Monday, April 28, 2014

The Raid 2 (2014)

Gareth Evans’ “TheRaid” had a thin plot: A SWAT team invades a Jakarta apartment tower to snatch a drug lord. Leading the charge: Rookie cop and to-be pop Iko Uwais with master hand-to-hand combatant skills and razor instincts. The close-quarters bloody violence astounded. “The Raid 2” goes city-wide and huge as Uwais is sent to prison by his bosses, tasked with befriending the son (Arifin Putra) of a crime kingpin (Tio Pakusadewo) to bring both down post-release. The job drags for years as Uwais enters the mob and learns that the son is out to get dad’s top spot via betrayal. Evans spins a well-known “Infernal Affairs”-like plot with epic kinetic force: He kills off near anyone from film one and ups the action to shockingly good effect with a car chase that tops any in years and a prison riot/fight that is a death ballet. Ditto fights set at a nightclub and kitchen. Welsh-native Evans just keeps raising the bar like an unhinged Tarantino. In a plot that eerily picks on the restaurant scene from the “Godfather,” the director/writer really shines. Uwais is spectacular as the silent hero. The Part 3 insider set up is more than welcome. A

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

It amazes me “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was ever needed. But so goes American history. It opens with a 1960s pop song playing as a giddy couple make its way from an airport to the girl’s childhood home, where she will introduce him to Mom and Dad. The couple is mixed race, her white (Katharine Houghton) and him black (Sidney Poitier). The taxi driver smirks. The parents (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey) are open liberals, but just how so? We find out in one long evening. Yes, it’s coy now, post-Loving vs. Virginia, but not too easy. Poitier’s fiancé puts a burden to the parents: Accept me and our whirlwind romance now or I call it off. Can anyone demand that? His doctor character is such a saint, it near smothers debate. The screenwriters intently did this to fully play the race card, but does it serve character? What if he were a reporter at Tracey’s old man’s paper? The dialogue is still sharp and Tracey –- then dying of cancer -- is powerful. Hepburn, too. Her crying is contagious. A-

Sunday, April 27, 2014

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

The very title of “The Last Days on Mars” is erroneous as it all takes place within one day on the Red Planet, but, hey, somehow it recalls a ’70s Brit prog rock concept album. Never mind that. This is “Alien” meets “Night of the Living Dead,” with Liev Schreiber as a scientist on a Mars research gig with a motley crew (Elias Koteas and Olivia Williams among them) who are all gung-ho to finish up until that one last errand goes bad bad bad oh so wrong. And then people start turning into zombies and start attacking each other. Why? No idea. I don’t need to know. “Alien” didn’t explain a thing. But I peered in too deep because there has to be something else here other than zombies attacking people on Mars, with no escape. But there’s just not. Oh, I dug Schreiber’s messed up astronaut, with his fear of closed spaces, and space ships (huh?), and some accident that struck before the film, but that’s not enough to carry this story. Not when the best character –- Williams’ cold officer -– is tossed off with a shrug. C+

The Oxford Murders (2008)

There is much to laugh at in “The Oxford Murders,” a serial murder thriller mixing in philosophy, math, and Frodo (Elijah Wood) as a hunk of smooth manliness wooing the English ladies with spaghetti and meatball themed sex. Not intended as a comedy, this flick is hilarious. Wood stars an American student who puts all his life into entering Oxford U to study under John Hunt’s wild-haired fruit loop professor’s logic class only to learn after his arrival on campus that the professor has retired from teaching. The kid is stunned. Really? Adults wrote and directed. The adults are Jorge Guerricaechevarria and Álex de la Iglesia (real names?) and they dish up all the genre thriller clichés sprinkled with inane philosophical babble and algorithm riddles that only nerds must think clever, with Wood – I must mention this again – as the stud wooing woman thrillingly open to pasta experimentation. Might all this be satire? Dig Jim Carter’s inspector who slowly catches on that serial murderers kill multiple victims. Dud. D+

Jobs (2013)

“Jobs” -– the biopic of Steve Jobs -– is not the dud everyone has proclaimed it to be. I say that in hindsight having watched the movie after it took a critical drubbing and box office dive. Ashton Kutcher plays the famed Apple founder from bum-ass college days until the intro of the iPod, the tiny device that turned the music industry on its head. That’s the hook: We open with the iPod and jump back to Jobs in college, then lead back up to the start. We see Jobs’ genius and his gift of knowing what people want, and, yes, his asshole tendencies. The film is at its best when we stick to Jobs’ desire to change the world with tech that can change how people do ... everything. Oddly, we never do see the birth of the iPod. Really. Just hints. That stings. Edited out? Why? More oddly, we skip over the Pixar years where Jobs learned to see the visions of others and build his family. Kutcher has the look and quirky walk -– oddly comical to tell the truth -– down. That’s good. But those dark Jobs’ moments, Kutcher falls short, too nice a guy? Passable. B

