The Place Beyond the Pines

Alternate Title:  Sins of the Fathers

One sentence synopsis:   The decisions made by a stuntman/bank robber and a young cop reverberate down to the lives of their sons.

Things Havoc liked: What a strange movie this is.

Luke Glanton is a motorcycle stunt rider, played by Ryan Gosling, an actor I've known about but never had much interaction with. He works for a traveling carnival that stops every so often in Schenectedy, New York (the titular Place Beyond the Pines in Mohawk). One night he learns that he has an infant son from a previous fling with Romina (Eva Mendes), his ex-girlfriend who now lives with another man. He quits his job and moves in with a mechanic (Ben Mendelsohn, one of my favorite character actors) and tries to earn money to support his son whether Romina or her new boyfriend want him to or not, turning ultimately to bank robbery. I really don't have much of an impression of Gosling, as I haven't seen most of his previous work, but his character reminds me a great deal of the "Born to Lose" whack-jobs that De Niro and Pacino were talking about in Heat, the sort of guy who seems destined to fail, who may even want to. He makes bone-headed decisions, but given what we know of his impulsive, none-too-bright nature, they make sense, and it's no surprise to anybody when they finally bring him into a violent confrontation with the police.

Enter Avery Cross, played by the ubiquitous Bradley Cooper, a young cop who happens to run into Glanton. The aftermath of this run-in forms the transition into the second portion of the movie, focusing entirely on him and his temptations from the corrupt cops that surround him in the Schenectedy police department. Front and center among such corrupt cops is Ray Liotta, doing his best sleaze routine, while Bruce Greenwood (another favorite character actor) tries to bust them all and Harris Yulin (and another), Avery's father, offers advice rooted not in hoary cliches of doing the right thing, but in a lifetime of experience dealing with the law and the enforcement thereof. Like the previous sequence, this one presents the character of Avery well enough that we understand why he does the various things he does even as he's doing them, and though Avery's choices are significantly better than Luke's, the forks of the dilemmas they are on are made perfectly clear to the viewer. The consequences of the decision Avery makes vis-a-vis his corrupt fellows make sense given his character as we understand it, and sets the stage for yet another transition.

Enter Jason and AJ (unknowns Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen), sons respectively of Luke and Avery, who fifteen years later, find themselves attending the same high school and meeting over a shared desire (like most high schoolers) to party and get high. As before, these two are excellent, capturing perfectly the twisted and even borderline-sociopathic mentality of real teenagers trying to grapple with their world. Jason seeks to know more about his mysterious father, while AJ seeks to know more about the ways in which he can mess himself up with drugs, and both searches lead approximately to where you might expect them to, though not necessarily with the results you would find in most films. I can't of course give away more than that, but despite the disjointed nature of these three stories, the film overall does an excellent job of connecting them into one solid whole.

What can I say then? The acting, overall, is excellent. Every actor, whether I've heard of them or not, brings a level of realism to their characters that one rarely encounters in film. Even Bradley Cooper and Ray Liotta, whom I like but usually see playing over-the-top crazy-men (Silver Linings Playbook, Limitless, everything-Liotta-has-ever-done) are restrained here, barely ever raising their voices as they go through motions we could actually see. The stories connect well, showing the realistic effects of the actions the characters take, be it coping with the aftermath of a shooting or the consequences of a marriage where one party is addicted to a job the other doesn't approve of. Corruption and robbery aside, the movie gets along more or less without villains. Even the "other man" (Mahershala Ali) who Romina winds up with as Luke is trying to win her back is portrayed as (ironically) the most responsible and reasonable person in the entire film. And overall, despite the knitting together of three fairly disconnected stories, the flow of events from one to the next is strong enough that we easily come along for the ride. A well-made, well-orchestrated, well-acted, well done production overall.

Things Havoc disliked: So then I'm left with trying to figure out why I didn't like it more.

I saw this movie with two other people, both of whom thought it was superb. I didn't. And yet they well be right, because when I look back on the film, I have only poor excuses to give for why I'm not singing this thing's praises.

To start with actual flaws, this movie is long. Three short-film-length stories crammed together are inevitably going to be I suppose, but it runs nearly two and a half hours, and I was checking my watch by the 100 minute mark. It's not that the movie is boring, nor that the plot can be predicted (although one can guess fairly quickly that Luke's character is not in for a particularly happy ending), just that the flow and pacing of the film are very slow. Normally I don't mind that so much... but... well maybe I do. None of the scenes in retrospect are un-necessary, yet all of them went on a bit longer than I would have held them, which in aggregate probably tacked a good 20-30 minutes of filler onto the film in packets of ten to fifteen seconds.

There are also (inevitably in a movie this complex) a number of... questionable character decisions. For one thing, if you're going to tell a teenage kid that his father was a bank robber and criminal, and give him the man's name, shouldn't you also mention the incredibly important circumstances that led to him no longer being here, ones which if viewed in the wrong light could lead to a number of unfortunate consequences? Why instead give the kid all the resources he needs to find these things out without any context? And while we're on the subject, while this film does avoid most of the cliches that come with law-and-crime character studies like this, one thing it lands hard on is the whole "I cannot bear to tell my children the truth" routine, even when the truth is explosive and the consequences of the children finding out on their own even more so. Yes, I know that not everyone wants to speak about past traumas, particularly to their kids. But no fewer than three different characters play this card at one point or another, to uniformly disastrous consequences. Family secrets are a thing, I agree, but it left me at least watching the whole last third of the film thinking that all of this drama could have been avoided if someone at some point had just said the things they should have said. Maybe that's the point of the film, in which case, well done. But it happened so often and with such regularity during the latter stages of the movie, that I began to get the impression that I was watching an "idiot plot", defined as a plot which would not exist if the participants were not all idiots.

