Death at a Funeral (2007)

Hey look, it’s another one of those disaster comedies that I so dislike that I keep watching more of them.

This is of course not the American version with Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan, but strangely enough it is the one with Peter Dinklage, because he’s in both of them playing the same character (with a different name). I haven’t seen the new version and I probably never will, since it’s the same exact movie without the British edge to the humor, which makes it an entirely pointless remake. Also, thanks to that movie you probably know the whole plot already just from the previews. I guess that saves me from writing about it.

It’s really funny though even after the American previews spoiled the majority of the jokes. Just about every character is a total dick in some way or another, and those that aren’t keep getting shoved around like they’re worthless, or in Alan Tudyk’s case they get pumped full of hallucinogens. Alan’s performance was of course my favorite, although it was pretty weird hearing him speak with a faux-British accent. As mentioned up at the top there, everything is always going wrong until the end. There were some moments that just made me cringe and laugh at the same time; I kept having to remind myself that this is a movie, not my life. Nothing to worry about. Just laugh. So I did.

As I’m really not very good at writing reviews of movies themselves, I think I’ll end that right here. Instead I’m going to talk about remakes for a bit. This one had no reason to be remade in the English language whatsoever. I hate Hollywood a bit more for that. However, there has been the recent trend in remaking awesome Swedish films based on their source material, like Let the Right One In (to be Let Me In), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The former seems to be actually turning out very well, and I’m looking forward to its release. There hasn’t been much development on the latter yet, although interestingly there was rumor a while back that Yo-Landi Vi$$er of the somewhat-underground Die Antwoord was offered the role of Lisbeth. Unfortunately it was later confirmed along with the news that she had declined it. I think she would have been great; she’s got that weird look and intensity that Noomi Rapace put on the screen so well. I guess she didn’t think she could do it justice. Daniel Craig is confirmed as Mikael Blomkvist though, which seems alright to me.

Anyway, there have been some really good remakes in the past, and there will probably be more. It would be nice though if people would start coming up with their own ideas for movies.

The Other Guys

I don’t think I’ve seen that many buddy-cop movies. The most similar thing to this movie that I can think of is Rush Hour. The Other Guys has less action and gets a bit more ridiculous in its humor, and is altogether less memorable. However, it was a fun ride and probably Ferrell’s best work in a number of years.

The plot isn’t worth writing about really; where it shines is the dialogue. Sam L Jackson and The Rock start it off with some absolutely over-the-top action and Sam’s trademark foul-mouthing, and then Ferrell and Wahlberg take over for the rest of the movie. Ferrell of course the main source of laughs, playing a an overtly bland cop to foil Wahlberg, who basically plays himself. It’s kind of similar to Dinner for Schmucks really, in that Ferrell is kind of playing a happy idiot, but there’s more to him than that; he has a dark past that he’s trying to bury with his ever-so-normal life, which isn’t really normal. I particularly enjoyed the the way every hot girl he comes in contact with becomes instantly infatuated with him, much to Wahlberg’s confusion.

It’s a fun enough movie and it really doesn’t try to stick to any sort of reality, which is cool. I think making it a cop movie helped to reign it in a little which may have helped keeping it from getting too ridiculous to stay funny, but I miss Anchorman.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo who Played with Fire

It’s actually two movies, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who Played with Fire, and there’s another one coming out later called The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. I just thought since these words will be about both movies I should get them both in the title.

I watched the first movie shortly after Roger Ebert started going nuts over it on the twitters. The main reason I think was because of the girl, one Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) whose gothic portrayal interested me a lot. You don’t see a lot of movies like this with protagonists like that. Anyway, the trilogy of Swedish movies is based on a book trilogy which I haven’t read, collectively called the Millennium Trilogy. The title of the book the first film is based on literally translates to “Men Who Hate Women,” which is the main theme of the story. There’s lots of rape, murder, and various other brutality, and some excellent retaliation in the form of Lisbeth’s vengeful personality.

The first movie is a cold-case murder mystery amid a wonderful character study. The other protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist, is an investigative reporter who runs foul of some powerful people and gets set up for some jail time. He gets six months before he has to go though, and some rich old guy contacts him about investigating the disappearance of his adopted daughter forty years ago. Turns out she was his babysitter a little while before that so he has some personal stake in it and accepts. Meanwhile, Lisbeth has an interest in this guy’s life because she was hired to investigate him, and ends up helping him with the case. She’s just gone through some rather nasty stuff with some dastardly men (which she handled in a completely badass way), and over time begins to see Mikael as a light of hope in a world that seems set on hurting her, while clinging to her mantra of solitude. This leads to some great relationship stuff and an awesome conclusion to the mystery.

