MOVIE: Scream 4 (2011)

This movie was exactly the flick I was expecting it to be — no more, no less.  It’s, you know, Scream 4.  ‘Nuff said, right? As a fan of the entire Scream series, I had a good time watching this one and actually thought it was marginally better than Scream 3.  But after this installment, I think it’s probably time to put ye olde Ghostface to bed — the two old men in charge of this franchise are, put simply, too old to be in charge of this franchise (more on this in a moment).

The set-up: Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who ought to win some kind of final girl award for having survived both the original AND its two sequels, is now all grown up.  After a decade of living in fear, she’s finally overcome her traumatic past and written a book about her experiences.  The final stop on her book tour?  Woodsboro, of course, and right around the anniversary of the original murders to boot.

Yeah, that oughta go well . . .

If you’ve seen the other three movies, you can pretty much take the plot, such as it is, from there.  Ghostface, Gail Weathers, and Dewey the dunderheaded cop are all back, and lots of really dumb teens get slashed in between scenes of sarcastic bantering about the nature of horror movie sequels and “reboots.”

Though I found this flick satisfying overall, I did have a few complaints.  The first was Courteney Cox’s face, which has been horribly marred by some plastic surgery procedure or another to the point where she looks so distractingly weird I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth instead of listening to what she was saying.  Jesus, ladies, what IS it you’re doing to yourselves that’s making you all start to look like Jack Nicholson’s Joker?   Whatever it is, it’s not doing you the favors you seem to think it’s doing and you should stop immediately.

The less-petty issues I had were with a few elements of the script.  First,  the dialogue sounds exactly like what it is:  lines written by a guy in his mid-40s (Kevin Williamson, author of Screams 1 and 2, way back when) who knows juuuuust enough about teen culture to be able to drop in a few semi-relevant keywords, but is no longer young enough himself to make any of it sound natural. Instead of portraying realistically casual use of social networking sites, texting, live-video-blogging, etc., everything gets pointed out directly and heavy-handedly (“I am going to post this on The Facebook right now!”  “The Facebook?  But The Twitter is so much more cooler, LOL!” “Something something JUSTIN BIEBER!  CHANNING TATUM!  TOP CHEF!” “Wait . . . Top Chef??”) (note: I just made all that up, but you get the picture).

This is the problem with trying to sound hipper than you actually are — Top friggin’ Chef, for pity’s sake.

The other weird thing about the script was that none of the teens in this movie appeared to have any empathy whatsoever.  Was that sly commentary on how our online lives are negatively impacting our ability to truly relate to others?  Or merely lame stereotyping of a population the writer no longer understands?  I’m guessing the latter.  And though there were also plenty of parts of the script that DID work, including a killer opening scene (pun intended) and some decent witty banter now and again, overall, I think Williamson and Craven are getting too old for the teen slasher genre.  (As if we didn’t know that already from Craven’s last feature, My Soul to Take, the only film in 2010 I walked out on due to INSANE BOREDOM.)

In any case, despite the fact it’s not brilliant, it’s still fun and definitely worth seeing if you’re a fan of the series.  You could probably wait for DVD, though I’m really going to miss movie theaters when they finally all go out of business because everybody keeps waiting for the DVD.  Sigh.  Que sera, etc.

Recommended!

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre: Horror
Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Adam Brody, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell

Marwencol, My Fave Film of 2010, Airs This Week on PBS!

Just a quick post to let you all know that the movie I rated as my favorite film from 2010, Marwencol, is going to be airing nation-wide this week on PBS stations.  If you’re in Seattle, it’ll be on tomorrow night, April 26th.

Check your local listings/station if you’re interested in seeing it — WHICH YOU BETTER BE BECAUSE IT IS AMAZING.

Read my original review of Marwencol.

View the PBS page about Marwencol (includes trailer).

View the Marwencol web site.

DO NOT MISS THIS FILM!

