National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Action/Delusion/Complete lack of grounding in reality/Adventure starring among others Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren and others.

—

Benjamin Gates is back. This time he’s knee-deep in a convoluted plot to clear the name of his ancestor Thomas Gates, and apparently this is done by finding a lost city of gold.

—

I kinda liked the first National Treasure. It was somewhat fresh and somewhat exciting. There was no big surprise that there’d be a sequel since it was –as far as I know– a huge financial hit. That’s the way Hollywood works, go where the money is.

So, this is the sequel. Apparently it’s going to be turned into a franchise as well, as is very obviously hinted at through the film.

How to summarize this? Nicolas Cage drones through a confusing and special effects-heavy plot dealing with everything from the Queen of Englands desk to Abraham Lincoln and the statue of Liberty. There isn’t a single stone unturned, for a moment I was expecting Thor, the god of thunder, to make an appearance and help Nic Cage out in his quest for justice and money.

If you liked the first one, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one too. I however think it’s vastly inferior to the spunky tempo of the first one. The plot is littered with really surreal Deus Ex Machinas, subplots run into the sand, the plucky blonde that accompanied them in the first film has in this one been reduced to pretty window-dressing since her only function is to look surprised or hand Cage a keypass every now and then. Riley the computer-geek and general nice guy does the same, basically just performing magic on command. He also got saddled with providing the comic relief for the entire film, and this makes him barely less annoying than anyone else.

To watch this movie you need to heavily suspend your knowledge of how anything works. The laws of physics gets thrown out the window immediately –apparently you CAN crash a car so badly it looks like junk afterwards without wearing seatbelts and yet not getting smashed into a million tiny bits of meat and broken bones. Also, even though the movie is littered with Apple-products none of them actually seem to function like an Apple-product. Every laptop is running the magic Hollywood-OS that chirps and beeps when scrolling text, and hacks into the british department of motor-vehicles at the push of a button. And OF COURSE all the traffic cameras in the UK are tied into the internet, so you immediately can download a photo of your grinning self running a red light. French cops will apparently happily help in translating clues taken from a statue. And a golden city buried underground hasn’t been discovered for hundreds of years, despite the fact that a national monument is built on top of it and every year hundreds of thousands of people stomp the area. And the president of the USA keeps a tiny book in the library of congress, and this book contains every secret and conspiracy theory ever produced. Aaaaand, primitive machinery built hundreds of years ago will work perfectly despite being soaked in water, oil and various other liquids without any maintenance.

This movie tries hard to be a mix between Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne. The first one was fun, this one is a lot more flat and tries too hard to mix too many things into the what-have-you. Top it all off with Nicolas Cages droning voice and expensive hairpiece and you’ve got National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

The only really fun and dynamic scene in the film is when Nicolas Cage slides down a banister and then starts howling absurdities at a security guard.

Other than that, don’t watch this movie if you’re going to pay for it. It’s just not worth it.

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

Action/scifi from 2007.

—

The Aliens and one lone Predator descend on a small village somewhere in the USA, squeezing the local humans between them.

—

Yeah, I guess that’s a pretty good summary of the story. The Predator (or Yautja, as they’re known in the expanded universe) takes on the task of cleaning up after the botched mission in the previous movie. Why? Because that ship crashed, and this lone creature was sent to erase the traces.

The story is a bit weird actually. The Predator first does an excellent job of removing any traces of aliens or Predators using some weird blue liquid that dissolves everything it touches, all the while staying out of most of the action. It gets a little weird after a while when he decides that he’s no longer there on a covert mission and instead goes off and starts collecting trophies instead.

So, the story is a bit iffy. It works, I suppose, but it’s not very logical.

It’s easy to think that this movie is crap. And I would assume that to someone not very into the whole AvP mythos it would just seem like another stupid actionfest. But I liked it. I went in with very low expectations since I thought the first AvP movie did a really half-assed job. So, expectations were low and interestingly enough, I think that if you’re a fan of Aliens, Predators or the concept of them kicking the crap out of each other then this movie might be for you.

