The Hurt Locker review. Buckle up :)

This review was also sent in to Aint it Cool news just in case it should appear there. They’re both me and no one is ripping me off Anyway, here’s my rambling thoughts on the film.

A bomb squad in Iraq! Talk about a high concept setting for an intense action flick. And that is what The Hurt Locker is. Forget the ad’s that seem to be selling it as an award winning ‘war movie’. This is a balls to the wall action thriller following a bomb disposal team as they count down the days to the end of their duty.

This isn’t a ‘war’ movie with a preachy message, there’s no ‘Private Ryan’ moments where the action stops for a twenty minute TV movie of the week discussion about war being hell, this is just full on action, right from the off. Any message Bigelow is intending is obvious from the men’s actions. These guys work in a place where death could be anywhere, a guy on a mobile phone, a pile of junk by the side of the road, a sniper a mile away. Bigelow’s prowling, edgy camera (hand-held done right, not used to disguise inept film-making skills) keeps the tension up as it cuts away to any number of possible threats and peeks from windows and alleyways. The hand-held zooms and wobble giving an urgency to proceedings as opposed to leaving the viewer confused and disorientated.

If there is a problem with the film it’s the lack of a real narrative. It is essentially just a collection of bravura bomb disposal set pieces (and a sniper sequence that is a shoe-in for one of the movie-scenes of the year) with little to hold it all together. In this sense though, it’s no worse than Saving Private Ryan and it’s likes and since it barrels along at such a nerve jangling pace it seems churlish to complain.

In a summer full of vapid gloss aimed at (and seemingly written by) 14 year old boys, it is an absolute joy to see a movie of this calibre appear. And there-in lies the problem. I saw this at the Edinburgh Film Festival and, as far as I can see, there is no European release date set for it. Over there in the US it seems to be getting a very limited release and that’s frankly shocking behaviour. What we have here is one of the films of the year. A genuinely thrilling, nerve jangling, palm sweatingly intense action thriller made by a master film-maker and…no ones going to see it because Transformers 2 has invaded the multiplexes. All those people whose appreciation of cinema has been eroded to the point that JJ Abrams is considered a great film-maker need to see this movie. Hell, JJ Abrams needs to see this movie and learn how to shoot for the cinema. This is what a great movie looks and sounds like. Forget the toy adverts, the fart gags and the dumb ass humour that Hollywood is hoisting upon you to tick the marketing boxes of the 14-25 year old demographic. Seek this out, have your socks blown off, stumble out of the cinema on wobbly legs and then tell all your friends. All the summer block-busters should be this good.

Talent is irrelevant: watching the ‘New Moon’

Hollywood cinema is reaching an all time moronic low at present. Narrative cinema is all but dying and audiences are flocking in droves to watch a barrage of images and noise under the impression that they’re seeing ‘awesome’ movies. Talent is now irrelevant in Hollywood. You don’t need it. You need a trailer, a couple of ‘hot’ kids, loads of cgi (good or bad), a script that consists of jokes, and a bad photoshop poster of the pre-mentioned ‘hot’ kids.

There is no other explanation for this reaction to the ‘New Moon’ trailer, which, frankly, looks like a bad TV movie. Enjoy.

The Star Trek debacle.

You may want to consider this part 2 of the ‘what’s shakin’ blog since it will deal with most of the issues raised there-in.

First off. What film did 90% of the the cinema going audience see that I didn’t? This is one of the best reviewed movies of the year and it’s terrible. Kurtzman and Orci are being praised for their ‘clever’ screenplay when, in actual fact, it’s so moronic it’s almost offensive. It falls apart as you’re watching it and has some ‘coincidences’ that i’d be embarrased to write in a blog far less a $5 million dollar screenplay. These two monkeys are a prime example of Hollywood mistaking ‘good box-office’ with ‘talent’. I wouldn’t let them write my shopping list for fear that they’d dumb it down and add a comedy sidekick to it.

Next up. JJ Abrams. Please send this guy back to TV where he belongs. Really. If you don’t know anything about shooting a film for the big screen then stick with TV. Once again, Abrams is getting high praise and is mentioned in the same breath as Spielberg (just NO). For what? Shooting an epic sci-fi film like an episode of TV. The whole thing, including the space battles, is shot in close-ups and mid-shots. With a hand-held camera. Which shakes about to signify ‘excitement’. FUCK. OFF. WITH. THIS. This is not exciting, it’s bad film-making. If you don’t understand shot composition, staging and editing then you shouldn’t be here. You could have handed a camera to a monkey and let him loose on the set and got the same footage. It’s all cut so fast it doesn’t make any difference anyway because you can’t follow the action, it just pummels you with images.

