Cemetery Junction (2010)

I’m constantly astounded that Ricky Gervais can be so brilliant at creating television but brings so much banality to feature filmmaking. He seems to be incapable of catching that same originality that drew viewers to The Office for more than 30 minutes at a time, save The Invention of Lying, which held out for 60 before limping to its end. Much of his latest feature project, Cemetery Junction, too, is a fairly pointless exercise in predictability.

 

It starts and remains every working class coming of age story of the past few decades. A young man in blue collar England wants to escape the drudgery of his life and the toil of his future. This one even comes with the prerequisite childhood friends who embarrass him and hold him back at the right moments. He turns to life insurance sales and is, of course, smitten with the boss’s daughter. She, of course, is betrothed to the company overachiever, who also happens to be its resident dickhead. Of course. Cemetery Junction hits all the right beats in order. I’ll give it that.

 

It fails to provide much of a reason to care about any of these characters for the first 75 minutes, though. The two friends eventually find their parts fleshed out enough at that point and have a few minutes, the best of the film, to shine. The young man figures out that money isn’t everything, of course, and gets the girl in the end. Don’t even try to call that a spoiler. His shining moment, though, is genuine and unique. He argues that if the girl marries what is essentially her father, she will turn into essentially her mother. I found that refreshingly honest and grounded as movie arguments to break an engagement go. And the mother’s own reaction gave her character a point to exist. The finale of the movie, though, goes right back into the rut it started in, dragging the film full circle.

 

While this may sound very negative, there’s actually nothing wrong with this film. It does everything reasonably well if not excellently. The acting is good, the setting is perfectly dreary and the writing is acceptable if lacking ambition. The movie in general lacks a voice. Even the music, while great songs individually, feels like a Best Of culled from other coming of age films. This film treads some very well worn ground but seems perfectly content to follow the grooves without branching off on its own path at all. 2 stars

Harry Brown (2009)

Director Daniel Barber opens Harry Brown with a killing that defines the violent world of its housing project setting immediately. The can be no doubt afterward that no one living in this place is ever safe from the threat of death, not even the killers themselves.

 

Eponymous retiree Michael Caine laments the state of the houses with his only friend, Len, as he visits his ailing wife and awaits the inevitable. He frequently avoids an underpass that represents the worst of the situation, an overly symbolic tunnel, lighted in the dark. In quick succession, however, Harry loses everything, following a visit from the staid plain clothes office Emily Mortimer. With nothing left in his life, Harry fights back against the terror inflicted by the kids that affect the violence in his home with his tactical knowledge that comes with his years of Marine service.

 

The movie clings to its Death Wish trappings heavily from this point out, becoming at times infectiously joyous in its returned violence. After all, these scum started it, right? One can only sympathize with Caine’s eye-for-an-eye mission to remove the worst of the local element, as he is never shown as remotely morally ambiguous. Harry is a force of righteous retribution, flawed only by his physical ailments. I found his playing savior to a heroin addict a little trite as it happened after his killing of her dealers, and a little forced to prove that he was a good man. We already know that, and why he acts against those who took from him. Similarly, one of the kids is introduced as having been molested, implying that this might be his reason for falling in with the killers, but no more is ever made of this, save one jarring kill that Caine makes (not against the kid). The fact is brought up and just sort of left open as a casual consideration. It’s an overly simplified, cliché reasoning.

 

Caine delivers another gripping performance as Harry, turning his grief on and off with the presence and absence of company. He carries Harry’s secrets, his unspoken confessions and witnessed war horrors, just below his surface, boiling over when he decides that enough is enough. A moment shared with a dying gunshot victim plays nicely when spoken by Caine, a sort of unburdening that Harry takes the man through with him. Mortimer plays her role as an exceptionally dour half investigator, half social worker. She comes off a bit martyred with a clumsy line about how she transferred from a cushy job somewhere else to work this area, and she sometimes carries herself with an air of pitying the people of the projects. Most of the cast gets little to show for their efforts, being often broadly sketched as either opportunistic, jaded or both.

