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Frost/Nixon (Movie Review)

By Andrew on April 26th, 2010

Originally written and posted on February 23, 2009.

Frost/Nixon

There is a sort of apprehension that comes with purchasing a ticket for a film based on true events in that you more or less already know most of the plot points and the ending. A certain “what’s the point?” attitude tends to permeate your consciousness just as you’re about to enter your pin number, and this largely resides in the fact that many go to theatres for sensory and not intellectual entertainment. When you’re teetering on the edge of being a twenty something, a film just doesn’t seem worth it unless there are a few murders or copious amounts of bare breasts. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I learned a little something about filmmaking in general tonight because it’s a principle I’ve discovered long ago, but often choose to ignore when I sacrifice the highbrow for the low.

Frost/Nixon is film that chronicles the efforts of David Frost as he pursues an interview with the infamous President “Tricky Dick” Nixon. Specifically, Frost/Nixon deals with time frame of January to April 1977, immediately before and during the intimate televised recordings that dealt with his presidency, policy, and Watergate. There’s also the prerequisite “life before/life after” scenes in order to establish a context, so really there is not all that much new in the construction of the film. Very linear, very straight forward, and largely by the numbers.

Don’t devalue the project because I’ve simplified the process most films of the genre go through. It sounds like an easy film to make on paper since there is no high octane action sequences or spiralling deutsche cinematography to wrap your head around. At the risk of sounding a smidgeon too bright-eyed, compelling narratives are far more difficult to create with deft pacing and cutting skill than setting off fireworks every fourteen seconds. I have far more appreciation for the director who knows exactly how long and how evenly scenes and cuts need to be spaced in order to sculpt a tight picture. This is something ambitious directors of big budget films more interested in exciting explosions than effective exposition need to learn.

As far as acting is concerned, Frank Langella as Nixon himself gives one of the most powerful performances I have ever seen. It’s just a few hairs shy of Mickey Rourke’s turn in “The Wrestler,” but the difference is split due to the material and style of their respective films. Langella carries the film on tone and expression alone, which is why it’s so remarkable. Michael Sheen does an admirable job as David Frost, but the success of his character lies in exceptionally strong characterization and not necessarily any unique touches. Sheen is good, but he lets Langella steal every scene towards the end of the film, to the point where he almost becomes a vehicle for his rival’s success (actually rather ironic when you consider the ending).

The script is a strong, but suffers from a few minor incongruities. I anticipated a film about two fierce and intelligent figures, masters of the art of discourse, locked in a battle for public reputation. This is almost exactly the case, except David Frost is not a fierce journalist vying for a lucrative interview and the prestige that comes with success. He’s a playboy talk show host who loves women and parties, and doesn’t care all that much for politics. This certainly makes for compelling drama because the conflict is totally dissimilar from what’s expected, but a final musing towards the end raises a question of continuity that comes dangerously close to undermining the theme of the film.

Never trick yourself into believing that visual flash is the only thing that creates engaging cinema. The film runs for two hours, but you’d never believe it. Frost/Nixon is the precise example of the type of tight and efficient filmmaking of which there needs to be more.

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Fired Up! (Movie Review)

By Andrew on April 26th, 2010

Originally written and posted on March 11, 2009.

Fired Up!

I think there’s something wrong with me. Perhaps there’s something in my Altoids that’s making me nicer or more generous in reviews, but whatever the reason, I’ve seen a bunch of movies that by any standard should be deemed terrible, and yet I can’t bring myself to crucify them. Maybe the typical winter cinema drought has lowered my standards, or maybe I’m too obsessed with a crappy film’s silver linings that I’m deluding myself into thinking I don’t throw away $10 per week on celluloid dross. Whatever the reason is, I actually quite enjoyed Fired Up!, and that is reason enough to devote this introduction to some light introspection.

