The Burlesque Assassins

Alternate Title:  War and Pasties

One sentence synopsis:  A team of international Burlesque Dancers/Assassins team up to defeat evil dictators and save the world.


Things Havoc liked:  A while back, I reviewed a film called Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, a movie in which the Great Emancipator liberated the entrails of an army of vampires with a silvered axe while racing to save the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was a movie with a premise so ridiculous that to criticize it was to miss the point. One could either choose to accept it, or not. It is with that notion in mind that I present The Burlesque Assassins, a movie with a premise so outlandish that I can't decide if it represents insanity, genius, or both: A world where Nazis, Fascists, and Cold War communists must fear the watchful eye of Johnny Valentine, and his posse of burlesque-dancers-turned assassins.

Who is Johnny Valentine? Picture a cross between Charlie (of the Angels) and Hannibal Smith of the A-Team, and you'll begin to get an idea. Valentine is a grizzled veteran who ran a secret squad of burlesque assassins during WWII (the newsreels of their exploits are one of the movie's highlights), while simultaneously carrying on with his Russian counterpart, Katerina Molotov any chance he could get. Valentine (I could not for the life of me discover the actor's name) brings just the right note of played-straight spy foolishness to a role that is, on the face of things, utterly ridiculous, and manages to render the entire thing believable, even as he dons an ever-more absurd series of "disguises" (the source of many awesome jokes). Valentine's performance is spot on, and grounds the entire escapade, somehow, in just enough of a veneer of reality that we can suspend our disbelief. His is the role of the gruff, cigar-chomping unit boss, unflappable and supremely confident in his plan and his agents, though when he gets his hands dirty (as he does several times in the film) the result is unfailingly hilarious.

But the stars of the show are intended to be the Burlesque Assassins themselves, a collection of actual burlesque dancers of note, acting here with stage names and cover identities that I must assume are barely, if at all, exaggerated above their "real" ones. The team's modus operandi is generally to seduce their targets with a sexy burlesque routine, following which the target is invited backstage for a 'private' show to die for. It comes as no surprise, of course, that professional burlesque dancers can indeed perform burlesque routines, but given the generally low budget style of the film, it is a surprise that several of them actually seem to be able to act as well. Particularly, the actresses portraying Bombshell Belle and Koko La Douce (I beg pardon if I'm confusing real stage names for film ones, but IMDB is singularly unhelpful here) bring just the right hint of world-weary comedy to the planning and execution of their assassinations to carry the farcical yet straight-played tone that the movie is going for. And many of the more slapsticky routines they engage in, particularly those where they have to dispose of the bodies of the malefactors, are actually really funny.

Speaking of the malefactors, this movie presents us with, and I'm not making this up, the Son of Mussolini, the Clone of Adolph Hitler, and a very much non-dead Joseph Stalin working in cahoots to destroy the world with a Death Ray. If that concept sounds awesome, it's because it is, and the actors who portray the three villains in question manage to have a great deal of fun with their roles, despite physically doing little more than sitting in a theater watching Burlesque routines. Of the three, Hitler is probably the funniest (if only because of a single hilarious sequence involving his er... preferences... in companionship), but all three play fantastically off one another, a cross between their versions from The Great Dictator, and more modern parodies from a Family Guy-style. Their interplay, and reactions to the girls are quite well done, and anchor several of the best sequences in the film.

Finally, I obviously can't speak to what budget this movie had, but given everything, the effects are better than I expected. Most of the violence is deliberately over-the-top, Tom and Jerry style "hijinx", but while the blood, body parts, or futuristic weapons won't be winning any Academy Awards, they were a step or so above what I initially expected to see from a movie like this one. Given that the movie's tongue is firmly in its cheek, a little bit of ludicrously over-the-top blood gives it a very Sam Raimi feel in all the right places.


Things Havoc disliked:  A risk with small projects like this is that the actors you're employing are not always up to par. Such is the case for the main assassin, Bourbon Sue, who simply doesn't know how to deliver a line properly. Oh she can dance seductively with the best of them, that much is for certain, but there's more to acting than burlesque dancing, and her wooden acting does the film no favors. In fact, given the movie's low budget and burlesque theme, Sue's performance hurts more than it normally would, as it brings to mind uncomfortable parallels to the bad acting one finds in porno movies. Don't get me wrong, that's not what this is, but it was the impression I got.

Speaking of Burlesque, I understand that this was a niche film made by a proud subculture, I really do. But for boring old me, a man who knows less about Burlesque than he does about rocket science (I'm not kidding), the movie seemed entirely overloaded with Burlesque routines. Not only does each of the assassins get their own number, but the rest of the action is intercut by three or four "guest" appearances by other well-known Burlesque stars. I recognize that it's a bit churlish to complain that there are too many beautiful women removing their clothes in front of me, but each of these routines is three or four minutes long, and after the seventh one, I began to wish the movie would simply get on with it. There was enough interesting and funny material to be had from the actual main characters, and given that I did not know who any of the guest Burlesquers (that may not be a word) were, there wasn't really anything for me there. I doubt there's much for anyone who doesn't know the participants.