My theory for all this nonsense is that the rise of quality TV shows has been picked up on by Hollywood. Being Hollywood, they haven’t realised that most of that quality comes from the excellent writing and so hire the Directors/creators to make movies. The TV directors jump at their big chance and proceed to shoot their movie exactly the same way as they would a TV show. On the Big Screen, this equals an ‘epic fail’. Audiences complain about feeling nauseous and getting headaches. Audiences are confused and can’t follow the action, but, the film makes loads of money and Hollywood keeps churning them out.

There needs to be some sort of test set up that potential directors have to pass before being allowed to make a movie. It sounds like a silly idea but ask yourself this – Would you hire someone to do a 100 million dollar job for you without interviewing them fully and making DAMN sure they had the skills to do the job professionally?

What’s shakin’ in Hollywood?

Every bloody camera on a movie set, that’s what.

Hollywood is in the grip of the ‘shaky-cam’ action movie at the moment and doesn’t look like its loosening that grip anytime soon (possibly through fear of dropping the camera). I’m not sure where this trend started (but I have my suspicions) but I will tell you one thing : It doesn’t make the film ‘exciting’ and it’s making me nauseous and giving me a migraine. On top of that, it’s just bad film-making. The excitement and thrill from great action movies comes through the composition and staging of the shot; the fluid use of the camera; well paced editing, not, I repeat, not, simply shaking the camera about and cutting it together so quickly no one notices that you haven’t actually filmed anything exciting.

The best example I can think of is, driving your car on the motorway.

Picture the scene. It’s an empty motorway, the sun is out, and you decide to live a little and put the foot down. The world starts rushing past you, the speedometer starts rising – 70.80.85.90. The road is flying past now, your adrenalin is starting to pump a little, 95. 100. The car zooms off into the sunset.

Exciting, eh!

Now try that again but instead of watching the road race towards you, randomly turn your attention to other things as quick as you can. The road. 70.80. Hands on the steering wheel. One of the car wheels going round. 85. Gear change.Cool angle of the car with an orange filter on the lens for some reason.90. shot of steering wheel. nice shot of road rushing pas…oh, its gone already,95, gear change again (how many gears does this car have), continuously zoom in and out on drivers face, steering wheel, gear change. 100.

Now try visualising all of that while you shake your head violently from side to side.

In fact, just try reading it while shaking your head from side to side. You can’t. It’s near impossible to concentrate when the object your viewing is constantly moving around. This is just as true in the cinema.

I think most people will agree that the first description give an emotional and visual sense of driving at high speed in a pretty simple way. Anyone whose done that will recognise it. In movie terms, we see the road speeding along, we see the speedometer rise, we see the concentration of the driver. We get a visual thrill form the camera racing along the road, we get information on how fast the car is going, we get information about the character driving. Doesn’t need anything else.

The second description is probably more familiar to modern audiences, and it may sound like movie scene of the year if you’re a 15 year old boy with ADD, but its all unnecessary flash and edits. By shaking and zooming with the camera and cutting lots of images together really fast you’re just giving the illusion of something exciting happening. You could probably shoot most of that without actually moving the car.

Simple, well planned, shot and edited scenes will always trump this kind of cinematic masturbation.

A good example is the Truck and motorbike chase in Terminator 2 and say, the motorway carnage chase scene in Bad Boys 2. Now Bad Boys 2 may seem the more spectacular of the two, and there is some fine car smashing fun in it, but really take a look at it, shot by shot, how much of what you’re seeing is just smoke and mirrors. Consider the pacing and editing of T2 and the exhileration of the pay off. Now look at BB2. A few spectacular shots and lots of zooming, shaky-cam filler and it just stops. What was the purpose of this scene?, what did it do to drive the narrative forward?

I have more to say on this and a few ideas on why we might be suffering it but i’ll keep them until part two…

The obtuse vernacular of the academic.

Currently writing a 2000 word essay on ‘genre hybridity’ in one of my favourite films, Strange Days. It’s a movie i’ve enjoyed and admired since I first saw it on the big screen, way back in 95, but by researching it for this essay i’ve unearthed a mountain of facts I’d never been aware of before. And discovered that some people write the most pretentious pish about films. If one word is guaranteed to strike fear into my heart, it is the word ‘academic’. Is there a bit of writing software somewhere that goes through your paper and finds the most obtuse version of each word in order to make you sound more intelligent,  a sort of ‘Microsoft Word for Academics’?

For example, I was trying to define ‘Science Fiction’ as I see it, in order to engage with certain ideas. To me, Sci-fi is a text which engages, at some level, with advanced technology; be it a spaceship, sonic screwdriver or the SQUID device from Strange Days. Darko Suvin (good name) an ‘academic’, describes sci-fi thus-ly – ‘SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” validated by cognitive logic.’

WTF!