Sure, you have to ignore that logical jump mentioned in the storyline, but the ingredients are all there and they seem in my opinion to have been mixed into the right kind of dish. I was annoyed at how stupid the Predators in Paul W.S. Andersons take were, but I can assure you - this time around the Predator takes no crap from anyone. He’s just as kick-ass as Predators should be, and whatever mistakes he does (because he does a few) is simply him being faced with an even more kick-ass enemy - in this case the Predator-Alien hybrid briefly glanced in the first film.

I’d say it’s obvious that Colin and Greg Strause who directed this did some research beforehand. A lot of the concepts in this movie are almost directly lifted out of previous films. In fact, they even pay homage by lifting a few lines from previous Alien/Predator films, most notably the classic “Get to the chopper” but without Arnold saying it. Normally I would wrinkle my nose at such a pathetic attempt to score fanboy-points, but in this case it actually works. Hell, a lot of the musical cues are taken from earlier films (the weird drums whenever the Predator does something, the dark horns when the Aliens do something) and again I would normally scoff at this. But not here, here it helps convey the gravitas behind the mythos.

Now, I understand that making a film out of something like this is tricky. You have to give it enough personal touch to make it “yours” as a director, while not changing too much and thus upsetting the fans of what you’re making a movie out of. This one manages to walk the line, if you ask me. PWSA changed a little too much, while the Straus brothers manage to keep it. Sure, they don’t add much new to the mix, but when the mix as it was is excellent then why bother?

This movie has action, and as far as being an AvP-movie I’d say it’s more faithful to the concept than the first one. The ending is a bit anticlimactic, but it has a very neat minor twist to it. I’m not going to spoil that for you though.

I liked it. If you’re a fan of the AvP-mythos then I think you’ll like it as well. It’s plenty gory, and the Predator is kick-ass. Recommended.

The Golden Compass

Fantasy from 2007 starring among others Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott.

—

In a parallell universe young Lyra Belacqua goes on an adventure up in the arctic. Or something. Here, I’ll just steal the summary from IMDB instead of writing my own: “In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization.” Yeah, I guess that works as a plot summary.

—

Okay, back in October when I mentioned this film I was pretty interested in it. Mainly that interest stemmed from the controversy the film (as well as the books it’s based on) was causing among the fundamentalist christians over in the US, but also because I thought it might be entertaining. When I read about it sounded kind of like Narnia crossed with the Lord of The Rings.

So, now I’ve seen it and what do I think of it?

I think it’s a pretty but incredibly dull affair.

Sure, it’s a nice production and visually it looks kind of like a steampunk-version of Narnia. It’s filled with computer-animation and gorgeous environments, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors. Yet it all feels so darn wasted.

The story is filled with incredibly heavy-handed metaphors for things Philip Pullman doesn’t like. It doesn’t really take a big brain to see that the magistrate is in fact the church, and they want to outlaw science (the dust) and free will. But the way these otherwise interesting metaphors are presented is so obvious. The whole world built in this film is just flat, there’s no excitement. It’s wooden.

And speaking of wooden. Let me tell you what else is wooden in this film. The acting. It’s like watching a bunch of planks sprouting ridiculous lines. Even Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman who usually manage to bring some kind of gravity to films fail miserably here. In fact, Daniel Craig barely even makes an appearance in this film, and Nicole Kidman is some generic Cruella DeVil-like villain. Pretty much every character in the film is just some two-dimensional cliché that’s been tossed into the mix to make it seem exciting. Casting Sam Elliot as the swaggerty adventurer with an accent as wide as his cowboy-hat is just too obvious.

Speaking of the dialogue. I mean, seriously, even in an alternate dimension, who the hell speaks like they do in this film?

Let me give you an example:

Normal film: RUN!

The Golden Compass: My young friend, I fear that now is the time where we must apply force to our legs and outrun the foolish enemy behind us. Lead the way and I will attempt to stave the flood of… etc etc etc etc and so forth and so on.

No, I think that the only people who will get a kick out of this film are already fans of the books. We who haven’t yet read them just find that this film is so self-important it’s almost falling over itself, and it’s formulaic and utterly boring delivery just underscores that. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, and I doubt that any kid who’s not a fan of Lyra will have troubles doing it too.

