Two Badass Saints

Rating: B+
The 1999 film, The Boondock Saints, directed by Troy Duffy is an action-packed tale of orphaned twin Irish brothers (Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus) who take it upon themselves to rid the world of sin. However, the brothers get the attention of the FBI, specifically agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), when they start killing off the Russian mob in their hometown of Boston. The film takes a journey from the twins’ revelation of becoming the proverbial hand of God to finding out who their father actually is and what he is good at doing.

The brothers are joined by a friend named Rocco, played by David Della Rocco, who serves as the source of comedic relief among the massive amounts of bullets that are constantly whizzing around. The characters seem to be on the edge of insanity throughout the entire film, one of which probably breaks that barrier. Agent Smecker goes beyond his duties as an agent to see the good in what the brothers are doing but in the midst of his epiphany he goes into a fit of hysteria. Dafoe plays the part so well, it’s scary. Dafoe is well known for bringing bad guys to life and shoving the character in your face to scare the hell out of you. By far, Dafoe does the best job in terms of acting within this film but he’s not the only good actor that we see.

Norman Reedus also does a great job playing his role as a vigilante justice seeker. Every time he gets mad, you feel it. Every time he says his prayer, you feel like he’s executing you. I love the way the story plays out. I’ve seen the movie many times now but it is still hard to believe some of the things that happen. Duffy does a great job in telling his story although he could leave out some of the Bostonian cussing which runs ramped throughout the entire film. I like the idea that these two are taking it upon themselves to get rid of everything that’s wrong with the world.

The cinematography is interesting in that there are many scenes in which Smecker visualizes himself being in the same room as the brothers while trying to figure out what is going on. There are a lot of interesting shots that are tried and succeed in making the action more intense or the emotions more potent. These scenes are accented by the music which seems to be chosen in order to make everything about the film more awesome. The wardrobe department did a good job in gauging what was appropriate for a person engaging in activity that lies outside of the law. Sunglasses and trench coats always add to glamorizing handguns even if the ones holding the guns can speak multiple languages and have tattoos on their hands that say “truth” and “justice” in Latin.

As incredibly awesome as this film is, there are a few drawbacks. First of all, not all of the actors were as good as Reedus and Dafoe. The majority of the actors playing various roles in the Russian mob seem to be trying too hard to be bad. None of them seem to draw in kind of emotional response from me, except for maybe annoyed. Also, the film does seem to go a little overboard in making out what the brothers are doing seem great. They are killing people left and right and at the same time making jokes about television shows from days gone by, but we have to realize that when you are surrounded by dead bodies telling jokes may not be an appropriate response. But then again, when the mob has problems with others and their response is extremely gratuitous violence, that isn’t appropriate either.

Duffy’s film is great for making people think about how the violence of the world should be dealt with. It floats along the same lines of revenge as say The Punisher and Kill Bill, but does so with a light-hearted air that makes you wonder if there are some psychiatric issues brewing in the mind of Troy Duffy. These factors, combined with the fact that the film did not make much of a splash when it made its debut, come together to make The Boondock Saints a film that will be remembered as a cult classic.

The Twilight of Vampire Movies

Rating: D
If you are unaware of the recent tween phenomenon known as Twilight then you either live under a rock or are dead. This movie is made by girls for girls. It was written by a woman (Stephanie Meyer), directed by a woman (Catherine Hardwicke), and starred a young female actress named Kristen Stewart who has also been in good movies like Panic Room. Also, a supposedly attractive young male was put in to serve as a love interest. Before we go any further, I would like to make it clear that after the song “Super Massive Black Hole”, which I used to love, was ruined for me during the baseball scene, I could no longer watch this travesty go on any longer. I turned it off and went to read Dracula to heal my mental wounds.

Just in case you are one of the few who have indeed been living under a rock, this film tells a story about a young girl, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father after having trouble living in Arizona with her mother. While there she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), a mysteriously depressed man who never goes to school when the sun is out. In other words, EMO! All of the buzz around the movie makes the character Edward into a vampire. However, that is entirely inaccurate. In fact, Edward even says that he is something similar to a vampire called a “Cold One”. But I’m not here to discuss the fact that these “Cold Ones” are not vampires.

