• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
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  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
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  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
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  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
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  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
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  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
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  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: June 2012

Review: “Brave”

24 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

billy connolly, brave, brenda chapman, emma thompson, how to train your dragon, kelly macdonald, la luna, mark andrews, pixar

“How to Train Your Princess”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

THE PEDIGREE THAT is Pixar Animation Studios has never featured a female in a lead role.  Until now.  With its ginger-haired Merida (voiced by Kelly MacDonald), the studio responsible for such wonders as “Up,” “Wall-E,” and “Finding Nemo,” has finally joined the twenty-first century and paradoxically turned to tenth-century Scotland to tell its quasi-feminist tale, “Brave.”   Merida’s head of hair, by the way, may alone be worth the price of admission; it’s a mess of red-orange curls and bouncingly blends with the natural world around her.  In a dazzling set of sequences, the young princess rides the highlands on the back of her faithful Clydesdale Angus and when frustrated with family life inside the castle walls, she escapes to a stable to vent about her buffoonish father and imperious queen of a mother. They’re the DunBrochs, a boisterous family led by uber-clansman King Fergus (Billy Connolly), a bit too similar to the Viking patriarch in “How to Train Your Dragon,” and wife Elinor (Emma Thompson), a bit too droll to make “Brave” truly spellbinding.

Behind-the-scenes at Pixar, a female at the helm may have rocked Pixar’s boat; much has been made of the fact that Brenda Chapman, who conceived of the original story, was replaced by Mark Andrews with whom she now only co-shares a directing credit.  That power-shift may be reflected in the somewhat mixed result: “Brave” had great potential – consider it the little feminist tale that could – but feels, perhaps like Chapman herself, hemmed in and restrained.  On one hand, Merida exerts her agency at an archery match and shows up all the boys eager for a betrothal.  “I am Merida, and I’ll be shooting for my own hand,” she declares, like an aspiring Katniss from “The Hunger Games.”  On the other, the dialogue written for her reeks of adolescent platitude and her sparring with ol’ mom sounds awfully quotidian for a film purportedly aiming for fantasy.  Her conflict with her mother is what drives her to an enchanted forest inhabited by a witch (Julie Walters) that offers her a life-altering spell.  As the witch, Julie Walters’ voice lights up the funniest scene in “Brave.” A close second is anytime Merida’s triplet brothers are spinning about like a trio of red-headed tornados.

Punctuality may be key to really enjoying “Brave”: the short film “La Luna” that precedes “Brave” is really over-the-moon.  What follows feels disappointingly closer to home.

Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”

23 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

abraham lincoln, action, anthony mackie, bejamin walker, caleb deschanel, civil war, dominic cooper, erin wasson, horror, joshua fry speed, liam neeson, mary elizabeth winstead, rufus sewell, seth grahame-smith, timur bekmambetov, true blood, vampire hunter, vampires

 

“The Exsanguination Proclamation”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

WHAT A PITY that “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” fails to live up to the fun of its name.  This deadly dull take on the American icon and vampirism’s imagined complicity in nineteenth-century slavery comes from the horror novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the screenplay here, and Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (“Wanted,” “Day Watch”).  But long before the runaway train carrying Abe (Benjamin Walker) and arch-enemy Adam (Rufus Sewell) crosses a burning bridge at the film’s climax, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” derails into a whole stockpile of horror film clichés.  If you opt for the 3-D version, prepare yourself for at least a dozen shots, compliments of cinematography Caleb Deschanel (Zooey’s papa), of a piranha-mouthed vampire swallowing his close-ups whole.  This is just as tiresome as the Civil War battlefield scenes which dispense with the realities of actual warfare and mobilize instead an onslaught of CGI simulacra.

