"2012" Review

Roland Emmerich gets his rocks off blowing up the world. Hey, whatever sinks your battleship. It's like the Tarantino foot fetish thing, you just have to shake your head and go, 'the guy likes feet.' But if destruction is Emmerich's erotica, then "2012" is a perverse shrine; it's disaster porn, a sweaty menage a trois of "Dante's Peak," "Titanic," and "Independence Day." "2012" distinguishes itself from those films only in its unabashed one-upmanship: bigger, louder, and more marginalized story.

The marketing admittedly piqued my interest, I think because it seemed so simultaneously silly and audacious. Highway billboards and movie theater stand-ups depicted iconic human art and architecture being pathetically splintered, smashed, or washed away. I imagined the lunacy of the digital disaster film coupled with an absurdist futility. I wanted "2012" to be genre satire, an unrelenting gleeful cataclysm without redemption. In retrospect, it was not wise to expect these things from Emmerich.

If anything, "2012" is torturously formulaic, layering state of the art special effects over the writer/director's decade-old story template. A renegade scientist discovers an inevitable global catastrophe, meets our always-noble president, and clashes with an evil cabinet member--it turns out 2012 is a whole lot like 1996. But perhaps most disappointingly, by any action movie standard, Emmerich breaks a cardinal rule: he never tops his first act. The five-plus minute sequence that arrives roughly forty minutes into the film involves John Cusack and company speeding through a crumbling Los Angeles cityscape by limousine and airplane while earthquakes topple skyscrapers and split the streets, swallowing countless fleeing innocents. It would have made a fantastically over-the-top finale, but Emmerich isn't content to simply shake things up when he could drown or pelt them with fiery balls of magma.

The majority of the disposable plot actually revolves around the struggle to reserve space on one of several 'arks' being built in China to house the lucky few chosen to repopulate the dying planet. The general public is never informed of their existence, but attention rich and famous: tickets can be purchased for just a few million Euro! The third act of "2012" then takes to the open water and devolves into everything I didn't want it to be, namely a countdown-clock movie in which the resilience of human ingenuity and spirit ultimately triumph over avers--

I'm sorry, I dozed off there for a second. Millions of people die in this film, so forgive me if John Cusack and his fickle ex-wife, son, and hat-loving daughter's survival aboard a ship loaded with billionaires and bureaucrats charting a course for the inexplicably unflooded African continent to, I'm sure, politely explain the concept of manifest destiny to any weary native survivors, fails to move me. Emmerich's ending is worse than cliche, it's insultingly euphemistic, backwards, and schmaltzy.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more apt that porn metaphor becomes. It's not difficult to tell which scenes exist solely to progress the plot, and which scenes set the stage for ludicrous action set pieces. Seeing a hanger full of Russian concept cars is like opening a scene in a porno with two girls on a couch. Come on. The film's primary function, as with feature length pornography, also makes the running time completely unnecessary. You know why you're watching.

As pure spectacle, "2012" occasionally succeeds, with some well-choreographed action sequences that straddle the fine line of utter ridiculousness and competently address their directive to entertain. The plot, however, is at best derivative and at worst short-sighted and masturbatory.

Can't wait for the sequel, Roland Emmerich's "Seamen."

2/5

FARCE/FILM Episode 19: 2012, The Road

--> Episode 19: 11/16/09 <--

Hosts: Colin George, Brian Crawford, and Kevin Mauer

Intro -- 00:00
Top 5 -- 01:16
2012 (Spoilers) -- 05:09

The Road (Spoilers) -- 26:55

Events and Outro -- 51:21

"2012"

Colin:

Crawford:

Kevin:

"The Road"

Colin:

Kevin:

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" Review

No, it's not a Coen brothers film, but it does a decent impression. The marks are clearly visible, foremost being the casting of veteran leads George Clooney and Jeff Bridges, and a plot that follows their reliable 'Joe-Local-gets-in-over-his-head' template. The film finds release just a year after the Coen's own "Burn After Reading," and the good news is that "The Men Who Stare at Goats," is just about on par with their espionage comedy, though I don't hold either in particularly high regard. Despite the misleading stylistic similarities, "Goats" was directed by a guy called Grant Heslov, who has a far more extensive resume as an actor than a director. He appeared in Clooney's "Leatherheads," last year and this appears to be the mutually beneficial returned favor.

Clooney brings an oomph to the film that Bridges or Kevin Spacey or even Ewan McGregor couldn't alone, and the script trades him one of the more legitimately charming performances of his career. As Lyn Cassidy, self-proclaimed 'Jedi warrior,' Clooney partners with a small town reporter (McGregor), for an undercover psychic mission on behalf of a secret branch of the U.S. Army. Their adventure is interspersed with a history of the 'First Earth Battalion,' a regiment with a freethinking spiritual approach to global conflict, based on information pulled from the supposedly real biography (also titled "The Men Who Stare at Goats") by author Jon Ronson. Experiments allegedly include, as advertised, the power to fell goats through channeled negative energy and the ability to pass through walls. The movie is prefaced with the phrase, "More of this is true than you would believe."

