I've been watching lots of movies lately. Some have been good. Some have redefined the opposite of good. In either case, there are six movies that earned some strong opinion.
The movie that first inspired this post was Speed Racer. I was never a fan of the cartoon and the Wachowski brothers have gone to some lengths to punish my enjoying the first Matrix. And yet, I wanted to see this movie. Speed Racer had no chance of being a good movie, but I would have been satisfied with fun. Even after lowering the bar, I was disappointed. The characters are about as interesting as their animated originals--not very. Trixie doesn't talk quite so obnoxiously fast anymore, but they still have a chimp as a co-star. I love technology more than the average person, but the distinctive shoot-everything-on-green-screen look actively pushed me out of the story. The big twist (seen from twenty miles away) and presumably the climax of the movie--not that I felt any different from the preceding 90 minutes--is so poorly delivered that I laughed. Sitting in a dark, otherwise-empty room with nobody else to get me into the make-fun-of-it frame of mind, I laughed at this movie's biggest Wow moment. The best part, ironically enough, was the bit right before the credits. The last five minutes or so when Speed stops his whining and just drives the damn car is a lot of legitimate fun, but that's the biggest concentration I could find. Stay away from this one.
One of my very favorite movies--period--is Taken from earlier this year. It's just a hair over 90 minutes, but they're almost perfect. Liam Neeson is amazing. The story is pretty simple: bad people kidnap his daughter while she's visiting Paris. Fortunately, he's very good at finding bad people and getting information from them. Neeson's character is absolutely ruthless. He's brutal on the people who have information, fights dirty when he needs to, and I'm completely fine with that. He's not really fighting for justice , he's not really trying to right a wrong, he's not even trying to punish the people threatening his family, he just wants his daughter back safe and sound. If someone gets in his way though, they might die where they stand. This could have easily been a two-hour movie by tying up all the loose ends, but I'm happy for the more focused story. We see only what Neeson sees and know only what he knows and care only for what he does. I love this movie. It hit DVD and Blu-Ray on May 12th. Go buy it.
There are some iconic movies before my time I feel the occasional obligation to see. That's made easier when those movies have decent reviews to back them up. Blade Runner is one such movie that is ingrained enough in the geek culture that I had to see it. I wanted to be a part of that experience, even decades after the fact. This movie sucks. I managed to fight off napping through it, but only just. The story doesn't make any damn sense: "We have four super-strong human-ish sociopathic Replicants on the loose. Harrison, we want you, and you alone, to find them and kill them." Inexplicably, Harrison agrees. This felt like a season finale more than a movie. The story--using the term loosely--is riddled with sentences that I can only accept as English if I assume they're talking about stuff I'm supposed to know. At the end of it, I didn't care about anyone and I truly wished all the characters would just die. If you're the sort who likes playing with the line between man and machine, watch Ghost in the Shell, I, Robot, or Wall-E--not Blade Runner.
J. J. Abrams' adaptation of Star Trek is flat-out brilliant. The characters are not impressions or caricatures; they're simply younger versions of the originals. The new actors captured the essence of what made McCoy, Kirk, or Spock who they were. The special effects are amazing. It's a paste-you-to-your-seat kind of fast paced without feeling rushed. I laughed. I cried. I paid to see it twice. Go find a showing right now.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the only one of this list that I've really heard varying opinions on. It's a definite box-office success (in spite or because of the leak, I'm not sure, but I have a hunch), but I really didn't like it. The effects were pretty lame. The big explosions came straight out of the Cliche Handbook. There are lots of practical effect problems--the wrong sounds, for example--that pushed me out of what little narrative there was. My biggest gripe is really that they strayed so very far from the source--seemingly for the sake of easier movie-making. There might be an alternate history I've not read that inspired this, but I doubt it. Putting characters together who aren't to meet each other for years is annoying. Completely fabricating the origin of another character is annoying. Foisting gimmicky 1980s-esque technology as anything approaching state-of-the-art (for any time) on an unsuspecting audience is annoying. A ten-minute love story being the inspiration for Wolverine going on a revenge-driven murdering spree is annoying. I can't really say this is a bad movie, it's just a quintessential "Summer Movie." It's fun enough, I guess. Go see it if you're bored and get tired of using paychecks as kindling.
I just finished watching A Scanner Darkly. I want to think that I really just don't get this one. It's clearly an homage to a book I've not read, but it's done nothing to convince me it's a book I need to read. I realized about 40 minutes in that I didn't really care about any of the characters. The closest I came to liking someone was Winona Ryder's character, but mostly because she's still pretty cartoon-ized. There's a pretty good twist that I honestly didn't see coming, but then it doesn't really pay off. There's about ten minutes of "woe-is-me, how could we do this to someone so innocent" bullshit that does nothing but make me wonder why not devote that time to telling me what the hell is going on. There's enough here that I really want to like it, but I can't really. Keanu Reeves gives another version of his classic Spaced-Out-But-Apparently-Still-Very-Important character--it's like a breath of fresh air...that's been recycled thousands of times because the future sucks like that. Robert Downey Jr. is really the reason to watch this at all. I didn't care about his character, but I enjoyed watching the mannerisms and hearing the inflections that lent some erg of life to a mostly dull cast.
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