A few more quickies from movies seen this week.  There may be (mild) spoilers in these reviews ….

Star Trek Into Darkness.  I’m what you’d call a mid level Trekkie, I guess. I watched the original series when it originally aired. (I had to go down to a neighbor’s apartment in order to watch it in color and I think that’s what finally got my dad to buy a color TV.) An old friend of mine wrote The Trouble With Tribbles (among many other things). I’ve probably watched all those episodes a dozen times each and I’ve watched all the movies too. But I never got hooked on any of the other TV series – and that includes TNG.  On the other hand, J.J. Abrams admitted last week on The Daily Show that he used to hate Star Trek, but that he loves it now. (duh)

I like what he’s done here in bringing back the spirit of the original series, the discussion of morals and obligations – because the original series was basically a fancied-up western with lots of pop philosophy.  So Abrams pays proper respect here. Thumbs up.  And Benedict Cumberbatch makes a great villain – though I would have preferred more time watching him talk instead of watching CGI versions of him doing CGI stunts.

But frankly speaking, once I realized that the whole film was essentially a homage (or rip-off, depending on who you ask) to Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, I started getting numb.  Does Abrams stand it on its head? Is it a deconstruction, much like a chef doing molecular cuisine deconstructs a popular dish so that it’s barely recognizable while tasting the same? Is it sacrilege?  One thing it is is hopelessly predictable in the second half, which is a letdown considering how it kept me guessing in the first half.  Also, the 3D is so unnecessary here that I found myself removing my 3D glasses for long stretches and not missing anything aside from the Chinese subtitles being blurry.

Overall, I suppose it’s a strong enough entry in the series.  My gf, who doesn’t remember Wrath of Khan (I’m pretty sure I made her sit through it at some point) completely loved it, even though all the bits that referred back to that movie went right past her.

Side Effects. Speaking of movies that start out as one film and end as a completely different film, there’s this from Steven Soderbergh.  He claims it’s his last film (not including his Liberace film, which will air on cable instead of theatrically).  If that’s really the case, he’s going out on a high note, quitting at the top of his game.

Soderbergh has always zig zagged between different genres and as this one proceeds, you think it’s going to be an expose of the pharmaceutical industry from the man whose films include Traffic, Contagion and Erin Brockovich.  But midway through, it switches gears to become film noir.  The plot is complicated and doesn’t entirely make sense, but firm direction, excellent pacing, and a strong cast led by Rooney Mara (who truly establishes herself here), Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones means this is an enjoyable ride.

Jack Reacher.  It’s difficult to remember now, but back in the 90s, Tom Cruise turned in one solid performance after another and it always looked as if he was just one film away from finally getting an Oscar. But it seems that in the last decade or so, he’s given up that quest and become a boring action star who can only open a film that has the words Mission and Impossible in the title. I think Oblivion (an expensive live action/CGI remake of Wall-E apparently) tanked.

But I didn’t watch this because of Cruise. I watched it because it was written (adapted from a popular detective series) and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. He wrote The Usual Suspects and wrote and directed The Way of the Gun, a very nasty little film that I truly love.  Based on Jack Reacher, it would seem that McQuarrie has also given up.

They try to position Jack Reacher as some sort of mystical all powerful anti-hero when in fact he’s a sad loner who is good at solving crimes but has no human relationships and spends much of the film blabbing on and on about how that’s a good thing.

Because it’s A Tom Cruise Film, at least he can bring in a good supporting cast – and in this case the uber-villain is played by none other than Werner Herzog! Robert Duvall is in it too and Rosamund Pike looks quite nice. But in the end, Jack Reacher is eminently forgettable.

Parker. Since 1998′s Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Jason Statham has turned into the most consistently entertaining B movie action star in western cinema – by that I mean that I don’t recall ever seeing his films open at #1 (or even #5) in the US but I’m sure they’re consistent money earners in home video. Parker seems to be an attempt at moving him to some sort of A list status but it falls short.

Most obviously, it attempts to do this by upping the game on co-stars.  Jennifer Lopez gets to remind us that she was quite a decent actress before she turned her thin voice to singing. Nick Nolte, Patti LuPone, Bobby Cannavale and Michael Chiklis also show up – the latter two sadly given roles they could have done in their sleep.

