A Serious Man (2009)

There's nothing funny about the midlife crisis of a Jew.

The Coen brothers have been pumping out movies rather quickly since they won an Oscar for No Country for Old Men. For the third year in a row, the Coen's had a movie in 2009 and, since it was nominated for Best Picture, it seemed it might be a return to classic form after the somewhat disappointing Burn After Reading. What I found in A Serious Man was some extremely interesting film-making, but a movie that wasn't quite the revelation I was expecting or hoping for.

A Serious Man is the story of Larry Gopnik. Larry, played by Michael Stuhlberg, is a generally good guy, expect for the part where he is a Jew, and suddenly his life just goes down the toilet. His wife decides to leave him, he is threatened and bribed by a South Korean exchange student who received a poor grade in his class and his son has picked up a pot habit just before his barmitsvah. As his life unravels, he seeks guidance from the faith, but that's not exactly helpful. The movie should basically be titled, bad stuff happens to a nice guy because God says so, A.K.A. the story of Job. As a rarity for the Coen's, the movie features none of their regular actors, but it is full of their trademark dark humor. The film was nominated for a pair of Oscars, Best Screenplay and Best Picture, but it walked away empty handed. In previous years, this would have been no big surprise, but I'm starting to call 2009 the year of wildly underwhelming movies.

A Serious Man, on a basic level, is an film snobs wet dream. The reason why the Coen's are so widely respected is that they make complex movies that don't spoon feed the audience answers. In this respect, A Serious Man might be the Coen's best movie. The film is a deep movie that is simply full of symbolism, allusion and meaning, but it requires that you look for it. Best of all, the movie is short enough that the lack of traditional pay-off in the end is more thought provoking than anger inducing. The ending still illicited an audible "what" from me, but the more I think about it, the more it works in really interesting ways. The ending is extremely memorable. What prevents it from being perfect in my book is that it feels like the film is building into a climax, but it never gets there. I don't mind the lack of closure, I just dislike the strange thing an abrupt ending does the to dramatic flow of the film. Generally, the lack of closure makes perfect sense here. The only element of the movie that I didn't enjoy was the beginning segment. The Coen's are on the record saying it was simply there to set the mood, but I found it rather confusing in the grand scheme of things. It's also worth mentioning that the humor here is top-notch. Dark humor is rarely done this well.

A Serious Man is a movie that may grow on me if I see it again. Knowing exactly what to expect makes a film like this better and it's impossible to really be ready for this movie. I'm nearly finished watching the Best Picture nominees from 2009 and I'm finding many of them to be fairly underwhelming. A Serious Man is a fine movie, but nowhere near Best Picture material. I say that now, but I know a movie that will grow on me in the future when I see one. Either I'm being brutally honest about A Serious Man, or I am seriously underestimating it. Only time will tell.

6/10

Gone With the Wind (1939)

Drink every time Scarlett is a bitch.

The word "classic" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but I think that the film Gone with the Wind might be the best definition. There's no need to say what makes a movie classic, just watch the film and you will, from that day forward, know exactly what a true classic film looks like. Gone with the Wind, the nearly four hours long story of love, war and drama, is worthy of all the praise it receives. It's, without a doubt, one the most important films ever made and the pinnacle of the golden age of Hollywood film-making.

Gone with the Wind, based off the best-selling book by the same name, is the story of Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett, the world's biggest bitch, humps her way through a fistful of men she doesn't love before one with a backcbone finally tells her to shove it in one of the most famous movie moments of all time. A pinch of racism here and some war there and you've got yourself the most successful movie of all time. The film stars Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable along with several other famous faces from the era. Gone with the Wind swept critics and audiences off their feet bringing in huge box office earning, the highest in history when adjusted for inflation, and winning 8 of the massive 13 Academy Awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture. There are very few films with the resume of success that Gone with the Wind carries with it and, this time, the film is totally deserving.

