The Cabin in the Woods

Alternate Title:  Deconstructing Horror


One sentence synopsis:  Five college students go to a remote cabin and fall prey to a horrible fate.


Things Havoc liked:  I am not a fan of horror movies. The entire genre is basically lost on me, as I don't find the spectacle of watching awful things happen to undeserving people to be either fulfilling or beneficial. I recognize that this is an unfair characterization of the genre, the pinnacles which are masterpieces of craftsmanship and atmosphere such as Alien, Exorcist, or the Thing. It is simply a matter of taste in my case, similar to my antipathy towards Romantic Comedies, and I have avoided reviewing horror films for this weekly exercise to-date because I simply do not believe that I have the proper background or objectivity to speak to their quality. So it was with some reluctance that I sat down to watch The Cabin in the Woods, on the strength of very strong recommendations from friends and family, and prepared myself to witness the usual routine of teenagers and twenty-somethings being transformed progressively from living beings to dead meat.

That expectation lasted ten seconds.

The Cabin in the Woods was created by the always-polarizing Joss Whedon, in conjunction with Cloverfield screenwriter Drew Goddard, a partnership that has already produced many hit television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Whedon is many things to many people, and there is a current within the nerd community that believes him strongly overrated, but he has always been fond of twisting the genre conventions of whatever genre he happens to be working in at the moment in a way that most other directors and writers merely pay lip service to. As such, describing this film as a horror movie does not properly do it justice. The movie plays with expectations to a degree I don't think I've ever seen in any film before, changing entire genres not once but multiple times, in a send-up to every horror film concept imaginable. The best comparison I can give is perhaps the Scream movies, only where Scream merely toyed with the concept of a self-aware horror film, this movie doesn't merely dive into the concept, but then rejects that notion in turn, and peels back another layer. It's actually fascinating.

You will notice I'm not saying much about the plot. The reason for this is that I don't believe I can say much about it without spoiling something, and here, the very explanation of what even the initial plot is will serve as a spoiler of sorts. Better, perhaps, to discuss the cast, which though comprised mostly of people I've never heard of, is spot-on-point from start to finish. The five leads play characters that are superficially the usual archetypes that one finds in the film, the Jock, the sexpot, the stoner, etc, but all of them are played with subtle nuance that renders them into actual characters, rather than simple sketches, and provides the answer to the age old question of why such disparate archetypes would ever associate with one another. The only one I recognize is Chris Hemsworth, of Thor fame, who here is frankly just as good as he was in that previous film. Special accolades should go to Fran Kranz, whom I've never heard of before, whose stoner philosopher is drop-dead hilarious (and not in the usual 'laugh at the stoned guy' way), and who truly steals the show in at least half a dozen scenes.

The antagonists, of which there are many, are headed off by, of all people, Bradley Whitford (of the West Wing) and Richard Jenkins (of The Visitor), both of whom turn in wonderful, funny(!), believable, and tremendously entertaining performances that remind of me of Aaron Sorkin's work (though that may be because Whitford seems to be playing Josh Lyman in his post-White House career, not that I object). If you're having trouble imagining how these two men in their 50s and 60s, both famous as realistic, sardonic character actors, manage to play the antagonists in a horror film and do it well, then all I can say is that the film manages to do just that. To say more would be to reveal matters that of plot, and in this case, the plot is the point. Finally, there are a couple of cameos, particularly one at the end which, if one is cognizant of the genre (which one ought be if one wishes to get everything out of this film), are simply wickedly-awesome, and must be seen to be believed.



Things Havoc disliked: Of all the five main leads, I wasn't wildly fond of Kristen Connoly, who seemed a bit too worldly to be playing the character she was (the bookish shy girl). As I said, everyone's archetype is twisted here to round them out and make them actual interesting characters, but I thought her rounding wasn't done as well as everyone else's, and that her performance as a result felt less real. This may be a factor of the high standard to which she is being compared, but it did stick out.

More importantly, and you all must forgive me for being coy on this subject, I did not find the ending of the film to be satisfying. I understand where it comes from, given the irreverent disembowelment of the usual rotes of the genre, and I certainly can't accuse the movie of either failing to make sense logically or failing to have the courage of its convictions. But given the characters that we've been presented with, and their general likeability, the decisions made at the end of the film struck me as very off-putting, a case of the screenwriters ceasing to simply wink at the audience and stepping out from behind their curtain. That can work sometimes (Inglorious Basterds for instance), when the film's tone has lent itself to the decisions made at the end of the movie, but as the tone, detached as it was, did not establish itself properly in this case, I felt the ending was a let-down. Your mileage may vary.



