doesn't have a lot to criticize about it, save perhaps for the structure, which, being drawn from reality with a European approach, seems fairly unfocused. Marital problems arise and then disappear. Addictions are brought up and then left to hang. Secondary characters (all with names I don't recognize) disappear at the drop of a hat or are gunned down by other secondary characters without any idea as to who or what is killing them. At one point, an entire mob war subplot is dropped thanks to a flash forward, and we never get any sense of even who won it beyond the fact that some people are still alive and some are not. I don't mind a movie that expects you to keep up, but some tightening would be nice, especially given how much nuance is always lost in the subtitles of a foreign film.

Final thoughts:   As an avowed Francophile, I always am conscious of the risks that any review I make for a French film will be seen as simple cultural-fawning, and it's certainly true that French movies have fared better with me (particularly this year) than the output of such nations as Hungary or Russia. But a critic must above all be honest, and in all honestly, The Connection is an excellent film, tense when it needs to be, and made with a care and style that one does not often see on this side of the pond, even among indie directors. Insofar as any of you will even have the opportunity to see this film, I don't know how much my recommendation is worth, but if you aren't afraid of a subtitle or two, there are far, far worse options in your local cinemas at the moment.

Speaking of which...

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Well something needs terminating...

The Water Diviner

Alternate Title:  Gallipoli 2: Revenge of the Cyber-Aussies

One sentence synopsis:     A widower whose three sons were all killed at the Battle of Gallipoli, goes to Turkey in 1919 to try and find their remains.


Things Havoc liked:  For all the obsessive retellings of WWII I've seen on screen, there aren't a huge number of movies about its predecessor out there, due primarily to the twin factors of WWI having not been a particularly cinematic war (trenches are only so interesting), and the United States having had not a whole hell of a lot to do with it. Yet alongside the obscure or art-house pieces one does find on the subject such as The Lost Battalion, Paths of Glory, or All Quiet on the Western Front, the major exception has always been Australian films, as the war has never been supplanted in Australian memory, not even by its sequel. The foremost Australian WWI movie I am aware of is, of course, Gallipoli itself, but Gallipoli is well over thirty years old at this point, and leave it to Russell Crowe, no longer young enough to play his typical bad boy roles, to try and replace it with a sombre historical piece about the aftermath of a lost battle halfway round the world.

Russell Crowe is a great actor of course, one of my favorites in everything from Gladiator to A Beautiful Mind to Master and Commander, but one of the nice things about seeing foreign indie films (and it is important, after the last couple of months, to remember that there are nice things) is encountering good actors one is not familiar with. Given that this movie takes place in Turkey, the two actors I speak of this time are Yılmaz Erdoğan and Cem Yılmaz (no relation), who respectively play Major Hassan and Sgt Jemal, two veterans of the battle of Gallipoli brought down by the Commonwealth forces to help locate and identify the bodies of those who died there. I have never seen either of these actors before in my life (Cem Yılmaz is most famous in Turkey as a stand-up comedian, of all things), but their characters are exquisitely-well-drawn, two dedicated soldiers who won their battle and lost their war, and who are now engaged in trying to find a way to preserve their country in defeat. Encountering Crowe early on, as he seeks to find out what happened to his sons, they carry the narrative through the tumultuous events of the transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, and the sequences focusing on them, particularly an underground party wherein everyone gets drunk and begins telling old war stories ("This man is the worst soldier in the Turkish army. Three times, I saved this man!") or a standout fight sequence later on between a trainload of Turkish troops and a battalion of Greek irregulars, provide the movie with its best moments.

This movie is not merely a Russell Crowe vehicle, but also Crowe's directorial debut, and for this first foray behind the camera, Crowe recruited legendary cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, who died just this last month, making this his final film. Lesnie was most famous for all six of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, and while the cinematography this time round isn't quite as lush, the film is beautiful when it needs to be, whether showing the wide open dry plains of the Australian Outback to the sun-draped shores of the Dardanelles, to the minaret-studded skyline of Istanbul (then Constantinople) at dusk, to the blasted, ravaged battlefields of Gallipoli itself. Lots of films justify their existences as travelogues, and if nothing else, this movie manages to serve well as a tourist ad for Turkey's Ionian coast.

Things Havoc disliked:  If nothing else indeed.

The core premise of this movie is fine, a man's search for his dead sons, and I have no objection to the contrivances that arise around it (such as the notion that Water Divining is somehow a real thing). What I do have an objection to though is a ham-fisted secondary plot surrounding French-Ukranian actress Olka Kurylenko, as Ayshe, the widow of a Turkish officer who also died at Gallipoli, and Dylan Georgiades as Orhan, her "adorable" ten year old son. These two have nothing whatsoever to do with the plot save to allow the obligatory love story to play out, something I'd be less upset by if they weren't both so damned awful in their parts. Kurylenko in particular, a veteran of Quantum of Solace, To the Wonder, and Hitman (all films, you may have noticed, that were not very good), I am simply prepared to label as a bad actress and move on. She is rigorously unconvincing as a Turkish widow, looking approximately as Turkish as I am, and overacting constantly as though afraid that the daring, novel idea of a woman from Turkey falling for our rugged Australian hero is so unexpected as to leave the audience agape at the staggering risks the movie is willing to take. Georgiades, meanwhile, plays the most aggravating type of child role imaginable, the cute moppet who warms the heart of the hero. The performance is bad, but any kid would do badly with material like this. Worse yet, it's apparent that the filmmakers were aware of the fact that these performances were awful or at least badly dated, and failed in consequence to tie them into the rest of the plot in any real sense. Ayshe and Orhan have nothing whatsoever to do with Crowe's search for his sons, not even in a thematic sense, thus giving us the impression that we are watching two completely disconnected movies happen before our eyes, forcing those characters that do bridge the two stories to change their motivations and intentions spontaneously in order to fit in.

And why is this subplot structured in so clunky a fashion? Well frankly, because Russell Crowe isn't a very good director, or at least isn't one yet. The whole film is structured in one of the more heavy-handed manners I've seen, with the direction and shot selection beating the viewer over the head with the notion that we are all SUPPOSED TO FEEL SAD NOW, ALRIGHT?! Some decent ideas, such as muting the most obligatory sappy sequences behind silent montage, do not cover for the fact that Crowe simply doesn't know what he is doing a great deal of the time. The British officers he encounters, for instance, are the most absurd pastiche, monocle-popping, stick-up-the-ass fastidious twits one can possibly imagine, twirling their mustaches in outraged propriety at the very notion that this colonial should think to come and upset their tea breaks by requesting to travel to the Dardanelles! As the film goes on, the British become positively pathological about ensuring that this unknown Australian farmer is inconvenienced as much as possible, sending soldiers to pursue him through the streets of Istanbul and across Asia Minor in the middle of a three-way war simply because the thought of leaving him be would be wholly unorthodox! (Harumph!) It's like this with everything, the Greek rebels who look like something out of Blackbeard's crew and must do evilly evil things for the sake of evilness just so the heroes can look gallant beside them, the arrogant Jr. officer who makes jaunty comments about how he expects Gallipoli will not be so bad as everyone tells him just so that he can have his comeuppance deployed in as telegraphed a manner as possible, the Irish priest who refuses to assist Crowe in burying his wife without a bribe because God has abandoned us!!!! Everything is so ridden with melodrama and telegraphed plot beats as to render the entire exercise fairly sterile, despite the obvious sincerity of the cast and crew.

