Movie Review

(In theaters, July 2008) This Canadian-made low-budget film blew through a limited theatrical release, and that’s too bad given how well it succeeds as a very dark comedy. As a young nerdish man inherits a struggling small-town funeral home, he comes to realize, with the help of his new girlfriend, that mortal accidents are a great way to send paying clients to his business. But once you start killing people, intentionally or not, it can be hard to stop… Rose Byrne (looking a lot like Kirsten Dunst) is the film’s standout performer as a mortician with a keen interest in her job; regrettably, Jay Baruchel is saddled with a too-annoying character to be sympathetic, and the film flounders a bit on this lack of attachment. The script itself is a clever hybrid between small town comedies and disturbingly morbid plotting. At a time where “dark comedy” is labeled on just about anything, Just Buried is the real thing, a film that could have slid in outright horror with just a few tiny adjustments. Despite a few third-act problems, the film wraps up neatly with a merciless finale that ironically gives moral weight to the rest of the script. It’s definitely a low-budget independent film: even if the budget allows for a few impressive explosions and crashes, it takes chances that normally wouldn’t even be thinkable for a wider audience. If your tastes can handle murder for love and profit, well, scour the local video store for this one.

(In theaters, July 2008) Oh my. If I was feeling generous, I would have a few nice things to say about Hancock‘s thematic depth regarding the tension between power and happiness, its unpredictability and the chances it takes with well-worn material. Alas, seeing Hancock doesn’t put anyone in a good mood, so let’s start swinging by saying that the film is picture perfect example of a good premise disintegrating as it goes along. The Big Problem of the film is that it’s two radically movies smashed together: a comedy about a drunk burnt-out superhero putting back his life together (the movie promised by the trailers) and a drama about superheroes who can’t live with each other (most definitely not shown in trailers). While it’s conceptually refreshing to see marketing campaigns not giving away the last half of a film, that radical alteration of the premise leads to a wholly different movie experience, and not a very good one at that: The suddenly-introduced mythology makes little sense and allows accursed screenwriter Akiva “massively overrated hack” Goldsman to indulge in his usual mystical nonsense. It’s bad enough that the back-story of the characters makes no sense (why would she move there, what did they look like 3,000 years earlier, what was in Miami 80 years ago, etc.), but the power-draining shtick is inconsistently applied for maximum tear-jerking impact. Over and over again, Hancock almost touches upon interesting issues: what would it take for a superhero to lose faith in the common man? But the final film is an uneven romp that wraps up after 40 minutes, leaving little but a far less pleasant last act as a so-called “climax”. It’s as if someone had received a mandate to torpedo a perfect summer blockbuster with extreme prejudice. As it stands, the only person who emerges from the debacle more or less intact is Will Smith. Director Peter Berg certainly doesn’t, mis-applying pseudo-documentary cinematic techniques to a film that doesn’t need any. Any half-way competent producing team would have been able to see the fundamental problem in Hancock‘s present form: but the final movie is nothing but a testimony to the power of how even large group of people can delude themselves into crashing a sure-fire production straight into a wall.

(In theaters, July 2008) This may not be a perfect movie, but it’s almost as good as blockbusters ever get: There are ridiculously big explosions, car chases and fist-fights, but also a generous amount of thematic ambition, symbolism and subtext. Christopher Nolan’s camera seldom missteps and the cinematography finds a happy medium between credible grittiness and the slickness we expect from big-budget cinema. This is an unusually smart superhero film, and the script does amazing things within the constraints of the Batman mythology: The Joker’s origins remain blissfully unexplained, Batman struggles with his own actions, and we get a full-blown tragic character with Harvey Dent. The acting is often spectacular, with bit roles going to good actors (William Fichner!) and the headliners handling themselves with skill. For the fears that Heath Ledger’s Joker may have been over-hyped, the actual performance itself is remarkable. The rest of the film meets the high standards left by the script, acting and direction: Special effects? Top-notch. Dialog? Better than you’d expect, except when the action stops for a few grandiose and unnecessary speeches. Sadly, the film’s own success leads to a number of quibbles we wouldn’t notice in lesser films: The sound editing is terrible and drowns out dialog (and that’s when we don’t get the ridiculous Batman growling). Some of the plot points are glossed over in the film’s hurry to get from beginning to end. Finally, the last act of the film feels notably less interesting or urgent that the rest: The climax, in particular, falls flat after the dramatic peaks hit earlier during the film’s two-and-a-half hours. But it’s rare enough to see films succeed so well both on a popular and critical level: Let’s just revel in what’s been achieved here.