Final thoughts:  And yet the reason I bring that complaint up at all is because this is not simply a fan-work for insiders only. It's actually a surprisingly well-done action-comedy-farce graced by good writing, acting, and a suitably ludicrous concept. Were it not for the languid pace that the various numbers give it, and the issues that mar its choice of main actress, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone. That said, even with its flaws, this is one of the better low/no-budget flicks I've seen, and should one of you happen to come across it in your wild journeys through the cinematic landscape, you might well be in for a surprise.

Final Score:  6/10

Cloud Atlas

Alternate Title:  The Story of Us

One sentence synopsis:  The lives of a group of people cross again and again throughout the past, present, and future.


Things Havoc disliked:  Yes, I know that normally I start with what I liked, and leave the whining until later, but this time I had to get something out of the way:

I don't like it when movies decide they're too smart for you. I don't like it when they go out of their way to be impenetrable, artifice-laden slogs. I don't like having to disentangle a movie from the pretensions of their authors, and I absolutely hate it when the movie compounds this issue by playing around with the basic language of cinema for some bullshit 'cognitive effect' dreamed up by an overindulged 'artiste'. Setting, character, shot selection, coherent editing, narrative flow, these are not optional elements in a film, they are the mechanisms by which the fever dreams of a cinematographer's imagination can be translated for the rest of us, and films which abuse these elements for the purposes of showing off how superior they are tend to arouse my ire.

Cloud Atlas, based on a novel by David Mitchell, is an unfilmable mess, worse by far than the Lord of the Rings adaptations ever were. The novel consists of six different stories told across time and space, linked together by the fact that many of the characters in each one are the re-incarnations (I assume) of one another. I am forced to assume this, as opposed to knowing it, because while in the film version of this novel, these characters are played time and again by the same actors, what is actually going on is never, ever explained. Some gestures are given to magical birthmarks, some to deja-vu, some to spiritualism and some to God, but we are clearly meant to simply sit back and accept the central conceit, something that would be much easier to do if it were made clear at any point if the characters played by such actors as Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Kieth David, or Hugo Weaving (to name only the ones I recognize) are meant to literally be the same person brought forth in a new time and place, the descendents thereof, or something else entirely. I just finished the entire movie, and I couldn't tell you the answer.

Indeed, I can't tell you a whole hell of a lot about this film, not even if I had the time to sit down and parse out the various narratives of this story one by one. Part of the problem is that the stories are tied together so closely and with such rapid shift from one to the next that we scarcely have time to get our bearings in terms of what is actually happening in one tale before we're whisked off without warning or hesitation to another. Worse yet, several scenes actually have the temerity to flash-forward within the same (or even a different) narrative, further confusing everybody as to just what's happening. And as though that wasn't enough, one of the larger narratives takes place with the characters speaking some kind of post-apocalyptic argot that's effectively incomprehensible. And since subtitles (or, you know, English) would spoil the majesty of whatever brilliance the filmmakers are deigning to place before us plebeian swine, I still have no idea what most of the characters in that sequence were saying. Of course, this would be the one plot thread where the directors decide to actually slow down and linger for a time.

You can therefore imagine my frustrations as I sat through this interminable (three hour) movie, completely lost as to what was going on, who the characters were, what they were doing, and even what words they were speaking to one another. What greater point the movie was trying to make was only dimly perceptible beneath layers of artifice, confusion, and artistic chaos. And all I could think of as I sat there, was that eventually it was going to be my task to come home and try and make sense of this mess to the rest of you.


Things Havoc liked:  And then, around the 45 minute mark or so, something very strange began to happen...

Each of the six stories that we are told here, taken in and of itself, carries a different theme and a very different tone, all this despite the actors occurring and re-occurring within each one. Some of these actors, like Hugo Weaving or Halle Berry, are constantly playing the same basic character archetypes (slimy villain and intrepid explorer, respectively), set down in settings as varied as a 19th century ship, 1970s San Francisco, or the distant future. But what began to dawn on me was that other characters, particularly those that Tom Hanks portrays, are not. Hanks portrays, at times, a violent thug who brutally murders people in a drunken rage (his cockney accent leaves something to be desired), at times a nebbish scientist dragged into doing the right thing against his will, and at other times a cowardly fisherman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of cannibalism and death. He's not alone. Jim Broadbent goes from a murderous, virulently-racist ship captain one moment to a conniving book publisher trapped in a mental hospital, while Jim Sturgess and Korean actress Bae Doona go from demure Victorian aristocrats to fire-breathing rebel leaders in an Orwellian superstate. Once this became apparent, and it took some time, it dawned on me that what was being represented here was not a specific set of characters, replayed through the ages like broken records. What was being represented was a range of human experience. And how some people, for better or worse, can change over time, and some people, for better or worse, cannot.

This recognition, such as it was, was the first of many within this film's enormous running time, and as the movie moved on, I became more accustomed to what it was trying to tell me, and more importantly, how it was trying to tell it. What appeared at first to be maddening artifice slowly evolved into a different language entirely than the one I was used to experiencing in movies. The overlap between the stories, I came to realize, was not based on tone or scene tension levels (action scene links to action scene, for instance), but based around something else entirely, specifically the relationships between all of the various characters at given moments, and the resonances, not repetitions, that their interactions had as they rippled across time and space itself. And once I had gotten over my confusion, even in the slightest degree... what a tremendous landscape this film unveiled before me.

