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The issue here isn’t spoilers. The issue is one of trust and here you just need to trust Chris Nolan.

The midnight showings of Inception in Burbank were sold out. Why? It’s not a Batman movie. Leonardo DiCaprio can’t open a huge film now, probably never could. The trailer is AT BEST confusing. So why were people packing the theaters?

There’s only one answer. They trust Chris Nolan. He’s earned it, I think we can agree. And for that reason, I entreat you not to read this review until after you’ve seen the film. I try my best below not to give anything away, but sometimes even knowing there’s something to give away gives something away. If you keep reading, then I warn you, you will lose some of the thrill of seeing the movie for the first time.  Continue reading…

Popularity: 15% [?]

Like the A-Team I feel I’m writing here for an audience who wonders what kind of movie this is, rather than because I have some insight burning to get out. Hopefully that’s a good enough reason.

If you think Predators are neat, and by this I mean, the idea of Predators absent any specific instantiation of them, if you watched the movies and read the comics, if you’re over 30 and you’ve got kids and you’re raising them to love all the stuff you loved growing up and you’re looking forward to taking them to see “a Predator movie” then this movie is for you. You’ll love it. Stop reading.

If, on the other hand, you love Predator, the original film from 1987, and think it was special and have never really given a shit about any of the Predator stuff that’s come since, and you’re wondering if this movie will be like that movie, then no. It won’t be. Stay home, save your money. Or go see A-Team, that’s lots of fun.

The original film is a snapshot of the Summer Action Movie in transition. The first 20 minutes of Predator is a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. Commando, Conan, Raw Deal take your pic.

But after the movie opens with an homage to the Commando-era action movies, it does something extraordinary. It goes into the jungle. The movie itself goes into the jungle with the heroes and the Predator destroys those 1980s ideas just like it does the characters in the movie. The characters in the film are not prepared for what’s in there, because they all just walked off the set of other 1980s action movies. Where they win. They always win. The Predator’s arrival announces that those kinds of heroes cannot survive in the new action movie. Muscles and guns are no longer enough. It’s going to take smarter, leaner heroes, everyman heroes like Mel Gibson or the balding Bruce Willis to save the day from now on. It reinvents Arnie and allows him forever after to be smart enough to continue making action movies in the ’90s. There was no indication, going into it, that this was the movie you were in for. You look at the cast and you think you’re getting a Walter Hill movie. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That was the virtue of the first movie. You had NO IDEA what was going to happen next. Presuming you haven’t been so oversaturated with culture that you know the entire story without having seen it. That first time, it was pretty intense. Especially if you grew up in the 80s and presumed Action Jackson and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura were going to make it.

Certainly there are many members of my generation who loved Predator because the alien was bad-ass, for which see paragraph #2 above. But I think for some of us, it opened our eyes to the idea that an action movie could be a little clever. A little smart. Encourage us to think. Show us heroes who think, and who persevere and win not only because of oiled muscles and oiled guns, but because they’re smart. That’s something I’ve been missing recently; heroes who have a virtue other than being pretty.

Predator showed you a real jungle. They went and filmed in a real jungle and the location scouts did an excellent job picking a place that let John McTiernan put his camera anywhere and create whatever feeling he wanted. Confusion, claustrophobia, or vast open space, awe. At one point, the camera gives us a shot and you felt like you could see and understand the shape of the jungle. Where everything was. Just as Arnie is figuring everything out, we are figuring the jungle out.

This movie, the jungle feels like a series of sets. There’s no sense of space. No sense of reality. Just props. Robert Rodriguez is famous for making great movies on the cheap, but this may be an instance of a little too cheap. John McTiernan had the benefit of being bankrolled by a huge studio.

McTiernan is a genius at this stuff. Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, The 13th Warrior. The dude invented the smart action movie. Rodriguez is pretty good, he might have been able to pull of a real spiritual sequel, but Robert Rodriguez didn’t direct this movie. Nimród Antal did. I haven’t seen anything this dude has done, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say, this movie was outside his brief.

It’s much more like a Twilight Zone episode. It opens just like Five Characters in Search of an Exit. But why? The whole purpose of that opening on the Twilight Zone was to keep you asking questions. Here, that same opening is used explicitly to avoid questions and answers. You already know why they’re there. You might not know who they are, but you know who they are.

Rather, this movie uses that opening because it wants to get straight to the action. It wants to dispense with story and character, plot and dialog, and just show the audience a bunch of dudes being hunted down and killed by Predators. It’s Fanservice. The whole movie is essentially fanservice. Without characters having sex with each other.