(In theaters, June 2008) Perhaps the best and biggest surprise of this film is how it manages to remain faithful to a certain facet of the source material despite changing nearly everything else about it. The comic-book super-villains (and their associated powers, quirks and backstory) are out; instead we get super-assassins controlled by a magic loom. Yeaaaah. But the first two minutes are nearly word-for-word recreation, and the adaptation even finds a way to spark the memory of the comic book’s infamous last two pages. (Sadly, the leads are not played by Eminem and Halle Berry.) The next-best thing about Wanted is Timur Bekmambetov’s insanely kinetic direction, which picks up where the Wachowski Brothers left off: Plenty of CGI-boosted sequences with long tracking shots, wild camera tricks, subjective point-of-view and variable-speed shots: The film defies the laws of physics with gusto, making one appreciate the attempt even as it trips up every single nonsense detector: The “curving the bullet” shtick (overplayed until exasperation) is a perfect example of style over credibility: Makes no sense, but sure looks cool. And that goes for much of the film itself, which is borderline trash on paper (binary code generated by a thousand-year-old loom that predicts the future?) but manages to keep things hopping through constant eyeball kicks. Alas, what feels pretty cool in the theater disaggregates soon afterwards, and ends up feeling far less substantial a short while later. Even Angelina Jolie seems wasted here, playing a surface caricature of herself as a sex-symbol while not actually doing anything sexy beyond showing up in the film itself. The biggest irony of those statements, of course, is that a script is cheap to fix early on, while all of the stylistic refinements that cover up the hollowness of the film are expensive to perfect. What could have this film been with a little more cleverness? Consider this: While a surprising amount of the comic has been kept intact (considering the comic book’s ultra-violence), very little attempt has been made to apply to the action movie genre the same critique than the book did: It’s all surface escapism, with a last-moment dash of wish fulfillment. What if Wanted-the-movie had gone after the action-movie geeks the same way Wanted-the-comic-book wiped the floor with comic-book fanboys? Ah, but that would have required the intent to question the assumptions of action movies…

(In theaters, June 2008) Even at its worst, Pixar makes better movies than 95% of what’s out there, and if Wall·E leaves too many uncomfortable questions open to debate, its willingness to raise such questions is enough to make this cute-robot movie one of the best SF movies of the year. There’s something admirable in how it manages to present a complete (even surprisingly deep) story with two main characters that barely share a twenty-word vocabulary: Lengthy moments pass without much more than sound effects, the plot building up through an accumulation of visual clues. When Wall·E expands to reveal a very different setting, more characters and a more urgent rhythm, it’s a minor miracle that it holds together. Beyond cute robots and slapstick gags, you’ll find a criticism of consumerism and at least three references to 2001. While some quieter bits are overdone, the rest of the film showcases Pixar’s trademark self-confidence in squeezing all potential out of their premises, flashing by the implications almost faster than anyone can catch. But by the end of the film, we’re left with a few issues that still haven’t been solved: There’s little indication that the errors of the past won’t be repeated and that the decision to come back won’t prove to be a pain for most: all of this is glossed over with an elaborate (and rather clever) epilogue-as-a-credit-sequence. Hm. But never mind that: It’s still one of the best movies of the year.