Watch this only if you have nothing else to do, and only if you aren’t paying for it. I don’t care that Phil Pullman is an atheist and is making the religious right nervous - this film is most of the time like watching paint dry.

If you want a fun and exciting film set in an alternate reality I instead recommend you go off and rent Stardust. Now that movie was fun!

The Mist

Action/Horror/Scifi/Drama starring among others Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden.

—

A strange storm descends on a small village in the northeastern USA. Immediately afterwards a thick mist envelops the town and traps a number of citizens inside a supermarket. Strange noises are heard from the mist, and people venturing into it are brutally killed. It’s discovered that strange creatures roam inside the mist, and a stand has to be made inside the supermarket by the survivors…

—

At first this movie seems like a very cheap knock-off of the old John Carpenter-classic The Fog. Even the title alludes to it, and it shares a lot of obvious themes with it’s predecessor. After a while it changes, and you start to assume that this will be a cheap monster-movie full of standard scares.

And that’s exactly what it is. At least at first glances.

Because, after a while the monsters become simply a backdrop to the madness that humans produce all by themselves. The movie changes gears, changes tempo, changes focus and instead become a surprisingly disturbing account of the darker nature hidden within humans. When the order around people are shattered, so is the illusion of civilization. The characters in the movie revert to a much more primitive and less coherent state of mind.

Up until that change in pace and focus I was rather bored by the whole thing. I even rolled my eyes at some of the typical Stephen King-stereotypes (since this movie is based on a novella by him) that are common both in his writings and even more so in movies based on his works.

But after the change, it became a fascinating and rather scary insight into the abyss of the human soul. Several themes work parallel to each other, but the most obvious theme is Rationality vs Religion. The rationality is represented by a continuously diminishing group of people led by David Drayton (Jane) and the Religion contingent is led by the impressively deranged Mrs. Carmody, (Harden). She is certain that the mist and it’s denizens are the wrath of god, and her unstable mentality gets the better of both her and the people she preaches to.

All during this disaster of the soul I sat thinking, wondering how Frank Darabont (the director) would wrap this all up. Would he go for a cheery Hollywood-ending where everything thanks to some Deus Ex Machina just goes away? Or, would he go for the horrible ending that was implied several times through the movie?

I don’t want to spoil this for people, but he did both of those things. The ending is horrible, not because it’s bad but because it’s a cruel and evil fate that befalls those who is damned under it. It’s beautifully gut-wrenching, and I can safely say that anyone who isn’t depressed by it must lack all forms of emotion. It’s the bleakest ending since Leaving Las Vegas.

Strongly recommended.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Action/Horror/Scifi from 2007 starring Milla Jovovich.

—

In the third installment of the Resident Evil-franchise we again get to familiarize ourselves with the heroine Alice (Jovovich). This time it’s really bad. The events of the previous film didn’t stop the T-virus from spreading, and it not only infected most of the human population of the world (turning them into dangerous zombies) it also killed the forests, nature, infected animals and generally wreaked havoc on our planet. The world as we know it is gone, replaced with a merciless desert eating away at what little natural resources are left. Alice maintains a day-to-day life until she gets reunited with other survivors of the Raccoon City-massacre in the previous film, and they decide to head for Alaska where supposedly there are more survivors. The remnants of the Umbrella Corporation have other plans in mind however…

—

I’m not really the target-audience for movies of this kind. I have a difficult time relating to the whole zombie-thing, and even though I enjoy most horrorfilms I have a somewhat strained relationship to this kind of movie. In general I feel that the zombie-genre is ridden with heavy clichés and that every attempt to modernize it simply confirms this theory.

I’ve never played a Resident Evil-game either, so I have no idea what all that is about, other than that most RE-fans seem as rabidly obsessed as the zombies in the games themselves.

