The General's Post Fall Roundup

And now, a note from the General

Hello again, ladies and gentlemen. Following a long break in which I had to re-charge my batteries and participate in other, non-cinematic activities, I have finally returned to the fold to do a little bit of catching up. The movies below were ones that I saw whilst taking my little break, and as I would not dream of forgoing the chance to tell you all what I think about them, I have provided my customary little summaries below. Here's to Oscar season at last, and a final race to the end of 2016!

The General's Post Fall Roundup

The Lovers and the Despot

Alternate Title:  This is Still a True Story

One sentence synopsis:    A South Korean Actress and her ex-husband, a famous Director, are abducted by North Korean Kidnappers and forced to make films for Kim Jong Il.


The Verdict: As you may recall from my completely honest and entirely reasonable review of Sony's hacked film The Interview, North Korea and I have a tempestuous relationship when it comes to movies (something I'm sure they share with nobody else). Yet despite all my attempts at hyperbole and outrage at some new gyration of the hermit-kingdom's antics, North Korea is a stranger place than any of us can possibly imagine, with a whole host of strange and inexplicable behaviors that exceed those of rogue states and enter those of Bond villains. This is a country that once nearly started a war over who was allowed to cut a tree down in the Korean DMZ, who spent a month and a half breathlessly reporting on the progress of their invincible armies' conquest of the United States, and who blew up part of the South Korean cabinet for reasons I don't think anyone has ever figured out. But like a lot of strange cult-of-personality regimes, North Korea does have a slight bit of method to their madness, particularly their obsession with art and the political implications and international prestige purposes thereof. And so it was that we come to the story of a kidnapping.

The Lovers and the Despot is the story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, once one of the greatest box office draws in all of South Korea, and her philandering, artistically-obsessed, outspoken director-husband, Shin Sang-ok, once touted (briefly) as Korea's answer to Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In the late 70s, amidst political turmoil in South Korea and dwindling fame as an actress, Choi was lured to Hong Kong under the guise of a film project, and kidnapped by North Korean agents under what appears to be the personal order of Kim Jong-il himself, who set her up as a kept guest and asked her to make films for North Korea, whose film output was so stagnant and poor quality that even Kim himself regarded their movies as nothing but tripe. Initially reluctant, she was eventually convinced to participate in this mad scheme after the arrival of her ex-husband Shin, who was either kidnapped himself, or made his way there voluntarily (reports vary). Together, they were compelled to re-marry, and became the leading couple of North Korean cinema, working there for eight years, attending film festivals and making a great many movies, before finally making their escape to the American embassy in Vienna.

Too weird to be true? This is North Korea, who once sent special forces commandos to beaches in Japan to kidnap teenagers and force them to teach Japanese to their army units. But what's compelling about this documentary isn't how strange it is, to be honest, but how... normal it is. Choi and Shin got it into their heads to record their conversations with Kim Jong-il (the first such recordings ever to be made), and what we consequently have is a candid, unscripted look at one of the most secretive and strangest figures in the late 20th century, the most awkward dictator in history, who comes across like a drooling fanboy intimidated by the artistic talents around him (Hitler is supposed to have acted similarly among stars of stage and screen). One might expect that the films Kim demanded would be nothing but propaganda, but no. Kim wanted prestige, particularly international prestige, and seems to have given his pet filmmakers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, ignoring the dictates of his own propaganda ministry, including the first love story ever filmed in North Korea, lush medieval epics, and even a Godzilla movie (yes, there is a North Korean Godzilla movie in existence. I must have it.) Though the film never softpedals the horrors that North Korea was and remains capable of, they also make clear what sort of exhilaration can come from being the favorite of an absolute God-Emperor like Kim, particularly for filmmakers whose stars were already in decline back home.

The Lovers and the Despot his not a perfect documentary, as the story it tells winds up being just about what you think it's going to be, save in details, and because frustrating gaps still remain in it, such as the question everyone seems to be tiptoeing around as to whether Shin was or was not kidnapped. But it is still a look at a subject it is rather hard to get a good look at, and yet another tale from the hermit-kingdom of North Korea to make one marvel at just how strange the world can be at times.

Final Score:  7/10

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The Magnificent Seven

Alternate Title:  The Mediocre Several

One sentence synopsis:   Seven disparate fighters in the Old West team up to stop a mining baron from destroying and slaughtering a small town of pioneers.

The Verdict:  Speaking of Akira Kurosawa, we have before us a remake of a remake of his greatest work. Goody.

Seven Samurai was a tremendous movie in every sense, and like most tremendous movies in every sense, has been copied a thousand times by every filmmaker who comes along looking to kick-start their career. John Sturges, of Ice Station Zebra, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (a musical version of the Wyatt Earp story), and The Great Escape, did so in 1960 with the original Magnificent Seven, a movie that starred Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steven McQueen, and Charles Bronson, and should really have been more awesome given the cast I just cited. But that was the early sixties, and here we are in the Year of our Lord, 2016, with an Antoine Fuqua-directed remake. Given that the original Kurosawa film all the way back at the beginning of this chain was one of the best movies ever made, is there a chance that the man behind Training Day could produce magic out of this?

No. No there was not. You see, Antoine Fuqua is just not a good director, Training Day notwithstanding. With the exception of his one great masterpiece, a movie that coincidentally (or not) also starred Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington, all he's ever made is a slew of crap such as The Replacement Killers, King Arthur, Olympus has Fallen, or The Equalizer. His version of the Magnificent Seven is par for the course in every way, a big, stupid action fest in which characters do dumb things for no reason other than the notion that they might look good on screen. I usually call this "xXx-syndrome", save that unlike xXx, this movie doesn't actually get the stunts correct, letting signature moments and scenes either run on way too long (such as a sequence wherein eighty-six bad guys to not shoot Chris Pratt for no reason at all, thus getting themselves killed), or not long enough (such as a culmination fight between Martin Sensmeier's Commanche warrior and a rival evil Indian, which ends in about five tenths of a second). How Fuqua, who has a twenty-year history with directing action movies, hasn't figured out certain basic truths yet is beyond me, but you cannot produce tension by having a hero effortlessly slaughter thirty mooks without breaking a sweat, nor are audiences so innocent in these days that they can't figure out that a hero who smiles and says goodbye to his love interest before mounting his horse and riding towards the villains to the accompaniment of stirring orchestral music has finally lost his character-shield and may now reach a sticky end.

