For the next 30 days I’ll torture you with my stupid answer to the writing prompts taken from the 30 Day Writing Challenge and the 30 Day Song Challenge. Here we go:

Source: http://knowledgera-theworld.blogspot.com/2011/01/blue-whales-can-eat-half-million.html

Writing Challenge – Day 28:  What is your biggest dream in life (what one great thing do you want to accomplish)?

I’d like to build a robot!  Yeah, I’m a simple creature.  Problem is, I know nothing about robotics and I’m not a damn engineer; but I can solder and follow instructions, and that should count for about 1% of what’s intellectually needed to build a robot.  I’d like to buy one of those robot kits and put the thing together without asking for help.  I’d probably do alright with something like the G-Dog Robot Kit.

I’d also like to be a blue whale and see the bottom of the ocean, or be a whale shark and peacefully navigate the oceans absorbing little krill.  That’s surely not happening.

Song Challenge – Day 28:  A song that makes you feel guilty.

Music doesn’t make me feel guilty.  Music makes me happy!  Like this song:

Not a Crime – Gogol Bordello

BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Entertainment One
MSRP: $7.29
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Featurettes
• Trailer

The Humans

Written and Directed by Ole Bornedal. Acted by Lasse Rimmer, Jens Andersen, Mogens Pedersen, Lene Nystrom, Fanny Bornedal, Bojan Navojec, Sonja Richter and Alexandre Willaume.

The Nutshell

We see life in a small Danish village. Lars (Andersen) is kind of a piece of shit. He drives an 18 wheeler for a living while pounding Vodka and when his girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant he spits at her. Lars’ brother Johannes (Rimmer) is doing quite a bit better, as he’s married to a gorgeous woman, has two children with all their fingers and toes and is slowly rebuilding the house he grew up in. When Lars runs over an elderly woman on her scooter while trying to light a cigarette, he drags the body off the road,  grabs some bloody evidence and plants it on a slow witted Bosnian immigrant named Alain (Navojec). When the husband of the dead woman finds the evidence and the drunken miscreants of the town decide to take justice into their own hand, only Johannes can protect Alain from the men and the women that would string him up.

K.D. Lang: Lost in Denmark. Coming to a who gives a fuck this fall.

The Lowdown

Just a quick clarification: This movie is neither the documentary from 2006 about the Catholic Church’s attempts to hide a pedophile, nor is it Deliver Us From Eva, the romantic comedy from 2003 with LL Cool J and the absurdly hot Gabrielle Union. I’m glad it’s a new movie I haven’t seen before, because I’ve seen both of those movies and was aroused by only one of them. No, this movie is Danish and bubbling with intensity and, even though it stumbles here and there, it sticks the landing well enough to feel satisfying, if slight. It probably would have made more of a lasting impression if it hadn’t seemed so afraid to commit to the tone and seriousness of it’s subject matter.

Spoilers beware.

The opening of the film is narrated by a woman walking along the road. She introduces us to all of the important characters in a very breezy and lighthearted way, reminiscent of something along the lines of Amélie. But this only lasts for the first 5 minutes or so and then we’re on our own, allowed to be in the world of the film without any more hand holding or symbolic narration. It’s the perfect choice since the tension starts building instantly and it almost becomes painful to watch since you can see where everything is heading. I don’t mean to say that it’s predictable, just horribly, horribly inevitable.

Once all the aggrieved parties converge and it starts heading to its climax, the film becomes impossible to look away from and the final 15 or 20 minutes contain some of the most intense filmmaking and acting I’ve seen all year. It’s a powerhouse of a climax that left me exhilarated and wondering what could possibly happen in the last couple of minutes. Since I’d completely forgotten about her, imagine my surprise when we jumped back to the narrator who sends us out on a note that could have been light and still maintained the power it had only moments before, but instead her coda is more whimsical in tone and undercuts all of the seriousness of the piece. Now, I’m as big of a fan of mash-up filmmaking as anyone and still think that From Dusk Til Dawn and Shaun of the Dead are the only movies to have walked that line perfectly of respecting multiple genres but not feeling beholden to them. Deliver Us From Evil fails to walk that line because it’s 90 minutes of a psychological thriller and 6 minutes of a whimsical parable about small town Danish life.

"And that light made him angry and belligerent because that was his default setting."

None of this means that it’s not an enjoyable movie. It’s got some of the best performances I’ve seen all year and if the characters were more sharply drawn then it would have made for an excellent character study instead of just a solid little revenge tale. The most you get to know of the characters is what the narrator tells you about them in the opening sequence. The rest of the film feels like the characters are telling us how they’re feeling instead of showing us through performance and behavior. It’s all a bit too critical though because I think the things that I was looking for to make this a genre classic were all things the filmmaker had no interest in portraying. I think the first hour of the movie exists just so he could stage the climactic standoff. All of the shortcomings really fall by the wayside in that final half hour. I found myself on the edge of my seat for a huge chunk of the finale, not really wanting to see how it all shook out because I couldn’t see how it wouldn’t be horrible for everyone involved. It’s a testament to the film that it feels like an organic ending to the film instead of something overly contrived like it could have been.

Deliver Us From Evil is worth your time but don’t expect a transcendent filmic experience. It’s just more of a pleasant surprise bolstered by assured direction, incredibly committed performances and a showstopper of a final setpiece. As long as you keep your expectations in check you’ll have a nice time with this film. It’s just a shame it isn’t more because almost all the pieces are there. The script might have just needed one more draft to be cooked properly but a good BLT is better than an undercooked salmon any day.

Is this... common in Denmark? I don't think America can be called lazy as a culture anymore after this. I might sit in my chair for three days without moving but at least I have a catheter in.