 

The final act of the film falls slightly apart, as Harry grows soft when it would seem most unlikely, and a poorly planned police raid sparks a full on riot in the name of a lip service “zero tolerance” policy. It would be more effective, and more in line with the movie’s themes, for the police to simply leave the projects alone to eat their own alive. The violence in this part is particularly affecting and casual, which works to the movie’s favor. Murder becomes disturbingly simple for the villains, and in turn for the heroes.

 

I liked Harry Brown, mostly because I liked Harry. I wanted to see him win. His antagonists had no redeeming qualities, his situation was utterly hopeless and he only wanted to make his world safe. You can’t help but appreciate that. It’s an easy situation to set up and an easy one to lose yourself in; it’s the nature of the revenge fantasy. In the end it really says very little about the environment that spawned Harry’s necessity, but manages to immerse the viewer in that world enough to want to see it cleaned. 3 ½ stars

The Social Network (2010)

I had my doubts that The Social Network could live up to its own press when I decided to give it a chance. And, having seen it, I still don’t see the reason for the level of hype behind it. It is a very good film; I have no intention of degrading it in any way. I just don’t see the importance prematurely bestowed upon it. Even as a Facebook user I fail to see the importance in its foundation to the viewer.

 

Aaron Sorkin’s script is terrific. The dialogue is both believable and snappy, not forced except in the case of lead Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerman, where the effect is intended. Eisenberg portrays essentially the same character he and Michael Cera have had a stranglehold on for a few years, though devoid of all charm and innocence, these replaced by anger and social ineptitude. He portrays these excellently, making a good villain in a straw man kind of way. His every action is tied to its core psychological flaw by the attorneys on the other side of his case with relative ease. He counters a few of their attempts, proving himself capable enough in the courtroom setting, but still comes across as petulant and immature. The character’s flaws and insistence on grating behavior eventually reduce all attempts at redemption to coming too little too late. Even the closing moment rang false to me, as if a friend request should atone for any of his conduct.

 

Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker takes the notion of this irredeemably flawed character even further, providing nothing but Luciferesque temptation to Eisenberg’s vulnerable Zuckerman. His blatant attempts to worm his way in and push out the only really relatable character in the film, Zuckerman’s only friend, work in the film, though. He might as well be offering the world to Christ on the mountain when they sit around some L.A. nightclub contemplating the future worth of Facebook. Unfortunately Zuckerman is to Jesus as a worm is to a lion. It removes the drama of that particular story.

 

Zuckerman’s only friend, a point driven home too blatantly and too many times, is well done by Andrew Garfield. The pain of betrayal comes through brilliantly when the hammer finally drops on him, but the story is not his. The addition of his unstable girlfriend adds little to the story and takes up some valuable screen time. For better or worse the film belongs to Eisenberg and should have focused slightly less on Garfield.

 

David Fincher’s direction, especially during the rowing contest and its narrow loss for the Harvard team, makes much of the drama, adding layers to the image of the story. There was little chance for him to show this flair, though, in the numerous scenes of programming and mediation that make up the bulk of the film.

 

At heart the movie is an espionage picture, but sappy with betrayal between college friends. I enjoyed the film but had difficulty truly investing myself in it, the characters or the outcome of their struggle. The backstabbing may have cost a lot of money to a few people but without a little blood I fail to see the great drama in this. 3 ½ stars

Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (2010)

DC’s animated movie series releases another impressive entry in Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. The movie delivers on a number of points I thought were missing in previous Justice League movies of late, namely the voice cast. In particular I was pleased to hear the return of the eponymous duo’s best incarnations: Kevin Conroy as Batman and Tim Daly as Superman. These two perfected their roles in Batman/Superman: The Animated Series individually, during the “Diniverse” era. The replacement of Conroy in particular constantly baffles me. Even the decidedly not-so-good Batman: Gotham Knights got that much right. Others include Michael Ironside as Darkseid, reprising the role, and a favorite of mine, Ed Asner’s spot on Granny Goodness. I could never get tired of hearing him voice her.