Yes, the cast is pretty decent, at least as a theoretical cast, and not as an actual one. Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke are about as good as they ever are, even in an Antoine Fuqua movie, which as we've established, is nothing new for them. The former plays the leader of the titular seven, and survives the film, as is customary for Washington, by downplaying everything and acting like the only adult in the room, while Hawke plays a Louisiana gunfighter of some repute (but no accent), who actually does a decent job alongside companion and life coach Lee Byung-hun, who gets the James Coburn role from the original as the quiet, knife-wielding assassin. Chris Pratt on the other hand, whom I love dearly in all manner of movies, is just not very good in this one, which makes no sense to me, given that the role of a cocky hotshot cowboy should have been right up his alley. I blame the direction, frankly, as Pratt's character is way too over-saturated in the film, with everything he does buttressed by shot selections, and especially a score (the late, great, James Horner, of Titanic, Braveheart, and, The Land Before Time, and The Wrath of Khan) which seems designed to make absolutely certain nobody in the audience can mistake him for anything but the designated charming rogue. Everyone else in the movie is completely forgettable, including Peter Sarsgaard as a typically slimy villain, save only for Vincent D'Onofrio, a man I generally have little good to say about, but who here plays a mountain man who has plainly gone crazy in the wilderness, and who, in a movie filled with over-choreographed stuntwork, stumbles blindly about like a drunken bull, screaming incoherent gibberish and murdering people with an axe. It's something.

Enough said, really. The Magnificent Seven is a boring movie that rises just enough off the strength of its cast to barely hit the mediocre bar. It's a film that will, I expect, be completely forgotten until it comes time to make yet another remake of Seven Samurai, which judging from the state of Hollywood, should take about ten minutes.

Final Score:  4.5/10

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Queen of Katwe

Alternate Title:  Zugzwang

One sentence synopsis:    An impoverished girl in the slums of Uganda is taught to play chess by her youth worker and becomes an international prodigy.


The Verdict:  When the trailers fail me, and they so often do, I find myself having to go see movies "on spec", by which I mean basing my decisions around who's in the movies, who made them, and what they're about. So if you want to know why I went to see a Disney movie about chess prodigies, look no further than the cast, which includes David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o (the former of a bunch of recent films including Selma, the latter of 12 Years a Slave), and the director, Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, of Salaam, Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding. FIlming on location in the Katwe slums of Kampala, Uganda, Nair used all local actors (save of course for the above-mentioned marquis ones) to produce a film about poverty and escape provided by chess. I felt I had to try it.

And... no. No it didn't work. And I feel bad about reporting that it didn't work, because like all movie critics, I like the concept of the story and want to give the film a pass for it, but this is not charity and I am not trying to praise movies because of their social content. The base fact is that when you hire non-actors for your movie, you're liable to get all sorts of things, but unlikely in the extreme for any of those things to be "acting". Nobody in this movie, save for Nyong'o and Oyelowo, can act. Nobody. Not the lead actress, a young Ugandan named Madina Nalwanga, not the many other children involved in the film, who have no idea what they are doing in front of a camera and have not been instructed, not even the other adults in the movie, who seem to have been told to overact as much as possible so as to make sure that the audience knows what they're saying. The script, meanwhile, is the most basic Disney-sports-movie fare you can imagine, following the exact same trajectory as Cool Runnings (for instance) save without the local color and humor that made that movie so watchable. Most of the film, indeed, seems to be filler material, as characters narrate each others' actions to one another in slow, laborious scenes that lack any punch or interest. If it weren't for the pedigree of the filmmakers here, I frankly would have called this a first-time effort from an amateur director. Maybe there were budgetary restrictions, maybe the biographical nature of the film got in the way, or maybe nobody was willing to take any risks with a "heartwarming, feelgood movie," but the overall effect is surprisingly poor, and leads to long stretches of the film rendered boring as paste by the simple fact that nothing is allowed to happen.

I don't want to pile it onto a basic movie like this one too thick, as the film is hardly some kind of crime against sense and cinema, but spec only gets you so far. If you want praise from me, you need to actually make a good film. And Queen of Katwe is not one.

Final Score:  4/10

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The Accountant

Alternate Title:  Number Crunching

One sentence synopsis:   A math savant with high-functioning Autism uncovers a conspiracy to defraud a major robotics company and murder the only witness.


The Verdict:  In 2003, Ben Affleck, then in the middle of the tailspin portion of his career, appeared in a superhero movie by the name of Daredevil. It sucked, miserably, and contributed to such a nexus of failure that year that Affleck abandoned superhero movies entirely in favor of more challenging work in more interesting movies such as Hollywoodland, Gone Girl, The Town, and Argo, the latter two of which he directed, and the last of which earned him an Oscar. In defiance of expectations from the last decade, Affleck is now a successful, respected, actor and director, a powerful man in Hollywood, capable and apparently willing to chose his own scripts. And yet the superhero bug never really seems to have left him. Hollywoodland involved him playing Superman after all (sort of), and this year, Affleck engaged in the double-whammy of playing not one but two superheros, first as Batman in DC's flagship Batman v. Superman, and second as an autistic killing machine in the movie we have before us here. The former, I need not tell you, was a disaster on the level of the Hindenburg explosion. How was the latter you ask?

Actually... pretty good.

Yeah, this one surprises me too, guys, but The Accountant, a movie in which Ben Affleck plays an autistic savant who happens to have been trained by his special-forces father to be a unstoppable killing machine as well as a mathematical prodigy, is a damn fine little movie, not because it makes a whole lot of sense, but because it involves good actors doing what they do best while good cinematographers capture them doing it, and that's a formula that will take you far with me. Ben Affleck is one such good actor, playing a role that could easily have been either silly or offensive, and in fact which ten years ago probably would have been both. His character's concept is manifestly ridiculous, but Affleck plays it sermon-straight, as a high-functioning autist who has developed a lengthy and complex series of coping mechanisms to deal with the nature of his condition, from sensory-overload chambers to repetitive tics. I would not call the movie the most er... realistic take on Autism and its many varieties, but the filmmakers clearly knew that they were treading on thin ice with this one and took active steps to make the movie into something like what Arnold Schwarzenegger would make if you told him to create an Autism Speaks commercial.

The rest of the cast is just as good, from the always-enjoyable J. K. Simmons, playing a treasury department director who has been chasing the mysterious "accountant" for decades, to John Lithgow, playing the head of the robotics company that all of this winds up landing upon, and Anna Kendrick, as a young in-house accountant who serves as a sort of "sidekick" (I hesitate to say love interest, given the workings of the film). But the real meat of the movie is the action, which I am satisfied to report is some of the best I've seen all year. There's been a trend over the last eighteen months or so of action directors finally starting to eschew the whole Jason Bourne-style shaky-cam style of cinematic combat for a cleaner, more focused style that I choose to call the "John Wick". The Accountant follows this trend, shooting the combat in glorious stable vision, allowing the characters to slice, shoot, stab, and smash each other with crisp, perfectly cinematic execution. The concept may be demonstrably goofy, but the film seems to know that, using the ridiculous contrivances that are the bread and butter of movies like this with something of a wink and a nod, as though the filmmaker were patting the audience on the back and asking them to bear with him so that he can tell his ridiculous story.

The Accountant is hardly a perfect movie, everyone seems to spend the entire run-time expositing the plot, and the ending makes even less sense than the absurdity of the setup would have you believe, but thanks to the strength of its cast and its style, it holds together surprisingly well. In a year that has already given me some of the worst action/superhero movies that I have ever seen, sometimes a mere "good" film is all that you can ask for.

Final Score:  7/10



Next Time: Time to get back in the swing of things with a proper Superhero movie.

Eddie the Eagle

Alternate Title:  I Believe I Can Fly...