There’s a character in here with literally two lines of dialog who exists solely so there can be a fight between a Samurai and a Predator. That’s fanservice. That’s a pretty good definition of fanservice. I haven’t seen everything ever made, but if I had, I’d probably still think the scene from this movie where a modern-day Yakuza on an alien planet re-enacts a scene from The Seven Samurai complete with katana, against a Predator, was Plato’s Ideal Fanservice  of which All Others are Mere Shadows.

Now, certainly there’s an audience for that. There always will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I am not that audience. The audience for this movie believes it when a character says “I’ve been in every jungle on earth, and this don’t feel right. Too hot for Africa. Wrong season for Indonesia….”

In that sense, it deploys a lot of comic book logic and characterization. Characters who can tell a guy is a member of the Yakuza because he’s Japanese and wearing a nice suit. Characters who can speak with authority about fighting in every jungle in the world.

Adrien Brody is the only actor who makes it through this movie with his dignity intact. No one else is given anything to do. But Brody, while wasted, at least shows us some of the charisma and acting chops that won him an Oscar. The rest of the cast, some are very fine actors, but they could all be replaced with random people from Central Casting and the movie would not suffer for it.

The movie never seems to take its own premise seriously. Apart from one line, no one in the movie thinks to wonder why Topher Grace’s character is there. Probably because it’s so obvious as soon as anyone starts to think about it.

You put some extreme people in an extreme situation, the expectation is we’re going to see humanity pushed to the extreme. Das Boot in a jungle with aliens. Alas here, everyone knows they’re in a Predator movie and so no work is done to show us anything but the absolute minimum required by the plot. The Scene Where He Won’t Tell Them His Name. The Scene Where He Says ‘I Work Best Alone.’ The Scene Where Two of Them Don’t Get Along. The Scene Where They Become Friends.

There are many people for whom the fun of moviegoing lies in recognizing those scenes. Execution plays no part in the process. They expect those scenes and so, if you put those scenes in front of them, they are satisfied.

For good or ill, I am not that kind of moviegoer. Happily there are plenty of other good movies!

Popularity: 10% [?]

With big-budget summer fare, I think often people look to reviewers for permission more than anything else. Sometimes, with movies everyone’s talking about like Avatar, we want permission not to go. We want someone to confirm our suspicion that the movie is awful so we feel better about not seeing it. Or, in the case of a movie like The A-Team, we want someone to give us permission to go, remove the guilt from the guilty-pleasure and say “hey, it’s pretty good. Don’t feel bad about wanting to go see it!”

Allow me to be your enabler. Hey, it’s pretty good! Don’t feel bad about wanting to see it!

This is how you resurrect a beloved property. You play it completely straight, and just make a bad-ass film. Anyone who remembers the original series with fondness (warning: do not attempt to enhance that fondness by going back and watching the original!) will love this, and anyone who’s never heard of or seen the original will have a great time. It’s exactly what I wanted from The Losers, but only got glimpses of, here and there.

Somewhat bravely, the movie does not take our heroes’ backstory and shove the whole thing offscreen, open with a jailbreak. Nor does the Set Up, the mechanism by which the team ends up in jail, or breaks out, happen in the first ten minutes. Oh no. First we get an over-the-top action sequence whereby our heroes meet and Hannibal gets the team together. Then we fast forward several years, to Iraq and the modern day, and the team are tasked with recovering some stolen plates used for forging US currency. This is the operation wherein the team is set up.

That arc, from getting the team together and recovering the stolen plates, is fully half the movie. This is a movie that takes its time with its characters, lavishes action sequences around, and allows the actors time to show camaraderie.

That’s my favorite thing in all moviedom, camaraderie. So when you put it in front of me, I tend to like it. My problem with The Losers is that we rarely got to see them doing their thing and enjoying it. There’s nothing in The A-Team that’s as much fun, as perfect and beautiful, as the Don’t Stop Believing sequence from The Losers, but in retrospect that’s all The Losers had. Whereas the A-Team has several fantastic action sequences, lots of laughs, some good dialog, sympathetic characters. Pretty much everything you want from a summer action movie.

Alas a movie like this is only as good as its bad-guy and that’s where everything kinda falls apart. The plot, how the story gets from point A to point B after the first half, probably makes sense if I spent a lot of time trying to puzzle it out, but I didn’t then and I’m not going to now. I think a lot of movies, and a lot of video games, give plot short shrift. Yes, you can take for granted that the audience will follow the characters anywhere if you’ve done your work, and so the plot becomes window-dressing. It only needs to *sound* like it makes sense. The audience will tune out, but they’ll think “presumably this would make sense if I paid attention,” and so you, the writer, escape. You’ve tricked your audience into thinking you knew what you were talking about, even if they didn’t. But that’s what separates a movie like Die Hard or Romancing the Stone from awful action movies: incredibly tight plotting. Everyone knows what Hans wanted in Die Hard and how he was going to get it. But it’s not clear to me why there were two or three bad guys in this movie and what they wanted. Or, maybe it is, I’m not sure.