It's hard to describe how Gone with the Wind succeeds. It's pretty rare that towering, nearly four hour war and romance epics can be described as enjoyable, but the film, somehow, defies the odds. Maybe it's the performances. Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable both knock the ball out of the park, both on their own and together, but even the supporting characters are magnificent. Olivia de Havilland is, somehow, the nicest person to ever live and her character is so amazing that it really makes you hate Scarlett even more. It's hard to say anything new about Vivian Leigh, who won an Oscar for her performance, but I must mention her performance. I hate Scarlett, I absolutely loath her as a human being, but she is played so earnestly by Leigh that you have to be impressed. Everyone in the production was committed to the project and what results is a wonderful group of performances with no weak links. Maybe it succeeds because of the film-making. The work here is beautifully detailed and all elements of the production, from the direction to the costumes and sets, show how much time and effort went into making the movie. Maybe you can't say why Gone with the Wind doesn't fall flat on it's face. Sometimes movie just have a certain magic, a certain spark that make them great. Gone with the Wind has this indefinable greatness in droves.

It might be hard to figured out from the love story I just wrote, why Gone with the Wind is receiving a 9 and not a 10. This is simply attributed to two things. First is the length. Gone with the Wind is near perfectly paced, but the film is still almost four hours long. It may be the shortest four hours of film-watching ever, but it can't help but feel long in certain places. The second reason is simply the second half of the film is not as good as the first half. This is not to say that the second half of the movie is bad, just that it's hard to live up to the first half's near perfection. There are, literally since intermission is almost two hours in, two movies here and it's hard to keep myself from comparing what comes before and what comes after the intermission. I find myself much more drawn to the war portion of the story. The crane shot of Scarlett walking through the crowd of dying soldiers is, without a doubt, one of my favorite shots in movie history and Scarlett's journey in the first half of the movie, from spoiled wealth to poverty, is just so much more interesting than her constant bitching and scheming that seems to permeate the last half of the movie. These complaints are really only minor specks on a film that deserves to be called one of the best ever.

Gone with the Wind is a movie without compare. It's so rare that a movie with such a huge scope can still feel so intensely personal and can astound with it's attention to the tiniest details. All of this from a movie that was made over 70 years ago. Gone with the Wind is a film that would probably be one of the first movies added to a must see list. It's just that important to the cinema world. It's importance isn't the only reason to see the film though. Gone with the Wind is, simply put, a phenomenal movie and one every movie buff must see.

9/10

The General (1927)

It's OK to cheer for the south as long as there are no slaves.

When the average moviegoer thinks about silent comedy, two names spring to mind before all others. Those two men, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, are the faces of the silent era for a lot of people and, before The General, I had only experienced the work of the former. While people may see them as equals, I don't quite understand how that is possible. The General, while full of impressive film-making feats is far from the instant classic that I was expecting.

The General is loosely based on a true civil war story. Some damned Yankees stole a confederate train with the intent to trash the supply rails leading into the south. They were pursued by a lone man, in this case Buster Keaton, who carries a confederate flag like he owns it and single-handedly out-wits the Union soldiers while getting some action with a pretty southern lady. The story is Keaton directed and stared in the film, but it was a full-fledged box-office and critical disaster when it was released. The film pretty much ended Keaton's career and it took many years before it became the comedy classic that people talk about today. I can't tell if it was pity for saying a decent film was awful or just some sort of strange karma, but I can't understand why this movie is praised so highly.

The General is either a dull thriller or a bland comedy. Segments of the film are fairly exciting and some segments are fairly funny, but the film completely fails to make either the humor or the suspense completely work. Personally, I error on the side of comedy because I found a lot more to laugh at than to be excited by. The biggest problem I had with the humor though was that it was unfocused. Jokes didn't develop cleanly and the movie tried to do too much at once. Maybe this was an attempt to make it more exciting, but it just ended up feeling jumbled. This was punctuated by ended train chases with far too few gags to make them worth the time. I can only watch one train go after another train for so long before I want to move on. These things said, The General remains an impressive technological feat. The scope of what happens in the film and some of the special effects sequences are truly impressive for the time. The train crash alone is one of the coolest things I have ever seen in a silent film.