One sentence synopsis:    A hapless, would-be British Olympian decides to become a ski-jumper, the first for Britain in 70 years.


Things Havoc liked:Those of you who remember my list of the best films of 2015 (which was not that long ago), will remember the movie Kingsman, the Secret Service, which was a demented, insane, bloodfest of a Matthew Vaughn movie which I adored to a degree that probably speaks poorly of my general character. Among the many, many virtues that Kingsman had was its lead actor, an unknown (to me) young man named Taron Egerton (who, I kid you not, grew up in a Welsh town called Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch). Egerton was absolutely fantastic in a role that should, by rights, have been insufferable, and has since garnered other awards for roles in movies I did not see such as Testament of Youth and Legend. I'm an actor's critic, as you all well know, so when a good young actor shows up, I like to track their career throughout the project, and lo and behold, his next film was, of all things, a feel-good sports movie about one of my favorite people of all time.

For those who do not know, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, was an Olympic Ski Jumper from Great Britain notable for being bereft of any shred of Olympic-grade talent for the sport, who nonetheless contrived (due to the fact that there were no other Ski Jumpers from his home country) to make it to the 1988 Calgary Olympics, which also played host to the Jamaican Bobsled team from Cool Runnings. Edwards had no particular aptitude for the sport of Ski Jumping (or for sport in general), but competed nonetheless, becoming a fan favorite on the back of his utter haplessness, self-effacing humor, and British Daring-Do. The role is a far cry from that of Egsy, from the aforementioned Kingsman, but Egerton is once again spot on with it, playing a particularly British type of myopic nerd, who dreams of becoming an Olympian and cares very little for what he has to do to get there, even if it means making a complete fool of himself, and sustaining the horrific bodily injuries that come with failing at a sport like Ski Jumping. These injuries are not minor, as we see in the best line in the film, where Eddie's coach watches with him as another ski jumper shatters every bone in his body while failing a moderate-sized jump, and then leans in to the horrified Eddie to comment "And he knew what he was doing..."

Ah, but the coach is very important in movies like this, isn't he, and Eddie the Eagle's coach is the, far as I can tell fictional, Bronson Peary, played by everyone's favorite wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Jackman is a sardonic, alcoholic bastard, in the wonderful style of these movies since time immemorial, who must gradually warm up to Eddie's innocent-if-ungainly earnestness. It's an old story for a sports movie, yeah, but Jackman has fun with it, gargling booze from everything in sight and seemingly growing to relish the opportunity to troll the entire establishment of Ski Jumping (which apparently exists) with an athlete who is not an athlete by any definition of the word. Long-time character actor and first-time director Dexter Fletcher (of Band of Brothers and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), takes on the director's chair with a style that seems to play around with the conventions of the sporting movie a bit, from comical overuse of slow-motion-uplifting-music shots to a truly trippy set of scenes involving the so-called "Flying Finn", Matti Nykänen, who rambles semi-coherently about the philosophical "meaning" of ski jumping like a cross between George Mallory and The Dude.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is all stock sports cliches, and not just that, but practically a re-tread of the aforementioned Cool Runnings. We have everything here, from the team of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic winter athletes (Norwegians, this time), who inexplicably hate our hero and resent his presence in the Olympics, to the fussy, over-proper British bureaucrats determined to prevent Eddie from doing anything so tremendously unorthodox (HARUMPH!) as competing in the Olympics. One of them even goes so far as to deliver a sneering, twirl-of-the-mustache remark about how the Olympics are not for amateurs, and how people with dreams should have them dashed so as to preserve propriety. Eddie, meanwhile, also has to deal with his father, a working-class plasterer who regards his sporting dreams as irrelevant, and who refuses to support him. Will Eddie's dad see the light in time for the big jump? Might he share a knowing nod with his son while acknowledging that he was right to follow his dreams all along? Perish the thought that I should spoil such mysteries of existence to you, but if you've seen a single film in the last thirty years, I have a feeling you'll work it out for yourself. Fletcher seems to have decided that the best way to make his movie would be to take all four of the plotlines that the four main characters in Cool Runnings had and merge them together into one, which is not precisely the decision I would have made. The result is a movie with a schmaltz and saccharine level that is high enough to carry a diabetes warning.

I also question what in the world several of the more prominent actors who lent their names to this film were thinking beyond the need for another paycheck. The wonderful Jim Broadbent is barely in the film at all, with maybe three minutes of screentime tops as the British broadcaster for the games, a role which requires him to do very little. He does, however, manage to do more than Christopher Walken, who somehow earned himself third billing in the movie for a total of roughly forty-five seconds of screentime, playing (in another nod to Cool Runnings) Jackman's former coach from his own days as a ski jumper, who is terminally disappointed in his once-promising pupil, and regards him as having embarrassed himself and his sport in fostering Eddie. As before, I shall refrain from revealing whether or not this ends with a tearful reunion at the end where bygones are allowed to be bygones and the former student is finally acknowledged by the master who once despaired of him, but I shall rely on the good judgment of all of my readers to determine what they think might come of all this.

Final thoughts:     Eddie the Eagle is a perfectly harmless movie in the style of a hundred other sports films, livened by a couple of good performances and the novelty of its source material, but required viewing by all fans of cinema it is definitely not. What you as a viewer are likely to get out of the film is going to be highly dependent on your tolerance for schmaltz, as well as your ability to excuse the fact that a film's plot is one you've seen many, many times before. I will confess to having enjoyed it, not as a masterpiece or a great work of art, but as a fun little story told reasonably well by a couple of actors I just like watching. There have been worse excuses for movies made.

 

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  The Fox and the... Meter-maid?

Creed

Alternate Title:  The 7th Round

One sentence synopsis:     The son of Apollo Creed goes to Philadelphia to find his father's long-time rival, Rocky Balboa, and enlist his help in becoming a professional boxer.


Things Havoc liked: Some movie series aren't just movies, but culture-defining institutions. You can hate a particular Star Wars movie all you want, and I certainly have in my day, but objecting that you dislike all of Star Wars is tantamount to rejecting the space opera as a genre, or maybe even the entire popular side of the sci-fi spectrum. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but while a given movie from a series that influential can be bad or good, criticism of the series as a series is more or less irrelevant. If one does not like Westerns, then one simply does not like them, and wishing they included less dust, six-shooters, and horseriding is missing the point. So it is with the Rocky movies, which came to define the entire genre of sports films in general and boxing films in specific. Rocky has had movies of better or worse quality over the years, to put it mildly, but the last film in the series, the simply-titled Rocky Balboa, was a surprisingly decent film overall, particularly considering the context and the depths to which the series had slipped with movies 4 and 5. But here we are, a decade later, with a new film and a new boxer, wherein everything can come full circle.

