Thursday, November 26, 2015

dog is (hit)man's best friend

To clarify, John Wick is a movie that Ash and I bought on a whim for a dollar because, aside from movie-obsessed nerds like us, who buys DVDs anymore?

It is a very, very stupid movie dressed up very well, similar to Keanu Reeves's titular character donning a four-figure suit in which to go a-killing. It's almost a shame that this is clearly a contract movie, featuring Willem Dafoe, Michael Nyqvist, a Swede portraying a Russian gangster* whose accent gets lost somewhere in the middle, and Alfie Allen of Game of Thrones fame. It builds a fictional world where assassins have a secret underground economy complete with a no-kill upscale hotel and trade favors in gold coins. Either that, or it's a grim alternate reality where Ron Paul is Lord Sovereign Commander of God's Green Earth.

*Aside: Since when are all gangsters Russian? I guess the Very Serious People who write movies have decided that it's a good idea to make us afraid of stereotypical Ruskis because AK-brandishing brown people with funny accents was played out when True Lies did it and would somehow be less tasteful given world affairs? Give it time, VSPs, give it time.

Anyway, John Wick the character is a hitman with a heart, out of the business but reeling from the death of his wife to a fatal but unspecified illness. The day after her funeral, an adorable beagle puppy arrives on his doorstep and oh holy shit the dog is going to eat it, isn't s/he!? Of course! Look, he even gave it a friggin' bowl of cereal -- that dog does not have long for the world.

Yes, the dog dies. At the hand of Allen's character Iosef no less: a spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boy who gives spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boys a bad name. The seemingly random carjacking and dog murder connects all the way back to gang boss dad Viggo, Wick's ex-employer, and thus begins the highly symbolic and blood-soaked punishment for the two men's collective sins.

John Wick the movie falls into a lot of the obvious traps of dumb action movies: it's essentially a series of completely unrealistic bloody gunfights broken up by dialog that is supposed to be deep, with the usual pretention to maturity that makes every third word "Fuck!" or "Shit!" We get it, writers: these are bad men who trade in bad things, but at this point they all sound like a pack of 12-year-old boys who accidentally turned the dictionary to the FT-FU page.

Giving credit where it's due, the movie is stylized and consistent. Professional killers for hire hang out at clubs and hotel bars like high school teachers in the Atlantic City Tropicana for the NJEA convention. There's a "code" that gets mentioned but never fully explained, save that there's no killing in the hotel and "dinner reservation" is hit-speak for "I just murdered the ever-loving shit out of a lot of people and would like a new sofa." And a small personal enjoyment: the camera pulls back from the action and lets you see the stunts, unlike the now-popular Batman Begins formula, in which some film editor wanted closeups of Christian Bale's teeth instead of action. Another much better hitman movie Haywire did this as well to great effect. (Like JJ Abrams use of lens flare to cover up crappy graphics, close up fight scenes mock intensity but are really just pulling the camera in to show less detail because the stunts aren't particularly inventive.)

But the real high point amid reliably silly and overtly expository speech is one simple exchange between John Wick the character and Viggo during their eventual showdown. Viggo laments for simpler days when murder was business and business was good, and the better killer answers with, "Do I look civilized to you?" Maybe it's unintentional, but the first thing one learns about screenwriting is that in an insane world, insane things are normal. John Wick the movie takes this to its logical conclusion and then tears the rule book up with Wick's character. He's been out of the job for a few years living perhaps better than the everyman, but not shooting people in the face for a paycheck and presumably paying for groceries with normal, everyday dollars. And upon going back in, he's seen the outside and that it is better, and the world of paid killers he left behind looks as nuts to him as it does to us. For as dumb as the movie was, there was a real attempt at connection between the audience and the character that was not entirely unsuccessful.

So, props, I guess? If I had to make an analogy, John Wick is worth seeing for the spectacle: it's a kid whose clearly fallen asleep in class but tiny glints of brilliance reflect off the drool pooling around his face.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

now i want a sandwich...

New movie, so, spoilers.

Before we begin, a confession: I only read the first 'Hunger Games.' Right now I'm picturing you, dear reader, with a shocked -- shocked! -- look on your face and in your best Martin-Lawrence-as-Shanaynay voice going, "Say whaaaaaaat!?" But honestly, I feel I can better judge the movies having not read the source material and therefore knowing them on their own merit. At least that keeps me from shelling out for them.

Despite being an enjoyable series as a whole, there's two big complaints. First, and regarding the movie itself, it didn't need to be split into two movies. I'd forgotten large chunks of the first and struggled to remember who half the people were while processing the action. It also gives the beginning a disconcerting start in the middle feeling -- probably because it does -- and at about hour two it passes from expanding on a detailed fictional world to just wasting everyone's damn time.

Secondly, I never felt that much about The Hunger Games had much to do with anything that happens in the real world. It's not a stretch, given that Collins is American and that the book is aimed at an American audience, that Panem is a dystopian America far in the future. For example, a government that purposefully forces its subjects into starvation is kind of asking for the rebellion that concludes the series, and my guess is real life people would've put up with it for a hell of a lot less time than at least the 75 years Districts 12 thru five did. I always thought it would've been much more interesting if the government provided a super unhealthy but cheap to produce food for its subjects, keeping them fed but rendering them weak with obesity and its many related health problems, and that Katniss stayed fit and fed her family meat and grain not out of death-defying need but simply choice.