The Package

Some interesting featurettes about the tone they were going for with the film and the character work they were attempting to make it all work. It seems like they did their homework and were fully prepared to make this the next Blood Simple, but none of the incredible work these actors are doing is helped by a script that thinks it’s smarter than it is. The audio is fantastic but there’s a bit of ghosting on the visuals that last for the entire running time. Regardless, it’s worth picking up for less than 8 bucks on Amazon.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

Courtesy of Just Jared (by way of Badass Digest), what looks to be the first-ever full-on shots of Bane have surfaced.  Whilst shooting The Dark Knight Rises in Pittsburgh, someone snagged these photos of Tom Hardy as Bane, and he looks hot in that wool coat.  That Nolan is a taskmaster!  Also included is a pic of Batman’s camo tumbler, which Hardy is standing on.  Ghost-riding the whip?  Ok, I didn’t think so.  And I’ll never say that again.  I really like this look, which gives off a real post-apocalyptic vibe to me.  Click the pics to get a better look!

One night in 1986, my grandmother woke my sister and I in the middle of the night with an urgency.  I was nine, my sister seven.  Grandma loaded the two of us into the car and drove us to the outskirts of town.  Half-asleep, I watched the deep-dark-blue skies as Halley’s comet zoomed into view.  The last time that celestial object made an appearance to human eyes (in 1910), nobody I’d ever met in my life had been born yet.  The next time Halley’s comet makes a visit (in 2061), I’ll most likely be a preserved brain encased in a robot body.  There’s no guarantee that I’ll see that comet again, but at least I saw it the one time.

My point is, sometimes you have to wake up and make the trip.  I could have slept through the night, without much major disruption to the course of my life.  I kind of wanted to.  But what I have now is a memory I will always remember, a unique thrill imprinted on my mind for as long as I own it.

Yes, I am absolutely comparing Attack The Block to a once-in-a-lifetime event.  Cosmically speaking, it probably doesn’t measure up to a gigantic collection of ice and rock hurtling past the Earth’s orbit.  In the grand scheme, Attack The Block is only an excellent genre movie.  But there is an uncommon soul to this movie, a youthful energy and a joyful, mischievous, anarchic spirit, that makes it an instant time-capsule movie, a major announcement of writer-director Joe Cornish as an important genre voice.  Even if he never makes a movie this good again, he made this one.  I strongly doubt it’s an overstatement to predict that this movie will have a long shelf-life.  Check back with me in 2061.

Attack The Block is by far the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.  I can’t imagine there’s one I’ll like more.  It’s funny, scary, bleak, exciting, and triumphant.  I feel about this movie the way I feel about many of the films of John Carpenter, which if you follow my writing, you’ll recognize as hallowed praise.  At 88 minutes, Attack The Block is lean and mean.  It’s composed like a fierce, scrappy symphony.  There’s not a scene that should be removed or added.  When it ended, I didn’t need it to be any longer, but I did want to watch it again immediately. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s do the recap thing:  Attack The Block begins with a pretty young nurse (Jodie Whitaker) heading home to her apartment in a lousy London neighborhood.   When she sees a small gang of hooded teens standing in her way, she moves to cross the street, which you might think marks her as a bigot, since she is white and all but one of the punks are black.  In the first daring reversal in a movie that’s full of them, Sam turns out to be right about these kids, as they proceed to mug her, stealing her meager earnings.  They let her run off, and then the movie shifts perspective (again, for the first of many times), focusing on the gang.  There’s Moses (John Boyega, an immediate star), the gruff, taciturn, baby-Clint of a leader.  There’s Dennis (Franz Drameh), the flashy-dressed hothead.  There’s Biggz (Simon Howard), the walking haircut.  There’s Jerome (Leeon Jones), the bespectacled voice of moderation.  There’s Pest (Alex Ismail), the comic relief.

There’s also Probs and Mayhem, two much younger kids, pipsqueaks who badly want in on the gang, but let’s leave them out of this summary so you can discover them for yourself.  ALL of these young actors are superlative, a major achievement in casting.  They fit their roles perfectly, and Cornish is an ace at corralling their energy.  Between the cast of this movie, Zack Kopplin’s righteous political crusade, and Odd Future’s shanghai-ing of the music industry, 2011 is the year that rambunctious teenagers kicked down the auditorium doors of the grown-up world and proved there’s plenty of hope for the future .

What I love about the kids in Attack The Block, even the iconic Carpenter-esque anti-hero Moses, is that they’re all unrepentant little shits.  This isn’t some coming-of-age story.  There are no Screenwriting 101 character arcs.  There’s no inspirational principal who teaches them to love.  These are raucous little bastards who will knock you down and steal your wallet.  Even as we grow to know and like them more and more over the course of the movie, it’s not as if they change.  The events of this movie represent one night of their lives.  We might come to understand why they are how they are, but it’s not as if they’re unhappy.  Attack The Block appeals directly to the adolescent prankster and anti-authoritarian menace in so many of us, and in fact it’s even a little darker and harsher than that.  That’s why you’ll see more and more comparisons to Season Four of The Wire as this movie gains in prominence.  These are some of the most authentic teenagers seen on screen in a while.

There’s really only one way you could improve upon Season Four of The Wire, and that’s by adding ferocious gorilla-bears from space.  Right after Moses and his boys rob Sam, an alien literally drops out of the sky, wrecking a nearby car.  Moses goes to check it out.  The alien bites him and bounds away.  Now Moses gets pissed.  He and the boys track the alien down and beat it to pulp, keeping the thing as a trophy.  That’s when more capsules start dropping from the sky, and the others of the species come looking for the lost member of the tribe.