Final thoughts:    I've been surprised by the quality of movies before, but rarely have I been as surprised as this. The Cabin in the Woods transcends its genre, indeed it may transcend all genres, and stands as a film that I can unhesitatingly recommend not only to aficionados of Horror (of which I am not), but to any moviegoer mired in the still-lingering doldrums and looking for something different to see (of which I definitely am). Say what you will about Joss Whedon's quality as a storyteller, the man knows how to produce daring and even riveting work, and here has generated a true masterpiece, one that, if there is any justice in the world, will easily displace Scream as the archetype of a truly modern horror film.

Final Score:  8.5/10

The Raid: Redemption

Alternate Title:  Ass Kicking, The Game: The Movie


One sentence synopsis:  An Indonesian SWAT officer must fight his way through an apartment complex filled with the minions of an evil drug lord.



Things Havoc liked:  There is a part of me that appreciates the premise of a movie like this. One man is required for arbitrary reasons to beat the hell out of an entire army of bad guys using only his guns, melee weapons, and martial art fighting skills. A movie that has no pretensions of being anything except precisely what it is: a showcase for violence in the most cinematic style conceivable. There is a place in my heart for this sort of film, and I went into it expecting to see awesomeness.

The Raid is an Indonesian production, designed to showcase the panoply of indigenous martial arts known as Pencak Silat, a catch-all term for a series of martial arts practiced throughout the Indonesian islands. I can't say that I can tell the difference between Silat and other south-east-asian martial arts, but then I don't suppose I need to. Indo-chinese martial arts are infamous for their brutal, vicious deadliness, with many limbs being snapped in horrible, acrobatic fashions. This movie provides more than enough opportunities to showcase Silat in all its gory glory, as our hero proceeds from assault rifles to guns to melee weapons to bare fists, destroying a metric horde of enemies in every conceivable manner. Action sequences are varied and high-energy, showcasing the skills of our hero (Iko Uwais) over those of his sufficiently dastardly enemies. If Uwais is attempting to make it as an action movie star, this film should give him plenty of bragging rights, for he definitely comes across as a sufficiently bad dude here.

Of course a hero is nothing if not pitted against sufficiently nasty antagonists, and this movie establishes several excellent ones, particularly the inventively-named "Mad Dog" (Yayan Ruhian), a reasonably small man who exhibits terrifying skill at demolishing those people who cross his path. Several other antagonists, including a terrifying-looking man with a machete whose name I have been unable to determine, serve as excellent foils for our heroes efforts to smash his way through every floor of the run-down apartment building. All of these men perform stunt-work that is truly impressive, and succeed in selling the ruthless, brutal violence that the movie uses as its raison-d'etre.



Things Havoc disliked: You may have noticed that I didn't mention the plot above. The reason for that isn't what you think.

A movie like this is not going to be plot-heavy. The plot exists as a vehicle for fight sequences of greater or lesser length, and is generally dispensed with. Many martial arts films actually take pride in this fact, producing advertising that hinges on the notion of having a complete, 90+ minute film without any of that boring plot stuff to get in the way. Walking into this movie, I felt as though I had been promised such a thing, and was disappointed to find that I did not receive it.

Before anyone pillories me, I'm not saying that movies should not have plots. I am saying that the plot in this film, which is necessarily forgettable and foolish, was not worth the sacrifice of 30-or-so minutes of the runtime. Standard movies must have plots, of course, but the martial arts film is a genre unto itself, and while there are plenty of martial arts films with excellent plots, characters, and story (Fearless, Kung Fu Hustle, etc...) a lazy, half-MacGuffin plot simply does not add to the experience. One is reminded of the old saying about pornographic movie plots, that they are expected to be there, but do not form the attraction of the film.  The filmmakers should have had the courage to actually follow through with their plot-less convictions, or alternately should have put in the time and effort to give us something worth seeing for half an hour of their movie. They unfortunately did neither.