Final thoughts:   I don't read other critics' reviews ahead of time, as I prefer to make my own mind up, but I do tend to consult them in the aftermath of my viewing, if only to see what others focused on that I may have missed, and in this case what I appear to have missed is some kind of grotesque and outrageous insult to the Armenian people due to the fact that this movie does not make mention of the Genocide against them on the part of the Ottoman army and government during WWI. With respect to the fact that the modern Turkish government's cowardly and censorious refusal to even discuss the subject does continue to turn my stomach, it does not follow that any movie that does not bring up the genocide in question is automatically an evil film out to recreate it all over again. I don't remember a lot of Holocaust references in Saving Private Ryan (or in last year's Fury), after all, and I did not read those movies as being anti-Semitic attempts to deny the legitimacy of the Holocaust. The Water Diviner is not a movie about the Armenian Genocide, and it is not at all fair to suggest that it is a bad film simply because it is about one subject and not another, especially not when there are perfectly good reasons to call it a bad film woven all throughout it.

Heartfelt though it is, the Water Diviner is a sappy, melodramatic, clunky film livened only by a handful of scenes that seem drawn from other, better movies, and while it is hardly some sin against man and god, it is the cherry on top of a long, bloody, ugly doldrums season that I am very glad to see the end of. Doldrums is always a hard time for me to get through, but this year was an unlivened disaster, and never have I been more happy to arrive at Blockbuster Season and its quota of mindless popcorn explosion-fests than I am now.

I get a lot of flak from certain circles about how I don't go to see enough independent, non-blockbuster fare. In the future, anyone making that objection will be instructed to go and watch the last eight weeks' worth of cinema that I have partaken in, and then let them tell me about my lack of taste and culture.

I, meanwhile, have a date with Marvel...

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time: Avengers Assemble.

White God

Alternate Title:  Barkticus

One sentence synopsis:     A mixed-breed dog forcibly separated from the girl who owns him is subjected to cruelties by human society before inspiring a canine revolution.


Things Havoc liked:  Yeah, you read that right.

So the Doldrums is something I've complained about many a time, but there's another concept in filmmaking which I call the "Rain Shadow". A rain shadow is the tendency for a really big, highly-anticipated movie release to empty the weeks both immediately before and immediately after its arrival of any movie whose audience could conceivably be drawn away by the arrival of such a huge event. This is the reason why Blockbuster season consists of a series of immense releases staggered as far apart from one another as possible with interludes of indie fare between them, as well as why the Doldrums exists at all, as the movies that normally go there cannot compete in any sense with the films that will be landing come May or October. What this means for me though, is that the Doldrums Season, which is bad enough by itself, gets worse before it gets better, as the movies that herald the arrival of Blockbuster season chase away even what few good things Doldrums has in store. In this case, with a certain film some of you have probably heard of on the immediate horizon, the movie world has emptied like the precursor to a tsunami. And since the only movies that do not adhere to this trend are the ones that do not expect that their audience will overlap with that one at all, I was forced, this week, to go and see a Hungarian indie film about dogs.

WC Fields always said to never work with animals or children, and this movie thoughtfully includes both, but to take them in order, the main character here is Hagen, a mixed-breed dog owned by a thirteen-year-old girl named Lili. "Mixed-breed" is the operative term here, as Lili is sent to live with her father in Budapest, where there is apparently a fee in place for mixed-breed dogs, designed to promote proper "Hungarian" breeds (whatever those are). With her father unwilling to meet this sudden hike in the cost of living, Hagan is abandoned on the roadside, and must survive on the mean streets alone. I, at least, have seen this story before, sometimes with more than one dog (Homeward Bound), sometimes with less than one (Oliver & Company), but whoever the canine actor was that was tipped to play this role, he's one of the better dog-actors I've seen. It's not that they can get him to do the big things, the growling or playing or emoting or fake-attacks, but the more subtle actions that really impressed me, getting him to stop on a mark, look out across a river, then continue on to another mark, and so on. A standout section late in the film has Hagan lead his band of killer dog-assassins (more on this later) to the house of the operator of a dogfighting ring, and then sit and watch in the manner of the Godfather as the other dogs rip him to pieces. Of course it's possible that they simply filmed the dog over and over until he accidentally did something they could use, I don't know, but either way, the leading dog manages to be a fairly stable element in a film that simply could not work without him.

Things Havoc disliked:  Pity about everything else, really.

For a movie that debuted at Cannes and was touted as Hungary's foreign film offering for the Academy Awards, White God is a pretty ineptly made film, and a good chunk of the reason for that has to do with the other half of the "kids and animals" duo, child-actress Zsófia Psotta, who plays Lili. I try to be nice to child actors around here, as there's no point in harping on a kid for not being able to skillfully perform a task that eludes most adults, but Psotta is flat terrible in this movie, and given that she comprises half the run-time of the film, this is something of an issue. Her character is a girl whose best friend, her dog, is callously abandoned in front of her by her father, who throws him dramatically out of a car and speeds away, and yet she can't seem to muster up enough emotion to do more than casually protest as these things take place. Were I, at the age of 13, to be faced with someone throwing my dog out of a car like this, I might well have caused a traffic accident with my reaction. This girl acts like she's had her video game privileges revoked for the next three days. And in the aftermath of this loss, as she acts through the obligatory stages of a teenage rebellion (going to parties and hanging out with older boys), this total lack of actual emotion or insight into how kids think only results in us waiting around for the movie to get back to the dogs.

Oh and speaking of the dogs, I appreciate that it's not easy to get one dog to do what you want it to on film, let alone six hundred, but speaking as someone who has some experience with man's best friend, the filmmakers here are deluding themselves if they think this movie is even slightly convincing. The plot of the film requires that we believe that Hagan, due to the terrible abuses he suffers, raises a canine revolution, inspiring hundreds and thousands of dogs to go on a murder-spree. A far out premise to be sure, but one must always be ready to take a movie at its premise. The issue though is that if you know anything about dogs, about their body language and behaviors, you will quickly realize that the filmmakers have not filmed a pack of ravening, savage beasts filled with outrage and malice, but a swarm of happy, friendly dogs, splashed with fake blood and told to run over to the nice man behind the camera who has a bag of dog treats for them. I appreciate that some people are afraid of dogs, and that others simply do not like them, but for me, as a dog lover, there is simply nothing menacing about watching a hundred dogs run happily down a street, tails wagging and tongues lolling. Even the scenes where the dogs are made to fight one another are clearly comprised of two large dogs riled up by their trainers who are wrestling playfully with one another without intent to cause real harm. Perhaps someone who knows nothing about dogs, or who is terrified by their very presence would be fooled. I am not this person. And I was consequently unable throughout the entire movie to understand why people were screaming and running in fear, calling out police firing lines and desperately manning barricades against a seething tide of dogs who had had enough and wanted, nay demanded, to be scratched behind the ears, and perhaps to be taken for a walk.

And that's really the core of the issue here, for White God is clearly not supposed to be about dogs at all, but a parable for how Europeans (I assume) treat the immigrant populations of Europe. And even leaving aside the fact that the dogs fail to act ferocious (it strikes me as I'm writing this that perhaps this was the point all along, and that the purpose of the movie was to show how people are afraid of nothing), but that they are dogs at all. Parable is fine, as is allegory, but the base fact is that we, as people (at least in the Western World), treat our dogs far, far better on average than we treat one another. After all, the days of us requiring dogs to help us hunt for food and ward off wild predators have been over for a while, and yet we are still, as a species, mad about our canine friends, spending huge amounts of money on them, looking after their well-being whenever possible, mourning them as members of our families when they die, and so on. I have more than once been part of a mob of fifteen or twenty people all working to corner a single collared dog that was clearly lost, just so we could find out to whom it belongs. Obviously abuses happen, dog fighting and animal abuse is a thing after all, and Europe's societal rules may be different than ours, but it just stretches the analogy to the limit of credulity to posit that all dogs are destined for abandonment and abuse on the part of truly psychotic humans (the butcher who starts chasing the dogs down the street with a butcher knife, screaming for blood, is a good example). You simply cannot allegorize the plight of immigrants in Europe using dogs, not if you expect to be believed. Most immigrants in Europe should be so lucky to be treated with the levels of compassion and care that most people reserve for dogs. Hell, killing or abusing a dog is so commonly used as a means of signalling the bad guy in movies because of this exact trait. Asking the audience to swallow a sea-change this massive and arbitrary (why the sudden obsession with dog-breed-purity?) just to make an allegory work leaves one wondering unavoidably just why the filmmakers didn't skip all this and make a film about the subject they were actually interested in.

