Machete Kills

Alternate Title:  All Blade and no Point

One sentence synopsis:     Unstoppable killer Machete returns to battle drug cartels and corrupt arms dealers on behalf of Mexico and the United States.

Things Havoc liked:  At some point, I lost track of whether it was or was not cool to like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' 2007 exploitation double feature "Grindhouse". I for one enjoyed it (the Tarantino side in particular), and particularly enjoyed the ludicrous fake trailers that were included with it. Apparently I wasn't alone in my appreciation, for two of those trailers were turned into movies: the Rutger Hauer-helmed Hobo with a Shotgun (?), and Machete, starring stern-faced badass extraordinaire, Danny Trejo. Machete was many things, crude, violent, stupid, unhinged, and with all the political subtext of a sledgehammer, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun, showcasing Trejo at his baddest alongside a cast of basically half the films Robert Rodriguez has ever done. And so it is that here, three years after the original, we find ourselves with the sequel to the movie made from the fake trailer in the exploitation double feature (?????), Machete Kills.

Once (many decades ago) a real gangster and thug, Danny Trejo has been in something like three hundred films since 1985, of varying qualities, and with some exceptions I've loved every minute of them. His range is not tremendous, not generally straying beyond "badass with a face that could curdle milk". But within those boundaries, he has for four decades been an incredible presence on any screen he graces, scything his way through a legion of mooks with a scowl and an assortment of bladed weapons. The movie wisely does not ask him to do much beyond that in terms of the acting department, leaving the scenery chewing to others, better suited to the task. One such man is Mel Gibson, playing a weapons dealer drawn directly from the Goldfinger/Scaramanga school of Bond villainy, complete with lengthy and unnecessary explanation to the hero as to the nature of his evil plan, and a cool looking accoutrements to compensate for a hideous disfigurement. Another one is Charlie Sheen, he of the Tiger Blood and Adonis DNA, here credited as Carlos Estavez, playing none other than the President of the United States. Surprisingly enough, Sheen plays the character fairly cool, trying to channel his father perhaps, but his mere presence is a lot of fun, as are the zany situations he appears in the course of. But the best one of the bunch is probably unknown-to-me Demian Bechir, who plays a schitzophrenic drug cartel boss who alternates between scenery-chewing madness and tearful repentance. Bechir doesn't so much devour scenery as vacuum it up, but in a movie like this, that is the appropriate reaction, and he enlivens the movie every time he's on screen.

Things Havoc disliked:  ... something the movie badly needs.

I had expected a number of things to come out of Machete Kills, but not the one that ultimately kills this movie. Machete Kills is straight out boring. And the reason for this is somewhat complex, but ultimately comes down to someone forgetting what the whole point of the Grindhouse-inspired films was.

Machete had a plot, a preposterous one, grounded in racism and immigration policy and other topical issues, but nevertheless secondary to the overall experience of having Machete kill people in a violent, bloody fashion. We were not here to experience the struggle of the Mexican immigrant, nor discuss the weighty issues involved in immigration policy, we were here to watch Danny Trejo kick people's asses in the company of other Robert Rodriguez regulars. And while this does technically remain true in this movie, the film seems to think that we not only give a damn about the plot this time, but retroactively gave a damn about the previous movie's plot enough to remember every single step it took. Lengthy sequences of the film consist of people monologuing about plans and politics, punctuated by Machete killing some of them and the whole thing repeating. The original film had extremely clear-cut good and bad guys, racist murdering scum on one side and Machete's crew on the other, and while this film does keep some of that (William Sadler plays an obvious standin for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio), the vast majority of the film is wrapped up in a labyrinthine plot involving drug cartel bosses that may or may not be evil, CIA agents that may or may not be evil, and a whole host of other characters with their own agendas and plots, all of whom betray one another seemingly at random. And in the middle of all this is Machete, who has no real ties to anyone present, and therefore seems to just drift through the film, as though this were the Big Lebowski starring Jason Voorhees. I get that in a grindhouse movie, the protagonist's invulnerable badassery is taken for granted, but the plot here is not merely unnecessary, it's actually irrelevant to Machete himself, who winds up feeling like the afterthought in his own film, so much time is taken up with exposition, double-crossing, and irrelevant plot development.

This is not the only problem. With respect to Danny Trejo, who is one of the better menacing badass character actors of the last thirty years, at the age of 69, he is no longer able to fight and kill as though he were 20. He can still sneer and look terrifying with the best of them, as well as beat the hell out of someone should it be required, but the acrobatic machete-fighting scenes are simply beyond his capacities, buttressed as they are with deceptive camera angles, ultra-close up shots, and bad CGI. Once more, I understand that this is an intentional throwback to the classic B-movies of yesteryear, but bad CGI simply does not have the retro-charm of bad practical effects, and the CGI in this movie is uniformly bad, to the point where I suspect that Rodriguez was trying to ape such legendary bad films as Birdemic.

Finally, some of the directorial decisions here simply baffle me. Machete Kills comes with an excellent cast, courtesy of Rodriguez' power as a star-magnet, but several of these excellent cast members are completely wasted in throwaway roles. Jessica Alba shows up for two minutes just to remind us that she was in the previous film, while a character called "El Cameleon" absorbs the services of a good half of the A-listers in the cast. The character is a shape-changer, by magic or theatrical talent it is never revealed, with the result that he is played (like the Doctor) by many different people at various points in the film including Antonio Banderas, post-Butler Cuba Gooding Jr, and Lady Gaga. There's nothing wrong with this idea, I suppose, except that all of these actors are utterly wasted due to El Cameleon having nothing whatsoever to do in the film. His (its?) presence consists of a handful of short scenes, each of which is played by a different actor, totaling maybe 8 minutes at the most, before being dispatched in the most perfunctory manner possible, rendering the services of all of these actors, every one of which I would have liked to see in precisely this sort of zany Rodriguez-style B-movie pastiche, into little more than glorified cameos.

