Three Films Make A Post: Aliens Invade! Mankind fights back!

The Wolverine (2013): After the apocalypse of crap that was the first Wolverine movie, I didn't expect anything at all from James Mangold's sequel, so it was a rather pleasant surprise to find it to be a highly entertaining mix of action movie tropes, good-natured Japan clichés, appropriate comic book silliness, and even half-way poignant moments. Add to these points the production's decision to cast the Japanese characters with actual Japanese actors instead of any Asian looking guy or girl they could grab from the street, and the (for contemporary blockbuster cinema) surprising amount of time The Wolverine has for its female characters. The film has reached the point where Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are actual female leads again, and not just the girls on screen to look pretty and motivate the lone hero.

And isn't it a fine thing too that the film's usually very lone hero actually needs a lot of help to get by, which the film treats as a strength and not as a weakness?

The World's End (2013): I think I've repeatedly gone on record as a big admirer of Edgar Wright, so it won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I really, really like the last film in the thematic trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead. Having said that, I also think it’s fortunate the film at hand is the final film in the thematic trilogy because it's hard not to see that things begin repeating themselves now, and it's probably good Wright is doing something probably quite different next with Ant-Man (as he did, to be fair, with Scott Pilgrim, a film many sad people seem to hate for reasons inexplicable to me). At this point, The World's End repeats Wright's favourite themes and character types on a still highly entertaining and clever level. It's also at its core probably Wright's saddest movie, though this is the kind of film that really isn't out to make its audience sad; the sadness is just there if you're of the temperament to see it.

Children of the Night (1991): Tony Randel's vampire horror comedy is a bit of a strange egg. Tonally, it rather undecidedly jumps from broad small town satire to gore to really stupid comedy to slightly less stupid comedy to grotesque semi body horror to dark fairy-tale and back again, putting quite a few moments of actual magic in between triteness, annoying stupidity and stupid fun. The permanent tonal shifts make it impossible to a) get a very good grip on the movie as a whole and b) to ever be as much drawn into the film's very weird world as one would wish. Still, there's as much to like as to hate in here, and this is the sort of small town horror movie whose true hero isn't one of its theoretical leads (Peter DeLuise and Ami Dolenz), nor Karen Black chewing scenery, but Garrett Morris as said small town's black town drunk. Which is to say, a film worth fighting through the unfunny moments for the actual surprises it contains.

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Three Films Make A Post: It Will Scare You To Pieces!

Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010): Syfy Channel original movies are one of the banes of human existence. Somehow, these films always manage to take a perfectly good b-movie idea (in this case: Little Red Riding Hood's descendants are a clan of werewolf hunters) and make a disappointingly bland movie out of them. If it's not the miserably bad CGI and just plain uninventive monster design, it's scripts that go through the motions of being an exciting ride instead of actually providing one, and direction so devoid of personality or style you couldn't get away with in most TV shows anymore, that kill films of this type. Or - as in Red - all those things at once.

Most of the actors on screen seem as bored by the film as I was. The only exceptions are Felicia Day and Stephen McHattie - both are game, but find no-one who wants to play.

Twice Dead (1988): Ostensibly a horror film about a haunted house, Twice Dead really wants to be a film about two annoying teenagers fighting a gang of late 80s Hollywood "punks". Director Dragin doesn't even seem to be trying to make the "punks" or the ghosts even the least bit menacing, creating a film that feels tired and pointless. The mandatory 80s cheese is not ripe enough to make up for Twice Dead's lack of anything else.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010): It would probably have needed a better world or a lot of bad compromises to let Edgar Wright's intensely nerdy and geeky and clever comic adaptation become the blockbuster Universal seems to have wanted it to be.

On the other hand, what do I care about Universal's bottom line when the film as it is is just about perfect, beginning with its pixelated Universal logo? That logo is just the beginning of the movie's show of just the right amount (which is to say a lot) of love for the formative pop-cultural influences of many people my age or a few years younger.

But beside this love, Wright's film also has a clear look for the things that just might be wrong with its pop-cultural loves and consequently its characters, and so never steps into the trap of using its cleverness only for the sake of being clever. The hyperactive excitement bolsters a (at its core old-fashioned) story about growing out of being a jerk. Just like it was in the comics.

In any case, the film's fidelity to its sources also explains why a certain type of elderly movie critic just didn't get Scott Pilgrim, and also explains to me why so little of what these guys have to say about movies interests me anymore; they are just so goddamn old that their little souls have shrivelled to the point of having no ability to recognize joy when they encounter it in a movie anymore.

Looks like I'll have to change my "I generally dislike comedy" shtick, too, or I'll at least have to amend it with "unlike Edgar Wright's got something to do with it".

 

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Three Films Make A Post: The Pounding of the Afterbrain Signals Vengeance and Death!

Hot Fuzz (2007): I'm not sure why I waited so long with watching this (except for a certain dislike for comedies and parody and everything that comes with it). Turns out Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg can do with cop movies and action movies what they already did with the zombie film and the romantic comedy: make the sort of genre parody that is based on love for and understanding of the genre it parodies and works also quite nicely as part of that genre (or rather these genres). And nodding in the direction of The Wicker Man is a great thing for a film to do.

Although I really think they should have sealed the blatant homoeroticism between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost with at least an on-screen kiss.

 

The Crazies (2010): So this is what happens when you take one of George A. Romero's minor (yet still worthwhile) films of the 70s, and "remake" it by removing its politics, the personal horror lying at the core of its miniature apocalypse and the way it admits complexity by showing the usually faceless government minions as people in way over their heads, and go on to replace it all through dull competence.

What happens then is a viral apocalypse that lacks passion.

 

Green Zone (2010): This is a strange one. On one hand, director Paul Greengrass puts a lot of energy into admitting complexity (of morals, of politics) into his thriller about the last US invasion of Iraq, but on the other hand uses such an unbelievably naive, milquetoast protagonist (Matt Damon) to explore them that it becomes difficult to reconcile this character with the rest of the film he is appearing in. With a bit more daring and less believe in a few of America's favourite ideological lies (for example shown by ending the movie with Damon dying and not making an impact on anything) this would be a much more honest film. As it stands, Green Zone is certainly an effective espionage film (in the broader meaning of the term), but might disappoint viewers expecting what it at first seems to promise.

 

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