Neil Marshall's career in the action-horror genre has been increasing along with the success of his last two films, Dog Soldiers and The Descent. But the tame box offices sales and quick release to DVD of his most recent film, Doomsday, could be seen as something of a setback. But not necessarily: these types of dystopian future punk flicks generally don't receive much immediate widespread appeal at first until they reanimated from seeming death by a rabid cult audience. Think Mad Max, Escape from New York, and The Warriors.
But then again, it's impossible to watch Doomsday and not think of those films.
A viral outbreak has left Scotland quarantined and its inhabitants left to become a savage mix of tribal society and future technology. Thirty years since confinement, an elite group must go back into the heart of this wasteland to retrieve a cure for the disease before it spreads to the general population. Everything from mohawked marauders to a bit of anachronistic medieval knights inhabit this no-man's land. Of course, there is plenty of car chases and gratuitous gore delivered along the way.
The way that this movie often portrays itself as a heavy handed homage to these very genre films seems to have initially stunted the appeal of its release as an unimaginative draw back, though it doesn't need to be. Fans of these types of films will get a real kick out of spotting these (very intentional, as the audio commentary explains) references to the classics of the genre. And it does a mighty fine job at this, never seeming to parody itself, yet not taking itself too seriously.
Less exciting is the feeling of the movie being a retread through more recent British viral apocalypse films, such as 28 Days Later or Children of Men. Seen as an update of a classic genre, Doomsday works; seen as cash-in on a recent trend, the film does little that's new.
Either way, the movie is fun to watch if you're willing to let these issues of originality take a back seat. The DVD release comes with several features that give a little behind the scenes insight into how they achieved such a level of gore and explosive violence within a relatively limited budget.
Utterly confusing is the DVD's claim to feature “2 movies in 1” since it runs both the theatrical version and the unrated version. This is only true if you consider a 4 minute difference in running time to be a different film. I'm as big of a fan of additional risque gore scenes as anybody, but these extra minutes don't deliver that either, but instead add a bit of character development.
And while Doomsday may not significantly add to Neil Marshall's overall career development, if he manages to establish himself as a widely respected action-horror director with his future releases, then maybe Doomsday will get the proper revisits that it deserves. It's a fun, action packed genre film, which is exactly what it wants to be.
I usually never follow hype. And this new re-imagining of the Batman legacy is, inescapably, bound in it. Already it would have been one of the most highly anticipated superhero flicks even before it tragically became a final legacy for actor Heath Ledger. Before the opening trailers even rolled, there was buzz in the audience of “biggest opening box office sales” and “posthumous Oscars.”
But there is something unique to the Batman myth that makes this all seem, well, justified. Despite its bell-curve dip into camp, in the hands of director Christopher Nolan the franchise has reemerged not only to redefine Batman's cinematic legacy but also the entire genre of superhero films as a whole, showing that these types of films can be a vehicle for more then just big budget effects; they can be a vehicle for powerful storytelling as well.
And though The Dark Knight is not perfect, the film overall almost singlehandedly is elevating the standard of what a super hero genre film can be. It's darker, more tragic, and more human then any such film that has come before. Batman is more then just another cool hero concept in tights, he is the embodiment of vigilante justice, capable of exploring the entire concept of what it means to be a hero or a villain. The Joker is here more then just one of the comic's most popular villains, rather his misanthropic sadism positions him to dig his nails deep under the seeming order of society to expose the raw nerves that lie beneath.
The film's opening scene has a group of clown-masked thugs robing a high security bank. Each time one goon completes his needed role in the operation, another kills him until only one remains. Even among criminals, this seems a perverted logic: no organized crime unite is sustainable without loyalty. But Ledger's Joker is not Jack Nicholson's theatrical Joker, and he doesn't represent any organized crime sensibilities. When he extorts Gotham's top crime bosses of half their entire bank holdings, he simply burns his share of the money. What's most frightening about this Joker is not that he's insane, but that he might be an ideologue.
In fact the movie is carried less by plot and more by its carefully established themes: the line between good and bad; order and chaos. But while it is this very attempt at superhero-film-as-analogy-for-the-human-condition that elevates The Dark Knight above its peers, it can also be problematic.
