Matt's Movie Blog

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Superman Returns

Seen 18 June 2006 at AMC Fenway (advance screening)
* * (out of 5)


My lack of anticipation has been confirmed. “Superman Returns,” while having a fun scene here and there and some great stuff from Kate Bosworth and Frank Langella, is the not the second coming of the Man of Steel. For everything hopeful about it, this is a miss.

This is an odd review to write, because I know there are a lot of people out there who will probably enjoy Superman Returns, but I was not one of them. At no point was I able to get myself excited for the film, and that extended straight into the closing credits. Based on that, even though I know a lot of people will like this film, I just can’t bring myself to recommend it.

Five years since astronomers discover a potentially healthy Krypton, Superman (Brandon Routh) returns to Metropolis after mounting his own investigation. Both for Supes and alter-super-reporter Clark Kent, the world is vastly changed. Most notably on both fronts, intrepid reporter and loving mommy Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has written an article called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” and is now raising her son, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu), with fiancé Richard White (James Marsden). What Supes doesn’t know is that old nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has returned to Metropolis as well, with something that belongs to Spandex-Man in tow: pieces of kryptonite Lex swiped from Kal-El’s Fortress of Solitude, which gave our hero the only remaining connection to dear old dad (Marlon Brando). Lex intends to use the crystals to create a new world… and then charge rent! Superman would never allow that to happen… WOULD HE???

The more removed from the screening of this 10 days ago, the less fondly I remember it. There was just very little in the film I truly liked. I bought Bosworth and Langella, moreso the latter, and James Marsden impressed me by not being as forgettable as I’ve usually found him. But much of the film is just off-the-mark, and that adds up to it falling significantly short of the greatness it was supposedly destined for.

Read the rest at HBS!

Friday, June 23, 2006

Click

Seen Tuesday 20 June 2006 at AMC Boston Common
* (out of 5)


I didn’t have high expectations for “Click.” Hell, I didn’t have ANY expectations for Click. The trailer looked slightly more amusing than Sandler’s typical crap, but not so much that I’d put money down. I figured the moments that made me giggle did so because they were contained within a three-minute clip, not a two-hour film. Boy, I was right. Despite the high concept with universal (zing!) appeal, this is a film made specifically for Adam Sandler’s pre-existing fan base. They’ll like it. If you don’t like Sandler, stay far, far away.

Sandler plays Billy Mad… er… Happy Gil… shit… MICHAEL… Michael Newman, an architect who is on the cusp of becoming a partner at his firm. To get to that point, he’s worked his ass off, trying to balance demands from his boss (David Hasselhoff), his wife (Kate Beckinsale… yeah, I know), his kids and his parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner). Unfortunately, most of his time goes to work, which angers the family, which stresses Michael out, etc, etc. Eventually, in a symbolic effort to make his life simpler, Michael makes a midnight run to Bed, Bath and Beyond to find the universal remote of his dreams, which will control the TV, the garage door, the ceiling fan, the kid’s toys, his neighbor’s car, and his kids’ hair growth. There he meets Morty (Christopher Walken) a Doc Brown ripoff who gives Michael a very special new product – a remote that controls his universe. Now Michael’s life has never been easier – he can savor the moments he wants to remember, and skip what he doesn’t want to experience. But everything goes to hell when the remote starts “learning” Michael’s habits, and skipping huge amounts of time that he didn’t want to miss.

So yes, the premise is just as pointless on film as those last few lines look on paper. Click’s biggest (but certainly not only) downfall is that the film’s pattern mimics Michael’s. Once the premise is established – “I can fast-forward through life!” – viewers could easily skip 15-minute sections of the film, and know they’ve only missed the same thing they’re now seeing. It’s a one-trick pony. It’s a gag that’s funny once or twice – one or two of the pause antics are amusing, especially when they involve Hasselhoff (and no, not the fart joke) – but when you stretch it out to two full hours without trailers, it wears very, very thin. It also doesn’t help that the same joke is made multiple times – specifically the 15-second sex session between Beckinsale and Sandler, and the family dog’s attraction to a giant plush duck. Repetition may be one route to comedy, but you have to make sure that you start with something humorous in the first place. So because of that, the film never really gets a chance to build the least bit of momentum – every time it looks to advance the bare-bones story, it runs headlong into some joke it already told, and grinds to a halt.

Read the rest at HBS!

Friday, June 16, 2006

Over the Hedge

Seen May 20 at AMC Fenway
* * * * (out of 5)

Over the Hedge is a completely inoffensive animated film. It is a good dose of family fare, and great for kids. At that point, does it really matter if you’re not laughing like you laughed at Toy Story or Shrek?

To me, it was pretty clear from the outset what kind of audience Over the Hedge was looking to grab, and that audience was not me or my girlfriend. But that’s OK. I can still appreciate a cute, sweet kids movie with basic gags. And that’s not to say that there weren’t some clever moments in the film. Dreamworks simply wasn’t shooting for the double-entendres in this film like most animated films feel a need to include.

