Tag / movie review

by hereandsphere

MEEK AT THE MOVIES : WORLD WAR Z ( Rating : 2 1/2 stars )

Image
Zombie apocalypse and anything vampire seems to be the hot ticket out of Hollywood these days. The subtext, that we prey on each other and that life is a precious and fragile thing, is a piquant notion that gets magnified to its fullest when examining how man comports himself as civilization crumbles.
Sans rules and with limited resources, what would you do? Snatch and grab, help out or hole up doomsday prepper style?
That’s the special sauce that makes any apocalypse-cum-horror flick grip the road. Real people, super natural horror, deep shit. George Romero’s seminal “Night of the Living Dead” was more about the dynamics and dissent amongst a band of survivors barricaded in a farm house than it was about the throng of shambling flesh scratching at the walls. Decades later, guys like Danny Boyle (“28 Days Later”) and Zack Snyder (the 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”) got the nifty idea to make the dead move at warp speed.
Speed kills and given the choice in “Jurassic Park,” who would you really want to face, T-Rex or the veloci-raptors?
“World War Z” does zombie on a grand scale and goes at the genre in new ways, even if the rabies outbreak that is transforming people in to flesh ripping berserkers is similar to the rage virus that fueled the “28 Days Later” series.  You get bitten and in seconds you’re one of them, a maniac on angel dust spreading the disease. The decayed, mangled weak-kneed dead in Romero’s tales and TV’s “The Walking Dead” have nothing on these Olympic athletes.
The outbreak comes suddenly and fast as Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, who snatched up the rights to Max Brooks’s 2006 book) and his family wallow in a Philadelphia traffic standstill and a wave of the rampaging infected sweep through, shattering windshields with their heads, chomping and biting, and increasing their numbers. It’s a terrifying beginning of the end.
Gerry, it turns out, is a recently retired UN operator who was adept at getting in and out of such hellish hotbeds as Liberia and Bosnia. Those survival skills keep the family alive for a night in a Newark housing project, and to get the family out and onto the safety of a flotilla of military vessels off the coast, Gerry has to agree to get back in the game. Bureaucracy and governments are eroding all around the world, and so Gerry, a SEAL team, and a Harvard educated biologist set out on a viral forensics mission of sorts to find a potential cure. The journey sends them to Korea, Wales and Israel where the Middle East flashpoint of contention has seen this coming and taken all their settlement walls and set them outward-facing.
The globe-hopping plot drops Gerry in one harrowing situation after another– I’m not sure what was more unsettling: the transformation of coach class on an airliner into a neck biting brood or being trapped in a W.H.O. laboratory (a veritable maze) with dormant undead at every turn. The scripts and Pitt play Gerry right, though; he’s not a can-do skull basher, he’s a thinker and a plotter, susceptible, vulnerable and human, more MacGyver than Rambo.
The film — directed by Marc Forster, who’s been all over the map with “Monster’s Ball” and a Bond credit — does an effusive job of rendering the world spanning terror. The scenes of broad carnage–that Philly traffic jam and the scaling of the wall in Israel by a zombie flesh ladder, which must be some type spin on the Tower of Babble — astound in scale, authenticity, and the seamless blend of FX and live action. If the story bogs down, it’s in its disjointedness. Each stop along the way feels like a chapter written by a different author; and that would be correct, as the script credits listed in IMDB require more comas that I care to entertain.
The end also comes (too) quick and rushed (and a bit of a groaner to boot), and there’s not enough screen time for Mireillie Enos of “The Killing,” who plays Pitt’s wife and the mother of their two daughters. The family tie binds the film nicely and Forster and Pitt hold it from going over and into cliché and hyperbole. The result is lithe and agile, and intrinsically eerie enough to keep your stomach pinned to the back of your throat throughout.
—- Tom Meek / “Meek at the Movies”
by hereandsphere

MEEK AT THE MOVIES : THIS IS THE END (rating : 3 ***)

 Image
“This is the End” may be the most meta-vanity project ever to come out of Hollywood, where things meta usually don’t fly unless Charlie Kaufman is involved. The film co-written and co-directed by Seth Rogen has Rogen playing Seth Rogen — the asshole extrapolation of himself.  James Franco, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill and Danny McBride all do the same. Baruchel is the one out of towner visiting Rogen in Los Angeles. Baruchel despises LA and just wants to hangout and smoke weed and watch 3D TV, but Rogen pries him off the couch and drags him to a house party at Franco’s manse.
Pot humor and pop up party guests like Rihanna keep the slow moving premise (Baruchel also hates Hill and is a bit of whining wet noodle to boot) alive, though there are nuggets of WTF humor that snap you out of the stupor : for example,  Michael Cera (yup, the anemic sweet wimp from “Juno”) doing blow and getting a rim job in the bathroom while sipping an effete cocktail that he seemingly relishes more than the sex act.
If that’s not an apocalyptic vision, the real apocalypse does arrive. A la the Rapture and Judgment Day, ‘good’ people are sucked up in blue tractor beams; the middlers and miscreants are left on Earth to perish in the building inferno. No one at Franco’s party gets beamed up to say the least, and, as the hills of Hollywood burn, it takes a while before the revelation sets in, and when it does, the sink hole from hell (literally) opens up and takes all but the main lads.
Most everything on view is aflame, and the six performers bunker up in Franco’s art-deco fortress, smoke more weed, divvy up supplies and jockey for masturbation rights to the lone porn mag in the house. McBride, so funny and unshakable in “Pineapple Express,” turns out to be the loose cannon, depleting the supplies in a matter of minutes; and Emma Watson shows up to provide a sexual distraction, not to mention dissension and Potter jokes.
This film, ostensibly birthed by the 2007 short film “Jay and Seth Versus the Apocalypse,” gets teeth from its self-deprecating nature. When wondering if they’ll be saved, one the insightful lot remarks, “They always save actors and famous people first.” One of the film’s wittier turns has Franco breaking out the video-camera from “127 Hours” and the boys making a cheeky, low-fi sequel to “Pineapple Express.” Things that don’t work so well are the heavily peddled spoof of “The Exorcist.” It’s dull, uninspired flatness will leave your head spinning.
Outside creatures that look like the minions of the Gatekeeper in “Ghostbusters” or some rubber costume baddie in a Scooby Doo episode tear up the turf. Eventually the posse must venture out; and when they do, the scale of special FX won’t wow you so much as make you wonder how such a hokey skit idea stretched into a feature length film got such big dollars.
“This is the End,” won’t get you any deeper into the personas on display or change your perception of them, no matter how you feel about them, but it will make you laugh — and test your patience a bit too.
—- Tom Meek  / “Meek at the Movies”
by hereandsphere