Final thoughts:   Cognizant of the potential for backlash in a movie about killer dogs (imagine what PETA would think!), the filmmakers made it clear both before and after the movie that not only were no dogs harmed during its filming, but that the entire stray dog population of Budapest was recruited for the sake of the movie, every single one of whom was adopted by the cast at the conclusion of the process. This fact, the placing of hundreds upon hundreds of dogs in loving homes, does serve to excuse many of these films problems, as I would gladly sit through a bad two hour movie so as to have a hand in arranging the above. But a good cause and a happy (real) ending do not magically make a bad film good, and White God is indeed a bad film, a film that could never have worked without a radical redesign in tone or focus, one cored around a premise that makes no sense, using dogs that never manage to convince the audience of their intent to harm, and a girl who never manages to convince the audience of her intent to act. It is, admittedly, hard to get angry at a movie like this, a movie made for the best of reasons with the best of intentions, but unlike all of the many, many critics who have praised this movie as some kind of act of staggering genius, I am forced to report to you, my valued readers, that this movie needs to be taken out in the back and shot.

It's for everyone's good, really.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time: Russell Crowe Fights Round the World

Leviathan

Alternate Title:  Misery

One sentence synopsis:    A Russian handiman confronts a corrupt small town mayor and the legal and religious systems around him intent on forcing him off his land and ruining his life.


Things Havoc liked:  ...

...

...

Ahem?! Things Havoc liked:

Go away.

What?

Go away. I don't wanna.

What the hell do you mean you don't wanna?

I don't wanna review Leviathan! I won't do it!

Oh come on now, it can't have been that -

It was that bad! It was awful! I don't wanna relive it! I'm not doing it!

Don't be such a baby.

TWO AND A HALF HOURS! I sat through this fucking thing for two and a half goddamn hours and you wanna call me a baby?!

But every critic on Earth called this a great film. Hell it was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars!

SO WAS UNDER THE SKIN!

And this was -

- WORSE!!!

I don't believe that. Under the Skin was a hole in the space-time continuum. This thing at least had nice cinematography, didn't it?

*Sniff* Yeah...

And the actors weren't bad, were they?

I... I guess not...

So how bad could it possibly have been?

You don't understand... this movie is just... contrived misery. For hours on end. Everything sucks and we have to make sure it keeps sucking artificially, even when it makes no sense for it to suck. We've gotta drop plotlines midway through and arrange macguffins and use every contrivance in the book so that everything can suck as much as humanly possible BECAUSE ART.

I get all that, but -

YOU DON'T GET SHIT! You can't understand how horrible an experience it is to sit through something this goddamn vacuous for that long with no actual purpose to it beyond some pathological need to display arbitrary suffering.

Well it's trying to be a daring indictment of Russia's corruption and culture of alcoholism

BULLSHIT. It takes more to indict something than just splashing it on the screen. Russia isn't corrupt because God and the impersonal forces of the universe are in collusion to ruin some drunken idiot's life. That's like saying Commando was a daring indictment of South American kidnapping rings.

But... you liked Commando.

I liked Commando because it's entertaining. This movie's as boring as wallpaper paste. I started trying to identify the make and model of the shuttle busses just so I wouldn't go completely mad. It's not like the plot was occupying my attention.

Did it even hold together?

Hell no! That would have required straying away from the daring thematic elements. Think about this one. Let's say you've got a corrupt mayor, who is being threatened by a hotshot lawyer from Moscow who has dirt on him so explosive that he nearly has a heart attack to see it. The lawyer is established as having high level connections in Moscow, and yet the mayor decides to drag him out to a rock quarry and beat him up with goons before throwing him on a train out of town. What do you think happens next?

The... lawyer goes to his connections and gets the government to -

NOTHING HAPPENS WHATSOEVER. We never hear from the lawyer again. Why not? Because Evil Must Triumph Or It Isn't Art!

Surely you're being a little overdramatic...

There is a scene in this movie where the main character sits down on a beach littered with whale bones, drinks an entire bottle of vodka in one swig, then looks out at the camera and says, in perfect dramatic seriousness, "Why?!"

... really?

I swear to God.

Okay so... not very good then.

Not something I'm gonna be running out to buy the Blue-ray of, no.

But you've reviewed bad movies before. What's the problem with this one?

I... I just hated it SO MUCH. Every time I sit down to write the review I degenerate into incoherent screaming. It was an atrocity. And everyone loved it because it was "daring" enough to claim there's corruption in Russia!

Sounds kinda like Under the Skin.

Don't remind me. Still... you're right, I do kinda have to do something.

See, that's the spirit! You'll think of something, don't worry about -

Wait, I know!

You do? Great! What's the plan?

I'll review it IN SONG!!!

Wait, WHAT? NO! NO DON'T YOU DARE! WE ARE NOT HAVING ANOTHER MUSICAL NUMBER IN THIS GODDAMN BLOG! DAMMIT, YOU GET BACK HERE AND REVIEW THIS MOVIE NORMALLY!!!

*Skips away in psychotic glee*

GODDAMMIT, WHO FORGOT HIS MEDS THIS TIME?!

  
The Russian Film 'Leviathan'(Sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas")  There's an indie film from Russia
The worst I've ever seen
With characters so wretched
They drink like Charlie Sheen
Two hours or more I sat there
It damn near stopped my heart
And if I find the filmmakers
I'll tear their lungs apart.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about your Requiems
Or the Choices of Sophie
But the Russian film Leviathan's
The one that finished me.


When the Fireflies are buried
No longer shining bright
And the lists of Oskar Schindler
Have vanished in the night
I will lie awake regardless
For how was I to foresee?
That Leviathan will stick with you
And never leave you be.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can send me to Elysium
Or the Life of Timmy Green
But among them all this film's the one
I wish I'd never seen.


And now I've seen this movie
And my heart is full of woe
It's like the Last Airbender
Crossed with The fucking Road
Under the Skin was awful
Worse than any film before
But the film that I most hated
I shall call it nevermore

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about the second Tron
Or sing of Matrix 3
But I would not give Leviathan
To my worst enemy. 

Final Score:  2/10

Next Time:  Do I really have to?

... fine.. how about Silver Linings Playbook 2: This Time It's Personal?  It seriously cannot be worse than this.

The Taking of Tiger Mountain

Alternate Title:  Welcome to the Club

One sentence synopsis:    During the Chinese civil war, a platoon of PLA soldiers must destroy a rampaging mountain warlord with an impregnable fortress and thousands of troops.


Things Havoc liked:  I once stated that there was a fine art to hagiography, and the same is true of propaganda. Propaganda gets a bad reputation these days, but all it is is media designed to influence people's opinions in one direction or another, and I shouldn't have to tell any of you that film has a long and rich history of the stuff. I don't just mean wartime cartoons about Donald Duck or Superman battling Hitler, though there is that, but also action films, particularly over here in the US, almost the entire genre of WWII action films, from Casablanca, filmed during the war, right up through 2014's Monuments Men and Fury. And yet despite Hollywood's domination of the worldwide cultural landscape, at least in film, propaganda movies are certainly not unique to the United States, as everything from Bollywood war epics to Turkish Rambo to last year's Stalingrad will attest to. And so in that spirit, it is perhaps time to turn our attention to the latest import from China.