Final thoughts:   Youtube has recently been showing ads for a direct-to-DVD film starring Trejo as an old west gangster raised from the grave to kill the crew that betrayed him. In these trailers, which I have to assume were made post-Machete Kills, Trejo looks perfect, a poised, menacing, glowering badass old west killer, who could be 40 or 50 or 70 or immortal for all anyone can tell (or cares). His acting looks sharper and his action cleaner and cooler than that which I saw in Machete Kills, and while I grant that trailers are intentionally designed to make people look good, this well illustrates the problem with Machete Kills. The draw of these films was Trejo, and the irreverence of Rodriguez, who was willing to let Trejo do scandalous, bloody things simply because they were awesome. It was not the shock value of stunt casting, nor the deep politics, nor some other convoluted venture into labyrinthine plotting. I literally lost track of what the hell was going on in this movie (something I don't often do), and could not, despite active efforts, catch back up. And once the plot was lost, there was simply not enough else going on to keep my attention.

The movie promises yet another Machete film in the future, one with an even more outlandish premise. But given what I saw from this movie, I'm afraid that the next time Machete takes up his blade, I'll be watching something else.

Final Score:  4/10

Rush

Alternate Title:  The Men who Drive in Circles

One sentence synopsis:     Racecar drivers James Hunt and Nikki Lauda face one another over the course of the 1976 Formula One Championship season.

Things Havoc liked:  Sports enthusiast though I am, Formula One racing is about as far outside my context as it's possible to get (Buzhkasi notwithstanding). Yet the sport's appeal is evident, as it consists of certifiable lunatics getting into explosive bombs that travel at substantial fractions of Mach and hurl themselves around fiendishly devised tracks in the vain hope that they will not die screaming in the midst of a 900 degree bonfire. If NASCAR carried this level of risk (and didn't consist of a single oval) I might even be a fan. But for those of us ignorant Americans to whom Formula 1 sounds like a chemistry reagent, acclaimed director Ron Howard has arrived to show us what we've all been missing.

Rush is the story of two Formula One drivers, Englishman James Hunt, and Austrian Nikki Lauda, and the events leading up to and during their tumultuous battle for the Fomula One championship during he 1976 season. Played respectively by Thor's Chris Hemsworth, and Inglorious Basterds' Daniel Bruhl, the two men, like any good rivals, are a study in contrasts. Hemsworth's Hunt is a well-liked party animal and playboy, a dilettante whose racing and lifestyles are bold and uncompromising, with whirlwind affairs and nights of blackout drinking. Yet the film does not portray Hunt as a degenerate, merely a man who lives and thrives upon the razor's edge of immense danger, driven to race so as to prove his worth to some unknown figure, or perhaps himself. During the several different moments when his life falls apart, he evidences quite clearly that nothing, not his ill-advised marriage, not his life, not any talking-to by figures of authority, matters to him more than his vocation, and thus we see him earn the respect of other drivers and racing managers alike. This is, after all, not a sport which caters to restrained people, and in one of the best lines in the film, he tells his wife, with whom he is having great difficulties, not to look to for normal behavior amongst men willing to die driving cars in circles.

And yet Lauda, on the other hand, seems to torpedo that entire line of argument. The scion of an Austrian banking family, Lauda is an abrasive, cold, and unlikeable individual, who pretends, at the very least, to have no passion for anything, regarding racing as merely his job. This is a lie, of course, as it rapidly becomes clear that Lauda is driven by the need to be better than everyone else, not necessarily at racing (though that is a major element), but in general, in any field he values in his life. His driving style is mathematical and precise, predicated on a sober analysis of the risks that he will face. Lest that sound cowardly, the movie opens with his flat declaration that every year, 24 Formula One drivers begin the season, two of whom, on average, will die during the course of it. Strategic and calculating, he creates a plan for victory based on the knowledge that Hunt's fearless risk-taking may well win him a race or two, but that in the long run, he will be the one to stand triumphant. His lack of warmth and reputation as an asshole are badges he proudly wears as evidence that his 'system' for racing is producing precisely the results he wishes it to, and damn all other costs and concerns that come his way.

So far, we have a setup for your average sports movie, I know, yet Rush is anything but. Lauda and Hunt hate one another from the day they meet, yet their parallel rises through the lower circuits to Formula One itself carries its share of challenges and surprises for both men. In an early sequence, Lauda, the unshakeable, meets a woman in Italy whom he almost accidentally charms by first correctly diagnosing her car's problems just from the feel and sound, and then, at her request, demonstrating his own abilities with the replacement car that picks them up. Despite all odds, they soon wed, yet Lauda now fears that happiness will ruin his competitive edge as he pushes into the grand campaign. Hunt meanwhile, whose racing team is as dissolute as he is, finds himself without sponsorship, without a car, and without a wife, but manages through grit and desperation, to overcome at least two of these obstacles (no prizes awarded for guessing which). By introducing and developing the characters separately, the film grounds us in both of their stories, making it all the more important to us what will happen when they finally do meet, compete, and suffer the inevitable consequences of that competition. The two characters' relationship begins and remains complicated all the way through to the end of the film, and is clear that Howard recognizes that this, not merely the cars, is what holds our attention.

Not that the rest of the movie has short shrift at all. Hans Zimmer's score is excellent as usual, incorporating period (70s) music for a dash of verisimilitude, and punctuating the actual races well without overpowering them. The racing is overall fantastic, giving a sense of the incredible speeds which these machines employ, alternating close in views and skycams with the occasional heads-up shot just to demonstrate what the experience of actually driving one of these things is like. The elaborate and frankly arcane scoring system that Formula One uses to determine who wins what is thankfully more or less dispensed with, the film simply giving us what information we actually need to know what the stakes are. I was surprised just how many races one can fail to complete in the course of a circuit while still remaining a top contender for the championship, but given the hair-thin margin on which these cars are balanced, I suppose events such as your engine spontaneously exploding into fine powder are the sorts of things one must expect to experience over the course of a year's campaign. All of the supporting actors, from World War Z's Pierfrancesco Favino to Downfall's Alexandra Maria Lara, play their roles just right, be it as other racers who understand the unspoken compact that such men engage in when risking their lives, or bystanders, family, and friends, who do not, and simply must live with this facet of their drivers' lives. Finally, the film does not shy away from the horrific, gruesome aftermath of car wrecks at 160 miles an hour, nor the exceedingly unpleasant process of trying to recover from a crash in which most of your body was burnt and your lungs filled with flaming gasoline fumes. These are the risks these men take to this day, and one need only look over the list of fatalities associated with Formula One in the last few years to grasp why these men might act as they do.