Plus, the messages about conformity and following orders would never fly with an actual population, especially if the contemporary era is the basis of that future. The reason so many angsty teenagers buy into the mantra that they are different, just like everyone else is different, is that everyone is a maverick in the modern age. Part of the hilarity of presidential elections is watching people like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush try to convince everyday Americans that somehow they are different, and not a bland emissary of the ruling class; that sending their children to the most exclusive prep schools in the world puts them on par with confused middle-income moms hopelessly confused over a high school grading system. In my estimation it would be impossible to keep a people down by convincing them of their place in society and just hammering the point. Americans are ceaselessly optimistic, after all, which is why I guess President Snow had it coming all along.

So The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay: Too Many Colons: Part 2 sums up Panem's revolt against power with a bang and a stern warning never to trust anyone over 40. Katniss herself is and isn't part of the climatic battle, but hangs back to film propaganda shots for the rebellion and carry out a super-secret mission that somehow everyone knows about. She feels almost ancillary at this point. Even the scene where she's filmed turning a captured worker to the cause ends with a gunfight that was going to happen whether she was there or not, and the incident quickly spirals out of her control and into rebellion leader Alma Coin's endless stream of Girl on Fire inspirational posters. The tango between Coin and Snow is perhaps the best written part, and its to Donald Sutherland's credit that he comes across as an evil leader, perfectly aware of his evil, who knows that his time is over and doesn't care one bit. It's to Julianne Moore's credit to play a younger version of exactly that during a moment of unfettered victory and rise to power -- you could say it's two sides of the same yeah I'm not even going to dignify that with a complete sentence.

In fact, the "beginning" to about the hour-thirty mark is sort of a blur since nothing very interesting happens, and the pivotal moments come crammed together at the end. Peeta slowly recovers from his government brainwashing and turns human again, while Gale leads what amounts to a rebellion-sponsored death squad. Haymitch, Effie, and the other tributes and side-characters are barely around before they're swiftly killed off or forgotten, and then there's zombies in a sewer for some reason?

The climatic battle is fantastically filmed and genuinely hard to watch, but leaves out what would otherwise be gallons and gallons of blood for that sweet PG-13 rating, and from then on the movie is solely about Katniss's plan to stop the original evil government from transitioning to a new evil government. I counted 3 plot twists heavy with mom-style hometown wisdom about power and double-edged swords and something-something violence begets violence before a very long end sequence that doesn't so much close the story but just kind of Peetas out.

Yep, that happened. I'm not funny. And did I mention the zombies?

Maybe it's mechanically-delivered end speech to a baby that doesn't yet have object permanence let alone speech centers or J-Law's seemingly unchanging youthful looks, or maybe it is the stupid yellow dress, but I don't buy Jennifer Lawrence as a mom. She's an immensely talented actress and a delight to watch, but the five minute appendix of her with babies being motherly and reassuring while Peeta does his best fun dad impression in the blurry distance felt forced. Perhaps after the intense breakdown scene where Katniss finally learns to love the mangy cat introduced in the opening paragraphs of the first book, the writers decided everyone needed a break and a cute baby. Here's a hint: if you want to end on a cheap positive note, just play this video of Tumbles the two-legged puppy getting wheels.

The thing I like the most about Hunger Games is just how cynical it all is. I said before that the best part of the final movie is watching Coin and Snow send respective legions of wide-eyed loyalists to their not-at-all-bloody deaths, literally playing chess with living pieces. It is an entirely unromantic image of political rebellion.

People have complained that Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale but having seen the entire thing through I believe the author when she said she didn't know anything about it beforehand. If it does rip anything, Katniss Everdeen has a distinctly Paul Atreides quality to her. If Dune was the story of a young, charismatic warrior leading a downtrodden people to a destiny of freedom, but unleashing a shit storm of unending slaughter as a by-product, I'd say Collins took far more inspiration from that than Japanese high schools students killing each other with Uzis and cleverly hidden razor blades. The comparison to Battle Royale is one of complete surface analysis that only makes sense as long as you don't think about it too much; Battle Royale is far more optimistic in its world view and opinion of people as heroes than Hunger Games. Which is what makes Hunger Games so good.

Monday, November 9, 2015

a spectre draws near!

New movie, so, spoilers.

If Skyfall set the new tone for James Bond by catapulting him from the 1970s -- where he's been stuck since the end of the decade like your uncle Luke who can't let go of his polyester wide-collared button-down -- into the modern age, then Spectre is a return to bad habits by washing Skyfall in an entire tub of OxyClean until the barbecue sauce stains come out. It is by no means a bad movie, just going from zero to more-of-the-same in about 3.1 seconds.

