GethinVanH Reviews

Flipped (I) (2010)

Same old same old

[3/10 · 15 December 2010]

The last good movie Rob Reiner directed was "Misery" in 1990, nearly 20 years ago. Since then he's been pumping out a lot of crap like "The American President" and "The Bucket List". Flipped falls into the same category. It's a movie about a suburban, middle-class white American kid who comes of age. To top it all off, I discovered that Flipped is based on a book which takes place in the 2000s. You've seen this movie if you've seen 'My Girl' or 'The Wonder Years' you've already seen this movie.

American Graffiti and Hairspray are at least more challenging and add something new. 'Flipped' adds nothing new except for a dual-narrative from both the teen boy and teen girl. This is interesting but since the male character is so utterly devoid of any charisma I couldn't stand listening to him. Reiner got it right with 'Stand By Me' by using an adult narrator (Dreyfuss) who could actually handle the task. The young actors are pretty bad narrators.

There's nothing new here and it's pretty much an all-white cast. This is not a time to be sentimental about with it's lack of diversity and sterile environments. Reiner had the option of having the film take place in the 2000s and obviously rejected it. He prefers to work in the cocoon which is the 1960s coming of age story.

Inception (2010)

A mediocre blockbuster

[6/10 · 6 November 2010]

I like Christopher Nolan. I did before he even did the Batman movies. Following was quite an interesting movie and Memento is one of the best movies of its decade. The Batman movies were good too, Nolan did something new and interesting with Batman and made Tim Burton look like an art school douche.

This is all to preface that Inception is a mediocre movie. No, it's not especially deep. A dream within a dream within a dream. It's about as philosophically deep as The Matrix and the execution is slightly better.

Leo is Leo. He essentially plays the same character he did in "Shutter Island", which I thought was a total mess. His wife is crazy and Leo just wants to set everything straight and go back to a normal existence. He'll do anything it takes and meanwhile will grimace, look stern and squint his way through the movie.

The plot is decent but I thought it got bogged down in senseless shoot-outs, three layers of shoot-outs actually, which are all happening simultaneously. The direction here is pretty clever but the movie isn't. The scenes in the second dream layer take place in a wintry landscape where there is a fortress on the side of a mountain. The whole thing is very James Bond, especially when guys on motorized ski-machines start coming out of the forest shooting guns. There are a lot of shots fired from guns, all kinds of guns, with probably thousands of bullets, few hit anyone. At that point I give up. I've seen it before and I pretty much started losing interest.

This is a blockbuster, not a movie about characters, plot or right-and-wrong. It's not thought-provoking in the least. The technology is never explained, which is probably for the best as it's inexplicable. Although, 'Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine" both did a much better job without ever explaining much of anything. The story is interesting enough to recommend. A few effects scenes are good.

The acting isn't very strong either. Leo acts like he does in most of his other movies, notably "Shutter Island" and "The Departed". He has his game face on. I'm kind of sick of his game face. It's that 'Something very serious is happening' look that is way over the top. http://tinyurl.com/29hqqcp (Let's discuss the serious part of the movie).

Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009)

Words aren't needed

[8/10 · 10 September 2010]

Like 'Baraka' and other documentaries which show images from the world, both good and bad, "Petropolis" does not need narration to tell you what is going on in Northern Alberta. The images alone do it justice. You only need to see the images of the tailings ponds, hot crude gushing from pipes into lakes and bleak, colourless landscapes to know that this is truly environmental damage on a mass scale.

The film opens with the camera panning across the unspoiled wilderness of the boreal forests of Northern Alberta. Suddenly, the viewer is over an industrial wasteland like none other. The total size of the tar sands is 140,000 square kilometres. By comparison the area of England is 130,000. There are also plans to extensively expand the oil sands in the near future.

The supplements on the DVD are interesting as well and perhaps should have been part of the 45 minute feature. There are interviews with local residents, a local doctor who speaks about increased cancer rates, a fisherman who talks of increased numbers of mutilated fish and residents of Fort McMurray who talk of the horrible toxic smell which now regularly covers the town.

This is a good documentary for anyone interested in the impact of the oil sands on the ecology of North Alberta.

Don't You Forget About Me (I) (2009 Video)

Well, the interviews were good...

[6/10 · 9 September 2010]

Finally a documentary about the life of John Hughes. The unfortunate part is that it's made by amateur Canadian (sadly) filmmakers. The interviews with the stars of Hughes' films are the best part of this documentary. The let down is that while Judd Nelson and other stars are present, there are many stars who aren't. Where was Matthew Broderick? The filmmakers also go on an adventure to go to Hughes' home and subsequently interview him. I'll save you the effort.They don't interview Hughes because they're silly amateurs who wrote up their interview questions half an hour earlier in a coffee shop. They also get Hughes' home address from his pizza delivery man.