MOVIE: Source Code (2011)

NOTE: This review does NOT contain anything I’d consider a “spoiler.”  But I can’t vouch for the comments section, where spoilage of the ending may occur.  If you haven’t seen the movie, STAY OUTTA THE COMMENTS!

Most of the reviews I’ve read about this movie have said the same thing: it’s a total blast as long as you don’t think about it too much.

Well, where’s the fun in THAT, I ask you.  I’m a bit of a physics nerd, and you can’t make a movie about time travel and expect me NOT to think about it.  That’s just crazy talk, sirs and madams.

But first, let me say that those critics and I agree about one thing:  this movie is definitely fun.  It’s about an Army helicopter pilot, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is being attacked in the air over Afghanistan when he suddenly finds himself at rest inside a strange metal pod.  On a TV screen above him comes a woman who identifies herself as Col. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) and explains he’s been recruited for an experimental mission that involves sending his consciousness back in time to inhabit the body of a young man named Sean Fentress on a Chicago-bound commuter train earlier that morning.

Because of the way the procedure works, she says, Stevens can only inhabit Sean for the last eight minutes of his life — you see, Sean, as well as everybody else on the train, was killed that morning when a terrorist’s bomb exploded on board, and they need Stevens to figure out who the bomber is so they can stop him before he detonates another one.

As Stevens returns over and over to re-experience the same eight minutes, he gradually collects enough information to deduce the identity of the bomber.  He also falls in love with a woman on the train, the first face he sees every time he is sent back.

What I found intriguing about this film was less the mystery about the bomber (which is pretty ho-hum, frankly) and more the mystery about this experimental time travel procedure, which the movie doesn’t even attempt to explain, aside from saying it involves “quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus.”  To the movie, and to most of its viewers, the “how?” is not really important.  But to nerds like me, it’s endlessly thought-provoking, so I will now ramble on for several paragraphs while I work through some of my theories.

There are two possibilities, to my mind.  One is that the time travel Stevens is experiencing involves parallel universes (as opposed to a more Back to the Future-type time travel, where you go back in your own reality and your actions can impact your own future — these are two well-known ideas about how time travel might work, and it’s my understanding that most physicists who believe in this stuff think the parallel universe one is more likely).

There are several elements in the story that suggest this parallel universe thing is at work, especially the ending, but there are also several elements that don’t quite make sense in that context.

For example, my understanding of parallel universes is that they’re not identical (and how could they be, when all it takes to change everything is the flap of a single butterfly’s wings, right?), and that’s suggested here too by the fact Stevens in Sean’s body is obviously altering the events of that time line.  But if that’s the case, and parallel universes are not identical, then how are they so sure the bombing will happen at all, let alone be perpetrated by the same guy?  And why does Goodwin tell Stevens he can’t save the people on the train because they’re already dead (in her universe/time line).  He’d be able to save them in HIS universe/time, right?

That, and other discrepancies like it, bring me to my other theory, which is that the procedure isn’t about time travel at all — the way we think of it anyway. Instead I’m thinking it could be some kind of complex computer simulation.  Professor Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), the procedure’s developer, talks about the brain being able to store eight minutes of memory after death, as though it were somehow retrievable data.  If it’s a simulation, that explains why Goodwin insists Stevens can’t save anybody (though she may simply have been lying about that for expediency’s sake, I suppose).  BUT, it doesn’t really explain how he could find the bomber. Sean’s last eight minutes were spent sitting in a train car talking to a friend — the only memories he would have would be of that single car, and possibly the restroom and any passengers who happened to walk through.  Yet Stevens is able to go beyond that and to interact with people Sean did not interact with, as well as get off the train and experience events there.

Then again, an advanced computer should be able to accurately extrapolate a lot of information from that original data set.  And so, in that case, maybe this theory works.  Goodwin tells Stevens the bomber is one of the passengers in that car, for one thing, which goes along with the idea that Sean is the perfect person to inhabit (though I’m not sure how she could possibly know the bomber was from that car and not, say, the car next to it — the location of the bomb and the phone the bomber leaves behind suggest proximity, not specificity) (but whatever).  Also, Stevens and the computer simulation are also given more data as Goodwin’s day progresses and her investigators find additional clues, thus providing more variables, leading, potentially, to more, and more accurate, extrapolations.

This is the theory that makes the most sense to me — at least until we get to the end.  Then I start having to go a little more Russell-Crowe-in-Virtuosity to get it to work out.

Oh, heck, who knows?  All I really know is that I wish I’d seen this one with my mom, because we LOVE trying to hash these kinds of things out together after watching movies like this one, and now I’ll have to wait for the damn DVD!  Rats!  (Though if any of you guys saw the movie and want to nerd out with me in the comments, I would love it.  Feel free to talk about the ending there, and if you haven’t seen the film, again, STAY OUT!)

Extremely entertaining flick and a great one for all fans of sci-fi action, nerd and non-nerd alike.  Recommended!

[Prequeue it at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Science Fiction, Action
Cast:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Arden

BOOK: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (2010)

I was a little wary of this novel, to be honest, because, man, THE HYPE!  The hype was INSANE!  I have a bad track record when it comes to high expectations — the more the masses rave about something, the more I expect it to be brilliant, the more I am typically extremely let-down.

And, to be honest, that kind of happened this time too, though not as dramatically as I feared it might.  I’m going to have a hard time explaining where my disappointment came from because I really did enjoy this novel — I did! — but I definitely wasn’t as mad-crazy about it as a lot of other people seem to have been.

The story is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi and centers around a community of rich white women, their young children, and the black maids who serve their families.  The white women fall along the entire spectrum of racism, ranging from the awful Miss Hilly, a horrible person whose primo cause is trying to convince other whites to install separate bathrooms in their homes for their maids because black people cause disease; all the way to Miss Skeeter, who can’t believe the way her friends treat the women who care for their children, houses, and husbands, and eventually decides to write a book consisting of interviews with the maids of Jackson, telling true stories about their lives as “the help.”

This happens right as the civil rights movement is gaining momentum, in Jackson and elsewhere, and the black women Skeeter wants to interview  resist the idea at first, knowing if they ever got caught at best they’d lose their jobs, and at worst, they’d be dragged into the street and killed (no exaggeration — it happens to their neighbor, activist Medgar Evers, mid-way through the book).

But gradually, one by one, they agree to tell Skeeter the stories of their lives.  These stories too encompass a spectrum, from horrific tales of astonishing abuse to descriptions of kindness and authentic familial love.  It seems the relationship between black and white women is not nearly as, well, black and white as one might have expected.

Each section of the novel is narrated by a different character, giving us a variety of perspectives, and overall, I thought this novel was very interesting, as well as entertaining, as it closely examines the history of race relations in the U.S. and provides some insight into the way things have and have not changed for those of us living now.  It’s also a book about the intricacies of human interaction, and how complex those interactions truly are.  Things are not always as cut and dry as they seem — not even hate.

BUT, there were a few things about this novel that kind of rubbed me the wrong way.  The primary one was the fact Stockett made a point of having all the black characters in the book speak with a thick dialect, written right into their dialogue in the story.  But the white women all speak cleanly and “normally,” despite the fact this story is set in the deep south, where, I’m sorry, even the wealthiest white folk talk funny.  That kind of made me uncomfortable — perhaps irrationally or unjustly, but still.  It didn’t feel quite right.  It felt like it was perpetuating some of the very stereotypes Stockett was trying to show us were invalid, and while Stockett also gave her black characters extremely sharp minds (one of the narrators, Aibileen, is such a powerful writer herself Skeeter doesn’t even have to edit her chapter in the book, for example), it didn’t quite go far enough to undo that incongruity for me.  I don’t think Stockett did this on purpose; I think it was probably done without thinking about it.  And perhaps it doesn’t really deserve the attention I’m giving it, either.  I can’t tell.  I’m not good at stuff like this.  Racism makes me uncomfortable because it so thoroughly perplexes me.  Judging someone based on their skin color or their language or their religion or their sexual preferences — this sort of thing simply does not compute to me.  So maybe I’m being overly sensitive.  But I thought it was worth mentioning and possibly discussing with others.

The other problem I had is a lot more mundane, and it was that the characters themselves all felt like stereotypes to me.  Okay, so, maybe that’s because Mississippi in the 1960s WAS a place full of stereotypes, right?  Stereotypes gotta come from somewhere, after all.  But I felt like nobody really changed in this novel, either — nobody had an experience that dramatically altered the character of their character.  You could argue this novel is actually ALL about change, but tell me which character started out one way and ended up another?  Because I didn’t really see growth like that in anybody.

You might think Skeeter was a stand-out in that regard — she begins as one of the clique of rich white girls and ends up publishing a controversial book on how awful that clique really is, after all.  But really, Skeeter takes on that topic not because it’s of deep interest to her, but because she’s pretty much told it’s the only thing she’ll ever be able to sell.  Sure, she then ends up learning a lot about the lives of the maids and families around her, but it doesn’t really CHANGE her, I wouldn’t say.  Nobody’s changed, really.  They start as stereotypes, and they end the same way.  That meant when I finally turned the last page, I felt unsatisfied.  Like I’d been taken on the beginning of a journey that ended before it should have.

Likewise lacking is the writing overall, which is merely sufficient and nothing special.  That’s not a huge deal — this is a very, very engaging and entertaining book and once I picked it up, I found it nearly impossible to put down.  But considering the widespread raving about it, I confess I was expecting a little more literary depth.   I could see it being perfect for book clubs and discussion, and I’d love to discuss it with some people myself.  But it’s not destined to become a classic, the way the hype almost had me believing it might be.  It’s just not strong enough.

Little niggling complaints aside, though, this is a really good book and one I think almost everybody will enjoy reading (especially women, I would say).  Recommended!

[FICTION]

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MOVIE: The Fighter (2010)

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this film when it was in theaters.  The critics were raving, my friends were raving, but it had two elements that were keeping me away.  One is that Christian Bale’s freaky, freaky teeth are freaky, and the other is that, in general, I’m not a huge fan of watching people get punched in the face repeatedly.

So, you know:  boxing movie starring Christian Bale?  Problematic.

After a conversation about the film with a close friend who assured me that, yes, people indeed got punched in the face a lot, but  nobody’s teeth flew out of their mouths in a bloody spray of gaaaaah (I have a “thing” about teeth) (you may have noticed), I finally went ahead and rented the thing a few weeks ago (sorry, way behind on film reviews here!).  And, just like everybody said I would, I ended up really enjoying it!

The story is about two brothers in Boston, Dicky (Bale) and his younger brother Micky (Mark Wahlberg).  Both are boxers, but Dicky’s career is pretty much dead, in no small part because of a crack habit, while Micky’s is on the up-and-up.  For his entire life as a boxer, Micky’s been managed and trained by his older brother and his mother (Oscar-winner Melissa Leo), but as he begins losing fight after fight, while Dicky gets high and fails to show up for training sessions, he begins to reconsider his family as his greatest asset. Supported in the decision by his new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), Micky breaks the news to Dicky and his mother (the Oscar-winning Melissa Leo), much to their offended fury, and heads off to Vegas to train with new management.

Though his fighting improves and his career begins to take off at last, Micky feels increasingly like he’s being forced to choose between his family and his vision for his life.  Will that get in the way of his fights?  Or will it ultimately be his roots that end up cementing his success?

This is a great film in many ways, and a riveting (true) story to boot.  I did have some problems with it, though.  The primary one was the relationship between Charlene and Micky, which never felt authentic to me.  His dedication to her and willingness to drop his family when she asked him to, a family that is incredibly close and deeply loyal, just didn’t fly to me.  Of course, they had to squeeze this relationship into two hours of a movie not focused on romance, so the build-up of their love for each other necessarily got short-changed.  But still, I didn’t feel much chemistry between the two, and it’s not all because I don’t like Amy Adams (though I loved her in Junebug, I haven’t seen her in anything since that really lit my fire, so to speak).

On the other hand, both Christian Bale and Melissa Leo were absolute powerhouses in this film.  I usually find Bale boring at best, and annoying most of the rest of the time, but he was fantastic here as the sad, washed-up, ex-boxer struggling with a tremendously destructive crack addiction.  AND, they even managed to work his freaky teeth right into the story (in the film, his teeth are all fake, having been knocked out one by one from years of punches to the jaw).

And Melissa Leo, wow.  I’d never noticed her in anything before, and it’s totally impossible not to notice her here.  Her character’s loyalty to her family was so strong I could feel it through the screen, and her inability to see the damage she was causing just by loving Micky as much as she did — unable to see reality through the blinding nature of her own hopes and dreams for her boys — felt extremely true.  Plus, the hair!  The accent!  The outfits!  So perfectly spot-on for a woman of that time and place. (In fact, all the hair made me laugh, having grown up in Rhode Island, where Aqua Net was practically distributed on street corners).

Overall, an excellent film, and one well worth watching.  Recommended!  Even if you don’t like face-punching and freaky teeth!

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:  Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Melissa McMeekin, Bianca Hunter

BOOK: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (2009)

I read Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, years ago and couldn’t get into it.  Wasn’t gripped by the story, wasn’t really enjoying the writing, etc.  But when I read a description of this novel — a ghost story! — I decided to give her a second try.  (I’m kind of a sucker for ghost stories, and good ones are a rare and wonderful thing.)

The plot is about a middle-aged woman, Elspeth, living in England and estranged for decades from her twin sister after a fight nobody in the family seems to know much about.  When Elspeth dies from cancer at age 44, she leaves her London flat to her American twin nieces, Julia and Valentina, under the stipulation they live in the flat for a year before selling it, and never allow their mother, Elspeth’s twin, to come inside.

Julie and Valentina are twenty and bored, looking for an adventure before starting college, so they jump at the opportunity to go live on their own in another country for a while.  But they have personal problems that are exacerbated by their new independence — and their growing codependence.  Valentina desperately wants to strike out on her own, but Julia is very controlling and fights hard to keep Valentina perpetually at her side.  At the same time, Valentina is meek, fearful, and relies too much on her sister’s strength to get through challenging times.  The twins feed off each other, and not in a mutually supportive way.  After years of being glued to the hip — they even sleep together every night — the chance to become individuals at last is both enticing and terrifying.

As they settle into their new life in Elspeth’s flat, they begin to befriend the neighbors — Martin, a man with severe and unhealthy obsessions about germs and disease, and Robert, Elspeth’s long-time lover, who is obsessed in an almost equally unhealthy way with a book he’s writing about nearby Highgate Cemetary (resting place of Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, and a host of other impressive and creative Brits).  But weird things are happening, and the girls soon begin to suspect there’s another force at play in the apartment: Elspeth.  DEAD Elspeth.  And when the girls find Elspeth’s diaries, a lot of questions are finally answered, including the dramatic (and somewhat silly) details of the battle that drove their mother and aunt apart all those many years ago.

Though I found the end of this novel a little unsatisfying (not to mention a bit on the ridiculous side), I did enjoy the book as a whole.  It explores well the themes of obsession, love, family, and the gradual “erasure” that comes through death, and does it with a bit of grace now and again to boot.  Niffenegger isn’t a brilliant wordsmith — her writing is fairly pedestrian, really — but the characters were intriguing and the story was meaty enough to keep me turning the pages.  Was I impressed enough to seek out more of her work?  Eh, not really.  But we’ll see what her next one is about, and if it sounds interesting, I’ll probably pick it up at some point.

Not bad.

[FICTION]

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