The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The final instalment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is both the greatest visually, but the weakest character and plot-wise, but not by much. Batman is driven to seclusion because he has been vilified in the media and he just wants to hide away anyhow. Enter both Catwoman (a slinky marginalized toughy who just needs someone to love her) and Robin (a young beat cop with a heart for orphans) to draw the Dark Knight from his cave. But the real conjurer is the new supervillain Bane who holds Gotham hostage with bombs developed by Batman's tech corp.

The drama is interesting if you can follow what Bane says through is mask and you can buy the storyline if you cast concerns about timelines aside (especially for Batman's bones to knit in the pit). Not sure why I'm so negative on this all of a sudden, maybe I've grown tired of this genre... I do find the bigger questions asked by Bane compelling and the underground movements to thwart him are inspiring and of course the death and resurrection themes are always sublime.

Tangled (2010)

I enjoyed this modern, musical, Disney-fied take on the Rapunzel story. With such high returns on animated features these days, they typically gather a stellar crew of writers, animators, and producers.

As is typical, the side characters are the funniest and most interesting (the horse, the chameleon, the tavern crew, etc.). Some of the songs are fun, but a lot of them are sentimental crooning which, you know, get stuck in your head and will likely be memorized by young girls.

My pastor preached a sermon on this movie, likening it to a modern parable about identity and going home.

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TRON: Legacy (2010)

Oh Tron. So unbelievable, but oh, so luminescent. Disney cashes in on 3D, Jeff Bridges popularity, and a cult classic by releasing this souped up version of a movie based on an arcade game.

Kevin Flynn's son enters the videogame a couple decades after his father disappeared only to find that the dominant microchip force is bad and is looking for a way out of the videogame world and into the real world where they can take over! Yikes!

Not a great film. Probably fun to watch on the big screen with glasses.

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127 Hours (2010)

Danny Boyle and James Franco tell the gutwrenching tale of an outdoorsman who is trapped with no prospect of rescue in the remote wilds of Utah. It is a formidable film and the final sequences are stellar!

The film lovingly captures the sacredness of life.

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Ningen No Jôken (1959)

The Human Condition, a Japanese saga lasting 9 hours 39 minutes, gives a sobering look at empirialism, socialism, and humanism.

It is set during the 2nd World War in Manchuria where the Japanese have set up labour camps among the Manchus. Kaji, the lead character, is young and idealistic believing that the world can be better and people will respond well if they are only treated with basic dignity. He is placed as a supervisor over a team of coal miners and is continually at odds with his fellow supervisors. As such, he makes several enemies. The epic story takes Kaji away from his wife and into the infantry where he is put into training, then battle. The story spirals into despair as the Japanese lose ground and later the war. Kaji struggles with his ideals and how they collide with the brutality surrounding him.

The film is black and white and could be accused of being a little melodramatic, but the story and struggle is superb giving the viewer a lot to mull over.

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The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the film stating that this film is not based on the gospels, it begs the question: What is this film based on then?

I was both blessed and challenged by the closing 45 minutes of the film where Christ is tempted to withdraw from the cross and enjoy a human life and his ultimate decision not to. The opening two hours were more of an insult to the Christian faith than anything, not because the filmmakers were meaning harm, but because of the shallowness of the screenwriter's understanding of Jesus' message, life and death.

I remember the controversy when this film was released. I've always been intrigued by the concept and, being a Christian, felt it was my duty to give Scorsese and company the benefit of the doubt. But, John the Baptist is depicted as a hippy nudist colony leader and Jesus as a neurotic demoniac. I appreciate that Christ's humanity was emphasized, but his holiness was ignored.

I found it odd too that the North African culture was so prominently displayed rather than attempting to portray anything remotely Hebrew.

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The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Where there was satisfaction in the finality of the story, I think the resolution felt forced, a weak negotiation. The effects were terrific and the enigma at the beginning was fun, but the micro-stories during the battle were rather formulaic as was the final sacrifice.

A fun trilogy; I'm better for having watched it.

