For No One

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012)

Rating: ★★★★★☆

This is my first time going on the public record about The Twilight Saga. I read the books, and after the release of Breaking Dawn Part 2, I have now seen all the movies. What do I think of the series as a whole? Let me give you my perspective.

I’m not averse to romance, done well (many of my favorite comedies happen to be romantic comedies). The Twilight series teeters on the border of overdoing it a little bit. However, even at its schmaltziest, there are still other things going on with these stories: specifically, vampires and werewolves.

I’ve been a fan of vampire stories for a long time, but unlike many offering their opinions on Twilight, I’m not a purist. I’ve never said “vampires don’t sparkle”. No two vampire canons agree on 100% of the dogma. The most successful stories often bend and extend their genre conventions.

And Twilight’s changes have not been written on Stephenie Meyer’s whims; they serve the story. Obviously, if the vampires in Twilight couldn’t leave the dark, there would be no story. They wouldn’t be able to blend in with society at all, attend high school, etc. Ultimately, this is one author’s take on a non-existant creature, and it’s her prerogative to write her own rules. That doesn’t bother me.

I didn’t love the books, and disagreed with criticism calling them poorly written. Shakespearean? Certainly not. Will people be reading them hundreds of years later? Not likely, but I enjoyed them all the same. I enjoyed the movies about as much, possibly more, as the three principal characters carried on well and the effects are pretty impressive.

It’s a little strange, though, writing a blog post about just the second movie in this two-part story. That’s ultimately a problem with the double-dip conclusion favored by Harry Potter and Twilight, and I hope this movie ends that trend. I’d prefer it to be a good three-hour movie (or even four with an intermission), but I digress.

Overall, I thought this conclusion sent the series off on a high note. The climax was captivating, and the film’s reveals were well-played. Also, this film ends with what reminds me most closely of a curtain call. The end credits give each principal character a few seconds of screen time, and a full-screen title card. That makes sense when concluding a series that has spanned five films over 4 years, and whose final entry didn’t include many of the characters instrumental in the earlier chapters. It was a nice touch.

One thing caused me to cringe repeatedly throughout the movie, however: Renesmee. The hybrid offspring of a vampire and human, she ages very rapidly. Unfortunately, this movie takes the Benjamin Button/TRON: Legacy direction, and to bad effect. Renesmee looks creepy. They should have used a real baby when she was first born (and for the brief moment we see her as an adult), and used more traditional practical effects as she grew to the actress’s actual age.

You don’t need me to recommend this movie or not. If you’ve never seen a Twilight movie, I would recommend watching the first two before you come to any sort of conclusion. If, after seeing the werewolves and battles in New Moon you don’t feel like seeing the rest, don’t. If you liked all previous entries, there’s no reason you wouldn’t watch this concluding chapter.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

The Crush (1993)

Rating: ★★★★☆☆

The Crush puts a new spin on the femme-fatale formula, by blending in some jail bait. This was the feature film debut performance of Alicia Silverstone, who rose to superstardom as a consequence.

She carries the film well, deftly walking the line between innocent child and twisted psychopath. Cary Elwes came across as somewhat sympathetic, but with questionable judgment.

I also got some serious laughs at seeing the computer equipment en vogue circa 1993, and how high-tech it must have seemed back then. It’s funny how far we’ve come in my lifetime alone, from beige DOS boxes to the iPhone.

I would recommend The Crush if you get the chance to see it, but not strongly, though. It stands as a decent thriller, but doesn’t push the form forward much. If you see it on your TV guide, though (as we did), there are worse ways to spend your time.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Tower Heist (2011)

Rating: ★★★☆☆☆

I laughed at, and enjoyed parts of Tower Heist, but it failed to make a lasting impression. The idea was novel, and the plot had some interesting twists. But seriously, what ever happened to Eddie Murphy’s career? He doesn’t contribute much to this movie.

He used to be so funny, in Saturday Night Live and many of his early movies (and even a couple of his 90’s titles), but when I saw his name appear in the opening credits, I remember asking aloud when I last saw him in a new movie. I couldn’t remember the answer, but of course, I was forgetting the Shrek movies, which I began to tune out after the second one.

The rest of the cast (a long list of recognizable names) also didn’t pull its weight, leaving the movie unsatisfying. You could do worse with your time than to watch Tower Heist, but it ultimately doesn’t offer much. I should have just watched Zoolander again.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

127 Hours (2010)

Rating: ★★★★☆☆

127 Hours, similar to Cast Away and other movies in the survival genre, hinged on James Franco’s performance, and he did not disappoint. In the movie’s earlier scenes we get a sense of his character. He’s a nice guy, loves the outdoors, and laughs in the face of danger (so to speak).

By the time he enters the film’s main conflict, we root for him. He carries the film well, but ultimately, that only goes so far. Danny Boyle, of whom I consider myself a fan, employs some interesting techniques to keep the tension up (and to fill out the movie’s runtime), but ultimately it didn’t feel as satisfying as it should have.

