The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Of all the simplistic movie formulas, I think the sports movie formula is the one I am most likely to fall for, regardless of the film's actual qualities. Somehow, the notions of competition and underdogs and come-from-behind victory resonates with me in a way no other formula I can think of really does. I'm not quite sure what this says about me (psychologically, I worry that it means I can relate to winning more than I can to, say, falling in love -- but I hope that's not the case).

So even though Christian Bale would rank highly among my least favorite working actors, I still went ahead and watched this out of a combination of curiousity at David O. Russell doing such a straightforward genre piece, and my aforementioned sucker-status for a well-crafted sports movie. Well, I wouldn't exactly say it disappointed. It's right there on the line, hovering, depending on how I feel at the given time I think about it, between something I'd tell people I enjoyed and something I'd tell people I almost enjoyed. Wahlberg's sisters are a particular low point, echoing the same women who exist only to be obnoxious and repressive in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. That Russell wants the audience to cheer when Amy Adams finally has enough and takes it to a couple of them is, uh, pretty icky, to say the least. I've never (well, not never, but at least since reaching cognitive adulthood -- i.e. a year or two ago) really liked the idea of the crowd-pleasing punch, when someone is being so odious and awful that the sympathetic, put-upon character unleashes some violence to the face and then we're supposed to find this cathartic?

But, to my surprise, I found Bale surprisingly tolerable. His scenery chewing Method Acting fits perfectly into the role of Wahlberg's narcissistic, attention-starved older brother. And Wahlberg brings his usual laconic tenderness, making him a plausible foil to the fast-talking, egomaniacal Bale. Melissa Leo and the sisters are the only real problem bogging this down from being a completely enjoyable entry into the canon of middling sports movies. But it's solid enough, and works the working class hero myth in a way that isn't completely obnoxious.

Raw Deal (John Irvin, 1986)

A strange amalgamation of Miami Vice-like style -- a constantly tracking camera, glitzy locations, shimmering glass and towering modernity -- with Arnold. Even in fancy suits his hulking, enormous frame looks completely out of place. Which I guess is something of the point. In the high life world of corruption and murder, who can one trust but the completely ridiculous, Superman embodied that is Arnold Schwarzenegger. But, unfortunately, the film takes this implication at face value, rather than trying to exploit his mythic figure as a satirical statement about ourselves, as Mark L. Lester did a year earlier in Commando. We trust Arnold because he is one of the good guys, and of course anyone who has ever done anything bad to Arnold is one of the bad guys. Unlike most films involving undercover police work, this one is completely uninterested in the moral grey area that can come from working alongside the so-called enemy. Instead, it ends with a rather abrupt and kinetically vacuous shootout, where Arnold gets revenge on all the bad guys by shooting them to pieces, then is rewarded with commendations, his old job back, etc. etc. It's the usual macho cop fantasy storyline, existing in a world where shooting a hundred people has no repercussions.

The vacuousness of the finale is the real disappointment, however. Up until that point the film had handled its action sequences with a certain joyous aplumb. A vehicular chase at a lumber yard early on showed a speed and weightiness that is generally lacking in today's digitally recreated stunts (not all, of course, but it seems like most). And a fist fight in an alley began with some neat tension, exploiting long shadows and a certain ryhthmic, careful pace. So it's too bad to see it all go down the drain for what should be the biggest part, but I suppose gun fights between a bunch of guys and the decidedly not-acrobatic Arnold would be difficult to choreograph in any interesting way, and John Irvin doesn't have Lester's cheeky sense of humor to fall back on. So the movie is a failure, but by no means as big a failure as many others would likely suggest. And the reason for its failure doesn't have much to do with its laughable script (which is quite bad, but I don't know who would expect otherwise).

