Monthly Movie Mayhem — August 2012

MOVIES SEEN IN AUGUST 2012

A Fish Called Wanda
Piranha DD
A Dangerous Method
Detention
The Raid: Redemption
The Shark Is Still Working
The Expendables 2
ParaNorman
The Wild Bunch
The Day After

STATS (for month / for year)

Seen theatrically:  2 / 30
Seen at home:  8 / 83
New films:  8 / 76
Rewatches:  2 / 37

INDIVIDUAL HONORS

Best Movie:  ParaNorman (review)

The term “instant classic” gets bandied about far too often on films that don’t deserve it, but ParaNorman is more than worthy of the label.  This is a film that’s going to get played every Halloween by kids who want a little bit of fright to call their own, and by adults who want to remember what that felt like.  I can’t wait to own it myself.  And beyond being a well-done fright-fest, it deftly develops and explores its themes without ever getting bogged down in them.

Honorable Mention:  A Dangerous Method

Worst Movie:  Piranha DD

I should have realized a film with that kind of title and a pair of breasts emblazoned on its cover was going to be up to no good.  I just hoped it would be in enough on the joke to be entertaining in a deliberately bad way.  And this film couldn’t even pull that off.  There’s nothing more painful than watching a film that thinks it’s clever when it really isn’t. At least the DD in the title was accurate, but honestly, I can get that on the internet for free and some smart Googling.

Dishonorable Mention:  None

Biggest Surprise:  The Raid: Redemption

I wasn’t surprised by how good the action was, how each fight seemed to have its own sense of style and place, adapting to its place in the overall structure of the film.  I wasn’t surprised by the effective direction, the simple shorthand of ever-higher room numbers elegantly cluing us in as to how far up the building we’d gone.  No, the surprise here was how genuinely affecting the story was, the literal redemption of the title.  And how effective that story is conveyed by actors speaking in a foreign language.  The story heightens the action, and the action underscores the story.  That’s rare in this kind of film.

Honorable Mention:  ParaNorman

Biggest Disappointment:  The Expendables 2

And I went in with incredibly tempered expectations, having not been a big fan of the first film.  But this second outing is far too satisfied to just sit back and toss in-jokes at the audience instead of really making us care about the characters.  The film also commits the cardinal sin of blowing its wad with a spectacular opening sequence that is everything I expected the film to be, but which leaves it absolutely no place to go afterward.

Dishonorable Mention:  Detention

RANDOM THOUGHTS

August was a pretty light month movie-wise, a combination of a lackluster slate of releases and me spending a good chunk of the month catching up on Once Upon a Time.  I tend to go through phases with my movie watching, alternating between months like July where I’m glued to a screen and months like August where the drive just isn’t there.  Hopefully September will see an improvement.

A Dangerous Method is a stunningly acted piece of work whose only drawback is that it feels a little episodic and less than the sum of its parts.  Keira Knightley in particular gives a brave, emotionally bare performance that must have been a harrowing experience as an actress.

I finally crossed The Wild Bunch off the List of Shame, and I’m glad I did.  It’s almost a more pessimistic version of The Magnificent Seven, dealing with the same themes of a dying way of life, but without the hopeful optimism of the farmers winning in the end.  In The Wild Bunch, nobody really wins.  They just hang on to the way things used to be as long as they can, because it’s all they know.

I’d heard a lot of praise for the frenetic style of Detention, but for me, it’s purely style in the service of itself.  It’s not nearly as deep or clever as it thinks it is, and so its visual assault feels hollow.  I’m all for pushing boundaries, but as long as its towards a larger goal than  reminding us how much of the 1990s the director remembers.

The Day After was a total whim of a watch, stumbled upon on YouTube and used to kill a few hours on a lazy morning.  Its doomsday scenario doesn’t seem as plausible now as it did then, so it’s of more interest now as a time capsule of the very real fears of the time than as a dramatic film.  It’s not helped by the overly melodramatic build-up to the nukes flying, indulging in every bad TV movie trope the 80s had to offer.  I was impressed though with how grimly bleak it lets itself get.  There’s no hope here at all, no possible rescue just over the horizon, just an apocalypse refreshingly free of zombies.