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The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

While there are obvious stylistic and realistic flaws in the telling of this story (as in Where do these "soldiers" find all that time to maintain such great hair? Where did Zion get all their supplies and energy to live deep beneath the earth? etc.), the story is compelling and brings out all the best questions about determinism. I personally enjoyed all the dialogue pertaining to free choice. That, and it's a great kung-fu flick too.

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Monsters vs Aliens (2009)

Dreamworks animated flicks, while they possess impressive artwork and creativity, lack the heart and dramatic story-telling that flows from Pixar studios. Monsters vs Aliens supports this.

A codependent bride gets zapped by some freak radioactive beam and becomes a giant (really, really big) amazonian woman. She is taken captive by a secret government agency and then used with other "monsters" to fight an alien invasion. She finds inner strength through this process rather than finding her identity in her weather man groom.

The other monsters were funny and Ginomica (the big chick) will certainly cause some girls to fret about body image, but the story lacked resonance.

Forgettable.

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Angels & Demons (2009)

This is Dan Brown, Ron Howard and Tom Hank's follow up story to the controversial title The Da Vinci Code that takes the viewer into another mystery at the heart of the Vatican. Full of outrageous clues and an insane plot, the film is a barrage of incoherent information, gruesome murders and fast camera movements. It's hard to know how the actors kept a straight face during the shoot.

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Right at Your Door (2006)

The twist at the end did very little to redeem this film. The preview showed promise and I think it could have been great. It wasn't.

A dirty biological bomb goes off in L.A. setting the entire metropolitan area under a cloud of a contagious disease. Brad seals himself inside his house after finding that it will be impossible to locate and get to his girlfriend, Lexy, who is downtown. He is faced with a dilemma when Lexy shows up at his house, coughing and asking to come in.

Some scenes drag on and on and while the opening sequence is pretty gripping, the last 3/4 of it lack depth and intensity.

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Terminator Salvation (2009)

Not really any reason why this film should have been made except to feature some special effects and make money on a lasting franchise. I expected more with Christian Bale taking the lead, but it really is quite boring.

The Machines still want to kill John Connor (the kid from Terminator 2) who is an adult now in 2018. So the Machines develop another elaborate trap for Connor involving another sophisticated machine. A couple children, being the remainder of the human Resistance in L.A., become central to the story and that doesn't help the movie.

Some cheesy lines, melodramatic scenes, and predictable ending make you wish John Connor would throw in the towel.

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Inglorious Basterds (2009)

This is the biggest surprise I've had in a long while. Because of the marketing surrounding Quentin Tarantino, I thought the film was going to be an ultraviolent blood bath. It wasn't! Instead, I found brilliant dialogue, intense cinematography and some very funny characters.

In occupied France, a Nazi becomes so notorious for his ability to sniff out hiding Jews that he is nicknamed the "Jew Hunter." In reply, an American platoon composed entirely of Jews terrorizes the German army by ambushing small groups of soldiers and brutally killing them. But this is really just the back story. A Jewish girl hiding out in Paris running a cinema plots her own vengeful massacre of the German high command.

As I mentioned the dialogue makes this film a winner. I loved that Tarantino didn't use the English language as a crutch - half the film is spoken in French and German. The final scene is the most brilliant and the most disturbing - well almost.

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Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)

This is the first silent film that I am reviewing on this blog. They have a hard time competing with speaking films I guess. As I saw Herzog's remake of this classic Nosferatu, I thought it would be cool to see how it built on this one. The stories are virtually identical - some divergence at the end.

The film is full of clues as the real estate agent travels to visit Count Orlok, a vampire and as he returns to find his town overcome by the plague.

A note if you do watch this, check out the various audio tracks at the beginning of the show. I found watching it in double speed helped with the super slow pacing and phrase panels.