(relax, I’m just joking)

So, while I had a somewhat fun time watching the first film, the second one soured me pretty bad on the whole concept. The first one had a good feel to it, and even though it was somewhat laughable at times it still provided decent entertainment. But the sequel was a far cry from being entertaining. It was almost painfully bad, and took itself way too seriously. Add to that, it was astoundingly silly in most every department, and as always riddled with clichés of the genre.

The groundwork didn’t look good for the third one. In fact, I considered not watching it at all. But it turned out I was in the mood for something braindead and filled with action, so I relented and gave it a go.

Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t as bad as I expected. Sure, it won’t win any awards for… well… pretty much anything, but it was pretty solid entertainment, and I didn’t yawn or check my watch a single time. Admittedly this also suffers from a lot of tired clichés, and Russell Mulcahy (yes, THE Russell Mulcahy, of Highlander-fame) falls pretty heavy for the temptation of using old by-the-book techniques to scare the viewer. The costumes are bordering on silly, and I always find it a bit amusing in movies of this kind how the hot chicks always have perfect makeup despite having spent years wandering the desert.

But for all it’s drawbacks this movie somehow works. A lot of people complained about a perceived lack of action, but I thought it was fine. I don’t really like movies who try to cover a thin plot or crappy acting by shoveling lots of action-sequences over the viewer, and I felt that this movie was somewhat balanced. Plus, the whole Zombies Meets Mad Max In The Desert-concept was interesting. I’ve always liked post-apocalyptic movies, and this fit the bill fine.

All in all, I’d say this is the best of the three movies so far. Which means it’s pretty mediocre, but hey - it wasn’t meant to be another Citizen Kane or something. Think of it as entertainment for teenage guys. And Milla has nice legs.

+ Desert
+ Milla Jovovich
+ Not too silly zombies
+ Guns, Guns, Guns
+ Lots of sand
+ Las Vegas buried in sand
+ Action
+ Weird ending
+ Slightly more character development than previous movies

- What’s with the ridiculous boss in the end of every movie?
- Tired dialogue
- Wooden acting
- Predictable plot
- Lots of genre-clichés, i.e. groups splitting up then getting killed off one at a time, monsters jumping out of closets, etc.

Seraphim Falls

Western/Drama starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson

—

At the end of the Civil War, a colonel hunts down a man with whom he has a grudge…

—

I borrowed that plot outline from IMDB. It pretty much sums up this movie, even if it’s not completely accurate. This movie starts out with a very slow pace, and nothing changes through it. I suppose that there’s some deeper meaning to it, but mostly this was just a drawn out, tiresome and somewhat boring affair with some pretty scenery-shots.

Most of the plot focuses on revenge, a common theme in westerns. Unfortunately the slow pace of the movie combined with the boring and in my opinion somewhat generic stock-western characters kills off any intrigue. My guess is that the writer/director wanted to create a mystery and slowly unfold the reason for the manhunt through flashbacks over the course of the movie, but this just makes it very boring in the beginning and when the conflict finally is revealed you’ve pretty much figured it out already. There’s no real suspense anywhere.

Minor characters show up out of nowhere and make absolutely no impact on anyone or anything. In fact, most of the supporting characters are more interesting than the main two characters, and when they disappear without a trace it just makes the whole thing more tedious.

But, there are some beautiful shots of scenery, and the music is probably a good cure for insomnia. Other than those two high points there really isn’t much to recommend this movie for. Bland and uninteresting characters, slow pace, borderline cliché-story doesn’t really work for a period-piece such as this. I really wonder what Brosnan and Neeson saw in this project.

Go grab Unforgiven and pop it in the DVD-player instead. Much better movie dealing with similar motifs.

I Am Legend

Action/Horror/Drama from 2007 featuring Will Smith.

—

Robert Neville (Smith) is the last survivor of a man-made plague causing horrible mutations. The plague started off as a well-intended genetic cure for cancer, but for unknown reasons instead started causing mutations and killing 90% of the human race. The survivors of the plague was rewarded with extreme mutations, and turned into violent creatures needing to feed on the minority of humans who were immune to the plague. Robert Neville is the last survivor of these naturally immune humans, and he’s desperately working on finding a cure for the infected before it’s too late…

—

Man, I was so badly looking forward to this movie.