Things Havoc disliked:  Some of the dialog in the film is a bit on the nose, particularly a couple of speeches given by Lauda to Hunt during one of their many conversations or confrontations. Most of them sound like prepared speeches instead of spontaneous dialog, as though the scriptwriter couldn't think of a way to demonstrate some particular facet of a character, and instead opted to have him explain it to the audience. Hardly the only film to do this, but it stands out when it happens.

There were also a few questions in my mind as to some of the racing decisions made here. Several of the races that year take place under torrential downpours, producing conditions so hazardous that, at least according to Lauda, they pushed the risk of someone dying in the course of the race up past 20%. Yet in every case, not only does the race continue on, but attempts to get it canceled or postponed are brushed aside almost contemptuously. Perhaps there is an element here that my American mind is not qualified to speak to, but I'm used to sporting events, even dangerous ones, where such elements as monsoon rains turning the track into a death trap are taken into account. The Super Bowl itself, the holy grail of American sporting, has been delayed several times in its history due to weather conditions, despite the fact that nobody has ever actually died in the course of playing it. Soccer, Cricket, and Rugby matches are also so governed, as is NASCAR, yet I am to believe that the most dangerous sport in the world (statistically) is not? The weather conditions in one of the final races of the season are so bad that I would not, in a million years, even consider driving in them, and I'm not customarily trying to race around a hairpin turn at a hundred and fifty-seven miles per hour.

Final thoughts:   I am required to find bad things in every great film, just as I am required to find good things in every terrible one. By now I think you know which this is. Rush is tremendous movie, interesting, even fascinating throughout, expertly crafted and compelling even to a non-fan. If you're not considering the film yet, then perhaps this little anecdote will convince you: As I said before, I am no follower of Formula One racing in general. But having seen this movie, I actually watched part of this year's Japanese Grand Prix, and may, in two days, watch some or all of the Indian one.

I'm pulling for Raikkonen personally, but the safe money is on Vettel to threepeat.

Final Score:  8/10

Gravity

Alternate Title:  A Bad Place for a Bad Day

One sentence synopsis:     Two astronauts caught in the middle of an escalating orbital cataclysm must attempt to survive and somehow return to the Earth.

Things Havoc liked:  I was very uninterested in Gravity when I first saw the trailers. Impressive though the visuals of the film appeared to be, there are few things that drive me out of a theatre faster than what I call "deathwatch thrillers", movies in which the main characters are quite obviously doomed, without hope of escape by any means, and our task is to watch them panic, suffer, and die. Many dead teenager movies fall into this category, but the ur-example is probably Open Water, a movie I described once as being one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. Any film that seems to promise a repetition of that is liable to go unwatched by me, but ultimately, with nothing much else to see and extremely favorable reports from many people I knew, I decided to give it a shot.

And goddamn, am I glad I did.

It is the near future, and the five-man crew of the Orion-class shuttle Explorer, are attempting to make repairs on the Hubble telescope during spacewalk, two of whom, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Cloony) are the sole survivors when a counter-orbit debris field from a Russian anti-satellite missile test gone awry smashes into the orbiter, the telescope, and largely everything else nearby. Trapped in nothing but their spacesuits, they now have to find a way to escape orbit and return to Earth alive. This is the entire plot of Gravity, and yet unlike the deathwatch movies I spoke of earlier, this one is an incredibly tense thriller, thanks to brilliant actors and smart decisions on the part of the writer, director, and producer, Alfonso Cuaron. Clooney and Bullock here play standard Clooney and Bullock roles, him the smooth, veteran mission commander whose confidence and wisdom are paramount, and her the frazzled, nervous technician who just wants to get the mission over with. Shallow though these things may sound in text, Bullock and Clooney do fantastic jobs, never letting the characters turn into one-note cutouts, getting much across with simple intonation and half-finished reference, no mean feat for a film wherein the character's faces are all but invisible for large sections of the film, and many scenes consist entirely of them, alone, or together, sitting in a capsule somewhere for long, multi-minute shots.

Speaking of which, Cuaron's last film, Children of Men, showed his penchant for such things, and here he lets himself go wild. The entire introductory sequence is a single ten-minute unbroken shot, done with computer effects of course, but that hardly matters. Unlike Lucas' prequels, this film uses long takes for stylistic purposes instead of showing off, letting us concentrate on the gorgeous visuals attendant to simply being in space. Almost everything in the film is not merely photo-realistic but physically-realistic. Fire and water behave as they actually do in zero gravity, as do thrusters, momentum, and high speed collisions. One thing I'd never really realized is just how violent the process of getting around things in orbit can be, as people bounce into and off of space stations, satellites, and odd protrusions of every sort. Granted, the circumstances are somewhat trying, but when momentum can only be generated by pushing off of or pulling onto something, one gets whip-lashed about almost constantly. This, and a hundred other little details about how one actually gets by in space are fully realized, giving the movie an excellent pedigree, and grounding us in the absolute remoteness of space, with all its attendant dangers and inability of rescue.

But cementing everything together for Gravity is the music, an eclectic collection of electro-orchestral pieces from all around the world. With a film this light on dialogue (many sequences take place in complete silence), the music must fill the space to keep our interest, something made all the more important as (true to life) the sound effects in space are portrayed realistically, meaning there are none when the source of the effect isn't happening in an enclosed atmosphere or through direct physical contact with a character's spacesuit. The music itself, light on percussion and heavy on synthesizers and strings, is a strange beast, but powerful in its own right, reminiscent of Blade Runner as much as anything. I can't speak for everyone on a subject this personal, but it certainly fit the bill for me.

