Bond: Skyfall (2012)

It was good. Go see it.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Overall, The film was pretty damn good. “The Dark Knight” was better, but they are both fantastic films.

SO to get it out, here are a few quips that totally stood out.

1.     Understanding what batman says is one thing, but understanding Bane is another. Both of their voices were so altered at times that it was difficult to keep up with what they were saying, especially when they were talking to each other in one of their fight scenes.

2.     Cheesy one-liners were amazing and modestly done too. They got it out and moved on, but I am very very glad they held on to the cheesy one-liners.

3.     There were a few plot twists (which I dislike) that altered very important information of the film. (I will discuss this later)

4.     Once again, lots of use of bombs and the classic ticking clock to build suspense. (I’m sort of over the whole ticking clock plot device, it’s been used too much in Nolan’s movies and I felt like I was just going through the motions.)

5.     Did anyone notice the giant Saks Fifth Avenue sign that was total product placement during the climax of the film?

Alright, so:

WRITING:

The first Dark Knight film was perfectly done. It fit script structure perfectly and was extremely well executed. It was a model for the perfect cookie-cut movie. The Dark Knight Rises on the other hand was a little bit looser and felt more organic with its storyline.

Being looser had some good and bad side effects.

It has an overwhelming world-view, too much. There was no centralized or focused law or balance of the world like the dark knight has. The Dark Knight is very Taoist and has a great balance between light and dark, good and evil, etc. The Dark Knight Rises on the other hand seemed to be cluttered with too many opinions and I’m not sure if Nolan knew exactly what he wanted to say about the world, so he crammed everything in. It kind of made the story lack unity; the scenes didn’t seem to fit together as well this time.

The arc was a little bit more subdued beneath the straight-foreword diction of the main characters bluntly stating their opinions of the world and politics.

The plot twists were a bit annoying too. Nolan knew what scenes he wanted in the film, but spent more time finding out where to put them than creating a cause and effect chain that helps the story grow. (Dark Knight was brilliant at this, it was like a Rube Goldberg Machine)

The discouraging thing about the plot twists, is that they would lead you to believe one thing, and then change it. I feel lied to (The flashbacks made it worse) because it should have been done where the bad guys create suspense by telling the audience something vague (it HAS to be vague) and it is revealed later that it was a step backwards so they could take 3 steps foreword, or there is a much bigger plan at stake: playing things out like a chess game.

(X-files and Battlestar Gallactica do this very well: “we have other plans for Mr. Mulder”)

Instead, the information was told to the audience (very pertinent information to the storyline), which was then changed after we are strung along for two thirds of the movie. This is very aggravating, because you cant go back and change facts.

Yes, it is okay to go back and change perspective or a new way to look at the motivation as to why someone did something, but to go back and change who did what while turning a supporting character into the lead villain (as well as breaking the reality bar) is just bad writing.

(They also tied loose ends of plot points from the first film through flashbacks, and I found this to be more distracting and dwelling on the past rather than moving foreword- although it is a trilogy which is sort of bookended.)

ON A BRIGHTER NOTE:

Anne Hathaway’s character and performance was amazing and brilliant.

(Anne Hathaway plays the protagonist who overcomes her inability to trust people.)

What I like about her character is:

She understands her identity and doesn’t rely on anyone else to know who she is, which makes her a very independent and strong-willed character, unlike many protagonists in most movies, and also unlike many people.

At the same time, she is also very weak, since her flaw is her inability to trust people. This makes her a great character facing a double-edged dilemma that she has to overcome.

What brings the character to a whole other level is the fact that she is desperate and somewhat depressed.

Her being “broken” is what makes her passionate.

It’s like how we can have no light without the dark, there needs to be some value of contrast for either to exist.

It is this balance of opposites, and the use of these opposites in correlation with one another in order to create contrast that makes the writing (and more importantly the characters) in these films great.

In one scene, Bane even says, “without hope, there can be no suffering”

(Which in a way is also kind of saying that war is balance)

Catwoman is a perfect paradigm of this perpetual balance that Nolan creates.

