Pacific Rim (2013) [5.5]

It’s funny how context kind of changes things.  Films of a certain era carry a certain type of tone and feel to them, even if they are made by different directors, because I suppose there’s a lot of “borrowing” that goes on, and so films that were awesome in one era may not translate well in other eras.  Some cinephile purists would argue that it’s silly for me to enjoy certain movies in the present as opposed to wanting to shoot myself in the face while watching Lawrence of Arabia, but I counter their own pretentiousness with my own.

Anyhow, Pacific Rim to me just feels like a 90s action movie.  Specifically, it reminds me of Terminator 2, Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.  A 90s action movie (NAM) was one of those movies where everyone got on board because some alien/computer/object was going to kill everyone and we as humans had to bind together and be the resistance, and how everyone felt like heroes at the end of the movie cause humanity had won.  NAMs generally were generally feel good-y with a few quips here and there about how the heroes were saving the world and all, but focused on world-saving and big important stuff like that.

The tone in recent years have been a bit more on the serious side.  Heroes are more in shades of gray than traditional black and white good guy bad guy caricatures, as tastes have changed, plots are slightly more complex (though complex does not necessarily mean better).  I have a feeling many big NAMs wouldn’t do so great now if they were first conceived and released to today’s audiences.  This is how I feel about Pacific Rim.

Pacific Rim’s plot is pretty straightforward, albeit not the most well-crafted or thought-out.  These alien beasts (Kaiju) come out of some portal that opened in the Pacific Ocean (clever title eh) and start attacking Earth because surprise surprise, they want Earth for themselves.  Humans start building machines (Jaegers) to defeat them, but they get bigger and bigger, etc.  Oh noes.

The plot, other than being a straight line with no real surprises, was also full of holes that just did not make sense*.  It served mainly as a device to show spectacle after spectacle.  If you were into Power Rangers back in the day, where big things just fight each other in the midst of populated areas, you’re basically in luck, because this is definitely an upgrade from PR.  All joking aside, the action scenes were definitely well produced and pretty to watch.

If the movie was released back in the 90s, it definitely would’ve struck chords as that feel-good movie of the year like ID4 did way back when.  As it is, it was kind of ho hum been there done that and was kind of an afterthought after viewing it.

 

 

* SPOILERS *

– Why didn’t the kaiju send their class 5 kick ass things from the beginning instead of slowly letting people adjust and develop strategies against them?

– Why doesn’t one of the jaeger’s pilot not know about the most important weapon of the jaeger, the sword?

 

Despicable Me 2 (2013) [5]

Minions.  For some reason, minions in the Despicable Me world seem to be very popular with children and 20-30s women.  I have no idea why this is the case.

But like its predecessor, DM2 is light on plot and heavy on gags and minions, which seems to bode well for its target audience.  To be honest, there’s nothing really more to say than it’s a very run of the mill movie, with predictable (almost painfully) story points, and cliche situations (teenage girl attracted to “bad-boy” kid that father disapproves of, girls want Gru to not be alone and get married, etc.)

Now that Gru has become “good”, he kind of loses a lot of the humor that he had in the first movie.  In the first movie, he learned the value of a family.  While this movie expands on that in finding him a wife, it does it in a very formulaic manner that’s yawn and cringe worthy.

If you’re male, single, and over the age of 12, I probably wouldn’t go to this movie.  Otherwise, it’s not the worst thing to sit through with a girlfriend/spouse/kids.

Man of Steel (2013) [5]

I’m not a fan of Superman.  There hasn’t really been a compelling character arc in any Superman story I’ve followed that makes him a true relatable character.  I admit there was a time and place for him when he was created in the Great Depression era, but the story of an alien superhuman arriving to Earth with near-invincibility is not very appealing nowadays, where more nuance and complexity is expected.  I hoped that Christopher Nolan’s influence would shape Man of Steel into a more palatable format when I heard about this movie.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

So much of the movie’s character development was flimsy at best.  There was not a single character I really cared about in the film, except maybe General Zod, because Michael Shannon is one crazy dude.  Everyone else was kind of just run of the mill, been there done that, adding nothing new to the already bland Superman canon.  Superman is just a dude who’s motivations aren’t particularly clear or interesting, he just follows a father figure on Earth who dies needlessly based on the fact that the world can’t know who Superman is (then he goes ahead and does that no disguise disguise thing with warby parker glasses or whatever).