Just because the movie has done amazingly well, does not mean that it is actually a well done movie. Kristen Stewart is a promising talent that will most certainly go on to do better movies in her future. Unfortunately her character in this film is so depressing and typical of a brooding teenage girl that I could not care about her feelings at all. In fact, I found myself yelling at the screen about how stupid she is for playing a baseball game with a bunch of vampire imitators that want to kill her. The judgment of these characters is completely out of whack with the majority of rational human beings. This alone caused me not to care about the characters but rather made me aggravated with them.

Stewart gives a decent performance while every other actor completely sucks. Pattinson was too busy pouting his lips and squinting his eyes to worry about giving some reality to a flat character. Or maybe he did a really good job of interpreting the character that just sucks. I haven’t read the book and I have no intention of reading it because I’m not a twelve year old girl who suffers from guy problems.

The effects weren’t all that great either. During the Spiderman tree climbing scene you might as well have been seeing the wires around Pattinson’s body. He was at arm’s length from the trunk of the tall tree making for a completely ridiculous look for a vampire. Along with terrible looking effects, there was nothing special about the cinematography. It seemed like there was no innovative thought put behind the film. Everything seemed to rely on the attractiveness of the actors even though Pattinson looks like he has Down Syndrome. As previously stated, this was a film made specifically for females. It is simply a redundancy on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet except this version has a moody, sparkling, vampire wannabe.

The only good aspect of the entire film was setting. The landscape was absolutely beautiful, capturing the majesty of the forests of Northwest America. Overall, I have one word of recommendation for people thinking about watching or rewatching this film. Don’t.

Tarantino Rewrites History with Inglourious Basterds

Rating: A
Now before we get into this, I must admit that I am a freak for Tarantino movies. My favorite of his is Pulp Fiction. I love the style in which he directs and the sense of a universe that he creates within all of his movies. It is like he turns his films into an individual member of a family. So if we were to go along with that idea in mind then this film, the latest of Quentin Tarantino's works, would be the old grandfather sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch telling war stories to his children. And the children would be wide-eyed and silent.

Quentin Tarantino rewrites the events of World War II by taking the 1978 film of the same name, directed by Enzo G. Castellari, and places the action in a theater, instead of a train, in Nazi-occupied France, instead of Italy. The film focuses on a rag-tag group of Jewish-American soldiers led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a Lieutenant in the army that has vowed to kill every Nazi that he comes across. At the same time that the Basterds are working their way closer and closer to France from where they were dropped in Italy, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) has just had her entire family slaughtered by SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) who has the appropriate title of Jew Hunter, a Nazi Sherlock Holmes with pipe to boot. Shoshanna is allowed to escape to Paris where she assumes a new identity as an owner of a movie theater. She becomes the desired object of the young Nazi Fredrick Zoller's (Daniel Brühl) affection. This desire leads to Fredrick convincing Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to show his new film, Nation's Pride, which is about Zoller's actions in battle that has made him a hero to his people. Shoshanna takes advantage of the opportunity to kill a bunch of high ranking officers with great pleasure.

Meanwhile the Basterds have made themselves feared among the Germans with a certain soldier that they affectionately refer to as Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz (Eli Roth) who kills Nazis by bludgeoning them to death with a baseball bat. Even Hitler himself, played by Martin Wuttke, has come to fear the power that this group has gained. The unit makes its way to a village in France called Nadine where they meet up with the British Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) who has a connection with a double agent film actress named Bridget von Hammersmark played by Diane Kruger. Together this group is going to get into the premier of the movie at Shoshanna’s theater but not before plenty of action ensues.

The entire movie is full of the thing that Tarantino loves most, violence. He is even quoted as saying that “violence is one of the most fun things to watch.” When you see this movie that becomes very clear with scenes like The Bear Jew beating the hell out of a Nazi officer’s head or Aldo Raine carving a swastika into the forehead of Hans Landa. This movie is very violent but appropriately so, echoing the horrors of World War II. Obviously, this is not a movie for children both for the fact that it uses the word “fuck” quite often and that it discusses one of the worst events in history.