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Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

So, I've recently discovered the films of Werner Herzog, so I zipped all of the ones I hadn't seen and got this 1979 remake of the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

The film opens with a sequence of mummified bodies, certainly the most gripping part of the film and the most horrifying too. The tale is that of Count Dracula, a vampire of Transylvania who is visited by a real estate agent, Mr. Harker, played by a much younger Bruno Ganz. The Count is super creepy which begs the question: Why in the world would Mr. Harker enter his decaying castle with this really long fingered dude with two pointy teeth and after having been warned by countless locals about the evils there. Anyway, he gets the warm welcome and Dracula makes his way by ship to Germany to dwell in his new home (and bring some rats along).

Herzog shot each sequence twice, once in English and once in German, thus all of the lines are spoken with thick German accents. The film has a strong low budget quality to it and the story just has the viewer shaking his head in disbelief. It has its moments, like a long out of print book with a missing cover.

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Nacho Libre (2006)

Jack Black becomes a man of the cloth and a luchador of the ring in this zany collaboration with Mike White.

Ignacio (Nacho for short), a junior monk in Mexico is faced with either finding a way to earn big money fast or continuing to feed slop to the orphans in his care. Finding some inspiration from a new and hot nun, Nacho teams up with a violent vagrant to become a local masked wrestler. He faces some moral compromises along the way.

The film is elegant and understated from the costumes to the music allowing Black to truly shine as a stout hearted athlete.

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Year One (2009)

Harold Ramis (a Ghostbuster and former SCTV member) directs this ridiculous comedy which blends biblical early history with cavemen.

Jack Black and Michael Cera are banished from their cave men tribe and journey to the end of the world (a nearby cliff) only to discover characters from Genesis (Cain & Abel, Adam & Eve, Abraham and Isaac, the city of Sodom, etc.). Every opportunity to weave in some sort of sexual deviancy (which isn't necessarily out of place in the Genesis story) is taken in this farce.

There are some wonderfully funny moments in the film, but it is still a "dumb comedy" and the few times when they try to make a great point, it has little meaning against its dopey backdrop.

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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

This classic monochrome film can still generate discussion and sentiment decades after it was released.

Young American men portray Germans eager to defend their country at the beginning of the Great War. No where in the film are the soldiers explicitly defined as German nor their enemies the British, French, and Americans. This is done on purpose so that a viewer would be able to sympathize with the war weary Germans even though they had been the enemy just over a decade previous to the making of the film.

The men, who are just barely men are broken in several ways by the trauma they witness on the front lines.

In fashion with its period, the film does err on the side of melodrama, but this adds to the potency of the film setting it right before the Second World War.

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The Perfect Storm (2000)

So, I get that the filmmakers wanted to eulogize and honour the dead at sea from Gloucester, Massachusetts, but why did they have to do it in such a melodramatic way?

When a fishing captain decides to return to sea during storm season and brings a ragtag group of money hungry down-and-outers who love to fish, they encounter the storm of the century. They meet it head on and go down in a blaze of glory while their moms and significant others languish at a fisherman's bar back in Gloucester.

While the fellowship between the boatmen is well noted and so is the hard life of a swordfish catcher. The movie makes a grave error by transforming the real men into comic book heros at sea with balls to big for their rainsuits. James Horner's sweeping orchestral soundtrack was way over the top leaving little room for any kind of real analysis or empathy towards the ocean's victims.

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4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007)

Winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a stark look at abortion behind the iron curtain in Romania circa 1987.

A university student seeks the help of her roommate in order to get an abortion. Having and performing abortions can earn you a prison term in Romania at this time and so everything must be done in stealth and secrecy. We are exposed to a high level of tension as the abortionist extorts his clients and as the abortion occurs.

Stylistically, it is identical to L'Enfant, a French Palme d'Or winner from a few years back. Long hand held shots coupled with long stationary camera shots. This style gives the film a very realistic feel and allows the actors to act off camera and for scenes to continue uninterrupted.

Without any kind of lecturing from the director or writer, viewers are given a full on look at the issue of both illegal and mid-term abortions. This is not an enjoyable film, but it is superbly made and has a lot to say to everyone who has an opinion on the issue.

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