Colette Arrand

Tag: Lionsgate

  • Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)

    Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)

    Two years ago, I called The Expendables “the official movie of the 13-year-old boy.” With The Expendables 2, star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone doubles down, ramping up the violence while making an action movie for the Chuck Norris Facts crowd. Personally, I don’t think the whole Chuck Norris Facts thing has improved much with age. Neither has the core concept of Stallone’s budding franchise, which is to gather the elder statesmen of dumb action movies together with the titans of straight-to-DVD sport-to-actor crossovers and set their combined unstoppable juggernaut against some exaggerated, outdated kind of villainy. In the first movie, The Expendables visited the isle of Villena. Here, they take on a dude named Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), emphasis on whichever syllable you like. Here’s a guy so evil he only takes off his sunglasses before an intended kill. (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

    Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

    As an exercise in metatextuality, The Cabin in the Woods really only rises above mere cleverness once, when the small band of attractive college undergraduates gather in the living room of their rustic soon-to-be deathtrap to play a game of truth or dare. The one christened as the dumb blonde of the group is dared to make out with the taxidermied head of a wolf. The wolf—surely a big and bad one, before the axe fell—has teeth so sharp and eyes so bright one is tempted to think its mouth will snap closed, devouring our poor heroine. It’s a nice bit of tension, yes, but its jaws never clamp down. Instead, this young, blonde woman makes out with the head of a dead animal. She has three audiences: Her friends, the men and women watching on monitors from an undisclosed location, and you. Presumably, all three are titillated, and for precisely the same reason: Something pristine, unspoiled, and innocent (remember, blonde hair is a trigger for sympathy) is being deflowered by something wild, merciless, and foreboding. (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

    Movie Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

    The Hunger Games is most startlingly successful in its opening thirty minutes, when surveying District 12 of Panem, a coal-mining center where dirty people do dirty labor to keep the lights on in the Capitol, a post-apocalyptic paradise built upon a crater lake. The denizens of District 12 are slightly cleaner than the men and women of Winter’s Bone, and compared to the Capitol’s visiting Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), their situations are quite dire. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), for example, has taken control of her household in the aftermath of a mining accident that killed her father, leaving her caring for both her mother and her younger sister. Jobs are scarce, so she’s been forced to take up hunting. She’s quite good at it, but big game, like deer, have become increasingly scarce in an environment that’s been scorched by war.

    War is very much in the fabric of The Hunger Games. Not only did it give rise to Panem, the massive, quizzically structured supercountry that arises sometime after the end of the United States, but a civil war between the districts and the Capitol were responsible for the creation of the games, which pit twenty-four young men and women, one of each gender from all twelve districts, in bloody, to-the-death conflict with each other. These twenty-four children, “Tributes,” as they’re called, serve two purposes. First and foremost, they’re a reminder to the twelve districts that supreme power lies with the Capitol, who participate in the Hunger Games by dressing-up and placing wagers. Secondly, the winner of the Hunger Games will bring fame and fortune to their district.

    It’s a broken system, but one can appreciate the “I Am the 99%” ishness of the film’s opening moments, wherein Effie stands before a crowd of slackjawed, horrified, poorly-fed children and, with the aplomb of Mitt Romney saying he has plenty of friends who own NASCAR teams, tells the group she looks forward to seeing them die; all in the spirit of competition, of course. When Katniss’ sister Primrose (Willow Shields) is chosen from the hat, Katniss volunteers for her and is thrown on a bullet train (funny how we get one of those in the post-apocalyptic future) with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a baker’s son who, according to his own mother, is as good as dead.

    Once Katniss and Peeta are on the train, The Hunger Games becomes significantly less interesting. The two are scrubbed down, becoming two more pretty people in a parade of pretty people, most of whom give little to go on in terms of character. We learn a little about some of the other districts—one and two have been churning out Hunger Games champions for most of their duration—and are introduced to a cast of characters who, depending on their allegiance to Katniss, are flamboyant and one-note, or somewhat nuanced. The people running the games include hosts Caesar (Stanley Tucci) and Claudius (Toby Jones), producer Seneca Cane (Wes Bentley), and President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland), who is exactly the sort of generic evil capable of manipulating things from the shadows across a franchise. Joining Effie in aiding Katness are Cinna (Lenny Kravitz)–a one man support group/fashion label—and Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), a former Hunger Games winner who acts as District 12’s mentor. Of the characters here who aren’t Katness, Harrelson’s is the most well-drawn, a jaded man who finds no pleasure in the Hunger Games, but who nevertheless comes to like his charge.