Every element to this film, taken by itself, is done extremely well, with great fidelity to the style and times required. The pastoral periods, be they pre-civilized or post-apocalyptic, are shot in glorious, vibrant color, while the futuristic dystopia setting has dark, gritty cinematography livened by bursts of bright visual effects, ones that honestly resemble Tron more than they do the Wachowskis' famous Matrix trilogy. The cinematography changes too, from broad canvasses appropriate to adventure films for the 1840s scenes, to a blocky procedural style for the 1970s segment, and to a more modern caper-flick Scorsese-inspired set of sweep-shots and held takes for the sequence taking place in the modern day. The major linking factor through all this is the truly incredible score, written by co-director Tom Tykwer, a score that somehow manages to make the same piece of music work for adventure, action, romance, and inspirational scenes all at the same time. It is able to do this because, as with everything else in the film, the important element isn't what scene is currently playing, but the overall tapestry of human experience that the movie is trying to portray, and a score appropriate to that will by definition be appropriate to every scene that represents it.

Indeed, Cloud Atlas might be one of the boldest films ever made, a sprawling, elaborate spectacle, both visually and in the sheer complexity of its narrative, which twists and turns around itself like a helix, filling every scene, every shot with detailed references to other stories, past or future. It's true that none of the individual stories that comprise this enormous offering are terribly nuanced by themselves, but taken in summation as they are, the stories buttress one another to produce a larger, more universal narrative, reflecting the themes of power, love, abandonment, indifference, and hope. Life, at times, is not terribly nuanced either, and only when combined with the stories of the lives of everyone that surrounds us does it acquire definition. This is not the sort of re-incarnation story where we see characters play out the same tale over and over again with changes of costume and scenery. Every story, every relationship, every moment of this film is unique to itself and yet rhymes in a strange, almost rhythmic way with moments and scenes scattered across creation. The various tracks that the movie jumps between with such frequency are not actually individual stories, but elements of a larger, cohesive whole, simultaneously unified and multifold, a record of human experience throughout the ages, and the ways that the black evils and selfless kindnesses that we do for one another resonate with people we never meet, whose lives we can scarcely imagine.


Final thoughts:  If the above sounds inane, meaningless, or like a particularly bad bout of over-analysis, then I apologize, but this is a film that defies easy description. Some critics have savaged the film for being a plodding bore, others for being overly full of itself, and some even for being horribly racist (several actors change their ages, genders, and even races for some of their characters, not always with the most convincing of effects). And yet, if I am to be brutally honest with everyone, I can't possibly describe it in terms other than near-rapture. I've seen dozens, hundreds of films in my life, both before and during this grand experiment. And yet I cannot name more than a handful of movies that have left me with such a feeling of awe and wonder as this one did. All the complaints I leveled against it in the beginning are true, and remained true throughout the movie, and yet at some point, I simply began to perceive what this film was trying to show me, and like an incomparably intricate Swiss clock, every element simply slid into place. What response it will generate from others, I cannot possibly speculate, yet the passion, heart, and empathy of the film are so strong as to be overflowing, all without once veering into maudlin or mawkish sentimentality. It is, without question, one of the greatest films I have ever seen.

'We are all connected to one another,' says one of the characters in this movie repeatedly, and indeed both the narrative and the thematic hearts of the film are encompassed within the above statement. This film's subject matter is no less than the interwoven nature of our lives, not in some basic tit-for-tat sense, but in all its glorious, majestic complexity. It shows us as we are, billions of individual threads dancing around and between one another, forming iterative patterns much greater than ourselves, simultaneously newly minted and long-worn. When revealed in all its glory, the resulting tapestry is vast beyond scope, yet infinitely detailed, a fractal pattern repeating itself forever, and each time in a manner wholly new. We call the result History.

Final Score:  9.5/10

Argo

Alternate Title:  The Best Bad Idea

One sentence synopsis:  A CIA exfiltration expert creates a fake Hollywood movie in order to rescue American diplomats during the Iran Hostage Crisis.


Things Havoc liked:  Be honest with me. Back in the early 2000s, when you had just finished seeing one of the lengthy series of disastrously terrible Ben Affleck movies that came out around then, movies like Pearl Harbor, Daredevil, or Gigli, did you ever imagine that some ten years later, you would find yourself looking forward to the newest film from critically acclaimed director Ben Affleck? I sure as hell didn't, and yet following films like Gone Baby Gone and The Town, there's simply no two ways about it. Affleck knows what he's doing behind the camera, and directing himself, he has put together a hell of a movie here.

Argo is a story so strange I would not have believed it if my own research had not backed it up. It concerns a fake CIA-financed science fiction movie that was thrown together so as to provide a cover for smuggling a handful of American diplomats out of the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran. Yet strange as the story is, the movie about it is very down-to-earth. Every step in the process, from the initial escape to the planning, preparation, and execution is dealt with precisely and efficiently, never rushing, but also never slowing down for forced character moments, relying on the characters themselves to come through via the plot. The best of a very strong cast is Alan Alda, an actor whose appeal I've never quite "gotten", who here plays Lester Siegel, a Hollywood film producer approached by the CIA to provide cover for the fake movie. Alda's only in the film for about half an hour, but is absolutely note-perfect as a man who has played around in Hollywood long enough to know exactly how and when to bullshit people and how and when to threaten and bluster to get what he wants. Yet unlike a lot of retrospective "Hollywood on Hollywood" movies (such as Hollywoodland), the film never gets caught up in itself, relegating the Hollywood material to its proper place in the overall plot.

