The Brothers Bloom

Rian Johnson's 2005 debut film, Brick, was a deservedly critically acclaimed piece of neo-noir, taking the world of Dashiell Hammett and moving it into a modern high school. Part of what made it so good was that combination of a world that is familiar because we've all lived it and a world that is familiar because we've grown up watching others live it. I was hoping for something similar when they first announced his follow-up, The Brothers Bloom. I knew it would be a con film, but I hoped there would be a twist. Unless some added quirk and an obvious Wes Anderson influence counts as a twist, my hopes were dashed, but I was not really disappointed in the film as a whole. It's not as good as Brick, which was an exciting, visually fascinating debut, but it is a very fun way to spend a couple hours.
The film opens with a way-too-long prologue telling the story of the titular brothers' first con. We see the younger one, simply called Bloom, as a romantic who is uncomfortable with their actions while the older Stephen plans and predicts everything in advance, and he is always right. The narration is heaviest here (it's really only used early), and it is pretty bad, plus the child actors are unimpressive. Next, we see the adult brothers, Bloom (Adrien Brody) and Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and their partner Bang-Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, from Babel) at the end of their latest con. Bloom is depressed, and despite Stephen's attempts to keep him, decides to quit. After a few months of hiding in Montenegro, Stephen finds him for one last con, involving eccentric American heiress Penelope, played by Rachel Weisz. Penelope has been alone for most of her life, studying everything and picking up hobbies. Her money is limitless, and she goes through three or four different Lamborghinis in her first ten minutes of screen-time. She is fun and quirky and Bloom quickly falls for her. Under the guise of antique dealing, the group winds up in Prague, and through a complicated, but still perfectly clear (one of the film's strengths is that it doesn't heavily rely on bad expositional dialogue) scheme, they get part of her money and move to Mexico to get the rest. Here, parts of the brothers' pasts and Bloom's feelings for Penelope begin to become an issue, and Bloom begins to wonder how he can get her out of the game.
The film does have issues. There is a lot of really obvious foreshadowing in the beginning, and, despite the stunning locations, I was kind of disappointed in the visuals. Johnson fails to really utilize everything around him, and many of the shots that do work don't come up until the end. There are also some cliche moments in the script, especially when the brothers constantly talk about living an "unwritten life," but the good certainly outweighs the bad in terms of dialogue. The film's sense of irony and some of the camera motions (especially in the way it pans from person to person) come off as Wes Anderson-light. If you added some brighter colors, a bit more irony and replaced Ruffalo and Brody with Owen and Luke Wilson, it would probably be a pretty good Anderson picture, but I love Anderson's work, so this didn't really bug me. Whatever flaws I found were outweighed by the breezy sense of fun and adventure. A large part of this was due to the actors. Brody's character is the "normal" one, and, while he isn't great here, he provides a solid emotional center. Ruffalo gets some juicy monologues, and he does a very good job with them, creating a likable character where a lesser actor would have seemed too sinister. Weisz, who I'm normally not a huge fan of, shows that comedy is one of her strengths, perfectly portraying her character's awkwardness and her transformation into a "normal" person. The real star in this film is Kikuchi. I hated Babel. I think it's one of the worst films of the decade, just the equally bad Crash on a larger scale, but she was very good in her Oscar-nominated role as a Japanese mute. Here, she plays a Japanese mute again, but this time her character exists mainly for laughs, and she gets them. Every little look she gives, even from the background, completely steals the scene, and the audience, at least in my screening, reacted wonderfully to her character.
The film manages to avoid many of the cliches of the con-man film (although some just have to be there) and there are some great bits of dialogue ("My brother writes jobs like dead Russians write novels") and memorable characters. I'm not sure what exactly the film was aspiring to be, but, despite a couple little issues here and there and the fact that it doesn't quite live up to the fantastic poster at the top of this review (seriously, how awesome is that thing?), it works wonderfully as a fun and breezy adventure story.
Rating (out of ****): ***

