Colette Arrand

Tag: 20th Century Fox

  • Movie Review: Prometheus (2012)

    Movie Review: Prometheus (2012)

    In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus gave humanity the gift of fire. Given its uses—cooking and warmth being paramount among them—this divine gift was secondary only to life itself, something he was also responsible for. As punishment, Prometheus was bound to a rock, and was visited each day by an eagle who feasted on his liver. As Prometheus has it, our Titan was a large, humanoid alien; our clay his genetic make-up and the planet’s water cycle. The alien who grants us life vomits, breaks apart, and ultimately disintegrates in a river. The price of aiding and abetting humanity is obviously quite high and, given human nature (read: fickle), not entirely worth paying.

    Untold thousands of years later, scientist couple Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a shocking commonality in ancient artwork spanning time and continents: Gigantic beings pointing the way to a cluster of stars that, the couple postulate, could lead humanity to the origin of life on Earth. They find a corporation willing to fund them—the Weyland Corporation—and take off for a habitable moon thousands of lightyears away in a trillion-dollar spaceship. The two most important people on the ship are representatives of the Weyland Corporation; Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the mission’s corporate overlord, and David (Michael Fassbender), an android programmed to service the crew and look after the interests of the recently deceased Weyland (Guy Pearce), who is as much interested in the origins of life as Dr. Shaw. The Prometheus carries a spartan crew that includes a captain (Idris Elba), a biologist (Rafe Spall), and a geologist (Sean Harris), all of whom are your somewhat standard horror movie fall guys. The captain is stalwart and dependable, responsible for his crew and his ship. The biologist quickly reveals himself as an idiot. The geologist is the audience guy, knowingly afraid of tunnels, caverns, and the dark. (more…)

  • Movie Review: Chronicle (2012)

    Movie Review: Chronicle (2012)

    The problem I have with Chronicle is essentially the problem I have with every found-footage movie: At some point in time, it becomes prudent to put the camera down. I’m sure there’s some basis for it in reality, but the footage-obsessed amateur cameraman seems like a convention created entirely for this sort of movie, and Chronicle takes it even further by inviting along a character who films every aspect of her rather typical high school life for a video blog—something that seems illegal, if not particularly worth watching. Chronicle has a better selling point than most found-footage films, however. Instead of documenting a haunted house or demonic possession, the teenagers at the center of the movie discover something that’s not of this world and are, as a result, imbued with telekinetic abilities.

    Three boys—outcast filmographer Andrew (Dane DeHaan), prom king candidate Steve (Michael B. Jordan), and Andrew’s popular cousin Matt (Alex Russel)—find a hole in the ground that leads to a bunch of glowing rocks They touch it, then their noses start to bleed. The next day, they discover that they have an apparently minor superpower—the ability to move small objects with their mind. Quickly, they push this ability, discovering that it is not unlike a muscle—the more they use it, the stronger it becomes. Unlike most superhero movies, which allow their heroes only a moment of joy at the onset of their powers, Chronicle allows the boys most of the movie to have fun discovering what they can do, and they go about telekinesis as you’d expect teenage boys to do: trying to stop hurled baseballs, building LEGO towers without their hands, messing around with people in a toy store, using a leaf-blower on a passing girl’s skirt. Eventually, they find that they can fly.

    If Chronicle were just this–three dudes getting powers and pushing the limits of those powers, perhaps struggling with the implications of them—it would easily have been much better than most movies using the found-footage gimmick. But Chronicle has a dark underbelly that drives the plot, that gives the whole thing a fairly standard beginning and an ultimately disappointing end. To fill in these gaps, director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis give Andrew an origin out of a John Hughes movie. He’s poor and shy, his mother is dying, his father is a raging alcoholic. He buys a camera and begins filming his life as a self-defense mechanism, a way of documenting the means by which life tortures him. He has certain odd tics—taking the camera to a party, filming cheerleaders as they practice—but beyond the bullies who kick his camera around and the occasional request that Andrew turn off the camera—a request that goes unfulfilled—most of the people he knows don’t figure his behavior as weird. The fact that he continues filming everything even after he telekinetically pushes a truck into the lake, however, complicates things. Is he filming to document his life, or to sate his ego? Given his urge to spill intensely personal things to Steven, who he’s only known for a few weeks, and to accuse Matt of not really being his friend, it’s probably a little bit of both.