Also along for the ride is director Taylor Hackford. If you don’t recognize the name, he’s the man behind 80s hits An Officer and a Gentleman and Against All Odds. His last good film was the biopic of Ray Charles. This is of a somewhat lesser nature.

It’s really disappointing almost from the start, when in the midst of a robbery Statham starts spouting his philosophy and it’s nothing we haven’t heard in 100 other movies. Why does Hackford allow the film to crawl to a halt for a speech that’s so utterly banal?  Meanwhile Lopez is not the love interest in the film, despite what you might think or what the poster might suggest. She’s a rather pathetic loser with very tight abs for a woman of her age – apparently she’s not going to get fully in character if it contrasts with her public image.

Oh well, it’s still entertaining, definitely better than anything Stallone or Willis is churning out these days. But he can do better.

Oh, when we went to see Star Trek at the Shatin UA last night, I saw this poster:

It would be nice to think that HK films are trying to get back to the wild and wacky comedies that were in such great abundance in the 80s and 90s. But I’m not overly optimistic.

Iron Man 3 – Marvel’s movies have pretty pretty consistently entertaining once they figured out the formula and Iron Man 3 is no exception.  One reason I figured in advance I’d enjoy this was because it was directed and co-written by Shane Black.  I might try to put together an argument that Martin Riggs (the detective portrayed by Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series that Black wrote) was an influence on RDJ’s Tony Stark. It is only Black’s 2nd film as a director but he’s better on managing the geography of action scenes (except the final one) than Jon Favreau (I could never figure out Favreau doing this kind of film). He’s also done something very smart here – separating RDJ from his iron suit for a large chunk of the film.

That being said, Robert Downey Jr. seemed curiously disengaged and displayed markedly lower energy than in the previous two films. Fortunately the slack is taken up by Ben Kingsley, who was extremely funny as The Mandarin.  (Is that a spoiler? Sorry.)  And the CGI effects that made Gwyneth Paltrow look consistently sexy and desirable were also remarkable. However, paying the extra to see this in 3D turned out to be a waste of money – I can think of no other 3D film I’ve seen where the technology meant less than it did here.

That’s the best thing we saw in the past week or two. Here are some lesser time killers.

Gangster Squad – How could a gangster movie starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte and Emma Stone be so horrible?  Especially coming from Warner Bros, the studio that created the greatest gangster films of the 30s and 40s? Start with a totally inept script that has far less narrative drive than would appear on the surface. Add in a mis-matched director – Ruben Fleischer. This is just his 3rd film after a terrific Zombieland and a meh 30 Minutes or Less. The icing on this shitty cake is the laughable make-up job someone did on Penn.

This movie wants to be The Untouchables. The script follows essentially the same story line with the same character types (though different cops and gangsters) and there were many moments during the film when I wanted to simply turn it off and put on De Palma’s Untouchables to remind myself of how films like this should be done. If Fleischer at least had the balls to rip anyone off for a decent action sequence, the way De Palma recycled the entire Odessa Steps sequence for his film, it might have been less of a snooze.

Movie 43 – Dig the cast – Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common, Seth MacFarlane, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, J.B. Smoove, Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi, Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Bobby Cannvale, Kristen Bell, John Hodgman, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Patrick Warburton, Gerard Butler, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Josh Duhamel … and many more. Yet this is one of the lowest rated movies of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, scoring just 4%.  Is it really that bad? Yes.

It’s a series of short sketches a la Kentucky Fried Movie. I think this was the brainchild of Peter Farrelly, who appeared to want to make an entire movie out of jokes lower than the semen-in-Cameron-Diaz’s hair bit in There’s Something About Mary. So these are all really low brow, to put it kindly, sketches about sex. Hugh Jackman’s testicles hang underneath his chin. Anna Faris wants her lover to poop all over her while having sex. Robin goes speed dating and gets interrupted by Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Two idiots torture a foul-mouthed leprechaun. Am I making it seem good? Sorry.