The special effects, while great in some areas, seem somewhat comical at spots, and not the good kind.  It brought memories, bad ones, of the Matrix Revolutions, aka when Neo fights Agent Smith in a Dragonball Z-esque clash.  It wasn’t cool then, and it isn’t cool now.

The movie overall lacked direction.  It didn’t feel like it had a unifying theme or a strong focus on character, vaguely throwing in Christ-like savior imagery (gotta market to the Christians!) here and there but just with a very general conflict of supervillain wants to take over the world and superhero has to stop him premise.  By the third act (you’ll know when it happens), you’re wondering, why is this movie not over yet?

Speaking of which, this movie clocks in 143 minutes.  And in the end, there’s a lot of run time in which not a lot actually really happens.  It feels like a wasted opportunity particularly because it was so long, a lot more could’ve been delved into.

Overall, meh.

This Is The End (2013) [6]

I usually go to comedy movies like this with a friend of mine in NYC, but since he was unavailable, I settled for a recent viewing at home on my computer.  I heard good things about it and expected a raucous ride, but perhaps hype translates better in a theater with an engaged audience than at home by myself with a pizza.  I thought this movie, while it had its moments and is an overall solid, was a bit too self-indulgent and chaotic to be a great comedy.

The movie, for those who are unfamiliar, is a kind of Entourage-esque, where the events take place with actual celebrities and what could be their real lives, that is until somewhat fictitious events occur.  The opening scenes are executed well in this fashion, with entertaining and fun cameos from a wide spectrum of different entertainers in Hollywood.  The opening act is where I found the self-deprecation/acknowledgement to be the most engaging.

After the apocalypse starts things get a little generic.  The movie turns into typical maniacal comedy fare, where the characters are constantly animated because some crazy shit is continually happening.  Some gags like the whole Emma Watson encounter was overdone and unnecessary, pretty much to just get the “Hermoine stole our shit” joke out (which you already get from the trailer).  It actually feels a lot like Pineapple Express, which I guess they may have intended in an attempt to be “meta” by having the characters enact a Pineapple Express 2 on camera out of boredom, which also was a movie that felt very tired by the end with too much heightening and franticness.  You can tell that the scripting was probably done while the screenwriters were high, as a lot of random shit just happens and feels sloppily improvised.

Danny McBride submits probably the most entertaining performance, stealing the show at various points from the main characters and generally delivering his material pretty well.  The other actors feel very bland and just caricatures of themselves or the characters they play in movies.  What the movie ended up feeling like is a post 2000s Adam Sandler movie, where Sandler just invites a bunch of his friends to be in a movie and they just sit around really just playing “make believe” and the movie is shitty because it’s a been there done that type of thing with actors who think they’re funnier than they actually are.  Fortunately, the actors in this movie are much more talented than Sandler’s crew, and the dialogue is infinitely more clever than typical recent Sandler fare.  It’s just that my investment level is low because the storyline and the relationships are paper thin.  You don’t really care about Jay and Seth’s bromance as you do say Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill)’s in Superbad.

Overall, after much hype, the movie was a disappointment.  I did laugh out loud a few times, so I can’t say it was a bad movie, but it was definitely a mediocre showing.

Fast and Furious 6 (2013) [7]

This movie was by far the most entertaining movie of the summer.  I can say this because frankly it’s been a shitty summer for movies.  There’s no way around it, summer of 2013 was pretty mediocre, which is probably why I’ve been dragging my heels in reviewing (and watching) these movies.

Fast and Furious has always been about fast cars, hot women and action.  But I give a lot of credit to Justin Lin who has turned it into a money making franchise with providing just enough of a story to keep viewers engaged (enough for apparently sequels 8 and 9 in concept stages!).  At this point, the franchise doesn’t even pretend to apologize for its various plot holes, inconsistencies, ignorance of the laws of physics, it just keeps the action running for the duration of the film.

The dialogue has gotten to the point where it’s intentionally unintentionally funny.  As in they’re acting goofy in acting serious on purpose in my mind, in a meta “I know this is cheesy and stupid but you’re coming along for the ride cause it’s fun” type of deal.  And somehow, it works.  I don’t know if it’ll continue to work for 3 more sequels, but for now, I’ve bought in.