Christine Cornea (Who’s book Science Fiction Cinema is a recommended read) explains the above passage as meaning, ‘the fictional inventions or non-human characters that colonise the genre are logically justified within the world of the genre… (but)…remain outside of a known reality’

So, basically, anything with spaceships and aliens!

And this is what I have to deal with when writing essays. Don’t even start me on some of the Film theorists.

Anyway, back to the essay.

‘Scream’ if you wanna go faster.

Horror movies have been the topic of discussion this week at Uni and we watched The Grudge as an example of Hollywood remakes/J-Horror type stuff. It wasn’t bad. Some nice creepy Japanese kids doing creepy Japanese kid things…if you like that kinda thing. And Buffy’s in it, but doesn’t kick any ass.

But the subject of Scream came up as a prime example of the modern Hollywood horror movie and since it’s a movie I feel strongly about I thought I would vent some spleen about it.

Nobody likes a post-modern smart ass. Yes it’s very clever and self-aware but the result is that there’s no ‘horror’. Because the characters treat everything as a big in-joke and don’t take the threat seriously, it ruins the scare. If we don’t feel like anyone is in jeopardy then the film is just going through the motions. As a result the film is more of a violent comedy than a horror film. I want to leave a horror movie shaken, not smiling and joking. The only scene in the movie which came close to working was the ‘two accomplices in murder’ stabbing each other in the kitchen. Their shock at the pain and the results of blood loss on them was quite disturbing and unsettling, but was ruined by the subsequent stupidity which ensued.

The worse thing about all this was that it was a success. Not to denegrate Wes Craven as a film-maker, as it’s a well made film and he knows the territory, but it lead to a series of  ‘fun’ horror movies which lasted almost a decade. It was only in fairly recent years with movies like The Descent and Wolf Creek that horror movies once again did what they should- grab you by the scruff of the neck and haul you along ’til you’re an emotional wreck.

And now we have ‘torture porn’, a stupid phrase for a bunch of stupid movies, ably led by a stupid film-maker Eli Roth. His atrocious, actually unwatchably bad, Cabin Fever started it all off and we’ve had to suffer a series of pointless gore movies since. Roth, who has a Roger Corman like ability for self-promotion but not the skills, often tells of his inspiration from cheapy, exploitation movies and how he wanted to return to those experiences. The problem is that he’s also learned all his film-making skills from those movies. He hasn’t realised that you can take those ‘exploitation’ elements and remould them like Cronenberg did in his early days, into something greater than the sum of its (body) parts. All he does is churn out z-grade fodder with lashings of gore and thinks he’s some kind of horror auteur. In fact, he’s just a film nerd who got lucky. Most of his luck coming from the fact that Hollywood Horror audiences have been dumbed down to the point that his movies were watchable. This is straight to video trash with a marketing budget.

And now we have an endless series of great horror films being remade for this dumbed down audience. The Omen doesn’t need a funky modern soundtrack and MTV editing. John Carpenters films are all good enough as they are. Spend some money to clean them up and re-release them. They don’t need remade, especially since you’re just gonna do it badly and, lets face it, probably miss the point of the original film.

Horror movies aren’t ‘fun’. Comedy doesn’t belong here. Where has all the intelligence and skill gone from these movies?

Anyone?

It’s something in my eye, honest.

A fun question was presented in class yesterday- What films have made you cry, or, at the very least, made you overly emotional?

The range of answers was pretty interesting and ranged from obvious, manipulative twaddle like ‘Pay if Forward’  to the slightly odd ‘Silent Running’…

Ok. That was mine.

If anyone remembers this film, it starred Bruce Dern as a kinda Space Hippy on board a spaceship/biodome. Their mission was to find a planet which could sustain life and introduce all the plants etc to it.

It featured two cute robots called Huey and Dewy. Everyone dies, including one of the robots, and the final shot is the remaining one tending to the plants as the bio-dome floats off through space for eternity.

Fucking killed me when I first saw it. To this day, I can’t bring myself to watch it again. Just thinking about that last shot now, brings a lump to my throat.

Needless to say, this got me thinking about other movies that left me an emotional wreck and I thought i’d share them with you, in the hope that you might do the same. In no particular order-

1. Field of Dreams. I’m Male and I have a Father. He’s still alive and well but when he dies, I’m going nowhere near this film.
2. Dead Man Walking. Sean Penn on the phone to his family=Emotional wreck.
3. Mr Hollands Opus. Okay, it’s manipulative but the ending is a killer. ‘We are your symphony, Mr Holland, we are the music of your life’. Dammit.

So, that’s some of my emotional movies. Would anyone care to add some more.

Return to Brokeback Mountain.

I will, occasionally, dip into some older movies as I see fit and today is the first.