This is only the first ten minutes of the movie, by the way.

So if we’ve seen the trailers, we know that the teens will barricade themselves in the projects they ruled until very recently, being pursued by a voracious pack of teeth with legs.  Attack The Block becomes a siege movie a la Night Of The Living Dead or Assault On Precinct 13, only funnier.  There are nearly-constant laughs in this movie, even in its darkest moments.  And don’t even bother trying to predict it.  It’s steadily surprising, in the most satisfying ways.  It’s an astounding crowd-pleaser of a film.  Attack The Block is expertly edited, by Jonathan Amos, engagingly lit by cinematographer Thomas Townend, and the score by Basement Jaxx and Steven Price is looking to reserve permanent GB on your iPod.  By the final pair of orchestral cues, your adrenaline will be surging, and your night will be that much more alive.  You’ll be charged with the very specific joy of having seen a new favorite movie.

Attack The Block opens in select theaters in the U.S. today, Friday July 29^th.  Look, you can go see this movie or not.  I know I’m headed to see it again.  It was eight ways a blast and I want to catch that high again.  I only want you to see this thing because I know you’ll love it too.  I know it.  You love movies.  Who doesn’t?  Well, this is why we go.  We go to movies, hoping every time they’ll be this much fun.  Usually they miss the mark.  Attack The Block hits, on every possible level.  But yeah, you can skip out on it.  You can sleep straight through the night.  Or you can get up and go see the comet.

Wake up, kid!

http://twitter.com/jonnyabomb

For the next 30 days I’ll torture you with my stupid answer to the writing prompts taken from the 30 Day Writing Challenge and the 30 Day Song Challenge. Here we go:

Writing Challenge – Day 27:  What is your vocation (why are you here on earth)?

While the sarcastic part of my brain wishes to respond this question with “to enforce my power to annoy”, the truth is that I don’t know.  I thought it was film and television, and maybe they still are in some capacity, whether it’s writing about them, writing them, or making them.  I know I love them.  I know it definitely is NOT editing, I wouldn’t want to be a producer or director, but there are many areas to explore.  I never thought I could write, I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, but I’ve found myself doing it and liking it, and there’s always room for improvement, so that could be it.  I also used to think my vocation was art because I used to be pretty good at drawing but I haven’t done that for years…  I could go on forever and never know why the hell I was born or what I’m supposed to do with my life. 

Song Challenge – Day 27: A song that you wish you could play.

This is so frustrating.  If I could somewhat competently play Guns ‘N Roses’ Welcome To The Jungle, I’d be a happy girl.

Welcome To The Jungle – Guns ‘N Roses

Every week I wax lyrical about how much I like Rex and every week I look at other reviews and find myself to be in an ever shrinking group. I’ve got a natural fondness for assholes, but I think my soft spot for Rex is due to the fact that I never particularly liked the original Torchwood crew. Whilst I have issues with John Barrowman’s acting (highlighted this week by both another floundering monologue and the hilarious piece of theatrical acting when Jack set off the fire alarm) my issue is more with the way the characters are written than either Barrowman’s or Eve Myles’ performances. As presented the original Torchwood crew are incompetent assholes, who kind of floundered onto the solutions to most of their problems and coasted on an ‘it’ll do’ sort of attitude. But the show also goes to pain to highlight the ‘specialness’ of the characters, in particular Gwen Cooper who has slowly become more and more ‘Mary Sue’ like as the series has progressed. As such I found myself empathising far more with Rex’s irritation with his new colleagues than I probably should have. I think Rex as a character is supposed to be a personification of the government, or at least people’s perceptions of the government. Capable but heartless, and dogmatic to a fault. I get that Rex is supposed to be an anti-hero, and at times an antagonist, but I find him to be a pragmatist rather than an actual foil. He just seems to be voicing the issues I have with how Torchwood operates as a whole, calling them out on their bullshit. For example in this episode the show was trying to make us feel bad for Esther as Rex continually screamed at her whilst on mission. However within the context of the show, and the mission itself, it seemed perfectly reasonable for Rex to be angry at someone for compromising their security. Especially when she actually did compromise their security and imperilled both Gwen and Jack.

It is even more reasonable when you consider that his heart has been literally, and figuratively, torn to pieces by a metal pipe (and his dad, in the figurative sense).

One of the issues I have with the show is that it seems to be separating the nature of Miracle Day from the needs of the plot. So about 20% of each episode is taken up by Dr. Juarez growling about the new healthcare paradigm whilst the other 80% of each episode is a standard sci-fi thriller where people are generally incapacitated as they normally would be. In this episode we had Jack run past a guy who had been throttled, but who was very much STILL alive, and Rex take out a hit man by shooting him a few times, with the hit man just slumping into unconsciousness. This sort of stuff wouldn’t bother me, if the show hadn’t gone out of its way last week to explain that people aren’t just not dying, they’re living through trauma which should have put them down for the count. What makes it so frustrating is that the show-runners are obviously proud of the thought they’ve put into Miracle Day, but it’s apparent that they weren’t able to figure out how to make a deathless world dramatically viable. Whilst there’s an occasional moment of brilliant body-horror, the eyeball in the car-wreckage this week was pretty spectacular; it feels like Miracle Day is something that happened to other people. Even Rex, who should be a walking reality check, only rarely registers the fact that he was impaled and isn’t healing properly. As it stands it feels like we’re watching three separate shows, with the Torchwood team investigating some deep-seated conspiracy, Oswald Danes politicking like no-one’s business whilst Dr. Vera Juarez demands some ethical medical care. The few moments these plotlines intersect feels more like a crossover event than parallel storylines.

