Silence - Movie Review

Starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Ciaran Hinds, Issei Ogata, Yosuke Kobuzuka, Yoshi Oida, Shin'ya Tsukamoto and Nana Komatsu.
Written by Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese.
Directed by Martin Scorsese.

★★½

Silence is adapted from a 1966 novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo. Martin Scorsese has been trying to get this film made for over two decades. It's clear he respects his source material. It feels like he respected it too much. There's a sprawling quality to it where the movie suffers from repetitive narrative beats.

The first half is the strongest. In 1640, two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver) request to go to Japan, where their mentor Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) is rumored to have left the faith. As Christianity is illegal in Japan, the priests must be hid by secret members. The Japanese Christians are grateful to finally have priests among them. The last few they had were killed or apostasized.

The second half is mostly filled with people getting tortured and/or killed, Garfield's Father Rodrigues speaking with the torturers, angst, rain, cruelty, and unanswered prayers.

I almost had this Apocalypse Now anticipation for when Ferreira might show up, but he shows up late, and it's pretty anti-climactic. In fact, I didn't like his character. And while I like Garfield - he was excellent in Hacksaw Ridge - he isn't quite up to the task of what he's supposed to be here.

There are many questions of faith wrestled with here. Does it really mean anything if you say you renounce God when you still believe in your heart? The movie does not make cartoon villains of the Japanese torturers either. My mind kept going back to how heretics were getting tortured and killed back home.

The last ten minutes felt like a lengthy denouement a novel would have, but the same beats could have been done in two minutes.

The LEGO Movie - Movie Review

Starring the voices of Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, Will Arnett, Liam Neeson, Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill.
Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller.

★★★★

Everything is awesome about this movie on so many levels. The message, the humor, the subtext, the characters, the creativity... All of it works.

Chris Pratt, who plays the guileless Andy on NBC's Parks & Recreation, brings that same dim-bulb wonderment to the voice of Emmet, a construction worker in Legoland. Emmet is chirpy, positive, and part of a team, a team that Reads The Instructions and builds buildings. The movie has this shrewd animation style that looks like it's a combo of stop-motion and CGI (I'm guessing it's more CGI than stop-motion).

This Lego universe is run by President Business (Will Ferrell), head of the government and most coroporations. Behind closed doors, he's Lord Business! (Think Chancellor Palpatine and Darth Sidious). Lord Business is determined to control everything, and he has a doomsday device called the Kragle which will allow him to usurp freedom forever. Ah, but there's this prophecy that someone called the Special will come forth with a Piece of Resistance and stop Lord Business.

Emmet accidentally stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance, and he becomes the unwitting fulfiller of prophecy. An underground resistance movement hails him as the Special, even though he's not smart or unique in any discernible way.

This movie isn't left- or right-wing, it's probably the most centrist pro-liberty movie ever made. It celebrates community not conformity, knowing when to break out and when to be safe, respect for yourself and others, and above all, it's good to let your imagination run wild.

Part of the freedom of this movie is how much it's able to borrow from others to create something new.  Characters from Star Wars and Harry Potter pop up, and one of the main supporting characters is Batman. The evil micro-managers that serve Lord Business look and behave an awful lot like the squid-robots from The Matrix. (Micro-managers! Ha! Surprised there weren't two henchmen named Sarbanes and Oxley).

It truly is a "whole family" movie. Plenty of laughs for kids and adults. Surely the front-runner for Best Animated Film of 2014, the other candidates sight unseen.

Random Movie News - 3/8/13

- George Lucas has confirmed that Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are all on board for Star Wars Episode VII.

- Keri Russell (Dark Skies) has joined the cast of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, starring Andy Serkis, Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke and Kodi Smit-McPhee.  Most of humanity has been wiped out, but the film centers on a resistance group in San Francisco, and Caesar's attempt to maintain order in his new ape society.

- Liam Neeson and Giovanni Ribisi have join the cast of A Million Ways to Die in the West, a western comedy starring Seth MacFarlane as a cowboy training to be a gunfighter.  Charlize Theron and Amanda Seyfried co-star.

- Michael Keaton will star in Birdman, about an actor once famous playing a superhero who is now trying to mount a Broadway play.  Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Zack Galifianakis, Amy Ryan and Naomi Watts.  Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) will direct.

