Blog Archives
Cars 2 (2011)
Universally regarded as the least involving and nuanced film in Pixar’s illustrious catalog, Cars was the last film I thought would get the sequel treatment. Was it a creative tale that yearned to be told on the big screen, or is this just a business decision motivated by the sound of merchandizing coffers? Those talking cars seemed pretty content by the end of the 2006 original film. It doesn’t take long to realize that Cars 2 was done strictly for the cash. A sequel to the least involving Pixar film, with an even less involving storyline and elevating the most annoying character (Mater the tow truck) to lead status provides little in the realm of adult entertainment. The storyline, a mistaken identity spy thriller, seems like a rejected plot for a lesser direct-to-DVD sequel. While the visuals are still outstanding, the humor is stuck in neutral, overloaded with motor vehicle puns and groan-worthy visual gags. The message about accepting your uncouth friends no matter what their bad behavior might be seems rather misguided. That’s the message? Congrats Pixar, for providing cover for irresponsibility and incivility. The environmental message and its connection to a Big Oil conspiracy feels tacked on as an afterthought to try and crowbar in something more meaningful than a mediocre spy farce. I think cars are rather limited in their anthropomorphic expressions. There’s only so much they can do. And a world populated completely by living, breathing, gas-guzzling (can they get drunk on ethanol?) vehicles begs for an examination on how this world operates without any opposable thumbs. After a magical slate of films that dealt with serious mature themes and danced with storytelling finesse, it’s a shame that daring run comes to an end with such a rudimentary roadblock. Little kids will be entertained by all the bright colors and simplistic storytelling, but I cannot foresee too many fans of Cars even justifying the sequel’s existence. It’s not out rightly bad it’s just so pitifully pedestrian. Cars 2 has so little going on under its hood, you’ll swear it came from a different maker.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Across the Universe (2007)
Julie Taymor is a one-of-a-kind artist. She made her name developing Disney’s The Lion King for the theater with highly elaborate and inventive costuming and staging. She then turned her vision to film and directed two strange yet visually splendid entires, 1999’s Titus and 2002’s Frida. Her latest is Across the Universe, a film constructed around actors singing Beatles songs. Hey, everyone likes the Beatles, so what could go wrong?
It’s the late 1960s and Jude (Jim Sturgess) has traveled from Liverpool (where else?) to Princeton to find his father. He makes friends with troublemaker Max (Joe Anderson) and they elect to travel to New York City and find their voice in these tumultuous times. They get a rather spacious apartment and their landlady, Sadie (Dana Fuchs), is a redheaded rock singer. Joe’s little sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) who just lost her boyfriend in the Vietnam War. JoJo (Martin Luther) and Prudence (T.V. Carpio) find their way to this apartment and into the increasing group of young, music-minded kids in the midst of a social revolution. Lucy fall hard for one another but their relationship is strained because Max has been shipped off to fight in Vietnam and Lucy is joining an increasingly violent radical resistance group.
I can’t decide whether it is clever of simply lazy to structure a whole screenplay around 30-some songs by one band. Many of the tunes are used for pointless reasons like “Dear Prudence” is reduced to coaxing a character out of a closet literally, though she is gay so perhaps there’s a double-meaning there, but it’s still lame. In fact, the entire character of Prudence is pointless and grafted onto the story with no real care or precision. She disappears and then miraculously pops up again, with happy girlfriend in tow, and then that’s it. But what really chafes is that when Taymor uses the Beatles’ songs to tell the bulk of her story that means that little feels authentic. Lucy and Jude spout their love songs so quickly after their first encounter. Their romance doesn’t feel believable and, more importantly, it doesn’t feel worthy of our time and interest.
Across the Universe is dripping with Baby Boomer nostalgia and the film leaves no cliché left unturned in its account of history. This jumbled melting pot of every late 1960s cultural event feels as shallow as a junior high report on the subject. Everything from the Watts riots, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to the Columbia protests and LSD activist Ken Kesey and his colorful bus are elbowed into a story that feels empty and crowded at the same time. Across the Universe is a tad overextended and even goes to the trouble of climaxing with a rooftop jam similar to the Beatles’ last public performance together.