LOOKING AHEAD

September’s a weird month as far as movies go, not quite summer, not quite fall, so there’s an odd mix of prestige and piffle.  Looper certainly looks intriguing, if only to see how Joseph Gordon-Levitt pulls off his Bruce Willis impersonation (it does actually look like a fun, twisty sci-fi thriller).  And despite Adam Sandler’s presence, I’ve been slowly won over by the trailers for Hotel Transylvania.  At any rate, it’s got to be a better Halloween romp than Tim Burton finally pulling an Ouroboros on himself and remaking his short film Frankenweenie, which awaits us in October.  It’ll also be interesting to see if Dredd can overcome its remarkable similarities to The Raid: Redemption and finally do justice to the character.  Of course, all of this is contingent on me being able to tear myself away from the month’s Blu-ray releases.  The Avengers, Titanic, and Indiana Jones?  Why leave the house?  Well, except to go buy them, obviously.

What I’d Watch 4/13/12

While there’s some noteworthy films opening or expanding this week, all the buzz is about a film that won’t be out for another three weeks that technically no one is supposed to be buzzing about yet.  The Avengers had its premiere earlier this week, and judging by the deliberately vague tweets that having been popping up since then, Marvel’s got a hit on its hands.  I’ll admit to a little bit of fatigue when it came to this film, seemingly endlessly teased at the end of every Marvel film for the last few years, but the most recent trailers have helped to dispel that. Combined with the positive word of mouth, May 4th can’t get here fast enough.  But there’s enough to scratch the movie itch this week while we wait.

The only scratching likely to be prompted by The Three Stooges, however, is of your head as you ponder how this film ever got made.  It’s not a bio-pic, it’s not some kind of witty deconstruction of what made the Stooges so popular, it’s just a Three Stooges movie made with different guys playing the Stooges.  I don’t get it.  I’ve never been a big Stooge fan, so maybe there’s an appeal here that’s simply lost on me, but if you’re jonesing for this particular brand of humor, I can’t imagine spending ten bucks on this when you can easily find the real thing for a lot cheaper.  But hey, this one’s in color, so I guess it’s a way to get your Stooge fill without dealing with black and white.

It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve had a “Die Hard on a ______” movie, but the genre comes roaring back by shooting it up into space and calling it Lockout.  Guy Pearce seems a little too stoic to slip into Bruce Willis’ lack of shoes, but then again, I doubt anyone is going to this for the caliber of acting.  It’s produced co-written by Luc Besson, so we’re coming on board for a lot of slick, well-shot action set pieces.  If it doesn’t deliver on that front, it could be Olivier up there and it wouldn’t matter.  It doesn’t seem to be aiming very high, but then again, no one’s really asking much.  It’s going to have to try really hard not to live up  to those expectations.

Writer-director Joss Whedon has his big moment next month, but writer-producer Joss Whedon has plenty to be excited about this week with The Cabin in the Woods.  While some mainstream critics have been left baffled by it — Rex Reed was apparently so confused by it, there’s speculation he actually fell asleep and missed most of it — the online community has been fairly universal in its praise for this blend of science fiction and horror.  I’m generally sort of meh when it comes to horror films, at least the more recent ones; the direction the genre has gone lately just doesn’t do anything for me.  This, however, looks like it hearkens back to the more fun horror films I remember, where the audience is as much co-conspirator as it is victim, and it’s not about bludgeoning you with as many bleak images as possible.  And with Whedon providing the words, you know the script won’t be boring.

But the slam-dunk for me this week is a film rolling out to only about six hundred screens, but that I’ve been waiting for ever since it blew people away at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, The Raid: Redemption.  Actually, it was just The Raid back then, but it seems there’s already an obscure Western from the 1950s with that title, so they tacked “Redemption” on the end even though there’s apparently not a lot of redeeming in this.  What there is a lot of,  however, is tremendous ass-kicking; it’s essentially a bunch of cops fighting their way floor by floor up a building to get to the bad guys at the top, and it’s supposed to be absolutely glorious in its mayhem.  It’s been playing in New York and Los Angeles for a few weeks already, so I’m pretty psyched Orlando nabbed runner-up to the cool kids status on this one.

Today also marks the beginning of the Florida Film Festival, which bounces around between the Enzian Theater and the Regal Cinemas at the Winter Park Village.  I’ve already got tickets to the midnight screenings of Bobcat Goldthwait’s angry shout of a film God Bless America and Don Coscarelli’s horror comedy John Dies at the End, and there are about a dozen other films I’d love to see, time and budget permitting.  Plus there’s what looks to be a really fun screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail outside on the lawn next to the Enzian.  This event usually gets raves every year, and it’s about time I took advantage of the opportunity to see some hidden gems while I’m waiting for Hulk to smash.