Fired Up! is the story of two high school football jocks who suddenly discover there’s something homoerotic about a bunch of muscularly headstrong men climbing over each for sport. When they realize their summer football camp will be in a hotter, sweatier place than they had anticipated, they agree that cheer camp is a better idea instead. And who can blame them? Would you rather spend your summer with a pack of grunting knuckleheads or hundreds of the hottest, fittest girls you’ve ever seen? Exactly.

Despite the title of the film being an obvious acronym for a common expletive phrase, Fired Up! is strictly PG13. The most offensive expletive is “shit,” and even then the word is used sparingly. Clothes get taken off frequently, but there’s never any nudity, any of the vulgar dialogue is often supplanted with weird gibberish that has a sort of bizarre charm to it, lewd behaviour is often implied and not overtly displayed, etc. Don’t misunderstand me, the core of Fired Up! might as well be a Tucker Max story adapted by Kevin Smith, but the vulgarity is toned down so much that it becomes strangely appealing. The reason for this is obvious: an R rating limits the potential audience which in turn cuts profit. Scale the content back far enough, secure the PG13 label, and you just tripled your potential sales.

So the story is by the numbers and entirely predictable. The cheerleading squad that wears matching black totalitarian uniforms, yeah, those are the evil guys. How will our underdogs overcome their rivals? Why, by performing the impossibly difficult “Fountain of Troy” cheer manoeuvre that’s been explicitly forbade by the camp coaches, of course! Though it’s worth pointing out that our heroes aren’t looking for the gold so much as they just want to get out of last place, not at all unlike how the movie itself isn’t looking to be Citizen Kane (or even Bring It On) so much as it just wants to be a decent time. And you know what? I applaud that. The only ambition of Fired Up! is to kill time, and no other Winter release has done so as effectively as it has.

What I did like about Fired Up! was the friendship between the two leads, Nick and Shawn (Eric Christian Olsen and Nicholas D’Agosto), starring in their very own 90 minute long “Axe” commercial. You know how in most buddy films there has to be a plot point that drives the two protagonists apart before they eventually reunite and triumph together? That never happens to Shawn and Nick. The friendship these two characters share is rock solid. They always have each others back in both success and failure, and I quite enjoyed that fact. It’s refreshing to see at least one novel idea present in what could otherwise be easily written off as midwinter tripe, so I’m at the very least thankful for that.

But alas, in the end Fired Up! isn’t a good movie, let alone a great one. It gets a mild recommendation because it’s a success unto itself. Just don’t ask for much else, and you’ll be fine.

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The Final Destination 3D (Movie Review)

By Andrew on April 26th, 2010

Originally written and posted on August 30, 2009.

The Final Destination 3D

While many film franchises are formulaic, few are as cut and dry as the Final Destination movies. After three instalments in a series built around the premise that “you can’t cheat death,” The Final Destination 3-D (emphasis on the definite article that allegedly indicates either a reboot or conclusion) becomes the fourth entry to follow the formula established in the first film with surgical precision. All four films begin with a vivid precognition of a horrific accident, feature broad sketches of characters from typical horror fare, and predictably hit every major plot point as set by the first movie from 2000. Although the cast and characters always change, continuity and clever scripting has never been the big draw for these films. What anyone in attendance for a Final Destination screening has ever been hoping to see are clever deathtraps dispatching human crash test dummies. Yet while death by twisted happenstance provides a nice change from the typical death by masked neglected golem, even the most creative of wells can run dry. After nine years and four films, the Final Destination franchise has sunk into a nadir that not even the 3-D rebirth can remedy.

Nick and his friends are enjoying an idyllic day at the races when he begins to question the safety of where he is sitting. The benches crack and buckle, the concrete superstructure is beginning to crumble, and the fences protecting the spectators from errant scrap metal are fraught with loose screws. Before he has a chance to rise from his seat and take a breather, a screwdriver finds its way onto the racetrack and causes a catastrophic crash that sends tires, shrapnel, and even whole cars hurdling towards the audience in a firestorm of death and destruction. People are burned alive, sliced in half, crushed, decapitated, and poor Nick winds up impaled on a piece of pipe. Lucky for him, however, the entire ordeal was merely a premonition. When the circumstances leading up to how he imagined the disaster begin to occur, he heeds the warning and ferries his friends to safety. Having cheated death, Nick thinks he’s in the clear. But when survivors of the tragedy begin dying in freak accidents in the order Nick foresaw their demise at the race track, Nick worries that he and his friends could wind up dead at any moment and races to stay one step ahead of the deadly unforeseen malevolence.