The plot also introduces a number of my old favorites. My never ending crush on the Giffen era Justice League loves to see characters like Mr. Miracle and Big Barda brought back into the fold (see also Batman: the Brave and the Bold for your Ted Kord Blue Beetle and Booster Gold fixes). The fantastically campy Fighting Female Furies turn up as the main plot device for the film, as Darkseid looks for a replacement to captain them after Granny’s most hopeful student proves not up to the task.

Where he turns for that is a reinvented, once again, Supergirl. Her crash to Earth, her misunderstood reception (a comic book classic trope) and her subsequent shipping off for training are all handled quite admirably. I enjoyed the film up to this point, when it introduced its sole sticking point for me: Doomsday. And not just Doomsday but dozens of Doomsdays, all some kind of clone. One of them beat Superman into a coma; now Batman can take out its clones with whatever is in his utility belt? I think this devalues the threat just a smidge. The only reason that it didn’t affect the film that much for me is that I think Doomsday is the hallmark of just how bad 1990s comics were in terms of desperate attention grabs, the Death of Superman sparking a host of “controversial” and increasingly ridiculous stories involving the fall of the DC heroes. Aquaman got his hand eaten by piranha for God’s sakes. It was a bad time to be a fan, so you can clog a toilet with Doomsdays for all I care.

90s rant aside, this leads to one of the greatest “haunted house” rides DC has to offer: a trip to Apokolips. This is portrayed as the most frightening, hopeless place in the universe and this films pulls it off quite well. This leads to another of the films best moments, too, when Batman and Darkseid face off in a test of who is simply the biggest bastard. *Spoiler Alert* This time it’s Batman. From here, though the movie should have ended, there is one plot extension that has a decent twist and salvages the double ending from derailing the movie. All in, the film was a very enjoyable entry into DC’s animated collection. The characters are all handled logically, the film keeps a sense of fun in its quick pace and it has a lot of callbacks for longtime fans. Now if only Netflix carried those shorts in their versions… 3 ½ stars

Fanboys (2009)

Fanboys is a movie with one idea and only one. Everything past this is built on a foundation of thoughtless cliché. It may be the single least ambitious film I have ever watched. It aspires to get by on fandom and offers little else. It gets its details right but that’s it; almost no original thought goes into the movie.

As I understand it, either the original script or another cut of the film deals with the strained/lost friendship of the four main characters, as well as dealing with the development of cancer in one of them more deeply. This cut only pays lip service, though, and the tinkering and adding a second director shows all too clearly.

Eric, the only one of his group of friends to move on from their slavish devotion to sci-fi, fantasy and comic books, comes back to the group once Linus develops cancer. I really wish there was more to say than that because afterward the movie falls into wacky hijinks revolving around breaking into the Skywalker ranch to watch Phantom Menace before its theatrical release, (God help the boy who’s last wish was to see that) and starting fights with Star Trek fans in the movie’s lamest bits. Seth Rogen’s “nerd makeup” was just embarrassing to see. I have yet to see the appeal in Dan Fogler’s act and Jay Baruchel can do much, much better than this. He really needs more material the caliber of Undeclared. Kristen Bell doesn’t get enough of a role to really count for much. She’s sort of the designated girl and love interest where one wasn’t really needed.

Back to the details, they either carry or sink this kind of film; they carry this one. Some good sight gags are the R2D2 on top of Fogler’s van and his custom mural on its side. The Star Trek bits fall flat for me, though the inevitable cameo was nice. Other cameos were more hamfisted, though, such as Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher. Once in particular, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, only serves to remind that all of this was actually much funnier when it was done in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. They’re pretty much the same movie. It hits all of the clichéd road trip bits, including a shamanic drug trip. At least that part was kind of fun, but it really didn’t feel like it belonged, just that it was on the checklist. Too much of the movie feels this way, with nothing genuine driving the characters, the scenes or even their resolution. 2 stars, nothing worthy of note good or bad.