The Taking of Tiger Mountain is a propaganda film from the People's Republic of China, and before we go any further, it's important to note that when I call a film 'propaganda', unlike most people who use the term, I don't mean to cast aspersions on the material itself. The long and rich history of nations glorifying themselves in film is far too important to our cultural heritage to throw the whole thing under the bus simply because of its partisanship, and it would be the height of hypocrisy for someone who unironically enjoyed everything from Captain America to the original Red Dawn to come down on a Chinese film maker for making a film about Chinese soldiers being badass. That said, Chinese propaganda isn't something we see a whole lot of around here, and so it might be instructive to see just what our erstwhile rivals have to say.

It is the winter of 1946, shortly after the end of WWII, and the long-deferred war between the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang (Nationalists) has exploded back into full flowering, even as large swatches of the country are overrun by bandit armies in sufficient numbers to merit the term. A small force of PLA (People's Liberation Army) troops are sent into the snow-covered mountains to engage with one such bandit army presently in occupation of a massive, fortified arsenal, complete with artillery, tanks, and hundreds upon hundreds of men. Uncertain of how his handful of troops are to protect the local villages from marauding armies of bandits, platoon commander, Lt Yang (Zhang Hanyu) sends a veteran scout, Shao Jianbao (Lin Gengxin) to infiltrate the bandit compound, gain their trust, and permit the PLA forces to seize a decisive advantage when it comes time to fight. Much of the film is taken up with Shao's efforts to weasel his way into the bandit forces, and as Lin Gengxin is the best actor in the entire affair by a country mile, this is a decent idea. The villains of the piece are straight out of the snarling, over-the-top, Peking-operatic school of cinematic villainy, with every snapped piece of evil dialogue accompanied by melodramatic gestures and crazed Zoolander looks hurled at the camera like weapons. The effect is not tremendously subtle, but it does work, and a particularly standout scene involves Shao performing a theatrical recitation of the events that led him to join the bandits while surrounded by a cavernous hall full of thousands of snarling bandits, all of whom are brandishing automatic weapons at him. Going big or going home is a well-worn path for action/war flicks like this, particularly the ones on the sillier end, after all. And there's nothing wrong with a bit of melodrama to liven up an obviously preposterous situation.

Neither is there anything wrong with the action beats here. Someone in the production staff of this movie appears to have watched 300 (or God help them, Wanted) at some point, because the action bears the marks of Zack Snyder quite strongly. Gunfights are punctuated with liberal use of slowdown-speed up routines, particularly an opening engagement in and around a train station, wherein each bullet fired by the platoon snipers seems to take five minutes to actually land. Yet I remain a fan of this technique, particularly when compared to the Shaky-Cam option (something Chinese action cinema, with its rich tradition of martial arts films, does not seem to have ever been infected with), and the action overall is of at least decent quality, not an easy thing to do when one is competing with Hollywood extravaganzas. I liked the consistent touch of every weapon in the bandits' arsenal, no matter how esoteric, being an American gun (propaganda, remember?), while the PLA are all using Russian/Chinese weapons. The rarer melee sequences are also done well, with shots stolen, in the main, from either Snyder or Rodriguez' films. Once again, this is not a criticism.

Things Havoc disliked:  Allow me, therefore, to offer things which are criticisms.

Propaganda films have come a long way in the US since the days of Audie Murphy. Yes, we've still got shameless dreck like the new Red Dawn or White House Down coming out periodically, but there's been so much more, as propaganda, and war films in general over here, were indelibly marked by such experiences as Vietnam and the Iraq war. It's impossible to look at movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, Hurt Locker, or Zero Dark Thirty in the same way as one might look at John Wayne's Green Berets, as the nature of American nationalism has evolved over time to reflect the somewhat more complex relationship that the American public has with its own military history. By no means is this a uniquely American phenomenon. Post-Stalinist Russian war-cinema is positively Dostoyevskian in its embrace of bloody fatalism (some would regard this as reversion to the Russian mean), while German films of the same nature tend to be about how war is the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone ever (there are more German films about Stalingrad than Russian ones). China however, caught up in its sudden emergence onto the world stage as a great power, and playing heavily on the Nationalism card (not to mention with a film censorship board considerably stronger than any over here), has not yet had time to temper its initial, exuberant instincts towards war propaganda, with the ultimate result, however culturally parochial it might sound, that this film, like a lot of Chinese war cinema, feels an awful lot like something Hollywood might have made in 1957.

What do I mean? Consider the actual scenario on offer here. A platoon of PLA troops, maybe twenty or twenty-five in total, are pitted against a force that I would conservatively estimate as being fifty times larger than them. These aren't "long odds", these are the sort of odds that the British faced during the Zulu wars, with the slight exception of the fact that the Zulu in this case are armed with tanks, grenade launchers, and machine guns. Lots of films present their heroes as being outnumbered, certainly, but this film is so stacked against the heroes that when they defeat their enemies, the reaction is not awe or even thrills, but gut-busting laughter, as the cold odds against the heroes are so great that they can only win by either transforming spontaneously into Superman or by having their enemies suffer sudden attacks of acute mental incapacity. Both are on offer here. A battle sequence midway through the movie involves the platoon repelling an assault by three hundred machine-gun-and-bazooka-wielding bandits, killing two hundred and fifty of them for the loss of ONE soldier, whose death is treated with ten minutes of solemnity in the aftermath. Later, in the climactic fight, the troops slay hundreds of men, engage in protracted gunfights, take out tanks and storm fortified positions, all without incurring any casualties whatsoever. Are we expected to be impressed by the achievement of having won a battle where the other side was firing blanks? What tension is there to be wrung from a film where the heroes are all invulnerable, thanks to the unshakeable faith they have in the rightness of Chairman Mao?

Yes, yes, I know that this is not the only film to make this mistake, not even recently. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing to have a movie with an invincible protagonist. John Wick did this, as did the Taken films, and The Expendables, and Shoot Em Up, and 47 Ronin and a hundred other movies. The difference is that those movies (the good ones anyway) were not intended to create tension, but to present a spectacle, the unavoidably awesome spectacle that is one man or group of men slaughtering another in artistic fashion. Tiger Mountain on the other hand, when not dealing with the antics of its villains, is as somber as a church sermon, as soldiers stand about talking in low, reverential tones to one another about how much they want to protect the "little people" of the villages they are passing through, and try to outdo one another in the heroic sacrifices they are able to make. It would get saccharine if it weren't so boring, and loooooong stretches of the film are comprised of nothing but this, presumably as a sop to the Chinese film censors who would no doubt blanch and faint at a portrayal of the PLA with anything approaching the verisimilitude of something like Platoon. None of this is helped by a completely unnecessary framing story, set alternately in New York and Beijing, where the grandson of one of the characters in the story learns that he must give up the materialistic ways of America and return to China to get in touch with his cultural and historical roots (or something). The film cuts back and forth between framing story and main story rather disjointedly, leaving me at least completely confused at more than one point as to what the hell was going on. And while there's nothing wrong with the themes of returning home to one's roots, the clumsiness with which this point is hammered home is strong enough that it even shines through the subtitling process, one which usually softens awkwardness like this.