Believe it or not, what you’ve just read regarding the plot is far more than what The Final Destination ever cares to reveal. Four films into a franchise should be the milestone that sparks experimentation, whether it’s to prevent stagnation or to capture the attention that the previous movies failed to ensnare (more likely the latter reason for this particular franchise). Unfortunately, The Final Destination is more concerned with pursuing a new dimension rather than a new direction. Yes, The Final Destination stands alongside My Bloody Valentine in ushering in the 3-D horror renaissance. Both movies flaunt the sex and gore staples of the typical teen slasher, further amplified by the rendering of every startling jolt in pseudo-tangibility. But while My Bloody Valentine offered 3-D as a compensation for story, plot, and character deficiency, The Final Destination sees the gimmick worthy of a substitution. “We stayed up all night googling premonitions,” quips Lori (Nick’s girlfriend) as if that’s all that needed to be said on the subject. The obligation for all sequels to reference the Flight 180 disaster from the first instalment released in 2000 is loosely established in a later exchange, and that’s the extent of this film’s exposition.

I’d normally consider such immediacy laudable, but the core theme of the franchise isn’t the only thing that’s glossed over. Even the characters are reduced to bland stock, a truly detestable decision since its entirely deliberate and not due to ineptitude with characterization. This film’s director and screenwriter, David R. Ellis and Jeffery Reddick respectively, also served on the first sequel released in 2003, at the time writing characters that are a cut above what’s expected in typical horror fare. In that film, relationships were established and the audience had a vested interest in who they’d like to see survive or die by means of falling construction equipment. With The Final Destination, however, every character is just one flat sour note. Nick is the well-to-do seer, Lori his peppy girlfriend, Janet her shrill best friend, and Hunt is Janet’s jock of a boyfriend. Also on the chopping block is the sage-like older black fellow, his racist tow-truck driving adversary, and the MILF (that’s exactly what actress Krista Allen’s character is referred to when the end credits roll). No character is memorable, well portrayed, rudimentarily fleshed out, or even likeable. There isn’t even a cynical undercurrent to writing such loathsome players in order to inspire the audience to cheer for ironic elimination. Just stick the boring lot in harm’s way and let the blood flow is the philosophy at play.

It’s been remarked that the only character worthy of note in the Final Destination franchise is Death, who’s generally manifested as a trickster wind agitating precariously perched objects that turn an otherwise random collection of knickknacks into a Rube Goldberg like deathtrap. Considering this, the real appeal of the Final Destination was never so much the blood and gore as it was the fact that the character onscreen could wind up dead at any moment from anything. A relentless omnipresent malevolence playing the antagonist is far more effective at creating a thick atmosphere of dread than a cookie-cutter psychopath armed with a kitchen knife. And while I can admire the horror movie that is able to create a truly terrifying scenario in broad daylight, The Final Destination resolves to shoot itself in the foot by giving the audience clues as to how the next unlucky sap is going to bite the bullet. Whenever disaster is about to strike, Nick suffers a brief acid trip that lets us know exactly what to be wary of, be it a man with a cigarette or a shiny quarter. Where’s the terror in knowing what to expect next? There are times when the movie throws a curveball and tries to lead us astray, but in those instances one must wonder what’s being undermined more: the premise, or the terror.

