Review: "Water for Elephants" is a beautifully-mounted, passionless drag

An old-fashioned, love-and-war under the big top spectacle, Francis Lawrence's period romance is easy on the eyes but so listlessly unromantic and glazed-over with its soporific nostalgia that it reveals (or rather diminishes) Sara Gruen's bestseller into a soggy, feeble circus melodrama more concerned with the sympathy of its animals than of its characters.
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Christoph Waltz, who plays the contemptible ringmaster August Rosenbluth, snaps and bites and lashes his bullhook out at all who oppose him and the film essentially - and rather tastelessly - runs on this conflict. He's a cheap, exhaustingly loathsome character that whatever charms the film may have (and they are few and far between) are tainted by a heinous middle-section.
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When animals aren't taking a beating for the audience, we're subjected to the touch-and-go romantics of Polish runaway Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) and the fetching, but married, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon).
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Pattinson plays Jacob like a bore - or rather, the author Sara Gruen's idea of a man - an impulsive, mannerly animal lover. He smiles nervously and ducks his head while Witherspoon tries her hand at platinum blonde buxomness. Honestly, Jacob and the over-the-hill elephant named Rosie make a better couple.
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Ultimately, Water for Elephants fails for the simple reason that it manages to take a setting that's so transportable and wondrous and yet produces something so hopelessly stolid and, worse yet, unpleasant. [D+]

Review: "Scream 4" knows it's a sequel, is just bad enough to be one.

The problem with the Scream series, what with its self-aware, movie-within-a-movie construct, is that it allows itself to wallow in the generalities and clichés of its genre, feeling less like a slasher-film deconstruction and more like a reconstruction, or recycling, if you will. 
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Wes Craven's Scream 4 is certainly playful and bloody and a little bit humorous, but its meta-movie circumvention is so precarious and, by now, exhausting, that halfway through its "when is this going to end?" running-time, the film has managed to shove its head thoroughly up its own ass. 
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More characters answering phones ("Who is this?"), more doofus policeman work, more geeky cinephile teenagers (plausibly parentless) who sip from red cups and discuss the rules of horror, theory, blah, blah, blah. Though this time, the film attempts to balance, rather awkwardly, the "old generation" of Woodsboro (Neve Campbell, Courtney Fox) with the "new" (Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere). 
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The film does, to its credit, address any issues of antiquity, bringing the "slasher film" into the 21st century, introducing social media, generational divide, internet immortality and the child-like allure of Youtube fame. (Although the central cast of young tweeners - twenty-something teens - cripples when it's needed the most to sell a third-act megaton of a twist). 
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Ultimately, through all of its self-sustained talk about the progression and transformation of sequels and reboots, Scream 4 is ironically brought down by the same thing that claims other less tongue-in-cheek sequels: serving up the same stuff we've already seen and at the same time, far too much of it. [C] 

I Can't See!

Peter Hyams' Timecop ('94), which I saw for the first time last weekend, is a kind-of mid-90's guilty pleasure - very much the usual Jean-Claude Van Damme routine with evil agency, big weirdo bad guys, family-in-danger stuff - it's basically Universal Soldier with time-traveling. 
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Anyway, the film essentially (aside from a brief Wall Street 1929 stint) shifts back-and-forth between the "present" (2004) and the "past" (1994), in which Van Damme's wife (played by Mia Sara) is killed and a Senator is trying to manipulate time in a way that would guarantee his rise to presidency. 
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For the most part, the "future" segments are handled with very little decorativeness in the way of production design, with one major exception, the cars. For some reason, the filmmakers thought that in ten years, we all might be driving these things around, built from the scrap heaps scrounged up by the Jawas on Tatooine.
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Seriously, these things look like the surface of the Death Star, they're wretched - not to mention impractical. 
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And the worst part of it is, you know it's just some maroon or teal '93 Acura under a flimsy lightweight kit and nothing else. It's got to be one of the most flabbergastingly awful production decisions made in movie history. I mean, those old B-westerns had wretchedly fake sets and matte paintings passing for the open prarie, but that's all they had, they couldn't exactly haul gear up to Monument Valley to shoot a 50-minute dime novel. Timecop: [B-]  Cars: [F]

"Star of Midnight"

I saw Stephen Roberts' Star of Midnight ('35) on TCM one night about a year-and-a-half ago and I've been pining for it to come on again ever since. 
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Just recently I've come to be extremely reverent towards those quick, convoluted 80-minute mystery-comedies that use to populate Hollywood in the 30's and 40's (you know, the ones where they round up all of the suspects in the last scene and he/she reaches for a gun in a last ditch attempt to escape their guilt?) and Star of Midnight is easily, albeit shamelessly, as good as, if not better than any of the Thin Man sequels. 
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These are the roles that immortalized William Powell - the blithe drunkard and amateur sleuth who loves his women but would never show it - and for any fans of his Nick Charles character, this is simply more of the same, but never enough. 