    It’s entirely possible to enjoy Chronicle on the basis of pure spectacle. Andrew’s mastery of telekinesis is such that he’s able to move the camera around without being behind it, often while doing other things. When he can’t, there’s other footage to be found—from police helicopters, live news reports, the camera belonging to Casey (Ashley Hinshaw), the life-blogger. For the most part, though, it’s Andrew shooting Andrew, and if it seems like it’d be smart of him to not take the camera along on certain parts of his journey, the film asks that we consider him a sort of Ozymandias. Look upon his works and tremble. It’s well and good to go beyond the conventions of a found footage movie, and the camera, rather than lend itself to the implausibility of the movie (“oh man, I’ve got to film this giant monster!”), is a nice, subtle touch: Andrew’s good at what he does, knows it, and is showing off to be a prick.

    That being said, Chronicle falls short of being a compelling origin story for Andrew, Matt, or Steve. Its comic book plot is so shopworn, so connect-the-dots obvious that it’s hard to take Andrew seriously as sympathetic lead or potential danger to mankind. Maybe it’s because I’m a cynical ex-comic book store employee, but the mixture of broken home and superpowers strikes me as a bit stale. With more time, maybe Andrew’s home life would have felt more genuine, perhaps the eventual conflict with his father (Michael Kelly) would have felt like a triumph, something that would then give way to horror as Andrew continued to sour, become more confident in his abilities. But then again, the big battle scene would need to wait until the sequel, and in a society where we’re so bored that we’ll film ourselves being bored, I suppose there’s no time for pathos. Bring on the explosions and flying buses, then. They’ll do, in a pinch.

    Rating:

    Chronicle. Directed by Josh Trank. With Dane DeHaan (Andrew), Alex Russel (Matt), Michael B. Jordan (Steve), Michael Kelly (Richard Detmer), and Ashley Hinshaw (Casey). Released Febuary 3, 2012, by 20th Century Fox.

  • Movie Review: The Sitter (2011)

    Movie Review: The Sitter (2011)

    After The Sitter and Your Highness, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the only projects David Gordon Green finds worth his time are stoned in-jokes spitballed between he and his friends in his smoke-filled basement, over a soundtrack of early-90s hip-hop. This is a director who has previously displayed immense talent but, perhaps egged on by the commercial and critical success of Pineapple Express, which is still quite good despite representing the nadir of the buddy stoner flick, he keeps going back to the well despite ever-diminishing returns. The Sitter, which is a 90-minute assemblage of uncomfortably bad jokes, bad characters, and bad set pieces, is a bad movie, and it’s badness is on another level than even that of Your Highness. Sitting through that movie, you wonder how its stars and its director convinced a studio to finance the shoot. Sitting through this one, you wonder why they bothered.

    For Jonah Hill, this represents a precipitous drop-off from Moneyball, a drop-off that even rivals the one James Franco took between 128 Days and, well, Your Highness. In The Sitter, he plays Noah, a sex-obsessed chubster who doesn’t get much action. He’s got no job, no goals, and no car. His dad left he and his mom high-and-dry for the babysitter years ago and owes something like ten years of alimony. His “girlfriend,” if you can call her that, invites him over so he can go down on her, then pushes him out the door so he can go to a party. If you’re thinking to yourself that it’s not possible for Noah to navigate three insane children through a minefield of drugs, overlords, exploding toilets, jewel heists, racial stereotyping, stolen cars, and cheating parents while teaching them (and himself) valuable lessons about the importance of being/respecting yourself, then you’re not giving The Sitter enough credit for trying harder than most movies do to heap sugar into an otherwise vile concoction.