To its credit ‘Escape to L.A.’ actually felt like an honest to goodness episode of TV, with goals and objectives and a clear, if unsubtly handled, thematic base. ‘Rendition’ and ‘Dead of Night’ both felt like they were trying to maintain a little of the propulsive energy of the first episode, this episode got down to business and carved out a niche for itself. Having clear objectives and a clear through line for the plot’s episode did wonders for the pacing, with the episode moving on at a fair old clip even as it straddled its three core elements. I must admit when Miracle Day was initially announced this is the sort of thing I expected, with the event serving as a background for more insular episodes, and it’s pleasing to see the show settle down into a rhythm of sorts. The stuff involving the Torchwood team and their mission was particularly diverting this week and it’s great to see Myles and Barrowman have a little fun with their characters. As I mentioned earlier I have issues with both Gwen Cooper and Jack Harkness, but Eve Myles and John Barrowman are a great double act and their natural chemistry often paves over the cutesiness of the characters. It was actually nice to see the team working together and carrying out a successful mission, albeit a mission where half the team got knocked unconscious and captured. But this is Torchwood we’re talking about and in the grand scheme of things their success today was like something out of Oceans 11.

Meanwhile Oswald Danes and Jilly Kitzinger continue to be entertaining but mystifying. I may have been reaching last week when searching for a connection between the Soulless and Danes, but that’s only because I really have no idea what’s going on with the character.  I get that Danes is now a celebrity, and he’s embracing this celebrity due to the fact he can’t be accepted in normal society, but I don’t get why he’s a celebrity. His fame felt flash in the pan, but the show keeps pushing him as a genuine person of interest. It doesn’t help that he’s embroiled in the super-conspiracy of the show which is now starting to get a little exhausting. Conspiracies in particular are a TV cliché I could do without. The problem is that conspiracies are usually mystery boxes where the solution to the main mystery is a roomful of middle-aged rich dudes. They’re also fantastically perhaps the anti-thesis of excitement, with your main villain reduced to a voice and an obscure logo for the majority of the run-time. Essentially all that conspiracies do is create a false sense of mystery and disconnect the audience from the antagonist of the show. RTD has always been a fan of long-form mysteries and as such I expect the revelation of the conspiracy to be held off until the last possible moment and there to be a thousand cryptic allusions to what they are. The thing is I’d gladly give up the joy of the mystery in favour of actually having a clear idea of the scale of the threat. Because at the moment the conspiracy seems to be far reaching, but no-one seems to know much about it.

Aside from the stuff with the conspiracy I actually found the Danes stuff to be uniformly great this episode.  Pullman still seems to be struggling in getting to the core of Danes, but little moments like his glee in breaking the seals of plastic bottles really helped to sell the idea of Danes as someone still getting used to his freedom.  What was great though was his address to the quarantined living dead, where we got to see Pullman channelling a little of President Whitmore.  Aside from literally coming out of nowhere the ‘Dead is Dead’ stuff was perhaps the most interesting element of the episode, even if it did seem to get resolved a little too easy. I hope that the ‘Dead is Dead’ stuff continues on as a recurring theme and isn’t a concept used purely to galvanise Danes. Whilst Danes was great it was also interesting to see a little of Kitzinger’s human side. Up until this point Lauren Ambrose, who I swear I only just realised was Claire from Six Feet Under, was perhaps a little too broad with her Machiavellian scheming contrasted by Ambrose’s penchant for exaggerated physical movement. It helped to create a larger than life character, but it was also hard to get an actual read on the characters thought process. As such it was nice to get a little peek behind the veneer today and it was interesting to find out that Kitzinger was just as uneasy about working with Danes as everyone else, despite her sharkish initial pursuit of him.

This week’s direction, despite being a little on the nose, was definitely a step-up as well with my favourite moment being the aftermath of Rex’s rescue. The characters were essentially huddled in front of a white wall, marred by an artistic dash of blood, which I took as a visual reference to Tenebrae by the great Dario Argento.  Compared to the rather anaemic direction last week this episode was full of pep and great shot compositions. In fact I feel that some of the shots, like the subject shot of Esther’s sister, may perhaps have been a little too arty. I was actually thrown a little by the hemmed in composition accompanying Esther’s visit to her sister, the subjective shot of her sister surrounded by blue-walls seeming almost unreal. But even if all of the shots didn’t work it was nice to see the show experimenting. It was just kind of fun to have an episode of a TV show which seemed to be gleefully homaging the visuals of DePalma, Kubrick and Argento.

I’m hoping that this is how the season is going to progress for at least the next few episodes, just because it’s nice to see the show have a sense of purpose. The show still has a lot of issues (the Hit Man waxing lyrical about his masters was a horrible ‘TV’ moment) but there’s a reflexive tendency for the show to lampshade its own shortcomings which makes me hope that it’ll pick up as it goes on.

First thing’s first: Before going to see this movie, I actually did take the time to read the Cowboys & Aliens comic book. It was bad. Not AT4W bad, but still pretty bad. The aliens were terribly designed, the characters were all two-dimensional, and the plot was hopelessly thin. Last but not least, the story was designed to convey a ham-fisted allegory about how the west was being taken over by foreign forces, just because the invaders were technologically superior. That might not have been a bad thing if the book hadn’t been so damn convinced that this theme and its presentation were original, deep and relevant.

On the other hand, the book was completely devoid of amnesiac cowboys, and though the hero did have an alien device that could magically do whatever the plot needed, it was a gun and not a manacle. Right off the bat, it’s clear that Cowboys & Aliens is an adaptation of the book in title only. This comes as a relief, since the title was easily the best part of the source text.