I’ve read the original novel by Richard Matheson a few times, and it quickly developed into one of my many favourite books. Essentially it was about how Robert Neville was the last survivor of a plague which turned everyone else into creatures essentially resembling vampires - they needed blood for sustenance and were vulnerable to sunlight. The two major things that fascinated me with the novel was partly the main protagonist (Neville) and his struggle to survive and remain sane in a world gone mad, but also the concept of scientifically explaining the symptoms of vampirism as a disease instead of something supernatural.

I’ve seen both the previous attempts at turning this book into a movie, and neither of them really caught me. I’ve never been much of a Charlton Heston-fan even though I accepted him in Planet of the Apes and thus felt a large ambivalence to The Omega Man, but the older adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) is, in my opinion, pure crap.

So when the teasers started to appear last year I felt that, yeah, this seemed like a much more worthy adaptation. With a proper budget, proper special effects and that nice post-apocalyptic feel that was sorely missed in the previous incarnations. Sure, I felt a little iffy at Will Smith as Robert Neville, but the fresh prince has actually developed into a fairly capable actor.

The teasers and trailers also gave the impression that they were sticking to the story and world established in the novel. Most obviously I felt that this was indicated by not altering the title from “I Am Legend” into something other like the previous adaptations.

But, unfortunately, I was wrong.

Before I continue, let me make clear that I don’t think this is a bad movie. Quite the opposite, it’s probably an enjoyable zombie-style flick to anyone who isn’t a fan of the book. I do think however that fans of the novel will be disappointed - just like I was.

The movie starts off quite promising. Visually it’s very impressive, and the mood is effectively set for the viewer. Smith is quite capable as Neville, trying to maintain his sanity and survive all the while trying to figure out the virus. He isn’t the usual Smith-character, he’s not fast-talking or cool, and there’s definitely a few cogs missing in the brain department. I was impressed by it.

Leave it to Hollywood to mess this up though, and they sure did. See, I really, really liked the novel. What really rubs my rhubarb with this movie is that after a while it descends into the usual Hollywood-happy ending. Also, most annoyingly, it cuts out large parts of the story of the novel, and messes up the reason why Neville is a legend, and to whom he is a legend.

In the novel, the infected were for all intents and purposes, vampires. They slept at day and awoke at night needing blood. During the day, Neville would go from house to house and kill the sleeping infected. However, what Neville doesn’t know until later is that there exist infected who have managed to keep most of the disease at bay. They still have the symptoms (vulnerability to sunlight, garlic, etc) but haven’t quite become the horribly disfigured and violent creatures that other have become. They have in fact established communities, and try to live normal lives. Neville doesn’t know this, and indiscriminately kills every sleeping person who’s been infected. This is what makes him a legend to these half-infected people, since he can walk in daylight and kill them while they sleep.

This is completely absent in the movie, and it seems that Neville instead spends his days working on finding a cure for the virus, as well as searching for other survivors and food. Any encounter with the infected is purely accident, apart from one which he captures to try his proposed cure on. The infected are instead violent zombie-style creatures who stay out of sunlight and only come out at night trying to find something to feed off of. Neville boards his house shut during the night, and stays out of trouble by not showing any activity then.

The movie descends even further into Hollywood-happy endings. After a while a girl and a young boy show up, claiming to be survivors of the disease, and that there is a community of survivors in Vermont. They want to go there, and bring Neville with them. Long story short, he dies and they take the cure (which all of a sudden miraculously worked) with them, tying up the movie in a nice Hollywood happy ending rather than the bleak and dark ending of the novel.

This really disturbed me. The ending was just too positive for me, and the girl and young boy serve as nothing except fodder to that stereotyped ending.

So, if you haven’t read the book then this will probably be a pretty decent action/horror-movie, with liberal doses of drama and good acting from Will Smith. But for me, I felt slightly cheated.

Gone In 60 Seconds

Cult-classic from 1974.