Final thoughts:    No, Place Beyond the Pines is not an Idiot Plot, and no, I have not given the film away by saying that there is drama and tension in the last third. But these reservations are what kept me from praising this movie with the same, fulsome approbation that everyone else who saw the movie seems to have. Well-acted, well-shot, well-directed and well-written, I should not really be looking for anything else when I go to see a movie. And yet the slow pace and questionable decisions by many of the characters all conspired to leave a lukewarm taste in my mouth.

I've agonized for several days over what to score this movie, as on the one hand, these are my reviews which are intended to reflect my reaction. And yet on the other hand I do hold to the notion that it is possible for an opinion, even a subjective one, to be erroneous if not outright wrong. It is one thing to dislike Citizen Kane or Casablanca, but quite another to claim that they are "bad films", which is what a low review grade indicates in some regard. And yet on the other hand, how high can I possibly rate a film I didn't love before I'm just repeating what other people think instead of what I do. As such, I therefore must give the movie what I think it deserves from me, cognizant of the fact that the vast majority of viewers would praise it much higher than I have done. Place Beyond the Pines is probably a much better movie than I found it to be, but I can't in good conscience call it the masterpiece that others claim.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Evil Dead

Alternate Title:  How are the Mighty Fallen

One sentence synopsis:   Five young adults go to a cabin in the woods to enjoy a pleasant evening's conversation on the mysteries of life. (I wish.)

Things Havoc liked: I've never been a big fan of horror flicks. For one thing, I don't think any of them are scary so much as just gory, and while there is indeed artistry to gore, it's rarely found in the found footage dead teenager movies that one has seen over the last 20 years. Classics like Alien, The Exorcist, or the more recent Cabin in the Woods notwithstanding, this genre is wasted on me unless something different can be done with the material. That said, one of the few directors who ever managed to make horror entertaining to me was Sam Raimi, specifically in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, a pair of utterly classic comedy-horror movies starring the irrepressible Bruce Campbell. The very reason I liked them is indeed that they weren't the usual parade of horror movie cliches, the jump scares and over-the-top gore effects and teenagers backing into dark rooms one by one in search of a killer who will, obediently, kill them. Instead they were hilarious, slapstick-filled, rip-roaring pastiches of Z-grade horror shlock. Raimi went on to do bigger and (occasionally) better things thereafter, while Campbell went on to become the reigning king of B-Movies and star or co-star in awesome television shows. But as horror grew continuously stupider throughout the 90s and 00s, I occasionally looked back on those movies wishing that there was something else like them out nowadays. As a result, while I can't say I was looking forward to Evil Dead, I had some hope that with both Raimi and Campbell returning as producers, there might be some semblance of the magic of the old films here, something that would take me back to a memory of better times.

Things Havoc disliked: There was not.

Okay, admittedly, this movie has one of the better premises for five young men and women to go into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape (one of the characters is a Heroin addict undergoing an enforced withdrawal courtesy of her friends), but the mere fact that such an excuse has to be invented is indicative of the major problem here. Evil Dead is a movie about five young men and women going into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape.

I mean, is it really necessary for me to say anything else at this point? The original films were parodies of this sort of movie, mocking the pretensions of the Cabin Fevers and Friday the Thirteenths and all the other schlock horror movies that did nothing more than assemble a cast of young twenty-somethings and killed them in increasingly gruesome ways. Long before Scream thought itself original by pointing out that, *GASP*, horror movies are generally contrived exercises in nauseating stupidity, Evil Dead 2 took this notion for granted while crafting a hilarious slapstick romp around them, while Army of Darkness took the premise and ran with it straight off the Cliffs of Insanity, becoming a movie that was half Dragonslayer, half Ghostbusters. And after twenty-plus years and a budget thirty times the original, this is what Evil Dead now has to show us? This formulaic, paint-by-numbers five-man-band film in which the characters die in predictable, gruesome ways after making the most boneheadedly stupid decisions known to man? This is what Evil Dead has been reduced to? The tagline for the film declares that Evil Dead is the most terrifying film you will ever experience, but even if that had been true, whose fucking idea was it to remove the comedy from Evil Dead? Is the world not well-enough supplied with Dead Teenager movies as it is that they need to raid this franchise of all franchises? How can Sam Raimi, who practically invented the art of the horror-mockery, possibly hope to make a movie like this not 12 months after the release of Cabin in the Woods, a film that riotously skewered this exact movie premise. Is there really a single living soul in America who expects that a film in which five young people with no personalities are stranded in a spooky cabin, they will all come out the next day fresh and renewed, and ready for the challenges of a bright future?

