Critical Film Condition

I just LOVE watching movies that get bashed by critics and, as a shameful consequence, by audiences, for two reasons: the hype is low AND I hope to understand something nobody else didn’t. “All About Steve” isn’t one of those movies. It isn’t nearly as bad as the media made it out to be, but it isn’t much more than a Sunday afternoon slapstick romedy, but it never aims to be either.

Sandra Bullock is getting bashed for it, but this is just the result of the movie being released the same year as “The Blind Side”, which is supposed to be the best role of her career. Bradley Cooper wouldn’t have bothered about it either, but his recent run of good roles and the impending release of “The A-Team” and the huge success of “The Hangover” made him noticeable enough to be bashed by this as well… People take life way too seriously.

If the story were relevant, it would be about a girl (Bullock) stalking a news camera-man (Cooper) along the road and, well… Girl meets boy, boy doesn’t want girl, girl doesn’t quite get it because she’s a supersmart talking encyclopedia freak. It’s neat and sometimes even unexpected.

Supporting the cast is Thomas Haden Church, who seems to be having loads of fun, which brought me to thinking: it seems that everyone is having fun. Bullock looks incredibly stupid, as does Cooper, and I kept asking myself if both didn’t owe a studio-head a movie in their contracts, and that might still be the case… But nonetheless, I always got the feeling that it was a relaxed shoot where everyone was just going nuts with their characters, and this may be the reason that I didn’t end up hating “All About Steve”… It was just fun for everybody.

Popularity: 1%

Understand when I say this: I seriously don’t know if Matt Damon is a good actor or not… I can’t make up my mind.

Anyhoo. “Rounders” is a fun little movie that has the problem of being a little too much in love with it’s own premise. Fear not, though: I liked this one, regardless of all that.

You see: this is the kind of movie where the screenwriter either A) did a shitload of research and didn’t want to let it all go to waste (thus the thousands of poker quotes and references) or B) is a poker fanatic and lifelong gambler who didn’t want to let his experience go to waste (there are really a lot of poker quotes). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing… If the movie manages to give you that feeling of wanting to pick up a card deck and get some friends together for a poker night (or strip-poker night… Whatever makes you happy). And THAT it achieves beautifully.

The story goes that Mike (Damon) is a talented Rounder (poker as a lifestyle) who decides to go all in and make big dough one night playing against Teddy KGB (John Malkovic, having LOADS of fun and stealing the movie in the process). Naturally, Mike loses all his cash and quits the poker world to go to law school. After living like a respectable human being (and not following his dream of becoming champion in the World Series), Mike’s live turns upside down when his childhood friend Worm (Edward Norton, good as always) gets out of jail. Dragged back into his former world, Mike has a hard time living up to the expectations of his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol, still looking like she’s 16) and his teacher (Martin Landau, the nicest guy on the PLANET), while Worm keeps pushing him deeper and deeper into the troubles of his past life.

The movie succeeds in displaying how the underground poker world works (or at least I THINK that’s how it works) and gives some new ideas to the whole “fight the system” thing that’s always present in these movies. Does Mike keep fooling himself that he can become a respectable lawyer or does he follow his dream and God-given-gift to become a professional poker player? The problem is that the movie gets a little stuck in that, since, I repeat, it falls in love too much with the depiction of the subculture of the card gambling world. The story gets stuck some times and if you’re not a card player (I know I’m not, but I know a little) you don’t get emotionally involved when they’re playing. I mean, how the hell are you supposed to get excited when you see Mike holding a Straight Flush when you have no idea how that compares to the Full House his opponent has. Get my point?

That is, thankfully, a minor problem, since the movie tries, in mundane ways, to explain things (And yes, there’s a lot of exciting card playing in the movie). But where, unfortunately, I can say the movie failed, MISERABLY, is in displaying Mike’s and Worm’s relationship. Worm is such an asshole through the whole movie that you really can’t believe that he and Mike were ever friends… Don’t get me wrong, though. I love the Worm character. He’s funny, charming and Edward Norton does a brilliant job to display that… But he just keeps backstabbing Mike so much in the story that the fact that they were inseparable childhood friends is just a little hard to believe.

All in all, this is a very satisfying movie that deserves its points due to the acting and passion (though a little over the top) for its subject. I still don’t know if I like Matt Damon’s acting style, but everybody else seems to be enjoying themselves in the experience of making this movie and the acting talent present (specially Malkovic and Norton, who unfortunately don’t share a scene) make for a very dynamic display of dialogue and card playing.

This movie, naturally, served as an inspiration for another fun little flick, though not as rich in context, called “Pool Hall Junkies”, which I will review soon, since now I have to see it again after this viewing of “Rounders”.

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Popularity: 2%

It’s hard to start a review like this and seem unbiased, but “Cloverfield” kicks ass. Every single expectation that I had has been fulfilled and my fears of this being an overhyped “am doing something new” flick are now far and away.

If you’ve been living under a rock over the past few months (OK, OK… Not EVERYBODY is a movie geek) and you don’t know what “Cloverfield” is, here’s the short version:

On July 2007, JJ Abrams (creator of “Alias” and “Lost”, director of “Mission: Impossible 3″) presented, right before “Transformers”, a short camcorder video of a going away party for Rob Hawkins. Then, suddenly, there’s big noise, tremors and everybody goes to the roof. THEN, we see a HUGE explosion in the distance, everybody running down the stairs to the streets, where we see the final shot: the FRIGGIN’ head of the Statue of Liberty flying to the ground. Nobody (NOBODY!) had any idea of what the hell was going on! Aliens, monster, terrorist, government experiment, Celine Dion concert? The only thing that WAS revealed was the release date: 1-18-08 (also the name of the movie at the time).