The film’s narrative is conventionally chronologic: we see the bushy-bearded president in middle-age in the Oval Office, penning his memoirs, before we flashback to 1818 and the waterside set of “Anaconda.”  A young Abe passionately defends his black friend Will (a wasted Anthony Mackie) from Jack Barts, the first piranha-mouthed bloodsucker played by Marton Csokas.  When Barts drains his mother in her sleep, the aspiring lawyer vows revenge on the undead roaming in Indiana.  (Lincoln’s real mother, Nancy, died of tremetol vomiting in 1818 when Lincoln was just nine years old.)  Vampirism is such a fetish in contemporary culture – think of Bella and Edward’s virginal antics or the queerish hedonism of HBO’s “True Blood” – that it always involves some sacred sort of initiation ceremony, and here, Henry Sturgess (played by up-stager Dominic Cooper) opens Lincoln’s eyes to all things vampiric, from the silver-edged axes he’ll need to slay them to the powerful cult led by Adam and sidekick Vadoma (Erin Wasson).  But whose side is he on?

Refreshingly, there’s a bit of bromance at play between Abe and Henry, perhaps a playful take on Lincoln’s romantic friendship with Joshua Fry Speed, the leader’s lifelong friend and “partner,” in the literal sense, at the general store they ran together in Springfield, Illinois.  One has to wonder why it is Henry’s voice that comes to Lincoln’s mind when he kisses his future first lady, Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).  But this is the only whiff of transgression in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” which, fatally, had the potential for campy humor but takes itself too seriously by following the rules.  What can we do but laugh when we see the sixteenth president of the U.S.A., Benjamin Walker, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Liam Neeson, wielding an axe and splitting heads like they’re watermelons?  If only Grahame-Smith and Bekmambetov had milked that absurdity for crimson laughs and not the black blood that repetitively splatters the screen.

If only this bloodless time-waster came with its very own John Wilkes Booth to sneak up behind you in the theatre and put you out of your misery.

Review: “Prometheus”

09 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

alien, charlize theron, dariusz wolski, frankenstein, frankenweenie, logan marshall green, michael fassbender, noomi rapace, prometheus, ridley scott, science fiction

“Space Oddity”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

MY 3-D SCREENING of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” was preceded by a trailer for Tim Burton’s forthcoming “Frankenweenie,” due out this Halloween.  The titles of both films openly borrow from the 1818 classic that more or less invented the mode we now know as science-fiction, that is, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.  The rebellion myth involving Prometheus was nothing short of indispensible to the nineteenth-century English Romantics.  Mary Shelley’s novel notwithstanding, husband Percy Shelley penned his own lyric drama Prometheus Unbound in 1819 while Lord Byron wrote his own short poem heroizing the Titan god, the fire-stealer who, in bringing fire to humanity, found himself eternally punished by Zeus, his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis.  “Like thee,” he wrote in 1816, “Man is in part divine,/A troubled stream from a pure source.” What obsessed the Romantics about the promethean narrative was is its faith in boundless human potential, in boundary-breaking, in playing with fire just as the gods do.  Prometheus, as our ally, stands in for the human.

Accordingly, questions of origins permeate Scott’s “Prometheus,” which is the most intelligent, visually satisfying science-fiction film since “Avatar,” and similarly interested in corporate exploitation and the meaningful ways in which spacemen rage against the machine.  Literally a machine, the excellent Michael Fassbender (“Shame”) plays a white-blooded robot named David who takes his cues for seeming human from Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.”  A close second to David’s robotic rigidity is Charlize Theron as Miss Vickers, a bloodless corporate drone working for Weyland Corp. and overseeing a trillion-dollar mission aboard the vessel named Prometheus.  The goal?  Investigate the alien remains on a deserted planet, which gradually draws the shipmates into its abyss.  The consequence?  Bloodshed, lots of it.  “Prometheus” looks in two directions at once: forward to the future world of 2090 when companies have colonized outer space and backward to the filmic past of “Alien” (1979), the first of Ridley’s Scott’s two sci-fi films – his equally influential “Blade Runner” followed three years later. “Prometheus” functions as a prequel to that first film.  Proof that we are back in the world of “Alien” are the airlock doors and padded hallways of the spaceship, the pod-like sleep chambers and, of course, the threat of a foreign body bursting through one’s abdomen.  It is hard to imagine a more terrifying scene on film this year than the self-administered C-section scene in “Prometheus” wherein an octopus-like fetus is gorily excised.