It's worth watching for the interviews with the cast of Breakfast Club (sans Molly Ringwald, Estevez, Michael Hall), Weird Science (sans Michael Hall), Ferris Bueller (sans Matthew Broderick,Jeffrey Jones (Rooney)). You get the idea. They also interview filmmaker inspired by Hughes like Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air) and Kevin Smith (Clerks). The celebs don't need much prodding so it's the best part of the documentary.

I still hope someone makes a halfway decent documentary about the life of John Hughes. Hopefully it won't be deluded fan-boys who treat Hughes like he's Jesus Christ or John Lennon (okay, Hughes really is the Gen X Lennon). Hughes is dead but his legacy lives on. The man simply wanted privacy and we'll probably never know how many weirdos showed up at his door telling him how important he is. It's the J.D. Salinger effect.

Zero Day (2002)

They were human

[8/10 · 23 May 2010]

Another Columbine movie, this one from 2003, the same year Gus Van Sant made the nihilistic but also chilling movie "Elephant". Elephant's whole purpose was to show the purposelessness of the event. There was no 'trigger', these were two screwed up kids, one a sociopath with extreme issues of anger and another who was a depressive who wanted an out.

Zero Day humanizes the boys. That's fine because they were human, not monsters, devils or Satan-incarnate. We have to think of these boys as human because this is what humans are capable of.

Zero Day does this very, very well. These are two normal-looking boys, from any town in America, with normal parents and normal siblings. To try and determine a cause for these events is to question the very nature of their mental illness.

These are boys who were interested in video games, girls, guns and history. They weren't stupid, they were just in high school which is one of the most socially difficult place a person could be put.

Zero Day is a camcorder movie. It's not so bad in this case but there are instances where I was wondering "Okay, why would they be filming this?" That is usually the case for movies like this, from "Cloverfield" to "Diary of the Dead".

The acting from the two main leads is pretty solid, but pretty much all they have to do is act like normal teenage boys who have issues of anger and hostility. The role of Eric Harris is a bit more difficult because he was the sociopath. Overall, this is well done. I have a feeling many of the scenes were improvised and the boys were allowed to try different things on camera. These are boys who were interested in video games, girls, guns and history. They weren't stupid, they were just in high school which is one of the most socially difficult place a person could be put.

Zero Day is a camcorder movie. It's not so bad in this case but there are instances where I was wondering "Okay, why would they be filming this?" That is usually the case for movies like this, from "Cloverfield" to "Diary of the Dead".

The acting from the two main leads is pretty solid, but pretty much all they have to do is act like normal teenage boys who have issues of anger and hostility. The role of Eric Harris is a bit more difficult because he was the sociopath. Overall, this is well done. I have a feeling many of the scenes were improvised and the boys were allowed to try different things on camera.

Of course we wonder why they did it. The characters themselves say that it wasn't music, movies or books. They seem predestined to do this act and that's pretty much how it was for Columbine.

The film is gritty realism. This is probably as close as we'll come to seeing the Basement Tapes which are locked and sealed in some courtroom in the US.

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (2008)

An uprising

[8/10 · 14 May 2010]

Burma is an oppressive military state. It's illegal to protest in public. Men with guns will come and take you away if you do it. In 2007 a massive uprising began in the country when fuel prices became too high.

The images of the monks marching in the streets were the defining image of this uprising but this documentary shows a lot more footage, the really important footage which is worth seeing.

The video journalists in Burma (Myanmar) record everything undercover and sneak the footage out of the country so it can be broadcast around the world.

The images are pretty stark, the army shooting unarmed civilians in the street, beating up and carrying away monks, a dead monk floating in a river the day after they were arrested.

This is a very good documentary about the people rising up and fighting what is pretty much an impossibly authoritarian force. The soldiers have guns, the civilians have flags and video cameras. It's not hard to see who will win when you think of it this way. And yet the students, monks and rest of the people in the streets never waiver. They march onward, even saying, "Those who don't fear death, come to the front". That's bravery. Our political fights in North America and the rest of the Western world, while important are a mere shadow compared to the people of Myanmar.

Burma is of course only one story of an authoritarian government, there are many more. Canadian and American companies regularly do business with this regime and rape the land of its resources. It's pretty obvious why Canadian troops are "fighting for democracy" in Afghanistan instead of Burma. We don't don't control the resources there, we do in Burma.

Promises (2001)

Unbiased documentary film-making at its best!