I later learned that Cowboys & Aliens was actually a movie pitch long before it was a graphic novel. The pitch was first bought by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks, but the process took so long that Scott Mitchell Rosenberg — the pitch’s author — formed his own comic publishing company and got his concept made that way. Five credited writers, sixteen producers, and God knows how many studio execs later, Cowboys & Aliens finally got onto the big screen, mutating beyond recognition along the way. And as you might have guessed, the script clearly suffered for having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie starts out great. The first act is phenomenal, with a lot of great character development, solid editing, some great fight scenes, and a score that sounds like classical western, tinged with just the subtlest hint of modern rock.

The cast certainly helps a lot, as well. Daniel Craig is the first person we see, and he wastes no time establishing his character as a badass. He’s the very picture of a cowboy action hero — equally capable with his fists and with guns — though he also plays a troubled amnesiac remarkably well. Funnily enough, the role was originally cast for Robert Downey Jr. (who dropped out to reprise Sherlock Holmes), but I can’t see why. Nothing against RDJ, he’s an amazing actor and all, but he just doesn’t have that gruff kind of machismo that Craig has. The casting is really what makes this character work.

Opposite him is Harrison Ford, and goddamn, is it sweet to see Ford putting his talents to good use again. He plays Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde, a man so wealthy and powerful that everyone considers him above the law (every western has one). The locals speak of him in hushed tones through the first act, and in Dolarhyde’s introductory scene, Ford perfectly delivers a man who’s earned his reputation as a hardass. This is a return to form for Harrison Ford, and it is glorious.

What’s also interesting is in how Ford’s Dolarhyde and Craig’s Lonergan play off each other to express the theme of redemption (the movie is set in a town called “Absolution,” for God’s sake). Lonergan is a man who’s clearly done a great deal of injury and crime, and yet — much to his pain — he can’t make amends for sins he can’t remember. Compare that to Dolarhyde, who always carries around all manner of emotional burdens and dark memories from his days in war. It’s also quite interesting to see Dolarhyde connect with a young boy — played by Noah Ringer — in a clear effort to atone for what an asshole his own son turned out to be.

Speaking of which, Percy Dolarhyde is played by none other than Paul Dano. As a reminder, Dano made his name playing good-hearted and/or withdrawn characters in such movies as Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood and Where the Wild Things Are. As such — even though he doesn’t get much screen time — I got an odd sort of pleasure in watching Dano chew scenery as a boorish, spoiled, sniveling bully. No doubt about it, this guy can act.

Clancy Brown and Keith Carradine also make brief appearances, and both of them elevate the film nicely. Sam Rockwell gets a significantly bigger role, nicely establishing himself as the wimp of the cast in such a way that doesn’t make him overly annoying. Easily the weak link in this cast is Olivia Wilde, which came as a surprise to me after she turned out to be the best actor in Tron: Legacy. Wilde plays Ella, a mysterious woman who clearly knows more about Lonergan than she’s letting on. Naturally, Lonergan and Ella get a romance arc that feels totally forced. Far more importantly, Wilde plays “enigmatic” in a way that gives the audience nothing to really latch onto. By the time we finally learn what her character’s really about, it doesn’t come off as a shock so much as a foregone conclusion.

(Side note: To anyone who saw the trailers and was hoping for some Olivia Wilde nudity, get real. This is a PG-13 movie).

Really, Ella’s arc is a symptom of the larger problem that this movie has: After that amazing first act, the movie keeps losing momentum without ever getting it back. I’ve got two reasons why, and they both have to do with the action scenes.

For one thing, the action scenes are at their most effective when they focus on characters that we’ve come to empathize with. This should be self-explanatory. Some members of the core group die, as would be expected. Unfortunately, the deaths are totally mishandled. It’s bad enough when a movie stops cold for one character to get a drawn-out dying monologue, but this movie does it twice. Also, when the early action scenes involve a core group of characters, and the later action scenes reduce the number of name characters while diluting the ranks with so many nameless redshirts, that sudden switch in focus is going to create a level of emotional disconnect.

Having said that, I wouldn’t have minded a whole ton of nameless soldiers in the fight sequences if doing so would expand the movie’s scale, but no such luck. See, the first major alien battle takes place in a town. People are getting abducted, buildings are being destroyed, it’s awesome. But then the movie focuses on a small band of cowboys, and the focus shifts to them. Thus, the movie decreased in scale, and that’s a huge problem. After all, we’re talking about an alien invasion flick. The entire human race is at stake here, yet the movie never seems to embrace that. Our heroes aren’t fighting to save the world, they’re fighting to save the dinky town of Absolution.

Sad as it is that the movie’s focus shrinks, everything else in this movie gets progressively less interesting as time goes by. The storytelling keeps getting lazier. The cinematography and editing get less remarkable. The score becomes less western and more generic. Ford’s hardass edge starts dulling. Rockwell’s character doesn’t get any less pathetic. The character arcs get more predictable and cliched. The film hits its nadir with a lazy and terribly unsatisfying climax, followed by a boring resolution filled with nothing but foregone conclusions. I’m normally very grateful when a big-budget blockbuster doesn’t end with a sequel tease, but anything would have been better than the nothing we wound up with.

Nevertheless, the acting stays consistent throughout the movie, and all the actors do the best they can with this script. Likewise, the production design is wonderful throughout, and the aliens look particularly good, though there wasn’t a lot of consistency as to how much damage they could take in a fight.

Cowboys & Aliens was very clearly a movie designed by committee. It’s an amazing premise with a great cast that was tempered down to the safest and most harmless point that everyone behind the scenes could agree on. What’s really sad is that by deliberately toning down any innovation or bombast this movie may have had, the filmmakers doomed their work to be lost amid Sucker Punch, Fast Five, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Captain America, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, and all the other movies released this year that dared to present their action scenes with imagination and energy.