There are, it should be noted, two completely different edits of the film. The theatrical version features a producer pitching various story ideas around Hollywood. An alternate cut has a nerd kid searching the internet for a mythical film of the same title. The thirteen directors credited (including Brett Ratner, Farrelly, Griffen Dunne, Bob Odenkirk) should have their DGA cards taken away from them.

Parental Guidance and The Guilt Trip – Two Jewish family films with big star power try very hard not to show they’re Jewish. In one grandparents Billy Crystal and Better Midler teach their grandchildren lessons about life. In the other, mother and son Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen take a cross-country road trip under the slimmest of pretexts.  And you know what? Maybe I’m mellowing in my old age, but neither of them sucked. Neither would be worth a second viewing either.

Back when I was growing up, there was no Internet and no cable TV. Movie reviews were what you read in newspapers and the occasional magazine. News shows on TV had people who did movie reviews – people who really didn’t seem to know much about the movies and were more concerned with coming up with cute quotes that might make it on to a movie poster.

And then seemingly out of nowhere, in 1975 Public Broadcasting started airing a weekly show called At the Movies that featured two critics from Chicago that I’d never heard of. They’d review 3 or 4 films a week and showed a good amount of clips.  And they argued. I mean, not TV show cartoon Gordon Ramsay stuff, they really argued with each other over their reviews. I was hooked.  The two reviewers were of course Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

More often than not, when Siskel and Ebert disagreed, I found myself siding with Ebert. What I didn’t know about Ebert at the time was that he was the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize.  And that he’d written a screenplay for a Russ Meyer movie!

The show moved from PBS to commercial TV and ran forever, or so it seemed. When Siskel died in ’99, the show never recovered. Ebert somehow ended up with Richard Roeper as the co-reviewer, and I thought Roeper was just awful.

Ebert had a bout with cancer in 2002 and then a far worse one in 2006. He lost his jaw and along with it the ability to talk or to eat solid food. That didn’t stop him. He poured all his energy into writing and was incredibly active on Twitter. He even wrote a cookbook featuring recipes for things that could be made in a rice cooker.

It was just three days ago that he posted on his blog that he was taking a “leave of presence,” as he put it, because cancer had returned.

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

And then I woke up this morning to the news that he’d died.

Sigh.

I think in his final years I disagreed with Ebert more than I agreed with him.  His later reviews also tended to have errors in the plot descriptions but I let that slide.  What I loved about Ebert was that he not only championed “great movies” – from classics like Citizen Kane to the works of the great international auteurs, he also loved crap – good crap to be sure, but he knew and understood drive-in movies and B movies to a great extent.  Yeah, he took a lot of heat for coming down hard on horror films and, more recently, for a lot of columns claiming that video games were not and could never be art the way film is.

But the point is that with all these battles with cancer that would have psychologically destroyed a lesser man, he never stopped. He must have had this amazing spirit and must have been an amazing person to call “friend.”

Here’s how he ended what turned out to be his final blog post:

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.

Thank you Roger for sharing so tirelessly for almost 50 years. You will be missed.

I found Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to be both brilliant and infuriating.  I wanted more to happen in the second half though I was not fazed by the ambiguity.

But here’s a question I have not seen raised elsewhere.  Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd and is occasionally addressed by his acolytes as “Master.”

And so every review I’ve read says that he is the title character.  But I think they’re wrong.  I think Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is The Master referenced by the title.

The film, after all, is about his journey, not Dodd’s.

[SPOILER]

And at the end of the film, to at least some extent, it seems that he has dealt with the demons that plagued him for most of his life. He’s let go of his anger and his fear and has become “normal.”

So I think he’s the title character, not Dodd. Either way, it’s a fascinating film and one that I expect will hold up well for repeated viewings.

The Directors Guild of America gives annual awards for best director in a variety of different categories.  They’ve been giving the award for best director of a feature film since 1949.  One might argue that since no one knows direction like a director, these awards are more meaningful (though I am sure that politics plays just as big a role here as it does for the Oscars.)  Out of 63 awards bestowed to date, there has been only six times that the winner has not gone on to win the Academy Award for best director as well.