The bureaucratic satire of the snappy flashbacks makes for considerably better comedy than the majority of the present-day sequences, which often stumble in shoehorning the amusing suppositions, characters, and gags from the precursor scenes into a narrative. The issue comes to a head in a generally misguided third act, which fumbles for dramatic and comedic footing, delivering a largely disappointing finale on both counts. Still, the movie is as easygoing as the new-age hippies it depicts, and as such, stands a difficult film to dislike.

Where I do take issue with it, however, is in its depiction of Jedi ability. For the most part, the effectiveness of Cassidy's powers is a punch line, though I can imagine those who believe in the telepathic potential of the mind could read him at face value, pronouncing his psychic powers truncated by a hex cast by a rival solider. These sequences are left pleasingly ambiguous with two exceptions. The first is featured in the trailer, and the second I won't spoil.

Cassidy and Bob Wilton (McGregor as the surrogate Ronson), are driving across the Iraqi dessert when Wilton calls out Cassidy for a peculiar upward squinting. Cassidy explains the behavior as "cloud dispersing," and we cut to an effects insert from Wilton's point of view as the heavenly mass quickly dissipates. As near as I can tell, whether intentionally or not, the shot suggests that Cassidy isn't crazy and that he is legitimately paranormally gifted, which kills the quirky suspense moving forward. Others have suggested the shot represents a natural dispersion, which Cassidy merely perceives to have caused of his own volition, but the speed ramping applied to the image suggests otherwise to me. The same sequence without that single shot could easily have maintained an intriguing open-endedness.

The shot could hardly be said to spoil the film, which on the whole remains a fun, occasionally engaging diversion. My pre-existing interest in the strange is certainly a handicap not all audiences will share, and the proceedings favor subtle irony to joke-a-minute yuk-fests like this Summer's aggressively unfunny, "Hangover," which, no, I really won't get tired of bashing. "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is an acquired taste to be sure, and even under the right frame of mind has its share of problems, but nevertheless offers an entertaining ninety minutes with some great performances and hilarious individual scenes.

If the Coen brothers are inadvertently receiving credit for this film, they needn't be embarrassed.

3.5/5

FARCE/FILM Episode 18: Men Who Stare at Goats

--> Episode 18: 11/8/09 <--

Hosts: Colin George, Brian Crawford, Maggie Ruder

Intro – 00:00
Top 5 – 02:34
The Men Who Stare at Goats (spoilers) – 20:21
Events and Outro – 42:52

"The Men Who Stare at Goats"

Colin:
Crawford:
Maggie:

"Bronson" Review

Can you really produce a biopic about the theatrical brutality of Britain's most dangerous prisoner and not incite comparisons to Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange?" The trailer for Nicholas Winding Refn's "Bronson" spouts the likeness triumphantly with a quote attributed to Damien McSorley for the publication, "Zoo." Surely Kubrick is a flattering filmmaker to have your humble work compared to, though like American director Wes Anderson, who borrows all the style of the man but none of the content, "Bronson" is a film with an air of grandiosity and very little in the way of actual story. Kubrick's film, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, has a Dickensian plot that doubles back on characters and scenarios established in the first act, leaving nothing unchanged by the end of the third. It's a comparison under which "Bronson" unfavorably suffers: well directed, impeccably performed, but completely devoid of structure.

I don't mean to undersell the above compliments, however. Tom Hardy as lowly criminal Michael Peterson and his imprisoned superstar alter ego Charles Bronson, displays a remarkable, feral intensity in the role, spitting meaty, cockney chunks of dialogue with a truly disquieting voracity. And Hardy makes a perfect match for Refn: both share a larger-than-life approach to their craft. The director's visual audacity is never more sublimely paired with Hardy's performance than during Bronson's intermittent narrations; snippets of a surreal one-man stage show for some great, unseen audience. The cutaways recall the feel of Alex's presentation following the successful administration of the ludovico technique in "Clockwork Orange." Swooping crane and sweeping dolly shots, along with some fantastic locations, also evoke Kubrick's directorial sentiments, as does the more obvious accompaniment of classical score to key sequences.