Taymor is a talented visionary but sometimes she lets her creative impulses take over her better judgment. The movie ultimately feels like 30-some music videos strung together by a flimsy boy-meets-girl story that will sink or swim depending upon the song-by-song visual follies. Sometimes Taymor excels with the sublimely surreal like some underwater canoodling to “Something,” Uncle Sam reaching out from a recruitment poster to the tune of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and a spectacular rendition of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” where Max and other war vets cope with their trauma while multiple Salma Hayeks tempt them in sexy nurse outfits. But then Taymor gets a little too carried away with her runaway train of an imagination and her visuals can become simplistic (splattering strawberries = blood shed) or just way too funky, like a truly awful animated excursion where the wonderful Eddie Izzard speak-sings “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” as a creepy circus ringleader. What does “Come Together” have to do with pimps and prostitutes and Joe Cocker as a bum? The worst moment may be when Taymor decides to visualize the parenthetical of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by having underwear-clad soldiers hauling the Statue of Liberty over the jungles of Vietnam while they sing, “She’s so heavy.” I’m also uncertain about the flagrant jumps into theatricality like the synchronized acrobatic dancing; it’s a bit jarring at times.
The cast is rather strong from a vocal standpoint and they recorded their performances live instead of within the confines of a recording studio. Wood has a particularly pure voice. Sturgess and his throaty pipes remind me of Ewan McGreggor in Moulin Rouge. Fuchs gives a favorable impression of Janis Joplin. Bono is great in his limited time on screen and hums one dandy version of “I Am the Walrus.” There isn’t a weak singer in the bunch and simply listening to them is one of the highlights of the film, but then I could accomplish this by plugging in the soundtrack. The new arrangements of the Beatles songs are a bit lackluster; they seem too bare and stripped down into vanilla ballads. “Something” sounds exactly note-for-note like how the Elliott Smith version sounded that hauntingly played over the closing credits of American Beauty. I seriously thought that Across the Universe just lifted Smith’s version.
Inherently goofy and occasionally garish, Across the Universe is a misguided trip through the back catalogue of the Beatles. There is a moderate level of fun with the concept and the quirky visuals, but the film plods on and on and eventually the appeal of the gimmick is long exhausted. The singing is strong and the visuals have a sense of whimsy when they work, but in the end the Beatles already had one failed movie constructed entirely from their songs (1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees) and now they have one more for a new generation of fans.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Ocean’s 13 (2007)
Much more like 11 than 12, this latest Ocean’s caper is just as preposterous as all the others but remembers that the audience needs to have fun too. Danny (George Clooney) and his baker’s dozen are plotting revenge on Willie Bank (Al Pacino, looking like a leather couch), a ruthless casino mogul who pushed old friend Rueben (Elliot Gould) out of a business agreement. The boys must outwit casino workers, modern technology, and a super computer able to detect pupil dilation in order to fleece Bank’s Vegas eyesore. Thankfully, all of the players are back and given tasks to do, and some of the means of their scheme are ingenious. How do you pass a lie detector tests? Place a tack in your shoe so that all your truthful answers match the intensity of your false ones. How do you get your hands on rigging dice? You send a couple guys to work in the Mexican factory and, why not, start a worker’s revolt. Ocean’s Thirteen glides along almost too smoothly, barely stopping to enjoy the crazy amount of absurd machinations before they fly by. The dialogue is packed with coded terms and the film doesn’t even stop to explain them. The movie works on the contact high of cool it luxuriates in, but unlike Ocean’s Twelve, this time the gang is given an objective, allows the audience in on their plot, and then we sit back and watch the execution. Steven Soderbergh and the gang have created a slick and amusing sequel. It lacks the freshness of the first go-round in 2001, but Ocean’s Thirteen is the most satisfying three-quel so far in a summer already weighed down by them.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Aristocrats (2005)
A man walks into a talent agency. He tells the agent he’s got a family act the likes of which no one has ever seen before. The agent tells the man to continue. The man’s wife, children, and pet come into the room and proceed to do the most vile, puerile, horrendously vulgar acts to themselves and each other. The agent is shocked. After a long moment of silence, the agent says, “What do you call this act?” The man replies, “The Aristocrats!” Ba-dum-dum.
It’s really not a good joke, but what makes it special is that the middle is entirely open for the comic to say whatever they want. Comedians will build and build in their obscenity so that the weak punchline is practically an afterthought. It’s a joke that goes all the way back to the days of vaudeville. Comics tell it to each other after shows like a secret handshake. The Aristocrats, an unrated documentary, gathers 100 comedians and lets them put their own crass spin on a classic dirty joke.