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2011)

This movie is exactly what it looks like: a series of video game cutscenes without a game attached. A while back I was talking about action movies on a video game forum and I suggested that they could actually do with borrowing some ideas from video games. When Zack Snyder read that comment of mine and then proceeded to make a movie that did just that, I'm not sure he entirely understood what I meant. What I was saying is that action movies are far too padded with dialogue, back story and unnecessary attempts at characterization. What they could use is some stripping down, as many video games have done, so that the viewer can revel in the kinetic pleasures of motion and tension, which film can do exceedingly well, without being bogged down in banality. Unfortunately, Zack Snyder took it to mean throwing a bunch of junk in a blender, pressing "badass" and then showing us the end result. Unfortunately, Snyder makes two fairly egregious errors on his way to presenting Cutscene: The Movie. The first, and slightly less offensive of the two, is that the movie is so joylessly serious. It takes action movie tropes and tries to tie them to a story about female struggles with sexual abuse, then fits this weird stylization to the entire proceedings, which only serves to make this serious undertaking seem ridiculous. There's nothing reclamatory about what he's trying to do here. The women are hollowed out shells of every girl group action trope that exists -- an ugly, brown, fantasy/sci-fi Charlie's Angels, but about how awful rape is, I swear. Okay, maybe that's actually worse than part two, which is that, like 99% of video game cutscenes, the action isn't interesting. It's weightless, lacking anything resembling verve or energy. The girls spin and move through a plasticine world of computer-generated everything, slipping through setpieces like buttered soap. But here games have an advantage. In a game, something is always at stake. There is almost always the possibility of losing. Movies do not have that. So they must make up for that by successfully imparting a feeling of physicality and realness that suggests more outcomes than there are. Sucker Punch cannot do this. Every outcome feels inevitable before it starts.

On a side note, I was surprised to find out this was an "original" idea pitched by Snyder himself. The whole thing certainly feels like the kind of high concept bargain basement comic book writing Hollywood has taken to adapting lately. I would guess that the film's disappointing box office performance will mean that Hollywood won't be as eager to take a chance on more original ideas, when what it should really mean is that they shouldn't be as eager to take a chance on any of Zack Snyder's awful ideas.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Aside from the virtuouso titular sequence this movie has far less to recommend than I remembered. A movie I was once proud to call one of my favorites ever (even though I'd only seen it once), it now feels like a series of gorgeous baroque paintings -- prettily lit, sumptuously colored, but a little flat and uninteresting nowadays. (I'm making that observation with little to no art history background, so feel free to call me out if the baroque period is actually awesome and I'm thinking of something else)

Anton Walbrook is more stiff than I'd remembered, and the movie honestly doesn't even quite feel like it gets going until after the titular sequence -- at which point it's almost over. There's something... underdeveloped about the tension that they're trying to convey. The stress and push-and-pull of a woman being forced to choose between the typical life of a domestic wife and the grandiosity of the stage only begins to cohede just as the movie comes to a startlingly abrupt end (I'd remembered the finale, but was surprised to discover it coming -- "oh, it's over already?").

But with all that, the sequence itself is truly a bit of amazing, expressive dancing -- every bit worthy of the praise that's been lavished upon it. And even the parts that are not it, but involve dancing, said dancing always shines in a way few dancing movies can pull off in this day and age. And there is the delightful silkiness of the pictures, that have a warmth and glow and look the soft, lush way that velvet feels. If only the characters, action, dialogue and thematic resolution could keep up, it would still be every bit the masterpiece I remembered it being.

Paul (Greg Mottola, 2011)

Astute audience members will more or less realize the trouble they've got into from the opening -- an ugly, terribly shot ode to Spielberg's E.T. After that there's a momentary spark of hope, as Paul at least proves itself to be the only movie about nerds I've seen that doesn't try to play off semi-malicious "haw haw, nerds" as "affectionate ribbing." The movie shows genuine fondness for the characters and their eccentric interests, rather than the usual have-it-both-ways that often comes off more as condescension than real endearment. Unfortunately, even this "high point" is made ugly by an awkward encounter with a non-American worker and jokes about Pegg and Frost's enthusiasm for aliens (the extraterrestrial kind) making him confused and uncomfortable. Ha ha? Soon the movie embraces all the most boring formulas of the buddy road movie, with titular character demonstrating an Amazing Superpower that nearly everyone should recognize will come in handy during the seemingly dire last act conflict.