MEEK AT THE MOVIES : “AFTER EARTH” FAILS THE TEST — 1 STAR

Image
Sure, I like Will Smith. I do. Still, I can’t say I am liking his choice of films as of late. Sure, the upcoming “Winter Tale” has a ton of fire power to it, but purportedly, Mr. Smith turned down the role of Django because he felt the role wasn’t a lead. Then there’s that rumored remake of “The Wild Bunch” that has the Peckinpah faithful hearing fingernails on the chalkboard. Now comes this ill-advised project with M. Night Shyamalan, who’s made exactly one quality film, a few intriguing follow ups and done a disastrous slide ever since.
If you’re wondering why the actor, who holds an obvious penchant for sci-fi, would jump into water with a man on his last breath, the answer is likely “his son.” “After Earth” is not a Will Smith movie but a Jaden Smith movie. The young thespian held his own with Dad in the underrated and wholly affecting, pull-yourself-up drama, “The Pursuit of Happyness” and was effective in “The Karate Kid” reboot; but this film ? It’s  Jaden’s coming out party, a big screen bar mitzvah for Papa Smith to declare to the world, “My son is an actor.”
Well not so fast Will.
Jump ahead one thousand years. Man no longer lives on Earth but some far away planet where the bane of his existence is a beast called the Ursa. Sounds like a bear, but it’s a giant hell-bender salamander with pincers and an “Alien” appetite for humans. They’re blind, but can easily pick off peeps because of fear pheromones. Will and Jaden fittingly play father and son. Dad is Cypher Raige — highly regarded Zen general who has all the stoicism and success of Phil Jackson while junior checks in as Kitai, a cadet in dad’s army.
The pair along with a legion of military personnel set off on a training mission aboard a ship carrying a cocooned Ursa in its hold. Why is scantily explained, but then again not much makes sense 1K years into the future. They have warp drive space ships but fight with double bladed pole arms that retract crisply like a light saber — yet they wield no cool semi-automatics or laser blasters? Or how about the man who lost a leg in a battle with an Ursa and is confined to a wheelchair–no bionics or even a blade runner?
Such questions abound throughout and become increasingly aggravated by the stiff direction, hokey futuristic sets, inert dialogue and equally unimpressive acting. Yes, Will too.
In any case, after a meteor storm, the ship crashes and Cypher and Kitai are the only two who survive–well the Ursa too. Cypher’s legs are broken, so he must sit in the fuselage while Kitai treks four days to get to a critical communication module that landed a hundred clicks away as the ship broke apart on entry.
Oh yeah, the planet they landed on is Earth. It’s not really explained why, but we no longer live on Earth, it’s become a bit of a hell hole even though it looks lush, verdant and inviting. Somehow, somewhere along the line Mother Nature got angry (for us mucking up the scenery and souring the seas?) and kicked our ass, mutating giant eagles and swarms of ravenous man sized baboons; and the temperature sways between tropical and sub-freezing each day, even though the flowers bloom and the buffalo roam as if it’s a stable climate. As Cypher says, “every life form has evolved to kill man.” Say what? You can build a spaceship with a nuclear fusion drive, but you can’t take out a troop of oversized baboons?
There’s also the weird notion that man can only sort of breathe on the new Earth. I won’t even go into it, but the bulk of the film is Cypher sitting in a chair–a burnt out game console if you will–shouting commands into the earpiece (well actually, a wrist-piece but you get the idea) of his charge as he evades the local fauna and the Ursa.
Never have I seen Will Smith so stiff and inarticulate, and I wonder now, if all that early praise for Jaden was premature. And, for such a high powered concept, I was amazed at the degree of fluctuation in FX which ranged from brilliantly seamless to a gooey slathering of Cheese-Wiz.
In the wake of such wreckage, who knows if Shyamalan will ever make a feature again? I hope he gets a chance at redemption. as for Will, he’ll be fine. He’s been here before with “The Wild West” and proven to be bulletproof. Then there’s Jaden. He’ll get another shot and he should use it wisely.  He’s got an in, and Will shouldn’t push too hard. I appreciate the parenting instinct, I truly do, but don’t give into nepotism or the egotistical desire for legacy. You’re making bad picks for yourself Will, don’t do your son the same disservice.
—- Tom Meek