[9/10 · 10 March 2010]

Absolutely brilliant documentary which would likely end up in my top 10 documentary films of all time. The best of these documentaries I find are ones where the camera is simply pointed and amazing things begin to happen. This is the complete opposite of editorial documentaries which take an issue and tell us what to think about it. Those movies can at times be quite good as well (Food Inc., Supersize Me) but I don't think they compare to documentaries like "Promises" and "Harlan County USA" Promises is about Palestinian and Israeli children. Surprise, surprise, they're not all that different. They like sports, their friends, some of their subjects in school. They're also both exposed to a huge amount of propaganda.

The brilliant part of the documentary is when the filmmaker suggests two of the Israeli boys meet one of the Palestinian boys. They all share a love for sports so it makes perfect sense. When it happens the filmmaker just runs the camera and the boys act like boys. It's amazing because the boys realize everything they've been told by their parents, the government and their religious leaders is bullshit.

The updates aren't as promising and it's suggested that it's up to the next generation to bring peace to this region. But I think it also shows that despite this experience these boys have, some of them fall into old habits anyway. The twins in the movie end up joining the Israeli military.

I think it suggests that it takes extremely strong people in these climates to overcome the kind of propaganda they're facing from the time they're born. To oppose Palestine or Israel if you lived there would essentially make you and outcast.

Unmistaken Child (2008)

Little Lama

[7/10 · 11 January 2010]

A very interesting documentary about the search for the reincarnation of a Buddhist Lama. Everything is shown on camera, including the search for the reincarnated Lama. The search eventually ends when a 2 year old is chosen to be the reincarnated lama. The process is quite interesting and I couldn't help but wonder what the 2 year old was thinking during the whole thing. Was it all just a game to him to identify his previous belongings? The parents of the little Lama are also torn between giving up their son and honouring their faith. I guess it's not a challenging prediction to guess which one they choose. The pain in their faces is obvious when they have to give up their son to a bunch of men in robes.

The little boy is interesting and intelligent but you have to wonder about his future and whether he really had any choice in the matter. There's no narration in the movie and both sides are shown pretty fairly. Occasionally the little boy does say things that makes him look like a Lama but then there are times which make him look like a little boy. Even when he's acting like a Lama I have a hard time not believing he's just playing pretend. He's 2 and doesn't really know the motivations of the adult world.

Take a kid at 2 and it's very easy to brainwash him and turn him into whatever you want. This is one of the nastier parts of what is otherwise seen to be as a very benign religion.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

Bad writing meets some very good acting

[5/10 · 10 January 2010]

When someone dies in a movie why is it the police never question the creepy middle-aged man who lives alone and builds doll house furniture? This question is never asked in the Lovely Bones and for most of the movie I put logical questions like this aside because the acting is actually quite good.

Everyone is very good in all their roles. Sarandon is pitch perfect as the domineering grandmother. Mark Wahlberg was actually very good in a role in which he didn't play a complete airhead. The young actress Ronan who plays Susie is also quite good in this role. The movie would have been really wretched if she wasn't able to do anything with this role. She pretty much accomplishes as much as she can given the script.

The visual effects are pretty good and even though they were pretty much used sparingly, I thought they were over-used. There's a lot of symbolism as well, almost too much at times.

Tucci wasn't exactly bad as the murderer either but there wasn't really a lot for him to work with here. He essentially plays a one-dimensional serial killer, complete with his secret scrapbook of misdeeds. His fate was supposedly sealed when a few test audiences thought his character should be killed off in the end. I think Jackson tried to humanize him to a degree but ultimately failed. He shouldn't trust test audiences, they're notoriously bad judges of good movie-making.

Big River Man (2009)

The heart of darkness

[8/10 · 9 January 2010]

Martin Strel is a long distance swimmer who has swam the lengths of the Yangtze River and the Mississippi River. In this documentary it is shown how he swims the Amazon River, the deadliest and longest river in the world.

'Why' is the obvious question but once you get to see Strel and learn his story, you quickly understand the reasons. Strel was abused as a child and the story of him running away from his abusive father and swimming an icy river is told as the beginning of Strel's journey.

The 'Heart of Darkness' allusions are pretty much mandatory when discussing Strel and his boat of assistants who go down the Amazon in search of a world record. No one has ever swam the Amazon before. No one had swam the Yagtze or Mississippi before either, but the Amazon of course has more allure and danger.

This is a documentary like "Grizzly Man", the movie wouldn't be at all appealing if it weren't for its unique main character who puts himself in a unique position. Strel is a larger than life figure, he's quite literally overweight, and he's an alcoholic. He's from Slovenia where's he's regarded as a national hero. One of the perks of his fame is that he gets private access to a cave in Slovenia where he meditates and "thinks like an animal so he won't get eaten in the Amazon" The reason people like Strel and Treadwell are interesting to me is that they put themselves in situations where you think they're completely insane but you can't help but root for them. It's part of the human spirit, I suppose. Everyone along the Amazon, in Peru and Brazil, want Strel to succeed and so does the viewer. This makes it a great documentary! Highly recommended.