The film's treatment of the Joker, who despite Ledger's sputtering desperate performance which paints the Joker as the most emotionally empathetic character, overall lacks a moral ambiguity and no real emotional vulnerability so that he seemingly operates with the supernatural resolution of pure evil. Is Nolan's conclusion that the world does in fact possess an inherent evil, a world which is black and white? The Joker has no background, no history - he's relentlessly masochistic and never suggests why his brilliance has lead him towards evil and not good.
Don't get me wrong, this is not to say Ledger's performance is anything less than spectacular. If he were to get a much speculated award nomination, it wouldn't be undeserved. But the performance alone is unable to shed the sense that some comic book sensibilities come creeping back into a genre film which needs to act as a film and not simply a big budget adaptation. In a film that attempts to more fully explore themes of good and evil that are only touched on in the comic, the fact the the Joker is irreducibly bad feels like a missed opportunity.
To that end, it makes more sense to follow the developments of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne and Aaron Eckhart's Harvy Dent, who struggle with the issue of being a hero across the film.
The film also effectively utilizes a sense that Gotham city is itself a character, helping to elevate the movie's themes to a societal level. Duologue is often filmed in sweeping pans that emphasis the beautiful metropolitan landscape behind them, and suggests that these characters are products of this very environment and just as is the resulting violence. It is this towering order of civilization, money, and power that much like the Joker suggests, is only thinly veiled chaos.
Most comic to film adaptation suffer from the awkward transition of mediums, each with different conventions and expectations. The Dark Knight picks up where Batman Begins left off: sowing that comic book films can be great films, not just a good adaptation. This marks the beginning of a new era in comic book films, one which makes it interesting to see where we will go from here, and one which is fully deserving of its hype.
Hollywood has been churning out blockbuster cinematic adaptations of comic books stories and their inevitable sequels with the grace and ease of an assembly line that by now they surely have perfected the craft.
Hellboy II is no exception. It's entertaining summer fare; requiring only that you give your mind a rest and absorb the action, the romantic subplot, the special effects wizardry, and the elves. This is more summertime fun for the backyard barbecue-set. Where Hellboy II really stands out is on the same merits as its predecessor: Ron Pearlman is a damn charming bastard in red latex body-paint and foam rubber chest muscles. No debates over who's the best Batman here; with Pearlman at the helm of the title role, his gruff features and snappy dry-drunk wit, it could hardly be imagined that anyone else would dare fill those boots.
The film itself moves along with a very comic book like sense of recklessness in every aspect from the city landscape that gets destroyed in order to save it, to the narrative logic of the supernatural fairy-tale world that infiltrates New York City. An elvish take over of the human race? Sure. These same elves live under the Brooklyn Bridge? Don't ask so many questions! Hellboy never over-sentimentalizes, never over-dramatizes so that our uncritical imaginations are free to run like wild. It's all the more entertaining for it.
An ancient war between humans and elves came to a halt when the elves developed an army of indestructible golden clockwork warriors and subsequently whooped human ass. The elvish kings, being a fair and noble race of ur-humans, formed a pact where the crown that controlled the golden army would be broken into three pieces in exchange for everlasting peace. Well, as we all know, the humans ended up populating the earth with Wall-Marts and the elves ended up moving under the Brooklyn Bridge. Now an elvish prince wants to regain his specie's lost power, reassemble the crown, command the golden army, crush the humans, and play out the classic tale of superhero vs. random nasty.
I cringe at having to legitimize the preponderance of sudden media buzzwords, but Hellboy II makes even heavier use of a certain steampunk aesthetic that affords it a unique roll in the eyes of a particular target audience. This combination of Jules Vernes inspired elegance in the meshing of leather and brass technology might be another fickle internet driven trend (Snakes on a Plane, anyone?), but it does help the Hellboy franchise exist in a world that is independent from that of the Batmans, Hulks, and X-mens already out there. Plus it admittedly looks darn cool.
But again, it is within Ron Pearlman's performance that the film is able to squeeze snappy one-liners in the middle of a dramatic sequence and not make you roll your eyes. He is the embodiment of the bad-ass anti-hero, who does what he wants and doesn't take bull from nobody, including sassy movie reviewers. Overall the film maintains a well balanced good humor, which is less a testament to it being terribly knee slapping funny and more to its success at achieving a comic book slapstick-edness.