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

This is rare: A remake smarter and cooler than the original. John McTiernan’s takes on 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunanway and spun on a bank-robber billionaire. Here, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo -- at the height of their stardom -– are in the spotlight with an art museum theft as the central plot device. Great change up. Brosnan is a Wall Street master who has grown bored with acquisitions and the back-slapping hoopla of taking other people’s money. But he loves oil and canvas, and a thrill. So he takes a Monet from New York’s Met. In broad daylight. During a giddy fun sideshow to a full-on robbery he orchestrated. Russo is the insurance investigator who care shit about art, but only the chase. She knows Crown did the theft, and he knows that she knows. Is the art the thing here? No. It's two bored powerful people who finally found the one who makes them tick. “Crown” is smart, damn sexy, and funny, with an insider streak that plays on the stars’ wattage, New York ego, and the prior film with Dunaway playing a wink-wink role. Brosnan and Russo are perfectly matched. B+

Event Horizon (1997)

I saw “Event Horizon” back in 1997 and thought it an ugly, silly mess with good actors – Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne star – mucking about in a spaceship so familiar one keeps waiting for John Hurt to lose his lunch. (Hurt does not appear.) The plot: Neill is a scientist leading the salvage of the spacecraft Event Horizon that went missing seven years prior with no clear explanation. The ship appears as if every ’80s slasher villain has run through it: Blood smears and grisly bodies abound, floating in micro-gravity. Why? How? I won’t spoil it. Naturally, though, the crew ditch the buddy system and split up because in 2047 no one has seen “Alien.” Made by Paul Anderson (not Thomas, but W.S.), “Event” smacks of a film that’s dead certain that pouring on guts, gore, eyeballs, and blood all means horror and scares, not aware that the opposite is true. The paces Neill is put through makeup-wise brings my truest pity. The scenes with men holding on by fingers to bending, twisting iron brought my continuous, unpitying laughter. Time has not been kind at all. D

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

The Lost Weekend (1945)

Billy Wilder is the greatest director. His “The Apartment” is the best romantic comedy film of all time. But check out Best Picture winner “The Lost Weekend,” the 1945 stark black-and-white story of a writer hitting bottom and finding yet more muck to dig through as he battles alcoholism, the kind where the guy knows he can’t breathe without a shot. Ray Milland –- I only ever knew him from “Escape to Witch Mountain” –- is Don, the insecure failure with just enough cash to buy just enough booze to finish ruining his life. But, this is 1940s-era movie, so there has to be an oh-so-devoted dame, and we get it with Jane Wyman as a magazine researcher. (Me, I thought the other lady of the film, a call girl, played by Doris Dowling, seemed far closer to earth than Wyman's saint.) Milland plays his part with a desperate bitterness and a swagger that every drunk knows is so well acted that no one would ever know he’s drunk. Wilder knowingly keeps those bottles in focus. The “upper” ender vibes wrong as if the studio didn't want audiences going home with too much a taste of reality. A-

The Sugarland Express (1974)

I marvel at Steven Spielberg’s debut theatrical film: “The Sugarland Express,” a fictionalized take on an outlaw Texas couple (William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run from hundreds of Texas cops as they seek their stolen toddler, now in state custody to an old couple out of GOP Weekly. Dad (Atherton) is just in early release from prison when Mom (Hawn) breaks him out comedy-like to get their boy, high-jacking an elderly couple’s car. She knows she’ll hold her baby. He knows they’ll die first, but he’s too in love to say “No.” Even the cop they take hostage feels bad for the duo. Forty years on, Spielberg’s film vibes with wonders – dig the scenes where we follow a tense screaming match via radio from inside a car, the camera roving about like a passenger, and the way he mixes in equal parts America’s outlaw romance and right-wing NRA types who shoot first and keep shooting. This is still timely. Hawn is so fantastically in the moment, and Atherton -– he found fame playing assholes in “Die Hard” and “Ghostbusters” –- is pure American Guy, stuck between choosing life and his blonde, and, well, there is no choice. Wife. A