The Invention of Lying (2009)

This simply does not work

[3/10 · 26 December 2009]

I'm a huge Ricky Gervais fan, I loved The Office and thought Extras was just as brilliant, but this movie is pretty awful. I don't mind the religion bashing or anything, there just aren't any laughs. Gervais is ordinarily a funny, witty, intelligent guy but this is one lousy screenplay that borrows heavily from Groundhog Day and fails miserably.

It's a world where no one can lie but that means for the first half of the movie everyone walks around saying exactly what they're thinking. The religious bashing could have been played for big laughs too but instead we just get lame visual gags, Gervais holding up two pizza boxes like stone tablets and later him looking like Jesus.

There's also a lot of pointless celebrity cameos. I'm sorry, was this an Austin Powers film? I understand that Gervais has a lot of clout now but that doesn't mean he should be injecting Philip Seymour Hoffman into a 5 minute bit. Putting someone famous in almost every scene is distracting and crass.

This is kind of like Idiocracy as well, it's a no holds barred satire, but that means some of the jokes just fall completely flat.

Trouble the Water (2008)

A documentary for the People, by the People

[8/10 · 26 December 2009]

A must-see documentary for anyone interested in the suppression of the poor in the United States. What went down in New Orleans was something even the corporate media had a hard time hiding. FOX News was reporting on Hurricane Katrina and saying the place looked like the 3rd world. The images were startling on the US news, but there was still the undertones of profit. "How will this affect gasoline prices?" Julie Chen asks on the CBS morning show after showing footage of all the homeless blacks.

This is the story as told by the people themselves, not by Anderson Cooper or anyone else. This is how the story should be told because these are the people who lived with it. It's not even a story anyone in uniform could tell because they were part of the problem in New Orleans.

One scene of this documentary allows the locals to narrate how they tried to go to a local Navy base in New Orleans which had been evacuated before the storm. It was empty and it had housing for people which wasn't being used. The National Guard who were protecting the building cocked and loaded M-16s and pointed them at the crowd. Nope, these aren't the stories you hear about on CNN.

You won't hear the story about a man in prison for a misdemeanour before the storm hit either. The television was taken away by the guards before footage of the storm was on the air, when the prisoners finally heard that there was a hurricane outside, they were denied food and most of the guards left.

This is a very good documentary, and an important one because it shows the failings of government. The government doesn't fail everyone, it takes very good care of the rich and businesses, which recovered quicker than anyone else in New Orleans. The government failures are biased towards the poor and visual minorities and this doc. pretty much confirms that thesis.

Four years on and not much has changed in the 9th ward, but the casino is open and the tourism department is showing a flashy video urging people to come to New Orleans. The poor black people aren't around any more, except when they're working for minimum wage. The rest have been displaced from the city where they lived but no longer trust to live in anymore.

Katrina is just one of the legacies of the Bush administration and perhaps a strong indication that the US is a country whose power is in decline. What can you possibly say about a country which won't even help its weakest and most destitute citizen? It sucks.

Invictus (2009)

Politics and sports come together decently

[7/10 · 26 December 2009]

I don't like many of Eastwood's emotionally cloying films like "Million Dollar Baby" and "Gran Torino". Emotional harp strings are played frequently in those movies.

Invictus is quite different. The movie is a biopic but it's not a biopic, it's about one part of Mandela's life. It's a very small part, the 1995 Rugby World Cup which was held in South Africa. This is a risky move, but this is in fact better than doing a complete biopic of Mandela's life. I would compare this movie to last year's Frost/Nixon, it's a glimpse of the man's life, a part of his life deemed important not by the man himself but by his biographers.

Freeman is quite good but his accent is a bit flaky at times. Damon is alright as well but he doesn't have much to work with here as the captain of the South Africa Rugby squad. A lot of it is working up his teammates and convincing them that there is a political purpose behind their team winning.

There is still some manipulation here as there always in Eastwood's films. A plane flies over at one point and the music gets all ominous and tense. Your first thought is 'OH MY GOD, IT'S THE TERRORISTS' but it's subterfuge on Eastwood's part, as usual.

The musical score is also quite bad in a few places. Instead of going with a traditional instrumental score, there are bad pieces of modern adult contemporary music.

Overall it's a pretty decent movie and I liked Freeman in his role as Mandela, I can't imagine anyone else really taking on this role. Maybe there is a South African actor out there who could do it. There are South African actors in this movie and it's really quite hard to understand their accent at times.