Trailer: Abduction (2011)

I have a soft-spot for any on-the-run spy thriller, but John Singleton's Abduction (Lionsgate, 9.23) looks fairly awful for two reasons: 1) it looks mind-numbingly banal, even down to the dialogue ("we'll find you..", "...not if I find you first", etc.) and b) Taylor Lautner looks absolutely atrocious. 
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In these kinds of movies the character being chased, the ones being pushed to their limits and fatigued by always having to think on their toes, make the right movies and rough up the baddies when the time comes, have to bring some kind of emotional weight behind their punches and their brief line readings and I can tell you right now that Lautner doesn't have it - no way. I could tell just a minute in that it wasn't working. 

'Cliffhanger'

After my unfortunate run-in with Clint Eastwood's dull, thrilless The Eiger Sanction ('75), I moved on to the only other assassins-on-a-mountain film I know, Renny Harlin's Cliffhanger ('93). 
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Obviously Cliffhanger, like pretty much every other action movie made in the early-to-mid 90's, is a pure cut-and-paste Die Hard clone - one man takes on international terrorists in an isolated environment, picking off the baddies one by one, etc. 
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As a result, the film is glaringly formulaic, increasingly predictable and incessantly dumb, yet its execution is so crisp and handsome and lean that that it wins you over. Essentially, it becomes a masterclass in satisfying on-screen deaths, all the way to the end.
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Maybe I'm just blinded by nostalgia, but Cliffhanger was like a good old rib-stickin' meal - prepared with the most common of ingredients, but served up in a heaping portion with extra sauce. [B] 

Trailer: The Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I smell trouble here as we get our look at the first trailer for Rupert Wyatt's The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5), a prequel to the 1968 science-fiction classic. 
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First off, the decision to bring in WETA (shamelessly and awkwardly given a prominent title card in the trailer) to digital create the apes seems silly to me, given the stellar, flawless make-up job that Tim Burton and his crew did on the otherwise dreadful 2001 remake. 
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I think this is a bad direction to go in and will most likely just reiterate what we all know, and that's the fact that this series has simply run its course. 

'The Eiger Sanction'

I watched Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction ('75) yesterday in an attempt to quench a sudden 60's/70's action movie fix and, well, it's no Where Eagles Dare. 
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Eastwood plays a retired hitman turned art collector brought back into the game for one final job on the steep north face of the Eiger, the 13,000ft mountain in the heart of the Burmese Alps in Switzerland. 
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Of course, Eastwood's Dr. Hemlock doesn't know which climber is the target, and so this overbearing guessing game pervades the final act, which is rather anticlimactic if I say so myself.
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The Eiger Sanction has more twists than anybody could (or would) want, and it's this unstable footing combined with sluggish results that produces a thriller that's hardly compelling or convincing.
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Perhaps the story behind the scenes would have had more palpable danger, seeing as how the production was plagued by injuries, budgets and even deaths. Frank Staley, a cameraman confined to a wheelchair for a portion of his life at the result of the film, adamantly opposed Eastwood's decision to shoot the film on the Eiger from the outset. Needless to say, the two of them never worked together again. [C-]

Car Chases

Over at Hollywood Elsewhere today, Jeff Wells posted a deserved dismissal of Justin Lin's upcoming Fast Five (Universal, 4.29), which I think looks somewhere between revolting and intolerable, but the talk quickly diverged into discussing what the best car chases in film are. 
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Obviously you can't start that conversation without mentioning Peter Yates' Bullitt ('68) and William Friedkin's The French Connection ('71), but some of the deeper cuts being thrown around are from Ronin, Bourne, Matrix Reloaded, To Live and Die in LA, etc. 
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Personally I love the race through the desert in the criminally panned Speed Racer and the finale of Death Proof is pure throwback goodness.

Reactions: Hanna and Source Code

Joe Wright's Hanna is a curious, off-beat thriller that's absolutely winning. Wright's wealth of busy, fluid camera orchestrations and eccentric set-pieces are off-set by the tenderness of Saoirse Ronan's central performance and an odd, endearing mid-section of teenage self-discovery.
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It's true that the film has a good dose of folk tale smeared on top of its European spy-thriller template, but it's Wright's stunning compositions that bring it all home, along with a killer electronic Chemical Brothers score. 
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This isn't some bland, base Phillip Noyce vehicle - it's unique, inventive filmmaking. Along with Anton Corbijn's The American, Joe Wright's Hanna is another on-the-run espionage thriller that doesn't need any narrative tricks to pull in an audience - it's straight-forward storytelling delivered with precision and verve and style to spare. [A-]
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Meanwhile, Duncan Jones' Source Code is a cerebral science-fiction thriller that's as gripping as it is poignant. It works as a standard, straight-ahead mystery, a quantum physics mind-bender and a delicate, emotional journey of self-preservation.
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Like Moon, the director's previous debut film, it concerns a lead character who is faced with a crippling revelation that significantly alters his perception of reality and the ensuing emotion turmoil that comes along with accepting this fact. Both films are very much about what it means to be human.
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If not for a dodgy moment here or there and a few spoonfuls too many of schmaltz in the last act, I would have been doing cartwheels down the aisles, but as it stands, Source Code is an engaging, heady thriller that continues Jones' growing reputation as an intelligent craftsmen of small-scale science-fiction films. [B]

Review: Sucker Punch (2011)

Trying to categorize the indefinable is certainly no easy task with Sucker Punch's anarchic fantasy backdrops, overt sexuality and rigid brutality, but at the end of the day, this is really just another Zack Snyder film full of slow-mo comic-book slop set to highly questionable musical choices.