Barring the leading character’s dread sabotaging hot flashes, the worst part of The Final Destination is how uninspired the entire movie is. Truth be told, this instalment is more of a greatest hits collection than a brand new entry in a series. All the highest points of the movie are essentially slightly reworked sequences from the second and third instalments with a more loathsome cast in substitution. A couple of characters are cut into large chunks, an immobilized person dies in their hospital room, a nail-gun becomes self-aware, and the silent bus strikes again. The only remarkable thing is how it took only four horror films prominently featuring the “you can’t cheat death” motif, all within the same franchise, to wear out an otherwise novel concept. Has the Rube Goldberg deathtrap really been reduced to the careless storage of inflammables and combustibles that can tip and spill at the slightest provocation? Death just doesn’t seem into it anymore.

In case you’re wondering, no, the 3-D does not add to the movie in any significant way. If all you’re going to use the technology for is throwing objects very suddenly at the camera, you might as well not bother.

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Drag Me To Hell (Movie Review)

By Andrew on April 26th, 2010

Originally written and posted on June 29, 2009.

Drag Me To Hell

PG-13 horror movies are often written off as shallow attempts by studios to increase profit at the cost of cutting away a film’s mature scenes. This basically means that what was once a topless gruesome F-bomb-a-thon becomes a watered down affair where the language and gore are toned down substantially, and the female characters are forced to wear tight scraps of clothing as opposed to nothing at all. While I’ll confess that I personally believe a sexless sex comedy to be a blatant oxymoron, exactly who’s to say that you can’t have a horror movie without gore? Effective horror has always been characterized by what is implied and not what is explicit, something that most horror filmmakers steadfastly refuse to understand.

Now we have Sam Raimi, once hyperbolic gore virtuosos extraordinaire, returning to his Evil Dead years in the 80s after taking some time off to make Columbia Pictures a few billion dollars with his rendition of Spider-Man. Drag Me To Hell is his latest film, which can be seen both as an Evil Dead spin-off and a revisitation of the genre he revolutionized. Though no matter which way you approach it, I can only think of one word to sum up this movie: Fun.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer who, eager for a promotion, denies an elderly woman an extension on her mortgage in an effort to prove to her boss that she has the ability to make tough decisions. Because antagonizing the disgusting wretch with a wandering glass eye is a sure fire way to make it to the end credits of a horror movie, Christine is assaulted and cursed in the parking garage by the vile woman shortly thereafter. Bizarre occurrences involving sentient winds lead Christine to seek the aid of a psychic (Dileep Rao) who informs her that she will be dragged to hell in three days if she is unable either to appease the demon harassing her or pawn the curse off to someone else. Thus begins the horrifyingly hilarious (or hilariously horrifying) demise of Christine Brown.

It’s not exactly Hitchcock and thankfully it’s not Eli Roth either, but Drag Me To Hell is 100% Sam Raimi. Due to the fact that you can convey the main plot of this movie in a text message, Raimi has plenty of room to let his slapstick tinged horror tendencies run wild. Every suspenseful sequence culminates in a splattered money shot of various flavours of disgusting, punctuated by a score both appropriate and unique. And this is accomplished without a single grisly onscreen death no less. Just because pimply faced high school students do not have to sneak into this film doesn’t make it any less rich and satisfying for the rest of us (unless it’s a boisterous bunch sitting next to you, of course).

Most remarkable is the fact that the film’s only casualty is an aged medium who dies without a single drop of spilt blood, let alone gruesome evisceration. Raimi cleverly puts the heroine’s immortal soul in danger as opposed to her mere physical being, and Christine ends up fighting for her afterlife more than her corporeal self. When the pre-opening credit scenes depict a cursed boy being dragged to hell decades prior to current events, the idea that his soul persists is clearly expressed. In fact, physical gore is so insubstantial that the most blood to be seen on screen comes from a harmless nose bleed (though it is worth nothing that it’s one for the ages). The movie starts of innocuously enough as the gypsy curses Christine in the parking garage after a wonderfully staged struggle to the tune of a jazzy string bass line, and it doesn’t take long before things take a turn for the creepy. When the rooms begin to creak, malevolent forces assault Christine in no short order by sweeping her up and thrashing her around.

