After watching a string of fairly weak movies, I decided to drop back in on the IMDB Top 250 to see what else has popped in while I wait for A Separation to hit DVD. What I found was that I really am going to have to hunker down and watch Like Stars on Earth (a three-hour Bollywood movie that keeps coming in and falling off the list) and at least in the meantime I could stall with Le Samourai… so that’s what I did.

Le Samourai is a 1960s French gangster movie (I know, right, you thought it was going to be another Akira Kurosawa flick) about a hitman who’s kind of a loner with a strong code of duty (hence the samurai connection).

The hitman, Jef, begins the film by going into a club and shooting a man dead, there are several witnesses, but Jef is confident enough in his method that it doesn’t really concern him. The police bring him in, but when they can’t definitely pin the murder on him, they have to let him go… under watch. They spend the rest of the film trying to build their case while they follow him and keep their tabs.

The film is pretty interesting; while I don’t mind subtitled movies, they tend to pull me out of the experience because my eyes are darting back and forth between the bottom and middle of the screen too often. However, Le Samourai is different… because Jef is the strong, silent type, the movie shares his man-of-few-words demeanor… in fact, whole stretches of 5-10 minutes frequently go by in the film without any dialog at all. It’s the kind of thing that, if done wrong, can really sink a movie, but here it really works. There’s a very claustrophobic feel to Le Samourai as the police get closer and closer to getting him and the silences add to the deliberately uncomfortable atmosphere. Actually, if you enjoyed Drive, you’ll probably notice a lot of similarities here as Le Samourai seems to have been an obvious influence.

To tell you more would really give away too much, so I’ll make like Jef and (for once) be a man of few words. I wouldn’t exactly call Le Samourai a must see, but if you like gangster movies and don’t mind a few subtitles, it’s an easy recommendation.

8/10

I finally finished LOST, which was great because even though I’ve seen the show all the way through several times now, this time more than ever certain things just clicked and I had a much greater understanding of it all. I’ll probably like a lot of shows in my lifetime, but there will never be another LOST.

Anyway, it’s relevant because today I’d like to talk about endings and their effect on a film. See, I really love the LOST finale, but many don’t and for those that don’t it seemed to ruin the overall experience of the show and cause them to hate it, even though they really liked the rest of the series.

This weekend I saw the movie TiMER (and I’m going to say right now that because this is a discussion about endings I’m going to be spoiling this thing, so if it’s important to you that you not be spoiled on this… even though you probably shouldn’t see it anyway… leave now), which was weird because it was a 9 or a 10 right up until the end when the whole thing spectacularly fell apart at the snap of a finger.

In TiMER a company makes a very special wristband that can count down to the moment you’re going to meet your true love, thus allowing you to forego useless relationships in favor of the one. In the beginning we meet Oona, a fairly neurotic single woman desperately searching for her better half. See, the downside to the TiMER is that it only works if your soul mate also has one… so Oona’s is blank. She’s been dating a guy for about a month and she brings him in to get fitted. Because the lady at the front desk has a jokingly friendly rapport with her, we know that this is something Oona’s done quite obsessively, and with that we’re introduced to her flaw.

Oona is afraid to trust her heart and take the plunge into love that we all have to and instead crutches on the guarantee that the TiMER will provide her. When her boyfriend’s timer doesn’t sync with hers, she immediately dumps him calling their relationship “moot.” And thus Oona must begin her journey of self-discovery where, before the close of the film, she’s going to need to throw the wristband in the trash and take charge of her own destiny. The process begins and over the course of the film she makes a slow, gradual march toward that ultimate point, even meeting others who have done it, and falling in love with a guy she has reason to believe is not “her one.”

However, her ultimate test comes when her wristband springs to life and she’s faced with the decision to either stay with the man she loves or follow the TiMER. She disappoints, and goes with the TiMER and then the credits roll and I was in shock. I couldn’t believe that Oona made all that progress only to make no progress at all. This movie that was going flawlessly up until that point had instantaneously gone from a must see to mindless entertainment all because writer/director Jac Schaeffer abandoned the message moments before the close of the film.

So how important is an ending to a movie? It’s pretty important! Imagine if The Lion King ended with Simba saying, “You know what… hakuna matata! I don’t need to save Pride Rock; we can just stay here in the jungle, Nala can come with us, but if she doesn’t want to, whatever, she can go back and have Scar’s kids.” So she does, and the film ends with Rafiki holding up Scar’s ugly spawn of evil as “The Circle of Life” plays. That would NOT be a good film despite how fantastically the rest of it had gone because the story is ABOUT Simba’s journey. He HAS to face his past and come to terms with it or the movie has no point, and that’s what happened here. Oona was supposed to say, “Screw it! I don’t need some piece of plastic to tell me who to love because I know in my heart how I feel.”