Furthermore, I would also like to say that it was really nice seeing catwoman NOT being slutty. It was wonderful seeing a woman portrayed in a respectable manner again.

As for the rest of the writing, I feel like it was mostly cluttered by trying to tie up loose ends and having too many sub-themes.

·       Bookending “Why do we fall Bruce? So we learn to pick ourselves up.”

·       Lots of flashbacks trying to prove what they said earlier in the first film.

o   Reminds me of “Austin Powers: Goldmember”:

“We have more in common than you think – Yeah, uh huh, I said that. ”

·       Heavy exposition in some spots

o   Too much explaining what’s going on, and too much regurgitating backstory.

o   I can’t recall which scenes had this, it was minimal, but when it happened, it was pretty blunt.

·       The plot started off really good, but then got cluttered as the film progressed.

·       Characters died, then surprise, they’re not really dead. Please stop it.

Essentially, I feel like the movie is kind of about the world ending, in a way saying, “if the world were to end tomorrow, and you knew it, what would you do?”

(In a way of encouraging/inspiring the audience to become more humane and look at their own morals)

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The locations were much simpler in this movie, which made it feel much more down-to-earth. The angles were a lot less bold/edgy, so they didn’t look as cool, but I think it was a really good choice and helped the audience get absorbed into the story more.

(I love the framing when Bruce speaks to Alfred for the last time in the mansion: the frame is nicely balanced by a window in the background, nothing more. Brilliant. That one stood out to me as a beautiful shot in its simplicity.)

As for the action and fight scenes, those didn’t appeal to me too much.

The fight scenes didn’t have much choreography to them, it was mainly just a bunch of punches and cuts back and forth. It could have been so much more. They also sort of detracted from the story and often times it felt like the scenes should have ended sooner and got back to the story. (Ip Man and Princess Bride are 2 great examples of great fight choreography.)

SOUND DESIGN

The sound design was really interesting. There were a lot of lines which were spoken almost as a whisper (mostly by Catwoman) and it brought a new intensity to the series.

On the down side, Bane and Batman were hard to hear.

I can’t really remember the music too much other than the low French horn tone, so it must have been good if it was so invisible.

And that is pretty much it for the dark knight!! It was very enjoyable regardless of my picky filmic nature, and I highly encourage seeing it.

Prometheus (2012)

Synopsis

The movie was very “gay”. I believe it should have been called probe-etheus. The film was about discovering that god is actually a tall ripped clean shaven naked dude and he is haunted by giant vagina monsters with vaginal dentada. (Even the penis-looking snake monster from the beginning was a vagina when they pulled back the foreskin)

Review:

Prometheus was… Okay.

I found the movie to be very preachy, arguing the purpose of life, proving over and over again the point that there is no point.

What’s aggravating about this is that they act all proud of themselves, for arguing a paradox that will never be solved… because it’s a paradox. And they act all proud, thinking they are really intellectual and creative.

What they should have done is come up with a better philosophy, stating something like: “it doesn’t matter where we come from, we should appreciate what and who we have now. Now fuck these aliens that are trying to eat us, lets go home.”

For 2 hours, they were calling the kettle black while I kept thinking: I don’t care what color the kettle is, give me some frakin tea!

What they were so preachy about was that humanity is all we have, and our ability to feel, is what makes us human and not robots. That our ability to be offended makes us human… not robots.

“I am a human, and u r a robot. We have emotions and u don’t. does that hurt your feelings? Oh wait, no it doesn’t cus you’re a robot.”
Really? I had no idea? Why don’t you spell it out for me a little more? Can we watch this closed caption when it moves to Netflix?

What bothered me about the film was that it told us everything opposed to showing it to us. A much better read is Hunger Games or anything that Asimov wrote. They know how to say things without outright saying them.

As for structure, it was decent, you can tell they used a stencil to write it, but the set ups and payoffs were lame, there really isn’t much plot to talk about and a whole lot isn’t revealed. Instead the just had a couple somewhat clever plot twists that slowly released more information, that was factual about aliens and yet still vague and I found myself thinking, what’s the point?