I don’t know what there is really much to say about the plot, other than it being a satisfactory vehicle for vehicular warfare.  And when they say that, they mean it in the most literal way possible.  It’s very obvious that the plots are engineered in a fashion that make it possible to make more sequels (and hence, more money), so you don’t really get invested in any of the characters on an emotional level.  I don’t even remember what happens in the past movies except for like the first one (probably because the ridiculous lines are the most quoted from that one).  I guess they tried to do something interesting by having like having the opposing villains be mirrors of the heroes in terms of skill set and jobs, it reminded me of that one episode where Captain Planet team faces Captain Pollution and those random rings.

Fast 6’s action sequences are pretty inventive, the way they heighten the stakes in terms of car stunts is definitely imaginative in the sense that you go in wondering “I wonder how they’re going to top that for the next movie”, and then you go, “oic”.   I think by now, even the most avid fans of the franchise will tell you they don’t go to have their minds challenged, they want their minds blown, and Fast 6 does a very good job in that.  Again, I don’t know how much more they can carry over to sequels to the franchise, but we’ll see.

At the heart of FF6 is an overall “fun” film.  I was originally going to assign a higher score, but admittedly the movie doesn’t leave you with anything to think about after the movie except for how long the final runway of the movie is.  I knocked it down for that lack of lasting impact, but it’s definitely a good summer blockbuster to watch, and I would say it was the best experience I had this summer at the theaters.

The Great Gatsby (2013) [6]

I read The Great Gatsby for the first time in 10th grade English class.  Along with Hemingway and Steinbeck, this book is what made Fitzgerald one of my literary idols as a youth, as I heavily identified with the character and his search for the innocence of the past and a conception of idealism and purity but tragically blind to the corruption of those things he put hope into.  The book really influenced a lot of my own world view and principles.

I’ve never watched a film version until this rendition, and so I don’t know how a film of Gatsby would be done properly or how it had been executed in the past, just that no real film version has been received very well.  I feel that any translation of Fitzgerald’s prose into film may lose a lot of the meaning and the ideas underneath that Fitzgerald wanted to impart on his audience.

I wouldn’t say I despised Baz Luhrmann’s rendition, but I wouldn’t say that I loved it either.  He does some parts very well I thought, capturing the decadence and extravagance of the roaring 20’s, the symbolic imagery of the novel, but what he gains in spectacle, he loses in the intimate lives of the characters themselves.  I feel that in this period piece, sometimes all I’m seeing is the period and not the piece itself.

Reflecting back, the movie felt too much like “Moulin Rouge 2”, a narrator who’s somehow a writer recounting the events with a typewriter, a scene where the narrator gets drunk in the same style of the absinthe scene, a scene with a huge party like the cancan scene, a backdrop showing the destitute nature of the poor in New York like bohemian Paris, a scene where a character tells the bad guy that has more of a claim to a woman that the woman doesn’t love him in rage, and heavy reliance on a soundtrack to carry through the movie’s dramatic moments.  Technically, these beats are very coincidentally in both stories and thus it is not Luhrmann’s fault that the similarities are there, but they are hit almost in identical fashion.  These worked for Moulin Rouge 1 because it was a musical of heavy overdramatic beats, but Gatsby I feel is a bit more nuanced than that.

Overall the important beats and ideas are contained within the movie, but sometimes it feels that the backdrop is prolonged instead of having the characters and the story be in the forefront of the film.  I wish they would’ve spent more time on Gatsby and the reveal of his actual character, his idealism and his background, instead of relegating that part to some pithy flashbacks of an old guy on a rainy boat screaming “old sport!” at him.  (By the way, I may be off but I don’t remember Gatsby saying old sport so many damn times.  He may have, but it just seems kind of ridiculous on screen.)

 

The main lessons that Nick learns are downplayed, and you never really get the sense of his character’s growth through the film, he kind of just a dispassionate observer that kind of is like, “Oh Gatsby, he was a cool guy that I shed a tear over once.”

The musical choices are not as seamless as they were in Moulin Rouge 1, and some of the hip hop and stuff was jarring (since when would they really pass by a car full of rich black people listening to “H to the Izzo” on the Queensboro bridge drinking Moet?).  While the soundtrack could be modernized, some of the songs felt really out of place and took you out of the story rather than immersing you in it.