When all is said and done, there are enough good things in Cowboys & Aliens that I can recommend a rental, but there’s absolutely no reason to go rush out and see this on the big screen. Still, at least it’s better than the comic book.

For the next 30 days I’ll torture you with my stupid answer to the writing prompts taken from the 30 Day Writing Challenge and the 30 Day Song Challenge. Here we go:

Source: http://www.swordsdirect.com/captain-america-shield.html

Writing Challenge – Day 26:  How do you handle/deal with both success and failure?

Badly.

And instead of going into details about how very badly I handle stuff, I’d rather briefly comment on the movie I just saw, which was Captain America:

I LOVED it!  It was fun, there was no gratuitous humour, every actor was outstanding, and it had some cool fights.  Seeing Chris Evans playing a character so different from what he usually gets was great and it was an admirable task the man’s performance stood out from his massive super manly pecs of doom; it was little Steve all the way through, but partly in the body of a giant beefcake.  Infinite Kudos!

The movie got the mood of the 40s just right.  I don’t think calling Captain America a summer blockbuster is appropriate. I think it is a period drama with a few action scenes.

The only thing I found off-putting was how seemingly easy the Cap took everything at the very end.  It almost didn’t make sense.  He has to be shown truly struggling with modern times in The Avengers, not just sitting somewhere, all morose, telling himself “I missed my <thing I can’t type here because it could be considered a spoiler>.”

I was the only one in the theatre who stayed for The Avengers thingie after the credits.  In my mind I laughed like a cheesy cartoon villain and said “Those damn fools…”  It was too brief, but cool enough.

Song Challenge – Day 26:  A song that you can play on an instrument.

When I was learning to play guitar, right before I had to accept that’ll never play acoustic because my fingers develop no strength no matter what I do, I used to sort of be able to play this:

My Happiness – Powderfinger

Hollywood loves a good franchise. The movie-going public does too. Horror, action, comedy, sci-fi, western, no genre is safe. And any film, no matter how seemingly stand-alone, conclusive, or inappropriate to sequel, could generate an expansive franchise. They are legion. We are surrounded. But a champion has risen from the rabble to defend us. Me. I have donned my sweats and taken up cinema’s gauntlet. Don’t try this at home. I am a professional.

Let’s be buddies on the Facebookz!

The Franchise: Planet of the Apes — chronicling the epic and turbulent history of a civilization of evolutionary advanced apes – particularly the bloodline of two chimps, Zira and Cornelius – and their relationships with humankind. The franchise spawned from Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des singes, and spans five original-series films, a theatrical remake, two television series, and a new prequel-re-boot hitting theaters August 5.

previous installments:
Planet of the Apes

The Installment: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

The Story: We pick up right where the previous film left off: Taylor and Nova have gone off into the Forbidden Zone on horseback and discovered the remnants of the Statue of Liberty, which is remarkably well preserved after nuclear fall-out and 2000 years of being half-submerged on the beach. Once Taylor is finished punching the sand and calling God’s wrath onto the long-dead denizens of the 20th-century, he totally chills out and he and Nova start having a good time in the Forbidden Zone. He tries to school her in speech (and presumably in the ways of non-reproductive love-making). Then during a strange fire-storm, Taylor vanishes into thin air. Meanwhile, yet another American spaceship has traveled through time and crashed onto the planet. The lone survivor is Brent (James Franciscus). Brent meets Nova. Then Brent meets the apes. The ape world has found itself in a bit of a pickle, with the gorillas, lead by General Ursus (James Gregory), itching to invade the Forbidden Zone and destroy the human menace. Brent and Nova venture into the Forbidden Zone looking for Taylor, and stumble upon a hidden civilization of subterranean humans. Unlike their mute and stupid above-ground counterparts, these humans have evolved psychic powers. They also worship a giant nuclear bomb, which they plan to use if the gorillas invade.

What Works:

The saving grace of Beneath is its shockingly nihilistic ending, in which a mortally wounded Taylor sets off the super-humans’ nuke and kersplodes the entire goddamn planet. And this is after the apes have gunned down both Nova and Brent (Brent’s death is particularly rough). What makes this ending so shocking isn’t simply that Taylor sets off the bomb, but rather the context in which he sets off the bomb. There aren’t many permutations to this final scenario that would make Taylor blowing up an entire planet full of living beings feel like a necessary or heroic move, but it is rather big-balls-flauntingly impressive that 20th-Century Fox okayed an ending in which there isn’t even an attempt to make Taylor’s act feel necessary or heroic. Taylor isn’t saving anyone or anything by setting off the bomb. He isn’t fixing a problem or wronging a right. Why does Taylor blow it all up? Spite. And not just regular, ol’ spite. Really petty spite, at that. Nova dies, then he gets shot. When he gets shot he asks Dr. Zaius for help, and Dr. Zaius scoffs at the idea of helping a human. So Taylor is basically like, “Oh yeah, well fuck all y’all.” Kaboom! Then we cut to black and get what may be the most comically curt and depressing voice-over epilogue ever: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”

The back story to the ending is that Charlton Heston didn’t want to do the sequel, but Fox kept throwing money at him. Finally he agreed to work for five days with the caveat that he get to destroy the planet at the end, killing off the possibility of anymore sequels (oh, Charlie, so naive). It’s an awesomely hardass move, and it resonates as such in the film itself. Shocking as it is, it fits right in with the character of Taylor. Taylor is a prick, and for all his anti-war platitudes and unfair persecutions at the hands of Dr. Zaius, in the end Taylor proves Zaius correct. Man is no good. Taylor is the anti-messiah for the apes. His arrival ultimately heralds the complete destruction of Earth. That’s a bleak and badass way to end a sequel. Whether intentional on Heston’s part or not, it is also a loaded Cold War mutually-assured-destruction metaphor.

