Mesrine is out on DVD and Blu-Ray in Europe if you can grab it. Its just now showing up in the US theaters though so if you have a small theater nearby you might be able to catch it on the big screen.
This is the best original (non-franchise) summer blockbuster I've seen in years. I'm not a fan of any of the other Nolan films I've seen, so I went in with limited expectations. I was wonderfully entertained for two and a half hours. Of course, I think Nolan underestimates the audience and certain things are a bit foreshadowed so I predicted three or so things within the first ten minutes of the film and five or six overall, proven correct within minutes or seconds of every inkling. For that it loses points but, unlike other Nolan films (The Prestige and, especially, The Dark Knight) this film maintains its pace and tone very well.
The Dark Knight was a mess by the time the last half hour rolled around and I couldn't have cared less what happened anymore. This one was just the opposite and kept me entertained. I wasn't enthralled or "amazed" (a phrase which is thrown around all too often these days) but it was popcorn fare at almost its greatest. If only Nolan would realize that the audience has a brain. The telegraphing in the film was the only real downfall. I found the micrograv sequences to be some of the best executed action beats I've ever seen in a film and even liked what Zimmer created for them. Let me say that again: I was entertained by Zimmer's contribution to the film. That's the only time I've been able to say that. I'm not slamming him, but he's not my cup of tea. I find myself really wanting to buy this album though.
In short, it probably deserves less than an 8, but the fact that such an ethereal concept as dreaming was handled so well on film bumps it up a notch or two. To say nothing of the fact that I think Ellen Page is a doll and quite the little actress. And I'm always glad to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy on screen. It was a real treat seeing Tommy and Shinzon play off of each other! I'm glad that they seem to be gaining momentum in Hollywood. I hope we see more of Hardy in the future as I've enjoyed his talent since Nemesis. Good popcorn flick with really nice cinematography, acting, choreography and a decent story. Isn't that what really matters, after all? Good stuff. The only Nolan film I plan on buying. Hopefully not for long... Keep up the good work Chris.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who enjoys Ellen Page's work (and visage).
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The Trigger Effect (1996) -- 8/10
Now that was one interesting movie. Wholly original. I've never seen a story quite like this one. Great, dark, moody, chilly score by James Newton Howard. I really enjoy Koepp's work.
This guy wrote about the movie much more eloquently than I could at 1:20 a.m.:
"Do yourself a favor and buy some canned goods, a flashlight, and a radio before you watch this film. Unfairly dismissed by the critics and missed by the public, this pre-Y2K suspense film by writer-director David Koepp (the writer of Jurassic Park and Apartment Zero) is a chilling, sobering experience that will turn any practical person into a paranoid, apocalyptic loon. When the power goes out in the big city and society starts to break down, husband and wife Matthew (Kyle MacLachlan) and Annie (Elisabeth Shue) find out that not even suburbia is safe. Complicating the situation is their mutual friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney), who stays with them during the blackout, partially because of his interest in Annie. Koepp's inventive and authentic take on interpersonal relationships (Shue and MacLachlan are great as a foundering couple) and the assault on the white-collar male ego are spot-on. Koepp doesn't stop there. He also plays and builds imaginatively on suspense conventions (including the casting of character-baddie Michael Rooker), race relations, and our prejudicial, judgmental attitudes toward strangers. The concatenation of events, how they affect us without our knowledge, and our dependence on the machinery and power that prop up our society complete this involving, perceptive analysis of our very weak social fabric.--Keith Simanton"
I'm with you all the way on this one Deputy. I'm absolutely shocked at how little attention Rogue has received since it came out. A perfect, tense little shocker. If anyone reads this and hasn't seen it please give it a bash. I don't think that you will be disappointed.