Final thoughts:   I have great respect for Chinese cinema, particularly Chinese historical action cinema. Movies like Red Cliff or The Flowers of War deserve to be spoken of alongside their Occidental counterparts, to say nothing of more fantastical wuxia fare like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the Hong Kong blood operas of John Woo and his inheritors. But a bad film is a bad film, and ultimately, all politics aside, The Taking of Tiger Mountain is a bad, boring film, one which comes across as contrived, dated, and quite crudely made overall. The campiness of its villains and one of its leads does earn it some points, and I'm hardly about to, as an American, criticize China for glorifying its own soldiery. But cinematic propaganda of this sort has a long, complicated history to it, one that it does not do to ignore when one is trying to make a film about how amazing your nation's troops are. In short, there is nothing wrong with the concept of this movie in theory, but if China wishes for this sort of thing to be taken seriously by an audience used to the rest of the world's fare, then judging by this film, they have a long way to go.

Of course, if you look only at Michael Bay, so do we.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time:  Goin' down to Alabama to see the King.

The Admiral: Roaring Currents

Alternate Title:  Zerg Rush!

One sentence synopsis:  Admiral Yi Sun-Sin leads a hopelessly outnumbered fleet in a desperate battle against a massive Japanese armada. 


Things Havoc liked: In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan, launched a massive invasion of the Korean Kingdom of Josoen, intent on conquering the peninsula, and using it as a base with which to invade and conquer Ming China. For seven years, this war raged on and off, as Japanese forces sought to subjugate Korea, and the Koreans, with their Chinese allies, sought to drive them back. Locally called the Seven-Years-War (a name which would be used for a different conflict in the West), this war remains almost completely unknown in Europe and the United States, but not in Korea, where it is justly regarded as one of the finest hours of the Korean nation. And front and center in the midst of this epic conflict is one of the towering figures in the annals of naval warfare, the legendary Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, a man who, despite a lowly background and no formal training in warfare or sailing, fought twenty-three major naval battles without once suffering defeat, almost single-handedly turning the tide of the war against Japan, and becoming in the process, along with Horatio Nelson himself, one of the greatest Admirals in all of history. It was therefore probably inevitable that a Korean film studio, in this case the Korean media giant CJ Entertainment, would seek to make a blockbuster film about Admiral Yi, choosing for a subject, as was also probably inevitable, his most famous and awe-inspiring victory, the 1597 Battle of Myeongnyang, in which Yi, with thirteen battle-worthy ships, stood against a fleet of a hundred and thirty three Japanese warships, and defeated them.

This is history, guys. Spoilers are gonna happen.

The highest-grossing film in Korean history, the Admiral is clearly a product of a culture simultaneously nothing like Hollywood, and yet exposed nonetheless to a century of Hollywood's works. It is a big, sweeping epic, in the vein of recent Chinese films such as Red Cliffs or more standard (to us westerners) Hollywood fare like Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Samurai. Historical epics are a particularly favorite genre of mine, and this is a good one, bright and colorful, with a cast of dozens and swarms of extras and warships filmed with lush camerawork and painstaking detail. East Asia in the sixteenth century was a flamboyant place, and this film captures every loving detail of it all, from military uniforms that approach superhero costumes in their levels of complexity and symbolism, to banners, temples, statuary and architecture, reveling in a time when even the design of warships and cannons was rife with artistic touches. Entire pagodas tower above lumbering flagships, rifle barrels and sword blades bear engraved calligraphy and religious iconography, and the styles of armor seem to grow more extravagant by the hour, including embossed masks, plumed helmets, woven inscriptions, and bright streamers. How much of all this is actually true to life, I don't know. My guess is most of it. But even if not, the film thereby earns a richness that ensures there's never a moment when we're not staring at something beautiful, even as people die by the tens of thousands.

And oh boy do they die. Battle sequences in this film are where director Kim Han-Min, whose previous credits include other historical war epics, shows off his Hollywood influences, for they are as frenetic, chaotic, and violent as anything from Ridley Scott or Oliver Stone. Warships thunder with broadsides of cannons (yes, cannons, Korea was arguably the most advanced cannon-using power in the world in 1597), volleys of musketfire, and clashes of sword, polearm, and more outlandish weapons. Ships smash through one another with bone-shattering impact, as masses of soldiers and marines engage in bitter combat until the blood runs freely through the gunwales. And yet unlike some action films that go so far beyond the point of reason that the military-connoisseur in me begins choking on my own tongue, this film manages to push riiiiiiight up to the limit of what's plausible without pushing past it. Epic battles are sanguinary affairs for all sides, and do not consist of the virile armies of right and good slaughtering wave after wave of incompetent foes without taking a scratch (yes, 300 did that, but 300 was a different movie). Instead the battle comes visibly down to tactics, strategy, misdirection, and a whole heap of backs-to-the-wall last-stand bravery on the part of our heroes, as they face down legions of Samurai warriors, all of whom are allowed to be just as lethal as we've all come to expect Samurai to be.

But what of the acting and plot, the things with which I usually start my reviews? The difficulty with foreign films, even for those unafraid of subtitles, is that cultural conventions in Korea (or wherever) are completely alien to those in the US, which can render it difficult to follow complex narratives, as things that a Korean audience would pick up on automatically are opaque, or even completely invisible to us. Yet this film manages well, telling a straightforward military story of an Admiral on his last legs with a fleet falling to pieces, standing against an overwhelming force and trying to best it by any means necessary. The Admiral himself, played by Oldboy's Choi Min-Suk, is very well-characterized, a driven, calculating man, ruthless when he needs to be, yet self-sacrificing when the occasion demands it, who recognizes the exact position he is in with a faultless eye, and constructs a plan to give himself the finest possible chance of emerging victorious. He is not portrayed as some divinely-inspired super-human genius of faultless calculation, nor a Xanatos-style ultra-schemer, whose every failure turns out to be actually all according to plan. Instead the film portrays him as a man who is simply very, very good at what he does, and utterly committed to doing just that, come what may. Surrounded by lieutenants of greater or lesser ability and loyalty, and sailors and soldiers who vary from the brave to the cowardly, he sets out to do battle in a fight he knows he has done everything to prepare for, and leaves the outcome to the designs of fate. There's more than one director of Hollywood epics who could stand to take a lesson here.

Things Havoc disliked: At the risk of sounding racist, watching a film starring an ensemble cast of hundreds of Korean actors I've never seen before playing characters whose names I do not know can get... unavoidably confusing. Several times I got lost as to just who was doing what and what relationship a given character had to whom. This is not helped by several characters who would appear to be major ones suddenly disappearing from the film for the duration while others come to prominence. When one follows history, this is the sort of thing that can happen, but it did leave me wishing that Kim had tightened things a bit around the main story.

Indeed, The Admiral is not a long film (a hair over two hours), but it definitely feels like one. The battle sequences are relentless, with lengthy crowd shots of killing and beginning-middle-end structures that give us hope of a false dawn before the Japanese send in the next wave of forces. Three separate times, I thought admiral Yi had finally won the battle, only to discover that everything that had so-far happened was merely a pre-battle skirmish and that the real meat of the fighting was about to start. This unfortunately robs the film of some of its epic feel, as it gets a bit ridiculous when you have five consecutive "shocking turning points that suddenly enable our heroes to win" within forty-five minutes. I grant that the real battle of Myeongnyang was such an insane upset victory that it may well have involved this sort of thing, but we're here to watch a movie, and even if you wanted to keep all of the various hinge points in the battle, structuring the film such that not every one of them is treated like the climax to Return of the King might be a good idea.