The film is a visible throwback to the 70s, not only in decor, hairstyles (those mustaches), but also in the overall structure. With nearly no action to speak of, the focus is on deliberation and procedure, an intentional throwback to classic spy thrillers like Day of the Jackal or The Spy who Came in from the Cold. The fact that we know how the mission turned out (at least if we've done any cursory research on the film) does not stop it from being extremely tense, particularly in a heavily atmospheric sequence in a crowded souk where a shopkeeper begins screaming at our heroes in untranslated Farsi over an issue nobody, including the audience, is able to even understand. The cinematography, meanwhile, is superb, showcasing Tehran as a normal, functioning city that has been at least partly taken over by madmen. The normal, everyday functioning elements of the city are juxtaposed with the rampaging 'students' who are apparently free to kill whoever they want, conscript small children for slave labor, and, at will, disrupt entire sections of the city's infrastructure. And yet none of these things feel artificial or ring false. This was, we believe, what it was to live in Tehran in 1979. And it was not an experience to recommend.


Things Havoc disliked:  The Iran Hostage crisis is still a contentious issue, to say the least, and the film does try to address in as balanced a manner as it can. Unfortunately, that balanced treatment amounts to "following thirty years of unrelieved evil, the Americans finally got what was coming to them."

Am I exaggerating? Yes, massively. But the problem with trying to condense a massively complicated political situation down into 45 seconds of title crawl is that someone is invariably going to wind up looking like a cartoonish villain, and given who and what made this film, one can guess just who that person is. It's a shame that the film does this, because this is one of the only films I can recall in which the CIA are actually portrayed as good guys doing good things. And yet lest this sound like a blip at the beginning of the movie, the film re-enforces the matter with not one but several scenes in which US diplomatic agents in hiding for their very lives, their friends and colleagues being beaten and tortured just down the road for months on end, discuss with one another how the Iranian revolution and its aftermath are the just deserts of the terrible US foreign policy they previously were responsible for enacting. While it's certainly true that there's precious little for the US to brag about in the history of its relations with Iran from circa 1950 onwards, I would submit that this is not a point likely to present itself as reasonable to people driving through streets filled with the hanged bodies of secularists while armed maniacs pursue them with assault rifles. It reads, at least to me, as a failed attempt to contextualize the events of the movie by trying not to portray the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as "all that bad", despite the visibly bad things they are attempting to do to our heroes. Again, perhaps it's just me reading this into the film, but most film critics have been praising this movie for its "even-handed" approach to the Iran Crisis. I would submit to such people that "even-handed" is not defined as blaming everything on the Americans, but that's generally not a position likely to find backers in some portions of Hollywood.


Final thoughts:  But while I may be obsessive about these obscure historico-political interpretations, I'm not so far gone to fail to recognize a good film when I see it. Argo is an excellent spy thriller, well-shot and acted, and with the additional virtue of somehow, despite its ludicrousness, being absolutely true. Oscar buzz (though I consider the possibility a long shot) has already begun circling around the movie, a clear signal to me that we are finally entering into Oscar season, the last of the three major "phases" that the film calendar recognizes. Given the worse-than-usual Doldrums and the utterly wasted Blockbuster season that we experienced this year (Avengers and Batman notwithstanding), I am hopeful that Argo represents the beginning of a much better stretch of film for the next few months.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Taken 2

Alternate Title:  Liam Neeson Kills Everyone Again

One sentence synopsis:  A retired special forces agent is attacked by the families of the men he killed protecting his daughter.


Things Havoc liked:  I don't mean to sound critical here, but for the last few years, Liam Neeson has been progressively transitioning from his previous wide range of movie roles to a typecasting of "badass middle-aged father figure who still has it". Though he's one of my favorite actors, thanks to films like Schindler's List, Love Actually, Rob Roy, Les Miserables, and Kingdom of Heaven, I've nonetheless always been conscious that Neeson is the sort of actor who needs a strong, capable director and script in order to bring out his talents. Without such things, Neeson tends to revert to monotone blandness, as examples as diverse as Star Wars Episode 1, the A-Team, and the Haunting can attest to. That said, one of his strengths is his ability to bring a level of quiet, refined subtlety to his better roles, whether they be Oscar Bait or his more recent action extravaganzas. A good example for this would be The Grey, where Neeson elevated the entire tone of the movie out of "Taken with Wolves" and into something truly special. Despite all the dross on his IMDB page, I still like watching Neeson, and I get excited to see him in most movies.

One of the things I liked about the original Taken was that, while the routine that Neeson went through to track his daughter down was demonstrably goofy, the movie at the very least did spend a great deal of time showing him go through it. Even if the particular steps and leaps that he was making in his search for his daughter (particularly the magic CIA buddy with infinite data on everything) were stupid, the movie got across tonally just how difficult and complex the process actually was, which lent credibility to the notion of a father with badass skills chasing his daughter down like a remorseless calculation engine. Taken 2, I'm relieved to report, tries to keep this model going. Easily the best sequence in the film comes roughly a third of the way in, after Neeson and his wife have been kidnapped by bad guys (the trailers spoil this, so I shall too). For about a solid half-hour, the movie puts the brakes on the action in favor of showing Neeson progressively working out how he will escape from this situation, giving us everything from complex memorization routines of the route his car is taking, to a phone conversation with his daughter that culminates in the use of dead reckoning by means of map circles, echolocation by hand grenade, and inferences made based on weather conditions, all so that Neeson can figure out where he is, and use this information to get a weapon and escape. It's far-fetched of course (I'm impressed by how nonchalantly the Istanbul police took random hand grenade explosions), but no more so than the glazed-over handwaving you find in most action films, and the detail to which the film goes works in its favor, lending the scene a patina (if nothing more) of believability.


Things Havoc disliked:  I never understood the hoopla over the original Taken. In my mind it was a formulaic, average action flick, elevated slightly by a few above-average scenes. And yet Taken became so iconic (the famous "I will find you" montage attained internet meme status) that I can today cite its title in a pun and be reasonably sure that everyone will understand what I mean. I didn't hate Taken, mind you, it was an all right action flick, but I don't understand what made it so special. And given that, I don't think this movie was made for me.

The premise is decent enough. Neeson, having slaughtered several busloads of people in the first movie through methods that were not entirely ethical (or sane), now faces a large quantity of people who have fairly specific things to say to him about having electrocuted their sons/brothers to death. As a motive to kick the action off, this is a great idea, deconstructing the first movie as a means for beginning the second, but unfortunately, outside of a couple minor scenes, the film never makes anything of this concept. The bad guys are simply another horde of faceless men out to get our determined hero, and the legitimate grievances they have with him are only ever addressed in the most perfunctory manner. The reliably awesome Rade Šerbedžija, brought in here to serve as Neeson's primary antagonist, is tied heavily into this reciprocity concept, and yet because the film drops it so perfunctorily, the result is that Šerbedžija is barely in the film at all.

So what do we get instead? Action scenes. Boring, repetitive, absurdly over-edited action scenes. The director of this film, Olivier Megaton, seems intent on proving my theory that no man who ever changed his name into something sounding supposedly "badass" has ever made a good film. Shot lengths in fight scenes are about three nanoseconds long, alternating between shots of Neeson holding a gun and looking concerned with distance shots of someone with noticeably different hair color performing martial arts. Neeson is 60 years old (though he does look younger), and I don't blame him for being unable to do all his own stunts here. But the least that a director can do is try and make the stunts look reasonably plausible, or at least sew the stunt double work together competently. There's exactly one fight scene, near the end of the film, which while completely contrived, does actually look like the sort of fight two older men with military training might have. Everything else is the invincible hero shooting, beating, and stabbing his way through villains that can't threaten him, all shot in a confused, hyper-frenetic manner that prevents you from seeing what's going on. Occasionally they add a car chase.


Final thoughts:  No, Taken 2 isn't horrible. I've seen far worse action films this year. But there's just nothing about it that's at all 'special', even by the standards of Liam-Neeson-revenge films (a surprisingly large genre). Granted, I didn't think there was anything too special about the first Taken either, but that movie at least had good, competent action with a strong narrative and interesting moral questions. This one seems to have somehow ratcheted the stakes down, like we're watching a direct-to-DVD sequel that got somehow released in cinemas, and none of the promising elements that the first film had have been followed up on.

Go see this movie if you must, but whatever it was you people found in the original Taken, I doubt seriously you're gonna find it here.

Final Score:  4.5/10

Dredd

Alternate Title:  Laaaaauuuuuugggghhhhhh!

One sentence synopsis:  The veteran Judge Dredd and a rookie psychic must fight for their lives against an arcology-wide drug gang.


Things Havoc liked:  Ever since appearing in The Lord of the Rings, Karl Urban has apparently made it his personal mission to appear in as many terrible action movies as he possibly can. Oh there's exceptions here and there (his turn as Leonard McCoy in Star Trek was inspired), but I refuse to believe that movies like Doom, Pathfinder, or Priest ever looked good, even on paper. That said, I've always had a soft spot for Urban, as even in the worst of films, he always manages to avoid looking like a complete fool by playing everything as straight and simple as possible, letting others do the hilarious overacting. Given this, his selection for Judge Dredd makes perfect sense. A far cry from the 90s Stalone adaptation, Urban's Dredd is less a character than a presence, a monotone archetype of toughness, perpetually scowling, whispering in a gravelly voice filled with menace. Though I've never read the comics, Urban's Dredd is exactly what I expected the character to embody, a single-minded lawman of simply inhuman dedication. He is not a caricature, nor a monomaniacal ass, there are sequences where he expresses admiration for idealistic views of the law, but Dredd himself is a remorseless, relentless figure, not cynical so much as beyond ideology. Urban plays him as a man who feels no need to bluster over his embodiments of the Law, for he has nothing whatsoever to prove. And given Urban's solid action movie credentials up to this point, the result is exactly as it should be.

This much I expected. What I didn't expect was Olivia Thirlby, an unknown 20-something playing Judge Anderson, a rookie cop with advanced psychic capabilities assigned to Dredd for evaluation. When I heard that this was to be the setup, I damn-near wrote the movie off altogether. If there's one cliche to cop movies that I simply don't need to see again, it's the 'young, fresh-faced rookie who must prove himself to the hardened veteran', particularly when the young rookie is a woman, typically intended to bring the softer side out of our main character. To my abject astonishment however, that's not at all what I received here. Anderson is young, and a rookie, intimidated by Dredd and her surroundings, and yet when the chips are down, she does not come across as the hesitating newbie who must make good, but a confident judge learning very quickly on her feet, bringing her own perspective to the business of law enforcement. A good early sequence establishes her motives for joining the judges, and the rationale given follows her all the way through the terrible ordeal she is made to undergo. Moreover, a sequence midway through the movie, when she is called upon to employ her psychic abilities to interrogate a suspect is damn near inspired, sidestepping all of our expectations for what letting a frightened girl into the mind of a hardened killer will result in, in favor of exploring just how scary a Judge with mental powers should properly be. Thirlby does all this without ever once losing the veneer of a rookie cop, allowing the film to ride the line of viewer expectation from start to finish. I admit to being impressed.

Most of the film takes place in a massive "block" tower, a 200-story skyscraper housing tens of thousands of residents, controlled by a criminal gang that must number in the high hundreds. In addition to provoking comparisons to last year's "The Raid" (more on that later), this location (chosen I assume to keep the costs down) allows the movie to focus on practical, as opposed to CGI effects, a decision I generally welcome. The action is crisp and easy to follow, unladen with modern contrivances such as shakycam, and while there's a fair amount of slo-mo work, it's actually explained in the plot quite well, and used for aesthetic, rather than stupid reasons. The supporting cast, headlined by Wood Harris (of the Wire) is uniformly excellent, giving us a gang of drug-fiends that are entirely believable, and grounding the more absurd stuff we are shown in a realistic setting. Overall, the movie simply works, and comes out to a good, solid action flick.


Things Havoc disliked:  Of course, that's not to say that there's no problems at all. One of them is unfortunately the villain, played by Lena Headey. Headey, of Sarah Connor and Game of Thrones fame is entirely wasted in this movie, playing a rote-criminal named Ma Ma who produces and sells drugs. The movie gives her no motives beyond that, despite hints of an interesting back-story, and she is required to play through the film in such a drug-addled stupor that it probably wouldn't matter anyway. I know the focus is supposed to be on Dredd and Anderson, but a villain can often make an action film, and it would have been nice to see some effort in that direction.

Frankly though, the main issue I had with this movie is going to sound a bit churlish. I've always held the position that it's neither fair nor reasonable to criticize a movie for not being a different movie, but in this case, having seen The Raid, a movie that is practically a carbon copy of this one, I find myself unable to separate the two, and unfortunately, Dredd comes out worse in the comparison. The Raid's action, though I stand by my position that it was not quite at the A+ level of some other kung fu blockbusters, was still of very high quality, and Dredd's, workmanlike though it is, just isn't in that same class. The gunfights are too procedural, and the bulky judge costumes prevent the actors (or stuntmen) from performing acrobatic stunts or hand-to-hand combat. I get that Dredd is not a typical action hero, a direct and forceful presence who simply bludgeons his way through any opposition, but the action in this film actually gets repetitive, as it never varies from Dredd shooting people with various types of ammunition while looking stern. It's all done well, but the action is never allowed to build to a transcendent "awesome" moment, instead simply running through scene after scene of shooting the same bad guys in the same fashion.


Final thoughts:  I must admit to being surprised that I liked Dredd at all, and yet while that's always a welcome development, it didn't manage to wow me the way other action films of this or last year did. That said, I did think the movie worked, and the concept and casting deserve a look. Given that the alternative for fans of Judge Dredd is Sylvester Stalone screaming at Armand Assante about the LAAAAAUUUGGGHH, I don't hesitate to suggest that such fans may want to cleanse their cinematic palates here.

After all, there's no Rob Schneider this time.

Final Score:  6.5/10

End of Watch

Alternate Title:  Knights in Blue

One sentence synopsis:  Two cops in South-Central Los Angeles run afoul of Mexican Drug cartels while living their lives outside of work.


Things Havoc liked:  I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: I hate Jake Gyllenhaal. I hate him primarily because he starred in Donnie Darko, one of the most overrated movies in cinematic history. He did not help his case when he went on from that to make movies like October Sky and The Day After Tomorrow, alternately a sappy snoozefest derived from the worst dregs of the 1950s and a preachy extremist tale of how Dick Cheney destroyed the world. Even his "good" work, such as Brokeback Mountain or last year's Source Code either went unseen by me, or had their virtues somehow contrive to hide themselves in my presence. As such, I was not exactly eager to go see this movie, headlined as it was by Mr. Gyllenhaal, but my other selection for this week fell through, and I found myself with no other options.

