Savages (Oliver Stone, 2012)

In the late 80’s and early 90’s Oliver Stone made some great films like Wall Street, Platoon, Natural Born Killers and The Doors. These movies were very decent and influential. Unfortunately Stone never managed to impress me with his more recent work like Alexander or Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or one of the many president-biographies. You can imagine I was a bit sceptical about Savages, a film about two Californian pot growers whose services are wanted by a Mexican drug cartel. But luckily it seems Stone found his roots again and delivered his best film in years.

Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson) have a secret recipe to grow the best weed in the world and they have a really successful business. They share their girlfriend O (Blake Lively) in what appears to be a functional love triangle. When a Mexican drug boss Elena (Salma Hayek!) gets affected by competition and the financial crisis she wants cooperation with the two friends, who prefer to stay independent. When they turn down Elena’s non-negotiable offer her crew decides to kidnap their shared love-interest.

The synopsis above sounds a bit lame and unoriginal and I guess it is. But there are a few fantastic roles like John Travolta as a corrupt DEA officer and Benicio del Toro as Elena’s ruthless number two. Their acting is awesome, the dialogue is fast, witty and the action is brutal and effective. Hayek is very believable as a merciless drug boss but caring mother. The leads by for instance Lively (who is the narrator as well) are a bit disappointing but still good enough to get you through 131 minutes of fun and excitement.

Of course everything is somewhat predictable and done before a thousand times (the usual twists and turns), but Stone managed to execute everything really well and even impressed me now and then with his style. It almost looks as if he was inspired by Tony Scott’s Domino, except that Savages is somewhat slower and easier on the eye (luckily).

Yes, I believe that Stone is back. Savages is very entertaining and despite its slight predictably it is suspenseful and entertaining, very well done by the director.

7.5/10

Zerkalo (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

"Tarkovsky is God"
- Lars von Trier -

As a moviefreak you’re always waiting for that moment when you find a pearl, a masterpiece, a movie that takes your breath away and is approaching your idea of a perfect film. With this in mind I made a shortlist of potential films that might be perfect. To prevent overkill I am spreading these candidates over time and it was about time to watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo or The Mirror. Let me tell you that this film is amongst the few films you watch in a year that really hit you and become a personal favourite, for me at least.

So far I watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Solyaris, both great films, but somehow I never considered them brilliant like some other filmlovers do. I was aware of the (lack of) narrative structure in Zerkalo and read somewhere how it has similarities with Terrence Malick’s beautiful Tree of Life (which was a unique film experience as well). After I found a good discount DVD version (as a real Dutchman) I decided it was about time to stop postponing and watch this poetic masterpiece.

Unlike almost every other movie I watch it is impossible to explain what is so great about this film. It is plotless, the story is about a man’s memories and fragments that are linked to him and his memories, and doesn’t create any puzzle or suspense-element what usually really draws me in a good film (perhaps the meaning of the film is a puzzle, but the director claimed otherwise at the time). This one is just (which is enough!) beautiful! Every shot is a painting and all these paintings are edited in a way that it creates a dreamlike rhythm and makes it a visual poem. The film builds around history and memories (just like Tree of Life), and for me created a nostalgic feeling that grew and grew during its length. It is a unique film (just like for instance my favourites Persona and L’année dernière a Marienbad) in the sense that there is none other like it (at least not that I am aware of, if there is, let me know!).

Zerkalo instantly entered my list of best films ever. It is aesthetic perfection, one of the reasons why I watch films, to be overwhelmed and experience poetic beauty. I will not spend more words, just watch, no, experience this perfect movie!

10/10

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

My previous investigation of the 70's Altman movies has already led me to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a movie that can be classified as anti-western (as in the western movie genre). Two years later Altman made what is known to be his view on film noir called The Long Goodbye, from Raymond Chandler’s novel and again with protagonist Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould). Our private eye hero had a bit of a transformation and unlike the cool and hard-boiled Philip Marlowe we know from for instance Howard Hawks his The Big Sleep, this one is a bit different.

The movie kicks off with Marlowe trying to feed his cat. He even goes to the supermarket in the middle of the night to get the right brand of cat food. When it turns out to be out of stock he tries to trick the little creature by replacing the food with a different brand. Unfortunately for him the cat doesn’t buy it and runs off. This scene, which is quite funny, is typical for the Philip Marlowe of the seventies and Altman’s universe. When I tell you that he is more interested in the wellbeing of his cat than the four topless neighbour girls practising yoga on their balcony you’ll get the idea.