James Gregory was always great as blowhards and he is a delight as General Ursus. He does a great job of serving as comic relief while also serving as a motivating antagonistic force. Plus his helmet is bitchin’. Though why is he named Ursus? That means “bear” in Latin. Not sure I get that one.

Nova gets points for improvement. Linda Harrison still has that confused cow-eyed look on her face most of the time, but the character itself works much better this time around. Nova seems smarter, and with Taylor out of the way she is given more to do. It also helps Harrison that James Franciscus doesn’t even have 1/3 the screen presence that Heston does, so she just inherently comes off better padding around with Brent than she did with Taylor. Overall, her acting definitely still leaves something to be desired, though it does provide some good unintentional laughs. Her facial reaction to Taylor disappearing in Act I is priceless, as is the moment when she triumphantly speaks at the end, screaming “Taylor” in a Golum-like creepy rasp. But I’ll say this for Harrison, her hair is out-of-control sexy in this film. High five, Linda. On a side note – How come I never see cosplay Nova outfits in Comic-Con photos? That should replace the overused Slave Leia.

The psychic-manipulation jail cell brawl between Taylor and Brent is good old “stage combat” style fun. And though this certainly isn’t something that “works” about the film, it is worth commending the film for so successfully covering up Roddy McDowall’s absence. Scheduling conflicts kept McDowall from being able to reprise his role, so David Watson was brought in to essentially do an impression of McDowall. The heavy make-up and use of McDowall footage from the first film in the prologue helped smooth over the transition.

What Doesn’t Work:

Beneath isn’t a terrible film if judged solely as a B sci-fi movie, where it mostly succeeds by virtue of its bugnuts qualities, but it is a major disappointment coming on the heels of the first film. Aside from the ballsy ending, the film is otherwise comprised of a lot of poor choices and forced cop-outs.

It was unfortunate that Heston had no enthusiasm for a sequel, as that ended up hurting the film in a variety of ways. First off, Beneath had half the budget of Apes, and a lion share of it went to Heston. Whereas the first film astounded with the sheer amount of great ape make-up, Beneath sadly feels cheap. The number of actors in crappy one-piece masks instead of make-up increased to the point of being unmanageable — they’re everywhere, in the foreground and even in medium shots at times. And the full-body suits Ursus and Zaius sport during a funny steam room scene look like something you can buy at any Halloween store. The amazing make-up in Apes was part of what helped us swallow the otherwise silly concept. Beneath really tests our suspension of disbelief. But… this is a film called Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Belief needed to be suspended anyway. We’re already buying that apes somehow evolved speech in a mere 2000 years (horses on the other hand are still stuck carrying humanoids). We should be able to take some jinky gorilla masks.

The true pains of Heston’s deal are felt in the story. The concept of Taylor disappearing and Nova pairing with someone else to go find him is a creative way around Heston’s short shooting schedule — certainly better than boringly killing him in Act I. But Brent shouldn’t have been in the movie. On just a basic level, the entire backstory of Brent’s mission makes no sense. It was never entirely clear exactly what Taylor’s mission was in the first film, but regardless, based on what we were told it seemed like everyone (including those on Earth) thought there was a strong possibility that the crew would return hundreds or thousands of years after they originally left Earth. Why would a rescue mission be sent out? More so, why would one be sent out mere weeks/months after Taylor and his crew left? (If Brent was following Taylor’s exact course, and he crashed so soon after Taylor crashed, that logically must mean he also left Earth not that long after Taylor.) That is a nitpick. If the rest of the film had worked great with Brent, this would simply be a funny illogicality to point out, just as there were plenty of illogicalities to point out in the first film, if one wanted to. But the rest of the film didn’t work out great with Brent.

It isn’t James Franciscus’ fault. He’s no Heston, and he at times seems like a bearded-Heston knock-off, but he’s not bad. Franciscus actually looks better standing next to Nova than Heston does (Heston looks kinda haggard and creepy next to Harrison). The problem is Brent is completely unnecessary. If Fox was passing the torch to a new character, that would make sense, but considering everyone blows up at the end everything involving Brent is a boring retread. His first scene, tending to his dying captain, recycles the conversations in Apes where our characters realize everyone they’ve ever loved is long dead. When he meets Nova we have to go through the motions of him realizing she’s a primitive human. Then we have to go through the rigamarole of him first seeing the apes. Heston first seeing the apes is one of Apes best scenes. When Brent first sees the apes and says, “My god, it’s a civilization of apes!” I had to fight off an eye roll. I realize Brent needs Zira and Cornelius to explain to him what the fuck is going on, but we don’t need to hear the details again. And when Brent discovers the underground remnants of New York he says, “My god, did we finally do it?” it is such an aping – boom! pun! – of Taylor’s line from Apes‘ ending that he might as well have screamed “Damn you all to hell!” to the heavens. He’s just Taylor 2.0, and though he may better fit the generic mold of a Hero better than the cynical Taylor ever did, the simple fact is that being a prick made Taylor interesting. Brent is boring. He isn’t a character we want to spend time with.

If we can’t have Taylor, we should get apes. The scenes involving General Ursus warmongering in ape city are fun, but once Brent encounters the super humans, we get very little apage, except for some blah scenes of Dr. Zaius and the gorillas in the Forbidden Zone. Ignoring the realities of where the franchise went after this film, I think Brent should have been replaced by Cornelius and Zira. Nova should have returned to them in the ape city, and the two chimps should have embarked on a secret mission to find Taylor. They should have found the super humans. The film should have focused on the ape civilization, expanding the mythology and inner-workings of the ape society. Maybe there just wasn’t the money to do that, but conceptually it makes a lot more sense to me. As is, we tread water with Brent until we finally encounter Taylor again, and the film gets interesting for its final moments. By then it is too late though.

