Colette Arrand

Category: Film

  • Movie Review: Bending the Rules (2012)

    Movie Review: Bending the Rules (2012)

    Mostly, I’m amazed that movies like Bending the Rules are still made. That its cop is so obviously shady and its lawyer is so annoying and its end boss so predictable—even if the movie tries to surprise you by proffering almost zero clues—is a marvel of cinematic ignorance. Sure, buddy cop movies are still made and renegade cops continue to be a favorite protagonist of the Hollywood machine, but rarely are the nuts and bolts of the genre so evident. That our corrupt police officers are routinely Bostonian with an unbreakable code of honor merely shows the progression we’ve made from the time when our hero was distinguishable from all the other men and women in blue by his wacky floral shirt and the way he waggled his eyebrows at the end of every sentence. It’s so bad that, at one point, the lawyer tells the cop—who is eating a doughnut, of course—that he’s a walking cliche. (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    A time-displaced soldier. A Norse god. A playboy billionaire genius. A brilliant scientist who turns into a raging monster when angry. A former Russian spy. An expert marksman. On paper, a team comprised of six individuals this vastly different shouldn’t work. There are egos to deal with, competitive urges, the occasional extinction-level event. Since 1963, the Avengers have walked the very fine line between being Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and Earth’s Largest Screw-Ups. All it took back then was an assortment of popular comic book characters and the retrospectively brilliant idea of bringing a World War II era hero back from the publishing grave. In 2012, to get The Avengers together under the auspices of one movie took a more herculean effort: Five good-to-great movies serving as pretense, an assemblage of the right actors playing the right characters, and the right director at the helm of so much potential chaos. (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: Lockout (2012)

    Movie Review: Lockout (2012)

    Lockout wants desperately for you to believe that its hero, the wise-cracking Snow (Guy Pearce), is a bad enough dude to save the president’s daughter. If creating an action hero were like ordering sushi a la carte, Snow would be the type of man who checks off a lot of boxes: Ex-CIA, wears leather jackets and sloganeering t-shirts, spouts rapid-fire jokes, uses big guns, has an active disinterest in forming relationships with attractive women, habitually smokes. Snow smokes despite a friend’s protest that it’s the future and nobody does that anymore. That’s how cool Snow is. He’s such a bad dude, he could likely rescue two president’s daughters. (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Raid: Redemption (2012)

    Movie Review: The Raid: Redemption (2012)

    I have, I think, a fairly unusual appreciation of kung-fu movies. It’s not just that I enjoy them, but that I’ve invested so much in them in terms of personal mythology. Like wrestling and like comic books, kung-fu movies are, at heart, a battle between Good and Evil. The characters within the genre are interchangeable, the level of violence variable. Fight sequences act as a kind of hand-to-hand chess match—the winner isn’t often the clear-cut best fighter, but the man or woman who has the best read on the board, who better anticipates his opponent’s strategy. Good defeats Evil, as it must, but Evil gets plenty of good licks in before the end of the film, looks sexier, feels more dangerous. (more…)

  • Movie Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

    Movie Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

    Tarsem Singh‘s Mirror Mirror is a constant disappointment, a re-imagining of Snow White so droll and lifeless one wonders when a valiant prince will wander by to resuscitate the poor thing. Though it supposes itself a radical take on classic material, there is little—if anything—new going on here. The Queen is still evil. The princess is still beautiful. The prince, though oafish, is still charming. The two will mostly likely live happily ever after, the very picture of hetero-normative bliss.

    Here, Snow White (Lily Collins) is the daughter of a King (Sean Bean). Her mother dies at birth, and her father re-marries. When he disappears, his second wife, Clementianna (Julia Roberts) becomes The Queen, using her royal appointment to drive up taxes and throw lavish parties. The kingdom, as one would expects, is in crippling financial peril, and The Queen must find a suitor who’ll provide her with a line of credit capable of maintaining her lifestyle. In wanders Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), stripped to his underwear after a roadside encounter with a band of thieves. The Queen is immediately smitten and begins plotting to take him as a husband, but he is woefully infatuated with Snow White, who cut him down from the thieves’ trap. When White and Alcott dance at a ball the Queen throws to ensnare the Prince, it’s clear that the two were meant to be with each other.

    Naturally, this enrages The Queen, who instructs her henchman (Nathan Lane) to take her to the woods, where she’ll be killed by a griffin-like creature who first appeared around the time The Queen took power. Despite Brighton’s slavish devotion to The Queen, he lets Snow White run away, where she takes up with the thieves—the seven dwarves. Together, they plan to return the Queen’s unfair taxes to the townspeople and restore Snow White to the throne, where she’ll presumably marry Prince Alcott and rule in peace. But The Queen, using the aid of her magic mirror, has Alcott under her spell, setting the stage for a royal wedding.

    As cut-and-dry as it seems, Mirror Mirror is an absolute mess of plot elements, bits and baubles of fairy tale shtick stuck here and there to prop up an incredibly weak plot. The mirror, for example, seemingly exists as the story’s sole tangential connection to any previous version of Snow White; her ability to conjure love potions and send puppet assassins after Snow and the dwarves carrying a faint whiff of  deus ex machina. The dwarves, too, are superficially updated for our time, given names like Half-Pint, Butcher and Chuckles, saddled with the backstories to match. They take Snow White in, teach her how to fight, and are then locked in their own house when the time comes for them to fight. This is perhaps a better fate than the one that befalls Brighton, who is turned into a cockroach for not killing Snow in the forest. “A grasshopper had his way with me,” he complains to The Queen, preparing for her wedding.

    As one expects from a Tarsem movie, Mirror Mirror is visually sumptuous. The castle’s architecture, the odd hut that houses the mirror, the dazzling array of dresses worn by both Roberts and Collins, all of these things look terrific, perhaps better encompassing the heightened, romantic reality of a fairytale than many films that’ve come before. Unfortunately, they’re put in the service of a film so benign that even its climactic role-reversal feels trite, a matter of focus group tested obligation. The action sequences, too, are listless, staged like lazy re-creations of the brawls from Shrek.

    Roberts, at least, appears to be having fun, and she is Mirror Mirror‘s saving grace. Though not quite sympathetic—Tarsem reportedly wanted the audience to look upon a woman who’d poison a teenager with an apple as more human than monster—her vanity not only makes her more human than any other character in the film, but also provides for all of the film’s worthwhile scenes, among them a lavishly ridiculous spa-treatment involving bees, worms, and bird droppings. When the cartoon peril is finished, I’m left feeling like The Queen probably deserves Prince Alcott more than Snow White does. God knows she put more work into her pursuit.

    Rating:

    Mirror Mirror. Directed by Tarsem Singh. With Julia Roberts (The Queen), Lily Collins (Snow White), Armie Hammer (Prince Alcott), Nathan Lane (Brighton), and Sean Bean (King). Released March 30, 2012, by Relativity Media.