The main story revolves around two interwoven plotlines. Firstly and old friend who is in trouble shows up on Marlowe’s door and asks him to give him a lift to Mexico. No questions asked Marlowe helps him. When he returns home the cops are waiting for him and he spends a couple of nights in jail and he finds out his friend apparently killed his wife and committed suicide in Mexico. Secondly a woman, living next to his friend, hires Marlowe to find her husband, a writer who has some mental- and drinking issues.

Just like the 1946 adaptation of the Marlowe story The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart, The Long Goodbye has quite a complex story, but this is about the only common element it has with the classic noir film. Philip Marlowe is portrayed by Altman as someone who still lives in the 50’s, he smokes, wears a suit and tries some wisecrack remarks on cops and crooks, but somehow they don’t have the desired impact (anymore). Furthermore there seems to be no interest in women and the private detective cannot even manage to trick and later find his own cat. All of this smells like another anti-genre movie from the director who did this before, as I mentioned, and would do it again in the nineties with The Player.

And again he does a great job. Forget about the plot, it is not at all why you should watch this one. This picture contains some memorable scenes that are alone worth it and are illustrative for the satirical tone Altman chose for. We see how Marlowe arrives at a party (in a suit) and gets chased out of the house by a dog, how he has to strip together with a group of criminals (including a silent Arnold Schwarzenegger!) and how almost every genre cliché is successfully reversed by Altman. A classic!

"Well, that's you Marlowe. You'll never learn, you're a born loser."

8.5/10

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

(May contain mild spoilers)

Finally it is there, the movie everyone has been looking forward to after The Dark Knight, considered by many as The Godfather of the superhero movies. And it deserves this status. It had great action, suspense and one of the best villains ever in the Joker. Quite a challenge for Christopher Nolan to live up to the standard he created. I was curious and full of expectations, especially since I could really appreciate his Inception, but this film fails to impress on many levels and I am afraid this is the first weak film of the British director. I’ll try to explain.

Of course Nolan is smart enough to know that he could never replace the Joker, and after the tragic death of Heath Ledger he had to create a different villain. He succeeded by creating Bane (Tom Hardy), a force of nature, pure muscle, evil and just like his predecessor not someone to bargain with. Unfortunately the director puts himself in trouble by creating someone who seems undefeatable. Halfway the film (in a great scene) we see how Bane kicks Batman’s ass and almost literally breaks him. Bruce Wayne goes to a prison-well from which only one person ever managed to escape and our hero has to overcome his own demons to deliver a happy end. With this knowledge I expected an intelligent non-physical solution to defeat the brute villain, who gave the ‘power to the people’ in Gotham city, but as it turns out a lame plot twist and ‘discovery’ about Bane give Nolan the easy way out. I expected much more from a filmmaker who usually comes up with inventive and intelligent scripts.

Hereby I haven’t mentioned the voice of Bane that made me laugh on a number of occasions and I am sure I was not supposed to laugh (his sound approaches the alien-villain from the first Men In Black picture, if you recall)

Apparently Nolan chose to find a role for most members of the Inception cast because there are a lot of new characters in The Dark Knight Rises. Some of them are completely redundant (think of the two businessmen trying to take over Wayne enterprises) and with characters like Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), Miranda Tate (the beautiful Marion Cotillard) and some new policemen (one of them the talented Joseph Gordon Levitt) the movie is full, too full. Its length (164 minutes) feels too short for good character building and emotional involvement and feels too long regarding some of the plot developments.

At first it feels like Nolan is trying to give us a message (like Bane is) with a revolution and an ‘approaching storm’ (financial crisis).Wayne enterprises invested in Green Energy, but soon the tool for nuclear fusion becomes a weapon and there are too many subplots and situations to give these themes the attention the director may have intended. The whole movie feels like Nolan had to cut a lot of material. This becomes clear in the last half hour, with some chaotically edited action and again some unoriginal and simple solutions, instead of balanced and clever developments as we are used from the director.

So am I just negative about this film? No. Most of the time The Dark Knight Rises was enjoyable but this is mainly because of the same reason the third Godfather film is for instance. As a viewer you are still on a high from the previous films. There are some memorable scenes between Batman and Alfred (the great Michael Caine), one almost perfect action sequence (I refer to the first appearance of Batman after the Wall Street heist, with the police force chasing him as they see him as the killer of Harvey Dent) and some powerful scenes where Batman/Bruce is struggling in prison.