Platform (Zhantai) (2000) by Zhang Ke Jia -- A film following a provincial amateur "culture group" in a small town in China over the decade of the 80s, from the fall of Maoism through the beginning of the rise of consumer culture. Jia is a filmmaker who makes fiction films to documentary purposes; I believe his movies have been banned in China. This is a very interesting movie, but it is not very engaging. This is a deliberate choice: the camera never gets too close to the characters (which, coupled with the less-than-pristine video quality, sometimes makes it difficult to tell whom you're looking at). What the film lacks in narrative and emotional engagement it makes up for in images and moments: it is impeccably photographed and has a lot of quietly powerful scenes. Jia's politics are interesting; his characters seem equally unfocused and unhappy in their teens at the beginning of the film and as they approach thirty at its end. This is a very good, and perhaps an important movie, but it's difficult to recommend to a general audience. (***½)
Beau Travail (1999) by Claire Denis -- Billy Budd meets Beau Geste in what may be Denis' masterpiece, a dreamlike meditation on envy, control and the male body in the French Foreign Legion. This is the type of movie that would have put me to sleep five years ago, but that I love being absorbed into now, a movie that's more about the experience than the plot. (****½)
Repo Men (2010) by Miguel Sapochnik -- Quite a disappointment. It's certainly watchable from beginning to end. It just doesn't work. Sharing a plot with Darren Lynn Bousman's Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), this movie stars Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as a couple of psychopaths who work in the repossession department of a company that supplies outrageously expensive "artiforgs", artificial organs, to people. When the people fall behind on payments, these guys break into their homes, knock them unconscious, cut them open and repo the organ. This film doesn't work on multiple levels. For one, it's impossible to feel sympathy for the Law's character. He's a remorseless murderer, and all of a sudden we're supposed to feel sorry for his plight when he too has an artificial organ, and continues to be a remorseless murderer, only now he's murdering law enforcement people and businessmen rather than people with false organs? Boo hoo. And the company has sufficiently sophisticated technology to make functioning mechanical organs, but has no way to track them, so has to send guys out to scan each person individually to see if there are any organs needing repossession? How about track them all so you know where your tech is at all times, and are able to simply switch off the organs remotely when payments are overdue. Seems a lot cheaper, a lot less hassle. Law's relationship with Braga's character has no development and no chemistry. And, frankly, there are much better stories to be told here. All these augmented eyes and ears and joints, and no one's gone overboard with the upgrade to fight back against the repo men? Seriously? Plus the ending's predictable. Basically if you're looking for some decent gory sci-fi violence, this movie's okay, but it had the potential to be an intelligent sci-fi thriller and absolutely squandered it. (**)
Offside (2006) by Jafar Panahi -- A comedy of gender relations and soccer in Iran. Set, and illicitly filmed, at the World Cup in Iran in 2006, this is a movie of female fans of the game who tried to sneak in dressed as men but were caught and held outside the stadium. While waiting to be delivered to the Vice Squad, they convince the officers holding them to report the game to them. The comedy is in that they're both smarter than and more sports-savvy than the officers. Like Jia, Panahi's films have been banned in his home country, and he was in fact incarcerated for several months earlier this year until, between an international petition and his hunger strike upon maltreatment, he was released. Also like Jia, he makes films that blur the line between fiction and documentary. Unlike Jia's film, though, this is a very, engaging movie that's easy to recommend to a general audience. Easily one of the best films of '06. Highly recommended. (****½)
Dorian Gray (2009) by Oliver Parker -- The director of the St. Trinian's films brings us a trite, cheap, if fairly literal adaptation of Wilde's story. Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian) makes a pretty Dorian Gray, but he has neither the subtlety nor the presence to really sell the character. Colin Firth as Henry Wotton is mostly wasted, spending much of the movie cynically offering hedonist platitudes; if he is the devil on one of Gray's shoulders; Ben Chaplin as the painter of the portrait is the angel on the other. Too much time is spent on Gray's decadent revelry, which is never quite decadent or obscene enough for us to believe in the absolute corruption of his soul, and not enough is spent developing his relationships with Rachel Hurd-Wood's Sibyl Vane or Rebecca Hall's Emily Wotton, the two loves of his life, so those significant stages in his character development aren't as meaningful or as powerful as they need to be. Most of the special effects look fairly cheap, although a couple moments are effective, and there are a few funny scenes as well. But on the whole this is just a trite, surface level reading of the story that doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about the characters or the human condition, and doesn't say what it does in anything like an interesting way. (**)
I'm absolutely shocked at how little attention Rogue has received since it came out.
I remember hearing something about it a couple years ago, but here in the US at least, I don't believe it was released in theaters (if it was, it was only a small release), but was instead released direct-to-video. I definitely never saw any ads for it at the theater or on television, though there were probably print ads in genre publications like Fangoria. I was always under the impression it was one of Sci-Fi Channel's typical assembly line cheapfests, but after looking it up online, I see it was actually an Australian production. So maybe I'll give it a rental via Netflix.
I'm absolutely shocked at how little attention Rogue has received since it came out.
I remember hearing something about it a couple years ago, but here in the US at least, I don't believe it was released in theaters (if it was, it was only a small release), but was instead released direct-to-video. I definitely never saw any ads for it at the theater or on television, though there were probably print ads in genre publications like Fangoria. I was always under the impression it was one of Sci-Fi Channel's typical assembly line cheapfests, but after looking it up online, I see it was actually an Australian production. So maybe I'll give it a rental via Netflix.
I think you'll really dig it. I really talk it up several posts back if you need more incentive!
I've always wanted to see Michael Vartan as a leading-man hero since his days on Alias, it was fun to see Sam Worthington before he hit it big, and Radha Mitchell is full-on sexy as hell with her Australian accent. Plus, the croc is ONE BAD MOTHA.