Don't let my review lead you to believe that I didn't enjoy The General. There are some great moments and some very funny scenes, but I didn't find the comedy classic that I was expecting. While my experience with silent films may be limited, I find it hard to even talk about Charlie Chaplin in the same sentence as Buster Keaton. Maybe my opinion will change over time, but it will have to be with another film. The General has it's merits for people who like silent comedy, but it's not the kind of film that will convince fans of modern movies to go back and watch more silent films.

6/10

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Launch the Cooling Missile!

After taking several weeks off, I am back with the next installment of the Godzilla series and boy was it a silly one. Destroy All Monsters was a movie I saw as a kid and loved, but it had been nearly 15 years since I had last seen it. How does it stand-up now? Fairly good when all is said and done. Destroy All Monsters suffers from some of the same mistakes as previous movies, but also does quite a few things right.

Many years have passed since Godzilla and his brat were left frozen on an island and now we find him and every other monster on earth living on Monster Island. The parties there are wicked. Unfortunately, Aliens interfere again and mind control the monsters so that they will attack major cities. These aliens, which turn into some sort of rock when they die have only one plan, to take over earth for their own, surely devious purposes. It's up to our cast of people no one cares about to free the monsters from mind control and retake the earth. This time around, Ishiro Honda is back and his presence is certainly noticed and appreciated. The child-like feel of the last two films is gone and we're left with a fun, even if it is highly cheesy, monster adventure.

Like most of Honda's film, Destroy All Monsters falters because it spends way to much time with the people and the aliens. It starts off great. The monsters are immediately the focal point and less than 30 minutes in, cities are being trashed. It all is going so well and then suddenly the monsters, for all intents and purposes, disappear and the people have to take charge and carry the story. These people are boring, probably some of the most boring people in the entire series up to this point, and it's pretty difficult to get excited about what they do. Luckily, once they free the monsters from Alien control, we get an excellent, although a little lop-sided, brawl between Earth's monsters and Ghidorah. That brawl is one of the most fun fights in the series so far and the four monster destruction of Tokyo is the best city destruction scene since the first film.

All and all, the movie is entertaining for Godzilla fans and it offers some mild entertainment for non fans. At the very least, Destroy All Monsters is much better than some of the other movies in the series. While it does nothing to make the series a serious film, it is fun to watch. I know there are some bad movies on the horizon, the 1970's weren't the best years of Godzilla's life, but many of those movies were my favorites as a very young kid.

5/10

Robin Hood (2010)

D-Day actually happened in the 13th century.

Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott are a match made in heaven. This is what I thought until I looked more closely. Sure, their first collaboration resulted in one of my favorite epics of all time, Gladiator, but all of their other films have been pretty questionable. Robin Hood proved one thing, these two gentlemen need to go their separate ways. The magic is gone and even though Robin Hood has brief moments where both the actor and the director shine, the movie is, overall, a complete failure.

Robin Hood is really a revisionist prequel to the Robin Hood story we all know and love. It's also a prequel to the the good stuff. Rather than clever traps and a quick tongue, we're given a Robin Hood before any of the fun stuff. In typical Hollywood fashion, a bunch of fortunate twists of fate put our protagonist in just the right place for him to start banging Cate Blanchett and to become a landed citizen. The film starts a bunch of recognizable faces other than the stars including William Hurt and Max von Sydow and even the supporting characters all look terribly familiar. The film is fresh out of the gates, but already looking to be a mild success at best. In it's first week, it failed to make more money then the aging Iron Man 2. Robin Hood will likely be forgotten as quickly as the last failed attempt to make a Robin Hood movie with a big star in the lead. I'm looking at you Kevin Costner.