But overall the movie is disappointing. It doesn’t have the unpredictability of the Joker, emotional involvement (like the death of Rachel in The Dark Knight or the ending with Jim Gordon and his son) and stunning action sequences. The ending of the saga contains cheaper action (not literally I am afraid), a weaker script with various plot holes and unoriginal solutions. Let’s hope this is an incidental ‘flaw’ from a director who usually delivers and deserves credit for both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

5.5/10

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev made a big impression on the arthouse movie world (and myself) with his debutfilm The Return, a very intense family drama portraying the relationship between a father and his two sons. Elena is the directors third film (I still have to watch his The Banishment) and shares the family thematic with The Return. Just like many other arthouse films it became a slow and dense picture, which is good in most aspects but unfortunately cannot top the director’s debut.

The title character Elena is an older woman who has a relationship with the wealthy and somewhat distant Vladimir. They have met in a later stage of their life and have been married for two years. Elena has a grandson who has to go to the army since the family cannot afford to send him to university, which apparently is his only way out. His parents, Elena’s son Sergey and his wife, are unemployed and don’t really intend to do their best to find at least one job. To make matters worse they just had a baby. Not a very bright future prospect.

Elena asks her husband Vladimir for financial funds to support her lowlife son and grandchildren. Vladimir, who has a troubled relationship with his only spoiled daughter, refuses to pay for them, since he believes the family could try harder. Elena’s offspring is portrayed as the typical drinking and antisocial lowlife, positioning Vladimir in a righteous position from an audience point of view.

When Vladimir ends up in the hospital after a heart attack he gets reunited with his daughter Katya. This results in one of the best scenes of the film. It contains great dialogue, acting and some interesting insights. Katya has a very hedonistic lifestyle and doesn’t deserve a potential heritage according to Elena, who gets more and more desperate about her family situation since Vladimir keeps refusing to support the ‘lazy bums’.

Just like he did in The Return, Zvyagintsev uses some beautiful imagery and long takes to portray the different family situations. Vladimir (and Elena) lives in a very cold and well organized house. He has daily structures and routines and just like his apartment his life seems to be in perfect order. This can’t be said about the household of Elena’s son Sergey. His messy, small, disorganized house is both a metaphor for his life as it is a realistic setting. The social differences are very well displayed and may be recognizable.

I will not spoil anything, but as to be expected (for those familiar with the director’s work, and as an arthouse cliché almost) this movie has no Hollywood ending, to say the least. The ending gave me an uncomfortable feeling and I am afraid Zvyagintsev gives a realistic insight in the social differences and cause and effect for in this case the Russian society (but it seems pretty universal).

Despite some good scenes, beautiful shots and metaphors Elena is not perfect. It doesn’t always manages to keep your full attention due to certain story developments (you might call it partly predictable in a way). Somehow I expected more from especially the last half hour, but the director chooses to let us observe events that only give us an idea of social patterns and doesn’t deliver the expected climax. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t distinguish itself from a handful of other films within its genre (think of some English kitchen sink pictures). Nevertheless Zvyagintsev manages to make a very decent and compelling observation of the differences and choices the different social classes tend to make. He is definitively a talented and promising filmmaker. Elena will not be remembered as his best film I believe.

7.5/10

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

Oddly enough I never watched the full MI movie series before. The first Mission: Impossible from 1996 was the first ‘proper’ film I saw in the cinema. Therefore it carries a lot of sentimental value and I still believe it is actually a good movie. After I ‘incidentally’ saw the 4^th film last year I was pretty disappointed and decided it was about time to watch numbers 2 and 3. The 2^nd one was pretty bad as well but the 3^rd oddly enough was a very entertaining and intelligently constructed film. I will try to explain the difference.

Let’s start with the first one, why was it good? Of course the complexity of the plot (let’s say it is more complex than the other 3 or for instance Inception) made it challenging, but I think in this case the director (Brian de Palma) managed to create a lot of suspense mainly by introducing every mission properly and explain its urgency to the viewer. Of course the movie has its flaws, but I believe it did pretty well what it was supposed to do: create an entertaining suspenseful action film.

About the second one. I will not spend too many words since I will compare most elements in my review of the third movie but director John Woo for me failed in most elements where the movie should and could score points. The story is usually more or less the same for these films (or a James Bond film if you wish) so this is not where the film can distinguish itself. This can be done in chemistry between male and female leads, the villain, the choreography of the action scenes and the suspense created.

Most of the elements mentioned above are much better portrayed and executed in Mission: Impossible III. Let’s start with the male and female lead. In this film Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) got married and wants to settle down. Of course the mission calls when he has the rescue a girl he trained and sent out in the field. When he can’t manage to save her the situation becomes personal for him and he wants to go after the villain Owen Davians (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who after being held hostage and threatened by Hunt promises to go after Hunt’s wife. This creates a sense of urgency we as viewers can understand. Compare this to the 2^nd film, where the relationship between Hunt and the female lead was forced and therefore felt unnatural, the sense of urgency was missing for me there.