Terminator Salvation

In recent months, despite the large amount of time I spend on Rottentomatoes, I've grown wary of the Tomatometer. See my recent review of The Limits of Control for a good example of this. I was hoping that the same sentiment would hold for the newest entry in a franchise that helped to define my childhood, Terminator Salvation. I was wrong, and the film's 39% seems about right. I first saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day when I was six or seven (probably a poor decision on someone's part), and while certain things flew over my head, including the various references to the first film, which I didn't see until years later, I still loved it. I watched it again last week in preparation for the fourth film, and it has held up. It's still one of the all-time great action films. I don't think the first film has held up quite as well, but it's still pretty fun. The third film was the first not directed by series creator James Cameron, and it showed. Jonathon Mostow's film wasn't terrible, but doesn't reach the quality of the first two. McG's entry in the series is about half as good as Mostow's. I've been waiting since I was a kid to see the future war between man and machine, and the only thing it did was leave me feeling underwhelmed.
I guess I should have expected this. McG, despite recent successes in television, is still the director of Charlie's Angels, and it was written by the guys who did Catwoman, but the ace cast and the source material gave me hope. This hope was very quickly dashed. The film opens with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) on death row in 2003. Before his execution, he agrees to donate his corpse to Cyberdyne systems after meeting an executive named Serena (a bald Helena Bonham Carter). Flash to the future (2018 to be exact), and we meet adult John Conner (Christian Bale), not yet leader of the resistance, who loses a large part of his team in the first of the film's many dull action scenes. Conner (using Bale's far-too-serious Batman voice) goes back to the resistance's submarine headquarters and finds out that they have a plan to destroy Skynet and end the war by changing the system's signals. He also discovers that Skynet has a kill-list, with his name second. First is Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), the man he will eventually send back to protect/impregnate his mother in the first film (as for his mother, Linda Hamilton has a voice cameo on a series of tapes that are played to catch up audiences who forgot). We then meet the rest of John's team, including his wife Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard) and right-hand-man, Barnes (Common). Marcus suddenly wakes up in Los Angeles, and after exploring the post-apocalyptic landscape, meets Kyle. They encounter a few giant robots/Transformers rejects who engage them in a series of repetitive, sepia-toned action sequences. Eventually, Skynet captures Kyle, and Marcus runs into Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood) a pilot for John's team who has been shot down. They head back to the base (in order to keep a PG-13 rating, a sex scene between the two, presumably in this part of the film, was cut, which is stupid, because it muddles the rationale behind their future actions), but before getting there, Marcus steps on a mine. This is where the film's first big twist, you know, the one that's been a major part of every trailer, is revealed. Eventually, Marcus and John attack Skynet's core. Along the way, we get references to the famous lines from the other films and one surprise "cameo" (is it a cameo if it's just a digitally created version of the actor?). There is more violence, and then the movie ends.
Terminator Salvation was not all bad. It's certainly better than Angels & Demons or Wolverine, but it is not good. I can ignore the logic/continuity errors (24 year-old Claire Danes aging into 29 year-old Bryce Dallas Howard, who looks about 24, in the 15 years between the events of T3 and Salvation, as well as switching from vet to doctor who can perform human heart transplants was almost too much), and the special effects were certainly impressive, but the action, which makes up about 80% of the movie is repetitive and dull and the dialogue that makes up the other 20% is a boring mix of cliches and references to past films. Some of the actors, especially Yelchin, who also impressed in Star Trek, and the Australian Worthington, who will be a major star by the end of the year due to his starring role in James Cameron's highly-anticipated Avatar, do a great job with what they have, but the others don't. Common is distractingly bad during his scenes and Bale never leaves his one-note, overly-intense Batman-mode. The emotional moments, which were what separated T2 from most 90s action films, all fall pathetically flat, as none of the relationships are believable or given enough screentime to make us care. Surprisingly enough, I don't think I can really blame this on McG. There are a few good looking shots, and the pacing is perfectly fine, so I'm going to blame it on the writers, John Brancato and Michael Ferris. Bad dialogue and the same action scene constantly repeating itself are what sink this film. The two really good performances (Kyle and Marcus both have roughly equal screentime with John, which helps), the effects and the nostalgia factor save it from being total crap, but I can't recommend this film.
Rating (out of ****): **