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Co-writing his first original screenplay, the film is a top-class geek-off session of the highest order - an untamed, uninhibited sideshow of Nazi zombies, skimpy miniskirts and stockings, dragons, zeppelins, gunplay and samurai swords. 

Inspired by and taking the shape of classic fantasy tales like The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland (a re-worked version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" plays over a few fight scenes in case you didn't get the connection), the film is (in reality) set in the dim, scummy corridors of an insane asylum, yet projected into a slightly upscale brothel setting and further into whatever genre backdrop (WWI, medieval, shogun, futuristic) that Baby Doll (Emily Browning) - or more pointedly, Zack Snyder - can cook up. 

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Whenever Baby Doll is forced to dance, we follow her as she transitions to the double-fantasy state, which occurs every time the girls need one of the five items required to escape the brothel, or rather, the asylum. (Map, key, knife, fire, etc.)

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My biggest gripe with the film - other than the fact that it's generally emotionless and conceptually flawed - is that Snyder's fantasyland settings are as excessively haphazard as they are blatantly simple. (Contrary to what people are saying, Sucker Punch isn't incoherent at all, just merely mute.)

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So eager to whip around in his gas-mask trenches (admittedly rather cool) and cliff-side castles (admittedly not) is Snyder that he forgets to (or rather is incapable of) telling a story that you can feel and latch on to and become a part of. 

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So far through four features, he's a director who has routinely exhibited his technical prowess behind the camera (and the way his films pop and flourish visually should not be ignored), while concurrently proving that he has no pulse for convincing storytelling whatsoever. Sucker Punch, like his two previous efforts, is a story better served on the page, told by illustrations. [C]

Limitless and Pointless

I did see Neil Burger's Limitless two weekends ago, but I didn't quite know what to say about it and thus it lingered in review limbo for quite some time. 
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I know that Burger's tunnel zooms and yellowed filters and head-rush filming style certainly suited the material and that I did get a bit of a kick out of watching Bradley Cooper's washed-up writer character pop pills and become a genius novelist, analyst, street fighter, etc. 
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But somewhere between Abbie Cornish throw-looping a pint-sized ice-skater and Cooper slurping up a puddle of blood, Limitless just sort of lost me with its apparent lack of direction which weakly concludes with a perfunctory epilogue that's like something out of a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. 
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In the end, I rather agree with those who describe the film as a cinematic drug trip - fun while it lasts, but once it's over, a fruitless, shallow high. It's like Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted without curved bullets and a secret sect of thread-weaving assassins. Limitless actually had me wishing for the tired but pulpy, throwback mechanizations of Jaume-Collet Serra's Unknown. [C-]

Blu-ray Blow-Out

I remember seeing Brian De Palma's Blow-Out ('81) on VHS in my early years, and now long unavailable on DVD, Criterion's Blu-ray release comes out in three weeks hence (4.26) and an early review from Blu-ray.com only confirms what we should come to suspect, that's it's a sparkling disc. 
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De Palma is one of those "director" directors that Francois Truffaut and the cahiers du cinéma always talked about, a guy whose presence is always felt in every frame and who has complete mastery over every aspect of production and a tireless, limitless knowledge of film and film history.
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My personal favorite of his has to be Carrie ('76) for that sublimely executed suspense scene as the pig's blood goes splat, but Sisters ('73), Obsession ('76) and Body Double ('84) are his holy trinity of Hitchcock homage and Phantom of the Paradise ('73) is a wonderful rock opera - I've never seen Dressed to Kill ('80), though not for a lack of trying. 

Classic Rewind: Experiment in Terror (1962)

Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror ('62) may just be the best film that the recently deceased, primarily lightweight director ever made. 
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Known for The Pink Panther series and the flawed but iconic Breakfast at Tiffany's, it's rather staggering how well-oiled this black-and-white noir-thriller really is, with its absolutely luscious San Francisco photography, a savory Henry Mancini jazz score and its propulsive, suspenseful plotting.
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In the way that it sticks to the details and is obviously composed by someone who knows what he's doing (i.e. putting it altogether with real pizazz and obedience), the film reminded me of David Fincher's Zodiac, another San Francisco serial-killer saga with a shot or two of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Much to my delight, Experiment in Terror is not a "horror" film in the strictest sense, but rather a stunningly shot by-the-details police procedural in which the killer doesn't know that the Feds (led by Glenn Ford) are on his tail as he stalks the lovely Lee Remick. 
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I love the way that Edwards frames his shots frequently with men in the foreground or background (either in their cars, a phone booth, a window, etc.) focused on Lee Remick and leaves it up to us to decide if they're killers or detectives. The finale at Candlestick Park is a real spectacle. [A-]