Lake Flicks

Hello readers. Sorry about the down time, but I got hired on as the movie critic for LakeExpo.com.

At the link above, you can read my review of It's Complicated at the link above. Enjoy and look back here for regular updates.

Also, look for updates on the long dormant Standard project at this link.

Gamer (Dir: Neveldine/Taylor)

Big spoilers below. But many of my readers will want to avoid this unsettling exploitation pic anyway. I saw it so you don't have to.

"Gamer" employs a fence-sitting plot of many exploitation films that both bemoans dehumanizing violence and revels in it. In the future, we force our death row inmates to participate in violent games in order to entertain us and possibly secure their freedom. Director(s) Neveldine/Taylor ("Crank" and "Crank: High Voltage") like so many exploitation filmmakers before them reveal the inherent evil of the system by focusing their film on a noble participant (Gerard Butler) wrongly accused and framed by the system. So maybe letting death row inmates kill each other isn't so bad--look at all the neat explosions and kill shots--but it's certainly bad in the instances when it snags a hero and a family man. We don't need a more humane outlook on justice. Just better quality control.

But the co-directors do add an interesting, if unpleasant, wrinkle in the film's subplot which follows the hero's wife and her participation in "The Sims"-like game Society. Society allows players to select a living, breathing avatar to exploit in whatever way they see fit--usually sexual escapades. Like the violent game in which the hero participates, the film both revels in the prurient results as well as criticizes them. These scenes, however, are so unsettling and vile--particularly the site of a nearly naked morbidly obese laughing at the pain he inflicts from afar--that the film seems to more successfully execute a critical position by making us sick to our stomachs. Engaging in the exploitation here makes the viewer queasy and more than a little guilty, sad.

The directors jettison their soapbox in the climax, however, which gives the villain his violent comeuppance while the whole world/moviegoing audience watches and cheers. The message: Enjoying violence is okay as long as its victims are bad people. This moral is as old as the cave walls, but Neveldine/Taylor seem prepared to criticize this position by making a film that is so disturbing as to wake us to our willingness to dehumanize in the name of entertainment and the pursuit of justice. But they throw this all out the window in the end and reveal that the prurience was the point, an end unto itself, and what we're rewarded for the price of admission.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Dir: Stephen Sommers)

Fans of the G.I. Joe cartoons, actions figures and playsets will find nostalgic charm in "G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra." The film is faithful to its source material right down to having the good guys shoot red lasers and the bad guys shoot blue lasers. This color coded anarchy is helpful during the manic onscreen melees. It's no help when the two sword carrying ninjas face off. Why does the high tech, high body count, gun-toting Joe force need a ninja? Because the bad guys have a ninja, too. See Cold war, arms race.

The faithfulness to source material also means the movie is incredibly stupid. This is Saturday morning plotting on a giant budget. The bad guys are insanely evil. The good guys are all basically the same character--this one's the black good guy, this one's the French good guy, this one's a girl. Appropriately, for a film based on plastic figures, Channing Tatum plays the lead. The whole enterprise might have been winningly stupid had Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy", "Van Helsing") cast someone else in the lead. Frequent Sommers' leading Brendan Fraser has a cameo in the film and one could imagine him successfully selling this frenetic mess as he has done before. He usually treats this kind of junk as comedy and brings us along for the ride. Tatum acts like he is starring in "Saving Private Ryan."

The film does feature a strong action scene at its center where the good guys try to stop the bad guys from destroying the Eiffel Tower. The music ramps up, the action is more clearly defined than at any other point in the film, and the movie sucks us in for about twenty minutes. After the fight, the movie immediately devolves into heavy handed French bashing that will be bliss for anyone who enjoyed diplomacy is for wusses message of "Transformers 2."

Here is yet another action movie trading in on and coasting on the nostalgia for plastic figures from our youth. It's a loud mess hopefully more indicative of the stupidity of summer than a dumbing down of the movies.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Dir: David Yates)

The plot of "Half Blood Prince" could fit on a cocktail napkin. Harry returns to Hogwarts, does some more coming of age, and tries to avert an evil plot by the forces of darkness. Like the Potter films before it, the production is competent, but leaves me with no desire to ever see it again. Having read the books, the films feel like visual Cliffs Notes with the only surprise being how the cast and crew interpret the material.

Director Yates, who helmed the previous Potter installment, gives us the gloomiest film yet. The thin material gives him a chance to show off including a wonderful CGI-enabled tracking shot that moves across the windows of Hogwarts from a scene of young Ron in love to a pensive Draco staring out hoplelessly to a shot of dawn breaking over Hogwarts. Jim Broadbent as the name-dropping Professor Slughorn delivers his usual strong work and gives the film a humane center in the midst of the exposition heavy script and CGI-wizardry.

