Category: Film

Movie Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2012)

We Need to Talk About Kevin doesn’t waste much time. From the start, we know that its title character is a murderer, moreover, that he’s responsible for a school massacre, something that’s become the new national nightmare. Its angle on the tragedy is one not often considered: The mother, who navigates through life in a permanent state of shock. It’s not so much that she didn’t expect what Kevin did to happen. On the contrary, she was suspicious of him as a toddler. What gets to her isn’t the decrepitude of her new home, the hopelessness of her new job, or even the open hostility of the neighborhood, but the knowledge that she was utterly powerless to stop the inevitable. (more…)

September 16, 2012
Movie Review: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

Hiding within Snow White and the Huntsman is something sleek and subversive, a forward-thinking fairy tale concerned with gender politics, something both of and for its time. It’s so well-secluded, however, that to continue on in that vein would mean entirely forgetting about the film’s title characters and focusing on its villain, which isn’t likely to happen in even the best summer blockbusters. The villain, after all, is just a crutch by which a less-than-interesting protagonist is supported, and while Rupert Sanders‘ retelling of Snow White flirts with crafting a staggeringly effective evil queen, the strength of Charlize Theron’s initial performance gives way to your usual bad guy platitudes, culminating in your typical CGI “epicness.” (more…)

September 15, 2012
Movie Review: Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Though it’s often portrayed as something fun and adventurous, I suspect that the true nature of time travel, at least for the basement quacks and pseudoscientists working on such projects. Even Marty McFly, patron saint of time travel, booked it to 1955 under tragic circumstances. That’s why it’s hardly surprising to learn that the people who respond to personal ads like the one that inspires Safety Not Guaranteed are inmates and survivors, those looking to rectify a mistake or save someone from dying. This strikes me as about right. Sure, there are plenty of people who’d go back in time just to do it, but the right person for the job has the right reasons for going.

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September 11, 2012
Movie Review: Killer Joe (2012)

It isn’t immediately apparent, but William Friedken‘s Killer Joe is the year’s most effective horror movie, a dirty, sexual, gore-spattered test of nerves, a psychological grindhouse film that introduces us to some deeply unlikable people who only grow more unlikable—and more disturbing—with each decision they make. The reason this isn’t obvious from the start is because Killer Joe is also, at times, one of the year’s funniest movies. Its characters and set-pieces are so dumb they defy the theory of evolution. Surely, God shaped the Smith family of mud and forgot to breathe life into them. Save one, they’re a pack of witless bumblers. It’s funny watching them get what’s coming their way, at least to a point, at which you feel disgusting for having enjoyed anything that came before. (more…)

September 8, 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…)

September 4, 2012
Movie Review: Premium Rush (2012)

Premium Rush is the sort of title that works two ways, both as the kind of delivery service proffered by the bike messengers of David Koepp‘s film, and as a description of the sort of thrill one of those messengers—Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)—gets from his chosen profession. Let’s get the former out of the way quickly: The envelope handed to Wilee is a MacGuffin, the object that sets him pedaling across Manhattan, dodging pedestrians, taxi cabs, buses, and bicycle cops. Though the movie backtracks a bit to establish the particular importance of this envelope and its contents, it only matters so much as another man—Detective Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon)—wants it for himself. See, Det. Monday’s in deep with a Chinese gambling concern, and he has a very tight deadline, by which he needs to have his debt paid. The envelope is worth enough money to do just that, but, unfortunately for him, what goes in Wilee’s bag stays there until it’s delivered. (more…)

September 3, 2012