I have heard a lot about Michael B. Jordan, but up until this film, with the exception of a small role on HBO's The Wire, I don't believe that he and I had crossed paths (at least until I discovered that he'd also had a small role in fucking Red Tails, of all things). Still, I've heard good things about his work in Chronicle, and this seemed like a good opportunity to see what he was all about. And the answer is a great deal, because Jordan is on fire in this movie. His character, Adonis, the illegitimate son of the legendary Apollo Creed, is a well-to-do young man, with a secure, white collar job, who nonetheless moonlights (almost literally) as a boxer in dive undercards in Tijuana. Early on in the film he makes the decision to leave everything behind, his job, his family, and move to Philadelphia in the hopes of finding his father's old nemesis/friend and receiving his training as a professional boxer. The question of why he does all this, when unlike Rocky or other typical sports movie underdogs, he has all manner of other choices he could make, is never really answered (except in one line at the very end of the film), and frankly, never really has to be, as Jordan conveys everything wordlessly, a drive that has nothing to do with the working class and everything to do with self-respect. The physicality demanded of anyone starring in a boxing movie is there as well, as Jordan looks lean and lethal, and the scenes in which he obsessively trains for a boxing career that may never ever happen are as convincing as any movie-boxing sequences I've ever seen. It's one of the best all-round boxer performances I've ever seen, frankly, and while that might not sound like much praise, bear in mind that that list includes Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Real Steel (shut up!), and the other Rocky films themselves.

Ah but this is a Rocky film, isn't it? So what of Rocky himself, played as always by the immortal Sylvester Stallone. Stallone might not have the greatest range as an actor, nor the finest reputation in these reviews of mine (the less said about Escape Plan and Expendables 3, the better), but lest anybody forget, Stallone is one of only three men (the others being Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin) to receive two Oscar nominations for the same film, nor should anyone forget that the movie in which he did this was the original Rocky. I've always counted myself a fan of Stallone's when he's in the right sort of role, Rocky or Rambo or some slurring badass fighting crime with both fists, but this is his original role, and frankly, at 69, he's every bit as convincing as he was at 30, maybe even more. Rocky in this movie is an old man, retired to his restaurant in his old working-class Philly neighborhood. Reluctant at first to even indulge some no-name youngster from California, a kid who is plainly not the first to seek the old war-horse out, Rocky has to be prodded and cajoled into the Burgess Meredith role from the original film. Yet when he finally takes it on, Stallone is, ironically, entirely in his element, even though that element entails nothing like his typical role. Moments such as a standout scene in a doctor's office, where the Italian Stallion is faced with a cancer diagnosis and quietly decides against seeking treatment, or a scene near the end where he has to be helped up the famous Philly steps that he once made famous sound melodramatic on paper, but Stallone plays them with a quiet dignity that I really didn't think he had in him. It's not the stuff of further Oscars, necessarily, but it's an excellent turn from an actor infamous for vanity projects showcasing him as an invulnerable badass irrespective of circumstance. Stallone and Jordan play off one another wonderfully, all without falling (too far at least) into the usual traps.

Creed was written and directed by up-and-comer Ryan Coogler, who made his debut in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, also starring Jordan. I had my issues with Fruitvale Station (to put it mildly), but most everyone else did not, and even I had to admit that the film was exceedingly well made on a mechanical level. Creed, on the other hand, is a step above, shot expertly and with great skill. An early standout sequence involves an entire light-heavyweight fight, including multiple rounds and corner breaks, all shot in a single, unbroken take. Granted, unbroken takes have become the auteur-du-jour calling card recently (thank you, Birdman), but a good one is still impressive, and Coogler supplements the camera tricks with other nice touches, such as the John Wick-style tale-of-the-tape stat-cards that appear around other boxers at key points in the film, and the judicious addition of the old-standby Rocky-training montages. As to the writing of the film, it leans heavily on elements that have always been strengths of the Rocky franchise. Rocky films have always had "villains" that weren't really villains, and this one is no different, as Creed's primary opponent is an English champion with serious anger management issues who, facing a seven-year sentence on a gun charge that is essentially going to end his career, is looking for one last high-profile fight so as to earn enough money to take care of his family, something he needs desperately enough to agree to a fight with an untested youngster with a famous name.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, not everything in the film is as well fleshed out as the villain. Tessa Thompson, from Selma and a number of other films, is the Creed's love interest in the film, a role that is in no way elevated above the previous statement. Clumsy attempts are made to give her character, a young singer and musician whom Creed meets in Philadelphia, something of interest, but these amount largely to the fact that she is suffering from congenital hearing loss and will eventually go deaf. What is done with this fact or this character in general? Nothing, save for the usual routine of three-act movies in which they must fight and break up only to reunite at the end when the main character needs her support the most. It's not that Thompson is particularly bad in the role, it's that the role is particularly useless, to the point where the Wikipedia summary of the film tellingly doesn't mention her character at all.

There's also the question of the boxing itself, which is a sore subject given that the problems this movie has are the same ones that Rocky effectively welded into the genre back in 1976. Simply put, boxing does not work this way, and it never has. Boxers in Creed, as in every Rocky movie, and by extension every boxing movie ever made, stand in the center of the ring trading blows to the head and body that would lay a man dead on the canvas were a real, professional boxer to ever deliver them in real life. Yet the movie seems to think it perfectly normal for its combatants to absorb dozens and hundreds of these blows before going down, even as their faces are pounded into hamburger meat and their bodies take shots that should liquify their organs with each punch. Boxing, at its most technical, can be a deceptively slow-looking sport, I grant, and nobody came to this movie hoping to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight all over again, but I do wish that boxing films would occasionally showcase something resembling boxing, rather than the Terminator-style bludgeonings that the Rocky films cemented in the genre to begin with.

Final thoughts:  Creed is not a terribly ambitious movie, but it is an extremely well-made one, a film that follows the old dictum that very little can go wrong when your movie calls for two good actors to stand in a room and act at one another. I'm not qualified, necessarily, to speak to it in terms of its position vis-a-vis the Rocky films of old, but as a sports film in the modern age, it stands as a testament to the notion, already highly popular this year, that new blood in an old franchise can pay great dividends if the material is treated with the respect it deserves. I don't know if this movie is the first of a new series, or if in 2018, we will see Jordan fighting steroid-enhanced Russians or acting alongside synthesized robots. But for now, all I've ever asked for was a movie that worked, and Creed is, if nothing else, unquestionably that.
 

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Pixar didn't just make movies about neurology this year...

Draft Day

Alternate Title:  Field of Snores

One sentence synopsis:       The General Manager of the Cleveland Browns must battle the team's owner, coach, media, and his own family as he attempts to build the best team possible through the NFL draft.



Things Havoc liked:  I've mentioned in my reviews of Moneyball and 42 that I'm an avowed Baseball fan, but I haven't had the opportunity yet to discuss my position on Football, my favorite of the American spectator sports. Though I tend to open such reviews with scathing denunciations of teams such as the Oakland Athletics or the Los Angeles Dodgers, I feel in this case it would be unsportsmanlike, as well as unfair, for me to do something similar. Every fan deserves the right to root for their team unmolested, after all, and so I shall forebear to mention that teams such as the Pittsburgh Steelers or Dallas Cowboys are comprised entirely of communist goat molesters who employ the blackest of arts to seize tainted victory from shining beacons of progress and virtue such as my own San Francisco 49ers. To mention such things would, after all, be uncivilized.