The information sucked and it was very straightforward.

(Not to be such a negative nancy, but if you want to see a good movie, watch megamind, or how to train your dragon those fit structure well and actually release good information as the characters develop. Also, anyone can enjoy it.)

Thematically, it was extremely preachy about creationism and pointing out how close we are to knowing exactly where we come from while also saying about how curiousity killed the cat. That was its most redeeming quality structurally for the story.

For 2 hours they tempted the question of god, but it didn’t have any answers and it didn’t stimulate any thought in my head about existence. It was existentialist without any insight or, well, any existentialism either. It was a waste of my time.

What really bothers me is that its about going to a new planet, when a movie does this, there is so much potential to create a whole new world with laws, physics, religion, and a whole balance of how the planet works. This being a movie like that: they had so much potential, but they squandered it.

It’s essentially a superhero movie, but they didn’t have any powers or any weaknesses, and everything just seemed flat, uncreative, and boring.

Watchmen sets up the world rules extremely well, which takes place on earth in the 60’s. Prometheus is in a whole other galaxy, but is basically Egypt on earth, except there is no reality bar, and it’s a lot more boring.

The set ups and payoffs didn’t stack up to anything great. It was like, lets do this, then lets do this, and then find a way to link the two in post. It was like, 6 unrelated plot points spread out loosely throughout the film.

 (im excuited to see dark knight rises, Christopher Nolan has great set ups and payoffs where onepayoff leads into another setup, which in cause and effect, grows the movie and makes it more exciting as it builds, plus there’s like 130 plot points instead of 6)

Moreover, how it was written:

If the movie had a love scene, this is how it would have went:

“I really really like you”
“I really really like you as well”
“Let us consummate our liking eachother”
“Okey doke”

zip

Except, (SPOILER ALERT) it didn’t have a love scene it just had a big black guy bang the cold-hearted captain (Played by Charlize Theron)

Another thing that I thought was lame was the robot who turned on everyone was a complete Aryan Nazi:

“Okay, lets build a perfect human being, except he’ll be a robot. So he’ll be perfect in every way except he wont have a soul. Lets give him blonde hair and blue eyes, and while we’re at it, lets give him a British accent, so he’s not entirely a nazi. Besides, it will make him seem more advanced because everyone in the future has a British accent.”

It was also dispointing to find that there was no comic relief. The movie took itself very seriously. Way too pretentious.

Music and lighting was cliché, following trends. I found it interesting they paid tribute to 2001 a space odyssey a couple times with the music, not the dance of the blue Danube, but it was like violins humming, when there’s the obelisk, they do that once or twice in prometheus.

As for the lighting, it was mostly made of midtones. A lot of films have been doing this lately to try and replicate film on digital. What’s interesting is that DP’s have been trending to light the characters eyes with eye lights then softly fill their faces, but the ratios are always 1:2 ratios the entire time.  This is VERY different from the original Alien movies.

The original Alien and Aliens had midtones on all the humans and super harsh ratios (1:8) on all the aliens, and the music did the same, which was cool. Now everything with Prometheus was very flat all in all. The cool connection between the two was that the lights were built into the set design so the actors could be blocked around the set really well, except the blocking in aliens is amazing and Prometheus blocking sucked. A couple cool shots looked cool and those are all in the trailer. Everything else was medium shots basically, which would have worked if the writing was better.

That's prettymuch it for prometheus. keep Checkin in for more more movie reviews and please check out my webiste. Thank you! :)

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

Snow white and the huntsman

So I saw Snow White and the Huntsman today with my Dad and brother for fathers day and it was a pretty bad movie all around.

STORY

First off, the writing was bad. It was a weak series of plot points spread far and thin, there weren’t any major events really, it was mostly just a bunch of filler and unnecessary action for special effects to take place. There really wasn’t any plot going on and the events seemed unrelated for the most part (Like, lets put a troll in this scene because we can.)