Then the earlier mentioned villain, with personal favourite Philip Seymour Hoffman the choice could not have been better for any film that needs an intelligent evil villain. Period.

Finally, the suspense. In every respect this film beats its predecessor. First of all, the choreography of the action sequences is much better. The style of John Woo couldn’t interest me much but the most important reason for this lies in the preparation. Let’s for instance take the masks Ethan Hunt and other characters tend to use in these films. Of course this is a gadget we take for granted, let’s not point out the differences in eye colour, length and manners of characters that could make this feature an unlikely one. The usage of this feature should somehow be introduced to us to make it credible I would say, this is exactly what Abrams does in the third film when Owen Davians is about to be kidnapped and Ethan will be impersonating him. We see how the mask is created and that it takes time to do this job well, this creates great suspense. In the second film the masks came out of nowhere, which annoyed me.

Last but not least: the missions. In the second one we have some kind of deadly ‘Chimera’ virus, which somehow can be spread by someone who is infected. There are some plotholes in this story. Abrams makes a very intelligent choice in the third film by not giving the viewer any details about a dangerous compound called ‘the Rabbit’s foot’. Not knowing what it is makes it scarier, this always seems to work. More or less the same holds for the presence of the villain, in the third film Hoffman doesn’t have that much screen time making him more mysterious than his predecessor in the second film. The missions concerning the deadly compounds are set out differently, just like in the first film Abrams prepares his viewers very well in how to get what they are after (in the third one this is the villain in person). Woo failed to introduce the scene of the heist in the second film and as a viewer you kind of fall straight into the action.

All in all, the 3^rd film can measure itself with the first Mission Impossible film and I believe that director J.J. Abrams took a good look at what went wrong before. Of course, not every role is acted well, and there are some flaws but overall he created a very credible and suspenseful action film which I can strongly recommend.

7.5/10

Rock of Ages (Adam Shankman, 2012)

"This man spews out three things: Sex, hateful music, and...sex!"

A rock musical, it sounds too good to be true. Normally I would never be thrilled to watch a film made by the director of Hairspray and Bringing Down the House, but when I saw the trailer a couple of weeks ago I was excited to see this one and I am proud to say this movie is already my guilty pleasure of 2012.

The story is total crap. The small town girl Sherrie (Julianne Hough) comes to the big city to make a career as a singer. She runs into Drew (Diego Boneta, who looks like Matthew McConaughey’s little brother) who works in the Bourbon Room, a famous rock temple about to go bankrupt. Drew of course has his own aspirations as a musician and of course the two of them fall in love. And of course later on when Drew has success in the industry something goes wrong, and in the end...you can guess.

Secondly there are the two owners of the Bourbon Room (Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand) who have tax issues. The major’s wife (Catherina Zeta Jones) is determined to shut the rock temple down and especially has something against rock god Stacee Jaxx (a brilliant role by Tom Cruise).

This synopsis sound lame and cliché and has been done a thousand times before. The filmmakers obviously didn’t take it serious since they use minimal time to tell this story and focus on the strong and funny performances by the supporting actors and last but not least on the great rock music from the eighties. Music from bands like Def Leppard, Journey, Twisted Sister and Whitesnake are integrated into the storyline, or maybe not, I believe that the story was built around the songs, since the corny 80’s lyrics fit perfectly to the story.

And then Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx. When I saw the trailer I was afraid that he would only have a cameo appearance but fortunately he has a lot of screentime and clearly enjoys every minute of it. The sheer fun he and actors like Paul Giamatti (his manager) have can be felt perfectly and makes this film ‘Nothin’ but a good time’. The scene between him and the Rolling Stone journalist, going under the brilliant name Constance Sack (Malin Akerman), is priceless. Besides all the fun, Rock of Ages ridicules some of the developments in the music industry. There is a funny development regarding a shift in pop culture (if you like New Kids on the Block it’s likely you disagree) that must be loved by anyone who is into rock music. The film also dares to ridicule the rock culture in a way as well with some gay thematics, hairstyle and the extreme adoration of a rock idol (“When my hamster died, your music got me through it”).

If you plan to regard this movie as a serious one you will be disappointed. If you, just like me, love eighties rock you will find this picture a treat. Enjoy the pleasure the actors are having in their performances and the spoof-factor (which I think is present). Don’t compare it to classics like This is Spinal Tap or Almost Famous, but just sit back and relax.

7.5/10