• 1968 – Anthony Harvey won for Lion in Winter but the Oscar went to Carol Reed for Oliver
• 1972 – Francis Ford Coppola won for The Godfather but the Oscar went to Bob Fosse for Cabaret
• 1985 – Steven Spielberg won for The Color Purple but the Oscar went to Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa
• 1995 – Ron Howard won for Apollo 13 but the Oscar went to Mel Gibson for Braveheart
• 2000 – Ang Lee won for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but the Oscar went to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic
• 2002 – Rob Marshall won for Chicago but the Oscar went to Roman Polanski for The Pianist

And now, for the 2012 Awards, we already know that the winner of the DGA best director award will not go on to win the Oscar.  That’s because the winner of the DGA award is Ben Affleck for Argo, and he wasn’t even nominated by the Academy.  (Affleck could still take home an award as producer should Argo win best picture.)

Affleck has directed three feature films – Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo – and all three are worth your time but to my way of thinking, Argo was clearly the best of the three.  Okay, it was also the first of the three not to be set in Boston, but I thought that as a director Affleck really pulled together not just a great story line but also really captured the look and feel of the time.  Argo may not be the best film of the year (I still haven’t seen a few of the nominees) and maybe it is or it isn’t the best directed, but like so many others, I’m puzzled by the omission of Affleck.

Those who were nominated this year are:

• Michael Haneke for Amour
• Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Ang Lee for Life of Pi
• David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook
• Steven Spielberg – Lincoln

For what it’s worth, I see this as a two-way race between Lee and Spielberg, though Russell could surprise.  I doubt that Haneke or Zeitlin stand a chance.

Ah, old age.  Back in the 80s I worked in a video rental store and, determined to see every film that the store stocked, watched an average of three films a day.  These days I’m lucky if I see three films a week.  Well, here are some brief thoughts on ten of the films I’ve watched over the past few weeks, in very random order.

Stand Up Guys – No, not a movie about stand-up comedians.  Al Pacino gets out of prison after 28 years and goes for a night on the town with his old buddies Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin.  While it’s extremely predictable, it moves along quickly enough and ends up being the best film that Pacino’s done in almost 10 years. Granted, that’s not saying much.

Flight - Denzel Washington has maintained his leadership position at the box office all these years by making the right choices on projects. Flight stretches him more than usual, and his Oscar nomination was well-deserved.  Robert Zemeckis returns to live action films after eons wasted doing crappy motion capture films.  One ending too many but mostly satisfying.

Frankenweenie – After a string of duds, Tim Burton re-energizes his creative juices by turning his 1984 short into a feature film – a black and white, stop motion animation, 3D feature film at that. I loved it from start to finish.

Seven Psychopaths – Martin McDonagh last gave us the quietly brilliant In Bruges.  This is brilliance of another kind and a film that I think will reveal even more of itself across repeated viewings.  Colin Farrell (who is always so good in indie films and so horrible in big budget bombs) is a screenwriter working on a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths – but all he has is the title.  Christoper Walken steals dogs and returns them for the rewards.  Woody Harrelson is a mobster whose dog is stolen. Tom Waits is a psycho killer with an affinity for bunny rabbits.  And Sam Rockwell is as wonderful as ever (my gf made me go out and get the same sunglasses he wears in the film).  The movie is quite different than the trailer would lead you to believe.  Fans of Boardwalk Empire will LOVE the opening sequence (which sort of takes the opening from Pulp Fiction and turns it upside down).

Silver Linings Playbook – David O. Russell returns in a big way with this sort-of-romantic sort-of-comedy about some very damaged people trying to find some degree of happiness.  This is the first film in a very long time which got nominations in all 4 acting categories and it includes Robert De Niro’s best work in 15 years.

Django Unchained – Quentin Tarantino returns with a mash-up of southern blaxploitation (a la Mandingo) and spaghetti western and scores the top grossing film of his career.  It’s a terrific film in many ways but the first half is so much better than the second, you almost wish he would have just continued with the bounty hunting and never went to Candie Land.