From a technical standpoint, the movie is very clean in terms of editing and cinematography, which has always been a strong point in Tarantino’s movies. Many shots that are used in this film have been used in his other movies like overheads and shots similar to the trunk shot which is a must have in Tarantino movies. Also, we get a shot of feet. Yes, a shot of feet. For those of you who don’t know, there are two things that you will find in almost every movie by Quentin Tarantino, a shot of a woman’s feet and Samuel L. Jackson, who in this film serves the role of narrator.

Quentin Tarantino is continually growing as a director with every film that he makes and so far, as the last line of the movie states, “this just might be his masterpiece.”

I'm Watching Watchmen

Rating: B+
Being a comic book enthusiast, Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of the graphic novel, Watchmen, proved to be a cinematic work of art. This harsh and alternate reality of the year 1985 portrays a world where superheroes are the norm and hating them happens just as often as seeing them. When a group of former heroes come back together to investigate the murder of a past colleague after years of disbandment, due to government intervention, they discover a horrible plot to kill millions. Some of these costumed individuals were used, abused, and murdered just as often as they helped. Most people either love this movie or hate it, and the main reasons to hate it are because of the differences from the graphic novel and the not-so-fantastic job in the wardrobe department.

Having read the written work by Alan Moore, after viewing the movie, I have found one main difference between the two, which would be the conclusion to a very twisted tale of a struggle for world peace. Giving away the ending to a newly released movie would be simply rude. However, ending a movie the same way you would end a comic book simply would not work. More people visit the movie theater than read comic books. Maybe it’s because the stereotype about comics is that they are childish and immature, yet going to see a movie about talking chihuahuas is perfectly fine. Some people simply will not buy a giant monster being a conspiracy to create civility between two warring nations, thanks to the smartest man on the planet. This is too much of a science fiction scenario for the general population. It’s not “realistic”, no matter how ridiculous it is to hear someone walk out of a movie saying, “it wasn’t realistic enough” or “that would never happen in real life”. That’s why it’s a movie. Unless it’s a documentary, it isn’t supposed to be realistic. This is why we have a little thing called imagination. But, because the imagination in people has died or is becoming that way, we cannot have a giant monster engineered from an extraordinary man destroying cities and still maintain blockbuster quality. So, we must go with something more “realistic”, a device of war meant to destroy civilizations. Something that was very nice was the homage to the original source, being the genetically enhanced lynx that remains at the side of Matthew Goode’s character, Adrian Veidt, or his superhero name, Ozymandias. Mainstream America can grasp this much easier than the more supernatural occurrence found in the comic. So, this is the compromise that must be made in order to try and entertain everyone that chooses to see this movie.

Another difference from the movie and the written work is leaving out two important characters that we see constantly throughout the graphic novel. These two characters are the newsstand vendor and the kid sitting next to him reading a fake comic, “Curse of the Black Freighter.” These two characters make the audience care about what happens at the end of the movie to everyone that is killed. The graphic novel has a total of twelve chapters and these two characters appear in each one of them. This creates a bond between the reader and the characters that does not occur in the movie. The reasoning for why this could not possibly happen in the movie is simply the time limit. The movie runs for well over two hours, coming close to three, meaning the director would have considered this and must have been relying on the fact that people would have to connect with the fact that it is New York City that is destroyed. It would have hit home with other disasters such as 9/11. This would make people feel sad about what happens but isn’t as effective as using characters from the newsstand. However, these two are shown when the city is destroyed, paying tribute to the graphic novel once again.

Cinematically, this movie is absolutely astounding. The opening montage shows what looks like slow moving pictures, reminiscent of the portraits from Harry Potter. Another great quality about the look of the movie is that a great number of shots are set up to give credit to the graphic novel recreating its scene art, yet again paying tribute. It becomes very apparent that Snyder is a very big fan of the work and wants to make as close to a mirror to the graphic novel as possible. This is very commendable and should be recognized as a great accomplishment in the movie because of its devotion to the source material.

The few differences between the graphic novel and the movie are not so great as to call the movie bad. Acting wise, Jeffery Dean Morgan (The Comedian) and Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) were incredible while others like Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II) and Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan) could have possibly been the wrong choices to make. This and some of the costumes and make up could have been justification enough to find faults within the movie. I mean, it was pretty bad to see an obviously fake nose hanging from Nixon’s face that looked like play-doh molded in a farmer’s hands and thrown on a guy’s face and said, “it’ll do.” But, all in all, this incredible twist on saving humanity that has never been done before is reason enough to call this movie great and Zack Snyder’s devotion to the source material should not be over-looked as well. So, should you be watching Watchmen? Most definitely. You’ll be in for one hell of a treat.