But while the plot is secondary to a film like this, the action is not, and much as it pains me to say, this action, while good, is not world-class. Films like Ong Bak, or Sat Po Long have really raised the bar in terms of what superb action choreography and filming can be these days, and the fight sequences in The Raid, impressive as they are, athletic as they are, are not in the league of the reigning champions of this genre. The battles seem too choreographed, too forced, too close to the old saw of one man destroying legions of foes with one move each as they obediantly attack him one after the next. The durability of the hero and his major opponents becomes ludicrous after a point, and while none of this makes the film bad, it doesn't elevate it to the stratospheric heights of the great films in the genre.



Final thoughts:    Lest I seem too harsh though, this is a movie that more or less does exactly what it was intended to do, provide a spectacle of beatings and violence to entertain those who have an affinity for such things. Nothing here is done particularly badly, but neither is it elevated above its material. Still, if one is eager to see one man beat the tar out of many in a flashy, cinematic fashion, one could do far worse than this. Anyone else simply need not apply.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Footnote

Alternate Title:  Grumpy Old Jews


One sentence synopsis:  The undistinguished academic father of a distinguished academic son mistakenly receives his son's prestigious award.



Things Havoc liked:  What a strange film this is.

Billed, or at least masquerading as a comedy from the trailers, what we have here is a quirky, psychological portrait of two men, a father and son played by Shlomo Bar Aba and Lior Ashkenazi. The former plays a man who is simply neurotic, a philologist of such extreme academic focus as to test the credulity of even a Jewish academic. This is a man who feels his life's work is validated by a single footnote in an obscure journal, and who feels no shame in publicly denigrating anyone, including his own successful son, who doesn't meet his arbitrary definitions for scholarship. Bar Aba's performance is seething and bitter, a solopsistic bastard who never does anything specific that one could call out, but nevertheless leaves his contempt for everyone around him slathered all over everything he touches. Though I would not call him comedic, his is probably the best performance in the movie.

But only slightly less good is Lior Ashkenazi as the younger, more successful Professor Shkolnik. Much less insane than his father, he spends the first half of the film trying to convince the governing authorities to grant the prize to his father and the second half regretting it. The first half is his better work, as the movie wisely does not make him out to be an asshole or arrogant about his success. We see him fight for his father in the face of men who want to give him awards, and laud his father's accomplishments before crowds of dignitaries at ceremonies in his honor. The elder Shkolnik may be an asshole, but he is this man's father, and it shows.

I described the film as "quirky" a moment ago, and that's a reasonable descriptor for the filming style. The characters of these two professors are explained to us in a series of vignettes, complete with graphical presentation and subtitles. It works pretty well for what it is. Moreover while the movie is not a comedy, it does have moments of levity, particularly a hilarious sequence with the prize committee and their meeting room. Without ever saying a word about it, the film draws attention to the pettiness and absurdity of the posturing academicians in their incredibly narrow fields. If only more of the film could have been taken up with such material, I would have liked it better.



Things Havoc disliked: But the base fact is that most of the film is taken up with sequences, the purpose of which are wholly opaque to me, even after a week's reflection.

I've seen slower movies than this, but not many. And while nothing in the film is done incompetently, the fact is that sequences that should take thirty seconds require six times as long due to the need to apply the proper "style" to them. The father's revelation, the son's descent into jealousy, all of these themes are perfectly workable, but the montages that accompany them seem to be moving much less fast than the brains of the audiences, and we are left sitting there, having figured out fifteen seconds into a montage what is going to happen, and then waiting for six minutes for it to actually finish. When this happens multiple times in a film, it becomes old rapidly.

More seriously however, the problem with this film is that Bar Aba does his job a bit too well. The elder Professor Shkolnik is such an unlikeable bastard that we start to wonder how anyone, even his own son, can possibly put up with his bullshit. The man visibly seethes with jealousy of his son, contemptuously dismissing all of his accomplishments and mocking the very notion of being a teacher ("Philologist!" he screams to himself, insulted). Having finally won the award, he turns around and eviscerates his son (and most of the rest of academia) in the press for being lesser, corrupted, charlatans, in language that would drive theology professors to reach for their knives. I have literally had college professors threaten to commit vehicular homicide against my person for lesser slanders than this, and the fact that nobody ever calls Bar Aba to account makes everyone involved seem masochistic, stupid, or both.

Finally, without spoiling too much, the entire last section of the film, intended I believe to be ambiguous, is not. A movie such as Inception can get away with trickery in their endings, because of the care and time established to permit multiple points of view that can be paid off logically. Despite what some might think, there is actually a difference between being ambiguous, and between being lazy. Telling the audience a story is the job of the film-maker, and making them do all the work in a situation wherein the audience does not have the evidence necessary to infer it for themselves is a dereliction of the film-maker's duties. One risks at such times falling into a situation where the audience begins to suspect that the film ended where it did not because the story was finished, nor because the filmmaker had crafted it to end there, but because the writers could not figure out what they wanted to happen next.



Final thoughts:    Most movies I see get a little better in my memory after a few days. This one did not. It's hard to illustrate exactly why, as nobody in it is bad, nor is the story naturally uncompelling. But the behaviors of the characters are at such odds with one another, and the filmmaker is allowed to meander on to a forced conclusion in a way that I found fundamentally dis-satisfying. Perhaps there is a cultural element at work here, and that audiences in Israel are accustomed to interacting with the stories they are shown in a different manner. But here in the States, to my mind, there was an element to this movie that simply left me feeling like I had missed something fundamental.

Final Score:  5.5/10

The Hunger Games

Alternate Title:  Battle Royale with Cheese


One sentence synopsis:  A teenaged girl from a poor region must fight 23 other teenagers to the death for the pleasure of an oppressive government.



Things Havoc liked:  Jennifer Lawrence is fast becoming one of my favorite actresses. After an incredible performance in Winters' Bone (which garnered her an oscar), and another amazing one in X-men First Class (where she actually made me give a damn about Mystique), Lawrence here plays the title role of Katniss Everdeen, a teenager in what I assume to be Appalachia who volunteers for the Battle-Royale-esque Hunger Games to spare her younger sister. The movie rests entirely on her shoulders, more or less, and she carries it off with her. Despite being 21 and playing 16, she looks the part and acts the part, helped by the fact that her character clearly has had to grow up very fast in a dystopian, poverty-stricken world that appears to have regressed to the early 1900s. She's not a "designated action star", but when she fights people or shoots them with a bow, we believe it's her doing it, and the movie wisely never makes her do anything that breaks our suspension of disbelief.

The rest of the cast meets her highly-set standard quite handily. Stanley Tucci turns in a hilarious (and vaguely disturbing) role as a talk show host, and Woody Harrelson is hilarious as a former victor of the Hunger Games assigned to whip Katniss into shape. Donald Sutherland, playing the obligatory Donald Sutherland role of the President of the Sovereign Evil People's Evil Republic of Evil, brings his usual grandfatherly charm to a role that is actually fairly menacing, Elizabeth Banks plays an out-of-touch frilly shill with such verve that I was actually impressed, and none other than Lenny Kravitz manages a decent turn as Katniss' 'image' consultant for the all-important sponsorships that accompany the games. Finally, Lawrence (and Katniss') co-star is Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, whom I've literally never seen in anything good, but who actually breaks the trend here. He plays a normal kid selected for this insane competition, who has no chance of winning and knows it, but does largely whatever he has to in order to just make it through.

The movie is hardly subtle in its gradations of the world. Katniss and her people are dirt-poor coal miners from what I assume to be Appalachia, while the citizens of the Capital district (somewhere in the Rockies, I believe) look like a cross between Studio 54 and Versailles. The names of the District 12ers are either plants or traditional rural names (Primrose, Haymitch, Gale) while those of the Capital denizens are Roman (Cinna, Seneca, Coriolanus, Cato, Caesar). There's a very much bread-and-circuses feel attributed to the Capital (its' very name is "Panem"), with characters who witness or even participate in these somewhat monstrous events not from cruelty but from simple ignorance and decadence. It's not what I'd call nuanced, but it does the job.

Despite the trailers, action is not really the focus of this film, and yet when it does happen, the action is decent enough. Much of it is shot in faded-sound, a mechanic I'm seeing more and more of and hope doesn't become overused, with strategic shakes of the camera or blurring effects (this is how you're supposed to use shaky-cam, guys) to mute the violent fact that we're watching kids killing kids. Nobody transforms into a superman at any point, and when people get hurt, it freaking hurts, even if the healing salve that the characters apply several times does seem a bit too effective. Much of the movie is spent simply with tracking, maneuvering, walking, or hiding in the forest, which I suppose is reasonable enough. Were I trapped in a wooded arena wherein 24 people were meant to fight to the death, I'd probably lay low and wait for the numbers to come down too.



