“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” — Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnifield in Pulp Fiction (1994).
If you think you’re seeing a lot of DVD reviews here lately, you are. I’m doubling the frequency of DVD review posts in an effort to catch up with movies I’ve watched, cataloged, and reviewed on Facebook.
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Witch Hunt (2008) This one was a real disappointment. Sean Penn has a reputation as a crusading rabble-rouser, so I expected much of this documentary about the innocent people rounded up and sent to prison without due process on false charges of pederasty. I remember the cases vividly — parents accused of having sex with their own children, trading them with other couples, satanic rites, middle-of-the-night airplane trips for sex with movie stars — it was a 20th century witch hunt, and some of these people served as much as 20 years before they were exonerated. Not a single person in authority at the time — not the “sex therapists” who coerced false confessions out of the kids, not the cops, not the DA — ever received any punishment for ruining all these lives. But the film doesn’t capture the outrage, and it leaves more questions unanswered than it answers. Sean Penn inexplicably pulled his punches with this one, and I just can’t figure out why. |
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Breaking Point (2009) Remember how cartoonishly cheesy and thuggish the villains in Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies were? Now imagine a movie where everybody is that bad, including the hero. Pretty bleak stuff. You can have it. |
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The Hurt Locker (2008) Watching The Hurt Locker, I couldn’t help contrasting it with the 1962 film The War Lover, which covered some of the same ground — the intensity of combat, the sense of mission and brotherhood in arms, the potency of being at the tip of the spear — but which covered it in a novelistic way, explaining everything as it went along. Not so The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow took a different tack — don’t tell, don’t explain, just show. And her movie packs three times the punch. This is a brilliant movie, and I’ll be rooting for it on Oscars night. |
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Pandorum (2009) It’s fine when a movie has dark subject matter, but not so fine when it’s filmed in the dark. I always think they’re trying to hide something . . . cheap sets, crappy special effects, something like that. This movie is dark all around, save for a sappy Adam-&-Eve-start-over-on-a-new-world ending. And listen, other Facebook reviewers, those weren’t aliens, they were fucked up humans. Go watch Pandorum again as punishment. |
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Public Enemies (2009) Public Enemies is an over-long, gloomy, pizazz-free retelling of the John Dillinger story. Watching Johnny Depp and Christian Bale walk around with identical pursed-lip expressions for two and a half hours led me to this startling realization: sometimes you literally cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys. Also: when the good guys’ actions are indistinguishable from the bad guys’ actions, the movie has nothing to say. |
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Moon (2009) Really good hard science fiction is hard to find. Moon mostly delivers. Remember how the replicants of Blade Runner had a short life span? Remember also that they were confined to off-world mining and production? At least the replicants knew who and what they were. Introduce Lunar Industries and Sam Bell, lone operator of an automated mining station sited on the dark side of the moon. He’s on a three-year contract, just about due to fly home to his wife and child. Uh, Sam? You’re a clone, dude, and you’re almost at the end of your three-year life span. Another Sam Bell clone, currently resting in cold storage, will soon replace you. This time, however, the old and new Sam Bells’ paths cross and they figure it all out, with the help of HAL’s non-evil twin, GERTY (you can tell GERTY’s friendly because his eye is blue . . . HAL’s was red). Okay, I’m making it sound corny and it isn’t corny at all. Moon is a thoughtful exploration of cloning and the bad uses to which it could be put, a pretty good detective story, and a solid psychological thriller. It’s also good sci-fi. Kudos to the director, Duncan Jones, for using well-lit sets, both inside the lunar habitat and outside on the surface. Too often, sci-fi films are dark (Pandorum and Event Horizon are good examples), probably to hide marginal sets and special effects. A couple of sci-fi geek quibbles: since when does the moon have normal Earth gravity, and since when can you hear an arriving lunar lander when you’re on the surface, in a vacuum? Other than that, I liked it. A lot. |
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Cold Souls (2009) Mostly, when a movie’s core idea is impossible — in this case, that you can have your soul removed and placed in storage, that you can have another person’s stored soul implanted, that the soul is a physical object — you’re constantly aware of the impossibility, and even if it’s a good movie you enjoy it in the same way you enjoy Star Wars, having fun but not taking it seriously at all. But with Cold Souls, you might find yourself accepting the impossible premise, actually hoping Paul Giamatti finds out more about his implanted soul, hoping he gets his own soul back, seriously stressing over the fate of Dina Korzun’s character. This is a well-acted, interesting movie. |
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Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) This one is actually pretty good. It reminded me of that vampire flick that’s so popular with the girlies, only with a manly man in the lead role, not some mincing ponce with bad teeth. Normally I’ll get up and leave when any sort of kung fu shit starts, but Christophe Gans apparently understands the “art” in “martial arts” means beauty, not technique, and as long as the viewer buys into the core concept of kung fu chivalry — that only one bad guy at a time is allowed to attack the hero — the fights are beautiful. Well, I say manly men, but actually the Mohawk sidekick is sort of androgynous, but hey, it’s French. And the bête — a hyena? — is awesome bad. Good entertainment, even if you do have to read subtitles, and gorgeously filmed. |
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Law Abiding Citizen (2009) Vengeance flicks satisfy something in us, but there’s something wrong with Law Abiding Citizen. Apart from the original murderer and his accomplice, I’m not sure the right people get killed. I guess that’s why Death Wish and The Brave One appeal to me where this one doesn’t. Bronson and Foster take on the specific people who do them wrong. Gerard Butler’s character takes on the system, where individual blame and responsibility are diffuse, killing people only peripherally involved in the injustice he suffers. Bronson and Foster go after their bad guys one on one, face to face. Butler goes after them from a control booth, using remote-controlled high-tech systems. Bronson and Foster know when to stop. Butler just keeps killing, aiming eventually to wipe out the entire city government of Philadelphia. Jesus, does this guy hate cheesesteaks too? So basically what I’m saying is . . . this is a movie with a muddled moral message. |
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Battle in Seattle (2007) A docudrama about the 1999 protests at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, and the third-world-dictatorship-style police response called in by our corporate overlords. A stirring reminder that the original Tea Partiers, like the activists and protesters in Seattle in 1999, were front-line revolutionaries prepared to take serious personal risks for political and social ideals, not the pack of ignorant cowards we see shouting on TV today, hiding behind the skirts of the Republican Party, cheering on the corporations as they consolidate power, amass obscene wealth, turn once-proud working people into abject wage slaves, poison our food supplies, and strip mine the very earth beneath our feet. That, right there, should give you an idea of the kinds of passions this movie will stir up in you . . . if you have a soul. |