    The Hunger Games themselves are effectively a long, drawn-out battle sequence, where most of the people involved end up slaughtered off-screen. Katniss has been advised to survive on her wits rather than join the mad rush for a weapon at the start of the games, and that’s exactly what she does, taking off for the woods with a backpack and a rope. She’s been cautioned that exposure and the lack of water and food are just as likely to kill her as the other children, but the weather’s temperate, water is plentiful, and nobody participating looks to be starving. The threats she faces in there are two-fold: The large hunting party that’s formed specifically in an effort to kill her (she’s the strongest one in the group), and the CGI machinations of Seneca Cane, who artificially generates a fire and sics mutated beasts on Katniss to keep the show rolling.

    Despite this, the Hunger Games portion of The Hunger Games feels momentum-less, hampered at turns by Katniss’ alliance with Rue (Amandia Stenberg), a little girl (seven or so) whose death sparks a riot in District 11, and a love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), who is forced to watch the events play out on TV. Rue’s death, obviously, is meant to be a huge moment in the film, but beyond her looking practically angelic pre- and post-martyrdom, she simply isn’t developed well enough within the parameters of the movie. It’s sad to see her die like it’d be sad to see any child get a spear stuck through them. The love triangle seems, at best, a concession to those who find Edward/Bella/Jacob the enduring romance of our time. It is built upon quick pecks on the cheek by Katniss and Peeta—who may be playing the folks in TV land for donations of soup and salve—and distressed looks from Gale, who is stuck in District 12 watching Katniss’ family.

    What I like most about these scenes is the way director Gary Ross has decided to shoot them, in a style that straddles the line between old-school action cinematography and the currently in-vogue shaky-cam. The resulting scenes of violence are appropriately chaotic while remaining easy to follow. His pacing is off—at two hours and twenty minutes, parts of the film feel decidedly overstuffed while leaving other areas critically, frustratingly underdeveloped—but one gets the idea that many of The Hunger Games‘ decisions were made in an effort to appease the book’s massive fanbase. That’s not to say that the film is accessible only to fans of the novel. Unlike the Twilight series, which requires a person who hasn’t read the books to have either an almanac or a very knowledgeable friend, The Hunger Games is quite inclusive. It’s easy to see how some characters, particularly Rue, may benefit from the written word, but the film very consciously reaches out to new fans and does so successfully.

    Frustratingly, The Hunger Games isn’t tremendously ambitious in scope, despite playing in the same sandbox as movies like Blade Runner and Metropolis. While the comparison may not be fair, most dystopian films use their future regimes and the inherent divide between squalor and excess to examine a problem eating away at our society. Those concerns are at the fringes of The Hunger Games, its kill-or-be-killed ethos hardly a breath of fresh air. The film squanders every chance it has of being challenging material, not even stopping to ask what Katniss would do if her and Rue were the last two left standing, and the dynamics of Panem society—one infers a kind of loose caste system, based on district—are left wholly untouched. Even if future sequels delve into that subject and give Katniss some tough decisions, I suspect the franchise will still leave me with two questions: 1) Nuclear holocaust be damned, at what point in the future do we begin naming people after American Gladiators? 2) Where have all the ugly people gone? Starvation, after all, isn’t pretty.

    Rating:

    The Hunger Games. Directed by Gary Ross. With Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta Mellark), Woody Harrelson (Haymitch Abernathy), Elizabeth Banks (Effie Trinket), Stanley Tucci (Caesar), Toby Jones (Claudius), and Donald Sutherland (President Coriolanus Snow). Released March 23, 2012, by Lionsgate.

  • Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Throughout my educational career, I’ve managed to frustrate many instructors—most of them smarter than me—who liked me, who liked talking to me, who liked my work, but ultimately had to give me a grade lower than what I was capable of. My mom, she’d drive 40 minutes from the suburbs to Detroit and stand in line patiently to speak with one of my teachers, just to be told that I was failing to live up to my potential. There was much hand-wringing; all of it justified. What do you do with potential that refuses to realize itself? That’s a question you could ask of Kevin Smith, whose Red State represents the first film of his that’s free from the yoke of an overseer. It comes close, very close, to being his first film as a mature artist, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

    This can be said of most of the movies Smith has done since Clerks, which was a great first feature, a great independent comedy, but established the director as a maestro of dick jokes and Star Wars references. Chasing Amy was close to greatness, but for its solipsistic treatment of sexuality. Dogma came close, but couldn’t walk away from Jay and Silent Bob. Clerks 2 refused to grow up. After the failure of Cop Out, Smith threw up his hands and declared himself done with the mainstream. He was going to make a movie his way, on his terms, and thus we have Red State, which has few comedic elements and manages, at times, to be one hell of a gripping movie. Instead of being a platform for Smith, whose rabble rousing about the state of Hollywood and the width of airline seats has not gone unnoticed, it ends up being a scene-stealer for two old hands—Michael Parks and John Goodman—who dance around Smith’s weaknesses and deliver two of the more compelling performances of the year.

    To get there, however, we’ve got to get through some stuff about a trio of high school dudes who want to hook up with a chick in her trailer. None of the teens are really that important, save that they’ve got great names (Billy-Ray!) and some of the worst movie hair I’ve seen in a long time. If Red State is a horror movie, then it is very much a Dead Teenager sort of horror film, where the teens don’t count for much beyond cannon fodder. They debate whether or not sleeping with the same woman in succession is a “faggoty” endeavor, but are off on their merry way to meet a woman named Sarah (Melissa Leo), who isn’t quite what her online profile picture indicated. In short order, the boys are knocked out and taken to a compound belonging to the Five Points Baptist Church, headed by Pastor Abin Cooper (Parks).

    Five Points: They’re a lot like the Westboro Baptist Church in that they protest funerals (including “that dead pope’s funeral in Italy”), but their extremism is taken, well, to the extreme. They aim to entrap fornicators, philanderers and homosexuals, torturing and killing them in the name of the Lord. This’d be entirely ridiculous were it not for Parks, who delivers his film-dominating sermon with such conviction that the existence of a guy like Abin Cooper is nothing short of plausible. His congregation of sons, daughters and grandchildren are enthralled by his routine, responding to his every call, exalting his words, laughing as he moons around the pulpit. He’s a charismatic guy, and charisma’s really all you need. Worse though, he’s a charismatic guy on the lunatic fringe, which is what makes him dangerous.

    After an altercation with the police (including, as the chief, the underutilized Stephen Root), the ATF are called in to search the premise for illegal weaponry. The point man on the operation is Special Agent Keenan (Goodman), who is caught off-guard when Cooper and his clan open fire from the compound. Once he radios in this situation, he’s given an order he struggles with: The complete destruction of the Five Points church. Though the film rushes through it, Goodman is good in the ensuing firefight, as is Parks, but both men are at their best when the gunfire is quiet and both are allowed to speak. Like Dogma, Red State is a film dealing with the dangers of belief. Red State is much more ambitious than Dogma, however, as it’s clear how much Smith fears what our beliefs can drive us to do. The Armageddon of Red State is intense, personal—it is not an apocalypse of loopholes, and Goodman’s character finds nothing funny about a group of nutjobs willing to turn machine guns on the society that mocks them.

    But the movie itself does. Maybe it’s necessary to laugh at Abin Cooper’s demise, to see him brought low. If that’s what we, as an audience, need to bring closure to the film, then fine, Cooper’s a fine boogeyman-cum-fool. I’d like to think, however, that we’re smarter than that, that we can deal with and rationalize Cooper without the film reaching for obvious jokes. People like Cooper are, in conversation, legitimately scary. Sometimes it’s nice to laugh off fear. Sometimes it’s better to be scared. Given the continuing radicalization of American discourse, often upon religious lines, I think the latter would have been more effective. For now, that seems like a road Kevin Smith is averse to traveling on.