The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens (2008)

Although a few years late to the party, Canadian Harry Potter cash-in The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens tries its damndest to get all the parts in place. It has a boy who with no clue he is actually a wizard, his friends, the girl who knows seemingly everything and the clumsy, lesser-than-Billy boy, and even a benevolent Dumbledore stand-in, as portrayed by wrestler Roddy Piper. Piper is the only real reason I bothered with this movie, as it looks like kiddy treacle, and in fact is, but if you cast the Hot Rod as a kindly old wizard I’ll have to give it a look on principle.

And, indeed, Piper is really the only enjoyable aspect of Billy Owens. No one in the film can act outside of him, though Piper appears to be trying to take the acting burden of the whole cast upon himself. His intensely hammy overacting, while possibly stoned out of his mind, against the wooden reading-their-lines performances of the rest of the cast is as jarring as it is amusing. His flailing about, trying to save his every scene from sinking, is pretty funny. He also grows a spotty, graying goatee in lieu of Dumbledore’s traditional immense white whiskers, and the movie outfits him with the goofiest hat in the community theater’s wardrobe but none of that makes “Rowdy Roddy” any more wizardly.

Outside of this you get a plot about another ancient wizard, who happens to be a teacher at Billy’s school, trying to resurrect a dragon in the town’s namesake river. This process pollutes the river, threatening to also destroy the town. The know-it-all girl relates this somehow to global warming in the worst move a schlock movie can make: adding a message. It comes up more than once, in a vain attempt to add depth to the fluff for reasons I cannot fathom. I personally hate this kind of faux important posturing. It ruins what could otherwise be entertaining rubbish and insults those who sit through it. Oh, and almost everyone in Billy’s life are secretly wizards, though they all rely on him as the “chosen one.”

I’ll try to give the movie a little praise- I found its obsession with the number 11 mildly charming. Billy turns 11 on November the 11^th, part of being the mystically selected hero of the film. Other than this, I can’t say much for it. The credits bear the hallmark of ultra-low budget filmmaking, in that the star, the man playing his father and many, many special thanks all bear the same surname. Given that most of the movie takes place in Billy’s home, the elementary school or just running around aimlessly in the snow, I’m guessing they were its chief financiers as well. And that Roddy Piper owed them a favor or something, which is a nice ace to have up your sleeve. Especially when Wrestle Mania rolls around. 1 star, though it’s likely more fun if you are 11 yourself.

Kick-Ass (2010)

Kick-Ass’s problem is its lack of tonal consistency. Opening as a what-if scenario, the film asks what would happen if a real person tried super-heroing around on street criminals. The eponymous character (Aaron Johnson), with his low tech wetsuit-and-police-baton style asks that question of his comic book loving trio. The answer is simple: he would be hurt badly if not killed, but that ends the movie in 15 minutes. This makes not a feature film, hence we meet Big Daddy and Hit Girl.

The character Big Daddy essentially asks “What if Batman and the Punisher were the same dude?”, which I found a lot of what-ifs for one film. Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz take these roles and absolutely run with them. These two veer to the complete opposite of the reality spectrum as well. Without revealing Big Daddy’s ultimate weapon, let’s just say that it looks like an A-Team upgrade to a James Bond gadget. Realism has long gone out the window before its introduction, but shortly after it a bazooka figures into the final battle scene.

The level of comic book cliché entrenched in Kick-Ass makes for some fun stuff, especially Christopher “Red Mist” Mintz-Plasse and his closing line, and Kick-Ass’s Spider-Man riffs when he dons his costume for the first time. I loved Cage’s dual Batman voice riffs when in costume. He changes his voice, a la Christian Bale, but in a slightly more familiar (and human) direction. But cliché also works against the characterization, especially with Big Daddy. His origin is a lazy pastiche of costumed heroes past, with little to differentiate him from them. Even Hit Girl is a female Robin who kills. Since Kick-Ass can’t achieve his namesake action, the plot conveniently borrows one of Darkman’s powers to make him more “believable” in his exploits. These tweaks are far slighter than the movie wants you to believe.