But back to the film's virtues. Despite all the crap he's been in, I can't hate Kevin Costner, especially now that he seems to have finally left his Waterworld/Postman days behind him. Though his character was mutilated beyond all recognition, I thought he was an excellent choice for Johnathan Kent in Man of Steel, and he remains one here. Costner plays Sonny Weaver Jr, son of a (fictional) long-time Browns coach, now serving as the General Manager of the Cleveland Browns as they struggle to recover from another (real) losing season. Unlike the Head Coach, the General Manager of a football team does not run the team but assemble it, responsible for drafting and trading the players that he believes he needs in order to produce a winning team. It's the same role, albeit for a different sport, that Brad Pitt held in Moneyball, but Costner plays it completely differently. Where Pitt was a self-assured rebel effortlessly engaging in multi-latteral trades to try and fleece his opponents, Costner struggles with the weight of the decision of the year, the selection of the Browns' first round draft pick, a decision that is his alone, but that literally everyone from the rest of the Browns staff to the fans to his own Mother want to give him "advice" on. Costner's performance isn't the best in the film, but he manages to sell the sheer importance of this single call, and the sequences wherein he snaps back at those who wish to bother him with their own "opinions" on what he ought to do are among the best he has.

And what a wonderful collection of dignitaries we have assembled to tell Costner that he is an idiot. Frank Langella plays the owner of the Browns, a showman who wants Costner to "make a splash" whether the pick works out well or not, by making some kind of massive, blockbuster trade/deal to stir up excitement. Langella is always fun to watch, regardless of the role, and he hams it up in this one in his best impression of Al Davis or George Steinbrenner. Dennis Leary, meanwhile, who has been making a habit of being the saving grace of otherwise terrible films, plays Coach Penn, head coach of the long-suffering Browns, a ringer brought in from a winning team to energize a snakebit franchise. Leary in particular in the standout for this film, as his trademark blue-collar acerbic schtick works very well in the mouth of the would-be tough guys that tend to hang around the margins of NFL coaching. One could easily see him as a standin for Bobby Petrino or Nick Saban. The generally strong cast is rounded out by other standouts, many of them in-jokes for NFL fans, including Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson of 42) as prospect linebacker desired by Costner and nobody else, and real life star running back Arian Foster, playing a college phenom whose father, a former Browns great, is played by Terry Crews, a decision I don't quite understand but do endorse.

Things Havoc disliked: What, exactly, is the audience for a film like this? Football fans, would be my guess, and yet based on the evidence, that's not a viewpoint shared by the filmmakers. The movie advertises itself as a hardboiled, burning negotiation film, where deals are made and unmade in split seconds and the destinies of NFL teams are forged in a crucible of calculation and gut instinct. And there is that, I suppose, but unfortunately, the majority of the film is instead comprised of, say it with me, "family drama". And who have we brought in to this little engagement to provide the requisite drama? Why Jennifer Garner, of course.

*Sigh*

No, Garner isn't godawful this time round (though she's not much better). The issue is really the idea that the movie should be about the personal and family troubles of Costner's character at all. Garner is his girlfriend/finance manager, who is suddenly pregnant barely a week after the death of Costner's father. What follows is a tired series of repeated scenes wherein Costner and Garner try to act at one another, misunderstand each other, are unable to talk about their troubles, become distant, make up, face relationship challllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllndfsmnasdf...........................

Huh? Sorry, I fell asleep on the keyboard there. You get the idea, right? Boring scene follows boring scene wherein Costner tries to act sensitive (never his strong suit) while Garner tries to act at all (same), all in regards to a subject that has nothing whatsoever to do with why we're actually here. And then, midway through the film, Ellen Burstyn, an actress I usually adore, shows up in a terrible role as Costner's mother, who seems to exist solely to make his life hard. Storming into his office the day of the draft itself, a subject she has been established as knowing all about (she calls him up to berate him for one of his draft moves earlier in the film), she demands that he drop everything to scatter his father's ashes on the practice field, and refuses categorically to consider doing it on any other day than the most important one in any NFL GM's life, nor to delay it by a single hour, and then drags his ex-wife along for no reason other than to snipe at Costner for working too much. This idea is so bad that it's actually painful to watch, as Burstyn is forced to play straight material that should have been laughed off the set. Of course she also doesn't like Garner (we have this much in common), and so we are given the obligatory sequences wherein Burstyn disrespects Garner, just so that we can wonder if they will later have a tearful scene of reconciliation to the accompaniment of string instruments.

And when we do, finally, return to the business of football, there are just too many questions. For one thing (spoiler alert?), Costner starts out the movie by making one of the most imbecilic moves in the history of bad draft moves, the kind of move that would, in reality, get compared to the infamous Herschel Walker trade between the Cowboys and Vikings. He spends the rest of the film being criticized for this move by most professionals in the organization, which is only fair, but the problem is that we see far too much of Costner's hand for the film to play the "is the move stupid or genius?" game. He has no secret plan, we know he has no secret plan, as we spend most of the film watching him agonize over the fact that he has no secret plan. So when the movie suddenly decides it wants to turn into Moneyball and pretend that Costner actually might have some kind of secret plan to turn this whole thing to his advantage, we are left with the conclusion that any good move he makes out of the aftermath of this situation is simply luck (or screenwriter fiat).

Ultimately, the film just doesn't feel like the sort of Hard Knocks, inside-the-curtain look at the backroom excitement of the NFL that it so clearly wants to be. Visits to other cities are accompanied by elaborate flyovers of the various stadiums (stadia?) complete with title cards reminding us that Seattle is, indeed, the home of the Seahawks, and Kansas City that of the Chiefs, something even a cursory fan of the NFL could probably figure out for themselves. Absent a montage sequence early in the film that seems placed there to acquaint people with the fact that football exists in Cleveland, there are no local touches, no colorful details of the Browns themselves, one of the most colorful (and storied) teams in the league. The terminology that the characters use with one another is either too vague and too detailed, with the script alternating between having characters explain concepts to one another that any professional would already know (so as to catch the audience up), and switching into the most arcane, acronym-laced verbiage imaginable, verbiage that could not possibly mean anything to any living human, and pretending that the characters (particularly Garner) understand what is being said as a sort of shorthand to the audience that "these guys know their stuff". Moneyball (and other movies of its ilk) managed to ride the line by using terms that the players or coaches might actually use, without bothering to explain them, understanding that audiences can catch up with the basics, and simply handwave away the rest, most of the time. But then, Moneyball was a movie with confidence and trust in its audience, whereas Draft Day is quite visibly not.

Final thoughts:   I don't want to make Draft Day sound terrible, for a terrible movie must take risks, and Draft Day takes none whatsoever. It is a movie that plays to a general audience that will never go see it, Doldrums or not, while failing to satisfy the specialty audience that might. Layered in personal drama that is both uninteresting and badly done, the movie thereby disguises what strengths it actually has by pretending for most of its runtime that it is about something other than football. I understand that not everyone is a fan of American football, but movies about something as precisely on-point as the NFL draft cannot get away with generalizing themselves in the hopes of drawing in a wider audience, not unless they are made with considerably more care and skill than this movie is.