And yes, some of this might have been forgivable (I guess) if Evil Dead actually lived up to the tagline, but this movie is neither terrifying, nor frankly even competently done. The basics here are all wrong. At times, characters die by simply being hit in the head with a door, while others linger on after being stabbed, mutilated, beaten, and shot repeatedly with a nailgun. Makeup effects, while visually gruesome, are terribly inconsistent, with characters' injuries changing or disappearing between scenes, whenever the plot "forgets" about the hideous compound fracture that someone sustained not five minutes earlier. Moreover, in grand horror film tradition, the characters are all the stupidest people alive. Even after evil forces are clearly seen to be at work, they walk alone into dark rooms and then spend long periods lingering over minute details on a wall or window while turning their backs on objects or corpses they should really not be turning their backs on. One sequence near the end of the film has one of the characters repeatedly wedge themselves into increasingly confined and inescapable spaces on purpose while being pursued by evil demons and undead monstrocities, only to be astonished when they find great difficulty in escaping from the evil forces that afflict them. Other characters do incredibly stupid things (read the evil book, pick up the evil object, summon the evil monster) for no reason whatsoever and then compound their stupidity by refusing to tell anyone else that they have just done these things. Within half an hour of the film's beginning, I informed my viewing companion that for the rest of the film, I would be rooting for Satan.

Final thoughts:    Evil Dead is the Richard Nixon of horror movies, a film that was once idealistic and hungry to stand out now reduced to a crumbling, reclusive ruin, aping the movies it once sought to pillory in quest of some quixotic drive I can scarcely guess at. The film is not atrociously made, but given its history, for Raimi to produce a film this generically awful is a measure of how tired he has become. Evil Dead II, for all its shlock, was a film that brimmed over with life and humor. Evil Dead, the remake, is a moribund piece of cinematic garbage, made all the worse for its association with a film series that was once great.

Final Score:  3/10

The Sapphires

Alternate Title:  Soul Sisters

One sentence synopsis:   Four Australian Aboriginal women form a soul group in the late 1960s to entertain the American troops in Vietnam.

Things Havoc liked:  It only takes one Doldrums season to make one reconsider the virtue of this weekly-film project, and I've now been through three. Each one had its hidden gems, but was mostly characterized by a flood of mediocrity, and films that ranged from barely tolerable to outright atrocious. Two years ago it was Tron: Legacy, last year Red Tails, and this year a slew of consistently boring, plotless, pointless films in endless succession. I knew when I started this that there'd be times when I had to drag myself to the movie theatre to see something I had no interest in watching, but I wasn't aware of how extended these times might become. And with little worth seeing on the horizon, even in indie cinemas, I have more than once considered just throwing the towel in rather than waste my time and money on a movie without hope of being any good, just so that I can come back here and inform you all that yes, Teenager Holocaust 7 is in fact exactly what you think it is.

But then I run into something like the Sapphires.

Set in the dusty outback of 1960s Australia, the Sapphires opens the film up with a stark recitation of the facts of life for Aboriginals in Australia up through the 1970s, covering such topics as the Stolen Generation, and the laws, then still on the books, that identified them as not human but "flora or fauna". And yet while the movie contains these subjects, it is not about them, insofar as the lives of the four women who form 80% of the main cast also contain these subjects, but are not comprised entirely of them. All four girls stand out individually in their roles, particularly Shari Sebbens' Kay, a light-skinned girl taken by the Australian government to live with a white family as part of the policies of the time, and Deborah Mailman's Gail, the self-appointed matriarch of the group, entirely uninterested in the posturing of those around her, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. All four women are excellent, lending their characters believable patinas as they butt heads with their Irish manager, Dave (Chris O'Dowd). Dave is a wreck, inept at best and usually drunk, but just barely competent enough to provide real help as the girls switch from Country to Soul music and refine their act into something bankable. He's also, crucially, an outsider to the world the women inhabit, enabling him to be both a window for the audience into what is going on (the movie does not generally pause to explain things otherwise), as well as a catalyst for illustrating a few uncomfortable truths from the women themselves.

If the above sounds like a particularly bad issue movie, then you'll simply have to take my word that it's anything but. For one thing, the Sapphires is wickedly funny, particularly in the early half of the film as Dave tries to forge the group into something approximating a real soul band. The dialogue is witty and real, even during bouts of exposition, all of it flowing naturally, like something real people would actually say. Given the subject matter on offer, which starts with racism and gets more serious from there, this is an almost unheard of achievement, as most films on such subjects either turn into bitter polemics or high-concept speeches on the need for tolerance. This movie manages to make the plights of our main characters fully real, all without hand-wringing and finger-pointing. The Aboriginal characters beyond the four women are not the "wise spirit people" of many misguided anti-racism films, but people, like any other. Rare indeed is the movie that manages to make everyone seem reasonable without falling into any of these traps. Rarer still is one that does so while also being hilarious.

Things Havoc disliked: Some of the secondary characters, the nightclub promoter in Saigon, the racist white Australians at the beginning of the film, and many of the American soldiers the group encounters along the way, are not drawn quite as well, failing the eye-test for whether a character is a real character or a cardboard stand-in for what the filmmakers thought they needed at that moment. As these are tertiary characters (at best), this matters little, but it does lead to a few issues of logic and plot. Why, for instance, does the promoter insist on sending the girls unescorted through the wilds of Vietnam to get to a special show? If the show is that important, surely an escort would be called for, especially given how easily the girls got one when they were still lowly unknowns.