I enjoyed it, and would even recommend it, but not strongly. I probably won’t bother seeing it again.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Sixteen Candles (1984)

Rating: ★★★★★★

Where do I begin to talk about such a phenomenal movie? For one thing, few comedies stand up so well to repeat viewings. I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen Sixteen Candles, but the humor doesn’t grow stale.

John Hughes hit on some pretty universal themes with this movie, and the humor doesn’t resort to traditional jokes, gags, or setups. The humor arises out of situations and characters, all ringing true to the high school experience.

As long as teenagers go to high school, Sixteen Candles should stand the test of time. Few movies have as many memorable characters, dialogue, and situations that never grow old. This is one of my all-time favorites.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Unstoppable (2010)

Rating: ★★★★★☆

I didn’t realize that Tony Scott directed Unstoppable until I started writing this post, and with his recent passing, this movie will stand as his last directorial effort. How does it stack up? It’s quite different than my two favorite Tony Scott films, Top Gun and True Romance, but I really enjoyed it.

Based on a true story, Unstoppable follows the events of one particular day when the trains, to put it mildly, didn’t run on time. With an interesting and well-played mix of characters, all behaving rationally and yet at cross-purposes, the drama seems very believable as it unfolds. That’s important for a story which could potentially strain credulity.

I haven’t seen many other movies that stack up the tension so high and keep it going throughout an entire movie. Speed is the only one coming to mind, but is certainly handled in way more over-the-top manor. The events of Speed have never happened to anybody, and probably never would, but those of Unstoppable did and easily could. That helps you to invest in the characters. What if that train were headed to my town? What if something happened at my job requiring such a huge effort to save so many lives?

Fargo notwithstanding¹, the “based on true events” label can make for great storytelling. If you’re interested in the actual events Unstoppable depicts (after seeing it! Don’t spoil the movie for yourself, I beg you!), you can get started reading about them on Unstoppable’s Wikipedia page, which links to the dedicated article about the event.

It’s a good movie, a story of real-life heroes. See it sometime, if you’re in the mood for sitting on the edge of your seat.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Skyfall (2012)

Rating: ★★★★★★

I love James Bond. I watched the entire series, along with John Gruber and Dan Benjamin when they went through all of them on a prior incarnation of The Talk Show, gaining a perspective on the entire series in the process. Growing up, Pierce Brosnan was my Bond, the first I had seen in a theater or on video (and video games, as the Goldeneye N64 game was pretty popular. By the time Casino Royale came out, I had stopped following the series. I watched it and Quantum of Solace for the first time during the aforementioned 5 By Bond marathon.

I came to understand one important thing watching the entire series: the movie makes the actor, not so much the other way around. Roger Moore, the least favorite Bond of many people, was in some pretty good movies, and some pretty bad ones. George Lazenby may or may not have ultimately been a good Bond, but was placed in an impossible position taking over for Sean Connery (widely held as the primo Bond), and a less-than-stellar screenplay.

When it comes to Daniel Craig, I feel that he’s a good Bond. Separately, I feel the three movies he has starred in are among the best Bond films. What’s more, Craig has played the Bond of these movies very well. He starts out as what “M”¹ referred to as a “blunt instrument” in Casino Royale, and by Skyfall, has become Britain’s top agent. He still possesses the raw physical skills his missions require, and has developed his intellectual side further.

While Casino Royale broke with the classic Bond conventions in most ways, Skyfall brings most of them back. This bothered some people, but I admire the approach. They stripped the character and narrative down to its most basic elements, removing any hint of cockamamie or camp, because they needed to. The Brosnan movies had veered so far into mediocrity, the series required a severe and definite course correction to regain credibility. Over the following two films, they built us back up to the Bond we’ve always known, and have shown some restraint in doing so. All the standard elements (gadgets, cars, women, villains, theme songs, etc.) are back, but all are done well, with the levels dialed down to levels acceptable for modern audiences.

Skyfall ultimately concludes the telling of Bond’s origin story, 3 films in the making. When you’re remaking a character who has lasted through 20 prior movies, it makes sense to take your time rebooting him, rather than doing so in one swift step. So, while you could complain that elements of Skyfall have been ripped from prior entries, it makes sense when you consider that the series has now certainly been rebooted. The story of the villain reminds you of GoldenEye’s villain, or the opening scene’s climax happened in You Only Live Twice? Those are some interesting concepts from the earlier series, ready to be recycled. Are Dr. Octopus, The Green Goblin, and Venom off-limits for the newly started Spider-Man series? I think not, since it’s going by the rules of a reboot. Just use them better than before, or don’t bother.

So, how do you judge Skyfall? As a Bond movie, it’s certainly one of the better ones. As an action movie, for a viewer who has never seen a previous Bond entry? I feel this would be an ideal starting point. From the opening and title sequence² through to the surprises revealed in the denouement, the final pre-credits statement “James Bond Will Return” nails my sentiment – he certainly has.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Rating: ★★☆☆☆☆

I enjoyed the original Wall Street, though I don’t remember it in great detail. I remember, in vague terms, that it had a lot of things the sequel lacked: fresh, compelling characters, high stakes (and the accompanying consequences), and a story that moved fluidly from beginning to end.