Aside from the story, the film is great because it’s quite a slow film, taking its time to show beautiful and horrific scenes, build characters, and make the audience invest themselves in the investigation through wonderfully engaging riddle-solving. There isn’t a terrific amount of action in this one, but there are moments that are very gripping. It’s very easy to get emotionally involved in it.

The second film was directed by a different guy, so it’s a bit different. There’s a lot more action and a fair bit more skin. Still, it continues the story pretty brilliantly and the two main characters continue to be played to perfection. A little disappointingly though, Lisbeth and Mikael don’t actually meet up until the end of the film. They have tenuous contact here and there but mostly it’s two separate but interacting storylines. I suppose it’s necessitated by Lisbeth’s continued claim to loner-hood, but I would have enjoyed some more interaction between the main characters.

I can’t really go into the story much because the plot relies on the story from the first film, and thus discussing it would require explaining the stuff I left out in my first summary. It mostly focuses on a bunch of people in governmental/police positions taking advantage of women who no one cares about, which is of course the theme of these stories. There’s a bunch more murder and stuff and our heroes get embroiled in it by association. Instead of Mikael getting set up this time it’s Lisbeth, and Mikael sets out to clear her name. Lisbeth of course would rather take it into her own hands despite the heightened danger posed by some rather imposing fellows. Still, she hands out a few cans of whoop-ass, and with the help of Mikael and his team, brings a little justice to the world.

A very good movie, but not as good as the first. I’m hoping the third can live up to it.

This is the first time I’ve seen an indie/foreign film in a theater. Living in the DC area has its perks, I guess. Parking was ridiculous though. Also the subtitles weren’t integrated at all well; they were always completely white with no outline, so you couldn’t really read them at all during light-colored scenes. Guess I’ll have to wait until the Blu-Ray comes out to really know what’s going on.

Dinner for Schmucks

This is what you might call a disaster-comedy film; not in the sense that it’s a disastrous failure (it isn’t), but that everything consistently goes wrong. In the past I’ve never really enjoyed movies of this sort. As a pessimist I get upset when stuff happens as I expect it to. However, there’s a lot to like about this movie, so it kind of makes it okay.

Steve Carell stars as a pretty charming middle-aged guy who has a hobby in mouse-taxidermy, making pretty awesome dioramas mostly depicting events from his sad life. Still, he’s a very happy guy pretty much all the time, seemingly ignorant of the destruction he’s causing (though always apologetic afterwards). His intervention in the life of Paul Rudd’s character takes every wrong turn possible but of course ends happily.

The main event of course is the titular dinner, in which a bunch of business executives bring “extraordinary people” to laugh at so they feel less like the nincompoops that they are. Tim (Rudd) brings Barry (Carell) to the dinner so he can secure his place in a new office and get a bigger paycheck. The lead-up to the dinner establishes that Tim isn’t doing this out of spite for Barry, and that he’s really just a good guy who’s trying to impress a girl by being successful, so you’re not supposed to hate him. Anyway the dinner is a lot of fun, bringing in Zach Gaifianakis, Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd, and a bunch of other funny people to show off their inane talents. Before and after the main even we are also blessed with the presence of Jemaine Clement in a role very unlike his character in Flight of the Conchords.

The movie is a remake of a French film which I know almost nothing about, but I assume it’s probably better. The ridiculousness of a lot of the situations is just a bit too much. Still, it was pretty funny, and Steve Carell is always fun to watch. Also the Fool on the Hill intro was pretty great.

Despicable Me

This is one of those movies that looked like it might be really cool when information started getting out about it. The shadow-profile of the protagonist, Gru, looked really stylish and not very funny. Then the minions became the main focus, and they were all funny and stuff. Still cool. Then the kid plotline reared its ugly head and all hope was lost. Still, it turned out to not be a complete bust.

The story is that this Russian-esque, Steve Carell-voiced, so-called villain is trying to be more of a real villain and thusly decides to steal the moon. Turns out visiting the moon has been a life-long dream of his, so it’s kind of a big deal for him. He has to deal with a new-comer villain to reach that goal, and in a rather stupid twist of events, it seems the only way to do this is to adopt three horribly cute girls who have a talent for selling cookies. The movie then becomes less about Gru’s faulty masterminding than it is about melting his cold heart and realizing that he likes taking care of cute things. You can guess how it ends.