    Does it work? Not even close. The Sitter isn’t aided any by the kids Noah is forced to babysit. There’s Slater (Max Records), a headcase who carries with him a fanny-pack full of pills and a promise that, if given any responsibility, he’ll snap; Blithe (Landry Bender), who is obsessed with celebrity and “hot gossip” and smearing make-up on her face; and Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), an adoptee who dabbles in explosions, the needless destruction of property, and “running away,” which is so literal a threat that he has a GPS tracker sewn into his jacket. Why these kids are this way is never really The Sitter‘s concern, but Noah, while stealing money from a bat mitzvah or crashing the minivan because Blithe farted, has the time to make crucial, insightful observations into their young lives. The speech Noah gives Slater is as close as The Sitter comes to genuine sentiment, but for two issues: 1. Slater’s outburst is practically lifted from Little Miss Sunshine, and 2. Noah’s message that it’s OK to be gay comes with the promise that Slater will, after enduring a torturous high school career, land a sweet gig in the entertainment industry, where he’ll be organized and smell nice.

    The other scenes like the one between Noah and Slater work similarly, and are clearly meant to cut the film’s otherwise bitter, jaded aesthetic. They just don’t work, though, as Hill is pretty much talking to two of the worst child characters yet conceived. Blithe’s crime is that she’s a subplot delivery device in a movie that barely has a main plot to begin with, her “hot gossip” being that her dad is sleeping around with some guy. She wears a lot of badly-applied make-up and talks about celebrities so Noah can tell her that celebrities and women who wear make-up are whores, thereby realizing that his “girlfriend,” who used to date a cagefighter, is just that. Rodrigo is plopped into the script to speak Spanish, because it’s funny when the white guy doesn’t understand another language and makes threatening suggestions in response. He blows things up and steals things and acts mischievous, and it’s not clear if that’s because he’s a kid or because he, like the black dudes at the pool hall or the gay dudes lifting weights, is a caricature, a modern-day Frito Bandito who only wants to be loved.

    Eventually, Hill builds an impressive rap sheet and forms a bond with the kids, not that any of it matters. This is the kind of movie where an eccentric drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) employs a gang of homoerotic bodybuilders because it’s meant to look funny, where the white hero wins over a gang of clichéd street thugs by getting punched out and bumbling through cribbed street lingo, and where a potential love interest hears the hero admit that his girlfriend really isn’t his girlfriend, only to indignantly ask “So you have a girlfriend?” a minute later. The street thugs exist to save Noah’s ass, the bodybuilders because a gay villain can’t be a gay villain without gay henchmen, and the love interest so Noah has somebody to move on to after he’s been properly beaten up and abused for his karmaic sins. So much of this movie happens separate from the narrative because someone thought it’d be funny. One of those things: an in-joke cameo of James Franco, doing his thing on an episode of General Hospital. He looks happy. He should be: he’s not in The Sitter.

    Rating:

    The Sitter. Directed by David Gordon Green. With Jonah Hill (Noah), Max Records (Slater), Landry Bender (Blithe), Kevin Hernandez (Rodrigo), and Sam Rockwell (Karl). Released December 9, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.

  • Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    It’s really hard to even begin a review of a movie like What’s Your Number? without selfishly floating a few things out there, so bear this in mind as I try to figure out what, exactly, I saw:

    1. As a man in a household consisting of myself, a sister, and a mother, I’ve seen a ton of romantic comedies. I was practically raised on a diet of Audrey Hepburn and John Hughes, so I’d like to think that I know what works, what’s funny, and what’s romantic. I consider myself not dude-at-a-chickflick, but an unbiased judge of these things.
    2. As a frequent grocery shopper, I often catch glimpse of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, the former being the magazine with the article that is the crux of this film. Other than learning a few overly-complicated methods to the male orgasm (hasn’t friction worked for centuries?), I’ve learned that a good amount of the magazine publishing industry relies on making women feel insecure about their looks, their weight, and how many men they have or haven’t slept with.
    3. As a human being, I can’t help but be sad (and a little angry) about how much money our society pumps into these industries. It seems like every other romantic comedy is an artless slice-of-“life” debating the merits of one relationship crisis article or another. He’s just not that into you? You’ve worn twenty-seven bridesmaids dresses but have yet to be the bride? You’ve slept with twenty dudes? Whatever. There are well over six billion people out there. Twenty isn’t a fraction; it’s a crumb.