Secondly, the scenes didn’t really Segway into one another and the intercutting of scenes was also weak and didn’t intensify it at all. Set ups and payoffs were few and far between as well.

On a more important note, there was very little theme expressed in the movie. Whenever there was a moral debate being questioned, it was told through extremely on-the-nose dialogue. The writing had very little subtlety or tact. In fact, the characters were very one-dimensional and too much time was spent trying to give them some sort of backstory rather than progressing their inner moral growth.

What bothers me the most is that they had this whole world to build and they squandered it. When creating a fantasy film, the possibilities are endless. There are infinite existentialist ways of telling your story and being as creative as possible, but these Hollywood big-budget buttholes  used a stencil to write this script.

They had this whole other world to create with its own set of rules and laws and magic but they didn’t do anything with it. There was no “magic comes at a price” or law of equivalent exchange, sense of karma, or any sort of world-view like that. The entire movie was just the same as putting babies on spikes for 2 hours with the only reason being because she is evil and jealous.

This movie was already a pre-sold franchise with being an adaptation with a handful of top stars as well as publicity and trends from shows like Once Upon a Time. They had so much potential to run with it however they wanted and to extrapolate the story so much further, but they completely fell short.

All in all, very poor writing.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The lighting was somewhat interesting by the fact that it wasn’t. I noticed that most of the movie was trending to current camera schemes and what seems to be becoming a cliché trend of current technology.

As many of you may know, digital has had a much shorter latitude than film until recent years. In effect, many digital narratives have used large silks or Kino-flos to get better gradients and somewhat emulate the look of film. Cameras are also advancing today to get wider latitudes, and in effect, Snow White and the Huntsman ended up looking very flat.

In the films defense, an interesting thing they did was light the characters eyes to tell their emotion (very much like how they did in the avengers) since they eyes are a sort of window to the soul, which also makes sense as to why the lighting looked so flat.

In Hollywood, it used to be “light the actors, not the set”, now it seems to be, “Light their eyes and the rest will take care of itself.” I find this true for melo-dramas and soap operas, but it doesn’t work with trying to be cinematic, particularly when it comes to choosing camera angles.

Most shots were eye-level close chest shots and medium-wides. I found this very boring cinematically since camera placement plays a huge role in visually telling the story. I think their focus was in the wrong place.

Occasionally there would be a cool shot here or there that may have been a birds eye shot from a helicopter or some time lapse on a slider, but I found these to be more distracting from the other shots rather than adding anything to the story. the shots would work much better as photographs, but they were distracting when cut with the other (quite objective) shots. I also believe this also further disrupted the rhythm of the cutting of the film for the editor.

EDITING

I feel that the editor didn’t have much say in how the film was edited. There were many shots that should have been left out, but the director or producer was probably pulling the strings while remembering how expensive each of those unnecessary shots was.

This also had a large effect on how the editor kept on cutting back to stale footage. Where the director should have chosen to push in for an intense moment or pull out to make it more intimate, he instead shot some “pretty” shots so the editing would go from a close up to an extremely wide helicopter shot, then back to the same close up. Most good movies would either choose to intensify it, or pull back.

OTHER

As for acting, the best acting of the film was from Charlize Theron, who half the time was just yelling at the camera.

A film theorist (I believe it was Bazin) had once said that the more we show in our films, the more we spell out to the audience, the less involved they will get. A great example is jaws, we get pretty absorbed into it through most of the film, then when we see the cheesy pain-in-the-ass mechanical shark.

This film went terribly overboard on special effects. Instead of just biting a poisonous apple and seeing it’s effect on Snow, we have to go into a dream sequence of the apple falling and turning into a hedgehog instead. This is one instance of many which had the sole purpose of showing “cool” special effects, which distracted from the story and ruined the shot selection/rhythm of the film.

A couple of the shots looked kinda cool, but you might as well just watch the trailer. It is actually a very good trailer which has all the best shots in it, and it will be much more worth your time and money to just watch the trailer then go buy a book like Jurassic park or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Dq2psogSw