Disney Surprises Audiences with Alice in Wonderland

Rating: B-
The new adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by director Tim Burton, proves to show many that Disney can be a little darker than many would think. With films like Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, not to mention his general demeanor, Tim Burton has made his name synonymous with the dark and eerily creepy. The fact that Disney, a kid-friendly company, would go along with scenes of little, blond-haired Alice hopping from decapitated head to decapitated head to get across a moat and a blue caterpillar smoking from a hookah would make most tilt their heads to the side and say “Really?”. While watching this film I found it easy to forget, until after it was over, that this is not the first time Disney has made a visual version of Alice in Wonderland.

It becomes very obvious that Tim Burton is the director of this film when there are trees with gnarled branches to look like fingers and vibrantly neutral colors. The story consists of a twenty-year old Alice who goes back to Underland (the real name of Wonderland) and follows her destiny to save everyone from the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen and restore power to the very peaceful White Queen. The point is made very clear that this film is about Alice’s return to Wonderland and not a remake of the original story, which makes one wonder why a different title was not chosen. The film gives many references to the actual happenings that are found in the book; such as Alice suggesting to her fiancés mother that her white roses should be painted red so that she can have the ones she wanted. Also, there is a montage toward the ending of the film showing the original occurrences of Carroll’s story that appropriately sums up what is needed for the audience to know.

What many potential audience members will want to know about is the performance that Johnny Depp gives as The Mad Hatter. Given that The Mad Hatter is supposed to be somewhat of a tortured soul, Depp is able to show audiences the character’s suffering, and slight insanity, and transform it into a performance that grabs the audience with a loose grip. Depp’s accent for the character does seem to vary at times between British to Scottish apparently without reason, taking away from the film slightly. The actress playing Alice, Mia Wasikowska, will likely be forgotten for her place in this film but does show some potential for improvement and should be looked for in future films. Alan Rickman voices the hookah-smoking, blue caterpillar named Absalom, with a wisdom and superiority that most grandparents use to shower on younger generations. Helena Bonham Carter, a staple of any Tim Burton film, gives a memorable performance as the Red Queen by seeming oddly destined for a role where the character is like a bratty child in control of toy soldiers.

One of the truly great triumphs of Burton’s film is the wardrobe of costumes shown throughout. At the beginning and end of the film wonderful, Victorian-style suits and dresses are shown, paying homage to the time frame in which Carroll’s work was published. Alice’s famous dress from the animated film of days passed is slightly altered by removing the section of white from the front and making it all blue. She is also given a new dress that is typical of the Burton technique, an asymmetrical, red dress with white frills showing black stripes, recalling films like Beetlejuice.

Another amazing aspect of the film is the animation that is so vibrant, real, and innovative. The fact that such a dark-minded film director uses colors that are so vibrant and hit viewers in the face like a baseball bat is innovative in itself, but when the same director uses this technique in conjunction with making his wife, Helena Bonham Carter, into another person with a completely different build, he does enough to make anyone stand back and say “wow!”. When simply watching the film, the viewer gets the sense that close up shots were taken of the actress’ face then digitally added to a computer model of the Red Queen’s body. The two are seemingly melded together and blend perfectly into one another. The mad intensity of colors that are used during Alice’s time at the home of the White Queen makes the screen seem to glow like a portal to heaven. Burton uses the color white on everything in sight, from Anne Hathaway’s hair and dress to the stones supporting the walls of the castle and takes the intensity beyond natural limits to add to the goodness and purity of the character and all her intentions.

Overall, the visual fire that is ignited from the start of the movie burns away the small glitches that are found in the acting and consume the audience in its warm magic. Some of the Victorianly dry comedic aspects may fall flat but the sheer insanity of the Mad Hatter’s dark humor takes control. Disney may have taken a dark route with Mr. Burton, but considering the visual wonder that has been created, I tip my hat.