Avatar (2009)

All effects, poor characters and a poor story

[4/10 · 21 December 2009]

Watching Avatar I felt like I was trapped in a pastel landscape. All the colours in this movie are bright greens, blues and pinks. I wondered for a while why this was familiar but then it dawned on me that it's oceanic landscapes which James Cameron obviously has an affinity for, judging from his previous record.

The storyline is very basic here. Big bad imperialists come to a planet to rape it and steal a precious stone which is worth lots of money, the stone in this case is "hillariously" referred to as 'unobtainium'. The natives of course must all be crushed, conquered and moved away from the precious resource. It has shades of the 2003 Iraq War but the metaphor is developed poorly and it's never especially subtle. At one point an invasion on the native peoples is referred to as "shock and awe".

The idea of avatars, creatures created from human DNA but meant to look like the native aliens is interesting. The invaders download their brain into the avatar and then walk around among the natives. Humans are the invaders in this story, it's supposed to be a flip-side version of Aliens, but we still have those robotic machines people get into which mimic their movements. It's a James Cameron trope now.

James Cameron isn't an especially good writer. I think that much was obvious when he strayed from science-fiction with Titanic. Almost everything about that movie was good except for the acting and writing, which is a pretty major flaw in any movie. The writing isn't much better in Avatar, there are a lot of eye-rolling cornball lines. Clichés like "We're not in Kansas anymore" are quite prevalent here. None of the characters are as well manicured as the CGI and other effects. The only real stand-out performance here, even for an action movie, is Sigorney Weaver, and she mostly rehashes her performance from the Alien movies. Sam Worthington is adequate but he never really wowed me either with his performance of a disabled Marine who gets the chance to bounce around a forest with fairy tale creatures.

The effects are okay but the design is pretty hokey at times. I didn't care much for the pallet of colours that Cameron used here. There's a lot of magical and mythical creatures flying around, Cameron really wanted us to see this world he has created but then he forgot about all the characters. The only Na'vi character we really get to know is Jake Sully's girlfriend, Neytiri. The rest are pretty much dismissed and blend into the blue backgrounds except when they are required for the final attack on the humans.

The final confrontation is pretty bad as well. The major characters all end up in peril of course and James Horner's score reaches its irritating crescendo. The odds are obviously stacked against the native Na'vi but this is fiction, in James Cameron's world anything is possible.

Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (2008)

Participating in Democracy

[8/10 · 21 December 2009]

Democracy is undergoing significant changes in Latin America. For most of the 20th century this continent was ruled by military juntas, backed by the United States, which tortured and killed their political opponents. As a reaction perhaps, in the past 15 years, these countries have moved towards a system of participatory democracy. Liberal democracy in which citizens vote once every election cycle has been dismissed as being corrupt and in fact anti-democratic.

That's what this documentary is about, the new evolution of democracy in Latin America, which has since spread to other countries around the globe. The revolution started in Brazil in Porto Alegre where the city created a system of participatory citizen budget committees. Essentially, all the neighbourhoods of the city come together and decide what they want the government to spend money on. New community centres? New homes? New sewer systems? If a local representative isn't listening this is the way to get things done. The results look very promising.

The documentary also focuses on the Chavez phenomenon in Venezuela where the President has encouraged direct democracy by allowing the voters to make many of the decisions for themselves. It looks like there is some horizontal democracy in Venezuela but Chavez has also reformed the constitution to allow for indefinite term limits. Yes, he is an authoritarian who is using this new phenomenon of direct democracy to further his own power. This isn't really mentioned in the documentary, the term limits were reformed earlier this year (February 2009).

The movie also explores the economic crisis of Argentina in 2001 and the resulting direct democracy movement there. Many workers when laid off from their jobs re-opened the factories without their bosses. The documentary actually uses clips from the Canadian Avi Lewis documentary "The Take" here. Eight years later the concept of employee-run workplaces is still going strong.

These ideas haven't really taken a foothold in Canada. A few towns in Quebec implemented participatory budgeting but for the most part it's scarce anywhere north of Mexico. Maybe we have to face a military junta before this happens or perhaps we're all distracted by the shiny lure of capitalism and its many goodies.

For those who are cynical and say that humanity can't rule itself without representatives then this is proof that it can happen and does work. It's a step in the right direction because people should have the right to govern their own lives and have the same essential services to which everyone has a universal right.

The White Ribbon (2009)

A brooding and messy metaphor

[6/10 · 18 December 2009]

"Das weisse Band" is disappointing compared to other German productions I've seen recently and I've become quite a big fan of German cinema. The story in this movie is extremely slow. There's very little tension around the events happening, there's more tension about the impending First World War but even that turns out to be a rather non-event. If you're looking for the political tension that was present in previous German films like "The Lives Of Others" and "Good-Bye Lenin" you won't find it here. There's not a lot to like. The cinematography is quite nice, the whole film is in black & white which extenuates the time and place. A few performances stand out as being quite good but the whole movie is steeped and stewed in metaphor.