Things Havoc disliked: By and large, the movie is about one single disaster which rapidly begets new ones as though by alchemy, but on the occasions where this fidelity is lost in favor of entirely unrelated disasters that also happen to afflict our heroes at the same time, the movie begins to stretch credulity. By the end of the film, as things went wrong which had nothing to do with the initial debris storm, one begins to stop suspecting bad luck and start suspecting a sadistic writer. I grant that this is a survival movie, and that fresh dangers are required to keep us in suspense, but some of these catastrophes (I won't spoil which) begin to get a bit ridiculous, taken in summation.

There's also a few elements that just don't make sense. Early on in the film, one of the characters is stranded with nothing but their spacesuit, a hundred kilometers from help, with almost no oxygen left in their tanks. A fine conceit for suspense, certainly, but not five minutes ago, this person was working on the Hubble, in an operation that was expected to take another hour. Were they intending on running the air in their suit down to the last possible second just for fun? I don't know NASA's policies, but I would expect there's a bit of a margin of safety built into spacewalk air calculations. Similarly, a sequence wherein one astronaut is dangling from wires attached to a space station while another astronaut dangles from a rope attached to the first, straining against the forces pulling them away, seems to forget that in space, momentum, once checked, is not recovered without another external force acting upon it, and that there is no such force when one is floating weightless in orbit. Given the decisions that some of the characters must make based on these sorts of situations, this would seem to be something of a major oversight.

Final thoughts:   But then, how much does that really matter, so long as the movie is both entertaining and reasonably accurate? After all, a normal person, even an astronaut, in a situation like that would probably die instantly, or at best linger on for a few hours, thus turning the film into exactly the sort of Open Water-esque exercise in futility that I wanted to avoid in the first place. Ultimately, Gravity is a spellbinding film, tense and majestic and incredibly well-crafted, one that simply gives us a pair of excellent actors and a situation for them to be in. And if this year has shown me nothing else, it has revealed just how difficult pulling off something that simple can actually be.

Ten months into this dismal year of film, and we may finally have turned the corner into a stretch of good movies. And if not, well, at least we have this one.

Final Score:  8/10

The Grandmaster

Alternate Title:  Too Cool for School

One sentence synopsis:     Famous Martial Artist Ip Man fights for position and respect in Warlord and WWII-era China.

Things Havoc liked:  For those who've never heard of him, Ip Man was one of the progenitors of modern martial arts teaching, a practitioner of Wing Chun, who brought martial arts into the mainstream through a succession of students who would go on to become famous in their own right (such as Bruce Lee). Active from roughly 1920 to 1960, first in mainland China and later in Hong Kong, Ip Man lived through the warlord period, the Japanese occupation of large portions of China, the civil war and subsequent communist takeover, and all the myriad chaos woven through those difficult years. The Grandmaster is not the first movie to chronicle Ip Man's story (the eponymous Ip Man series is a particular gem for fans of kung fu movies), but it is one of the first to find a major American distributor, and thus here we are.

My knowledge of chinese actors is very limitted, and the only two actors I recognize are, providentially, the two leads, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, and Zhang Ziyi, respectively playing Ip Man himself, and Gong Er, the exceptionally skilled daughter of one of Ip Man's confederate martial arts masters. Leung has been in a hundred films, most of them unseen by me, but insofar as I can compare this performance to others of his at all, this is probably the best I've seen from him. He plays Ip Man not as a brooding badass, nor even as a young, indestructable lion, but as a martial arts master, who, when we meet him first, is at the top of his game, and knows it. His manner is refined and very restrained, with no un-necessary bragging or even needless demonstrations of his "true" power. He can, when necessary, destroy numbers of armed men who confront him in the streets, or defeat the mightiest martial artists in all of China, but failing the absolute need to do so, and to practice his craft, he seems perfectly content to allow others to attain glory and reputation, secure in the knowledge that his own place among the grandmasters is already unshakeable. Most Kung Fu movies are about the invincible protagonist triumphing over a sea of arch-rivals and evil foes. This invincible protagonist doesn't even bother to recognize his foes as worth worrying about. If they confront him, they will be beaten. And if they do not, then his life is unmolested by them.

Probably the only actor that anyone else here in the states will recognize however is Zhang Ziyi, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memoires of a Geisha, and The House of Flying Daggers. Though she looks roughly half of Ip Man's age, Zhang does manage to play the foil to him very well, partly because of her undisputed martial arts credentials. Indeed, weirdly enough, Zhang's character of Gong Er is the one who has the more traditional martial arts badass journey through the film, as she swears revenge against her father's finest student, who, following Japan's invasion of China, joins with the puppet government of Manchukuo and seizes control of his former master's training academy after slaying him. Gong Er's obsession with revenge (she forsakes marriage, children, and teaching in favor of vengeance) alongside her stern retainer Ding Lianshan, comprises a good half of the film, culminating in an inventive martial arts battle in a train station. Whether this actually happened or was made up out of whole cloth, I have no idea, but this thread provides the movie with much of its action...

Things Havoc disliked: ... which is really the problem.

I was prepared for many things when I sat down to watch this movie, but one thing I did not expect was to be bored. The reason for this is not the actors, who are uniformly excellent, nor the choreography, which is as high quality as one expects from Chinese martial arts movies, but because the story itself involves nothing happening. Ip Man literally does nothing for most of the film, save for the occasional philosophical discussion or sparring session. So detached that he doesn't even seem to be offended by his enemies, he simply saunters through the movie, leaving nothing whatsoever to look at. Yes, this is probably much more like the real Ip Man than the high-octane kung fu extravaganzas that have borne his name before this, but those movies at least had something in them worth watching. This movie is painfully dull, particularly in the long segments following Ip Man's appointment as grandmaster of the southern chinese martial arts schools, to say nothing of the entire last third of the movie, following the aforementioned battle in the train station, in which nothing happens for interminable periods of time.