—

Maindrian Pace leads a double life. By day he is an insurance claims investigator, and by night he runs an illegal chop-shop and makes big money stealing cars. One day he takes it upon himself to deliver 48 different luxury vehicles to a South American druglord. Almost all of the cars are delivered without a hitch except one - a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1 which proves difficult to acquire…

—

This is one of those cult-movies from the 70’s that everyone who’s into car-movies talks a lot about. It’s usually mentioned together with two other legendary movies; Vanishing Point from 1971 and Bullitt from 1968. I’ve seen both of those, and personally I think Bullitt is a long boring winding road towards a chase-scene that ends way too quickly, while Vanishing Point is a white-line masterpiece virtually defining this now dead era of movie-making.

Gone in 60 Seconds is the ultimate low-budget car-chase movie. It’s got a story wrapped around it somewhere, but it’s paper-thin. The acting is awful and the editing up to the final chase is lackluster and mostly serves to confuse the viewer. You can find some shred of story, but it’s mostly just foreplay to the grande finale - the spectacular car-chase the movie is known for.

As far as a movie is considered this is a pretty crappy one. But as car-porn it’s absolutely spectacular. Totally recommended to people who like me is into cars from the 60’s and 70’s.

Tideland

Surreal/Fantasy/Drama from 2005 with among others Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly. Directed by Terry Gilliam.

—

Jeliza-Rose travels with her father to an abandoned farmhouse in Texas after her mother dies from a drug overdose. At the farm she befriends the locals and experiences deeply surreal adventures…

—

The summary above is the best I can manage. That’s really the only resemblance of a story present in this movie, since most of it seems to consist of really weird scenes in… well… somewhere.

Is it good?

Kinda. But not really.

Is it bad?

Kinda. But not really.

I don’t know whether to like it or to hate it. Watching this movie was a bit like how I would imagine it would feel if someone scooped your brains out while eating vanilla ice-cream and LSD. It feels really awesome at the same time that you find yourself wondering what the hell you’re doing and how it can contribute to anything positive at all.

This is easily the weirdest movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some really strange and messed up films in my day.

Recommended? Umm… I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

So, last night me and the girlfriend finally got around to watching Death Proof, Quentin Tarantinos half of the Grindhouse-project he shared with Robert Rodriguez.

—

A psychotic man calling himself Stuntman Mike stalks two different groups of women, using his heavily modified car to perform murderous deeds on them.

—

Now, I really like Pulp Fiction, and while I tolerate watching Reservoir Dogs I was left with a deep feeling of dissatisfaction with his later works. Jackie Brown was watchable but Kill Bill really didn’t do it for me. In fact, Kill Bill didn’t do it enough for me to watch the other half of.

This meant that I wasn’t frothing at the mouth when I heard about Death Proof the first time.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I disapproved of its existence - I’m a movie-geek just like mr Tarantino and I know what it’s like to want to make your dreamproject. The difference between us is that he’s got the resources to do it.

No, rather I was a little worried that this might turn out to be too nerdy and too pretentious. That’s what I felt Kill Bill was like; a neat idea that might’ve sounded great as a fanboy-fantasy but should’ve stayed that way since it in my opinion took itself way too seriously.

Last night however we were starved for movies and decided to give Death Proof a go.

It turned out to be an excellent decision, and in my opinion this is Tarantino at his best. Not only does it give tribute to a whole genre of exploitation-movies but it’s also incredibly fun. It’s quite clear that Quentin knows his shlock-movies and he manages to copy it without making it into a cliché.

Sure, this movie isn’t exactly the most intellectual out there - but it’s not meant to be either. The plot is essentially non-existent and the real gem of the movie is (like most Tarantino-flicks) the dialogue. There’s sexy babes, there’s hot cars, and there’s some truly spectacular car-chases. There’s also tons of references to various other more or less obscure movies (the least obscure being Vanishing Point) and all the variations of the F-word is sprinkled liberally throughout the conversations between the characters.

All in all this is a gorgeous, crazy and sometimes hilarious tribute to a dead genre. Definitely recommended.

(On a sidenote, me being a fan of musclecars from the late ’60s and early ’70s found it great seeing so many excellent representations of the same in this movie.)