The movie serves as a decent way to get acquainted with the story of Gatsby if you’ve never read the book before, but it misses some of the key central ideas in the midst of the lavish production.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) [6.5]

Before the first reboot of the Star Trek franchise, the only familiarity I really had was when Star Trek the Next Generation was on UPN 9 and I was flipping through channels and caught small glimpses of it before going to the inevitable cartoon or sitcom I’d watch when I rarely would watch TV.  Professor X was some sort of captain, and they flew into space and what not, and that’s about all the knowledge I had of that universe.  So when I saw the original reboot 4 years ago, I was pleasantly surprised because I had no expectations or knowledge going in.  Since I have nothing really to compare it to, I thought the movie in 2009 was exceptionally well done as a movie, the pacing, character chemistry, and story were woven together efficiently and effectively, albeit the overuse of lens flare.

As a continuation of a new series without knowing anything about the lore, I thought this was somewhat of a letdown from the momentum of the initial movie.  Even without going through the plot holes very intricately examined in this io9 review, the story lacked the personality and punch of the original.  While Nero in the original wasn’t someone you really cared about, it didn’t matter because the movie was centered around the budding bromance of Spock and Kirk.  In this movie, the villains are introduced in very convoluted ways that are half-assed because they are trying to pay fan service and have their own original storyline at the same time.  And because the relationship between Spock and Kirk is put more on the backburner this time around, there’s no real relationship to get invested in.  The movie lazily assumes you know the importance and weight of Khan’s character from Trek lore without really developing him itself within the movie.  The movie also suffers from too many bad guy syndrome, where having multiple villains with separate agendas becomes confusing and jumbled, where the net result is just not really caring one way or the other for either.

The movie kind of also kind of follows the same formula as the earlier movie, Kirk gets in trouble for being subordinate, goes after an enemy for revenge, etc. etc.  In addition, the Trek franchise does seem to stray from its roots of being socially forward, recasting Khan as a white guy (surprise surprise) and even having one of the writers kind of apologize for blatant mysogyny.  It hardly seems like a movie that lives up to the motto of going where no man has gone before.

STID was a decent summer movie, fun to watch, but very little lasting value afterwards.  It had very beautiful visuals and effects, and the performances were decent enough, the movie just very unfocused as a whole and felt disjointed as a result.  I was pretty excited about it, but the reality was that STID ushered in an overall disappointing summer at the movies.

Iron Man 3 (2013) [5.5]

When Marvel started the Iron Man movie series, I was a bit skeptical.  I didn’t really know much about the Iron Man story other than he was a rich dude in a suit, so I thought he would just kind of be a lamer version of Batman.  But the first movie, while not a classic, was still a good enough film to endear you to Iron Man’s character, even though he does end up being a version of Batman (orphan kid, powerful dad with a legacy, billionaire company) with cooler (and slightly less believable) gadgets.  In the first movie, he’s a douche, and unlike Batman, the douchiness is more of a character trait than a mask.  It’s just that RDJ can play it and be charming so well at the same time, that we buy into the character (and I mean literally buy into, anyone seen RDJ’s Avenger check recently?).

The second movie was forgettable; we saw what Iron Man was struggling against although the plot was fairly predictable and more of a setup to the Avengers than anything.

The third movie was a mess.  Though not quite an awful movie, its storyline tried to do too much.  Is it an action movie?  A drama?  A comedy?  The problem is that it tried to do everything all at once, and as a result, didn’t do any of those three well.

A lot of the problem also arose from the “who cares” aspect of it all. Ie simply don’t really care about the plight of Tony Stark because the movie assumes that I am already invested in his plight of PTSD from the events in the Avengers.  In this installment, I hardly see Stark going through any sort of character arc that I haven’t already seen.  This is similar to why I never really cared for the last 5 seasons or so of Entourage, there was nowhere else really for Vinny Chase to go.  To me it didn’t feel as if Stark was really challenged in this movie except for all the predictable beats in the story.  And forget about caring at all about the villain in the story, they merely serve as trying to be clever plot devices.

And then there were just the unbelievable plot holes.*

The movie has great action sequences and inventive new uses of the Iron Man suit which all are very cool looking and such, but even that got a little gimmicky towards the end.  It’s not much better than Iron Man 2.