It's hard to narrow down the mistakes in Robin Hood to one specific thing that drives it towards failure because there are just so many. In concept alone, the movie fails. Revisionist history and storytelling can be really interesting, but there is nothing interesting about this retelling. The Robin Hood back-story is fine as it is and not giving the audience that story creates false expectations that only lead to disappointment. I was prepared for the story arch, but I still found it rather bland. One of the best things about Robin Hood is that he goes from being a complete nobody to one of the most influential men in the country. This story removes that whole element. This is coupled with the film's poor pace makes it a drag to watch. The film is more than two hours long, most of which is needless plot and dialog, and even the battle scenes are fairly underwhelming. The film suffers from ADD, like most modern action movies, and the battles are a jumbled mess of editing and angles that makes it difficult to watch. The films saving grace is that Robin Hood wields an actual war-hammer in the final battle. I thought those things were only in video games.

There aren't many good things to say about Robin Hood. I'm sure disappointment is factoring into my review, but I just can't get excited about the movie. There are better Robin Hood movies, better actions movies, better historical epics and better movies staring Russel Crowe that are directed by Ridley Scott. The second coming of Gladiator this is not. 

4/10

Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)

It's the Wizard of Oz with just the tin man.

When I saw Artificial Intelligence: AI in 2001, I thought it was an admirable effort. Little did I know how young and innocent I really was. For most movie goers, a team effort between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg is about the greatest possible thing that could happen. Even I thought this combination would yield amazing results, but I was severely mistaken. Kubrick was already gone by the time AI: Artificial Intelligence reached it's completion and, even if he was around, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. The film really amounts to nearly three hours of Spielberg wasting potential.

Artificial Intelligence: AI is the story of David. David is the first of his kind, a child robot built to truly love, filling a void for families who aren't able to have a child in the film's slightly dystopic future. David, played by Haley Joel Osment, is brought home by a family whose real son is in a coma. Things are good until the family's real son awakes and David is abandoned with only the story of Pinocchio giving him hope that if he becomes a real boy his mother will love him back. He goes on an adventure, meeting robot gigolos, crazy, robot smashing lunatics and some sort of super aliens, or robots, in an effort to finally be loved by his "mother". The movie features William Hurt, Jude Law and a few other recognizable faces and voices and is directed by the one and only Steven Spielberg. The whole idea was Stanley Kubrick's brainchild, adapted from a short story, but Kubrick refused to direct the film until technology could accurately show it. In the end, Kubrick chose Spielberg to direct, and to finish developing the movie instead of himself. That decision was a huge mistake.

I'll start by briefly saying what I liked about Artificial Intelligence: AI. Those things were, simply, the minor thematic touches left over from Kubrick's original vision. The world imagined by Kubrick is not a happy one and it shows through in the middle section of the film. David's journey of discovery is fairly compelling and full of interesting questions about existence and the future. While this section of the film is good, it is still slightly marred by Spielberg's terrible writing and his inability for subtly or unanswered questions. What made Kubrick such a great film-maker was that he required the audience to ponder the questions of the film without spelling it all out for them.

With Spielberg in the lead, Artificial Intelligence: AI goes from being the next 2001: A Space Odyssey to being a run-of-the-mill unsatisfying science fiction effort. The fact that the film is Spielberg's first writing credit since Poltergeist, which also has a terrible script, is no surprise. Spielberg has a lot in common with George Lucas in the film-making department. He is certainly a visionary, but it is better for him to leave the writing up to someone else. Aside from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, written many years ago, he has had most of his success using other peoples scripts. He should stick to it. I don't think I need to mention how awful the end of this movie is either. There is a perfectly good ending point, borderline amazing ending, and Spielberg mucks it up by adding another 30 minutes of useless crap with space robots or something. In the long run, the biggest problem here is Spielberg's total lack of confidence in his audiences ability to come up with answers and meaning on their own. The first half and the last chunk of the movie are seriously dumbed down to the point of being insulting.