The Limits of Control

As a film critic (sort of), do I have the right to grant a director a certain limit of self indulgence if he's never failed me in the past? I think so. Apparently other critics disagree. The Limits Of Control, the latest film from American master Jim Jarmusch, is also the worst-reviewed film of his career, scoring a rather pathetic 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. To an extent, I do understand the hatred. While the film is not ideologically complicated, it is a bit difficult to sit through. The entire thing is a few minutes of silence, followed by a short amount of dialogue, repeated for 115 minutes, the main character only says six or seven full sentences, three of which are in the final scene, and the entire thing is obviously more concerned with aesthetic than plot. Conveniently, these are things that I tend to love. Now, it does run a bit long, and there are some clearly overly self-indulgent touches from Jarmusch, but sometimes you just have to accept these things. It's not a perfect film by any means, and it probably won't hold up anywhere near as well as Stranger Than Paradise or Dead Man, but I'm still pretty sure that it's worth seeing.
The characters are not given names, so I'm just going to use the descriptions given by IMDB (which has the film erroneously titled No Limits, No Control). The main character, "The Lone Man," a hired assassin is played by Isaach De Bankole, who has appeared in a few of Jarmusch's films before, but never as a lead. It opens with him meeting the "creole" and "French," who give him a speech on life, and how anyone who thinks they're better than others should go to the cemetery, because then they see what life is: dirt. This idea is constantly repeated throughout. They then give him a matchbook with instructions for his next contact, a man with a violin. He goes to Spain to meet him (the rest of the film takes place in Spain, I'm not sure where the opening took place). He goes to a cafe, orders two espressos in two separate cups (something else that is repeated throughout), and meets the man, who gives him another matchbook, and the cycle goes on. It all sounds rather boring as a description, so I'll just go with the highlights. Tilda Swinton plays a mysterious blonde contact who discusses film, and the idea that the best images in film are the same as our greatest dreams (I'll get to this later). Paz de la Huerta plays a contact who is nude for the entirety of her screentime. I had no problem with this. A contact on a train discusses molecules. John Hurt plays a contact who discusses the nature of Bohemianism and gives Isaach a guitar. Gael Garcia Bernal is a contact who discusses history and myth. Someone is killed (not on screen), and our only real chance to see Isaach's emotions is blurred in shadow, which was probably the right decision. Finally, at the end, Bill Murray plays the target of this convoluted assassination, and he, as others have pointed out, is clearly channeling Dick Cheney, and he discusses power and control. After his mission is over, Isaach cleans up and goes on. We never know who ordered it or why any of this has happened, but I guess it doesn't matter.
I probably shouldn't have spent so much time on plot. It's not that relevant. Basically, it's saying that technology and government are bad, while bohemianism and art are good. Nothing remotely new or groundbreaking, and that's not the point in this film. First, it's probably important to discuss De Bankole's performance. The camera is focused on him for nearly the entire time, and it studies his face and body. During the silent scenes, he is near-perfect, and, after Jarmusch's homage to Le Samourai in Ghost Dog, it's hard not to compare him to Delon's protagonist in Melville's masterpiece. Then he occasionally opens his mouth, and these moments aren't as good. His dialogue isn't that great, but he doesn't do too much with what he gets. Still, the physical nature of his performance is fantastic. There's also the music. Jarmusch uses a post-rock score to perfection, and the film picks up whenever the music starts.
However the real star of this film is Christopher Doyle's cinematography. In my opinion, Doyle deserves to be mentioned in at least the same category as Roger Deakins and Emmanual Lubezki, arguably the two most well-known working cinematographers among most film buffs (with good reason). To quote a friend of mine, Wong Kar Wai's masterful "In The Mood for Love will make your eyes cum rainbows," and Doyle's photography is a huge part of it. While The Limits of Control may not reach that level of beauty, it is still a fantastic looking film. The shots of the actors and settings, using great lighting and Jarmusch's standard lingering pauses, pull the audience in and allow us to look around if we're not in love with what's happening on screen, although many of these pauses do last a bit too long. During the first part of the film, there are some shots that seemed really obviously cinematic in nature, which sort of bugged me, but Swinton's speech on beautiful images in film and dreams clears this up, and almost makes it a commentary on those shots in Jarmusch's past work (although I don't know if that's how he meant it to be seen). As we are reminded throughout the film, "reality is arbitrary," and there are moments where the color shifts, the background appears to be a bit off or the editing brings attention to itself (this last one really doesn't work too well here) that remind us of this idea.
Overall, it is an undoubtedly beautiful film, with some very good performances and great music that's hurt by an ultimately shallow premise, a bit too much lingering (and this is coming from someone who considers The Werckmeister Harmonies his favorite film, so there is a lot of lingering) and questionable editing. I wish I hadn't made this blog under a 4-star system. I don't think it's a three-and-a-half star film, but it's better than a three. Well, I guess this is where that benefit of the doubt I was talking about comes in.
Final rating (out of ****): ***1/2