And it's not like the movie has nothing to do in those periods either. Ip Man's fall from grace during the 1930s mirrored that of China itself. His daughters died of starvation, his wife was threatened by the Japanese puppet government if he did not join them publicly, he had to flee China for Hong Kong in the face of the Maoists or risk being killed as a symbol of China that was. Yet every one of these events is glanced over as unimportant next to scene number thirty-seven of Ip Man staring longingly out a window while Gong Er reads his letter and contemplates the beauty of snow on the cedar trees. If the film had just left these things out entirely, I could have understood it. Film is a narrative medium, and not every biography has to be scrupulously accurate. But worse than that, it actually references these seminal events in voiceover narration, passing off the deaths of Ip Man's family from starvation as though it were a minor incident of no importance. Worse yet, the movie actually goes on to treat it as such, scarcely giving Ip Man the slightest reaction to the horrific death of his entire family.

Final thoughts:   The above may sound worse than it actually is, but it illustrates the problem with this movie. Refreshing though it is to see a martial arts master who doesn't need to flex and attack every fifteen seconds to prove his manliness, this film goes way too far in the other direction, resulting in a main character who seems barely human in his reaction to the tragedies that shape his life. I appreciate the desire to do something new with a character that has, up till now, mostly been fodder for kung fu extravaganzas of mixed quality, but if the movie can't be bothered to take an interest in its own goings on, then why should we?

Final Score:  4/10

Riddick

Alternate Title:  Back in Black

One sentence synopsis:     Riddick must adapt to survive a death planet and two crews of mercenaries bent on retrieving his head.

Things Havoc liked:  I've long maintained that the Riddick movies are among the best purely speculative sci-fi-adventure movies I've seen. Pitch Black in particular was almost the ur-example of the simple-story-done-right, proof positive that the mere fact that others have done something before (in this case "survival amidst monsters") does not mean that it can't be done in an entertaining fashion if given a chance. While Chronicles of Riddick was something of a disappointment, I still held out hopes for Riddick as a return to form, and not to spoil my review or anything, but that's exactly what it was.

The Riddick series' strengths have always been attention to detail within a simple story, and Riddick, the film, is perhaps the epitome of this. The entire first act of the movie is simply Riddick, alone and without resources, endeavoring to survive on the harsh, alien planet where he has been deposited despite the efforts of the climate, the wildlife, and largely everything else around to prevent him from doing so. Though explanation as to how this situation came about does eventually arrive, for a considerable amount of time we get no context whatsoever, and are simply allowed to watch Riddick go through the motions of survival, struggling to avoid being eaten, melted, or poisoned to death, without any need for a greater narrative than this.

And what motions these are. Riddick is of course a ridiculously bad dude, but one of the great strengths of the film is how well it demonstrates why he is such a bad dude. Yes, he's strong and combat-capable and ferocious and so on, but unlike the Arnold-wannabes of which action films are well supplied, the focus with Riddick is not his badass displays of ultraviolence but the preparations for his badass displays of ultraviolence. For instance, early on in the film, when Riddick finds himself confronted by a massive semi-aquatic scorpion-like monster with a poisoned stinger, blocking the one path to a more hospitable part of the planet. Rather than wade in and defeat it with his manly combat skills, the movie stops in its tracks as Riddick spends weeks preparing himself to take the creature on. We see him forging weapons, taming local fauna, dosing himself with small amounts of toxin so as to build up a resistance to it, capturing smaller versions of the creature to test strategies and capabilities against. The heroic-preparation-montage has been a staple of action films since Conan (or arguably Taxi Driver), but plainly the makers of Riddick understand why it exists. By extending the preparation this far, while still keeping the material interesting, the eventual showdown with the creature takes on more weight than it would if Riddick had fought it in a cursory duel. Great action does not come from having the hero make things look easy, but from having the hero make them look ridiculously difficult, and Riddick, like the great action movies of yore (Predator for instance) knows this.

Of course the film is not all weapon-forging and cave-dwelling. There is indeed a plot here, or more precisely a cast of characters set down in one place in the hopes that their interactions will supply a plot. These characters, two different crews of mercenaries who arrive on the planet looking for Riddick for two different reasons, comprise the majority of the character interaction for the first two thirds of the film. The list of characters and motivations is long and thick, but like before the film prefers to let the plot take a backseat to the situation and the characters. Every one of the dozen or so mercenaries that arrive to find Riddick are exceptionally well-characterized, even the bit players, and as Riddick (or other things) winnow their numbers down, they respond in ways that are both logically and thematically consistent. Confronted with the knowledge that Riddick may be in a dark cave, for instance, the mercenaries enter with a large, well-armed party and plenty of light sources, covering one another's backs and leaving once again as soon as they determine that there's no further benefit to being in it. Finding themselves attacked, they immediately hunker down to defend themselves with maximum efficiency, making it as difficult as possible to surprise or otherwise assault them, once more rendering the task Riddick has before him a tremendously difficult (and thus interesting) one. But the vast majority of the time, the mercenaries simply spend interacting, with Riddick or with one another, in ways that while not always pleasant, make a degree of sense and are consistent from one scene to the next. The unfailing ability of this film to wring interesting results out of boilerplate scenes and concepts such as these is perhaps the most surprising element of a film that could well have been as generic as Will Smith's After Earth.

Things Havoc disliked: Just because all of the mercenaries are characterized, doesn't make all those characters excellent. Katee Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica) plays a character who is supposedly a lesbian (this is mentioned, for no reason, multiple times), yet who flirts shamelessly with Riddick, and periodically takes her clothes off for pointless breast shots. I have no objection to beautiful women taking their clothes off, but the eye-candy here is such obvious fan-service that it mars the film's overall well-crafted style. Other characters, such as the obligatory wet-behind-the-ears newbie, and the money-obsessed mercenary who will sell anyone out for a buck are travelling well-trod paths, and not always with enough material to make them stand out from these archetypes, despite the film's best efforts.