Final thoughts:    Yeah, I'm really reaching with this one for bad stuff to say, and there's a reason for it. The Sapphires is one of the best films I've seen since the Oscar Season opened last year, a gem of a comedy that's more real than 99% of the films made about this or any similarly touchy subject. Funny, well-written, entertaining, and otherwise brilliantly put together, this film is a gem, especially given when it came out. In a season where the highest-grossing film is the Evil Dead remake (we'll get to that), what more can you really ask for?

Final Score:  8.5/10

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Alternate Title:  Sleight of Plot

One sentence synopsis:   A famous stage magician must overcome his own arrogance to compete with a shock-artist street magician in Las Vegas.

Things Havoc liked: I like Steve Carrell. I like him despite the admittedly awful material he often chooses to appear in. Yes, he's schmaltzy when he's not being insufferable, but that works in some movies, and things like The 40-year-old Virgin, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Dinner for Schmucks, or Little Miss Sunshine (to say nothing of his work on The Office) showcase just how well he's able to play a sincere idiot (if that makes any sense). As such, despite the utter dreck that his career is studded with (the less said about Evan Almighty or the Get Smart remake, the better), I actually pay attention when a new film of his comes out, despite the fact that straight comedy is in no way my preferred genre. At worst, his films are inoffensively stupid, and at best, they can actually, I think, be almost moving (shut up). One need only look over the other films on offer during Doldrums Season to see just how appealing a minimum threshold of "inoffensive" can become.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone stars Carrell as a stage magician in the vein of Seigfreid & Roy, the leading half of a partnership whose other half is played by the inestimable Steve Buscemi. What Buscemi, whose pedigree needs no recitation, is doing here in the role of the hapless best friend being driven away by Carrell's arrogance is entirely beyond me, but fortunately Buscemi is an awesome actor who makes everything he's in better, and it's fun just watching him parade around on stage like a cross between David Copperfield and Liberace. The antagonist, meanwhile, is supplied by none other than Jim Carrey, whose career has been an Eddie-Murphy-level joke for the last nine years. I loved Jim Carrey back in the 90s and into the 2000s whenever he took on a project more adult than Yes Man. Here, he plays a David-Blaine style "street" magician, whose acts involve ever-escalating bouts of self-mutilation, shock-horror, and exceedingly painful endurance stunts. Carrey steals the show in this one, riding the edge of his usual slapstick insanity without ever crossing over into out-and-out lunacy. It's a pleasure to see him back in proper form at last, and his villain is just weird enough to prove the most interesting part of the entire exercise.

Things Havoc disliked: *Sigh*

So, a couple years ago, Will Farrell and John C. Reily made a movie called Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, about a NASCAR driver who falls from the pinnacle of his profession due to his arrogance, must spend time in a humble position reconnecting with why he came to love the sport he practices, and then with the help of an elderly mentor, returns to the limelight armed with the lessons he has learned to unseat an even more arrogant rival and reclaim his championship and his personal relationships. It was a fairly forgettable movie, being neither particularly good nor particularly funny, but I mention it here because Burt Wonderstone is the exact same film.

This is not hyperbole. This movie is identical, almost to the point of a shot-for-shot remake, to the Farrell film. The same journeys are taken by the same characters for the same reasons at the same moments. Everything, down to the minor details of when a character gives an inspiring speech, how long the retraining montages last, or when and in what manner the various protagonist-antagonist clashes erupt is identical, root and branch. Lest I sound accusatory, I am not trying to claim that the filmmakers here consciously ripped the other film off, but merely that the plot formula they came up with was so generic that it has literally already been done before. And despite the fact that Talledega Nights was the very definition of forgettable, this one actually comes off like the low-rent version.

I could single out this actor or that one to blame, from Carrell, whose amoral shithead of a magician is such an uncaring douchebag that nobody would believably put up with him for five minutes, to James Gandolfini, still playing Tony Soprano, to Olivia Wilde, last seen in the brilliant Tron Legacy (ugh) who here plays a completely generic love interest, but the issue isn't that this performance is bad or that one wooden. The issue is that even within the formulaic plot, there are mis-steps made. Jim Carrey's character is forced into the antagonist slot simply because it's what his character is "supposed" to play in a movie like this, all without actually bothering to make him a bad guy. He's weird of course, and arrogant, but so is our hero, moreso than this guy could ever hope to be. And as Carrell's "conversion" to being a non-douchebag is handled with such a sense of obligatory obliviousness that we never buy it in the first place, the worst thing that can be laid at Carrey's door is that he revels in showing off his superior magician skills. Similarly, the grand "reveal" that the heroes use to win their place in the end of the film is nowhere established, but simply deployed out of nowhere. It's as though the filmmakers knew the formula had been done to death, and thought it so well established that there was no need to establish it within the film. Carrell doesn't win out over Carey or become a better person because of actions that happen in the movie. He does these things because the filmmakers know we're expecting him to.

Final thoughts:    Burt Wonderstone isn't a terrible movie by any stretch. Carrell does a decent enough job once he stops pretending to be an insufferable dick (yes, it's possible to be bad at being an asshole), Carrey and Buscemi are entertaining to watch, and there's quite a bit of good-to-excellent slight-of-hand on screen. But I've seen out-and-out remakes less derivative of another film than this movie was of earlier genre comedies, and nothing here ever builds to the point of the farce that might have excused such lame recycling.