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

It doesn't take much to make a film that is simply bad. A weak story, poor direction and bad acting aren't uncommon. On the other hand, it takes some kind of perverse talent to make a film that is completely and utterly useless in every single way. If the performances are good, they must be wasted, if the director has talent, he must be far over his head, if the writers know what they're doing, well, then it probably wouldn't be completely useless. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a completely useless film. It's entire 100-minute run-time is devoted to useless exposition and bad action scenes expanding on the backstory in the far superior X2: X-Men United, which is probably my favorite non-Batman, non-Hellboy superhero movie. The actors are fine, even if some seem to phone it in and director Gavin Hood has proven to be at least somewhat talented as a filmmaker with the Oscar-winning Tsotsi, so I'm placing a lot of the blame here on the writers and the studio. The writers because, well, it's Skip Woods, whose previous credits include Swordfish and Hitman, and David Benioff, who wrote Troy and The Kite Runner. I shouldn't have expected much out of that. The studio because, well, it's Fox. When a workprint version of the film leaked a month ago, they immediately came out and said that it was incomplete, that, along with unfinished effects and musical cues, scenes were missing. This was, of course, a blatant lie. I watched the workprint, and I actually enjoyed it a bit more, because at least we could see into the process of designing special effects, although given the godawful effects in Wolverine, maybe it wasn't the best place to learn (if anyone is wondering why I saw it again after disliking the workprint, I wanted to take a break from studying for finals, a friend asked me to go and I figured the updated effects may help). Here's a little hint for Fox: incomplete effects cannot make up for shallow, dull characters, complete failure in terms of emotional connection and an idiotic plot that spends large portions of time trying to retcon with the first X-Men film and ends with giving its character amnesia, just to make sure.
In a laughably bad (more so than the rest of the film), opening sequence, we discover that James (Wolverine) and Victor (Sabertooth) are brothers who grew up in 1860s Canada. Somehow they move to America and stop growing at arbitrary ages (apparently those of Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber), fight in all our wars and eventually join a team of other mutants (one of the only things I liked about this film was seeing Dominic Monaghan and Kevin Durand, who, played Charlie and Keamy respectively on Lost, on a team together). The team does bad things and James leaves and decides to call himself Logan. He works as a lumberjack in Canada for a few years and lives with his girlfriend. They seem happy, but the dialogue between them is so cliche and uninteresting that I just didn't care. Victor starts killing old members of the team because, shocker, he is working for the obviously evil colonel who was directing the team in the past. Victor kills Logan's girlfriend, they fight and Logan loses, but Col. Stryker (remember, he was also the bad guy in X2) gets Wolverine to allow himself to be injected with metal to become stronger and kill Victor (we don't know that Stryker is evil yet). This is a ruse, which Logan figures out, and he escapes. While in hiding on a farm, he meets a nice old couple who give him life advice, and are then killed at the start of one of the most idiotic, cliche-riddled action sequences I've ever seen. I didn't think there were actually movies any more where people walked away from explosions without turning around or showing any reactions. Didn't that go out of style with Bad Boys? If a movie does that in a clever, self-aware or parodic way, I'm OK with it, but Wolverine is none of those things. This begins a cross-country chase, where Wolverine meets up with another former member of the team, played miserably by Will.i.am, but, no worries, he is soon killed by Victor. Logan meets with Gambit, a mutant who had been held by Stryker at his headquarters on 3-mile island (yes, it is that stupid). I think they want us to care about Gambit, but, like everyone in this film except Logan, Stryker and Victor, he only has two or three minutes of dull, wasted screentime. Somewhere in there, Victor and Stryker capture Cyclops when he is still a child (they don't even attempt to retcon this). Logan gets to the island, there is more dull action and exposition, including what is apparently a complete bastardization of the character Deadpool (I haven't read the comics, but I can imagine the fanboys being rather angry about such a dull villain taking the place of the popular character). Eventually, Stryker shoots Wolverine in the head with an Adamantium bullet, which apparently erases his memory of everything that happened in the film. Oh, also, Charles Xavier (an unintentionally hilarious de-aged Patrick Stewart) shows up in a cameo to rescue young Cyclops and the other mutants from the island.
I guess I should mention the one...not bad thing about this film (I really don't want to use the word "good" in relation to this garbage). The actors, especially Jackman and Schreiber are fine. Their roles are awful, but that's more of a script thing than anything. Otherwise, there really isn't a single way in which this film succeeds. The plot is idiotic and useless (I think I'm going to watch X2 right now, just so I can remember that this story can be told well), none of the supporting characters are given more than five minutes of screentime and whatever attempts at development go on in that time invariably fail. The dialogue is cliched and obvious beyond belief and the film's attempts at emotional connection (Logan and his girlfriend, the old couple on the farm and Logan and Victor's eventual, inexplicable reconciliation) are beyond laughable. Last, and arguably most important in a film like this (a superhero film without aspirations to be something more, like Dark Knight and Watchmen), is just how fucking dull the action scenes are. Seriously, the exposition in between was pointless and kind of stupid, but the action sequences range from boring (the fight between Logan and Gambit) to purely idiotic (the chase scene after Logan's escape). I wasn't expecting Dark Knight, X2 or Hellboy 2 levels of greatness, but I also wasn't expecting Ghost Rider, Fantastic 4 or Catwoman levels of trash, and that's what this is.
Rating (out of ****): *1/2