There's also the question of scope. Riddick is a very tight film, reminiscent in some ways of last year's Dredd, and while that tightness enables the film to focus on what material it actually has, and the interactions between the characters stuck in the situation, the base fact remains that we're basically watching a remake of John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars with better writing. I'm not objecting to the improvements by any means, but the limited horizons for this film limit in turn the possibilities that the movie can entertain. The greatest films are those with a sense of ambition, ones that seek to show us things we have not before imagined. This movie quite consciously shows us something it knows we've seen done before, relying on the fact that they're going to do it well to keep our interest, and while by and large they succeed in this, the effect is somewhat akin to re-reading a book you enjoyed the first time. A pleasant experience, but not something that will fundamentally alter your worldview or present you with a new horizon.

Final thoughts:   But then again, perhaps that's the point. Not every film can possibly give us things we (or at least those of us who see as many films as I do) have never before considered, and a movie that recognizes this, and substitutes successful execution for failed ambition, cannot be doing much wrong. Riddick, ultimately, is a film I was not expecting to be any good at all, given the genericness of its premise and trailers, and the generally suspect quality of Vin Diesel-helmed movies. Yet to my astonishment, the quality of the filmmaking craft at work here, in terms of the basic elements that constitute a film (writing, scripting, directing, editing), shine through the premise and present a movie that has no right to be anywhere as good as it is. I would accuse the trailers of lying about the movie, except they did not do so. Riddick is a generic adventure-survival film about a morose badass and a gang of shrinking supporting characters being stalked by a tide of monsters, when all is said and done. Yet even within that genre, there is a wide gulf between boring tripe such as Ghosts of Mars, and standouts like Predator, and Diesel, and director David Twohy, know just how to construct the film so as to place it in the company of the latter.

You never know what you're going to get when you go see a movie, of course. But even considering that, it's not often that a movie that promised this little delivers this much. But ultimately, I'd rather have a movie tell me a simple story well, than fall all over itself failing to tell a complex one at all.

Final Score:  7/10

Jobs

Alternate Title:  Citizen J

One sentence synopsis:    Steve Jobs rises, falls, and rises again, alongside his company, Apple Computer.

Things Havoc liked:  Ashton Kutcher and I have never gotten along. For one thing, I can't tell him and Josh Hartnett apart, and for another thing, nothing he's ever done interested me in the slightest. I don't watch Two and a Half Men or Punk'd, stoner movies like Dude, Where's My Car are entirely wasted on me, and I thought The Butterfly Effect was a mediocre, sloppy mess, aping better metaphysical films such as Being John Malkovich without understanding how to make them work. Still, actors with worse resumes than Kutcher's have salvaged their careers with a single mindblowing biopic, and while I was surprised to see one about Steve Jobs appear so shortly after his demise, my status as an old-time Apple fanboy more or less required that I see this film.

It's no secret that among the very strange denizens of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs was one of the strangest. Abandoned by his birth parents and adopted by new ones, a dropout of Reed College (one of my Alma Mater's rivals), and a follower of everything from homeopathy to eastern religions to fruitarianism, Jobs combined two attributes that would seem contradictory: An instinctual genius for business, creative design, and managerial inspiration, and a seemingly absolute lack of basic human empathy. If the movie gets nothing else right, it gets this fundamental dichotomy nailed down pat. Though some of the obligatory "inspiring speeches" fall a bit flat, the film gets across Jobs' single-minded obsession with design, style, and user-friendliness, a concept which doesn't sound revolutionary today only because he singlehandedly pounded that obsession into the entire computer industry. Yet Jobs, according to this film, did not act on these obsessions because he knew it was the right business move, but because of some sort of deep-seated need to produce things in accordance with his vision, whether buyable or not. We watch Jobs arguing with his business partners and investors and venture capital firms about whether the massive overruns and investments he is making into products from the Lisa to the Macintosh will pay off, but all along we get the sense that Jobs is making excuses, covering up his own obsessions with design, irrespective of the soundness of his decision making. This enables his struggles with the board to take on a slightly more real cast, rather than simply having unthinking stodgy suits fail to get his 'vision'.

Of course the same effect is helped by the fact that Jobs is an unlikeable asshole from the beginning of the film to the end of it. I had wondered how the movie would handle the uncomfortable reality of Jobs' Larry-Ellison-sized ego and Dr-House-class indifference to human behavior or standards of propriety. Many movies or television shows (I cite House again) have the distressing tendency to present a massive dickhead to us and then attempt to justify his behavior towards everyone by virtue of his genius. Jobs does the opposite, showing how Steve Jobs' total inability to empathize with people, even his closest friends and associates, drives each of them away, one by one. This is not merely the usual 'movie' version of an asshole, who calls out the pretensions of the 'designated bad guys' in an impolite manner. An early scene has Jobs call his friend Steve Wozniak in to help him with a technical matter and then outright lie to him about the compensation they are due to receive, while another has him reject and even throw his pregnant girlfriend out of his house, blaming the pregnancy on her and refusing to take any responsibility for it. As the movie goes on we see him coldly toss old friends to the curb once they can no longer promote his career, going out of his way to deny them the fruits of their labors, and generally acting as though he doesn't know them any longer. Portraying Jobs (who was indeed this big of an asshole) in this way is probably the only decision that would have worked, as it means that when the sparks at Apple begin to fly, and Jobs is forced to confront the Board of Directors and his own CEO, his abusive personality turns these scenes from "stuffy dicks oppress counter-cultural rebel" to "reasonable men trying to deal with a certifiable sociopath before he destroys the company." Not everything Jobs touched was gold, nor was his every move the right one, and his "triumph", upon returning to Apple, immense though it was (he turned a failing company into the most valuable one on Earth), is marred, ultimately, by the score-settling and pettiness that marks him through the entire film.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Josh Gad plays Steve Wozniak like the geeky computer nerd he was (and is, something I can confirm personally), while major figures in Apple's rise and fall, such as CEO John Scully (of the famous 1984 commercial) and Apple Board president Arthur Rock are played respectively by Matthew Modine and the always-awesome J. K. Simmons. Both of them bring a certain veneer of sanity to their roles steadfastly lacking in Jobs, as mentioned before. But the main event is, of course, Kutcher himself, who looks a near dead-ringer for Steve Jobs, and plays him with just the right combination of madness and inspiration. This is the sort of performance that alters the trajectory of careers, one that will at least get me to look a bit closer at Kutcher the next time I see him.