Pickings are always slim this time of year, I grant, but if your movie choices get to the point where you're considering going to see this repetitive film, then the best advice I have is to stay home.

Final Score:  4.5/10

Emperor

Alternate Title:  What do you do with a Living God?

One sentence synopsis:   General Douglas MacArthur and his deputy Bonner Fellers must investigate the role of the Emperor of Japan in perpetrating war crimes in the aftermath of World War II.


Things Havoc liked: Tommy Lee Jones has gotten into the habit recently of playing himself in every movie he's in. Your tolerance for his antics will, of course, depend on how much you like his craggy, one-liner-spouting, no-nonsense Texas schtick, but I love Jones and largely everything he's ever been in. Yes, there are occasions when he turns to smarminess and camp, such as Blown Away, Batman Forever, or The Missing, but by and large, Jones' performances attract the best lines in the script, and even when he's hamming it up (Under Siege, anyone?), I can't help but smile. In Emperor, Jones has plainly decided that if he can do one egotistical American WWII General (his riotous send-up to Patton in 2011's Captain America), then he might as well go for the repeat and play Mr. Congeniality himself, General Douglas MacArthur.

As I'm sure everyone knows, at the end of WWII, MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the American occupation forces in Japan, tasked with somehow rebuilding a country that had been both figuratively and literally atomized in a way few societies had ever been. Part of this task, of course, involved deciding what should be done with the Emperor of Japan, whose guilt or innocence in the crimes committed by Japan were of less importance, overall, than what his arrest or exoneration would mean politically, both in Japan and out of it. Though MacArthur himself wisely desired to leave the Emperor in place as a means of placating the national sensibility of Japan, the position in Washington was far more inclined towards vengeance or justice, depending on how you looked at it. MacArthur thus appointed one of his deputies, General Bonner Fellers, to investigate the role of the Emperor in starting and prosecuting the war, and to recommend what should be done with both the Emperor and the Imperial system itself.

To say this issue was complicated is understating the matter, and fortunately, the movie is not shy about diving into all of the complexities attendant involved in it. Generals and Field Marshals and High Chancellors of the Privy Council are identified and interviewed and interrogated in dizzying succession. Each one has his own perspective to bring to bear on just how the war began and who (or what) was responsible for the terrible things that happened within it. Our window into the investigation is General Fellers, played by Matthew Fox of Lost fame. I hated Lost (a TV show whose title adequately described the predicament of its own writing staff), and a cursory glance at Fox' movie career (his last two films were Speed Racer and Alex Cross) does not fill me with confidence. That said, Fox is at least decent here, playing a Japanophile returning to the land that long-fascinated him to find it in ashes at the hands of his own nation. Neither vitriolic nor apologetic, Fellers' conversations with the various officials he meets with as he tries to find some reason to exonerate the Emperor are the best parts of the film, particularly his conversations with General Kajima (Toshiyuki Nishida), a senior Japanese general staff officer whose self-conscious analysis of the Japanese cultural mindset is a highly perceptive exploration of what led Japan to do the things, war-related or otherwise, that it did.


Things Havoc disliked: I've had comments from readers of these reviews that they are tired of me getting on a soapbox and rambling about some political or historical issue that I felt was handled incorrectly in this film or that one. These people are encouraged to stop reading this review now.

No, I'm not about to condemn this film and all its works, far from it. Given the contentiousness of the subject matter, it actually does amazingly well in portraying the complexities of a worldwide war. But particularly given Japan's less than stellar history in facing up to the actions of its armed forces in WWII, there are still some issues here that need to be addressed. For one thing, while it's true that Pearl Harbor inflamed American opinion to a level not seen again until 9/11, it is not true that the war crimes tribunals in post-war Japan began and ended with culpability for the Pearl Harbor raid. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, and pissed a lot of people off, but it was not a war crime. The Bataan Death March, the indiscriminate massacre of POWs and civilians by the hundreds of thousands, these were the war crimes for which men hanged after the war, and to frame the discussion as one of America seeking vengeance for Pearl Harbor alone without ever mentioning these events is to show a very narrow interpretation of what actually happened in that war. Similarly, a flashback to before the war mentions that the Japanese went to war because of the American oil embargo, without mentioning the by then ten year war with China that Japan was mired in, the war that had already brought on the Rape of Nanking, the destruction of the US gunboat Panay, and which was the proximate cause of the oil embargo. Yes, American policy vis-a-vis Japan was hardly a model of reason and color-blindedness. Yes, Japanese officers immediately after WWII would likely have framed the discussion in exactly these terms. But none of that changes the fact that to describe the oil embargo as something the US "did to" Japan for no reason other than arrogance or racism is to completely shatter the truth of that war. And given the way that war is typically presented in Japan nowadays, that's not a neutral act.