I didn't hate Artifical Intelligence: AI, but it made me angry. There are a lot of admirable things going on in the film, but all of them seem to be pushed under the rug by Spielberg. Rather than the brilliant collaboration I was hoping for, I got peaks of Kubrick's genius amidst the crap the Spielberg turned it in to. The film is mostly insulting because it was so widely viewed. If this is the kind of movie people think of when you talk about science fiction, I can understand why the genre is so unappreciated. Do yourself a favor and just go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey instead of this movie. You'll thank me.

4/10

Iron Man 2 (2010)

Just like your midlife crisis except for the money, beautiful women and the flying suit of super armor.

The first Iron Man movie was a big surprise. The film firmly put Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau back in the spot-light and both have been huge draws since. It's only two years later and they've returned to the same character with only some of the same success. Iron Man 2 is polish, well-made and fun to look at, but it just feels like more of the same.

After the events of the first film, Iron Man/Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr., goes on a mission to single-handidly create world peace. Of course he succeeds with a combination of handsomeness and alcohol. He makes enemies all along the way and this time he is opposed by rival weapons developer Justin Hammer, Sam Rockwell, and Russian super genius Ivan Vanko, Micky Rourke. The rest of the cast is full of impressive names, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Samuel Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, and it's directed by Jon Favreau. While the first film opened to massive critical appeal, Iron Man 2 has received more mild praise, but it also opened to substantially more money. This is due to factors other than the films quality though.

I will keep this short. Iron Man 2 is a fine movie. It's exciting and pretty much everything you could want out of a summer blockbuster. The problem is that it just doesn't feel fresh. It hasn't been long enough since Iron Man's last outing and the movie suffers because it just doesn't have good enough ideas. The film plays more like a giant set-up for the future Avenger's movie, which I am pretty excited for, but it alienates a lot of casual viewers because it hinges so heavily on the comic book material. In the end, it's a film made for comic book fans and it does succeed on that level and on a basic, entertaining level. I'm not recommending Iron Man 2 to anyone who doesn't enjoy a comic book film, but if you do like these kinds of movies, you won't be disappointed by the film.

6/10

Man Bites Dog (1992)

A serial killer movie that saves room for gratuitous chubby broad nudity.

I don't think anyone really knows where people's fascination with serial killers comes from, but it's certainly there. I myself find their existence and exploits strangely interesting and I find myself drawn to movies, books and television that feature them. With that in mind, I was cautiously optimistic about Man Bites Dog. Going in fully prepared, I found myself pretty disappointed with what I saw.

Man Bites Dog is a fake documentary, think This is Spinal Tap or Best in Show, about a film team following a serial killer and his exploits. The killer waxes on poetically about his craft, shoots some people and treats everyone to a gang rape before it all ends. The movie is the definition of a cult film, as in no one has seen it, and those who like the film are of a very certain sort.

I'm keeping this brief mostly because I find it hard to get excited, angry or to even really care about Man Bites Dog. Everyone talked about how disgusting and violent it was, but they seriously over-estimate the film so that they can claim people who don't like it are just offended by it. The truth is, the movie barely registers as offensive. The violence is pretty tame and a person talking in great detail about killing people is nothing new or interesting. I would say that the rape sequence was pretty disturbing, and you could make a case for the child murder getting you angry, but neither of those things were really all that bad. Both are featured in big budget Hollywood movies fairly regularly and I don't see those movies become cult classics. Really, Man Bits Dog comes down to a serial killer talking about what he does in a mockumentary fashion. Lucky for the film-makers, that works. The film is actually pretty funny at times. It is extremely dark humor, but it often works. I actually laughed out loud a few times, so it wasn't a complete waste of my time.

In the end, Man Bites Dog is one of those movies that just doesn't matter. Like many cult films, it's sphere of influence in the film-making world is extremely limited and it doesn't really deserve must see status. I enjoy a cult movie on occasion, but Man Bites Dog isn't funny or interesting enough to hold my attention. I can't think of a good reason to see this movie unless your doing the 1001 movies project so just don't bother.

4/10