(In theaters, June 2008) There are good things about this low-budget exploitation film: The idea of putting five medical professionals far away in Northern Ontario, then making them face against a mysterious killer in a grueling contest of survival horror, definitely has potential even through the Deliverance and Blair Witch Project flashbacks. Hal Holbrook makes a capable hero, and the scenery can be breathtaking. Unfortunately, this grueling contest of survival horror soon extends to the viewers as the film drags on, and on, and on. The increasingly unsatisfying ending (which is content not explaining anything) does little to explain the terrible coincidences that would be necessary to make the story work, and provide more strangeness than satisfaction in how it stages the final showdown between survivors and tormentors. There are reportedly no plans to make this film available on DVD: despite a few good things here and there, I’m not sure that this is much of a loss.

(On DVD, June 2008) I avoided this film for years, convinced that it was “just” a big-issues tear-jerking drama with little more to it. But, hey, I was wrong: Despite the familiar themes and the goody-goody preachiness, there’s a solid drama in here, ably supported by Oscar-worthy acting by Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. Director Jonathan Demme keeps things moving swiftly until the last act, where the film collapses upon its own dramatic weight from the aria sequence onward. Still, it’s a good script with some effective time-compression techniques: it’s a pleasure to watch until the lengthy final twenty minutes, and Washington’s character ably anchors the drama through a rough portrait of a Man Who Learns Better (But Not That Much). What’s perhaps most interesting, watching this film fifteen years later in a Canadian society that has evolved a lot since then, is that a number of the issues presented in the film are now self-obvious: homophobia is wrong, AIDS can be managed (especially with the newer drugs) and the controversial aspect of the film may not play as well among ever-larger progressive audiences. And that’s the way big-issues films should run: presenting aspirational ideas that eventually become mainstream. Well done.

(On DVD, June 2008) After years of being hidden on studio shelves, the long-rumored The Onion Movie has finally been quietly released on DVD and the final result is… uneven. Blame the structure of the film for some of the problems: The screenwriters have chosen to build the movie as a series of sketches loosely held together by a dull story about corporate interference at a news network. (The ending, which tries to bring it all together, is far too long for its own good.) Some sketches are better, and some of them aren’t (the whole “rape mystery party”, for instance, is a long resounding thud.) But I suspect that the fault is also due to the source material: The Onion’s usual shtick is to present the punchline first in the headline, then work out its implications in the following article. This works in a scannable medium like text, but it’s deadly on-screen. Here, whole sequences drag on and on until the final joke: The “Wizards and Warlords” segment is particularly awful in this regard. It’s too bad, really, because the production values of the film are surprisingly good and a lot of the material does work –including a slickly-produced cute/raunchy take-off on Britney Spears which, along with the Rodney Dangerfield cameo, shows the late-2003 origins of the film. Like its source material, the film isn’t afraid to let loose with profanity, violence and glimpses of graphic gay sex: This is one of those movies that really tries to offend everyone. (Including movie reviewers, in amusing self-referential segments.) It’s a bit of a problem that the “deleted scenes” on the DVD are just as good, or bad, as the rest of the film. Otherwise, well, it’s a curious rental for those who already like The Onion. And frankly, it’s still far better than stuff like Epic Movie.

(In theaters, June 2008) Spy/Comedy hybrids usually have more potential than success and this film is no exception to the rule. While several of the conceits from the “Get Smart” TV series are still ingenious, their incarnation here never seems to be exploited to its fullest extent. Steve Carrel is irreproachable as Maxwell Smart, presenting an endearing mixture of competence and inexperience. Anne Hathaway, surprisingly enough, isn’t as charming: her character is quicker to become abusive than exasperated, and despite the in-story justification for her false youthfulness, there’s seldom a sense that she’s got the maturity required for that type of character. The rest of the plot isn’t much better than adequate. The nonsense about weapons of mass destruction is too pedestrian to fit in the humorous premise, and indeed the film struggles to find comedy in situations that should be ripe for it. The most disappointing aspect of this big-budget movie remake is the pedestrian dialog, which rarely rises above the strictly perfunctory. As you may expect, the action sequences play better than anything else (well, except Alan Alda, who’s a riot no matter what he does) but the problem here is that action sequences are cheap and plentiful, while Get Smart most definitely isn’t. While the film is not a disaster, it is a disappointment in how it suggests intriguing possibilities and then fails to follow them up.