There's also the issue of Melodrama, something that I've noticed happens with fair regularity in Korean film and television. There are moments in the film when the director lets the reins slip a bit, and allows characters to vent full reign of their most King Lear-like emotions. These can be fun, but some of them go so far over the top that we start to question whether they make any sense at all. A moment midway through the film when Admiral Yi's turtle ship unexpectedly catches fire and burns to the waterline involves him running screaming into the night in a nightgown, tearing his hair and crying to all and sundry that he will crush the Japanese with the very ship being reduced to ashes in front of his face. That the ship is a loss and the admiral distraught at its destruction, I understand, but the reaction is so over the top one might expect that his entire family was aboard, plunging wild-eyed into the water and being held back by his loyal subordinates from hurling himself into the flames. And yet the next morning he is sober and controlled again, prepared to revise his battle plan to account for the ship's loss, a change so stark that I suspected his performance the night before would eventually be revealed as a cunning act of theater designed to misdirect his enemies or somehow inspire his own men. There are a handful of such scenes, where the tight logic and control of the film suddenly deserts it in favor of Gone-With-the-Wind melodrama, each time dragging me back out of the film and into reality. Perhaps Korean audiences have a better tolerance for such things.

Final thoughts:  The Admiral is a wonderful film, not an epochal triumph along the lines of Marvel's outings, but a great movie in its own way, the biggest ever in Korean history, and justly so. Sweeping, epic, and beautiful, it sheds light on a period even I knew almost nothing about, highlighting one of the greatest captains in history in the way he deserves to be highlighted. A foreign film in limited release stateside is obviously only going to be available to a select audience, but insofar as it is on offer, I would unhesitatingly recommend it to war, history, and foreign cinema buffs alike.

After all, with the September slump upon us, your alternatives are not encouraging...

Final Score:  7/10

Le Chef

Alternate Title:  The Professional (Chef)

One sentence synopsis:    A talented young chef tries to earn a place at a world-famous restaurant whose head chef is engaged in a heated battle with the owner.


Things Havoc liked: Three facts that none of you knew about Jean Réno:

1: Jean Réno's real name is Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez.
2: Jean Réno is a Moroccan of Spanish descent.
3: In France, Jean Réno is best known for his comedies.

That's right, Jean Réno, one of the only French action stars ever accepted in the United States (Van Damme was Belgian, you plebeians), famous here for films such as The Professional, Ronin, Mission Impossible, or The Da Vinci Code, is well-known in France as a comedic actor (though to be sure his action work remains popular there too), generally playing a straight-man in comedies such as Les Visiteurs, Wasabi, Décalage Horaire, and Tais-Toi. I didn't even know this last one until recently, when it came time for me to venture into the wacky world of French comedy once more and see a movie with, distressingly enough, the same title as a Jon Favreau comedy I saw less than two months ago.

French cinema has a reputation for being impenetrable, and there are certainly movies that earn that designation (most things by Truffaut for instance), but then that's no different than if you go cherry-picking through American indie films (consider Mallick). The vast bulk of French films are like the vast bulk of films everywhere, common-denominator fare designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. This sort of thing, not the black and white films of women wearing roofing materials reciting Chinese poetry while strangling ducks, is more akin to France's standard, and proof of that is in the performances that Réno and his co-star, Michaël Youn. The two play a fairly standard game of straight man/funny man throughout the film, with a bit of traditional madcap French flair. Réno plays Alexandre Vauclair, a classical, Michelin-starred chef of a five-star haute-cuisine restaurant, whose inspiration is flagging under a conflict with his new-wave boss Stanislas Matter (Julien Boisselier). Youn, playing Jackie, is a talented young chef of the same school, in desperate need of a job and of greatness, who comes to the attention of Vauclair and is enlisted to help him ward off the conversion of the restaurant into a cutting edge Molecular Gastronomy house. This is the core of the film, and when the movie is concentrating on these elements, it's actually quite funny, particularly anything involving Jackie, Alexandre, and Jackie's three disciples from an old-folks home, Chang, Titi, and Moussa, all three of whom are terrible chefs dreaming of achieving excellence in at least some field. Along the way, various adventures and hijinx ensue, in the best broad-comedy traditions, including an interlude with Spanish molecular chef Juan, whose concoctions seem to resemble explosives more than lunch, and another, highly-non-PC incident where both chefs visit a competing molecular restaurant in... shall we say "disguise"? The very concept of molecular cuisine, with its infusions and foams and "ideas of" that resemble chemistry experiments more than they do food, lends itself well to broad comedy, and the movie's almost slapstick-y approach is nothing if not broad. If that's your thing, this movie should appeal just fine.

Things Havoc disliked: If it's not however...

French film comedy, like I mentioned above, is often broad, stock stuff, derived from commedia del'arte and traditional continental European comedic disciplines. I'd hesitate to call it unsophisticated, but films like this unavoidably start feeling that way when you compare them to the more modern types of British or American comedy. Part of that is the subtitles, which by necessity have to dampen down the complexity of what we're dealing with, but even if you speak French fluently, the exaggerated gestures, the slapstick, the broad one-stroke characters and their instantly-obvious plot complications, these things all speak to a moviegoing audience that simply does not see the breadth of film that others might.

Take Réno's daughter, for instance, a graduate student who is annoyed that her father does not consider her upcoming thesis defense to be sufficiently important. Réno is obsessed with his restaurant and his cooking, to the point where even he recognizes he is simply tired of it all, and wants to spend more time with his daughter in a lower stress environment. So when he encounters a lovely rustic restaurant in rural Bourgogne run by a beautiful (and single) hostess whom he immediately begins making eyes towards, and also a young, brilliant, up-and-coming chef in desperate need of a job, who enthusiastically worships him and his recipes and proposes helping him create a menu to retain the Michelin stars that he is in jeopardy of losing, there's not a lot of room for doubt as to how all this is going to be resolved. And yet the filmmakers seem to think there is, pouring vast amounts of, frankly, melodrama, into questions that anyone who has ever seen a movie before will already know the answers to. Youn has lied to his fiance about his job, and she is mad at him. Will they reconnect? The arrogant, smarmy owner of the restaurant waxes eloquently about how he can't wait for Réno to get his comeuppance so that he can fire him and all his staff and turn the restaurant into a chemistry lab. Will he succeed? It's the night of the big critics' taste test and the young phenom must lead the brigade to produce food like they've never done it before? Will he manage it? If you are burning to know the answers to these profound, unsolvable mysteries, then you must immediately see this film, for that is all it consists of. But if you've seen more than six films in the entirety of your life, then you may, like me, be left wondering how it is that the only people in the room unable to determine by the five-minute-mark the resolution to every problem in the film, were apparently the director, writers, and producers.

Final thoughts:   I've honestly not been trying to badmouth the entire genre of French comedies in this review, for they, like any genre, can be as layered and witty and complicated as anything you'll find in English. I could cite Les Visiteurs, Diner de Cons, Ridicule, Rabbi Jacob, or 2012's runner up for MOTY (Movie of the Year) Les Intouchables. But there is a strong subset of broad comedy at work in French films, and you've gotta like that in order to get anything out of Le Chef. I do, and so I found the movie charming and reasonably funny, if nothing more, but one of the masterpieces of the genre it ain't. If you're looking for a foreign film that isn't going to make you wish for the relative accessibility of a Jim Jarmush piece, or simply want to see Jean Réno do something other than kill people, this movie might do the trick. Otherwise, there's plenty of stupid comedies in English to be had this time of year. One of them is probably just as good as this one.

... probably.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Snowpiercer

Alternate Title:  Off the Rails

One sentence synopsis:    A perpetual-motion, class-segregated train experiences a working-class uprising following the end of the world.


Things Havoc liked:  Despite my best efforts, it was probably inevitable that I would go to see this movie, the product of a South Korean filmmaker (Bong Joon-Ho) and a French graphic novelist (Jacques Lob), two things that, if you'll forgive a stereotype, typically are completely insane. French graphic novels, for whatever reason, tend towards the surreal and the nonsensical, while Korean action films, particularly sci-fi ones, bend in the same direction. Throw in a whole pile of A-list western actors I love (and a couple I don't), and it was probably predictable that I would eventually make my way through the door.