Unfortunately, the failure of "Bronson" is not only that there's very little dramatically to be done with a man who spends the better part of his life in solitary confinement, but that beyond a vague notoriety, Peterson's ultimate goal is never particularly clear. The ending of the film is startling in its abruptness given that the scene seems interchangeable with any number of the fights Bronson picks over the course of the film. It doesn't feel a particularly epic brawl, and by that point, the tedium of Bronson's outbursts, battles, and increasingly severe punishments had worn me (though it could maybe be called a statement on the nature of desensitizing cinema--in that respect a reverse "Clockwork Orange") into a sleepy passivity.

The film is nevertheless a step the right direction for the usually-schlocky and hyper-masculine Refn, but "Bronson" still wants for the substantiality that makes great films great films. It isn't likely to inspire any further meditation on its subject beyond perhaps provoking a curiosity about the man himself in those intrigued but unsatisfied with the screenplay's frugal allocation of hard data and social context. But despite the film's inability to make clear its greater thematic intent, I don't think "Bronson" is a perversely violent film or that it exists solely as a fetishistic idol to counterculture, as some will likely label it, and have labeled Kubrick's masterpiece. Its beautiful cinematography (courtesy Larry Smith, interestingly enough, the lighting cameraman for Kubick's own "Eyes Wide Shut") and stellar lead may make it a worthwhile rental next year, but as it stands, "Bronson" is a precautionary tale. It's a film that has everything going for it except the the thing that matters most: its story. And you don't need to be Stanley Kubrick to figure that out.

3/5

"A Serious Man" Review

With a prolificacy unprecedented in their decade and a half filmmaking career, the Coen brothers have released three films in three consecutive years. The first, 2007's "No Country for Old Men" won the duo a long belated best picture Oscar. Their second, the amiable "Burn After Reading" received mixed reviews but remained a commercial success. "A Serious Man," their latest, is a semi-autobiographical parable about the relevance of religion to modern society (modern being the seventies for a pair that have so tirelessly explored the earlier half of the twentieth century). To label the piece one of the best films of the year is to undersell it; it's the Coens' best film of the decade.

The statement gives an initial impression of grandeur, but is still somewhat misleading given that the new millennium has seen a median decline in the quality of the Coens' work, if only when compared to their streak of wildly diverse successes during the nineties. 2003 and 2004 also saw the release of their two most styleless films ("Intolerable Cruelty," "The Ladykillers"), which may prompt more cynical readers to regard my proclamation as somewhat hallow. The greatest compliment I can pay the Coen brothers' latest effort may simply be to say that it holds up to their best work. Radically different in setting and character while still embodying an ineffable Coen-ness, "A Serious Man" is truly worthy of the duo's legacy.

Tonally, it bears closest similarity to "Fargo," in that the filmmakers' bizarre humor remains in tact, but is broadcast at a lower decibel than "Burn After Reading," or "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "A Serious Man" is a subtly engaging film, its pacing slow and deliberate, with a series of escalating misfortunes that ratchet up the tension for the Coen's surrogate father, protagonist Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), until the apotheosis funnels into one of the most viscerally cinematic and profoundly powerful endings in recent memory. The only thing that comes close is maybe the last five minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."

Without spoiling anything, the film is deliberately constructed to leave the interpretation of God, or the manifestation of His will, up to the viewer. Is "A Serious Man" a film about fate, about the futility of religious practice, or about its importance? Plug in either interpretation and it works, and that's just a sliver of the film's brilliance. Religion is really a perfect subject for the Coens, given that the pair has always favored the unresolved and the unexplained in their storytelling. For them, God is the ultimate question mark.

But more importantly, above its philosophical and theological subtext, "A Serious Man" is an entertaining story. More reserved than perhaps any of their films, the Coens still squeeze in their signature hard-edged silliness with a cast of memorable characters and offbeat subplots involving the people in Larry's life: his dope-smoking son, dope-smoking neighbor, live-in brother, estranged wife, and her prospective future husband. Truth be told, the events that transpire are rarely enthralling in the moment, but the further I stand from them, the more complete and satisfying a portrait they form. The final moments are beautiful and haunting, and tie everything together so well with so little that you may not realize how perfect it is until the credits are already rolling.

The Coens have reasserted themselves as incomparable American filmmakers worthy of mention in the same breath as genre-chameleon Billy Wilder. With a relatively dry award season ahead of us, "A Serious Man" is at the top of my list, and though the pair won their first best picture Oscar only two years ago, it suddenly seems rather implausible that they'll be waiting another thirteen years for their next.

4.5/5

FARCE/FILM Episode 17: Bronson, Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus

--> Episode 17: 11/1/09 <--

Hosts: Colin George, Brian Crawford, Tyler Drown

Intro – 00:00

Top 5 - 07:15

Bronson - 13:45

I Can’t Believe You’ve Seen - 23:32

(Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus)

Events and Outro - 41:16

"Bronson"

Colin:

"Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus"
Colin:
Crawford:
Tyler: