Sunday, March 27, 2011

Black Death 2010

Black Death 2010

This British film slipped by me.  I didn't know about its production, release, buzz, reviews, or critiques.  I love it when someone (in this case a friend known as Baron Von Awesome... freaking awesome handle) brings a film to my attention that catches me completely unaware.  It means that when I get around to watching it I have read only a few articles and maybe a review or two.  This one I couldn't even find a good review that didn't have spoiler warnings.  I went in only knowing the basic premise and that Sean Bean starred in it.  Bean is a great actor who is famous among nerds for his work in the Lord of the Rings series and his upcoming role as Eddard Stark in the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones.  Bean's high nerd cred is really what sold me on this obscure British medieval horror.



First of all it turns out Bean isn't even really in the real protagonist role.  He is merely the biggest name in the production, but the main character is Osmund played by Eddie Redmayne is fantastic so I don't mind that Bean got all the poster and box art time despite Redmayne playing the protagonist.  This is not to say that Bean plays a minor role, but Redmayne is the lead and John Lynch as Wolfstan seems to get the most lines.  Bean plays Ulric a knight working for an unnamed bishop somewhere in England sent to hunt down witches and a necromancer in a remote village in a foggy swamp.  Bean does an excellent job of being violent and devout at the same time.  He brings out the troubled nature in his character using his notable eyes to display fanaticism or insanity while keeping a calm, cool guise.  Along the way he picks up Redmayne's character Osmund as a guide. Osmund is a young monk who is straying from his vows due to the love of a beautiful young blond.  Along with them is a great group of actors playing the Christian warriors.  Of real note are Lynch as Wolfstan and Johnny Harris as the gruff, violent Mold.  They travel to a village that may or may not be anti-Christian or Pagan.  The village seems to be led by the beautiful Carice van Houten (Valkyrie 2008).  She also does a great job, but it is almost jarring as she is the only person in the cast who seems to be both clean and beautiful.  The makeup crew got a bit heavy with the mud makeup to say the least.

Speaking of makeup, lets talk about the technical side of the film.  The makeup overall was solid especially the boils and sores from the people dieing of the black plague.  There was a sharp contrast though between most of the world being presented as dirty with people smeared with mud and the village in the middle of the marsh where much of the clothing seems too pristine.  I think this was a purposeful decision to add yet more contrast between the Christian world and the supposedly evil village, but it brought me out of the world as I started wondering how the heck they got homespun shirts to look so nice.  So costuming overall was great other than what I just mentioned.  The armors for the most part looked used and worn and the clothes, furnishings, and building all looked genuine to a non-historian like myself. 

The rest of the technical aspects were just as solid.  The Director Christopher Smith, who most won't know unless they saw the comic horror Severance from 2006, really put together a great movie.  It got a bit heavy handed with the narration by Lynch at the end, but he really built a world where a battle between Christianity and a necromancer seems plausible.  You feel the superstitions of the age creeping in constantly while Smith also seems to regularly re-root the film firmly back to reality.  The writer Dario Poloni deserves some of the credit for that as he wrote this thrilling tale, but I feel the dialogue occasionally was too modern.  The Cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid did some great scenes even if the movie wasn't perfect.  One notable scene has the camera locked onto the face of a character as he is dragged and then crucified.  As in much of the film clever cuts don't show all the violence but being jerked around along with the character as he is tortured really was a good, dark touch.    The music and sound by (I believe) Christian Henson is good and plays with the absence of sound like I haven't seen since the last religious action movie I watched, Book of Eli
(2010).  It ratchets up the tension in those scenes like no music could.

So all in all I have to say I really like this thriller period piece.  Even after watching it I can't firmly identify if the movie was pro or anti Christianity, but it does seem to say it is against hunting witches... maybe?  I personally love when the message in a movie becomes a bit muddled, but some may dislike this.  It also deals with medieval Christianity and its sponsored savagery so some religious folk may feel like skipping it.  This movie will draw you into a world where questions aren't answered, the supernatural may be real, and violence or thrills lie in every dark forest.  I would recommend this movie to horror fans who want something deeper than Saw-like gore-porn and people interested in medieval history.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Paul 2011

Paul 2011

Paul was a movie I had been looking forward to for some time.  It stars the awesome comedy duo Nick Frost and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead 2004, Hot Fuzz 2007, and the Britcom about slackers Spaced).  They are a comedy set that has turned out cult classic comedies based on a tried recipe of geek humor and pop culture references.  I read a few interviews with the pair leading up to the release of Paul and I had the impression they were attempting a less referential style with a more mainstream appeal.  The inclusion of American mainstream comedy actor Seth Rogen (Pineapple Express 2008, Knocked Up 2007, The 40 Year Old Virgin 2005) as the voice of Paul reinforced that idea.  I wondered how a movie that starts with two British blokes going to Comic-Con would have mass appeal, but geek culture has been becoming the dominant sub-40-year-old culture for years. Because I had this bias going into Paul, I got a great surprise.  Pegg and Frost continued using their famous recipe of referencing geek culture, alien/UFO lore, and occasionally obscure references.  In order to make a movie with broader appeal they added more popular culture references and allowed the humor to dwell mostly on more famous sci-fi using multiple references to the Star Wars series and the classic UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  This should allow the movie to be accessible to a larger audience, but may sacrifice the cult following of Pegg and Frost's earlier works.


The comedy duo of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg really forms the core of this movie and their fans should feel right at home.  The pair brings in their usual chemistry and fall into their usual roles with Pegg going after a girl and Frost having a bordering on obsession friendship with Pegg.  The chemistry works great, but is not exceptional. Rogen plays the voice of the alien Paul.  He turns in a good performance and delivers his lines with good comedic timing, but somehow the big stoner voice of Rogen never really jived with the tiny surfer style CGI alien on screen.  I think this was more of a casting problem, but it never really detracts from this mostly silly adventure.



In this film the love interest is played by cute and funny Kristen Wiig (best known from SNL, but recently did well in the deliberately bad MacGruber in 2010).  Her character starts as a religious person and this is used to set up multiple gags on evolution/creationism and hardcore hillbilly Christianity.  Her character's main role is to set up a romantic appeal for the movie, but she delivers the best performance of the reality shattering truth that aliens exist and are talking to you.  Despite fainting gags the rest of the cast seem to mostly take Paul in stride, but Wiig's character genuinely struggles with the truth that her religion is false and everything she knows is being shaken up including her morality and relationship to her crazy hillbilly dad.  Wiig's character and her story should upset many religious people and I suggest keeping your more religious friends and family away from this film or you might end up getting an earful.  Her acting is the most notable in the film, but this is a fun comedy and the cast's acting is pretty bad throughout.

Pegg and Frost's previous greats were all with Director Edgar Wright who worked with them on Spaced, Shaun, and Hot Fuzz.  I was worried about Wright not being the director on Paul, but Director Greg Mottola does nearly as well.  The effects, music, and shots from this film don't stand out and lack some of crazy ideas from earlier Pegg and Frost films, but they all work in the film and have good comedic elements.

I have to say that I did not enjoy this film as much as Shaun of the Dead, but it was close to on par with Hot FuzzPaul worked a lot better for me than Pegg's work without partner Frost such as Run, Fatboy, Run (2007).  Overall I think the movie was a great sci-fi comedy and contained such great pop culture references and cameos that most people should find a good laugh.  I would recommend this movie to fans of Frost and Pegg or people who like geek reference comedies like Fanboys (2008).

Trailers, Photos, Etc

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Dogtooth 2009

Dogtooth 2009

After realizing I had missed a few of the foreign film nominees from the Oscars, I decided to catch up.  With foreign films access is always an issue, but Netflix seems to be getting better all the time.  One nice advantage of foreign films is that sites like Netflix can get streaming rights cheaply.  I personally love this feature since a trip to the mailbox is way too much work!  Now if Netflix just broadened its 'Watch it Now' collection and allowed for you to change subtitles or audio tracks I would probably never leave the house, but I digress.

Dogtooth was the first film on my list available streaming from Netflix so I dove into it first despite hearing some really mixed reviews.  After watching it, the mixed reviews make a lot more sense.  I watched the film last week, but had to take four or five days to digest it all.  This is a truly odd and disturbing movie.  It is also much more than that.  It is moving, interesting, gritty, at times violent, and totally funny in a deeply dark way.  I can understand it getting the Oscar nod due to its acting and story, but it is way to off beat and disturbing to win... Apparently the Academy agrees (It did not win, that was In a Better World).

OK a little background on the film might be nice before I get into the odd details.  Dogtooth is a Greek film that was released there in 2009, but like most foreign films it took a while to reach the US.  It won an award at the Cannes Film Festival gaining international attention in 2009. I am not sure exactly when it first hit our shores, but it splashed up on my radar late in 2010.  It was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who to our American audience has done nothing noteworthy before Dogtooth, but has directed a handful Greek language feature films.  The rest of its technical crew and writers are equally off the radar to myself and most Americans, but the writing was good.  The story was unique and interesting with dialogue that really sold the crazy world the characters lived in.  Lighting, sound, and cinematography were all sub par even with budget restrictions in mind.  There were a few clever shots, but most of the film was technically mechanical and uninspiring.