The movie boasts plenty of well-known names getting down and dirty, like Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, George Carlin, the South Park creators, Jason Alexander, Eric Idle, Richard Lewis, Andy Dick, Fred Willard, Howie Mandel, Eddie Izzard, and Drew Carey (he insists the punchline should be accompanied by finger-snaps). Few comedians give a full rendition of the joke but the clips are just as potent. Judy Gold involves her unborn baby in the act and Carrie Fisher says her mother likes to sing in a very different kind of shower, but the filthiest mind of all belongs to Bob Saget, who can’t make it through without breaking up and saying, “What am I doing?” The Aristocrats also includes comics from different eras, including Larry Storch, the Smothers Brothers (one of which has never heard the joke before), and even Phyllis Diller, who pretty much just cackles at others. Dana Gould manages to pull together a very funny clean rendition involving the Amish version of the joke. The film opens on Carlin, closes on Gilbert Gottfried, and oh what a journey the film takes.
The Aristocrats is very very funny but also a rather incisive look at the nature of comedy. In between dishing the dirt, various comedians rhapsodize about the mechanics of comedy, the freedom in conquering taboos, and the intricacies of delivery (Paul Reiser stresses that any poo-related parts should be saved for the big finish). Penn Jilette says, “It’s the singer, not the song.” The Aristocrats displays comedy like it was jazz, each individual playing the same note a different way.
Things get a tad repetitious after awhile and the vulgarity starts to lose its impact once you’ve listened to countless unspeakable acts, mostly involving family members, the animal kingdom, and the loosening of bowels. As an example, my friend from college, Jason Davis, attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans one year, and as any viewer of late night TV will attest, the girls have gone wild. The ladies, it seems, will freely show you their bosoms in exchange for cheap plastic beads, and some don’t even want anything in return. Jason said the experience was amazing, at first, but after hours of non-stop frontal nudity, it all got a little tiring after awhile. The rampant nudity lost its effect and Jason started paying more attention to the women who actually kept their clothes on. So too is it with The Aristocrats, in a manner of speaking.
The film’s unabashed vulgarity will spur guffaws and titters, especially in an “Oh-my-God-did-he/she-just-say-that?” way. But after so many tellings, things that were funny because they were taboo don’t seem as funny in repetition. It’s at this point that an audience can really appreciate comics that take unconventional routes toward telling the joke. Eric Meade does a card trick, Kevin Pollack does the joke as Christopher Walken, Mario Cantone performs the joke as Liza Minnelli, Sarah Silverman actually puts herself in the joke’s family (for my money, she gives the best performance), Penn and Teller do a magic trick with a soda bottle, there are jugglers, a ventriloquist, and even a mime. The Aristocrats still has its straightforward dirty pleasures, but it’s much more satisfying when certain comics work outside the box.
It should be obvious at this point but The Aristocrats is not going to be a movie for most people. The incredibly course language and graphic accounts of lewd acts will not sit well with most of the American public. This is a movie strictly for people that have a strong stomach and like hearing a dirty joke. For that group, The Aristocrats will knock you silly with laughter. My three friends whom I saw the film with said they were in pain from laughing so hard. Perhaps that speaks volumes about the company I keep.
The Aristocrats is a bawdy, filthy, hilarious documentary that becomes more than a bunch of funnymen retelling a dirty joke. This is a film for a very select audience, to say the least, and it does lag at parts when the continual vulgarity loses its impact. The Aristocrats also seems to be erratically edited; scenes will rapidly jump from different angles for little reason. Every comedian has their own style and every audience member will find something different to strike their funny bone. At the very end, The Aristocrats invites viewers to submit their own form of the joke for the eventual DVD. I don’t know about you but I’ve already got a goldmine of ideas.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Ocean’s 12 (2004)
In 2001, Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven was a giant surprise. It was a blast of fun with an impressive collection of Hollywood royalty. It had clever dialogue, fun characters, and a gala of amusing plot twists. It was one of the breeziest, most entertaining movies in years. Now, come late 2004, Ocean’s Twelve is released with the entire cast returning, including the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones in tow. Expectations are high for another glitzy romp, but what you’re left with in Ocean’s Twelve is all glitz and no romp.
It’s been three years after the gang robbed ruthless casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) of 160 million dollars. Benedict tracks down each member of Ocean’s Eleven and gives them the same ultimatum: either pay back what they stole, with interest, in two weeks or they’ll be killed. Danny Ocean (George Clooney) leaves his attempts at normal home life with Tess (Julia Roberts) and reassembles the team, many of whom have burned through their shares of the millions. Danny and his right-hand man Rusty (Brad Pitt) figure they’re too hot stateside so they’ll need to travel overseas if they’re to steal their fortunes. Linus (Matt Damon) also wants to have a greater role in the heist this time around.