SPOILERS

* 10 year old kid fixes Iron Man suit?  Stark has a billion remote controllable suits and doesn’t activate them to help him until the very end when he could’ve used them earlier to make sure Pepper was safe and his house didn’t get destroyed?  Stark doesn’t use billion remote controllable suits to save people from Air Force One?  WTF

Les Miserables (2012) [5.0]

I watched the original musical when I was 9, and I didn’t really understand much of it.  However, the story is very famous, and I’ve always heard it being talked about, so I had a sense of what it was going to be before I went in.  I’m always a fan of musicals as well, and read up on how the movie was shot without ADR (everything you hear was on the taped take that you see), lending to a more realistic experience.  Intrigued, I decided to watch the movie, despite my familiarity with it.

From the first scene we are given a glimpse of what we are to expect from the rest of the movie, the voices of the two leads, Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman in a number together.  It’s terrible.  Russell Crowe is probably the worst casting in a musical that I’ve ever witnessed.  Sure he can play a part of Javert in a movie, but not one that involves singing.  It’s like they actually cast for an ACTUAL regular law enforcement officer who sings, rather than one who can sing.  (apologies in advance to law enforcement who can sing)  Wolvie’s no huge improvement either, while he’s mostly ok, there are definitely parts where it’s like I feel I need to slap him in the face with a tuning fork.  Given these egregious performances, they take you out of the experience, which ultimately kills the effect of the whole ADR thing.

The movie was not without some good parts.  The set pieces and the cinematography are well done, and provides an excellent backdrop to revolutionary France.  The story is still timeless and entertaining.  Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried are decent in their roles (though I don’t get the whole Academy Award for Hathaway thing, she’s on for like a few minutes), but Helena Carter and Sasha Cohen definitely steal the show with their performances.  I especially enjoyed Cohen’s “Master of the House”, and his comedic relief throughout.

Sometimes however, the movie feels like just a large amalgam of greatest hits of Les Mis rather than a coherent storyline, like they tried to stuff every song into the film.  As a result the 154 minutes feels very very long.  The “Red, Black” song was definitely dragged out like WAY too long, that part made me want to shoot myself in the face.  I feel like if they stuck to the main hits and included effective dialogue, it could’ve tightened up the storytelling and made it easier to understand and fluid.

Ultimately, the execution of this movie was greatly flawed, due to questionable casting choices and scene direction.  I feel that even the most die-hard Les Mis fans would be disappointed at this movie, because it feels like it could’ve been done so much better.

Django Unchained (2012) [7.0]

Django Unchained to me was basically Inglorious Basterds, where the Jews are changed to blacks, and Christoph Waltz plays the same exact character, except as a good guy.  The movie is entertaining to watch, as Tarantino’s perfected the art of a revenge thriller.  However, like Basterds, and Kill Bill before it, there’s little to no character development, even less so than those previous movies.  The run time clocks over 2 hours, which is a long time to not really be invested in the main character.  Switch Django out with generic “black slave who’s wife is in captivity and is good with a pistol” and you have pretty much the same film.

That’s not to say that there weren’t good performances from the actors themselves.  Waltz steals the scenes again with his Dr.Shultz, that’s as said before, very similar to Hans Landa.  Kooky and self confident, he brings comic relief and tension at all the right moments.  Though he’s not as powerful as in Inglorious, he still commands a presence.  Leonardo DiCaprio’s transformations from a sweet Southern gentleman into a raving lunatic are fun to watch, though his southern accent was a bit off putting at times.  And who could you hate more than Samuel L’s house slave character?  The supporting cast was well assembled.

But you couldn’t really get much out of Jamie Foxx’s Django, because the role written for him was pretty one note.  This is what I mean when his role was pretty generic, he’s pretty taciturn and is just there to serve the story, instead of being part of the narrative.  That’s the main problem with the movie, it seemed very formulaic and predictable without any good moments for the slaves themselves.

Those looking for gore, blood and guts however, have come to the right place.  As with most Tarantino films, the violence is over the top to the point of ridiculousness and comical.

So while the movie was fun and well executed, the connection to the characters was missing, and it ended up becoming a revenge porn movie with super high production values.  Great for Tarantino fans, but it seems just more of the same to me.