As soon as it becomes clear that everyone involved is committed to the concept, especially Lorna Raver who plays what is possibly the most vindictive corpse in the history of cinema, thoughts begin to arise as to what an R-rated theatrical cut would have been like. While there are ample gushes of pus, bile and vomit, there’s nothing quite like the veritable fountains experienced in the Evil Dead movies. There also isn’t anything quite as shocking as the infamous “tree rape” scene from the first Evil Dead, which easily could’ve been mimicked given the persistence of a possessed neckerchief. Dirty thoughts, to be sure, but this is a notion largely stemming from Alison Lohman’s previous escapades in a certain Atom Egoyan flick from 2005.

Still, despite the fact that the actors are fully on board for Raimi’s shenanigans, there’s not a whole heck of a lot for them to do. All that’s required of Alison Lohman is that she innocently whimpers her lines in between several rounds of supernatural abuse, and this she does admirably. While she can’t hold a deadite to Bruce Campbell’s impossibly chiselled jaw-line and charisma, that doesn’t stop her from seeming a bit too eager to frolic in mud and bile. Opposite her is Justin Long, whose primary reason for being is to advertise Apple products and play the straight man that is dubious towards all this ridiculous gypsy curse business. While he never gets smacked around by a demonic goat shadow, his character is still necessary for a secondary function: in order to illustrate that someone out there would miss Christine Brown should she get dragged to hell.

This actually leads into a rather interesting point in that the characterization is fairly messy. As bright and spunky and Christine seems, she only appears to have one other person, her boyfriend, in her life. No friends, no family, and certainly no pets after the halfway mark. The impact of a thoroughly virtuous person being potentially dragged kicking and screaming to hell for one misdeed is a tad lost when one realizes that there’s isn’t much of an argument for the protagonist’s sterling track record. There’s also a niggling little irony in that the film starts off with Christine refusing leniency to someone essentially begging for their livelihood, yet she herself demands concession for a triviality five minutes from the end. I’d like to make the case that she’s punished on account of her fickleness, but these peculiarities are hardly central to the film. One doesn’t hop on a roller coaster for the teacup experience, so why should one expect a morality play from the master of horror camp?

What simply cannot be denied is how much fun Drag Me To Hell is. It’s far from being terrifying, in fact I noticed that I tended to be laughing as others were shrieking in discomfort. Even though Raimi creates a dense horror atmosphere, it tends to amount to little more than the startle that leads to a cyclone of mayhem and superfluous bodily fluids. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. People desensitized to excessive gore and sadism, whether new to Raimi’s brand of horror or nostalgic for the Evil Dead trilogy, will delight in how refreshingly entertaining it is to see a gypsy explosively vomit a bounty of insects onto a helpless bank employee. People who aren’t will be scared out of their wits.

Don’t let the words “PG-13 Horror” dissuade you; Drag Me To Hell is the best horror movie in years. And to think that all it took was someone with a penchant for revolution to turn the aforementioned death phrase into a satisfying breath of fresh air.

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Crank: High Voltage (Movie Review)

By Andrew on April 26th, 2010

Originally written and posted on April 17, 2009

Crank: High Voltage

Malleus. Incus. Stapes. Someone once told me that when a person falls from a tremendous height, these three tiny bones located in the ear are the only bones in the entire human body that don’t shatter upon impact. Bearing this in mind, Crank’s Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) should be dead, and Crank: High Voltage seems to agree since they devote the first few minutes of the film recounting the event using 8-bit theatre. But a strange thing happened at the end of Crank. Apparently, a group of Chinese mobsters saved the crime scene cleaners of LA the trouble of scraping Chelios’ body off the ground by quickly abducting it in order to extract its super human organs. And thus Crank: High Voltage is born.