Things Havoc disliked: It was probably unavoidable for this movie to turn into an extended Apple commercial at times. We are dealing with a biopic about the man who built Apple from the ground up twice, after all, and moreover a man famous for the "Reality Distortion Field" (to quote Andy Hertzfeld) that surrounded him as he spoke on issues of design, excellence, and quality. Bereft of the field, however, some of Jobs' speeches sound rather like generic corporate bloviations on "commitments to excellence" (is there any company in the world that has a 'commitment to mediocrity'?). A particular sequence near the end of the film where the returned Jobs asks iMac designer Johnathan Ive why he's at a company that has deprecated style and design so much, sounds like the sort of thing I would have said back in my High School years when I was an unabashed fanboy who thought Apple could do no wrong. Apple was and remains (for the present) a trendsetter among technology companies, visionary in design and product beyond the scope of 99.9% of its peers. It does not follow, however, that whimsy and creative freedom are the sole supports of its success. After all, we all know how well "Design is Law" worked for John Romero...

The film also has a very strange sense of scope. The movie ends (spoiler alert) in 1997, with the iMac on the horizon and Jobs re-instated as CEO of Apple. All well and good, but Jobs' greatest triumph, arguably, is what he did after that point, taking a broken, marketless organization in free-fall and turning it into a company more valuable than Exxon-Mobile. Ending the film there shortchanges the actual genius of Jobs, as the iMac is barely in the film, the iPod gets a cameo appearance, and the iPhone is totally unseen. Perhaps the assumption was that everyone knows how the story ends (which is probably true), but this is not the only gap in the film's account of Jobs' life. Following his fall from grace at Apple, the movie abruptly shifts ten years ahead, to when Jobs was approached by Gil Amelio (Kevin Dunn) to resume a role at Apple. Unfortunately, when we last left Jobs he was a single, broken man, thrown out of his company and doomed at last by his own tragic flaws, the ones that drove away his friends and supporters, until he had nothing. All of a sudden, Jobs is married, has children, and is even taking care of the daughter from his previous relationship, the one he previously refused to have anything to do with or even sign visitation papers for, dismissing her as irrelevant to his life. The Steve Jobs we've gotten to know would do none of these things, indeed the movie spends a great deal of time establishing the particular fact that he would not do them, and yet we are now, suddenly, shown a Steve Jobs whose personal life is in order and his relationships fully repaired, all without a hint as to how this miracle was accomplished. To put the question mildly, what the hell happened?

Final thoughts:   Elementary flaws like this, done no doubt for the best of reasons, are what keep Jobs from being a great film. The great biopics of film's history, Ghandi, Patton, even Citizen Kane (yes), dug into the lives of their subjects to extract a narrative story from them. They did not simply recount their lives in the fashion of "this happened, then that happened", but strove to find order within the chaos of an actual human life so as to tell a story worth telling. To an extent, Jobs tries to do this, by portraying Steve Jobs as a classical tragic hero, whose flaw encompasses his own destruction, at least until he can rise again). But between the destruction and rebirth must come a change, and whether because of poor editing decisions, or an attempt to cover over the fact that Steve Jobs really didn't mend his evil ways over those missing ten years, this film leaves us wondering if the projectionist forgot to include a reel.

Still, Steve Jobs was a sufficiently influential and iconic person as to merit a film like this, and hopefully, the upcoming one from Aaron Sorkin will deal with him in an equally interesting manner. Kutcher's work, as well as that of the rest of the actors, is stellar, and the movie does not pull any punches out of reverence or narrative convenience as to the real Jobs' shortcomings. It may not be an instant classic, but if you're at all interested in what made the world's greatest computer salesman tick, then you could do far worse than this as a starting point.

Final Score:  6.5/10

The Butler

Alternate Title:  George Lucas' Homework Assignment

One sentence synopsis:   The lives of a White House Butler and his activist son are entwined with the history of the Civil Rights movement.

Things Havoc liked:  I am often reminded, in the course of this ongoing experiment, of the worst movie I have seen to-date under its auspices, specifically George Lucas' titanic World War II/Racism failure, Red Tails. I savaged Red Tails when it came out, still recovering from the trauma of having watched it in the first place, and yet somehow I have never felt satisfied by my response to the film, as for all the detail I went into, there was no way for me to fully sum up in text what mistakes Lucas had made in celluloid. Jean-Luc Goddard (the filmmaker, not the Starfleet Captain, you philistines), once said that the way to criticize a film is to make another film, but alas, the majority of us amateur film critics do not have the years or disposable millions to do that, and must settle for complaining in text on obscure film blogs in the dark corners of the internet to tiny audiences. Nevertheless, there remains something to the notion, as it is (I now quote Pixar), ultimately a more meaningful act to create a terrible film than it is to describe it as such. I muse on these things here because, given the evidence, Lee Daniels, the director behind Monster's Ball, Precious, and The Paperboy, has also recognized this fundamental notion, and in the spirit of responding to Lucas' atrocity in a manner Goddard would approve of, has given us The Butler.

Set in Washington and the South from the 1920s through to today, the Butler is the tale of Cecil Gaines, the son of dirt-poor, black sharecroppers in Georgia, who finds his way to Washington DC and becomes a butler in the Eisenhower White House. It is also the tale of his son, Louis, who attends Fisk University in Tennessee just in time to be caught up the tumultuous events of the Civil Rights movement, becoming an activist, a Black Panther, and ultimately, a congressman. Along the way, the film surveys more or less the entire civil rights movement, both from the perspective of the presidents that had to grapple with the challenges of civil rights, to the servants within the White House, and their elevated-but-lowly status, insulated from the chaos further south, to the freedom riders and sit-iners who bore the brunt of the violence, abuse, and arrest that the movement demanded. Along the way, we meet presidents, staffers, servants, neighbors, girlfriends, civil rights leaders, racists, soldiers, and all the various panoply of people that fill these characters lives over the course of a good forty years, played in almost every case by the single most loaded cast I have ever seen.