It’s still quite a funny movie though. There are a bunch of pretty great one-liners and lots of explosive slapstick comedy. The minions (little yellow dudes) are of course a large source of laughs, with their unintelligible jabbering and even more slapstick humor. Even the kids are funny from time to time, although usually they just ended up annoying me. I think it would have been a much more enjoyable thing if they’d found some other way to make it an acceptable kids’ movie. Heck, they could have just made it a short.

Inception

 

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.

Christopher Nolan’s made some good movies. These include Memento and The Dark Knight. Those two movies in particular are important to mention in reference to this movie, because it probably wouldn’t exist without them; it is in a way the combination of the first’s cerebral jack-hammering and the latter’s enormous action-film scope. Nolan’s been working on this for a while, and 10 years after its inception (heh), it’s finally come to life and the big screen.

The conceit (yay new word) of the film is that there’s this new technology of some sort that allows people to insert themselves into other people’s dreams, and sometimes have rather extensive control over them; seemingly the most profitable use of this tech is to extract information from a sleeper’s mind. Leonardo DiCaprio has taken this as his main gig. His life is pretty screwed up though, and this screwed-upness starts leaking into his carefully constructed mental heists. With the help of a fantastic cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page, Leo attempts to pull off one more caper without destroying himself while under the influence of heavy sedatives.

Dreams are weird. The movie deals a whole lot with lucid dreaming and that thing where you keep waking up over and over before you actually wake up, which has always bugged the hell outta me. Since pretty much anything can happen in a dream, this makes the possible roads the movie could take pretty limitless; of course it is limited by a ~2.5 hour timespan and a budget less than the United State’s national debt, so it can’t be that amazing. Still, it’s pretty darn. There’s lots of antigravity stuff and neat architectural tricks, and a healthy dose of explosions and gunfire.

Aside from the action there’s some very nice and sometimes subtle emotional stuff going on, which I thought made the movie all that much better. The best part of it though is the uncertainty of what’s actually happening; there’s really no way to be sure if any of it is actually happening outside of someone’s mind. I got a big kick out of the audience’s reaction at the end. There are probably going to be a lot of people who hate it just because of that.

Anyway. Best movie of the year so far. Go see it.

Predators

The first Predator movie was good mostly because of Ahnold’s incapability to be taken completely seriously, which led to funny bits within a lot of macho gun-slinging and blood-letting with neat sci-fi monsters and junk. A great combination. Ahnold is not in this one; still, it doesn’t really suffer for it.

Quite purposefully, Predators mirrors the second movie in the Alien series (Aliens), by attaching an ‘s’ to the end of the title. It also has more than one baddy oddly enough. Aliens had an ensemble cast, and so does this one. Aliens was a good movie, and so is this one. The problem with most of the other Predator sequels has been an overabundance of action and very little in the way of multi-dimensional characters; this time around, a whole ton of effort was put into finding good actors and giving them great developmental arcs (though varying in length, of course. This is still a slasher movie of sorts). There are short bursts of action throughout the movie, surrounded by quite nice character interaction, including a few side-busting quips from one or two of the guys.

Anyway, the movie’s about a bunch of hard-asses that get stranded in some place they don’t recognize in order to be hunted down by Predators for sport. They all have unique stories related only in the aspect of badassery. As you might expect, the movie involves cutting them down one-by-one until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, which I think was accomplished quite nicely.

Most of the strategic decisions are believable, though sometimes the explanations seem a bit coddling. Adrien Brody is usually the man with the plan, but doesn’t always tell everyone, which makes him cooler. I’m really quite happy with most of the roles he’s taken lately. I guess he figures one Oscar is enough. The rest of the cast varies in its colorfulness; Topher Grace seems a bit awkward sometimes, much like in Spidy III, but he doesn’t suck as much as that did. Some guy named Walton Goggins plays a convict-type and provides most of the comedy. Danny Trejo is his awesome self as usual, Laurence Fishburn doesn’t quite hit his stride but works well enough, and some Asian dude is pretty awesome in the stereotypical Asian action-hero fashion. The rest I don’t really care all that much about.

I suppose if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you probably won’t like this movie. Since I am definitely one of those dudes, I kept seeing things in here that just made me smile like a baby in a room full of bright colored objects. Robert Rodriguez now has a significant bit more of my respect.

Now let’s all try to forget Predator 2 and all those AVP abominations.