Public Enemies (Dir: Michael Mann)

So it seems that Director Michael Mann has permanently graduated from the use of film to muddy, mundane digital video. And it's a shame. In collaboration with cinematographer Dante Spinotti ("L.A. Confidential"), Mann brought us the visually lush "Last of the Mohicans" and "Heat." Even the less epic Russell Crowe muckraking film "The Insider" had a sharp, compelling presentation. Digital video (DV) is considerably cheaper which undoubtedly gives the director more control over the film. (Keep your film under budget and studios are more apt to stay out of your way.) DV, however, is ugly. It's pretty bad at capturing rapid movement, making action scenes less intelligible. DV is also apt to let light overpower an image and it takes away the traditional visual crispness associated with the heightened reality of cinema.

Mann first used DV in the Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx film "Collateral" and it lent that film veracity and a feeling of "being there." In his follow-up "Miami Vice," Mann's use of digital video underlined the vapidity of the source material rather than allowing Mann to revel in the film's glitzy, dangerous setting. The cinematography in "Public Enemies" is mostly tolerable, but it still hobbles the film. Take for instance a scene where John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp declares his undying love for girlfriend Billie (Marion Cotillard) while at a sun drenched Miami race track. The camera raises dramatically for an overhead shot of the couple and the lush Elliot Goldenthal score kicks in and the moment fizzles. Digital video, at least as used by Mann, is incongruous with traditional dramatic cinema technique.

The film does offer a fascinating take on bank robber Dillinger. He lived his life in public and was a fascination of the press and public. He flaunted the law and seemed to live above it. J. Edgar Hoover, played by the always excellent Billy Crudup, decides to take down Dillinger in order to boost the credibility of the under fire FBI. Mann packs his film with a solid supporting cast and offers a unique take on the gangster story, but his visual technique never allows the film to take off. Some great performances; a forgettable film.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Dir: Michael Bay)

Wife: The food here is terrible.
Husband: Yeah, but look at the size of the portions!

For sheer moviegoing value, you can't beat Michael Bay, a director whose films are so bloated, busy, and full of heroic imagery that you get an entire summer's worth of blockbusters in one sitting. But just like eating a large bag of Doritos eventually leads to regret and self loathing, sitting through an entire Bay film brings on the hate and it's hard to live with yourself in the morning.

Where to start with this regrettable extension of the Transformers brand? Like the similarly incomprehensible Jerry Bruckheimer produced "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Revenge of the Fallen" is a globe-spanning bauble hunt involving shards of the All-Spark and the Matrix of Leadership all integral to the quest to cultivate much-needed Energon. With a script that is clearly an afterthought--a means to get us from Point A to Point B and to create an excuse for giant robots fighting--why make it all so complicated? All of these baubles have appeared in the Transformers mythology at one point or another, but does a franchise created solely to sell toys deserve slavish accuracy in its adaptation for the big screen? All that's gained is confusion and a few grins of recognition from devoted fanboys.

The Michael Bay aesthetic has not changed with his latest film. Every shot is a hero shot with a helicopter mounted camera view always preferable to a static close-up. In Michael Bay world there are no static close-ups. Every moment is as equally important as the next. There are no moments of reflection and calm before the action gears start turning once again. It's frankly exhausting and displays a profound lack of storytelling skill. His storytelling is further hobbled by his inability to establish visual geography. Visual geography allows a viewer to orient himself within the filmed space, understand the players involved and what's at stake. Bay just buys the largest fireworks display possible, lights it on fire and moves his camera from one point to another--never for longer than seven seconds.

"Revenge of the Fallen" also displays clumsy attempts at humor including dogs humping each other, robots humping humans, and robots with testicles. Every woman in the movie is either a super model or lunatic and the film trades in unnecessary stereotypes. The two worst offenders are the jive talking Skids and Mudflap who have gold teeth, monkey shaped faces, foul mouths, and can't read. Bay's world is an ugly, over caffeinated place.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Dir: Tony Scott)

Your ability to enjoy "Pelham," Tony Scott's slight but serviceable thriller remake, depends on how much you can stand John Travolta hamming it up as The Villain. He's bad. Real bad. You can tell by the fact that he has evil facial hair and has a tendency to switch from gleefully ironic line readings to uncontrolled rage at a moment's notice. When Travolta plays villains he always appears to be having a ton of fun. Usually more fun than the audience. His "Pelham" baddie is almost tolerable and falls on the Travolta villain spectrum between "Battlefield Earth"--awful--and "Face/Off"--actually menacing.

He shares screen time with Denzel Washington as a somewhat paunchy transit worker forced into a hostage situation he would rather avoid. There are some great scenes in the early going when we get to see Washington behind his desk directing the many trains of the New York City subway system through the use of a giant electronic display. At one point he is referred to as maestro and it's a pleasure to see someone doing a complicated, demanding job well as he directs the cars steadily on their way. These scenes are important to the film and endear you to a character that gets satisfyingly more complicated as the film wears on.

Washington soon finds himself trying to negotiate on behalf of Travolta's subway hostages. The scenes at the train station are tight, interesting, and offer compelling character moments while Travolta's subway menace moments are flabby and rote. We are seeing two different films and Washington's is substantially more interesting. When the two films merge, the film speeds on to a violent climax that will not surprise any seasoned moviegoer. Tony Scott's direction is frequently distracting as his use of freeze frame and slow motion do little to heighten tension. Washington is enough of a force to keep the movie interesting and he keeps it chugging along.