As part of an excellent evening out in Fort Worth this weekend, I saw Inside Man. (Because my mom has this weird thing where if a movie has alien slugs that mutate people and/or turn them into zombies (or has a name like Slither), for some reason she pre-judges it and assumes she won’t like it. This is an ongoing mystery to me, but I must live with it.) So, bank heist, Denzel, I can dig it.

And it seems like, after enjoying it from start to finish, I’d have quite a lot of good to say. Good acting, good piece-by-piece reveal of the puzzle that was the point of the thing… okay, I’m out of good things, and that’s just it. It was like a cream puff, or light popcorn to pick a rather more trite metaphor. You enjoy it while you’re eating it, but after all, it’s mostly air and hard to describe why it was as good as that once you’re not right in the midst of it. I think it’s the plot was neither unique nor tense enough to carry it up out of the realms of summer movie, and that the collective star charisma power wasn’t either. That summer thing is the single biggest flaw, though. I’m pretty sure if it had come out four months later, I’d have been able to completely overlook the flaw of being overdone. That’s what July is for.

What we have here is a movie that breaks two rules even before you’ve walked into the theater. 1) It’s a movie based on a video game, but the video game doesn’t exist. (Which is a pity, because we could build it. We have the technology.) 2) The title is instructive rather than descriptive. Well, okay, maybe that’s not actually a rule, but it seems like it should be. Horror movie titles mostly tend to tell you either when you’re going to die or what is going to kill you, or every now and then why you’re going to die. Telling you to Stay Alive is both unprecedented and really quite redundant. Although I suppose Scream was kind of the same way.

Unfortunately, all similarities to Scream that I will be able to include in this review have come and gone. Basically, someone without a talent for tying up stray plots or thinking up particularly scary (or even gruesome) death scenes watched The Ring, and decided that if watching a tape can kill you, then by God, playing a video game can too. So, some gamer geeks play the video game, and then die. (Shocking!) Inevitably, the game was far better than the movie. The problem is, unlike the standard for this formula, I can’t even comfort myself by going back and playing the game.

And then, because apparently I was having a busy day, I saw Adaptation. It’s… it’s quite a movie. It’s a movie about the screenwriter’s struggle to write the screenplay adaptation of a book about flowers, which is really a loosely connected set of essays and personal thoughts. His goal is to not impose any Hollywood crap onto his adaptation, but instead remain as true to it as possible. The problem he discovers is that it’s impossible to write a movie without a plot, or themes, or events, or characters that grow and change. And… it’s almost impossible to talk about it in more depth without spoiling things. I shall say now that I really enjoyed it a lot, that I was laughing almost constantly, but that it probably isn’t the kind of movie that I’d want to watch over and over again.
Continue reading →

My dad wanted to see the action movie du jour, and I am rarely averse to such an enterprise. Thusly, Ultraviolet. I feel like there’s something sloppy to the mindset that allows you to preface your movie with a voiceover claiming that you may not understand the heroine’s world. It’s not that I couldn’t understand it. You have your basic class warfare, only the classes are separated not by money, skin, religion, or nationality, but by disease status. (Although it rankles my sensibilities that the disease provides exceptional reflexes and healing powers, without any negative side-effects. Well, it rankles my sensibilities that people are terrified of this so-called disease.) So, yeah, pretty comprehensible. But the principle of the thing annoys me.

It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times. Woman loses child. Woman finds surrogate child while battling the oppressive system. Woman sacrifices everything to protect surrogate child, while taking revenge on oppressive system. But have we seen it with the inevitably naked Milla Jovovich? Granted the lack of a kid in the Resident Evil movies, I think not.

Lots of comic-style violence reminiscent of Sky Captain or Sin City plus hip cityscape designs helped to distract me from the slow plot. It was decent, and all, but if you insist on seeing this movie, you should probably see the version from a couple of months ago, when they were calling it Aeon Flux.

I feel both sheepish and not a little bit dumb admitting it, but: I have no idea what Syriana was about, and only a little more about what happened in it. Okay, yeah, it was about oil. More specifically, it was about the intersections of four storylines: a thinly veiled reference to the Exxon Mobil merger and the struggles of certain people to get the merger approved by the SEC, Pakistani immigrant workers in Saudi Arabia losing their jobs because of the merger and struggling to retain visas and identity in the aftermath, a CIA agent of long standing in the region, and an energy analyst’s ties to the Saudi royal family in the midst of the succession. (At least, I think the country was Saudi Arabia both times, although quite a bit of time is spent in or discussing the liberation of Iran.)

It made a good story, and I think I’m glad I watched it. I’m pretty sure on the whole the message is that our government hasn’t been handling the region well since time out of mind, and also that oil is mostly bad for us. (My favorite single moment was the awards ceremony for Oil Man of the Year, because the award was presented by the Moneybags guy in the Monopoly boardgame. No lie, I swear it was him.) Still, though, I’d be more comfortable knowing to what extent it was non-fiction and, well, having a better idea of what actually occurred in the plot. Oh, and what if anything Syriana actually refers to.