- Jessica Chastain tops Warner Bros' wish list to play Jane in their upcoming live-action Tarzan movie.

- Christopher Nolan's next movie will open November 7, 2014. It's called Interstellar, and plot details are currently under wraps.

My Worst Ten Films of 2012

For the record, I never saw such (alleged) stinkers as One for the Money, W.E., Project X, A Thousand Words, Damsels in Distress, The Raven, LOL, A Little Bit of Heaven, What to Expect When You're Expecting, Bel Ami, That's My Boy, People Like Us, The Watch, Cosmopolis, The Apparition, The Oogieloves Movie, The Words, The Cold Light of Day, Stolen, House at the End of the Street, Bringing Up Baby, Butter, Here Comes the Boom, Atlas Shrugged Part 2, The Man with the Iron Fists, Red Dawn, Playing for Keeps, Parental Guidance or anything with Tyler Perry.

But of what I have seen, these were the worst.

Dishonorable Mentions:

360 - I only watched the first forty minutes, and I'd seen enough.  Just a slow, slow slog meeting a bunch of boring or unpleasant people, and supposedly all their storylines tie together in the end, but even with a cast of Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, etc., I just didn't care.

AMERICAN REUNION - These kids are too old for this excrement.

LOCKOUT - Guy Pearce gives a great tough-guy performance in an "Escape from New York in Space" movie that might have been cool to me if I'd seen it in 1990.

MAN ON A LEDGE - Sam Worthington's star power's faded.  The whole thing felt predictable and cheap, and it really falls apart if you think about it. ("Please don't think about it!" pleads the studio.)

THE PAPERBOY - Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack all give great performances in a story not worth telling.  (Why am I watching Kidman pee on Zac Efron?)  This slice of Southern Gothic is not enough Lee "Precious" Daniels and too much Lee "Shadowboxer" Daniels.

RED LIGHTS - Starts off promising but gets progressively worse until we hit our twist ending that has no impact whatsoever.

ROCK OF AGES - Not counting any scene that had Tom Cruise.  It's worth seeing on DVD or cable to just watch Tom Cruise's scenes. Everything else about the movie is terrible.  Had it come out in the 1970's, it'd be the next cult midnight show where people yell at the screen.  Who on Earth thought having three Foreigner tracks on the soundtrack was a good idea?

TOTAL RECALL - Director Len Wiseman and wife Kate Beckinsale probably shouldn't make movies together anymore.

And now...

... My Worst Ten

10. Taylor Kitsch in JOHN CARTER and BATTLESHIP - Neither movie is as bad as you may have heard. I actually kinda liked John Carter, whereas Battleship only ceased being the worst movie of the year once the aliens showed up.  But Kitsch is the worst thing about both movies, and he was the lead.  His movie career will go the way of Josh Hartnett.

9. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER - This movie could have, should have been campy fun, but it's poorly lit and surprisingly uncreative.  I credit them for casting Benjamin Walker, who looks like a young Liam Neeson, but I thought it might have more creative weaving into history while Abe slaughters vampires on the side.

8. THE EXPENDABLES 2 - The first movie was a fun reunion of all these old muscle-headed action stars.  Now while it's cool that Jean-Claude Van Damme shows up, and he's a villain, this sequel wears out its welcome early.  Just empty-headed mindless gunfire at a bunch of faceless foreigners.

7. THE DEEP BLUE SEA - Poorly-paced melodrama about a woman who leaves her affluent husband for a younger man who doesn't love her back. But they have passion. On the days that he likes her.  There's a three-second pause after every line.

6. & 5. GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE and SEEKING JUSTICE - How far hath Nicolas Cage fallen. Dude won an Academy Award, you know.  Academy. Award.   First, he's starring in arguably the worst comic-book hero franchise, and then he's doing these VOD projects that make about $75,000 in theaters before disappearing.  We know he doesn't manage his money well, so maybe that's it.

4. THE DEVIL INSIDE - A low-budget horror movie where the characters don't behave rationally. I know, they make a hundred of these a year. But have you ever watched one that ends on a cliffhanger then directs you to its website to what happens next. Its website?!