In Europe, Ocean is challenged by a French playboy (Vincent Cassel) who moonlights as the notorious thief, the Night Fox. The challenge is to see who can steal a priceless Faberge egg, and if bested the Night Fox promises to pay all of Ocean’s debts to Benedict. Hot on the heels of both thieves is Isabel (Zeta-Jones), an expert police officer that also happens to be the former girlfriend to Rusty.
Ocean’s Twelve does not work as a heist picture. For starters, the audience has no idea what’s going on for most of it. A general heist movie bylaw is to explain what the heist will entail, and then we watch the team hit it step by step. Forget that. In Ocean’s Twelve we’re never told how they are going to do their heist, and as they commence with their plan it’s not surprising to an audience, only confusing. I had to wait until the very end for some character to go into a monologue to explain how they accomplished their heist, and let me say, it was not worth two hours of waiting and scratching my head. The result seems to push away an audience instead of involving them in the fun of the scheme.
The story doesn’t utilize the talents of the assembled members. There’s a reason you hire a demolitions expert or a pick pocket, and that’s to let them work their skill. Well in Ocean’s Twelve we get none of that. Most of the cast’s skills are not ever put to use, which further gunks up a heist movie. The movie really errs by putting many of its eleven on ice for long stretches of the film. Around the second act almost everyone gets arrested. Pity poor Bernie Mac, who is in jail for near the whole movie. It seems that Soderbergh doesn’t know what to do with all his characters, and the new additions, so he stashes them away for long stages of time hoping an audience won’t notice.
Soderbergh is in danger of becoming a parody of himself. His usual narrative flourishes are present, including jumps in time and perspective; however, they don’t add up to much except unnecessary showmanship. The nonlinear leaps and shell game of information do not add to the film. Soderbergh keeps his audience in the dark for too long and then cheats us with the ending. Ocean’s Twelve is a good looking film (the vistas look beautiful), but it’s a good looking movie with nowhere to go. What’s even more frustrating is the ending to Ocean’s Twelve. You see, in the end we find out that the last hour plus of the movie was unnecessary. Yes, the movie actually makes a reveal that nullifies over half of the film. It’s cheap and unappreciated. Ocean’s Twelve, there’s a difference between tricking an audience and conning them. Maybe some day you’ll realize this.
The new storylines never really develop. Zeta-Jones doesn’t add much besides another authority figure to chase after Ocean and the boys. Her subplot involving finding her master thief father is abrupt and easy. The best new addition to Ocean’s Twelve was the prospect of a rival, but again nothing really happens with our French thief. He’s more of a catalyst for the plot than anything else, and it’s a shame, because he could have opened the door for a great film pitting two competitive teams of thieves against each other.
Ocean’s Twelve is too satisfied with itself to be that entertaining. It’s now actually reminiscent of the 1960 original film (my grandmother swears it’s wonderful, take that for what you will), starring the Rat Pack. Plot and logic are secondary to a bunch of cool characters having fun. I really enjoyed Ocean’s Eleven (the 2001 film, not my grandmother’s preferred version), but this new sequel lacks any charm and verve. I can’t even say there were many good scenes, just some good ideas that they didn’t fully actualize, like stowing Yen in baggage and then losing their luggage (nothing comes of this). There’s a fun scene involving Topher Grace spoofing his own micro-celebrity, but beyond that many of the scenes and ideas don’t seem developed. The best moment of Ocean’s Twelve, for me, was when I saw Eddie Izzard, the funniest man on the face of the Earth and then some, chat with Hollywood’s A-list on screen. God bless you Eddie Izzard.
Ocean’s Twelve wilts in comparison to its witty, effervescent predecessor. Ocean’s Eleven was fun and hip but didn’t need to coast on star appeal. It had a believable heist, engaging personalities, and it was fun because we knew what was going on and it mattered! I’m sure the cast of Ocean’s Twelve had a blast making the movie together, and their friendly camaraderie shows, but when I left the theater I felt like I had been stuck with the bill for someone else?s good time.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Darkly comical with great stabs of satire at the film industry (bloodsuckers in the movies anyone? Hmmmmmm). Willem Dafoe retains his title as Creepiest Actor Alive and goes for broke with a tour de force performance that should have you checking under the bed. Shadow of the Vampire is alive, to use the term sparingly, with wit and a slow but maturely steadied pace. Dafoe deserves an Oscar and your fear.
Nate’s Grade: A
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