After an extended break due to lack of motivation, I’m back and raring to go. In my time off I’ve written notes on a few films that I’ve seen and thought I’d publish them here without trying to go back and flesh them out too rigorously, as none of them are recent. Most are short, around a paragraph or so, with a few longer ones to come in the second post. Regular length reviews should return next week or sooner.Mongol
Another installment of the mishandled marketing mobile,
Mongol is not the action film the trailers would have you believe. It's a slow moving and brooding portrait of a man and it's simply stunningly beautiful film most of the time. The only hitch comes near the end, with a stunted and confusing climax that requires expositional dialogue to straighten out. Keep in mind that his is not a film about “Genghis Khan” the man, it is about the events and relationships that made a young mongolian boy turn into the man who would be called Genghis Khan. Go in with these expectations and you will not be disappointed.
Drillbit Taylor
I often have trouble reviewing bad comedies because I keep rationalizing the film’s mediocrity by asking myself “What did you expect?” I’ve seen a few bad comedies recently, which included
Strange Wilderness and
Semi-Pro and I declined to review them for the simple fact that I had nothing constructive to add to the already well trodden review mileau that exists.
And
Drillbit Taylor, about three young boys who hire a homeless man to protect them from a bully, doesn't quite escape these problems; it is not by any means a good movie. But it's not half bad, and I thought it might be fun to point out the one, integral, mistake it makes. The problem lies in whether the film is about Drillbit or the kids he is protecting. Should the script follow him and his sappy, terrible romance or the growing-up of the young lads in question? Obviously the answer is the latter and I wonder at what point in production this problem arose - at the script level, or later, when they found out who would be playing the titular Mr. Drillbit.
Mirrors
It doesn't take much insight to break this one down.
Alexandre Aja is at the forefront of contemporary horror. He made the startlingly scary
High Tension in 2003 and in his subsequent move to Hollywood, he even managed to give us a remake of
The Hills Have Eyes that was remarkably watchable. But
Mirrors is miles away from watchable. Kiefer Sutherland plays a security guard at an abandoned department store where the mirrors want to kill him. It's a preposterous plot, but one that could be pretty creepy in the right hands, after all, how many times a day do we encounter our reflection, hundreds? But
Mirrors doesn't work. It's slow, it's cliche, it has terrible dialogue and wooden acting.
And it often makes no sense. Avoid like the plague.
Street Kings
In
Street Kings’ first five minutes, in which Keanu Reeves bursts into a Korean porn dungeon and singlehandedly kills five shotgun-toting bad guys with his pistol, I thought to myself, perhaps director David Ayer should be making video games. Because it’s in video games that we want to see, and to be, all-powerful, invincible and enact a bit of the old ultraviolence. But in a gritty cop drama with aspirations to be taken seriously, many of Ayer’s fantasies of the conflicted supercop come off seeming, well, fantastic.
Street Kings is about hardened supercop Tom Ludlow, LA’s finest. He always gets his man, even if he has to muck the evidence a bit to do it. Ludlow finds out his old partner Washington has been talking to IA and things are not looking good. But before Ludlow can give Washington a swift ass-kicking for ratting him out, Washington is gunned down in cold blood by two guys in a convenience store and wouldn’t you believe it, Ludlow just can't let the murder be buried. He has to find out who killed his ex-partner, even if the corruption takes him back to his own department!
I kind of fell asleep just writing out that scenario, and it isn't much better watching it. Every scene is completely phoned in, writing and acting both, and all of the dialogue is either trite or expository. In a way it's funny, but it's also patronizing. There are no surprises here and if you've seen a few films of this kind, you know how this one ends.
Acting-wise, Keanu gives the same performance he always turns in, Forest Whitaker overacts away what little respect I had for him, and Hugh Laurie as the IA guy is either sleeping through his scenes or laughing inside at what a goof all this is.
David Ayer has yet to make a really good movie but I had high hopes for
Street Kings after seeing his directorial debut
Harsh Times, which had an original and satisfying story. But he is definitely working backwards with
Street Kings. Ayer didn't write this one, it's based on a James Elroy novel, and IMDB tells me that three scriptwriters were mucking about with the screenplay, so it’s possible that with so many cooks in the kitchen the pot got a little overcooked and we wound up with a confusing mess.
Whatever it is, it's not a gritty cop drama, it's too stupid for that. And it's not an action movie, it's too boring.
Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road is a polarizing film. Highly rated by many critics, I went in with high hopes and left just wondering why. What did so many high ranking pundits see that I couldn't? When I viewed the film, I found a detached, cold character study with no character development or dimensionality.
The film's plot is old fashioned but strong: Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple who move to the suburbs and have to decide if they strive to realize their dreams or settle for little successes. The characters want more from their lives but are afraid of stepping outside of their comfort zone. A lot of moping and brooding occurs, and a later turn by Michael Shannon as a crazy guy is well played and fun to watch, but feels like a narrative cheat, as he shows up and sums up the film's themes without director Sam Mendes being required to explore those themes with any real nuance.
There is a narrative and aesthetic detachment to these characters that prevented me from empathizing with them and I surmise that the film must be rated highly by people who have projected their own dissatisfaction with life onto the cardboard characters. I understand it was based on a book and that much of it follows that book closely, but a book is not inherently a screenplay.
However, I concede that the art direction is nice.