Things Havoc disliked: I hate to sound like a teenager, but this movie could really have used more action. I don't mind a cerebral film, nor one that eschews kung fu in a case like this, but the vast majority of the action in this film takes place off-screen, a decision I suspect was made to earn the film a PG-13 rating. It's not that I want Katniss to brutally murder more people, but the film is supposed to be about the brutalization of children and the attempt to hold onto common decency in a setting like this, and allowing Katniss to get away almost clean (which it does) renders that drama inert. There is a sequence where she pairs up with a much younger girl who saves her from a swarm of mutated hornets (don't ask), and who appears to look to her as a protector, and the entire time the audience is left thinking that, by the rules of the game, these two are going to be forced to kill each other. The movie (of course) sidesteps the question, but in doing so, robs the material of the drama that it inherently possesses. The only people Katniss ever actually has to kill are 'designated bad kids' who are generally in the immediate process of doing evil, which results in the film softballing its own hard, brutal premise.

On a slightly less metaphysical note though, the movie is quite long (almost two and a half hours), and while I didn't feel that was too much, I did feel that it didn't make good use of its time. More time spent with the weird and interesting society of Panem would have been nice, as opposed to yet another hike through the woods. Don't get me wrong, I know the Games themselves are the focus here, but we can only watch shots of people staring apprehensively at the trees for so long before we begin to get bored. The strange, facile, decadent world of Panem is so well-crafted that I was left wanting to see more from it, to find out if the majority of its citizens are evil, ignorant, or simply (and most interestingly) have a set of social morals that is simply alien to our own. It would also have been nice to establish some of the other contestants better. Gestures are made in the direction that the other kids, even the "evil" other kids, are just kids who are doing what they feel they have to in a situation that terrifies them all out of their wits. More of that would have aided the dramatic weight of the film more than the fourth shot of Katniss tying herself to the top of a tree to sleep.



Final thoughts:   Based on a YA trilogy of books (unread by me), the Hunger Games seems to have done well enough at the Box Office to merit sequels, and I can't say I disagree with that judgment based on the quality of the film. While I would have liked to see more of certain elements and less of others, the film itself is well-structured, acted, and shot, and Lawrence is a very believable and likeable heroine (even if her Appalachian accent is about as pronounced as my own). Though I wasn't as rapturous about it as some people I've talked to, I did quite like this film, and I would be interested in seeing where the series goes next. In an age where YA books have spawned such movie series as Twilight, I suppose one should count one's blessings.

Final Score:  7/10

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Alternate Title:  Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (what, you thought I was gonna top that?)


One sentence synopsis:  A biologist and a project manager try to help a Yemeni Sheik bring salmon fishing to his home country.


Things Havoc liked:  Independent film will be my salvation. When the doldrums are in full swing and the theaters stuffed with utter garbage, it is independent film that makes an experiment like this bearable. And popping up out of nowhere this year was a little film with a title so absurd that I sort of had to go and see it. Lighthearted comedies are not my usual fare, I know, but bear with me here. The alternative was 21 Jump Street.

Half political satire (a genre I'm lukewarm on), half romantic comedy (a genre I cordially hate), this movie is wickedly funny, particularly in the former case. Ewan McGregor (last seen being boring as hell in Beginners) plays a salmon expert working in some forgotten corner of the British government, trapped in a loveless marriage without realizing it. His counterpart, Emily Blunt (last seen opposite Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau), plays a woman hired to oversee a project that appears, on its face, to be insane, and upon further close study, to be even more insane. As romantic leads go, the arc these characters go through is nothing special, they hate one another at first and grow to love one another etc. That said, McGregor and Blunt are excellent in these roles (something not always true of McGregor), and particularly in the beginning of the film, sell the archetypes they are given flawlessly. What really pushes them over the boring threshold and into interesting characters however is the influence of the two real driving forces in the movie, the Sheik himself, and the Minister.