I did really like both Cage’s and Moretz’s performances in the film. She seemed really natural despite the over the top nature of her character, and Cage had one of his more grounded performances in quite a while. Their father-and-daughter connection was one of the better aspects, and served to make me wish that Kick-Ass would be written out of his own movie to make more room for them.

I found Mark Strong’s criminal kingpin really difficult to relate to as well. He had a signature color, supervillain style, and several scenes establishing his martial arts prowess (including a gi in that color), but had such weird reactions to superheroes that it felt off when his scenes dealt with that. He blew up emotionally with little provocation when confronted with the very idea of superheroes, undercutting his cool as a villain. His character is a good example of where the film held back when it should have pressed the limits on the ridiculous.

The biggest problem for me in Kick-Ass, though, was its spotty morality. In one scene Hit Girl rescues Kick-Ass from a confrontation with some hoods. In this scene she also straight up murders one guy who just seemed to be hanging out smoking, committing no onscreen violent crime, and a women who only broke a bottle to defend herself when all of her friends were killed by a psychotic little girl. What were their crimes exactly to deserve death? Just being with the wrong people? Like too many other aspects of the film, the moral compass never seemed to know where it wanted to go. A character death in the last act felt like it intended to be much deeper than the nature of the film allowed, and the death is utter comic book cliché with no necessity in driving the plot. Just another thrown together moment in Kick-Ass, which make up the majority of the film. 2 ½ stars

Get Low (2009)

Get Low is Robert Duvall’s movie from beginning to end, and it may be his most perfect casting in his career. Playing Felix Bush, a hermit in rural 1930s Tennessee, Duvall captures loneliness, frustration, anger and guilt in his performance to an incredible degree. Bush has a secret buried in himself, and in turn has buried himself in isolation for 40 years, but given his growing closeness to death he wishes to be unburdened of it.

To this end Bush turns first to the church (and a surprising appearance by Gerald McRaney, a face I had not seen in years) for a funeral arrangement. Finding no satisfaction here he leaves, but an eager young funeral home employee overhears his plea. Buddy (a grown Lucas Black of Sling Blade) offers to help him with his final goal, a “funeral party.” Bush invites four counties worth of people to tell their stories of him, a “crazy old nutter,” while he yet lives to hear them.

The burden of backstory the writers and director Aaron Schneider handle quite well. It feels ominous without overpowering the story in the present, and then delivers a terrible but believable blow when revealed.

The film belongs to its actors, though, starting with star Duvall and extending to Black’s fine performance as the conflicted but earnest Buddy, unsure as to how to proceed with an outrageous request from a dying man. Bill Murray delivers as the businessman willing to go to great lengths for Bush during a dry spell. I wondered at first if this was yet another chapter for Murray, possibly closing the period from Herman Blume in Rushmore through Don Johnston in Broken Flowers. But his Frank Quinn feels a little too familiar, like what Peter Venkman may have become without the success of the “Ghostbusters,” shilling the same old song to whoever would listen. It’s a great performance, just not in retrospect the revelation I thought I’d seen. Sissy Spacek turns in a great performance as a key to Bush’s past. She carries her part without revealing much more than a hurt, and locking that away almost as tightly as Bush himself does. Bill Cobbs has a similar role and handles it just as well. His stubbornness in the face of Bush’s ailing health speaks volumes as to the depth of their past and he conveys this brilliantly.

All of these parts fit so well together and tell such a rich story, from the acting, writing and direction, the beautiful cinematography and even the choices in gospel and music contemporary of the time, all of it works to build the story to its climax. The music in particular provides a kind of backbone to the film, an uplift where the painful events could drag it down, not unlike what a church should do for its congregation. 4 ½ stars

The Stone Reader (2002)

The Stone Reader could have been a fascinating documentary about forgotten works, novels lost to time through the indifference of readers at the wrong period, had writer/director Mark Moskowitz ever planned for that to be its purpose. Though presented as a tribute to the written word, its power and beauty, the film comes off as a love letter to Moskowitz’s own history of reading.