    Rating:

    Red State. Directed by Kevin Smith. With Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), John Goodman (Special Agent Keenan), Melissa Leo (Sarah Cooper), Stephen Root (Sheriff Wynan), and Kerry Bishé (Cheyenne). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.

  • Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    A quick spoiler for those of you considering putting down your hard earned money on Abduction: Nobody in it gets abducted. Guns are fired, people are murdered, others are beaten up, and spies from the CIA battle a rogue Russian black-ops agent looking to regain some stolen files, but the only people who get kidnapped here are Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver and Michael Nyqvist, who were apparently blindfolded and shoved into a van headed to Pittsburgh. There, they were forced, likely at gunpoint, to recite 20-years worth of teen action movie cliches as Taylor Lautner smiled or grimaced at them, depending on the scenario.

    There happen to be two scenarios. In the first, Nathan (Lautner), is a typical high school kid. He crushes on the girl next door (Lily Collins), gets wasted at a party, gets busted by his dad and, like your normal American high school kid, is beaten up by him in the backyard of their fantastic mansion. Lautner is all smiles here, other than when he’s about to deck his crush’s boyfriend or when he’s at therapy, where his shrink (Weaver) leads him by the hand through some angsty boilerplate. Despite the fun he has playing beer pong and riding his motorcycle, he feels weird, like he doesn’t belong at the school or with his family…a stranger in his own skin.

    If that’s not familiar enough, there’s scenario two, where Lautner discovers that his parents aren’t his parents, that he’s been trained by world-class martial artists, and that he has a Russian hit squad coming after him for unknown reasons. He finds this out because, conveniently, he was assigned a paper on missing persons, and a missing persons site had some software that aged an old baby photo of his into a shockingly accurate future-him. The girl he’s crushing on, Karen, immediately jumps to the most alarmist conclusion: “Like, ohmigod Nathan, your parent’s totally aren’t your parents! They, like, abducted you or something!”

    Only they didn’t abduct him, and they’re soon shot dead by the Russians. The CIA gets involved, and Nathan and Karen run from both groups, traveling in teen-friendly vehicles like 2011 BMWs and Amtrak trains as CIA man Burton (Molina) and the rogue Kozlow (Nyqvist) chase him down. The rest of the movie consists of standard chase scenes, punctuated briefly by bits of dialog so awkward, Sir Laurence Olivier would struggle in lending them gravitas.

    “I’m not dying here,” A man says, trying to fend off Lautner’s blows. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know. There’s a bomb in the oven.”

    And then Lautner goes to the oven, discovers that there is indeed a bomb in it (a decidedly old-school looking one that must have been placed and set magically), and manages to drag his panic-stricken future girlfriend to safety, even though the digital readout is at a comically short seven seconds. This, of course, means that the man who swore he wasn’t dying there dies, which would be sad were he not inept at his job. Later, in recounting the day’s tragedy, Lautner grimaces and deadpans “I just saw my parents get murdered in front of my eyes.”

    And that’s just it…his parents did get murdered, right in front of his eyes even, and his loss just flat does not register. Yes, I understand that he’s an “action hero” and I get that he’s got “rage issues.” But rage is an emotion, and it’s the one action heroes need. First Blood, for example, would be nothing without Stallone breaking down and crying into Richard Crenna’s arms at the end of the movie, and half of Schwarzenegger‘s best stuff would similarly be wasted were he not enraged that somebody killed/kidnapped/threatened his wife/child/Christmas cookies. Neither Schwarzenegger or Stallone were particularly known for pathos, but, bulletproof though they were, they reacted to danger as if it were dangerous. Here, in an empty PNC Park, Lautner puts his arm around his girl and cracks wise about how exciting their first date was, despite missing the Pirates game.

    Yeah bro, but your parents are still dead. Maybe you ought to work through those issues before sliding into second base.

    Rating: 

    Abduction. Directed by John Singletary. With Taylor Lautner (Nathan), Lily Collins (Karen), Alfred Molina (Agt. Burton), Michael Nyqvist (Koslow), and Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Bennett). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.