I should have known better. End of Watch was written and directed by David Ayer, writer of such movies as Dark Blue, SWAT, and a movie so good it made me like Ethan Hawke, Training Day. Ayer is a rarity, a Hollywood writer so good with a particular genre that he has managed to typecast himself, but given that we're working within the genre here, that's no problem. And to make this film, Ayer wisely added Michael Pena, formerly of Crash and various TV movies, to serve as Officer Mike Zavala, partner of Officer Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal) on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles. In a film with very few missteps, Pena steals the show as one of the most "real" portrayals of a cop I've ever seen on the silver screen. None of the usual things one means by "real" apply here, as Zavala (and Taylor) are neither "gritty" nor "hard boiled" nor "break all the rules" nor "rookies", though they are all of these things at times. Instead they are real people, partners in a Law Enforcement agency that might well exist, just as portrayed. Taylor and Zavala are less like partners and more like brothers, covering one another's backs in a sense that goes beyond professional but never veers into hackneyed cliche. They attend each others' weddings, talk about their lives, their plans, their hopes, joke and fight with one another the way only people of long acquaintance can, cementing over and over again a bond between them that seems absolutely real. In one of the best sequences in the film, Zavala offers Taylor tickets to a Dodgers game, which he turns down, as he and his girlfriend are going to attend the LA Philharmonic instead. "Oh, okay, have fun with your white people shit," says Zavala, entirely without sarcasm.

End of Watch isn't really a narrative film in the sense that we expect. It's not about a series of events that happen in sequence to characters who are changed by the experience. Instead, the movie is simply about two cops, no more, no less, chronicling their lives as peace officers in South Central LA, an area showcased so much in film that merely mentioning it brings all manner of expectations to the forefront. The film is shot Blair-Witch style with a series of cameras mounted on dashboards, jacket pockets, or within lockers, presumably as a film school assignment on the part of one of the cops, permitting us to essentially follow along with them as they go through their days. We see Taylor and Zavala cruising their patrols, serving warrants, performing traffic stops on suspicious vehicles. We see them dealing with other cops from their precinct, dealing with paperwork, we meet their families, attend their weddings and the births of their children, and are just generally allowed to get to know them without the need for an imposed storyline or narrative. Oh the story is there, certainly, involving Mexican drug cartels and the increasingly violent events that the two cops get swept up in, but it's never once pushed to the forefront, nor made to feel like the movie is about anything but the lives of these two police. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might have been boring. Instead it's almost fascinating.


Things Havoc disliked:  The gimmick here is that the movie is "found footage" of a sort, compiled from cameras mounted in the cops' car, on their uniforms, etc... Unfortunately, rudimentary thinking causes this conceit to fall apart. Sequences wherein the bad guys (a gang of affiliated gangsters trying to ascend the ranks of the cartel) are filmed planning their crimes torpedo the entire premise instantly, as does any one of the many, many shots wherein someone besides the two cops is plainly holding the camera. This break in the immersion isn't terribly jarring, admittedly, but it leads one to ask why the conceit of a film-making project was necessary in the first place.

There's also a couple of sequences that are just not handled terribly well. The gangster that Pena throws down with early on in the film, thus earning respect for having the balls to handle himself, is a bit too heavy-handed. Surely it takes more for a cop to gain the confidence and admiration of a hard-core two-time felon gangster in South Central LA than said cop fighting him man to man and not bolstering the felon's charges for it? There's also the unfortunate addition of Cody Horn as Davis, the Rookie cop, who while she is not in the film terribly much, has an obviously pre-scripted role in the time-honored tradition of Rookie cops in movies. Again, nothing that would be too jarring, save for the overall high level of verisimilitude in the movie in general.


Final thoughts:  Honestly though, that's about all I can complain about here. End of Watch isn't a game-changer for actor or genre the way Training Day was, but it's nonetheless one of the most complete cop films I've ever seen, and my opinion of the movie, high as it was on exiting, has only increased with time. And while I wouldn't say it has made me a fan of Jake Gyllenhaal, if he keeps on making movies like this one, we might get there some day.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Sleepwalk with Me

Alternate Title:  Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard


One sentence synopsis:  A struggling stand-up comedian must deal with a decision on whether to marry his long-term girlfriend, as well as a worsening case of sleepwalking.


Things Havoc liked:  I'd never heard of Mike Birbiglia before, but judging from his IMDB and Wikipedia pages, that places me in something of a minority. My sister, who had heard of him, recommended that I see this film, based on a one-man Broadway play and a series of stand-up sketches he performed at various times on tour and for National Public Radio, detailing the lengthy process that he went through trying to define his relationship with his long-term girlfriend, break into the stand-up comedian business, and deal with a sleepwalking problem that has grew progressively worse as the tensions with the first two issues increased. To describe it as a 'problem' is perhaps understating the matter. One episode involves Birbiglia diving headfirst through a closed, second-story window in his hotel room, an incident we are repeatedly assured actually happened.

Such assurances come to us because Sleepwalk with me is filmed as a part-movie, part-Video log, with lengthy sequences wherein Birbiglia stares into a camera mounted in his car passenger seat, and explains to us his mindset or additional details concerning what we are about to see or have just seen. It's a narrative trick that used to be far more common in indie cinema, the best example of which is probably 'High Fidelity', John Cusack's greatest movie, made back in 2000. Through it, Birbiglia delivers a bewildering array of flashbacks, flash-forwards, timeskips, and other editing tricks that somehow manage to knit together into a coherent, nominally autobiographical story.