The White Ribbon is put on the children who do not behave. I'm thinking it's all about the last 'good' years before Germany entered the First World War and subsequently lost all its power and wealth until the late 20th century.

In the Loop (2009)

A brilliant political satire

[8/10 · 16 December 2009]

'In The Loop' is a brilliant British comedy that is so fast paced and funny that if you left the room for 3 minutes you might miss a dozen amazing moments. The movie is about a war being coordinated by the British and Americans. It lampoons the failure of communication between the two brilliantly.

Only the British can do satire on this level. The movie has the pacing and subtlety of a British episode of "The Office". This movie pretty much does for government incompetence what "Brazil" did for the incompetence of government bureaucracy. The left hand never knows what the right hand is doing in this movie. I don't think the left hand even knows there's a right-hand.

The British are openly mocked for being pulled along in a war in which they don't have any resources, intelligence or public support. Sounds familiar? The movie takes place in a post-Iraq world it seems because there are all sorts of references to modern phenomenon like Facebook and the like. It's a very, very clever movie.

The Americans are portrayed as bumbling fools as well, but bumbling fools who are slightly more tactful in that they're using the British politicians for their own benefit and depend on them for all kinds of faulty intelligence to go to war.

All the actors in this are brilliant. James Gandolfini stands out as the reluctant but deeply angry top American military General. I can't say I know any of the British actors in this but they're all quite convincing.

This is a manic farce. It's easily comparable to other scathing political satires like the aforementioned "Brazil" but as well as to "Dr Strangelove". Mostly, I didn't know whether to laugh or be depressed about how savagely, cynically accurate this movie is. It's mostly very funny and definitely worth multiple viewings.

The US hasn't reached this kind of gallows humour about their failed war. I guess the wounds are just too deep, but for the British it seems no wound is ever too deep or to fresh for them to start with the laughs.

500 Days of Summer (2009)

Quirky indie comedy is quirky!

[7/10 · 12 December 2009]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a mopey man in his early twenties, working a soulless job at a greeting card company. His life is pretty meaningless until he meets Zooey Deschanel. They share an affinity for The Smiths. They do zany things like pretend that Ikea is their personal living room and generally flirt with each other.

It's a pretty good film overall, I was quite surprised I liked this. The writing was pretty sharp and Deschanel who is usually pretty annoying seemed to be a little more restrained in this movie. Gordon-Levitt is good as well. These are probably the types of movies he should be making instead of crap like Killshot where he was almost laughable as a petty criminal.

Maybe this the movie which epitomizes everyone's early 20s or at least their post-university life. You want to tell Gordon-Levitt to stop being so damn mopey in this movie but there's really no hope, you know everyone has to go through something like this and he plays the role pretty well in this movie.

The Graduate features prominently in the movie and with good reason because this movie is somewhat similar to that one. It also dealt with a mopey man out of college falling in love with the wrong girl. I could have done without some of the more pretentious overtones such as the narration which reminded me of One Week, a film I just recently saw about a young guy trying to find out who he is.

Public Enemies (2009)

Depp's shootout

[7/10 · 11 December 2009]

Johnny Depp is very capable in the role of John Dillinger. He's a great actor, but besides Depp and a fine supporting role by Bale, there's not all that much which is great about the acting in this movie. The movie feels very conventional to me. It's good but it's never special. This is not to say the movie doesn't have good point. The set pieces are all very top notch as well. This is a very good movie to look at, everything looks authentic 1930s.

But there have been movies like this before, movies about convicts on the loose with lots of firepower and a hatred of the police, Bonnie & Clyde is one excellent movie about this topic. It's similarly based on a true story although there is a lot of artistic license being used.

I never felt that kind of excitement in Public Enemies. There's lots of shooting but that seems to have taken the precedent over any character development.

I would have liked to get to know Christian Bale's character more as well as some of the other officers in the then newly created FBI trying to catch Dillinger. Dillinger's comrades also seem to get a once over.

Depp is good as always and it's nice to see him in a different kind of role for him (something outside of a Tim Burton film) but the story felt like it could have been a lot better. We've all seen shootouts captured on screen before but this movie should have been more about the characters than their actions.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

An action movie which never becomes a drama

[6/10 · 11 December 2009]

A story about soldiers in Iraq whose job it is to disable IEDs. This movie is being sold as a drama that could potentially get many award nominations but it feels to me more like an ordinary action film. The motivations of the characters are never really known. Jeremy Renner plays the level-headed bomb defusing expert but we never really understand why he's so cool under pressure. Very few hints about his life at home are given, the story instead focuses on more scenes of action and suspense as he tries to defuse more bombs. The secondary characters are decent but the movie doesn't really move beyond being a movie about the tough guy camaraderie in Iraq.