Batman: Under the Red Hood 9/10 One of the best DC Direct titles yet. This along with Green Lantern: First Flight are my favorites so far with Justice League: New Frontier following closely behind. DC Directs releases of Wonder Woman and Crisis on Two Earths are dead last.
I was surprised at how beautiful Eastwood's score was, too. The man is a veritable fountain of immense talent, The Rookie not withstanding.
Keep an eye out for Jason Butler Harner; he should have won an Academy Award for his role as a deranged and disturbed psychopath.
Hell yes! Fantastic movie. I walked out of there with the score stuck in my head and ordered it soon after. The haunting music really fits the movie's tone and emotion. I saw the movie on Halloween night with my dad back in 2008 when it opened and we both left the theater surprised by the powerful movie. I will forever consider Changeling one of Jolie's best performances.
Hell yes! Fantastic movie. I walked out of there with the score stuck in my head and ordered it soon after. The haunting music really fits the movie's tone and emotion. I saw the movie on Halloween night with my dad back in 2008 when it opened and we both left the theater surprised by the powerful movie. I will forever consider Changeling one of Jolie's best performances.
We often seem to have similar tastes, sirusjr...very cool. I agree about Jolie's performance -- the best work she's ever done, except maybe for Girl, Interrupted. She really made me feel for her character and she was totally and completely believable and 100% sympathetic.
I also thought Eastwood created a beautifully and meticulously rendered period setting, I was very impressed with his attention to period detail, from the switchboard operators to the costumes to the dated mental ward shock-therapy equipment.
I was particularly impressed by Michael Kelly's role as Lester Ybarra, the good cop who is led to discover the 20 murdered bodies of the children at the ranch. His smoldering intensity was riveting. I swore up and down through the whole movie that he would end up a bad guy after seeing him play such an jerk in the Dawn of the Dead remake, but was surprised to see him play a character with such honor and integrity. Conversely, I swore that Jeffrey Donovan's police captain would end up helping Jolie's character and showing his good side, but he turned out to have very few redeeming qualities. There was something there, though...I really felt during certain moments that there was a lot going on in his mind and he seemed very conflicted. I liked how my two assumptions of these two cops were completely flipped upside down and it made the movie very unpredictable for me. I think it was an incredible casting decision on Eastwood's part, at least in my mind...casting both actors against type and making the movie more unpredictable.
I'll definitely be getting the Eastwood score. I never thought he could match up with my favorite composers, but this score proved to me that he can play in the big leagues, which is no surprise as he's conquered acting, directing, producing...at the beginning of the movie, the main theme played on piano was repeated a few times and I worried that it would saturate the movie and the score would be completely dependant on the theme, but the score turned out to be very broad and versatile, and the piano theme recurring at key emotional moments in the film was so skillfully placed. I even found the suspense music intriguing, how does it play out on album?
The album drags a bit towards the middle when the more ambient tracks play that don't have the themes, but enough of it is enjoyable that its a good listen.
Account of a Leopold/Loeb-type case in which college guys kidnap and murder someone in a manner they think is a perfect crime to prove their superior intellects. Very good performances by Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as killers. Stockwell is particularly creepy. Orson Welles is defense attorney and gets to chew scenery during final courtroom monologue.
Most of the score is 1920s-era source music. However, Lionel Newman's very brief original score is incongruous, sounding like 1950s jazz--something one would hear in a TV detective series from that era.
I kind of hated Changeling, a bizarre mash-up of elements from L.A. Confidential, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Frailty(!) sporting "ACT-ing!" performances from the entire cast and a narrative that kept wildly shifting tone. And Jolie is woefully miscast in period roles (then again, I don't like Jolie in general, either for talent or looks).
Yet another horror film that starts well, builds up the tension and mounting horror and then...is utterly ruined by an ending that comes across as if the filmmakers just couldn't decide on how to end it. I won't give a clue as to 2 movies that it resembles, but if this movie had an ending that fitted the rest of what took place, it could have taken a rightful place in the realm of great horror films.
The acting is spot on and the filmmakers really do a good job of making it as real of a docu style horror film as one could hope for. And the shaky cam is not nearly as nausea inducing as say Blair Witch or Cloverfield.
But again, even though the film is a solidly crafted horror story for its nearly its entirety, it literally tosses itself out the window into oblivion at the very end with a truly crappy climax.
As with a lot of horror movies, this one starts out pretty terrible but really picks up once the mayhem begins. Unfortunately not enough to save the film from being a disappointment.
This might be the sweetest romance I've ever seen on film (maybe a tie with Frankie & Johnny). Seeing Hartnett do such a 180 after watching him in August, I have a glorious newfound respect for the man's acting skills.