None of the bad guys are memorable. It’s the rare movie that stacks villains two or three deep and keeps them all memorable and compelling. Robocop is probably the best at this. Die Hard has two good bad guys. Lethal Weapon had two, but one was forgettable. If the plot for the second half were a little more straight forward, if there was one fantastic bad guy–and it’s no small challenge to find someone to play the heavy to Neeson’s hero–then we’d be talking about a truly great action movie. But what we get instead is still a surprising amount of fun, and better–I feel–than The Losers which it inspired.

The actors take to their roles well. There’s a little too much work in getting things like “I love it when a plan comes together” to make sense. I’m not sure a statement like that needs an explanation, but at the same time we learn why BA hates to fly, and it’s pretty spectacular. So the principle is sound, they just go overboard a little trying to get the actors to convincingly say lines of dialog designed to explicate character we don’t need explicated.

Liam Neeson is a born leader and has been a friend to genre work ever since Excalibur, Krull, and Darkman. Here, we believe these men would follow him, we believe he’s got everything worked out, and we believe nothing is as crazy as it looks.

It was fun watching Sharlto Copley from District 9 being, if not too crazy, just crazy enough.  His accent comes and goes and if you’ve ever wondered what a South African speaking with a Louisiana accent would sound like, it turns out it sounds Australian. I have no explanation for this, its purely observational analysis. His Murdock is slightly more believable than the one we got in the TV show, in that you feel this is a character using the insanity bit as a smokescreen, possibly for some deep disturbance, rather than an actor using it to get a laugh.

I have no idea where Quinton Jackson came from, I haven’t bothered to look him up, because I don’t need to. I have some awareness that he’s from some other entertainment, which means probably wrestling, but who cares? It would only matter if there were a problem, and there’s no problem. There are a few moments where he’s sitting opposite Liam Neeson and you realize he’s out of his league…and you realize he’s realizing it, but mostly he’s acting off the other two members of the team and he’s a lot of fun.

The guy they have as Face is a lot of fun, but doesn’t get much chance to show us why he’s on the team. That’s another thing that’s not a problem; we like him and we like the interplay between the four characters, but Liam Neeson is a pretty charismatic dude, and pretty good looking, so you need some other reason to have Face on the team besides charm and good looks. He needs to be the thief, the cat burglar and while we get one or two moments that hint at that, it would have been nice to see it.

It’d be nice if we could have a sequel to this, but there’s no real need. Plenty of action movies to go around. But it’s an awful lot of fun to watch Liam Neeson having fun in an action movie.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I’ve posted the entire thing now, in PDF form, and at some point soon I hope to have a Kindle version available, but you might have to pay a couple of bucks for that one.

http://www.mattcolville.com/download-priest/

I’ve had two long Squaremans posts percolating for a while, one on Mass Effect 2 and one on Harlan Ellison, which I should now be able to finish. The Harlan Ellison one is going to be good, stay tuned!

If you’re keen to know what the novel is about, here’s the excerpt from the web page.

What’s it About?

A reasonable question!

It’s about a man who lead the typical Fantasy Hero life for a long time, and the damage that life did to him. A man who, when we meet him, is incapable of living up to the standards he sets for himself. It’s about the awful choices life forces us to make. It’s about how for some people, before things can get better, they must first get worse. There’s a lot of action, some of it epic, a large cast of characters, and hopefully some little humor.

Our hero is lured out of the inn he bought but never opened, and sent into a dark forest to solve a murder no one wants him to solve.

It’s short, compared to most fantasy novels these days, more akin to the typical fantasy novel from the 1980s when books were about 350 pages. There’s a lot of dialog, and I hope  it reads fast.

It’s the first book of what I intend to be a series about camaraderie. All my favorite movies are about camaraderie, and I felt there was no point writing anything personal, anything that spoke to me, if I didn’t build it on a foundation of camaraderie.

But this first book only hints at that. It’s not about a group, it’s about one man. I rewound the series back to before the heroes get together to show the reader that you can have the bad-ass Fantasy Hero, but there is a price. The things that happen in this book give the rest of the series a much-needed sense of gravitas.

Part of my inspiration was Heroes, which takes all the tropes from comic books, and reskins them to make them universal and appeal to a wide audience. So a fan of fantasy fiction will recognize many of the tropes of the genre in Priest, but someone new to should, I hope, also find it accessible.

Popularity: 9% [?]

There was a point, about midway through this movie, watching Russel Crowe and Cate Blanchett acting together when I thought “This would be an excellent movie if it had nothing to do with Robin Hood.”

Continue reading…

Popularity: 10% [?]