The Iraqis themselves are background characters except for one kid who is only used as a plot device to show that Jeremy Renner is a good guy whereas everyone else is simply 'bad ass'.

Anvil (2008)

The real-life Spinal Tap

[8/10 · 11 December 2009]

Anvil: The Story of Anvil is more or less a real life version of "This is Spinal Tap" Two guys in their fifties, Lips and Robb Reiner are still living the dream that they had as teenagers, to become international rock superstars. Take "This is Spinnal Tap" and add a dash of "Almost Famous" and the essence of Jack Black and you have "Anvil".

It's hard not to root for these guys who have been trying for 40 years to become big but haven't had the chance because of lousy management, poor production on their albums and in-fighting between Lips and Reiner. The band tries to overcome these adversities while working day jobs to support themselves. Lips works at a catering company for local schools in Southern Ontario. Both have the essence of teenage rockers who never grew up. You have to give these guys credit because they simply will not let their dream die.

One scene which was particularly sad was Lips the aging rocker trying to work at a telemarketing firm as a cold call salesman selling sunglasses. The point is that he'll do almost anything to raise enough money so he can get his next album professionally produced.

The editing in the movie is shoddy at times. I'm sure there's a few tricks here and there with the time line of the events in the movie but I don't think that takes anything away from this movie. The stars are Lips and Reiner who embody the rockstar dream that many people have as kids. The difference is that these guys won't give it up!

The Power of Nightmares (2004)

Jihad vs. McWorld

[9/10 · 9 December 2009]

All of the talk of terrorist threats, sleeper cells and weapons of mass destruction seem to be quietly going away now that Obama is President of the United States. Very few people are really saying that the US was wrong, or that the neo-conservatives in power made everything up, it's just simply vanished. One day the terrorist threat level in the US disappeared and wasn't mentioned again. Now that Barry is in power is everything okay? So no one ever was convicted for these crimes against the public and few people even talk about them anymore. It's all been erased from the public's memory with new episodes of So You Think You Can Dance.

This documentary is quite interesting. This is much more in depth than anything created by Michael Moore. Moore touches on a few of these topics in "Fahrenheit 9/11" but Moore himself is a political figure who supports the Democrats so can't be taken seriously.

The origins of neo-con movement are well known in political-science circles but this movie tells them quite well. Leo Strauss was a philosopher who came up with these ideas and taught them to students such as Paul Wolfowitz who applied them later to US policy with Reagan and Bush (II).

The movie also explores the fundamentalist Islamic revolution which never really swept through the middle-east and was limited to a small group of bandits who took hold in Afghanistan. Their story begins with an Egyptian man who has an epiphany about the moral corruption of western society and brings those ideas back to the middle east. They're always fringe and never widespread as the corporate media or neo-con governments would have us believe.

All the myths of the post 9/11 age are explored here and quickly debunked. The one line the movie does not cross is saying that 9/11 was an inside job. With all the other information in the movie about the false sleeper cells and bogus security, it wouldn't have been a stretch to acknowledge that maybe 9/11 was an inside job.

Comparing the neo-conservatives in the US with the Islamic fundamentalists in the middle-east isn't a new idea. Jihad vs. McWorld was a 1992 article written by Benjamin Barber which was later expanded into a full-length book.

Another interesting concept of the movie is that the terrorist myth created by the US neo-cons actually may have led to a resurgence in real terrorists. The filmmakers speculate that several of the men in these groups may have played into the hands of the US myth by giving them false information about planned bombings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty.

This is a very effective documentary for anyone interested in the terrorist myth as created by America. It's hard to say if this story ends with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The idea of terrorism is so ingrained at this point that Obama has to add thousands more soldiers simply to get out of the quagmire which is Afghanistan.

The Road (I) (2009)

Survivor men

[8/10 · 7 December 2009]

There's dark days ahead in The Road when a man and his son are one of a few scattered number of people left on the continent after a major natural disaster. For the past half century writers have been obsessed with the idea of humanity's ultimate demise. It's a nightmare that perhaps came to light with the development of the nuclear bomb and Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

With more environmental disasters on the horizon and memories of Hurricane Katrina and the 2009 typhoon season which killed 2500 people in Asia, this movie is especially timely. Movies like The Road are more terrifying than any disaster-fest Roland Emmerich can dream up because of their realism.

The Road is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy who also wrote "No Country For Old Men". His books seem to feature few female characters and are mostly about men among men in the darkest situations. This is definitely a dick flick. When the women go to see Twilight, the guys can always sneak off and see The Road.