Seventeen years after an attempt to end global warming backfired disastrously and froze the entire planet, a train running on a perpetual motion machine circles the world once every year on an endless ride to nowhere. Locked within are literally all that's left of humanity and its works, from the upper class to the lower classes, strictly segregated by train car, with the rich living it up with their literally priceless luxuries and the poor crammed into the tail section to wither and die at the whim of their overlords. Among these poor have-nothings are Chris Evans, playing Curtiss, a rebel leader preparing the latest in a series of attempted uprisings to seize control of more of the train and force the front section group to equalize everything. I'm a big fan of Evans thanks to the Captain America/Avengers series, as you well know, and I've also been a fan of his in the non-Marvel stuff he's done, such as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Sunshine. His character here is nothing to write home about, and has the unenviable task of basically getting no characterization until the very end of the film, where we get it all in one heap, but Evans knows how to play with material like this, and gets across everything he needs to with a few understated gestures and expressions. It is nice, admittedly, to see him get a bit dirtier than his Captain America persona would allow, chopping people apart with hatchets or blowing them away deadpan with firearms. John Hurt meanwhile is playing the exact same character that John Hurt plays these days, a wise, bewhiskered leader who serves as the surrogate commander to Evans' field officer, while Jamie Bell and The Help's Octavia Spencer turn in better performances than I'm accustomed to from either of them as secondary characters supporting the revolution.

But the best of them all is unquestionably Tilda Swinton, an actress I've seen all over the place in the last year or so, and who seems to be desperately laboring to secure the title of "weirdest actor in the universe", (which given the competition she has for such a title, demands quite an effort). Swinton plays Mason, a loudspeaker-wielding martinet straight out of a Marx Brothers spoof, who marches imperiously into trian cars filled with filthy, starving families, and berates them like a whiny schoolteacher for being disorderly while soldiers steal their children and hack off their limbs. Her performance is so weird that it's almost fascinating, even by Tilda Swinton's admittedly elevated standards for this sort of thing, stitched up in a schoolmarm outfit with oversized sunglasses and a barely-functioning microphone. She adds, if nothing else, a modicum of interest to the generally basic workings of the film.

This is Bong Joon-Ho's first English language film, as well as the first one I've seen of his, but the man knows how to point cameras. The style of this movie is all its own, a strange, almost Burton-esque design for the varied and frankly absurd lineup of train cars that the heroes must battle their way through. Several sequences, including one where the two sides engage in a long-range gun battle between cars as the train goes round a large bend, are inventively enough done, and the frozen world beyond the train, only seen in brief glimpses through windows, has a stark, but colorful feel to it. The style carries over into the action sequences, particularly an early one which begins well lit, switches to night-vision, and then to torchlight, each transition accompanied by an interesting, and inventive series of visual devices. Say whatever you will about Bong's filmmaking, his visuals leave little to complain about.

Things Havoc disliked: But don't worry, there's plenty else for that.

This film is presently in the process of generating widespread critical acclaim, a fact I have literally no explanation for. Yes, the acting has high points, yes the visuals are inventive, but is that all that audiences nowadays require? A few nice images and a performance that manages to get beyond "mediocre"? Have standards slipped this low? Or am I just a curmudgeonly bastard who can't appreciate great art?

Snowpiercer is a profoundly stupid movie, this much is no surprise, but what is, or should be a surprise is that the stupidity is not merely in terms of its premise, nor even its story, but in the choices made by the director and writer of this mess. I alluded earlier to the fact that Chris Evans' characterization is left until the end of the film, whereupon it is all delivered to us in one big fat expo-dump, as if the writer realized four fifths of the way through his project that he had added no characterization whatsoever and so rather than back up, decided to simply devote five minutes to telling the audience what they were supposed to have been shown. I recognize that characterization is an afterthought in a movie like this, but given that the film actually dials the action back after the midway point of the film in order to focus on the "daring" social commentary at work here, I'm not entirely sure it was supposed to be one.

Oh and speaking of that daring social commentary, I recognize that a movie like this takes refuge in audacity by painting with a broad brush, but there's a difference between a broad brush and a steamroller. The villains are so evil as to be cartoonish, literally unable to perceive why someone might object to being forced to live in squalor, to surrender their children to lifetimes of drudgery, or to having their spouses beaten and crippled in front of their eyes. Again, nothing wrong with that in theory, except that the film tries to excuse the villains' myopia by painting them as some kind of cult dedicated to the worship of the train's leader, whose secret machinations are presented, the more things get surreal, as being set up for some kind of "big reveal". It's as if the movie is saying "Trust us, we're going somewhere with all this weirdness," trying to get us to buy into the fact that the villains are not as stupid as they're being characterized as.

What's the big reveal? Nothing. The villains are actually that stupid. In fact Ed Harris gets a lengthy, almost interminable scene wherein he monologues for ten minutes about the fact that he and the rest of the villains are precisely that stupid. Thanks for that.

That's the problem with the movie in a nutshell. The notion of all of humanity being locked on a perpetual train is one that is manifestly stupid and could be dealt with either by showing us how it is that this society is able to operate at all, or by dodging the question in favor of badass action sequences. This film basically decides to hint towards doing the former before pulling the rug out from under us at the last minute and revealing that they actually are doing the latter, except without any of the compensatory awesomeness that makes a movie like The Raid or The Lego Movie work despite the thinness of its plot. And when you take away a handful of decent action scenes or inventive shots, there's really nothing left except a handful of hints towards an actual explanation as to what the hell is going on that never comes. Action movies do not need a defense to exist, spectacle is its own justification after all, but this film omits most of the spectacle without replacing it with any sort of justification for its own existence. And so in the time-honored tradition of bad movies the world over, Snowpiercer, for all its promise and hype, becomes nothing more than a simple series of events which happen and then are over. Curtain up. Thanks for the money.

Final thoughts:   I get the sense that I'm not making my case particularly well here, but Snowpiercer is a movie that is bad in a way all its own. I have seen plenty of films that did not leave up to the hype of their trailers, but this is perhaps the first film I've ever seen that did not live up to the hype of its own script. Implicitly promising depth that does not exist as a means of excusing the fact that we do not get the spectacle we were initially promised in the trailers, the movie winds up coming across, at least to me, as a shaggy dog story, so transparently a waste of time as to seem almost cynical. One should always assume good faith in the production of movies of course, so perhaps there's a cultural thing at work here, but the result, ultimately, is a movie I could not wait to see the end of in all the worst ways.

My neighbors in viewing this film made the decision to bring copious quantities of liquor into the theater (they offered me a bottle of whiskey partway through), and at the end of the film, asked me if it had actually been as bad as their drunken perceptions told them it was. When I assured them that it was, they expressed total mystification at the fact that friends of theirs had recommended this film to them. I told them that any friends that did so clearly did not like them very much.

In my case, it was fellow critics that informed me of this film's qualities, and whom I must consequently conclude are out to get me. But then that's not new information.

Final Score:  3.5/10

The Rover

Alternate Title:  Madder Max

One sentence synopsis:    A violent, dangerous drifter pursues the men who stole his car through the post-collapse Australian outback.


Things Havoc liked:  A year before I started doing these reviews, I saw an Australian gangster film called "Animal Kingdom" by a first-time director named David Michod. It was a wonderful little film, sparse and twisted and intensely realistic, and more than that, it managed to star several actors I don't like (Joel Edgerton, Guy Pierce) and make me like them despite our history. As such, when I learned that Michod had returned to the screen with another movie about bad people doing very bad things in the middle of Australia starring a pair of actors I couldn't possibly care less about, I knew I had to be there.