    But our biological clocks are ticking from the moment of conception, so I suppose it’s not all that unreasonable to feel pressure/begin panicking when, on the eve of thirty, no significant headway has been made towards our mutual goal of not dying alone. This, I suppose, is why I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the plight of Ally Darling (Anna Feris), the woman who has slept with twenty dudes and who is freaked out about the Marie Claire article (researched by a Harvard doctor, no less!) that says she’ll never find happiness.

    This, of course, is absolute crap, but go along with it for a bit. In an effort to find her one true love, Ally decides to put off everything, including her sister’s (Ari Graynor) wedding, to track down her twenty ex-loves. Because a woman can’t be expected to do these things on her own, she turns to her neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) who, as the movie has it, knows how to find people. Of course, some people are right out. Colin, for one, since he’s a womanizer and would put her over her number. Julie, a girl she slept with in college, because she’s a dude now. Gerry, a puppeteer, because puppeteers are probably more interesting than divorced guys and Miami gynecologists. She’s really hoping to settle for two options, though: A Senate hopeful (Anthony Mackie) and the son of an incredibly rich guy (Dave Annable), neither of whom question her motives for looking them up again some 5 or 15 years after their last contact. Naturally, the one who’s right for her is right under her nose, having sex with every woman in Boston. Naturally, he comes to realize that she’s the only woman he’ll ever need to have sex with again.

    I’d feel bad about spoiling the end of the movie were it not a bastardization of the same ol’, same ol’. The film’s every element is predictable. For example, if I told you that the black senatorial candidate was a Republican, would you be able to guess his sexual orientation? If I said that Ally had a “weird” hobby, would you guess which smokin’ hot bro suggests she make it her career? If I told you that the events of the film surround the wedding of her sister, would you be able to guess which character would grab a fretting Ally by the shoulders on that day to say “Go to him?”

    If you can (heck, even if you can’t), it’s probably obvious that Ally’s not a person worth your interest. To the point, she seems like a terrible person, oddly infatuated with the idea of snatching money and power without earning either, to the point that she makes her sister’s wedding about her. None of this would be a problem were the situations comic in nature, but the movie can’t, at any point, decide if Ally is somebody we should be rooting for or somebody we should hate for being a slut, and Anna Ferris, once tabbed as one of the funniest women in Hollywood, can’t make anything about her stick. In a way, the movie’s funniest moment is when Ally’s father tells her to be herself. If she really followed through on that advice, she’d be a gibbering collection of lies she’s told men so she’d get laid.

    But getting laid, as every romantic comedy would have you know, is terrible unless it’s with one partner, for the rest of your life. Last night at a Waffle House, I wound up having a conversation with the waitress about this movie. She was pretty drunk during it and couldn’t remember much, but she said “There was nothing wrong with her [Ferris]. A number’s a number. You should own it.” Her number was one. At this, the restaurant Awwwwed. Maybe someday romantic comedies will go back to being about nice women like the waitress at Waffle House, who fall in love with nice people and whose lives are complicated by more than magazine-issue stereotype. Until then, we’ll always have the rom-com slut. We’ll always have our insatiable appetite for slutshaming.

    Rating:

    What’s Your Number? Directed by Mark Mylod. With Anna Faris (Ally Darling), Chris Evans (Colin Shea), Ari Graynor (Daisy Darling), Joel McHale (Roger), Blythe Danner (Ms. Darling), Andy Samberg (Gerry Perry), Anthony Mackie (Tom Piper), Dave Annable (Jack Adams), and Aziz Ansari (Jay). Released on September 30, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.