DVD Reviews: Bernie, The Innkeepers, Lockout

These are all 2012 releases now available on Netflix.

BERNIE (★★★) Starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey. Directed by Richard Linklater.  Black does his best acting job in years as Bernie, a mild-mannered mortician who befriends all the old ladies of his small town, but finds himself the object of affection of one rich spinster (MacLaine).  The Texas humor is gentle, and it's another great turn by Linklater alum McConaughey, doing a new twist on his Southern lawman character.

THE INNKEEPERS (★★½) Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy and Kelly McGillis.  Directed by Ti West.  I'm enjoying West's continuing contribution to old-school style horror movies.  This one suffers from being just a little too slow and a little too willing to get its heroine out of danger as soon as she's put in it.  But it is a great lesson how much more effective a thriller can be when we get to know and care about the characters.

LOCKOUT (★★) Starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace and Peter Stormare.  Directed by James Mather & Stephen St. Leger.  Here's an example of an old-school style action movie but it feels more like a retread than a revisiting.  Pearce's wiseguy antihero deserves a better movie than this Escape from New York ripoff, where he must rescue the President's daughter, being held hostage in the world's first supermax prison in outer space. Most of it takes place in hallways and corridors, and it kept making me wish a xenomorph would show up and start picking off everyone.

Seeking Justice - DVD Review

Starring Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce, January Jones, Harold Perrineau, Jennifer Carpenter, Xander Berkeley and IronE Singleton. 
Directed by Roger Donaldson.

★½

This is a terrific idea for a movie. And yet, the bombastic execution here betrays the premise.

Nicolas Cage and January Jones are the happily married couple, Will and Laura Gerard. Then one night their lives are shattered when she is attacked and raped. While grieving in the hospital waiting room, Will has a stranger named Simon (Guy Pearce) console him and offer to "take care of things." Will knows what Simon means, and in his vulnerable state, he agrees.

Here's where the movie makes its first mistake for me, or at least makes this protagonist more difficult to root for. Even though Will was not in his right mind, he doesn't call anything off, and the next day he gets a picture of the rapist, shot dead. Now he knows he'll need to someday pay Simon and his organization a favor.

At first Will goes along, but when he realizes he's going to have to eventually kill someone, he tries to get out of it. Does he try to go to the cops? No. But what did he expect? It's easier to go along with a character who makes immoral decisions than stupid ones.

Since Will is played by he of the bugged-eyed craziness of Cage, and the direction comes from he of the fearless-action-ratcheting of Donaldson (The Recruit), the movie doesn't address the ethical dilemmas of a vigilante organization; it prefers to devolve into a series of chase sequences.

Now that's not entirely fair. Cage is still capable of good performances, and Donaldson is also the man behind No Way Out and The Bank Job. But something went awry in the evolution of this movie.

Its original title was The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, which is the phrase someone speaks to signal the favor they've done for Simon is complete. Much more interesting title, right? "Seeking Justice" sounds like a straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal movie.

I kinda liked seeing all these TV faces pop up.  Cage and Pearce are the movie stars but it also has Jones (Mad Men), Harold Perrineau (Lost), Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter), Xander Berkeley (24) and IronE Singleton (The Walking Dead) pop up.  Not that they have much to do beyond me mentally pointing at the screen and going, "Oh, hey, it's that one guy."

Prometheus - Movie Review

Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Alba, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green, Sean Harris and Rafe Spall.  Directed by Ridley Scott.
★★★

This is a prequel of sorts to Alien, but it's a distant prequel, by which I mean I can see another movie or two happening between the events of this and Scott's original classic Alien.

The setup is familiar. A team of scientists, experts, etc., are on an exploratory mission. They believe they've found where life on Earth came from. They're in hibernation for two years while the ship travels; only the android David (Michael Fassbender) is awake. The scenes of David by himself are very reminiscent of the first half-hour of Wall-E.

The crew eventually awakens, and then they are given their mission brief. I think it's amazing that a crew would agree to go on a four-year mission without being told why before they were put into hibernation, but work with me here. They have found a habitable moon around the planet LV-223 (look up Leviticus 22:3), where they believe their creators - they call them the Engineers - are from.

I caught this in 3-D, and I really enjoyed it that way. This is a visually gorgeous film. The set design has H.R. Geiger's handiwork everywhere, and the eventual mythology spelled out makes sense in the Aliens universe.

There are three primary issues I have with this film. I have many more, but these are the three primary ones.

1. Unanswered questions. I am cool with some unanswered questions; it invites discussion. But there are so many unanswered questions that it's hard to tell what they were intentionally ambiguous about and what they just had no idea what the actual answer is. Rememeber how the end of Star Trek V felt like a cheat? Prometheus isn't as bad as that, but it made me think of it.

2. Stupid characters. Stupid character decisions are okay here and there. I mean, why is Brett looking for the cat by himself in 1979's Alien when he knows that killer critter's on board? But Alien had seven people and we got to know each of them. Prometheus has seventeen people on board, and half of them could be named Soon to Be Alien Fodder Especially If You Have An Accent. The experts in their fields, allegedly smart people (especially the biologist), behave as idiotically as teenagers in a Friday the 13th movie.

3. There is one character who dies near the end in such a stupid way that I can't help but think that maybe they actually survived and we had a bad camera angle. I mean, it's stupider than anything else anyone else does, and therefore it gets its own issue number.

It has its other, more minor issues, like why cast Guy Pearce if he's going to be in old-age make-up the whole time? And despite all of this, I am hungry for Prometheus 2. Prometheus 2 doesn't even have to connect us to Alien yet. There's plenty of room there, and possibilities. A lot of the bioengineering stuff worked for me. The explanation of what's really going on on that planet worked for me. Most of the time we don't know much more than the characters. I devoured the visuals.

It's a brilliant mess, a moronic masterpiece, a wonderful misfire. It's a paradox. And so I would recommend it to those who are curious, but expect to be a little annoyed when you come out.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/21/12

- Guy Pearce (Memento, Lockout) is set to join the cast of Iron Man 3.  He'd play geneticist Aldrich Killian, who sells nanotechnology to terrorists to help them spread a virus.  Ben Kingsley's also on board, and returning are Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle.  It's scheduled to open May 3, 2013.  Pearce can be seen in this summer's Prometheus.

- Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) is in talks to direct Wish List, about a girl who makes ten wishes on a coin and throws it into a magical fountain.  Unbeknownst to her, the coin got tstuck and didn't make it to the bottom, but twenty years later it gets unstuck and hits the bottom, causing all ten wishes to suddenly come true and disrupt her life. It stars Reese Witherspoon.

- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is finally moving forward, and the first two confirmed returnees are Mickey Rourke and Rosario Dawson.

- Jonathan Frid, who played vampire barnabas Collins on the original Dark Shadows sopa opera, has died at age 87.  He did film a cameo in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, which opens next month.