The Minister in question, the best character in the movie, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas as a cynical press officer to the British prime minister who latches onto the Salmon project as a means of generating good will between the UK and the Arab World. Thomas is flat out hilarious in every scene, playing the character like a partially-crazy control freak who is half again smarter than everyone else in the British government, and knows it all too well. The sort of character who insults their bosses at great length, confident that their boss won't get the joke. Though there's no doubt parallels to be made, the character isn't a particular pastiche of anyone (at least nobody I'm familiar with), as the point here is simple humor. Meanwhile, the Sheik, played by Egyptian actor Amr Waked (of Syriana), almost manages to convince the audience that a man might actually seek to do something like this. A pro-Western philosophical man who uses an outsized infrastructure project as an excuse to indulge in his hobby at home, he never quite gets across why he would dump this much money into a project this insane, but he manages to infer many of the reasons through his acting.

For a film that involves terrorism, death, political assassination, natural disaster, and spin doctoring, the film never gets morose or bogged down in moroseness. A lot of the humor is implied or observational, funny moments being elicited from shot construction or a piece of furniture. The direction (by Lasse Hallström, most of whose other films have been middling to awful) is this time sure and competent. The pacing is excellent, never letting the film drag too much in message or tragedy, intercutting hilarious sequences from back in Britain where the press, the government, and the officials who blend the two seem to be perpetually engaged in scheming against one another.



Things Havoc disliked: The story does get a bit absurd at points, particularly when terrorist assassins are infiltrating private estates in the Highlands of Scotland to shoot people. One can accept a certain level of absurdity in comedies of course, but the concept of the assassination is not played for laughs (though the resolution of it definitely is). There are several other sequences similar to this, where a plot point that seems ludicrous, even in a story about fishing salmon in the Middle East, is presented without actual comic purpose (the engineers from China come to mind).

But more important than the above is the formula of the romantic comedy element in this film. I don't object to the use of a formula here, as the basic formula is well executed. My objection is the "crisis" that the characters go through, in the form of Emily Blunt's boyfriend. Tom Mison (who plays the boyfriend) does a fine job, the issue is how he is inserted and re-inserted into the plot, something I can't describe without providing massive spoilers, but involves one of the characters acting in a way that would unquestionably get her beaten with a pipe wrench were she to do this in real life (and on national TV no less). It's transparently inserted into the story to provide a forced "crisis" between our two main characters, and contributes to why the last third or so of the film is the weakest.



Final thoughts:  But ultimately, you have to judge comedies, and particularly romantic comedies by different standards, and that is what I must do here. The movie is flat out funny, and that's kind of all you can ask a movie like this to be. It's not a laugh riot like some farces I've seen, but it maintains a generally funny tone throughout that elevates it above the pedestrian formula and last-third issues. As such, if you're fortunate enough to have an independent cinema near you, it might prove a better time than the rest of the dreck available.

Final Score:  7.5/10

John Carter

Alternate Title:  Last Samurai of Mars


One sentence synopsis:  A confederate veteran is transported to Mars and tries to stop an evil warlord and his shadowy backers.



Things Havoc liked:  I know nothing of the Barsoom saga. Edgar Rice Burroughs has gone unread by me to-date. As such, I have no conception of what the source material for this film was supposed to look like, nor what was and wasn't cut out of it to make it fit. Based on what research I've done, several books were concatenated together and turned into this one screenplay, but I'm not here to evaluate how good of a job they did. I'm here to evaluate the film they produced, irrespective of how faithful it was.

Let's start with the cast. To begin with, this movie starts out by giving me the dynamic duo of Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy as Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, (although for some reason they insist on calling them Tardos Mors and Kantos Kan) respectively King of the city of Helium, and his chief Lieutenant. The very concept of putting those two together in roles like this is the sort of terrible bribe that film-makers use when they want me to be nice to them, and I am helpless to resist grinning like an idiot every time I saw either one on screen (particularly when they do awesome things. 'Take me hostage' was a hoot). They are menaced by the evil Dominic West (of the Wire), playing a ruthless general given a god-like weapon by Mark Strong (of general badassery) and his band of evil shapeshifters. These characters are both stock and ridiculous, but these actors are so much fun to watch that they pull it off regardless. Hinds screaming that he has no choice but to act the way he does, Purefoy being a smarmy badass, West mugging for the camera evilly, or Strong exuding his typical bad-guy charm are all things I love seeing when I go to the movies. Any film that gives me all of the above can't be doing too much wrong.