But to return to the subject of the movie itself, the problem here is that the reason none of the above is discussed is because the film has to make room for a love story, told entirely through flashback, between our main character and a Japanese woman he meets at college a full decade before the war. This woman, played by Eriko Hatsune, serves literally no purpose in the movie other than to provide a hackneyed attempt at personal tragedy within the context of the massive, overwhelming catastrophe that has befallen Japan, as Fellers searches for her in the aftermath of the war's devastation and confronts the fact that the war he participated in may have killed the woman he loved. Tragic though this sounds on paper, it's never addressed in the film in anything but the most perfunctory, insensitive manner, as Fellers howls in agony about his lost love to Japanese adjutants whose families, cities, and entire nation have been burnt to ashes. Worse yet, though Hatsune does her best with the material she's given, Fox has no idea how to play a romantic lead, and comes across sounding like a whiny teenager annoyed that the world is not reshaping itself to suit his wishes. Given that Fellers has been established as an expert on and aficionado of Japanese culture from the get-go, and that his sympathies lean clearly towards sparing the Emperor if humanly possible (this much is established within the first five minutes), there is simply no need to occupy a third of the movie's run-time with this useless subplot.


Final thoughts:    I sort of admire Emperor more than I like it. The decision to spare Hirohito (spoilers?) and retain the Imperial system, albeit in the limited, constitutional form it occupies today, was one of the single most important moments of the post-war era, and MacArthur's stint as governor of occupied Japan remains, in my opinion at least, his finest hour. Towards the end, as the movie builds up to the famous meeting of Hirohito and MacArthur, from whence the photograph of the Emperor and the General emerged, it finally begins to gain some momentum, and build towards a sense of actual historical importance. And yet the movie overall seems like a wasted opportunity to actually delve into the issues that surrounded the war and its aftermath. Maybe it's impossible to fully explore a topic like this in 98 minutes, and I've read reviews that complained about the dryness of the subject and the lack of any human material to lighten it up. But these reviews of mine are not some objective marker of quality, but my reaction to the film, and I found that I could have stood a lot more complexity, and a lot less obligatory-love-story.

I've been accused before of filling my reviews with too much pro-American nationalistic sabre-rattling. I will, no doubt, be accused of this again. But it's not really a pro or anti-American slant that I object to here, but the fact that the causes and course of the greatest war in history are by necessity going to be a highly complicated subject. That doesn't mean that a movie of finite duration is evil for presenting a simplified view of the subject. But neither does it mean that you can get away with pretending the simplified version is all there is to it.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Oz the Great and Powerful

Alternate Title:  The Wonderful Wizard of Schlock

One sentence synopsis:   A carnival magician is transported to the magical land of Oz, where he must fulfill a prophecy to destroy the Wicked Witch.


Things Havoc liked: Say what you will about this movie's qualities, it has an awesome title.

L Frank Baum's Oz series is a never-ending source of astonishment to me, if only because of the sheer bulk of the thing. I knew only that there was a book and the classic movie made therefrom, but it turns out Baum wrote no fewer than fourteen Oz books, with another forty-odd being published by a host of authors afterwards, which would appear to make Oz the fantasy equivalent of Lovecraft (there's a crossover I'd like to see). Having never seen a thing from all this material save of course for the 1939 Judy Garland movie, I could only assume that this prequel is derived from canonical sources, and that given everything here, the film-writers were free to plunder a near-infinite quantity of material for their adaptation of what happened before Dorothy found the red shoes.

Some adaptations, reboots, or sequels, don't even seem to be aware of the existence of their previous work. No such difficulties here. The opening sequence of the film, the first 30 minutes or so of it, is a beat-for-beat remake of the opening for Wizard of Oz. We are introduced via a sepia-toned crop-formatted sequence to a series of characters that we will never see again for the rest of the film, but whose actors and voices will follow us into the land of Oz itself. This transitions, following a tornado, into a wonderful technicolor (or in this case, 3D) panorama, showcasing the miracles of modern film-graphics. Though I saw the movie in 2D, 3D and the latest digital effects are here intended to stand in for the miracle that was color in 1939, but the design doesn't just pile images on us. Backdrops are created to look rather uncannily like the expansive matte paintings of yesteryear, generally with more success than failure, while the world has a vibrancy and broad, pastel palette that one doesn't often see, even in this age of oversaturated CG.

Though the movie is theoretically about the Wizard (more on him later) the focus is oddly enough on the three witches Glinda, Evanora, and Theodora, of various, shifting allegiances good or evil. A fair amount of time is spent establishing the three of them, particularly Evanora, played by Rachel Weisz. Easily the best actor in the film (helped by getting the best material), Weisz's associated antics are the most realistic (not an attribute in high supply around Oz) and the easiest to follow. Though she hams it up when necessary, she provides a nice sheen of grounding to a story that could very easily fly completely to pieces. Several of the smaller details are appreciated as well. A visit to a village made entirely of porcelain results in the Wizard finding a small girl made of china, who joins the inevitable "party" as they make their way towards destiny. The China Girl verges on annoying at times, but the movie manages to keep her bearable, while the effects used to produce her are, in this case at least, genuinely fascinating, putting aside the big-budget spectacle in favor of real texture and sharpness to a fictional character.


Things Havoc disliked:  You may have noticed that I've finished with the stuff I liked without discussing the main character, most of the rest of the cast, the writing, story, and cinematography. I think you know why.