But perhaps Hollywood has gotten a bit too good at this whole effortless comic book, sci-fi, action business. The underworld elvish/ goblin market bizarre scene seems a bit suspiciously reminiscent of certain well known Star Wars parallel. The briefly touched upon conflict between Hellboy & co.'s allegiance towards humans or towards other supernaturals, reminds me of a similar conflict from a particular X-Men subplot. The antipathy of the authorities all seems a bit Batman-esque.
But let's just chalk it up to the solidification of genre conventions. Perhaps Hellboy II doesn't need to do anything new, Pearlmen is a gem in the lead roll, and so he just needs any particular vehicle to deliver him to box office success. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a fun ride, even if we have been down this road before.
A film about birdwatching for those who don't give much of a rat's ass about birdwatching.
By Denez McAdoo
The Ivory-billed woodpecker. The Lord-God bird. The holy-grail of birdwatching. If these phrases alone don't get your ornithological blood pumping, then, well, your probably just well-adjusted.
Birdwatching might not necessarily be the sexy and seductive world that you hyperbolically think it is. But director Alex Karpovsky's new film, Woodpecker, screening this weekend at the Independent Film Festival, is only ostensibly a movie about the lurid world of birdwatching and what happens when its rarest specimen emerges for rediscovery. Rather, it is the tale of how one man can be driven past the brink of sanity in order to pursue the ultimate quest of personal self fulfillment: becoming a world class birdwatcher.
The film is part documentary and part narrative as it explores actual events surrounding the rediscovery of the previously-thought-extinct lost holy-grail of birdwatching: the Ivory-billed woodpecker. There are a number of talking-heads that guide you through the sudden volatility of this otherwise seemingly sterile world of ornithology, but the main narrative action surrounds one disparagingly dedicated man and his chronically inarticulate side-kick as they tough the Arkansas wilderness in order to catch a glimpse of the impossible and attain fame and glory. Instead, it's hope, defeat, tragedy, and despair that are all on full display here, all served up with a healthy dose of tongue held firmly in cheek. One man's mental breakdown is our film festival entertainment fodder as the line between documentary exploitation becomes blurred between the characters and the audience.
Johnny is house painter and an amateur poet, but at heart, his is all birdwatcher. He's also a wee-bit socially maladjusted, though remains a sympathetic character both because of his infectious passion and because a certain level of social maladjustment is expected from anyone willing to spend several weeks wading knee deep in a bog just to look at birds. Johnny also writes poems about birds. Terrible poems. Ok, Johnny is a neurotic.
Set in Brinkley, Arkansas, the backdrop of the movie chronicles the true tale of how a small town USA, crippled by economic downturn, develops its identity, as well as a lucrative cottage industry, around the possibility of sightings of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. But the rare bird, known affectionately as Good-God bird or Lord-God bird based on the the sudden exclamations of those that claim to have seen it, is as elusive a specimen as its reputation would suggest. We end up never quite sure weather the bird even exists or not.
But this ambiguity is exactly the sort of concept that director Karpovsky wants to intentionally toy around with – mainly involving our expectations of a documentary. Woodpecker is no average animal centered nature documentary. There's a certain comedic twist to it that can't be given away in this preview, so just take my advise that this film will likely defy your expectations, is truly entertaining, and will probably teach you nothing about birdwatching.
Keep your eyes open, and maybe one day you'll find your own inner Ivory-billed woodpecker.
Jim Ether's co-star is a tomato. A small, red, foam-rubber puppet tomato. But this doesn't mean that his morally-skewed new film, Onward to Calgary which he acted in and directed, is a kids film. Rather, Ether's been incubating his talents on the internet for a while now, building quite a reputation for himself and the hair-brained puppet/animated/live action shorts that have populated internet video sites like newgrounds.com as well as his own site persarc.com.
Now ready to expand beyond pimple-faced internet users, Ether has finally managed to scrounge up enough dough and foam-rubber to eke out this unorthodox feature length indy film, which will be playing this Saturday at the 2008 Boston Underground Film Festival alongside over a bakers dozen of other local and independent films.
If you've watched any of Ether's Poem Time online shorts, you'll know that the plot's framing device about Jim as the host of a public access Television show and the eclectic cast of human and sub-human characters that populate it, is only loosely able to contain the deranged sequence of ideas that are churned out of Ether's stunted-juvenile mind.