While Theron remains in the same deep freeze as her performance in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” she is offset by warmer, more human characters such as Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) and her ill-fated husband Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green).  The screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof foregrounds Dr. Shaw as a proto-Ripley heroine who demands some ethical accountability from her cruel captains of (space) industry.  After surveying the alien planet that holds the key to humanity’s own origins, he declares: “This is just another tomb.”  This is the eeriest aspect of Ripley’s masterpiece: space is a sepulcher, and with dim, brownish camerawork by Dariusz Wolski, we are plunged into a kind of puzzle.  “Prometheus” isn’t just a top-shelf work of space-horror with the power to shock, even revolt, its viewer, but the work of a director wiser than the one who directed “Alien” thirty years ago. With its milky-way moments reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and even Malick’s magnum opus, “The Tree of Life,” Scott’s film goes deeper, to the DNA level of human life and its precarious place in a mysterious and often cruel cosmos.

Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

action, bob hoskins, charlize theron, chris hemsworth, grimm brothers fairytale, ian mcshane, kristen stewart, rupert sanders, sam spruell, snow white, snow white and the huntsman, toby jones

Mirror, Mirror…Temper! Temper!

Grade: A-/B+ (SEE IT)

THERE ARE REALLY ONLY two great times of the year to go to the movies: summertime, when they’re garish and loud, and just prior to the holiday season when Oscar is rearing his golden head.  In all actuality, the visual treat that is “Snow White and the Huntsman” is a winter film, chockfull as it is of doom and gloom, blood and mud.  It is worth remembering that the Disney-produced “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released in December of 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theatre, the famed movie palace in Los Angeles.  There are dwarfs, here, too – digitally rendered dwarfs played by Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, and Toby Jones – but they’re a motley crew with names like Gort and Muir, much dingier than the cartoon versions we know as Grumpy and Sneezy.

 “Snow White and the Huntsman” is from first-time director Rupert Sanders, writers Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini; it’s also the second Snow White-inspired film of the year (following the more light-hearted “Mirror, Mirror” with Julia Roberts).  When one thinks of Snow White, one doesn’t think of her in a suit of armor brandishing a sword, but Sanders’ take on her is closer to Snow-Storm White.   With a focused and fierce Kristen Stewart in the title role, the princess, daughter of King Magnus, must do battle with the dark queen, the aptly named Ravenna, who has banished her to the Dark Forest.

As the foil to Snow White’s purity, Charlize Theron has just the kind of sharp beauty for the part.  In league with her albino brother Finn (Sam Spruell), she literally sucks the life out of her young subjects when she’s not preening before her magic mirror.  Here it resembles a golden gong that, “Terminator 2”-style, mutates from liquid metal into a man with a Darth Vader-like baritone.  That this version of the Grimm Brothers myth doesn’t shy away from the sexual dynamics inherent in most, if not all, myths is a relief.  Straddling Snow White’s father in his bedchamber, Ravenna quivers a bit after plunging a dagger into her husband’s chest.  There’s something not a little devious, too, in the way she must drain her virginal victims of life to keep herself going and going.  At one point, she oozes from a bleeding flock of crows back into a demonic diva crawling on all fours.  Eat your heart out, Mr. Hitchcock.

Where there are apples, there is allegory, and “Snow White and the Huntsman” is nothing if not a war between good and evil with the slight sprinkling of a love story.  The widower Huntsman, played by Chris Hemsworth, is originally hired to capture Snow White, but soon becomes her protector.  Four words in the film’s final showdown point to the film as allegory; Ravenna hisses: “I’m everything you’re not!”  Duh, girl!  Ravenna and Snow White may look human but they’re really oppositional forces, intertwined like the eagle and the serpent.  Snow doesn’t even hate the witch who stabbed her father and stole her sovereignty; instead, she pities her.  In keeping with Snow White’s fall, there is an eden to occupy, if only temporarily. One of the real wonders of this film’s top-shelf production value is its take on fairyland; inside, there are epicene nymphs, mushrooms with eyes, snakes and turtles so ingrained in their ecosystem that they have backs made of bark and moss.  The terrain suggests that the human and the nonhuman fuse into one environment, and that the rivalry between the black Ravenna and the white Snow is a ferocious force of nature, always at work around us.

Far from being Sleepy or Dopey, “Snow White and the Huntsman” demands a new dwarf name to describe itself: It’s Icy.

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