First of all, what is Sam Raimi doing here? I understand the desire to branch out, but this is so far from Raimi's strengths that I cannot for the life of me figure out what he was thinking. Raimi cut his teeth on low-budget horror-schlock such as Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, or Drag me to Hell before breaking into the superhero business with the original Spiderman trilogy. I love these movies, but none of them are anything like Wizard of Oz, and whoever decided that Raimi, who never met a slapstick routine he didn't like, should be given the keys to a reboot of a 70-year-old fantastical wonderland classic should have their damned heads examined. Raimi, characteristically, fills the movie with wacky pratfall nonsense, particularly in the first half when he simply stops the movie for about ten minutes so that the 3D audience can get their money's worth. When things aren't being thrown at the screen, we instead get pratfalls and slapstick, not perhaps to the extent of the Transformers atrocities, but plenty. Many of these involve Tony Cox (of Bad Santa and the Epic Movie series) or Bill Cobbs (the poor filmmaker's Morgan Freeman), neither of whom belong anywhere near a movie about Oz.

But Cox and Cobbs are secondary actors. Let's talk about the main actors, such as James Franco, playing Oscar Diggs, a carnival magician turned Wizard-savior. I respect the hell out of Franco's absurd commitment to his craft and truly mad work and study schedule he follows religiously, but I've never liked him in damn near any movie he's been in, not even movies widely regarded as tours-de-force (127 Hours, for instance). His work in the Spiderman films was among the low points of the series, and he singlehandedly ruined Rise of the Planet of the Apes for me with his laconic, wooden style, a style he carries over, I'm sad to say, into this film. It's not that Franco's horrible, he's really not, but he can't act worth a damn beyond his usual vaguely-stoned, detached schtick, and while there's roles that works for, I assume, this is not among them. There's no real sense of wonder (or for that matter, sincerity) from Franco's performance, to the point where, when the movie calls for him to play the actual Wizard of Oz, complete with floating smoke-head, pyrotechnics, and fiery wrath, he comes across sounding like a parent trying to scare their five-year-old into thinking there's a ghost in the closet (Oooooooo! I'm the big bad Wizard of Ozzzzzz!). Granted, the screenplay does him no favors, sending him on a boring, predictable rote-telling of the "hero's journey", wherein he must learn to overcome his greed and be the good person he always was etc etc... But even pedestrian material can be elevated by a great performance, and Franco's not up to the task.

Neither, by the way, are Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis, playing the other two witches. I haven't seen Kunis since Black Swan, and based on this performance, I'm in no hurry for the next encounter. To describe her character fully would enter the realm of spoilers, but suffice to say she spends the majority of the movie either making a pastiche-quality attempt to imitate a classic character from the original film, or creeping out the rest of the cast and the audience with a weird, disjointed performance. The best thing I can say about her character involves a makeup effect. Williams, meanwhile, playing Glinda the Good, is caught helplessly between the roles of "mentor who sees the true potential in our hapless protagonist" and damsel in distress, possessing neither the necessary gravitas for the former role, nor the proper chemistry with Franco for the latter one. The result is an uneven, bland performance, uninteresting even when the scriptwriter decides to steal the wizard duel from Fellowship of the Ring wholesale and present us with a witch's duel which, on paper, should work, but thanks to its inept blocking and terrible pacing, simply does not. The best that can be said of Zach Braff meanwhile, who voices a winged monkey that joins Oz on his journey, is that he doesn't stoop to Jar-Jar Binks levels of annoyance. But then that's hardly glowing praise.


Final thoughts:    That's really the story of Oz the Great and Powerful. There's nothing wrong with a fresh look at Oz in principle, but neither Raimi, nor these actors, nor the screenwriters seem to have had any real ideas of substance to bring to it. Even Danny Elfman's score is instantly forgettable, not even attempting to approach Herbert Strothart's fantastic contribution to the original. Mired in modern contrivances and lacking any genuine charm, the movie simply has nothing to offer beyond a tired tramp through a thin knock-off of a classic film. Not being an obsessive fan of the original, I can't exactly cry betrayal over this tepid remake, but if you're looking for a movie to recapture some of the magic of the original Wizard of Oz, then I'm afraid this one's nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Final Score:  4/10

Alternate Title:  The Power of Positive Thinking

One sentence synopsis:   A young Chilean advertising producer is asked to help run the campaign to vote down Augusto Pinochet's regime in the plebiscite of 1988.


Things Havoc liked: I've been waiting for a movie like this, I think. One that deals with the actual business of getting people to vote the way you want them to, come hell or high water. What methods you use to convince people to take action, even in defense of their own presumed best interests, are not always as simple as the straightforward polemics that one hears from talking heads and pundits. The mechanics of winning an election, whatever the subject or conditions, are fascinating to me, and thus I was predisposed to like this movie from the start.

For those who've never heard of it, No is a movie from Chile, set in the late 80s, when the rule of Augusto Pinochet had long-since solidified into a sort of society-wide apathy. In response to escalating pressure from abroad to legitimize his regime, Pinochet decided in 1988 to hold a plebiscite to determine whether or not he should remain in power for another eight years. Both the government and the opposition would get television time in the days running up to the election to present their cases, which is where our main character comes in. Rene, a comfortably middle-class advertising director, with a young son and an ex-wife who is considerably more politically radical than him, is gradually brought into the forces of the "No" camp, and asked to craft for them a political campaign to stamp out Pinochet forever.