Onward to Calgary builds off of where his online series starts, injecting it with appropriate dramatic-tension when the Poem Time TV show is bought-out by a fish stick company and the ensuing road trip to Canada provides, if nothing else, the cinematic forward momentum needed in order to develop the puppet-lust/love story of Timmy Tomato (played by a crimson googly-eyed ball with a mouth) and his quest to meet his biggest fan, Tammy Tomato. But knowing that all road trips are really just journeys across the highways of our collective soul, the hearts and minds of these puppet creations are shown to be filled with more than just the noodling fingers of a spare cast member's hand.
Fleshing out the film are a series of animated asides in which Ether has enlisted a few of the internet's most well-known flash-animators, such as David Firth of Salad Fingers fame along with Leigh McGrath and Juho Lehmonen to provide their own interpretations of the story's tale of love, loss, tomatoes, robots, and chubby pants wearing elephants. Don't worry, there are plenty of humans in this film too, they're just not as perversely adorable.
Check out Onward to Calgary as part of the 2008 Boston Underground Film Festival, Saturday March 22, 3:30 pm, at the AMC Loews Theatre in Harvard Square. For more info check out www.bostonunderground.org
It's always been a nice idea to place valentines day smack dab in the second half of winter. It's cold and melancholic, making it a bit tough to get warm bodies up and out to go see a matinée movie, and so any encouragement to get said warm bodies snuggling up in the back of a theater is a plenty fine idea by me. The new Universal Pictures release, Definitely, Maybe, arrives just in time for this holiday de l'amour and it brings an additional sense of sentimental fuzziness by being perhaps the first major 90's nostalgia flick of the post-millennium. Occasional Nirvana references pop up enough to boost their iTunes sales but thankfully this navel-gazing never slides into being the obtuse eyeball-rolling of funny-haircuts-as-gag-fodder that most 80's rehashes have been.
Definitely, Maybe effortlessly nails the romantic comedy format as it works through the prerequisite boy-meets-girl, boy-falls-in-love-with-girl, boy-arrogantly-fumbles-the-situation-but-remains-a-vulnerable-and-sympathetic-character - its all here. But it's how the film manages to unwind this otherwise formulaic genre staple that allows it to breath with fresh life creating one truelly memorable film of this season.
Ryan Reynolds plays Will Hayes as the lead “boy” character in a slightly reprising the mannish-boy roles he's previously nailed so easily. Hayes is a Manhattan single father living with his cute-as-a-button daughter Maya, played by Abigail Breslin who likewise is a can't miss in this role. When she comes home from a grammar school sex-ed class armed with a pixie-sized arsenal of questions, Hayes is forced to explain the birds, the bees, and why mommy and daddy aren't together anymore. Unable to shatter her fragile pre-adolescent world with adult-sized sex-politics, Haze proceeds to lay out his whole history via flash-back and candy-coats it in a sort of guessing game where Mia gets to speculate which potential mate from his past (names changed to protect the innocent) ends up being the incubator for his daughter's own in-utero existence.
Aside from the slight awkwardness of a prepubescent father-daughter love-chat about ex's, this set-up ultimately successfuly serves to both soften the sentimentality with Maya's charming interjections as well as help the viewer to navigate the at times tangled web of a gen-X relationship in New York.
Haze's tale of love and loss begins in his immediate post-college days where he leaves behind rural Wisconsin along with his small-town girlfriend and heads to big city New York to work on the just blooming Clinton campaign. Nostalgia is appropriately squeezed out this setting, the relative-innocuousness of Clintonian sexcapades along side foreshadowing rib-ticklers of a young Governor W. Bush, but this context retains a contemporary poignancy as our own election-year cycle moves forward, this time a different Clinton reprising the role.
Haze is quickly caught up in the excitement of his career as well as the ups and downs of love gained and lost. Maya helps chart his love-quest as she tries to narrow down which lady in dad's life is her future mommy: Will it be the small town sweetheart? The sultry sophisticate journalist? The spunky-yet-edgy female best-friend?
The ride is fun and sweet and director Adam Brooks never overreaches his grasp. The nostalgia and love are never served up in overpowering doses. Definitely, Maybe succeeds at being exactly what it needs to be: fun, hart-warming, and romantic, just what you need to shake those winter woes.