If you're a fan like me, watch the real draft, and otherwise tide yourself over until next season, as you will find nothing in this film you don't already know, and in fact plenty that you likely know better than the film's creators. If you're not a fan, then frankly you had no chance of seeing this anyway, as the subject will mean nothing to you, and the film is not nearly strong enough to be worth seeing by itself.

Oh, and if you happen to be one of those hipsters who cannot tolerate the mention of the word "Football" without loudly proclaiming to all and sundry how much you don't like the sport of 'hand-egg', and how that makes you special and unique? Then I strongly recommend you go see this movie immediately. Seriously, man, it'll change your life.

Final Score:  4.5/10

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

42

Alternate Title:  Elegy for Saint Jack

One sentence synopsis:   Jackie Robinson and Branch Ricky shatter the color barrier in major league baseball.

Things Havoc liked:  Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play professional, major league baseball. He was, however, the first one to do it in the modern era, bringing a sixty year period of baseball segregation to an end, and did so at a time wherein the risks of attempting such a thing were very real. By all accounts an unassuming man, Robinson broke the color barrier the only way anyone could, by playing lots of top-quality baseball, and his career remains the only positive accomplishment I am willing to lay at the feet of the Dodgers, then of Brooklyn, now of Los Angeles, who as rivals to my beloved Giants are axiomatically comprised of nothing but scum and dog-molesters, unfit to wear uniforms or swing bats.

Erm... sorry, where were we?

So yes, as a baseball fan of record, (see my Moneyball review for more details), I was interested in seeing 42, and finding out what it offered. As it turns out, what it offered in no small part was a hell of a cast. The main event of course is Robinson himself, played here by unknown (to me at least) Chadwick Boseman, who not only does a fine job but looks a spitting image of Robinson himself. Boseman's performance isn't the greatest in the film, but then his role is to do as Robinson himself did, and not react to things, not even when he desperately wants to. Co-starring (effectively) alongside Boseman is Harrison Ford, playing pioneering Dodgers president Branch Ricky, a man who simply wanted to torpedo the unwritten color barrier of baseball any way he could, and brought Robinson in to do just that. Dearly though I love Ford, I have always had a very hard time seeing anyone but Ford himself in his performances, with the exception of those so iconic that it's impossible to imagine anyone else (Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Jack Ryan). Here, well, he came close at least, employing a jowly growl of a voice as he glowers menacingly at anyone who dares to enter his office, be it his own staff or the commissioner of baseball itself. Yet Ford's is also not the best performance in the film. Most of the other roles go to recognizable character actors, uniformly on top of their game, particularly Law & Order's Christopher Meloni playing the Dodgers' womanizing manager Leo Durocher, a man with no patience for the racial hangups of his players, willing to fire anyone who refuses to play on the field with Robinson. Meanwhile, the games themselves are narrated by Dr. Cox himself, John McGinnley, who plays the legendary Dodgers play-by-play man Red Barber. Meloni's role is relatively small, but he is perfect in every scene, a man who simply cannot be bothered to either be or tolerate racists, as the sum total of his cares in the world are to win baseball games and make money. McGinnley meanwhile tones his usual manic screen presence waaaaaaay down to faithfully replicate Barber's laconic call style, one which defined an entire generation of sports broadcasters. Both of these performances are excellent, and yet neither one of them are the best performances in the movie.

No, the best performance in the film belongs to (of all people) Alan Tudyk, who plays Ben Chapman, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and one of the most virulent racists ever to set foot on a baseball diamond (yes, including Ty Cobb). Chapman's hatred for Robinson and everything he represented was legendary, even by the standards. He would stand on the field shrieking vile epithets at every at-bat, and ordered his pitchers to hit Robinson in the head as often as they dared. Tudyk, whom I've only ever seen play comedic or semi-serious roles, here transforms himself into something wholly new. Not only does he play a despicable scumbag with great vigor, but he even manages to capture the self-righteous justifications that allow him to behave in such a way (his reaction to an article condemning his vile racism is to declare "a Jew wrote that.") I've seen Tudyk in a number of roles since Firefly, not always to his credit, but never before have I seen him transform himself into a role this divergent from his traditional body of work.

Things Havoc disliked: There's a fine art to hagiography. You can't expect a movie like this to provide you with the same character experience that you might see in a wholly fictional story. This movie is not here to give us a full accounting of Jackie Robinson's life, it's here to tell us about a pivotal moment in the history of baseball. And that's fine, except that this movie goes completely overboard with the saccharine element.

Look, I'm not objecting to a sentimental film. Pixar's films are sentimental. Spielberg's (better) films are sentimental. There's nothing wrong with a sentimental film, indeed there's often much that's right, as a sentimental film can pierce the cynicism with which we go through our lives and touch us on a human level. Sentiment is one of the ways that film reminds us that it is an art form as well as a commercial enterprise, and thus has value in and of itself. 42 is not sentimental however. 42 is sappy, and sappy films are a completely different beast than sentimental ones. Sappy films include such scenes as when a little black boy prays aloud to God that Jackie Robinson get a hit so as to "show everyone that we can do it too". Sappy films involve sequences where Jackie's teammates walk over to him on the field and thank him for having the courage to "bring out the best in them". Sappy films focus on a home run he hit in the middle of the pennant race as though it was the most important single event in the history of time (did we forget that the world series also exists)?

Yes, I'm sure most of these events actually happened in some form (Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Robinson during a Cincinnati game has been memorialized in a statue), but I seriously doubt they happened like this, with actors reciting unutterable dialogue while swelling violin music plays in the background and they stare off into the distance as though savoring the moment of history. However good your intentions are for a film, you simply cannot produce scenes wherein people speak in a manner nobody in the history of the world has ever spoken and expect the audience to buy it. No, not even if your subject matter is as "uplifting" (or "correct") as that of Jackie Robinson's career. Very few things are able to drive me out of my immersion in a film faster than hacky dialogue intended to induce diabetic comas, and this movie produces that exact effect more than once.

But as though that weren't enough, there's a specific moment in the film I have to call out. One of the many antagonists that Robinson faces among major leaguers is a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates named Fritz Ostermueller. In the film, Ostermueller is a violent racist who throws at Robinson's head and screams at him to get off the field, as black people (his term is less polite) do not belong in baseball. Nothing special relative to what else Robinson faces, yet unlike the various other racists Robinson encounters, this one is a complete distortion of the truth. The real Ostermueller never accosted Robinson, on or off the field. He was on the record multiple times as having supported the idea of Robinson and other black players joining the Major Leagues, and the infamous HBP (hit by pitch) that the movie claims was a racist assault, was actually an inside pitch that hit Robinson in the wrist, something that happened quite often, as Robinson had a tendency to crowd the plate against left-handed pitchers. It's one thing to get facts wrong in a movie. Every movie does this. But it's quite another to blacken a man's reputation by accusing him of being a vile racist when he was anything but. Ostermueller was no hall of famer, certainly. Few people have ever heard of him outside this movie. But does that make it right to arbitrarily re-assign his memory into that of a race-baiting hatemonger? Were there really not enough genuine villains that Robinson faced to fill two hours of screen time?