3. UNDERWORLD AWAKENING - The fourth time is not the charm. Kate Beckinsale is back, but it doesn't matter. It's the future where vampires are known and the humans are trying to exterminate them.  The plot's the thinnest yet.

2. BENEATH THE DARKNESS - Dennis Quaid tries his hand at playing a psychopath in this trifle where the mystery is obvious from the beginning, but the participants on screen pretend that it isn't.

1. TAKEN 2 - The first movie had a visceral satisfaction to it. A great trailer, and a movie that lived up to it.  Even though it's the same director, the sequel is almost a parody of the first one. After the traumatic events of the first movie, the wife and daughter decide to surprise Dad by showing up... in Istanbul?  You'd think the daughter would never leave the mainland USA again.  Relatives of all the dead Eurotrach from the first movie seek revenge in the second, and several of them get dispatched with ease.  The whole thing has an unpleasant sheen to it.  It's a cynical cash-grab.

Random Movie Stuff - 10/19/12

- Warner Bros. plans to release a Justice League movie in Summer 2015. No director have been announced. Christopher Nolan passed on the offer to produce it.  Will Beall has a written a script.  No word if Henry Cavill (Superman), Christian Bale (Batman) and Ryan Reynolds (Green Lantern) will be attached, but it's said to use those characters as well as Wonder Woman and the Flash.  The Avengers 2 is also scheduled to open Summer 2015.

- Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters has been moved back to January 25.  It stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as the famous gingerbread-house-visiting siblings, grown up and determined to fight all witches.

- Jason Statham will star in Homefront, about a DEA agent who retires to a small town only to find out the town has its own drug underbelly.  Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay.  It co-stars James Franco, Winona Ryder, Kate Bosworth, Frank Grillo (The Grey) and Rachelle LeFevre (Twilight).

- Liam Neeson, James Franco, Kim Basinger, Adrien Brody, Mila Kunis, Maria Bello and Olivia Wilde will star in Paul Haggis's next drama Third Person, which will weave together three storylines, one in Paris, one in New York, and one in Rome.

- Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) has joined the cast of Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman (Swordfish) as a man who takes the law into his own hands after his wife and child are kidnapped.  Jake Gyllenhaal (End of Watch) and Melissa Leo (The Fighter) co-star.

- Watched some trailers recently.  This has been my lowest movie-attending season in about ten years so I watch them online.  The most moving one for me was The Impossible, based on the true story of a family separated during the 2004 tsunami. It stars Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.  We have yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake too.  Once again, five kids go into a big house they shouldn't.  Silver Linings Playbook looks good.  Jennifer Lawrence's presense is always a plus, but Bradley Cooper's character looks like it could be his most interesting work to date.

- Saw MIRROR MIRROR (★★) on DVD and it's just far less interesting than Snow White & the Huntsman.  It's more comical, more aimed at kids.  I liked Julia Roberts, Lily Collins and the dwarves fine. I was embarrassed for Armie Hammer as the prince; this did not do him any favors and doesn't give me much hope for The Lone Ranger.

Taken 2 - Movie Review

Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Rade Sherbedgia and Luke Grimes.
Directed by Olivier Megaton.

★½

The first Taken had a visceral drive behind it.  His daughter was kidnapped. He didn't know who or why, but he knew he was going to hunt them down and kill anyone who got in his way, and it drove him all the way to an Albanian sex-slave ring.

This time around, he invites his ex-wife and daughter to join him on a vacation to Istanbul. Istanbul? I would think his daughter would never want to leave the US again after the events of the first movie, but why visit a country just a hop, skip and jump away from all those men he killed?  Yes, he has some business there, but why not say "And afterwards, we'll go to DisneyWorld!"

The father of one of the men he killed wants revenge, and he has dozens of henchmen at his disposal.  Unfortunately for him, they're the type of henchmen who sit around and smoke and watch futbol and don't notice the trained killer entering the room until it's too late.

Taken 2 feels like a straight-to-DVD sequel where they figured they'd get Wesley Snipes to do it, but then Neeson said no, he'll do it, so they rewrote it back to being him two weeks before shooting.  It's 92 minutes long, and it's not exciting. We never feel like he or his wife or his daughter is in real danger, but we know pretty much every unshaven Albanian we meet is going to get killed.  Neeson also is getting up there in age, and every fight scene is obviously chopped and edited to death.