But the humans are only one half of Barsoom's characters. There are also the Thark, giant-sized four-armed barbarian aliens whose society is if anything even more important than the human (Martian, whatever). CGI is nothing special anymore, but the characters we are presented with in this one are actually characters, identifiable despite their visual similarity. The king of the Tharks is voiced by Willam Defoe, a strange man whose work is always a pleasure to watch, and he infuses Tars Tarkas with a real personality that shines through the CGI effortlessly. The Tharks overall are well designed, still looking quite alien while retaining enough humanizing traits for us to appreciate their characters, and the movie actually spends quite a bit of time on their society, giving us a good picture of a coherent alien species without lapsing too far into base caricature.

The overall design of this film is awesome. The rival cities of Helium and Zodanga are instantly distinctive, both from themselves and everything else on Earth. Costumes, sets, props, vehicles, weapons, everything seems consistent and wonderfully detailed, even if the practicality of many of these things is an open question. The sense is almost Lord-of-the-Rings-like, in terms of a larger world with greater detail than we are presently being shown, giving the film a grounding it may not normally deserve. Monsters and creatures are reasonably interesting, particularly the large six-legged hyper-speed dog-like creature that Carter adopts as part of his campaign across Barsoom.

The action, an important element in a film like this, varies from decent to awesome. One sequence in particular, an all-out brawl featuring our hero against a horde of multi-limbed giants, is damn near awe-inspiring (thanks to excellent direction and editing choices). Even the fights that aren't amazing are at least very competent. Why everyone is running around with swords when there are flying machines, cannons and guns is unclear, but this is clearly the sort of movie wherein one is intended to simply accept that cool shit is happening for the sake of being cool. I'm honestly okay with that.



Things Havoc disliked: Taylor Kitsch can't act.

He couldn't act in Wolverine, couldn't act in Snakes on a Plane, won't be acting in Battleship (I feel safe in this prediction), and could not act here. And given that Kitsch is playing the titular John Carter of Mars, that's something of a problem. We'll ignore the fact that his Virginian accent was less convincing than mine (assuming he was even trying to produce one). The speeches he has to give are completely unconvincing, particularly in the second half of the film, where he is required to address large crowds of Martians and sway them to his side. I have gotten to the point where I can tell when a bad line is the fault of the screenwriter, and when it is the fault of the actor, and while the script of this film is nothing to write home about, in this case it's Kitsch who lets the writing down with a boring, uninvolved, and plodding performance that makes Cowboys and Aliens look exciting. Whoever decided that this man should be the lead and not any one of a dozen others I could mention needs to turn in their casting license.

Leaving the main character aside for a moment, the plot here was nothing to write home about. I know this is an old story, one that literally invented many of the cliches that we are now so tired of, and there were some shots and elements that attempted to freshen the matter (I liked the "reciting the qualifications of our hero" sequence at the beginning of the film), but frankly, pointing at the age of the source material is not an excuse for making a lackluster plot. If your problem is that audiences have seen all of this before, then it is your responsibility as filmmakers to ensure that this time they see it in a new way, or with a fresh twist. Not enough effort was done to do that in this film, and so it winds up coming across as competently done, but a story we've all seen before.



Final thoughts:  I had very low expectations for this one going into it. A March release date for an action movie in particular is a sign not just of lack of faith but full-on panic on the part of the studio heads, who are signalling that this film can't compete with the likes of Dark Knight Rises or Avengers. And while they're ultimately right about that, the movie isn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It's not some transcendent masterpiece that shines above its genre, but despite the boring plot and terrible main character, there's real quality buried in this film. I didn't like it as much as some of my fellows did, but neither did I hate it as much as many of the professional critics. Go figure.

Final Score:  6/10

2012 Oscar-nominated Short Films

And Now for Something Completely Different

One of the things one notices after watching films for long enough is that movies have their seasons, just like fruit. There is Oscar Season, late in the year, when the studios release the movies they think have the best chance of garnering awards from both the Academy and other ceremonies. There is Blockbuster Season, generally from mid-May to late September, when the schools are out and the studios drop their big-budget action and effects showpieces to rake in as big of a young-male demographic as possible. And then we have the period I like to call "The Doldrums".