Final thoughts:    I wanted to like this film, I did, but I can only take so much in the way of sappy preaching on the saintliness of someone, genuine hero or otherwise, especially since the film seems to think that the heroic patina surrounding Robinson excuses a hatchet job on an undeserving player. 42 is not an unpleasant film nor is it a particularly bad one, but I walked out of it without any particular need to see it again. The sappiness quotient wasn't enough for me to condemn it the way I've condemned other sap-fests (Timothy Green, for instance), but it certainly was enough to let this one pass by. Given that Brian Helgeland, who wrote and directed this film, was previous to this employed on Salt and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, I feel confident enough in pronouncing this movie to be a third strike.

But don't worry Helgeland. There's always next year.

Final Score:  5/10

Real Steel

Alternate Title:  Rock 'em Sock 'em Rocky


One sentence synopsis:  An ex-boxer and his estranged kid try to take a broken-down sparring bot to the championship of the World Robot Boxing League.


Things Havoc liked:    Hugh Jackman has been in his share of bad films (Wolverine and Swordfish come to mind), but I've never thought that he was bad, just unable to elevate the material. And when Jackman is good (X-men 2, The Fountain, the Prestige), he's quite good. Headliner as he is in this film, I have to admit that he's quite good. Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, who is a douchebag (no, not a lovable douchebag, a douchebag), an underground robot boxing promoter who scams and steals and does all the things movie douchebags do. Yet despite being a douchebag, unrepentantly, Jackson brings an excellent performance here, such that the movie doesn't have to soften him in order to get the audience to like him. I'm actually impressed.

But not as impressed as I am by Jackson's co-star, a kid named Dakota Goyo, playing Charlie's estranged 11-year old son Max. Child actors are dangerous in any movie, especially a movie that is transparently about cute kids and robots. Moreover, this particular kid has the unfortunate characteristic of reminding me of Jake Lloyd from the Phantom Menace (and we all know what a cinematic masterwork that was). Yet, to my surprise, Goyo nails the role (and it's a much bigger role than one would expect from the trailers) very well. The character fails to lend itself to particular adjectives, he's not "plucky" or "edgy" or "angry" or "cute" though he does at times hit all those notes. The performance, and the interplay with Jackson's character (and with the robot) just... works.

Speaking of the robot(s), the effects in this movie are excellent. That's par for the course these days, but they're excellent regardless, mostly because of the decision to use animatronics where possible and CGI only when necessary. It gives the robots weight and dimension, such that when they fight (or simply run about), we actually feel their existence rather than view video game images. There is none of the cinematographic bullshit that got in the way with the Transformers movies. Fight scenes are shot cleanly and with good lighting, giving us an excellent idea of what's going on. The robots themselves are distinctive, well-designed, and interesting, and their fight choreography (shaped by Sugar Ray Leonard of all people) is excellent and entertaining.

Soundtracks are a dime a dozen, but I did notice in watching this film that this particular soundtrack was excellent. There are some recognizable songs on it, but mostly its a mood-setter soundtrack that blends standard orchestral scores with, of all things, synthesized country ballads. That this is the work of Danny Elfman, a composer of great fame and skill, comes as no surprise, but the music fits the mood shifts of the plot much better than any film of this caliber has a right to.

Oddly enough for a story about pugilistic robots, the plot of this movie is derived in no small part from a famous 1973 movie called Paper Moon, starring real life father-and-daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal. An excellent film in its own right (it garnered an Oscar for Tatum), this movie basically blends it with Rocky to produce a movie that's simultaneously about an estranged father and son coming together and about robots boxing. All that I will say here is that the writing in the film is good enough to elevate it above what you would expect a ludicrous combination like this to result in, and the actors carry it off well enough to make it work...



Things Havoc disliked:  ... sometimes.

When I say that this movie is Paper Moon crossed with Rocky, I mean it. It is those movies verbatim, plot point by plot point, woven together to create something simultaneously new and completely predictable. I have never guessed right so many times as to what was going to happen in a movie as I have with this one. I said that the writing in the film is good, and it is, but the plot (as distinct from the writing) is really lackluster. Not only have you seen this all before, you've seen it before so many times that you know exactly what's going to happen. This makes parts of the film (towards the beginning especially, I found), rather painful to sit through

I know I praised the cinematography before, and I meant it, in that it's so rare we see good fight sequences in this age of over-processed CGI. But the reason the cinematography is good in the fights is because the movie uses a very old-school approach to its cinematography (see Paper Moon again). This is good in the fight scenes, but less good in the rest of the movie. It's not that the film is badly shot, far from it, but there is an unconscious language to cinema of inferences and shot constructions, and this movie abuses that language to the point of absurdity. Many shots were almost pretentious in their obvious desire to symbolize things like the gulf between two characters, to the point where I was just waiting for the director to get over his film school textbook and get on with it.

Some of the supporting cast is good and some is less good. The villains in this film are among the latter, stereotyped "evil terse asian supertechstar", "evil russian ice queen mobster" and "evil redneck racist hillbilly" foremost of all. Other than adding something for our audience to root against, they don't do a hell of a lot. This actually undercuts some of the effective design work that went into the bots, as it takes the attention away from the thirteen-foot armored monstrosity trying to beat the heroic underdog into the dirt with pile drivers. That's not an easy thing to do, mind you.

While the writing is good overall, the decision to stick so closely to formula hurts the movie in that there are some sequences that simply cannot work in a modern film, no matter how good your actors and how good your writing. Tearful apology scenes for instance are tremendously hard to do right without a tremendous amount of skill, and chaining the film to older movies with older sensibilities only guarantees that won't be the case here. These moments weren't that common, frankly, but they were still present, and almost cringeworthy when they popped up.

Finally, the product placements in this movie were egregious, even by today's standards. Guys, we get that Dr. Pepper and Budweiser (and ESPN and Droid and Toshiba and Red Bull and fifty others) paid you. At a certain point, enough is enough.


Final thoughts:  *Sigh*

To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to writing this review as I was taking the train home from the movie theater, and most of the reason for that was that, while I was able to portion out and characterize this movie's strengths and weaknesses, the way I have for every film I've reviewed here, I knew I was eventually going to have to come to this section, wherein I would be required to admit that I basically adored every second of this movie the instant I started watching it.

That sound you hear is the sound of my credibility disappearing.

I loved this film. I loved everything about this film. I'm not entirely certain I can explain why. Everything I said above, all the criticisms I made about the pretentious cinematography, about the outright theft of a plot, about the stupid villains and the cringeworthy moments, all of that is true and I don't give a damn. This is the movie I wanted Transformers to be. Fuck, this is the movie I wanted Rocky to be. Nothing here makes sense. Paper Moon crossed with Rocky (plus robots!) makes about as much sense as crossing Total Recall with Driving Miss Daisy, and yet something, something buried deep inside this movie just worked, on a level so profound that I completely forgot everything mean I had said about the film by about the 2/3s mark. Part of it is the acting, which from both Jackman and Goyo is just right. Part of it is the overall design. Yes I whined about the product placement overload, but the design work on the film is awesome regardless. It feels like a real near future, even with a premise this ludicrous. Part of it is the soundtrack, which I cannot rave enough about in doing a fantastic job of buttressing the movie emotionally. And part of it is the writing, which despite the hackneyed plot, feels completely real at all times.