And what a task he has ahead of him. Beyond question, the element of this film I loved the most was the sheer "reality" of it all. Rene's co-workers are an eclectic collection of dissidents of all sorts, radicals, moderates, socialists (the repeated insistence on ever-more rarefied terms to avoid the word 'communism' become hilarious), exiles, indigenous rights activists, students, lawyers, anarchists, the works. Merely getting them all to agree to participate in the referendum in the first place is an exercise in near-maddening futility, as fifteen years of bitter resentments are not easily set aside in the service of actually "winning". The key issue is Rene's strategy, which is to play up the positive aspects of freedom and democracy rather than yet another kludgy sermon on the evils of Pinochet. Yet when he unveils this presentation to the assembled party leaders, one of them stands up and violently denounces him and his team as collaborators who wish to "marginalize" the suffering he and his people have undergone. Refusing to hear even a word edgewise, he tells Rene to fuck himself and storms out of the building, never to be seen again. I have met these people, people so blinded by the bitterness of their own political grudges that they refuse to allow the subject of the political conversation be anything besides the evil done to them, willing to brand anyone who simply wants to win as a traitor. Yet doggedly, Rene sticks to his message, that the only possible way to galvanize a people so brutalized by Pinochet for so long is to give them a vision of a future worth seeing. Perhaps it's just a personal reaction, but I found the character, and the voluminous flack he receives from every side (radical, moderate, and reactionary), highly compelling. Though a liberal opposed to Pinochet, Rene's exhaustion with those among the leftists who want to do nothing but complain about Pinochet to one another is palpable. "I'm sick of your fucking denunciations" he shouts at one point to an aide who suggests holding another press conference to condemn the government. It's a line I could well have uttered.

The movie is shot on what looks like either 8mm film or VHS tape, giving it a grainy, washed out look, with an editing structure that cuts rapidly between scenes without missing a beat in whatever conversation was being had. The result almost resembles found footage at times, and blends seamlessly well into the whole lunatic design and feel of the late eighties (a scene where Rene and his young son sit in front of their brand new microwave and watch it heat soup made me smile). The style lends itself to a highly-realistic feel, helped in no small part by the character relationships as established and presented. Rene's boss at the ad agency, Luis, is a conservative supporter of the government, who eventually winds up working for the rival "Yes" campaign. Yet rather than the expected scene wherein the two characters rupture with one another amidst fireworks and drama, the two continue to work together perfectly normally outside the campaign, despite Luis' ever-escalating attempts to cajole, bribe, or even plead with Rene to stop working for the opposition. At one point Rene responds to an ever-escalating series of bribes all with "No, fire me", fully aware that Luis cannot and will not fire him, as of course is Luis. What might sound like melodrama is made almost comedic by the fact that the conversation is taking place on set of an advertisement shoot, with both parties being interrupted every ten seconds by actors or lighting technicians as they try to do their jobs. Similarly, when Rene's radical ex-wife mocks him as a stooge of the government for even believing Pinochet will allow the referendum at all, the result is not an impassioned speech or a drag-out fight, but the sort of sudden subject shift that naturally comes from two people who know one another well enough to know what the other is going to do and say.


Things Havoc disliked: Of course, refreshing as this style is, it does leave us with the ugly fact of just why most movies spice everything up with drama and confrontation. Removing all of the interpersonal conflict (or muting it down to a nearly-invisible level) doesn't render the film boring, but it does leave the filmmakers with something of a quandary as to what they can actually show us for the two hours this movie runs. Their answer, by and large, is political ads, most of which I must assume were lifted directly from the actual campaigns in question. These ads are interesting, in a sort of weird retro-style, but only to a point. Around halfway through, the movie freezes the characters altogether in favor of an unending succession of three different types of scenes: Scenes of politicians and activists (opposition and government alike) discussing or filming their respective ads, scenes of those ads showing, and reaction shots of the characters watching the ads of the other side in silence. These scenes contain interesting little moments (the government ads often look shoddy because none of the first-rate choreographers or artists will work for them), but given that the thrust of both sides' arguments is established early on in the movie (Democracy is Fun vs. Chaos without Pinochet), it's hard to shake the feeling that the movie is spinning its wheels through a fair portion of it. This tendency is re-enforced with the addition of several enormous (five+ minute) steadicam shots of Rene walking through a "situation" of some sort. When that situation is a brutal government crackdown on an opposition demonstration, the result is tension and interest, but not so much when it's him walking through a celebrating crowd or an advertisement set


Final thoughts:    This isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, No is one of the better films I've seen on the subject, effortlessly cutting through the pretensions and story "dressing" that so many films like it fall prey to. But these lengthy, almost empty stretches of film really strike me as a wasted opportunity. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), when Rene returns to work, unchanged in circumstance save for a brief mention at a pitch meeting that he was associated with the No campaign as a sort of resume point, the intention (I think) is to show how the election, big as it was, did not instantly change people's lives. Yet in showing no consequences to any of the decisions that the characters made, it makes that point too well. An election happened, a dictator was deposed, the sun came up the next day, and the world went on. Perhaps that's how the world works, but if the subject was so inconsequential, why make a movie about it in the first place?

Good material sells itself. But a filmmaker has to have the courage to present his topic as worthy of the audience's time.

Final Score:  7/10