While High Voltage picks up immediately where the first film left off, the actual events are three months ahead in the film’s continuity. Chelios has spent a quarter of a year incapacitated in a Chinese mob hideout where the Triads intend to harvest and sell his organs. As it turns out, the father of the Triads, Poon Dong (played by David Carradine, though you’d never guess it), is suffering from heart failure at the tender age of “rumoured to be 100″. The plan is to steal Chelios’ titanium ticker and give it to the old man to extend his life and permanently endear the benefactor to him. The Triads successfully steal the heart and replace it with a temporary battery powered one, but before they can take anything else out of Chelios, he wakes up and initiates a fire storm of mayhem all across Los Angeles. The only catch is that he must remain electrically charged to stay alive, which involves getting juiced frequently using everything from car engines to tasers.

Before you ask yourself any questions like “Why didn’t they just kill him as soon as they pulled out the heart?” or “What happened to the poison from the first film that should probably render the heart valueless?” let me remind you (or make clear) exactly what type of film Crank: High Voltage is. This is the type of film that doesn’t have the patience for fluff like plausibility and plot. This is the type of film so relentlessly excessive that it’s probably been drip fed a mixture of Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Absinthe since conception. This is the type of film for people who have been so utterly and irreversibly desensitized by sex, violence, and sexy violence, that its sole mission is to shock those people into paying attention while at the same time weeding out the losers. High Voltage knows that it probably shouldn’t exist, so it goes absolutely crazy and takes glee in just simply being around. At the same time, High Voltage knows that its target audience has seen it all before in the first film, so the only way they can possibly outdo themselves is by a constant assault of real-world cartoon mayhem in a tongue and cheek execution. The ensuing ride is a mainstream cinematic experience unlike anything the average North American audience has seen before.

Crank: High Voltage is undeniably fun, but there is an unfortunate major failing that will probably irk many fans of the first film. To help illustrate this, let’s say for sake of example that your parents ask you what you would like for dinner one evening. “Anything but fried chicken,” is something you might reasonably reply. The dinner hour rolls around and you hastily run to the table only to find, sure enough, a big old greasy bucket of KFC. High Voltage evokes the exact same feeling of disappointment in that of all the possibilities and surprises, not only did they take a wrong turn but they probably made a deliberate wrong turn into territory you hoped they would avoid. Crank 2 is very keen to remind us of Crank 1, and this is a problem because Crank 2 spends an inordinate amount of time trying to manage a sort closure from the loony plot of Crank 1 that no one really cares about. The first Crank from nearly three years ago ended rather conclusively, and now the filmmakers had a free ticket to explore and really see what could be done with an action film with total disregard for public reception. So what do they decide to do? Retread tired tropes and revisit old faces. Great…

When a film is all about relentless chaos, the biggest threat is plot, and anything that either hints at a grand plot or shifts attention from the sight of a topless hooker with a shotgun to the question “Why does the topless hooker have a shotgun?” is bad. I don’t care about character, back story, and motivation, at least not when an ultra-violent British man is interrogating a gang banger after lodging a shotgun in his ass. That’s why it’s such a buzz kill to become reacquainted with characters from the first film that I was reasonably certain had been sufficiently dealt with and tied off. Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam) is okay because he’s furthest removed from the action functioning chiefly as a commentator, as is Eve (Amy Smart) because she’s necessary for the graphic public sex scene requisite to top the one from the first film. But why do we need to reintroduce Efren Ramirez playing an identical twin of Chelios’ dead sidekick from the first film, and with that all the aforementioned minor loose ends no one cares about?

Thankfully, moments that become too exposition heavy are largely balanced by moments so incredibly surreal that you have absolutely no idea how to react to them. A great example is when Chelios thinks he’s about to reclaim his heart in a showdown with a skinny Chinese punk and a tiny red cooler, and the scene suddenly turns into something so bizarre it must be experienced spoiler free for full effect. Actually, the entire film could be summed up that way. Between the tongue and cheek editing, the outlandish levels of sex and violence, and the campy yet potent visual and sound effects, Crank: High Voltage is more an amusement park thrill ride than a legitimate film, though still a pretty good time taken either way.