Let's set up a little comparison: Skyfall is to James Bond as Die Hard is to 80s action movies. No doubt many of the unkillable ain't-got-time-to-bleed heroes of the hair metal era took a thing or two from the master himself. But Die Hard made Commando look like the G.I. Joe doll he was: a plastic, two-dimensional and otherwise flawless robot -- it's difficult to understate what John McClane, a hero who bled, cried, got tired and screwed up his marriage, did in the face of action heroes who were otherwise a bulletproof hybrid of man and backhoe. Likewise, Bond as a franchise was basically unchanged since the Sean Connery era, and Skyfall put a bullet right between that one's eyes.

Now that I think about it, Skyfall probably should have been the second movie and Spectre the prequel. We've known about unlimited/unquestioned government surveillance for some time now, but the more recent development is the dangers of hacking en masse, which was more Skyfall's techno-anarchist baddie's thing, are perhaps the larger concern when it comes to privacy. One thing I really hate that movies do is assume that everyone computer, phone, camera and garage door opener is on some kind of Wi-Fi network and can be hacked into and taken over by a few nerds and rapid typing. Speaking of Die Hard, #4 mangled this worse than almost any other movie I've seen. Good job.

Anyway, hacking on a "Tarje" or Office of Personnel Management scale is only possible because of how data is stored and if you think of hacks as a natural by-product of the Internet existing, logical. Likewise, the tech industry is not only complicit in government snooping, but its obsession with mass storage, cloud computing and data backup lends itself toward mass collection. The best prisoner, after all, is the one who locks himself up. Large, centralized databases make big targets to unsavory folks. But probably the best argument I've come across against such bulk dredging is that it provides too much useless information through which to sift and not only doesn't work, can't work. The volume is so huge that the government pays wads of taxpayer dollars to millions of private contractors, and to me it's sort of amazing that there has only been one Ed Snowden thus far. And since we've seen the kind of damage one singular person can do the structure as a whole, casting a wide net for (comparatively) cheap private labor doesn't exactly give me much comfort. Plus, I don't exactly want some 23-year-old Reddit addict knowing that I bought baguette pans on Amazon. 

Alright, back to Spectre. Government spying bad. Like the way Silva in Skyfall modernized the individual Bond villain, Spectre tries to drag the rest of the component parts that make up a Bond movie into the future as well. Problem being that such things were silly in the Fleming novels and remain silly to this day. Spectre itself is a massive criminal network pushing the world to adopt its spying measures by committing acts of terrorism to scare governments into it for... reasons? Good megalomaniacs are hard to come by and as creepy as Christolf Waltz gets, he doesn't come close to John Huston in Chinatown. He could've just as easily become a bank or insurance company CEO and had a similar amount of government influence and lived a life of needless violence away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, so the entire Stonecutters thing has a cartoony feel.





There are further attempts to humanize Bond -- give him the full McClane so to speak -- but they fall sort of flat. Monica Bellucci had the potential to be a great Bond Girl (or Bond Woman has Daniel Craig himself pointed out), but all we get is a PG-13 sex scene and a quick PG shot of her in some sexy lingerie that she somehow had time to put on between assassination attempts. She's never in the movie again. Lea Seydoux does a nice turn as the actual Bond Girl, but as Ash pointed out, why does she have a French accent if her dad is Austrian, and why does that accent start to go away at about the three-quarters mark? Another way Spectre fails to live up to its predecessor is trying to have a tough Bond Girl, and Seydeoux is at turns tough and icy, but then all hot and bothered for some Bond action and really doesn't do much else. Skyfall did this better to by making the ultimate Bond Girl "M," which works as a far better humanizing force: Bond only knows the job, so having his boss as his lady tugs at whatever heartstings he has left even more, and there's no possibility of humping, which forces Bond to understand her as human and not an ambulatory penis receptacle. It hurt when she ate it.

Finally, Waltz himself does a turn as Bond's long-lost sort of adopted brother and man does this go nowhere. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but the entire thing made me want to see the movie from Waltz's point of view: a kid who had his childhood stolen away by an adopted stranger and used the drive as a rise to prominence and vehicle to exact symbolic revenge.

Oh wait, that's Old Boy.

Waltz is a good actor and all, but I got a sort of Gary Oldman in Book of Eli feel from it, where some studio head said to another, "Hey, Terry, who does creepy really really well?" and Terry responded "You know, this movie sounds suspiciously like some Korean flick I saw a while back and, hey, where'd you get a hockey sti--" *WHACK*

But the biggest sin of Spectre is also its largest departure from Skyfall. See, Skyfall worked because it spent a lot of time distancing itself from other James Bond movies and really pulled new fans into the fold. When we saw it, Ash went into the theater feeling like I was dragging her to some stupid dude movie  and left singing the theme song. Spectre (which means, by the way, Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, but you wouldn't know that from seeing the goddamned film named after it) references not only the Daniel Craig movies but goes back to the Connery era -- the entire torture scene is pretty much lifted from Goldfinger with crappier dialog. Even for people in their 30s like my, James Bond is kind of old, and the references were so many and so frequent it's like the Spectre was just a cut-n-paste job of other, arguably better movies.

That, or they just ripped off freaking Old Boy.

The rumor is that Craig is done with James Bond, and I suppose the future is a little brighter given the fact that World War 3 might just start if they don't cast Idirs Elba.