I'm normally suspicious of autobiographies, but I'm prepared to take this one on faith, considering the utter disregard this movie seems to hold its main character in. Birbiglia is portrayed here as an insensitive idiot, not mean necessarily, just clueless to the point of blindness thanks to the competing pressures he either receives or perceives from his parents (played by Carol Kane and the ubiquitous James Rebhorn), his sister, his agent, and of course, his long-time (8-year) girlfriend, played by Lauren Ambrose. We watch him as he drifts through his life, struggling to break into stand up comedy, despite having apparently no talent whatsoever for it. As Birbiglia himself is a famous comedian, with Comedy Central specials, successful Broadway plays, and now a Sundance Festival Award, I must assume that he is only pretending to be an awkward, unfunny comedian struggling to find his voice, a role he is eminently successful at. Indeed, despite the absurd lengths to which both his sleepwalking (drop kicking a clothes hamper and protesting in his sleep that it's a jaguar), and his comedy career (how does anyone continue after bombing on stage like that?) go, the film never once caused me to sit back and cynically question whether things like this had happened. It all felt entirely real...


Things Havoc disliked:  ... which is sort of the problem.

Birbiglia is not only the main star of this film, but also wrote and directed it, and here we run into an issue that often afflicts projects this personal. A movie created entirely by one person and based entirely around their life story can fail in a number of ways, one of which is the 'so what' test. Events that have earth-shattering importance when they are happening to you are not necessarily going to translate into interest for a wider audience, unacquainted with the details of your personal circumstance and unconcerned with whether or not you succeed in your goals. That's not to say you can't get up on a screen and tell us your story, any audience should be willing to give a filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. But we need a reason to be interested in what you have to tell us, or else the film risks turning into the celluloid equivalent of that annoying bore who monopolizes the conversation for two hours at the office Christmas party to tell you how he rose above his Lawn Gnome addictions. And while Birbiglia is, I'm sure, a talented comedian who can tell a funny story when asked to, I'm afraid we see very little evidence of that here.

For one thing, there's nothing in the world quite as awkward as bad comedy, and to paraphrase Galvatron, there is an awful lot of bad comedy in this movie. I understand that it's intentional, that comedy is hard and that newly-starting comedians often bomb on stage, but it's still hard to watch a man get up on stage and fail to be funny. In a movie that tried to wring pathos or character out of Birbiglia's failures, this might have worked, but Sleepwalk With Me is Indie to a fault, and too afraid of appearing maudlin to give the main character any catharsis for his issues. Yes, in reality, this is probably how it went, but reality is no excuse for telling a boring story, and eventually the audience is left sitting through yet another unfunny comedy routine, just waiting for it all to end. And while we do get flashes, later on, of the more successful routines that he eventually came up with, the routines are never allowed to build any momentum. A joke (or a scene) draws a laugh from the audience, and then is abandoned, as the movie veers off into another aspect of Birbiglia's strange life. Much attention is paid, for instance, to the fact that Birbiglia begins to achieve success when he draws on his own personal life for his comedy, and his worries about whether his girlfriend will understand him doing so, all without ever paying off the question.

Even when he's not on stage though, Birbiglia's life is not just enough to hold our attention. The will-they-or-won't-they dance that he and his girlfriend do play out like slightly more self-aware sitcom formulas, their veracity notwithstanding, something not helped by the movie pausing every five minutes so that Birbiglia can explain what he was thinking at the time to us. High Fidelity worked so well because Cusack's musings at the camera served as an effective contrast to what he was doing between the monologues, giving us insight into his philosophies, tastes, and intentions of the character. Most of the time, he was not directly discussing what he had just done or was about to do, trusting to us to connect the dots between his oblique references and memories, and his present situation. Birbiglia's monologues consist mostly of him explaining his thoughts to us directly, telling us what should frankly be shown instead. This is not helped by Birbiglia's general manner of speech both in and out of monologue. Stand-up comedy involves a loose, stream-of-consciousness recitation of pre-planned material designed to make it all sound off-the-cuff. Film, a completely different medium than stand-up, does not reward hemming and hawing, and Birbiglia's colorless tone and broken cadence, which never varies between monologue, dialogue, and stand-up routine, lends the whole thing a feeling of contrivance and dispassion. This gives the film (in combination with the subject matter) a very Woody Allen-like feel, save that Birbiglia, try as he might, is simply not the same caliber of filmmaker that Woody Allen is (of course, given Allen's last project, neither is he).


Final thoughts:  This movie isn't horrible, but it never really rises above the level of mediocre. Its artifices and style, which no doubt garnered it all manner of awards from professional film critics, serve either to deaden what life is in this material, or simply try to disguise the lack thereof. There are a few moments where Birbiglia gives himself license to do what I assume he does best, which draw a couple of laughs (a joke involving him and his girlfriend discussing their worst fears is actually really funny), but these fade as quickly as they arise, as though Birbiglia was too afraid of being accused of narcissism to actually let us into his head. Ultimately, Sleepwalk with Me is a leaden, uninteresting enterprise, one that takes a story that is intensely personal and fails to convince the rest of us that it need be anything else.

Final Score:  4.5/10