But I think most of it is none of those things, or maybe all of them in aggregate, I don't know. Alfred Hitchcock said that the soul of cinema lies between the shots. Something lies between the shots in this movie, something real and intense and passionate and just plain childish fun. Somewhere along the line, someone associated with this movie loved it enough to insert blood and sweat into polishing it, and the end result shows up on screen. This film was everything a setup like this could possibly be and more, exciting, fun, appealing, everything I wanted the retread movies that trampled on my childhood to be, and were not. Watching this movie, I felt like I was ten years old again, watching awesome robots fight with wide eyes and an open imagination. I suspect someone making this film brought the same mindset towards its creation.

On paper (and maybe even in objective reality), this film should be around a 5.5 or a 6, a decent film but nothing spectacular. After all, everything here has been done before, and bigger, and louder, and more edgy, and more real, and with more cool jump cuts and CGI. All of those things may be true, but goddamnit, these are my reviews, and I will call them as I see them. Call me a sucker. Call me a nostalgic fool. Call me an idiot, I don't care. I loved this film. I loved everything about this film. This is what Transformers should have been.

This is what Transformers once was.

Final Score:  8.5/10

Moneyball

Alternate Title:  The Agony of Defeat


One sentence synopsis:  The general manager of the Oakland A's turns to Sabermetric analysis to find a championship team he can afford.


Things Havoc liked:   Baseball is the great American pastime, and I am a great admirer thereof, particularly of my own home team, the San Francisco Giants. As a loyal Giants fan, not to mention a San Franciscan, I of course believe that everything even remotely related to Oakland, including their foul, diseased, putrid excuse for a baseball team (playing godless American League baseball, no less) should be summarily consigned to the lowest pit of Hell, where they shall be tormented by the devil with hellfire for ever and ever for the sin of having employed the Designated Hitter and thereby tarnishing the face of baseball for all time.

Er... sorry, where was I?

Er yes, the film. This is not a standard sports movie by any stretch of the imagination. For one thing, it's primarily about the back office. Brad Pitt plays A's general manager (and now minority owner) Billy Beane as a very rounded character, one whom I can easily see alongside the Steinbrenners and La Russas and the other lunatic personalities that baseball seems to generate. The movie focuses on him as general manager, a role entirely different from the manager (played in this case by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), one concerned with the details of personnel acquisition, high pressure player trades, and scout management. More time is spent looking at spreadsheets and computer models than at baseball players playing baseball. Pitt's character doesn't even watch the games.

Indeed, this movie is almost single-minded in its overturning of the general cliches of the sports movie genre. The players are shown almost as an afterthought (with the exception of Scott Hatteberg, an injured catcher-turned-first baseman whom the A's are able to pick up because nobody else wants him). No rag-tag team of plucky all-stars here, but a bunch of soulless, interchangeable parts, picked up and released without so much as a question. What we see therefore resembles more of a collectible card game than Field of Dreams, as managers call one another and enact byzantine strategies to outmaneuver one another for the players they think are undervalued. The movie takes what seems to be pathological delight in completely dispensing with notions of "fundamentals", "intangibles", "scout wisdom", or "small ball", all concepts that are usually used to give the plucky, ragtag group of movie baseball misfits a fighting chance against the big bad soulless ball team.

And yet, surprisingly, this doesn't make the film unwatchable, far from it. The focus instead is on Beane and on his assistant general manager, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill in easily the best performance I've ever seen out of him). Brand is a 25-year old Yale-educated economics student, who also happens to be a fat baseball statistics nerd. Yet he brings an absolute conviction to his belief that baseball in general is doing it all wrong, valuing (and thus, rejecting) players for subjective reasons that have nothing to do with their actual performance. Through Brand, the movie throws massive amounts of data at us, but never in a fashion that feels infodumpish or bewildering, and the core tenet that teams are buying players when they should be buying wins, is one that underlies everything that these people do.

The effect is very weird, turning everything we normally see in a sports movie on its head. The plucky misfit players become almost background noise, the wise, sagely coach becomes the antagonist who nearly derails the team for the sake of his future employability. The sports commentators vilify our heroes when the system doesn't work, and credit the useless manager when the sabermetric analysis pays off with an unprecidented 20-game winning streak. And all that time, the penny-pinching, numbers-obsessed capitalistic moneyball players are our heroes.

And yet it works, more or less. Pitt and Hill deliver effective, realistic performances, as do many of the more minor characters (including, of all people, Robert Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, playing the owner of the A's). The movie generates investment for the idea that these people are working with, rather than for the players or the coaches. And somehow, none of this takes away from the majesty of the game itself. When the A's pull of their streak, it's no less effective than in any other well done sports movie. The movie looks the moneyed aspects of baseball in the eye, and still comes away with a love of the game.



Things Havoc disliked:  This movie is almost perverse in its focus, relentlessly, on failure, loss, and lack of success. We see many games in the film, almost all of them from the period when the system wasn't working, and nearly none from the period when it was. An even more pressing example is that the one game we focus on clearly. In this game, the A's take an 11-0 lead, and then lose it, returning to 11-11, before finally winning with a walk-off home run 12-11. We do not see any of the A's runs to take their lead, but we watch in abject, well-shot detail as they lose it, run by run, before an almost perfunctory victory sequence that glosses over their record 20th consecutive victory by following it up instantly with a lengthy speech indicating how it doesn't matter at all.

I don't mind that they want to turn sports movie cliches around, but the movie is so single-minded about showing us nothing but loss and failure that it becomes very awkward to watch, ironically because it's shot so well. This obsession spills over into the rest of the film as well. Even when people aren't on the field, we hear nothing about them except that they are going to fail, have failed, or have succeeded, but that their success doesn't matter because they're going to fail at something else. It's not maudlin or campy, but it does get old.

Finally, I have to say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is an excellent actor, simply does not do well in this role. His manager's an antagonist, I understand, but unlike the antagonistic scouts, the film doesn't give him an opportunity to make his case, instead simply having him hamfistedly refuse to play the new players and to adopt the new style for no reason other than blockheadedness. I can see why the real Art Howe had nothing good to say about this movie.


Final thoughts:  This is a very strange film, and a hard one to rate, frankly, as the tone and the writing are simultaneously very skillful and very subversive. Overall though, baseball fan as I am, I was entertained and fascinated by this look into the backrooms of the great pastime, and both Pitt, who is not my favorite actor, and Hill, whom I have never seen before, sell their roles really well in it. Hoffman's a letdown, and the emphasis is really too grim for a movie that's supposed to be about sport and a team that, frankly, was a great and shocking success, but the movie still tells quite an interesting story, and might be worth a look even if baseball isn't your particular thing.

Oh, and fuck the A's. And Oakland.

Final Score:  7/10