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reuben-18
Reviews
My Science Project (1985)
Great premise, but doesn't quite deliver.
A car jock, his comedy sidekick, and a cute science geek have to work together to save the town from the destructive consequences of awakening an alien artifact of immense power. It may not be original, but it is a great idea for a story, and the first half hour or so works brilliantly. Unfortunately the logic and character development suddenly goes out the window at a certain point, becoming just an excuse for genre-jumping action sequences and special effects. Dennis Hopper shines whenever he is on screen: if this had been a movie about the science teacher, it would have been far more watchable. The other characters never really expand beyond their stereotypes.
The latter half of the story feels like it is assembled by taking a tour through a bunch of different sound stages on a Hollywood lot, and just hoping it'll all fit together somehow. Putting dinosaurs and laser guns and roman gladiators together may seem like the perfect recipe for excitement, but without a point to it, and without any sense of why or what is happening, there isn't much reason to care about any of it. There is no glue keeping all the assembled pieces together. It has a certain B-grade charm, but not enough to make it a classic.
Premium Rush (2012)
Had potential.
Watch youtube footage of an alleycat race through any big city, and you'll get an idea of why this film got funded - the speed, skill, and inherent danger of riding at high speeds and no road rules on a bike with no brakes is a recipe for great action. Sadly, what we get is something constantly diluted by things that are illogical, unnecessary, and destroy any sense of authenticity. We have pointless and clichéd romance with a character who is only there as an attempt to say "girls can ride too!" We have some ridiculously contrived villains and a mcguffin our main character must deliver. We have preachy nonsense about what you must be to be a true cyclist. (Brakes on a bike are bad, apparently.)
The action is repeatedly frozen at crucial points to show multiple options they can take; completely breaking the suspension of disbelief at the moments where we should be most drawn into the action. It seems like every idea that the writers and directors had, they loved it so much they would use it several times - like the pathways, the map view, multiple flashbacks to earlier that day, the cycle cop trying to chase them, and the slow motion flying-through-the-air shot. It is irritating and amateurish. And although I don't expect action movies to be realistic, doing a 360 off a 10 foot drop when you have multiple fractured ribs....? wow, just wow.
My advice? Watch a bike messenger documentary instead. Better action, no distractions, and real cyclists.
Visioneers (2008)
Darker than you might think.
Trailers are strange beasts that often hugely misrepresent the tone of a film. I'm not sure if I enjoy the mischievous manipulation involved, or hate the mistrust that it generates. A little of both, I guess.
Visioneers is one such example: the trailer comes across as a fairly light-hearted, quirky romantic comedy.
In reality, however, this film deserves to sit beside 1984 and Blade Runner as dark and disturbing visions of dystopian futures. While it starts out with the uncomfortable humor you'd expect from a Zach Galifianakis film, the atmosphere of oppression builds over the course of the movie to become almost unbearable. This film makes Requiem for a Dream seem like an episode of 'friends'. The central character, George, lives robotically both in his dull office job and at home in a loveless marriage. The world around him is full of deadpan absurdities, a parody of drab offices and mid life crises, with an undercurrent of hopelessness that rings a little too true to sit comfortably.
The way the theme of dreams is turned into a literal threat is done with obvious self-awareness, but it comes across like a bad cinematic pun. Its more carefully constructed distortions of reality are where it really shines, with its vapid self-help infomercials, eccentric mentor figures, and the mega-corporation as a cult. And the way George seems to communicate through much of the movie semi-telepathically instead of verbally may be strange and unsettling, but also mesmerizing. Thoroughly worth watching.
The Lovely Bones (2009)
Avatar meets Heavenly Creatures?
A main character of a film should have some purpose in being there, and I think that is one of the main failings of The Lovely Bones. The subject of the story, a murdered 14 girl, acts mostly as a narrator - which makes a lot more sense as a first-person literary device than it does in a visual context (which is told through the eyes of a camera rather than a specific character). Its easy to pick out a movie adapted from a book: They are usually heavy on the narration, due to the screenwriters temptation to transpose internal monologue to voice-over. Unfortunately narration really only works well when it contrasts heavily with what happens on screen, in an ironic manner; anything else tends to come across as heavy-handed.
Heavy-handed sums up Jackson's directing style fairly well. While this may work in low budget B movies, such as Jacksons earlier works (Bad Taste and The Frighteners), when it comes to an intimate study of grief and strain on a family after the loss of a daughter, overblown CGI scenes of the candy and bubblegum-teen-fantasy afterlife are really quite jarring, and completely unnecessary interludes to the story. I wonder if, after having built up a large visual effects company for the creation of Lord Of The Rings, Jackson feels he must make use of CGI at every opportunity -- no matter how contrived. It is the more standard thriller scenes which are most effective here.
Remember the incredibly ridiculous glowy pillow fight ending of Return of the King? Well imagine that popping up in the middle of a normal film every ten minutes, and you get an idea of what the numerous heaven scenes are like within the context of The Lovely Bones. It reduces the narrative device of a heavenly observer to a gimmick... Conflict is necessary to make a scene interesting, but Jackson wastes most of the afterlife scenes with skipping girls and giant floating things.
However, it is the ending which is the worst and most obvious flaw. All tension that had built up between the main characters was ignored, and instead we have all the most pointless characters in the entire film eating up the last few minutes, along with the bad guy, who gets away (kind of). Peter Jackson should not be surprised that this didn't go over well with test audiences. Instead of a bad guy/good guy showdown, we have a kind of karmic philosophy lecture to try to tie things up. This would be hilarious if it was a deliberate parody of the expected showdown ending of an action movie: The action hero dies horribly, but he comes back as a ghost and says to everyone "hey don't worry, its okay, because my death brought everyone closer together". Then everyone could hug, and then the bad guy could burst through the wall and slaughter everyone. Unfortunately this movie has no sense of humor (although there is one montage joke about the mother being not good at housework, it goes on waaayyy too long and becomes merely irritating).
Jackson seems content in sticking with his contemporaries Tim Burton or George Lucas, who fill sub-standard scripts with annoying visual extravagance. Its a shame.