I've made no secret of my distaste for Guy Pierce in these reviews. He nearly ruined Iron Man 3. He wore terrible old-person makeup in Prometheus. He made The Time Machine, Lockout, and Two Brothers. And while obviously there are roles of his I have liked (Memento, LA Confidential, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert), my distaste for his smug leading man schtick remains firmly intact. This role, however, is like nothing I've ever seen from Pierce. Eric, the main character of the film, is a murderous, violent demon, quiet and barely controlled, a sociopathic monster whose inclinations towards summary action are given free reign by the dire circumstances that society has fallen into. Yet Pierce does not play the character as a screaming maniac, but rather like a villain from one of Ralph Fiennes' better performances, Coriolanus perhaps, or even Schindler's List. Quiet, monosyllabic, and yet deeply disturbing, Pierce evidences a raging ferocity through nothing more than expression and eye movement, staring into the depths of people's souls like a drilling augur before killing them with ruthless, entirely non-cinematic efficiency. A scene early on where he attempts to buy a gun from a group of carnies, only to remorselessly murder them at the first sign of difficulties, cements the tone of the character nicely. Protagonist or not, this character, and men like him, are not victims of the fall of civilization, but the reason for it. And in the absence of the law, they are let loose to do as they would in pursuit of objectives that may well make sense only to themselves.

But Pierce, for all that I hate him, has been good in films before. His co-star, Robert Pattinson, of Twilight, has not. And yet moreso even than Kirsten Stewart, I wanted to give Pattinson another shot, as there were hints, I felt, that Twilight was not a fair means to judge his actual abilities. And while Stewart was simply not up to the task of headlining her second chance (Snow White and the Huntsman), Pattinson is on a completely different plane of existence here. Unrecognizable from his chaste pretty-boy persona in the Twilight series, Pattinson plays Reynolds, a redneck miner with a southern accent captured early on by Pierce's character and forced to take him to the hideout of his brother and their gang of car thieves. Lisping and confused, Pattinson plays the character like a victim of some kind of mild retardation, a damaged, naive, unfocussed loser, so dependent on others for direction that he willingly becomes Pierce's accomplice, despite the fact that Pierce himself seems to want little or nothing to do with him. Stuttering, limping, and simpering like a whining dog, Pattinson's performance is, astonishingly enough, the best thing in the entire movie, reminding me somewhat of Leonardo DiCaprio's turn in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which is not a comparison I make lightly. Indeed, I must admit that it occurred to me while watching this movie, that before he became the well-known and well-respected actor that we know today, DiCaprio had to make such teenage masterworks as Titanic and Romeo+Juliet.

The Australian outback is a punishing, unforgiving place, as anyone who has seen Mad Max can tell you, and consequently needs little to transform it into a perfect setting for a gritty, brutal movie of violence and death. Yet aware of this as he is, Michod decides against the usual tropes of post-apocalyptia, of souped-up cars worn by men in gimp masks and famous landmarks crumbling amidst the open waste. What exactly happened to render things so bad is not stated outright, but seems to have been less nuclear war and more stock market crash. Some facets of society still exist, the Australian military, the mining industry, precisely those you would expect to continue on in the aftermath of anything short of total annihilation, hardened and sharpened to a brutal edge. Money still circulates, though the Australian dollar is hinted as having become worthless, and shopkeepers will take nothing but US from behind their armored, gun-covered storefronts. Revealing comments, like one of Pattinson's that travel times are longer thanks to the lack of road maintenance putting a limit on people's effective speeds, or the doctor who takes care of dozens of dogs abandoned by their presumably-deceased owners, are the stuff of the collapse here, not lurid Emmerichian images of the Opera House in ruins. The shots are long and desolate, as much a western as an apocalypse film, as characters walk across barren plains into sharp sunrises, or loom menacingly before dark corridors in buildings full of armed men. The violence, when it erupts (and it does erupt) is fast and brutal and entirely uncinematic. People simply are shot and die and are then dead and the movie goes on, in the best traditions of any society-breakdown film.

Things Havoc disliked: I've got nothing against a movie that doesn't stop every five seconds to explain itself, but unfortunately, that only works if the movie doesn't leave major questions in its wake, and this one unfortunately does. Early on, after Guy Pierce has confronted the men who stole his car and is beaten unconscious for his trouble, he awakens on the side of the road, alive, and lying next to the thieves' original car, fueled and intact, with his money and his guns still on his person. Given the general tenor of this film, the question begs itself, why is Pierce still alive, let alone in possession of all the tools necessary for him to enact his crusade for revenge? It's not like the men who subdued him have been established as being possessed of particularly strong moral codes against killing, and the question as to why they have left him in this state is simply never answered, not even with a throwaway comment about how it would be 'wrong' to kill him out of hand or something. Similarly, characters find one another in the midst of the outback via methods that are never established, tracking them effortlessly over trackless desert to precisely the right locations, all without any indication as to how. I understand the desire to do away with the obligatory establishing material in favor of simply telling the story and implying the rest, but some establishment is required in order for the film to make sense. Another sequence early on had Pierce carrying an automatic pistol in one shot, and in the next, prominently carrying a revolver instead. After a minute's confusion and whispered conversation with my neighbor, I managed to construct a reasonable explanation for why Pierce suddenly had a different gun, but the fact that it was necessary for me to effectively stop watching the film for a minute and consult with friends in order to follow what was happening is not a good sign insofar as the film's editing is concerned.

There's also a simple question of pacing. The Rover is a slow, deliberate film, allowing tension to build out of empty spaces and unspoken lines, which is fine, but the tendency here is to push it a bit too far. Characters can never actually say anything without hemming and hawing for five minutes, and have to spend at least ten seconds of pregnant silence between every single short or monosyllabic line they pronounce. Used sparingly, this is an efficient technique, as evidenced by dozens of films including Unforgiven. But used constantly, all it serves to do is make most of the movie feel like padding as nobody, not even brooding loners staring into the campfire with rage-laden eyes, speaks like this constantly, and anyone who does would be so unsettling as to rapidly put anyone else off of their attempts to engage them in conversation. As it stands though, characters react to an wild-eyed, armed psychotic, visibly on the verge of a breakdown, whose words are clipped and quivering with rage, by smiling sweetly as though nothing is the matter and permitting him to walk about their homes armed and unsupervised. Given the state of society and the fact that everyone is so constantly on-edge against the predators that roam the roads, this is like making a Godzilla film wherein soldiers have been battling giant monsters for the better part of a decade, and then making everyone dismiss loud booming footsteps which shake the very walls as nothing but thunder, while stacking their weapons in another building and going back to sleep.

Final thoughts:  The Rover is a stark, well-acted thriller of a movie, an attempt to do Mad Max without the camp, but it's problems like these that really hold it back. Taken by themselves, the performances on offer here from Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson are worth seeing in any context, but unfortunately the context in question is just not good enough for a full-throated recommendation. Michod's first film, Animal Kingdom, was damn near a masterpiece. It garnered Jackie Weaver a deserved Oscar nod for her turn as the matriarch of an Australian crime family after all, and yet this time round, Michod's lack of experience at the rest of the business of moviemaking is unfortunately on display. I will continue to watch this man's career with interest, as Rover was at least good enough to prove that the first film was not a fluke, but the systemic flaws of script, editing, and general pacing (something that seems to bedevil an awful lot of the films I see, Hollywood and otherwise) keep this from being anything but a niche recommendation.

But then, if all you're looking for is the exploits of a crazy man in the Australian outback killing people, you might still want to check this film out. It's not like that genre is overflowing with examples.

Final Score:  6/10