Along the way the movie stops to take potshots at just about every easy target, Middle American stereotype one can think of -- from outwardly homophobic and violent rednecks (as opposed to the main characters, who are homophobic in the more polite, good-natured kind of way of us fine, upstanding liberals) to Bible-thumping "wacko" creationists to the usual boring jokes about incompetent government officials. And, unlike Michel Gondry's work in The Green Hornet, Mottola lacks either the skills or the interest to reign in Seth Rogen's occasionally insufferable riffing, leading the movie down long stretches of meandering, unfunny gags. Also there's the icky subplot involving a newly unburdened Christian falling for Simon Pegg's character, with all the man-showing-woman-the-ways-of-the-world baggage that goes with it. I don't know, while I didn't exactly have high hopes for this one, it did manage to let me down in almost every way imaginable. Even Sigourney Weaver is wasted in a thankless role of not funny bossy voice lady. And eventually the movie ends by moving from not-always-clever, but at least somewhat hidden references to a string of line-for-line cribbing that demonstrates a complete descent into creative bankruptcy.

Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)

There's something about the spectacle of hundreds of people in period clothing all running at each other that CGI still hasn't managed to capture. No amount of modeling, crowd-cloning, or crazy specific detailing seems capable of convincing my eyes that what I'm seeing isn't at least a little bit a put on. Which is mostly fine, except that what these scenes always seem to want is a gravity and power and verisimilitude that convinces people we are actually watching a bunch of dudes about to kill each other. They can't ever just give completely into the idea of it as a fantasy, and their desire to trick us makes the scenes even less powerful than they are. So, that is the benefit of Braveheart. It is, probably, the last movie to show huge groups of people with such a minimal amount of special effects (if any), that it really does look like huge swaths of men charging into one another. It makes the battle scenes believably dirty, violent and like there is something real at stake for the upstart Scotsmen fighting for FREEDOM.

Unfortunately, there's the whole rest of the movie. Having watched this now, Gibson's weirdo beliefs should've been apparent miles away. How did everyone else miss it back then? Gibson and his Scottish cohorts as bristling, masculine ideals of rugged, uncompromising manliness. The king's son as a flustered, gay child who deserves to have his lover thrown out the window and to be cuckolded by the sensitive, yet impassioned, sexually amazing and absolutely 100% not gay William Wallace. Not to mention not-so-subtle ideas that even the most prim, proper and upright of women cannot keep their legs closed for the testosterone-y, probably musky smelling, men of the earth. His strange gender attitudes, homophobia, xenophobia, unbridled emotion, it is all on display here for everyone to see. And it is, in its own insidious way, nearly as ugly as everything we know about the man now.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010)

The only redeeming facet of this movie is that it occasionally has beautiful pictures of a river that remind of the Amazon in Aguirre, only shot on a DSLR. While it never approaches that film's most memorable moments, it does, at least, remind the viewer of just how awe-inspiringly beautiful the lush green jungle river can be. But those moments last perhaps 2 minutes in a 90 minute feature. The rest is a blanket of naively un-self-aware pandering to the converted mixed with yet another sticky representation of people of color as literal aliens. Why is there more than one movie like this? Wouldn't it only take one to convince pretty much anyone that this is actually a TERRIBLE IDEA? Like, no matter how sound your intentions are, this will always come off as condescending and just, like, unspeakably gross. But even if you manage to ignore that, the ham-fisted explications of the theme of aliens as metaphor for Latin-American workers work only as self-congratulation. There's nothing compelling about two of the most boring white people ever conceived uttering lines like, "I thought I'd be happy to be home, but now all I want to do is go back" and depicting America building a giant, Great Wall-like structure to keep the aliens out. Like, ha ha, get it? This is what crazy tea party America will do if you let it! But the aliens, they're actually really beautiful and peaceful and amazing if you get to know them. I don't know, there really isn't anything to say -- except, at least, that Gareth Edwards made a fairly handsome movie for however much the probably low budget was. Too bad about the writing, editing, acting, everything else.