Brokeback Mountain.

I currently have a class in ‘Contemporary Hollywood Cinema’ and the viewing list has some gems in it. So far we’ve watched:

1. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang -great movie, not a bad word to say about it.
2. I am Legend -Ok, apart from the awful last act. Is it really so difficult to make a great movie from this book.
3. The Devil Wears Prada – Don’t even start me. All its characterisation is jammed into the last five minutes where a nice musical montage absolves Anne Hathaway of the previous two hours.
4. Brokeback Mountain -

I’m jumping the gun a bit here as i’m watching this again this afternoon. I saw it during its original release and enjoyed it to a degree. My issues with it were more cosmetic than the ‘ Oh My God. Queer Cowboys. Blasphemy’ furore that appeared at the time.

1. The Heath Ledger character sounds like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. For the whole movie I kept imagining him saying ‘it rubs the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again’. Very distracting.
2. The makeup effects are terrible to the stage of being pointless. The only signifier of time passing is Anne Hathaway’s hats and haircuts. These become as unintentionally funny as Ledger’s voice.
3. The movie starts as sweeping epic and descends into TV movie of the week.

I will return later after watching it again and see if it has grown in my estimation.

Edit.

Forgive the odd analogy, but it reminds me of The Matrix. That too was a film I felt was blown out of all proportion based on breaking new ground as opposed to actually being a good film. This struck me watching Brokeback again. If it was about a straight couple, would it be anywhere near as interesting?

I say No. Its a nice enough film but take the ‘Gay’ out and its all pretty average and dull. And the Anne Hathaway stuff is like a really bad TV movie.

Who watches the ‘Watchmen’

Well, me, for one.

I’ve been a bit mean about this film based purely on my hatred for Zach Snyder. Re-making , badly, one of my favourite films and stealing two hours of my life with the bloody awful ’300′ has not really endeared him to me.

…Its not the total car crash I was expecting. In fact, a lot of it is pretty good. When its sticking close to the book and allowing the story to breathe I was quite engrossed. The Rorschach and Dr Manhattan stories are well done and some of the performances are great.

However. Zach Snyder. Dear me, what are we going to do with you?

He’s just too immature for this material. It’s a dark, adult fantasy world and Snyder is still a comic book geek who giggles at tits. Every slo-mo action set piece hauls you out of the story. The characters are suddenly accompanied by sub-woofer punches and the abilty to send people hurtling through the air; not to mention, take an inhuman amount of abuse themselves. This is really an anti-superhero story and Snyder’s ‘visionary’ stylistics completely miss the point.

The ‘Munich’ award for most poorly judged sex scene…goes to…

Yes. A Sex scene scored to ‘hallelujah’, in which, on orgasmic cue, Malin Ackerman hits a red button which causes flames to shoot out the vehicle they’re in. Was this scene supposed to be funny? Was ‘Hallelujah’ a pun? Either way its childish and bloody awful.

The Music.
Alternative 80′s history but loads of actual 80′s songs. Every one of which pulls you out of the film. Not sure why, but they just don’t seem to fit in with the style.

That said, there’s a great movie in here and the screenplay is surprisingly intelligent, which is even more surprising if you’ve read David Hayter’s open letter that’s around the internet. In a more skilled directors hands it could have been a masterpiece. As it is, its an engaging enough film let down by some mis-judged choices and too much unnecessary stylistics.

Credit for getting it made though, although you’re still better off reading the graphic novel.

The New Star Trek Movie

The new trailer for JJ Abrahms Star Trek prequel is now online. I’m not posting a link because I don’t, in any way want to feel like i’m helping to promote the piece of shit.

You may recall Abrahms last (first?) movie was the dreadful Mission:Impossible 3, a very badly written , shot and edited excuse for an action pic. He basically just shot the whole thing like an episode of Lost; all handheld cameras and close ups, which is fine for TV but blown up to cinema size is headache inducing and confusing.

So, instead of sending him back to TV-land where he belongs, Paramount entrusted him with the Star Trek franchise. Which is bad enough. Even worse is the fact that it’s a prequel. It’s the Star Trek characters we know and love…as teenagers. Now, if anyone can name a prequel that’s actually any good, I’ll go and see this.

Adding to this indignity is the Mutt and Jeff writing duo of Kurtzman and Orci. These are the guys who’s literary skill were responsible for Transformers; a movie in which, lets face it, giant robots changing into cars and planes, was, by far, the least stupid idea in the whole picture. Choice dialogue from the Star Trek trailer includes the young Kirk saying ‘Why you even talkin’ to me, man’ in a completely out of character, dumb-ass valley speak style.

Looks like, once again, re-imagining a film series basically means, dumbing it down for pot-smoking, no attention span, teenagers.

Nice one.