The movie itself is very good. Utterly suspenseful and very grim to look at. It's a unique post-apocalyptic world that makes me think of images seen after the explosion of Mount St. Helen's in the US or maybe just Ottawa, Ontario in the winter. Everything is very grey, desolate and sepia toned. The adds brilliantly to the tenseness and bleakness of the movie.

Viggo Mortensen is very good as the father "Papa" who will do anything to help his son survive as he's the last thing he has in this world. His love extends to even giving his son a gun with two bullets so he can kill himself rather than fall in the hands of cannibals roaming the countryside. Yes, it's pretty bleak but the movie actually leaves out some of the darker elements of the book which couldn't be shown on film.

Viggo's on screen son is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee and he's very capable as the only point of hope in the whole movie. While the father is resolved to do anything to help his son survive, the son frequently has empathy for every person they meet along the road. He's a little Jesus figure among a world full of cannibals and thieves. It's something the movie definitely needs.

This is one of the better movies of the year. Charlize Theron also appears in flashbacks as a troubled mother who doesn't want to exist or survive in the post-apocalyptic world. Yes, she's kind of the stereotypical "weak woman" but I understand the underlying point, this movie is primarily about the love between father and son. It's based on the relationship McCarthy had with his own son.

The setting is pretty bleak and so are those creepy redneck cannibals but the characters show a lot of hope and the spirit of human survival against all adversities. The movie has the tone of something like a holocaust movie but it also has the spirit of humans doing what they can to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Cove (2009)

Activists fight back!

[8/10 · 3 December 2009]

Activists fight back against the slaughter of dolphins in what might be the best documentary of the year. Not an informal sit-down discussion, which was mostly what Food Inc was, this documentary shows activists fighting back against what they see as a horrible act, the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins.

One of the activists is Richard O'Barry who was the dolphin trainer who was on the show 'Flipper' in the 60s. He holds a lot of guilt (and quite understandably) for the spike of interest in dolphins and dolphin zoos like SeaWorld, Marineland etc. There are more dolphins in captivity today than ever before and many of them live in horrible conditions and end up dying prematurely.

The dolphin slaughter in the movie happens in Japan in an isolated cove. A few are selected by dolphin shows all over the world, the rest are brutally slaughtered out of view of everyone. These activists aim to change that so the slaughter can stop.

Very few people were actually aware of the slaughter outside of this town. The Japanese do enjoy some whale meats but most the small sample of urban Japanese are disgusted by the idea of eating dolphin. There could be an argument here that dolphins aren't any more special than other species we regularly eat except that dolphins contain 1000x times the safe amount of mercury. A fact that the Japanese government which subsidizes the slaughter does not let anyone know.

The other fact is that dolphins do possess amazing intelligence and should be one species we don't fill out bellies with. There are enough animals out there for us to eat and we really should make an exception for some of the smartest animals out there.

This is a great documentary. The activists are experienced and smart and recruit what they refer to as an "Oceans Eleven" of activists to capture the footage the Japanese government, fishermen and other groups.

I'm a meat-eater but I think we should strive to eat less meat for the sake of the planet and probably for the sake of our own bodies. Eating dolphins strikes me as indulgent and disgusting.

Precious (II) (2009)

A mixed bag of poor performances and bad writing

[4/10 · 28 November 2009]

This is a very dreary movie about an overweight, abused, pregnant teenager's life in Harlem. The acting is absolutely uneven from everyone except Gabourey Sidibe. She's fine in this role but the script really limited where she could go with this role.

The main problem with the movie is the script. It doesn't flow very well after the first act. Precious' fellow students in the alternative school were cut-out characters from every movie ever made about inner-city black schools.

The mother (played by Mo'Nique) is a welfare case who mopes around in her kitchen, eats and watches TV. It's hard to feel sympathetic to Precious when her mother is an After School Special version of parental abuse.

The writing was simply puzzling in places. Okay, she has to overcome adversity, but the script just kept throwing more and more at Precious until I was convinced that the writers were really laying very thick and playing to the audiences' sympathies. How many adversities does Precious really have to face in order for the audience to feel sorry for her? One or two would be sufficient but they keep coming. The ultimate result is one very dreary movie.

This movie will ultimately be compared to last year's "Slumdog Millionaire" which was also about someone overcoming their poverty as well as many other obstacles. The good thing about that movie was that although the first chunk of the movie was very dark, the movie lightened up in the second half. I think we need to see both sides of this world and showing only the darkest part of this character's life was emotionally cloying.

I'd slightly recommend the movie because at times it is unique and there is a slight spark of life. The problem is that the spark is never really around long enough for this movie to be very good.