The Grey - DVD Review

Starring Liam Neeson, Dallas Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie and James Badge Dale.  Directed by Joe Carnahan.

★★½

The marketing made this look like Liam Neeson kicking wolf butt in the Alaskan wilderness. This has more in common with a Jack London story than Taken.

After a handful of oil workers survive a plane crash during a snow storm, they find themselves surrounded by man-killing wolves. The eight men find themselves sitting ducks if they stay with what's left of their plane, and so they trek south. And then there were seven. And then there were six...

I liked the thoughtfulness to this story, and it is a bleak contemplation on life and death. It also gets predictable in its killing order. If the story seems to be focussing on one guy that isn't Liam Neeson, it's a pretty good bet that he's going to be the next to go. In fact some of the deaths started to make this feel like Final Destination.

Battleship - Movie Review

Starring Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Hamish Linklater, Peter MacNicol, Jesse Plemons and Jerry Ferrara.
Directed by Peter Berg.

★★

When Paramount centered Top Gun around the star power of Tom Cruise, he'd already earned it. After supporting turns in Endless Love, Taps and The Outsiders, he made the most of his big break in Risky Business.

Taylor Kitsch has been given the same opportunity here, in a movie that wants to be Top Gun with Aliens. And he's not really up to the task.

For the first half-hour, this is one of the worst movies of the year. We go through the motions of establishing that Kitsch's Alex Hopper is impulsive, irresponsible, smart, cocky, a real maverick. Heh. His disapproving older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) is there to shout expository dialogue at him, but one too many stunts has led to Alex possibly getting kicked out of the Navy, right after these combat exercises the US is doing with Japan.

Then the aliens finally show up and it gets more interesting. They drop a dome over a few-miles radius, trapping some ships in there with them, and no one can get in or out. What's their motivation? Well, once they blow up the first ship, that's all they need to know.

It never goes off the Roland Emmerich rails, nor does it go into that "commercial for itself" Michael Bay mode. It really stays the whole time in Jerry Bruckheimer-wannabe land. Top Gun more than anything, but it reminded me of Pearl Harbor at one point too.  And, yeah, Transformers.  By the way, Transformers 1 & 3 were better movies than this.

I can't think of an actor though, that could have saved this movie. I mean, I liked Skarsgard and Rihanna and the others in their supporting roles fine, but no one is required to do much. Liam Neeson's part could have been played by anybody. Could have just as easily been Beau Bridges.

And no one ever says "You sank my battleship!"

P.S. I did like the one sequence with AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

P.P.S. I hated the obvious product placement. Coke Zero, I'm talking about you!

Unknown - Movie Review

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Starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Bruno Ganz, Aidan Quinn, Frank Langella, Sebastian Koch and Karl Markovics.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.

I love Liam Neeson kicking butt in Europe. We had Taken, now we have this. I'd like it to become a genre. Every third movie Liam makes should be him kicking butt in Europe.

This isn't as satisfying as Taken, but it is a nice little puzzle of a movie where Liam plays Dr. Martin Harris, attending a convention in Germany with his wife. He forgets his suitcase with their passports and hopes into a taxi to recover it. The taxi crashes, and he wakes up with partial amnesia. Nevertheless when he shows up back at the hotel, his wife (Mad Men's January Jones) acts like she doesn't know who he is, and there's another man (Aidan Quinn) there caliming to be Martin Harris.

So Martin has to go on the run, trying to figure out what's going on. Is his wife a double-agent, or is she being forced to play this out? The revelation toward the end at first disappointed me until I thought about it and realized it was the only way the first two acts made sense. But then there are decisions made in the third act that don't make sense, but it's house of cards that asks you to admire the patience of construction, not how easy it is to swipe and knock it down.

I also like the bonus of respectable German actors popping up, like Bruno Ganz (Downfall), Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) and Karl Markovics (The Counterfeiters).

It's not high art; it's pulp action. It has its share of car chases, most of which bored me, honestly. Two guys in pursuit of a snowy rooftop will do more than any standard car chase.