The Man With the Iron Fists – Quentin Tarantino “presents” this martial arts exploitation film directed by, written by (along with Tarantino buddy Eli Roth) and starring the Wu Tang Clan’s RZA.  The film also stars Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, Jamie Chung, Gordon Liu (and fortunately no cameo from Tarantino) as well as lots of digital splatter and lots of action directed by Corey Yuen.  The film is a complete mess from beginning to end.  RZA shows no talent as an actor and not much ability as a director to tell a story but he clearly loves this genre and while it is, as I said, a complete mess, it’s one of the best bad movies I’ve watched in a long time.

This is Forty – A film that’s ostensibly about two minor characters from Knocked Up, this is Judd Apatow in semi-serious vein a la Funny People and the fact that he’s cast his wife and his two kids in the film is just one indication that he’s trying to get deeply personal here.  The cast also includes Jason Segel, Robert Smigel (not as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog), Megan Fox, Michael Ian Black, Chris O’Dowd, Albert Brooks (very good, of course), John Lithgow, Tatum O’Neal, Melissa McCarthy and Graham Parker & the Rumour.  It would have been a better film if Apatow had a clearer idea of what he was trying to say but it’s mostly entertaining.

Searching for Sugar Man – The Oscar-nominated documentary about Sixto Rodriguez, who released two albums in the early 70s that sold a total of 15 copies and then returned to a life of construction work and community organizing.  But somehow these albums found their way to South Africa where they outsold Elvis and inspired the protest music of the anti-apartheid movement and where they thought he’d committed suicide by setting himself on fire on stage.  It’s an amazing story, a “truth is stranger than fiction” tale and fairly well told.  But no one states the obvious – the reasons those albums never sold, despite Rodriguez having a good voice and some pretty good songs, were due to crappy middle of the road arrangements, released on a tiny label at a time when the majors had a lock on the industry, and maybe the fact that radio wasn’t ready for a guy with a Hispanic name singing Dylan-esque topical songs with arrangements that might have better suited The Carpenters.

The Thieves – One thing Korean filmmakers really excel at are action sequences, and this film has a fun opening caper scene and a stunning gun fight sequence involving people suspended by ropes from the side of a building that left me sweating and breathless.  Some of this film takes place in Hong Kong and a lot takes place in Macau – and so the dialog ends up being in Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and even Japanese.  It stars Gianna Jun (from My Sassy Girl), a bunch of other Korean actors whom I don’t know, and Simon Yam.  The twisty heist/caper/revenge tale might have been told a bit better but overall it was very entertaining.

So yeah, 10 films, and I mostly liked all 10.  Seven Psychopaths, Django Unchained and Frankenweenie are the ones I’ll definitely watch more than once.  Did I watch any movies in the past few weeks that I didn’t like?  Taken 2 ….

Before closing this post out, I have to put in a word for the newly restored Lawrence of Arabia.  The digital 4K restoration (something like 4 times the resolution of Blu-Ray if I’m not mistaken) is stunning.  The film looks new.  It remains one of the greatest films of all time.  There is of course O’Toole’s commanding performance.  There is Freddie Young’s astonishing cinematography.  And scenes of such massive vision and scale that were done for real – hundreds and thousands of extras shot against these great backdrops.  When I explained to my gf that all of the stuff on the screen was shot for real, that there was no CGI in those days, the thousands of extras on camels, that scenery, well, I’m not sure she entirely believed me.  The scope is just astonishing.  It’s what David Lean did so well in the last phase of his career – telling these massive historical epic stories perfectly balanced with the personalities of the individuals involved.

While I consider this easily one of the top ten films ever made, it does fall down a bit in the final third – it feels rushed to me and much of the human element is taken out.  If it had lasted another 30 minutes, I would have been quite okay with that. Also, the casting of Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn ….

The regular blu-ray edition contains a second disc of bonus features.  The deluxe edition comes with 2 discs of bonus features, a soundtrack CD and a hardcover book and for once is well worth the extra price.  The making-of documentary will greatly add to your appreciation of the film. Steven Spielberg’s story of watching the restored version with David Lean sitting next to him talking him through the entire film will leave you green with envy.  My favorite bit comes on that second disc of extras – Peter O’Toole reminiscing about the making of the film.  I love his stories about Claude Rains.  ”Every morning I’d ask him how he was and he’d answer, ‘I don’t know.’”