So the idea of the movie is as follows: some THING (best kept secret in Hollywood, by the way) is turning New York City to a pile of dust and there’s a guy recording everything on his handycam because he thinks that someone will want to watch it someday (according to the box office, many people did). That is why the script score is a little on the short side… Because, well, that’s it for the story. Rob Hawkins is trying to find his girlfriend Beth in the city while this THING (it deserves CAPS) is destroying everything (EVERYTHING!) and his rather annoying friend Hub is recording. The similarities with “The Blair Witch Project”, however, end there. Unlike “Blair Witch”, this movie is a big budget experiment that Abrams decided to produce and two things clarify that: first, the special effects are SPECTACULAR. People involved in movies know how hard it is to track camera movement for Special FX, and in this case, it’s a friggin’ hand held camera, with shaking, unexpected movement and all. So this is REALLY tough… The effects are right on. The scene with Lady Liberty’s head flying to the ground gave me SHIVERS! Second, and more importantly, the camera shaking is not annoying like in “Blair Witch”. It takes a little away from the whole thing about the shots being real and all, but it’s still claustrophobic as shit. We do have, of course, sudden cuts to the action, awkward angles, shots to the ground, but on most of the scenes, however, the camera is right where it should be, giving us as much as we deserve to see at the present. The first time I caught a glimpse of the THING, I wanted to give it a standing ovation.

But what really makes this movie stand out is its pace. “Cloverfield” is relatively short on running time (74mins.), but it is a massively entertaining thrill ride that doesn’t seem one minute too long or too short for that matter. It’s just that much FUN. Every time you think that our guys are safe from the THING, it takes awhile, but it shows up, every time, to make you jump from your seat. You see, one of the coolest things about this movie is that it doesn’t look like the THING is going after our guys. It’s going after the whole city, and Rob and his friend are just a bunch of random people (who happen to have a camcorder) caught in the middle. The THING is just pissed-off at something and it just WON’T STOP randomly destroying stuff.

The fact that the central characters are so random adds to the fact that we feel like them through the whole experience. Naturally, it doesn’t take too long for the military to get to Manhattan, but we haven’t got a clue of what they’re doing. We don’t know what the government is doing, we don’t know anything about the THING, and it’s creepier that way. It makes it more real.

The bottom line is: many people were a little thrown off by “The Blair Witch Project” because, even though it brought something new to the plate, it was just terribly written and executed. “Cloverfield”, on the other hand, takes the best of high-production values and experimentation and mixes it up in what is probably the coolest movie so far this year

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Popularity: 2%

“I Am Legend” is a remake of “The Last Man on Earth” with dunno who and “The Omega Man”, with Charlton Heston (“Guns don’t kill people… Apes with guns kill people”). It is also based on the book “I Am Legend”, but according to what I’ve read, it’s very loosely based.

The story begins in 2009 when a virus outbreak wipes out all of humanity, except for Will Smith and a dog named Samantha. Smith is Robert Neville (not a name for a black man), a military scientist who is the perfect guy for the job, since he’s got some kick-ass training in his sleeve and a PhD to boot. Neville spends his days gathering food, getting crazy in loneliness and looking for other survivors, something that has yielded no results in the last three years. At night he hides out from the Dark Seekers, other survivors of the outbreak who are now mutated into crappy CG vampire-like monsters, and tries to find a cure for these mutations by researching with his own blood (he IS immune).

What starts out as the coolest story EVER soon turns into rubbish when you clearly see how hard it is to maintain this story interesting. 80% of the script is awesome, with Neville trying to keep it cool in his shitty situation and finding something interesting every ten minutes or so to do. The problem is when the director likes this story too much and starts extending it to the point where there just isn’t anything interesting to show anymore. How many times do we have to see the guy waking up and listening to Bob Marley over, and over, and over, and over again before they realize that WE JUST DON’T CARE, GIVE US SOME FUCKING MONSTERS! And when they do, it gets worse, because the monsters just plain suck. What probably brought this film down for me (aside from Alice Braga’s acting in it) was the fact that the CGI monsters are so clearly fake that they don’t scare a 12 year old girl. Not only that, they try to make you identify an Alpha Male monster, but they all look alike, so you don’t care.

The depiction of a post-apocalyptic New York, completely empty, is just amazing, which then makes me wonder: By demonstrating such high production values and completely cleaning up the Big Apple’s streets, couldn’t they have worked on cooler, scarier, more disgusting monsters? What happened to make-up? George Romero’s monsters creep me out more that those things.

Now, try to understand this: “I Am Legend” isn’t all bad. For one thing, the WHAT IF factor of our fooling around with genetic science made me scratch my head after the movie for awhile. The coolness of New York being wiped out by a plague ups the COOL FACTOR by a few marks. The photography is brilliant, allowing for us to check out every detail of the city, now being taken back by nature. The problem (and this is something that just pisses me off) is when a guy like Francis Lawrence (he made “Constantine”, for God’s sakes… THAT was cool) is left with such an awesome premise to deal with and turns it into something less than satisfactory. This movie had potential, and it just didn’t deliver. THAT’S why it deserves a 5.

If someone disagrees, stop being a bitch and COMMENT.

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Popularity: 3%