The super humans. While the psychics and their bomb-worshiping ways are undeniably good batshit b-movie antics, they simply don’t work for me on the serious level Apes did. Why do they wear fake faces? That’s just cheap weirdness. In his Beneath the Planet of the Apes commentary on Trailers From Hell, John Landis relates a story of seeing the original designs for the super humans’ true faces, which he claims were so disgusting it made you want to puke. Sadly, Fox rejected those designs. As is they’re just kinda veiny in a boring way. Their whole civilization is too sci-fi goofy, turning the film into the kind of film people assumed the first film would be, but wasn’t. They feel like characters from Lost in Space or the original run of Star Trek. This vibe is particularly strong in the super humans’ first scene, in which none of them speak, forcing Franciscus to awkwardly phrase everything he says so as to recap what they’ve just said to him, as though he were performing a classic Bob Newhart telephone comedy routine. The idea of individuals worshiping a nuke is solid, but there must have been a better way to work that concept in — something more allegorical, maybe with the apes finding a nuke and then, Animal Farm-style, becoming the very monsters they originally stood against. I don’t know. Something different. I just wanted more apes, dammit.

Dorkiest Political Allegory Moment: The chimps partaking in a Vietnam-style protest as General Ursus and the gorillas head to war.

Zoological Faux Pas:  Zira is always going on and on about how violent and brutish the gorillas are. In reality gorillas are the gentle giants of the ape world. Chimps are the assholes, and have been documented committing acts of war against neighboring communities of chimps. Gorillas will usually leave an area if they hear chimpanzees, much in the same way you might leave a bar if you spot that drunk asshole who is always picking fights.

Best Jackass Heston Line: After Nova dies. “Well, that tears it. Maybe we should just let the world blow up.”

Best Inverted Reality Line: General Ursus: “The only good human is a dead human.”

Awkward Inter-Species Moment: Zira thinking that Brent is Taylor. Oh, what? All humans look alike, Zira?

Fucked Up Ending: Already described. Taylor is all, “Zaius, help me, bro!” And then Zaius is all, “Help a human? But you’re so inferior and evil!” And so Taylor is all, “You bloody bastard.” Then he blows it all to shit. His final line should’ve been, “I finally really did it. I’m a maniac! I blew it up! Ah, damn me! God damn me to hell!”

Should There Have Been a Sequel: No. This one wasn’t very good and every character is now dead… or are they?!

Up Next: Escape From the Planet of the Apes

previous franchises battled
Leprechaun
Tremors
Critters
Death Wish
Police Academy
Phantasm

Cowboys & Aliens is a pitch that was bought by the studios long before it was ever a graphic novel, and was even figured as a follow up for the Nutty Professor II director to tackle after that triumphant sequel was finished. It sat for a long time until the publishing of the graphic novel finally lit a fire under a proposed production starring Robert Downey, Jr.

I would be willing to say that version would have been notably better, as Daniel Craig plays the stoic cowboy too  well as the movie around him is pretty much devoid of interest. That could be because a dozen+ years and a dozen+ writers have muddied the painting until it turned into a colorless brown tapesty- having stripped out the anti-gravity-horseshoed flying horses and such. This is an example of  Hollywood innocently whistling while they use their foot to nudge a profoundly silly concept into movie theaters, doing so by grounding it in reality and presenting it as a straightforward blockbuster. They’ve done too good of a job though, and in a summer with Norse gods, wizards, robots and star-spangled superheroes keeping things colorful, they seem to have desaturated this one past the point of being noticed. So a film bearing Spielberg and Ron Howard’s names, that stars James Bond and Indiana Jones, and has the “from the director of Iron Man” title plastered all over it will barely break $40m, if that. That will be better than several alien flicks this year (Battle: LA, Super 8), but it was made with a pretty heavy budget and a pedigree that sets much higher expectations.

With aliens quickly becoming the new zombies (tired!), maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

Our other two new openers (all of which are discussed in the new CHUD Video) should find themselves scattered among the top 5, with the branded kiddie flick doing solid business in the mid-20s. Those live action-CGI hybrids tend to do pretty well, especially if they’ve got a nostalgia angle for the parents. Since Smurfs is infinitely more tolerable than the Chipmunks films, I foresee it doing pretty well.

Crazy Stupid Love should see pretty standard rom-com numbers, as the overly mature tone of the ads will be slightly balanced out by Carrell’s comedy reach. It won’t make the fluffy Date Night numbers, but it should do just under $20m, putting it in league with things like Friend With Benefits. That mature tone and more adult look at love and dating may give it a shot at the longer play as well.

The summer is waning, and more interesting movies are on the horizon. In fact, it’s already starting this weekend, with the 7-city opening of Attack the Block– the film’s first opportunity to turn major geek buzz into actual dollars. Lots of fingers are crossed for it, and I would suggest that if it is anywhere near you, don’t hesitate to skip the big releases and enjoy some real alien mayhem.

We’ll meet up Monday morning (or Sunday night, if I’m feeling frisky).

Numbers!

Cowboys & Aliens (R) ….. $38,500,000
Captain America (R/R) ….. $29,000,000
The Smurfs ….. $28,500,000
HP: Deathly Hallows Part 2 (R) ….. $24,000,000
Crazy Stupid Love ….. $18,000,000

Come back Sunday to wonder what the fuck I was thinking with me.

The thread in which you talk about this stuff.