The first lovable little rascal we meet is RJ (Bruce Willis), a raccoon who has worked up a sizeable debt to a big menacing bear (Nick Nolte). If RJ can’t fill Vincent’s cave back up with food in time, RJ will become the food. Nearly hopeless, RJ stumbles on a hodgepodge family of forest creatures living in an isolated oasis in the middle of suburbia. Led by Verne the turtle (Garry Shandling), they spend every day collecting food so they can survive the winter. This winter, though, they wake up to a new addition – a giant hedge severely restricting the border of their once-huge forest, since the suburb has expanded into their territory. RJ sees their naivety as an opportunity, and embeds himself into the group with the ruse that he will lead them through suburbia to collect all the food they need, all the while planning to grab the food once they’ve gathered it and pay off his debt. But once he gets to know the crazy bunch, will he really be able to screw them over like that?

Yep. It’s predictable. But the ride to get there is fun, and filled with a few really great moments. Not surprisingly, based on the trailer and the voice cast, many of those moments come from Hammy the Squirrel (Steve Carell). Hyper as hell and dumb as a brick, Hammy is very endearing because of his happy dimwittedness. He takes to RJ immediately, and is really the emotional leader of the film – the look in his eyes when he learns of RJ’s betrayal is heartbreaking, something very impressive to do in an animated film. He also has some of the funniest moments in the film – between rabid squirrel and the outcome of feeding an already-hyper animal (who weights under a pound, no less) an entire energy drink, Hammy definitely got the most chuckles out of me.

The entire cast is very solid. For the forest creatures, Shandling and Carell are joined by William Shatner and Avril Lavigne as possums, Wanda Sykes as a sassy skunk, and Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara as porcupine parents. Thomas Hayden “Lowell” Church plays the main villain, an exterminator determined to eliminate the pests, and he provides some good laughs while the animators give him some good sight gags.

Read the rest at HBS!

Monday, June 05, 2006

Banlieue 13 (District B13)

Seen 2 June 2006 at Loews Boston Common
* * * * (out of 5)

A lot of summer movies come off as mindless entertainment. They’re still worth watching, but they don’t have nearly the intellectual interest that some of their filmmakers would like to think they do. What’s even more fun is when a filmmaker doesn’t even make an attempt. They just deliver the fun.

As the film starts, we’re informed that crime in Paris has gotten so bad that in 2010, the worst section (banlieue 13) has been closed to anyone who doesn’t live there, and the police have pulled out, leaving the residents to their own devices. One man, Leïto (David Belle), refuses to give into the criminal temptations around him. We find him destroying a shipment of cocaine, which naturally pisses off the previous owner, a crimelord named Taha (co-writer Bibi Naceri). He sends a band of thugs to smoke out Leïto, triggering maybe the most fun chase scene in a very long time. For a good seven minutes, Leïto doesn’t stop running, no matter what thugs, locked doors, windows or balconies get in his way – apparently following a running discipline called parkour. After a nasty incident with the police, which also sees his sister kidnapped by Taha’s thugs, Leïto is thrown in jail. Six months later, he is recruited to help a special strike against Taha, who has acquired an armed and ticking nuclear warhead. He teams with the equally-impressive Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), the military agent assigned to the job. Lots of fun running and kicking ensue.

One of the great things about this film is that there’s really nothing to it. It’s pure fluff, and it is aware of that. The “plot” is actually just a backdrop for a pretty kickass martial arts demo. The characters have no real depth to them beyond their clear identities of ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’. The plot, silly as it is, is only used to get the two heroes into confrontations with the villains.

The thing is… that’s all OK.

Read the rest at HBS!

Friday, June 02, 2006

Brick

Seen at Coolidge Corner Theater Screening Room
* * * * (out of 5)

Brick is a very unusual film. Its brilliance lies in the fact that the characters exist in a sort of parallel universe. It’s a world where people talk in strange patterns, with strange analogies, and no one thinks twice. And showing emotion is BAD. It’s a world of noir, which Rian Johnson has brought it crashing headlong into the high-school drama genre, and he handles both sides brilliantly.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, a loner at his high school. When the film starts, Brendan is outside an aqueduct, grieving over the body of a blonde girl. Retracing his steps shows the girl to be Emily (Emile de Ravin), Brendan’s ex-girlfriend that he never really got over. Days earlier, Emily, who hadn’t been seen for some time, called Brendan in a panic, ranting about some trouble she’d gotten herself into. Not understanding half of what she said, Brendan enlists the help of The Brain (Matt O’Leary), who knows just about everything that goes on in the school, and begins unraveling the events that eventually led to Emily’s death. In doing so, he must burrow deep into an underground drug syndicate that Emily was linked to, agitating an already volatile situation.

For the first half hour, the gimmick is a hard sell – as a viewer, you really need to readjust your perception of normal speech and behavior. Once you get there, though, the world is so engaging that the snippets of reality that pop up every once in awhile are almost jarring. Most interesting is that for the most part, these characters operate almost completely independent of adult involvement. They are so on their own that it almost seems absurd when The Brain remarks that he’ll have to borrow his mother’s car. All the dialogue is so well-written and performed that you'll quickly pick up the flow of it.

Read the rest at HBS!