The film opens with Moskowitz’s rediscovery of a novel he had previously found unreadable, falling in love with it and wondering why he could find no more works by the author. This premise could easily provide a heartbreaking look at single book authors, and Moskowitz does look into this idea, but rather than seek out more of them he stops at authors famously unsuccessful during their lifetimes, such as the go to man in this category, Herman Melville. He also takes the longest route possible to reach his subject, Dow Mossman, where looking in the phone book might have helped.

In the midst of his search, however, Moskowitz drags out his film with every possibility to talk about himself. He brings out his mother to assure the viewer that he always read as a young man. He takes us through his gigs that keep him away from filming in the fall. He makes sure that we always know exactly how he feels about every aspect of the film, which would be fine if only it did not remove focus from the subject, the lost book The Stones of Summer. This makes the whole of the film overlong and rudderless at points where he should have been wrapping up, or at least making his point stronger. Moskowitz is entirely too present in his film, overshadowing the subject and shifting the spotlight to him. The Stone Reader becomes a vanity project as a result, which is a shame, as Moskowitz had a quite intriguing premise with so much fertile ground to explore. 2 stars

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World might be the first comic book series to deserve a franchise and not attempt one, rather than the other way around. Director Edgar Wright finds a way to weave all of the material together, and provide a satisfying conclusion, but when seven mangas worth of material combines it should yield more than a single film. There simply has to be worthwhile material left behind.

That’s not to say that I’d want to see more of the same film presented. The constant bombardment of referencing could easily spread out over three films and lose nothing. Some of it serves the movie brilliantly, as Wright may be the first director to understand what makes the video game references fun over tedious. By the time that the Seinfeld reference came through, though, I had had enough of them.

The movie’s biggest weakness is its villains’, the League of Evil Exes, lack of character. Each one has a single defining trait (if that) to which the entire character boils down. Nothing positive of Ramona’s past relationships ever comes up, even in metaphor as the rest of their existences, and that would have been more challenging to the Scott Pilgrim character than big punch ups are. Just as each of them represents some form of baggage or insecurity, so should the exes not have been so easily beaten by just punches or weak trickery. The kinds of heady ideas and relationship problems that creator Bryan Lee O’Malley raises in his stories are too complex for brawling to be a satisfactory conclusion.

The protagonists fare little better. For all his valiance in pursuing Ramona, Scott is too cowardly to tell her that he already has a girlfriend when they meet, and his back story shows little more to him. Ramona, beyond looking cute in matching hair and tights’ colors, shows little for which Scott should compete. She just never gets much time to shine as a person, to make the audience understand what Scott really sees in her outside of a couple of omens.

Visually, Wright brings a perfect look to Scott Pilgrim. The layers of effects that he uses from video games of the 16 bit era are phenomenal, from power ups to extra lives to draining meters. The disposal of his enemies, though, loses its charm with each successive victory, though it is very funny the first time shown. Much of the movie is like this, though. It settles for being cute where it could have gone for funny. Scott himself is begging to be deflated through most of the film, in spite of Michael Cera’s underplayed performance.

None of the cast gets a particularly great focus in the film. The best role was Kieran Culkin’s roommate character, sly, wise and the only one who seemed to know what he was doing. That set up never got old either. Anna Kendrick as Scott’s sister and Aubrey Plaza as his foul-mouthed friend both made the absolute most of their parts, too. These two were most likely to keep Scott in his place.

For all my criticism of its parts, though, the sum of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World does make a good film. For all the missed opportunities the compressed story may have, it also doesn’t hang around longer than the occasionally weak characters can support the scene. It moves at sometimes too brisk a pace while still feeling breezy. This takes away some of the film’s gravity but this is a film that uses an X-Men sew-on patch for symbolism. Maybe that’s all the gravity it really has coming to it. 3 ½ stars