The Doldrums stretch from February through April, and consist of the period when most studios drop the movies that they think, in-house, cannot compete with either the Oscar-dramas of late fall, or the blockbusters of high summer. These are the films that, for one reason or another, have not inspired faith from their own producers, and are therefore released against as little competition as possible, in the hope that the sheer lack of anything else worth seeing will enable them to do well. Studios don't always know what they have on their hands, and sometimes a movie can be relegated to the Doldrums by mistake, because of studio politics, or just lack of imagination on the part of bosses. But that said, most films wind up in the Doldrums because they're total crap.

Last year, just as an example, the Doldrums brought us such scintillating films as Tron Legacy, Battle Los Angeles, and Suckerpunch (which I loved, but I admit is clearly a bad film). This year, the Doldrums have already given me Red Tails (an early candidate for worst film of the decade), Mission Impossible 4, and would have given me several more turds had I not managed to stretch out Oscar season deep into February. Looking ahead, I have to look forward to such shining lights as Battleship, 21 Jump Street, This Means War, and the Lorax, all of which are either currently in or about to enter theaters. Having exhausted most of the hidden gems I can sense coming (there's always a few) and with six weeks minimum of the Doldrums left to go, my stated goal of a film a week is likely to lead me into unpleasant places in the near future.

Which is all a fancy way of explaining why, this week, I wrung a little bit more moisture out of the last remnants of Oscar Season by going to see all five of the Academy Award-nominated Live-action short films. My alternatives were on the order of Tyler Perry's Good Deeds. Sue me.



Pentecost: Shortest and thinnest of the bunch, this 11-minute send-up to a single joke is kind of out of place, given its fellows. The story (if you can call it that) is about an irish altar boy who is preparing to "perform" (what do you call what altar boys do?) at an important mass in his home parish. The movie essentially plays like a particularly long Monty-Python joke, with the priests and deacons speaking about the boys like they're the coaches of a soccer team. The soundtrack is excellent, and actors have good comic timing and expressions, but there doesn't seem to be much point to it all.

6/10

Raju: The most "Oscar-like" of the movies by far, and the one I was certain had won the award until I got home and found out that it had not, Raju is about a German couple who goes to India to adopt an orphan, only to find themselves in the middle of a corrupt kidnapping ring. The write-up makes it sound like an action film, which it is not, as well as an unflattering portrait of India's society, poverty, and problems with corruption, which it absolutely is. Very well-acted and shot, the film is quite uncomfortable to watch, and gets across the utter alienness of a place like Calcutta (to a westerner at least), as well as the ugly reality of many "charities" in the third world.

7.5/10

The Shore: Longest of the five movies, and the one that actually did win the award, this movie stars Ciarán Hinds (aka Gaius Julius Caesar) as a Northern Irishman returning home for the first time in 25 years, and re-uniting with his ex-fiance and best friend. A careful, gently meandering film, centered around a legitimately funny sequence involving misunderstandings, mussel collectors, and a horse, the movie doesn't have much of a point to make really, save that Ireland is pretty and it's good to forgive people. A decent film, but light on substance, and I admit to being surprised that the Academy chose it.

6.5/10

Timefreak: A hilarious send-up to movies like Back to the Future or Primer, this one's about a guy who invents a Time Machine and begins obsessively returning to the previous day to "get everything right". Very brisk and tight, the movie gets a lot across purely with its editing, and compresses what feels like a longer movie's worth of material into an eleven-minute running time. Michael Nathanson, playing the lead, gets the mad-scientist role down pat, and the film's ending is perfect for its style. A real gem.

8/10

Tuba Atlantic: A movie like this could somehow only come from Norway. An old man finds out he has six days to live, and tries to complete his life's work with the help of an "Angel of Death", a young girl sent to keep company of the dying by her church group. Despite the subject matter, this is the funniest by far of the five films, if only because it grants us the sight of an octogenarian massacring seagulls with dynamite and a machine gun. Twisted and yet oddball, this is one of the least morose dying-films I've ever seen, and is filled with dark comedy, hilarious one-liners (made more hilarious, I must admit, by how odd Norwegian sounds to my American ear), and a completely ludicrous premise taken to its illogical extreme by the end of the film. My personal selection as best of the bunch, and by itself worth the price of admission.

8.5/10