The story is a bit unhinged, but so unique I can totally forgive the lackluster aspects of the film.  It centers around a family of five.  The father seems to work as an average factory manager, but that is the only connection to the outside world that the family has.  The three 'kids', one boy and two girls, are late teenagers, but have never left the compound that they live in with their parents.  The parents have completely sheltered their children and control their lives and education.  The parents redefine words and terms to explain the outside world.  The 'sea' is a chair and cats are dangerous animals that kill.  Much of the dark comedy in the movie revolve around these repurposed words and misunderstandings.  The son attacks a kitten with garden shears to protect his family and the children believe that real airplanes sometimes fall out of the sky so you can play with them (the parents put toy sized models in the yard where the plane 'crashed').

The downside is some of the most disturbing content also revolves around these misunderstandings.  The scene with the kitten is highly disturbing and dark.  The daughters lick each other sexually after learning it from a visitor, but in all the wrong places (shoulders, stomach, face, etc).  This brings me to the most unsettling aspect of the movie to me.  Incest plays out prominently in the story, always a direct result to such insular families, and is portrayed a little too completely.  American cinema would probably ignore this controversial story idea completely and without it the film would loose its potency, but it could have been addressed more through inference making it less unnerving.  This seems to be a conclusion other reviews have also reached.  It deals with interesting, even if disturbing, topics, but shows too much of the truth to be viewed as entertainment.  The story can't be discussed in too much more detail without ruining the humorous and dark surprises, but the film's story was very engaging.

My favorite part of the movie was the acting.  Considering the movie basically had a cast of five, without stand out acting this movie would be a complete bore.  The roles of the children were wonderfully acted.  In particular the 'Eldest' played by Aggeliki Papoulia.  She was spectacular in this film's lead role and made awkward-rebellious work.  She was oddly sexual, violent, and beautiful while still maintaining an innocence and childlike nature.  Her character was the child testing the boundaries and creating the central conflicts throughout the film giving her the most room to work.  Papoulia's portrayal showed all the depth of the internal conflict of a character who is totally trapped, but is scared to escape.  The father played by Christos Stergioglou was amazing as well.  Taking a violently protective and abusive father, but playing him as a soft, methodical character worked wonders in this role.

So to wrap this up... Dogtooth was a great character drama that also touched on dark humor and sexuality, but did it all in a way that was disturbing to watch.  It is a movie that will leave you thinking, but was slow paced and at times boring.  I was moved by and sympathized with the main character, but felt no relief upon resolution.  The characters and story were intriguing, yet if I had to balance enjoyment and entertainment against the disturbing and hard to watch scenes, this film would come up short.  All in all, this film was amazingly well acting, but was so oddly paced and unnerving that I cannot totally say I enjoyed the experience.  I would recommend this film to fans of foreign language dramas and those that will put up with a lot of bore for those dark, dark comedy gems.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Academy Awards 2011

Academy Awards 2011

 A Quick Wrap Up

The Oscars this year came with few surprises.  There were a few promising dark horse pictures like 127 Hours (2010) or the touching comedy The Kids Are All Right (2010).  A few artistic pictures were in the mix as well such as Black Swan (2010) or Winter's Bone (2010).  Despite these promising films the major awards went to the top dogs that everyone knew were going to win big.  The King's Speech (2011) swept up the awards like Best Picture, Actor, and Screenplay as well as taking Best Directing.  No surprise since The King's Speech was nominated for every award it could qualify for.  Inception (2010) was my personal favorite in the running and it had its share of nominations.  It won Sound Mixing and Editing which makes sense.  That movie had some of the best foley effects I had heard in a long time.  Inception also took best Cinematography and Visual Effects.  It was the only big special effects movie to be nominated for multiple awards so it is no surprise that it swept these categories.  The last big winner was The Social Network (2010), which I still have not seen despite everyone telling me how great it is.  It was nominated in all the major categories and took home a few that surprised me like Best Adapted Screen Play, it was up against a Coen brothers remake of True Grit (2010) and the greatest 'under the radar' movie of the last year 127 Hours.  It also won awards for Film Editing and Music Original Score.

Another big film that had its share of nominations was The Fighter (2010).  It took only a few awards, but did well considering the technical juggernauts of The Social Network and Inception and the heart strings powerhouse of The King's Speech.  It won for both Actor and Actress in a Supporting Role.  Toy Story 3 (2010) won best animated to no one's surprise.  The biggest dark horse winner was Alice in Wonderland (2010) which won best Costume Design and Art Direction.  It deserved both, with the only other real contender being Black Swan for Art Direction despite it not being nominated in that category!  Speaking of Black Swan Natalie Portman did take home Best Actress in a Leading Role.  Best Shorts and Foreign nobody but myself and a few film critics care about so we can ignore those categories, but there was an upset in Foreign Language Film.  The last thing of note to me and my geeky friends is that the awesome werewolf costumes and make up from Wolfman (2010) took best make up!  Rick Baker does an awesome werewolf.

Well that about wraps it up.  Few big surprises and very little excitement, but that is the Oscars!