I recall criticism upon the initial announcement of Money Never Sleeps that the original needed no sequel, but I held out hope. After all, Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone both returned, and neither’s career had tanked so badly as to require a desperate last-ditch sequel. And yet, somehow, that’s how this came off.

The basic premise, of Gordon Gekko’s return from prison into a much-changed world, could have been good. Shia LaBeouf’s character was somewhat interesting, but not developed well enough.

My biggest gripe was the ending (with the stilted plot close behind). It might be a little bit of a spoiler, so don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you care about such things, but the ending soured any chance for satisfaction. What did the denouement ultimately tell me? Bad guys don’t really change, and con-men will always con, even their own family. Why do I need to watch a movie to tell me that?

If done right, this movie could have paved the way for a subsequent series, but the stilted execution of this entry guaranteed I won’t be seeing any further entries. This time around, greed was bad.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

Short Circuit (1986)

Rating: ★★★★★★

Though it’s about as old as I am, I managed not to see Short Circuit until now. That’s a shame, because I can only imagine how much my childhood self would have loved this movie, which is certainly not to say I didn’t enjoy it as an adult.

It succeeds on many levels, but I’ll focus on what I appreciated most. I enjoyed this movie primarily as a comedy, especially since its sci-fi aspects have aged less gracefully. But strictly as a comedy, it had me laughing harder than many other movies have in recent years.

Fisher Stevens’s character, Ben, with his severely botched pop culture phraseology, entertains as a human so completely out of touch with his own language, while the star, “Number 5”, does so because he’s a machine who is so human. I laughed so hard at both of them, I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite. Each of them alone in a movie would have been enjoyable, but the two of them together, each presenting a counterpoint to the other, makes this a comedy to study.

And then there’s Stephanie, Ally Sheedy’s character. She provided a grounded point of view on the movie’s events, and provided somewhat more mild humor. At least they developed her character pretty well, to the point she became a real character, more than just a hollow love interest. And Steve Guttenberg, a slacker geek in this movie, was alright, but I don’t expect much more from him – his character had some interesting moments, but not any great ones. His best scenes were toward the end, as he’s testing and probing Number 5’s capabilities.

Obviously, anyone who has seen Wall•E might think Short Circuit looks similar¹. It is, in somewhat unimportant ways. Wall•E’s character looks similar, they’re both intelligent robots, and they both have comedic and serious elements to them. They each also share similar moments in their third acts, which I will not spoil here. But most importantly, they both have robots as main characters, who through clever writing, acting, and production, make you care about them every bit as much as, or possibly more than, their human co-stars.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who likes sci-fi and/or comedy, and for some reason it’s been residing in bargain bins at Best Buy and Amazon – dig through the trash around it, and get a copy.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD

The Tree of Life (2011)

Rating: ★★☆☆☆☆

I like Brad Pitt quite a bit, and scanning through his IMDb page to confirm it, I’ve never seen him in a movie I didn’t like – and beyond that, he’s in some of my all-time favorites. Say what you want about the man’s appearance or talent, but he can pick a script (or his agent can, whichever).

So how the hell did he choose this pretentious artsy-fartsy meandering aimless in-cohesive mess? I was going along with the movie, waiting to see where it was all leading. And then we were watching dinosaurs for half an hour¹, and I knew exactly what kind of movie it is.

Have you seen Adaptation before? I love that movie. There’s a part where he contemplates starting his movie at the beginning of the universe, and builds from there to the birth of the main character. But it took only a few minutes, and it was hilarious – it was lampooning pretentious ivory-tower-screenwriter movies like Tree of Life (which obviously came almost a decade later).

I don’t mind watching a movie with a complex narrative structure, or one that asks you to synthesize your own experience from the material given. I liked Melancholia and Mulholland Drive, and loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Vanilla Sky, all movies with a non-linear plot which, at least to some degree, ask you to put together a lot of the story in your head. But Terrence Malick took that dial and cranked it to 11 with this one.

He doesn’t set expectations for what’s going to happen in the movie, so you have no framework for piecing together the fractured story that follows. All we find out in the beginning is that one of their kids died. So I then watched the rest of the movie trying to answer a few questions. Which kid is it who grows up to be Sean Penn²? Which kid dies and how? What happens to the third brother? I still don’t know the answers, and wasn’t given enough to even draw my own conclusions, or care one way or another about it.

I could have enjoyed the movie, even its artsy-fartsy aspects (the poetic surreal imagery, dinosaurs, etc.), if the first 20 minutes had set my expectations properly. Perhaps Malick assumed that viewers have read press surrounding the movie, and know what to expect. I did not. As expressed in other movie posts, I go into most movies knowing as little as possible. In this case, all I knew was it was supposed to be a great movie. So if you haven’t seen it, but after reading this still somehow want to, let me help you have more of a chance to enjoy it than I did.

Appreciate each scene on its own. Don’t expect any explanations or tidy conclusions. The point of the movie, as far as I could tell, is to explore childhood and its end, through the lens of one particular family. Maybe you can enjoy it, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just didn’t get it.

Links: IMDb | Blu-ray | DVD