I'm serious, the cast for this movie is stacked, so stacked that I can't even go through it all and have time to discuss anything else. Not since Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet have I seen such a cast, one so impressive that Vanessa Redgrave is called upon to play a bit part with one line, and Robin Williams is afforded scarcely more than a minute of screentime. Every part in the film, from the most minor to the most major is filled by recognizable, A (or at least B)-list actors, but front and center are three in particular. Forrest Whittaker, of Ghost Dog and Last King of Scotland (and Battlefield Earth) fame, plays the title role of Cecil Gaines, a sharecropper-turned-thief-turned-butler who winds up at the White House serving president after president. I wouldn't call this Whittaker's best role, as with the exception of a couple scenes, he's more or less called upon to play a reactionless servant. But the sequences where he does get to stretch the character (dealing with his family) are done well, and Whittaker plays the character at a variety of ages with perfect consistency. But it's Gaines' wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, who really steals these sequences. I've seen Oprah in a couple of films before, some good (The Color Purple), some not good (Beloved), but here she steals the entire show. Someone I know told me they had a hard time seeing anyone but Oprah, the television personality, but I had no such difficulty. Oprah's performance is the best in the film, and in many ways holds it together.

A lot of this film is stunt casting, meaning casting done for novelty value, but with actors of this caliber, this matters very little. Best of the bunch for the Presidents is Liev Schreiber, playing LBJ, who curses up a Texas storm and refers to the black population of the country by the N-word, all while signing the most comprehensive civil rights bill since the 14th amendment. Alan Rickman, a man I would not think of to play Ronald Reagan, also does a good turn, mimicking the Gipper's soft voice and extended word delivery. Meanwhile, downstairs, Cecil's fellow butlers are played most effectively by Lenny Kravitz (?) and Red Tails' Cuba Gooding Jr. Gooding, in particular, has been in a slump basically ever since Jerry Maguire, but here manages to break out of it with a role that, while small, feels drawn from real places. When Cecil's son, to whom he is no longer speaking, is arrested for some fresh protest, Gooding's character is the one to bail him out, along with a number of words concerning what he should and should not be doing. And speaking of Cecil's son, David Oyelowo, who was the best thing out of Red Tails (not that that's saying much), does an excellent turn as a college firebrand turned panther turned congressman. As with Red Tails, he plays the character straight and understated, save of course that in this movie that's more of a stylistic choice and less of a survival strategy. The sequences where his character participates in the civil rights movement are portrayed with brutal honesty towards how these episodes must have happened, particularly an early sequence where the young activists (both white and black, I was glad to see), first prepare for, and then execute a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, ultimately being beaten, abused, and arrested by the white authorities and local militiamen.

Things Havoc disliked:  It's often said that if you have to resort to a voiceover narration, you have failed as a scriptwriter, and while that notion is slightly flippant, there's something to it nonetheless. Among such films as have used voiceover to wonderful effect are the terrible theatrical version of Blade Runner, and the worst movie in the history of filmmaking, The Last Airbender. The Butler's sins do not come close to those of the films I just cited, but the voiceover in the Butler is still a bad idea, one that tells us episodes we should be shown. The inner thoughts of a character should come from within the characters actions and the actor's performance, not from the screenwriter standing up with a megaphone and shouting "this character is sad now!"

There's also the difficulty of the film's first half hour, wherein Cecil grows up on a cotton plantation, and sees his mother (Mariah Carey) raped and his father murdered with impunity by the son of the local plantation boss. I grant that such things probably did happen in the world of 1920s Georgia, but the son is so perfectly evil in every way, murdering people openly in the fields with a racist sneer on his face, that the entire concept disintegrates into bad farce. There are excellent scenes of racism in action in this film, the aforementioned sit-in, a lengthy sequence involving the KKK's attack on a Freedom Rider bus, and other moments both overt and subtle from the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s. Why, then, was it necessary to headline all of these sequences with something so over the top as to be a pastiche of racism?

Finally, we have to discuss (fellow Red Tails Alum) Terrence Howard's character, a neighbor of Cecil and Gloria, who is a womanizer and general disreputable person, and with whom Gloria has an affair. Anyone who can explain to me what the point of Howard's character was is invited to do so, as I could not determine as much. His character shows up, acts sleazy, disappears, acts sleazy some more, and then is killed off-screen by a jealous husband, never to be mentioned again. Even his affair with Gloria, an episode that would seem to be important, is glossed over with a few throwaway lines and no consequences whatsoever. Cecil never discovers the affair, meaning he cannot react to it, and the very first mention of it is Gloria telling Howard that it must end. In a film this congested with actors and characters, this is time that could have gone to so many other things.

Final thoughts:   I have no idea if Lee Daniels actually intended The Butler to be a response to Red Tails (my guess would be no), but in perfect honesty, he might as well have. This movie is to that one like Interview with the Vampire is to Twilight, a movie that is not only good, but simply by being good, illustrates the manifest flaws of its inferior counterpart. Taking the same cast (Gooding, Howard, Oyelowo) and putting them in another film about racism and the struggle for equality, Daniels proves conclusively what did not need proving, that Red Tails was not the fault of its cast, but of its scriptwriters, director, and producer. Though it falls short of the oscar-worthy mark it is clearly attempting to reach, The Butler is still a very good film, a simple story about a man and his son who lived in interesting times, and what they made of them. Never overly sappy, nor flagrantly melodramatic, the movie is a very solid piece about a historical process of infinite complexity, as seen by those whose lives were played out in its wake.

Final Score:  7/10