My wife tried justifying it to me by saying that Oona really didn’t love her boyfriend after all and the TiMER was just confirming that, but Oona doesn’t get to make that decision, not because of her magical wristband, but because Oona is a fictional character. If she comes to the realization that she never really loved her boyfriend after all it’s because Schaeffer wrote her that way.

Oh well. Not every movie needs to be great, but it’s just so much more disappointing when a movie CAN be great, but fails… and over such an easily avoidable issue at that…

5/10

Urge to kill… rising…

If Occupy Wall Street accomplished anything, it was bringing to a head the growing class warfare this country had been somewhat silently in since the 1970s.

For those who don’t remember, or are reading this ten years from now (since the Internet can definitely be like that), the economic troubles we’ve been facing recently brought to light the growing distance between the 99% locked into the middle class, whose salaries seemed to stagnate beginning in the 1970s, and the 1% that just got richer and richer and richer. There was a great deal of bitterness, especially by college students who recognized they were about to enter into the same gloomy pattern and (for some reason) Anne Hathaway, who decided to join into the battle, and so a fraction of the 99% (say the 0.00000000005%) camped out on Wall Street protesting the situation. But without any plan for how to fix the problems inherent to our capitalist way of life, the Occupy movement slowly failed. Nonetheless, companies like AIG and assholes like Bernie Maddoff who got caught stepping on the 99% to further their own wealth were vilified and brought down… and may always be seen as the very small victories the 99% got to smile over.

And with that, we have Tower Heist.

I saw Tower Heist this weekend while I had a splitting headache and a cRAzY allergy attack and was just looking for something mindlessly funny to chuckle at, but Tower Heist is not so much funny as it is 99% propaganda. Really though, since it stars Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, I should have realized it wasn’t going to be all that funny in the first place.

The movie is about a hotel staff that gets swindled out of their retirement pensions by Arthur Shaw (a Maddoff type), who pulls a Ponzi scheme and depletes their savings. But rather than slinking back in defeat to take it from the 1%, they decide to do something about it. Upon hearing about a $20 million stash Shaw has in his hotel safe, they recruit a local thief (Murphy) to help them steal it in the hopes of distributing the loot to those who lost their savings.

Stiller’s character becomes a Robin Hood archetype stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and if the metaphor was lost on you, he makes sure to refer to Casey Affleck’s character as his Friar Tuck. He stands up to the evil 1%er as Shaw plays into evil boss stepping on the little guy stereotypes to get a rise out of the audience, and all of this is great, except all I was really looking for out of Tower Heist was the comedy the trailer promised.

To be fair, I did laugh a few times during Tower Heist and I probably would have laughed more if not for the headache. Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) is hilarious (despite the little airtime afforded to her) and Murphy is probably at his funniest since Daddy Day Care, which in itself was probably his funniest since Beverly Hills Cop. If you’re a working stiff looking for a few laughs at the expense of your evil boss, you could do better, but a lot worse than Tower Heist.

6/10

On a complete side note, since the movie takes place in New York, I lost it when I saw them eating at Shake Shack. It was one of those moments where your eyes shoot open and you go “I WAS THERE!!!” I went for the first time a few months ago after a wedding and instantly fell in love with their burgers. It’s a chain though, so if there’s one by you, GO!

I’m nearly done rewatching LOST from pilot to finale (about halfway through season 6 of 6), but I did happen to catch a couple movies this weekend, so I thought I’d pop in and talk about them today and tomorrow.

First up we have The English Patient, the most recent Academy Award Best Picture-winning film I hadn’t seen. The English Patient is about a guy (Ralph Fiennes, or Voldemort for those who wouldn’t recognize him with a nose) who becomes horribly burned (think Anakin Skywalker / the gross half of Two Face burned) and, much like Anakin and Harvey, it was all over a woman. Through flashbacks, the film tells the story of how his great romance led to his terrible fall as he lay dying in a makeshift hospital bed in the middle of nowhere.

The film is actually pretty good; I’m not going to go so far as to call it classically great, but in a year where the greatest competition was Jerry Maguire and Fargo, I could see this winning the Oscar (don’t get me wrong though, I do really like both of those movies). It has an all-star cast with Fiennes, Colin Firth, Willem Dafoe, the guy who played Sayid on LOST and Juliette Binoche (who won the Best Supporting Oscar for this film) so it’s very well-acted, and the knowledge that somehow Fiennes’ character is going to get horribly burned as a result of loving a woman keeps your curiosity piqued (much in the same way that it did during Revenge of the Sith and The Dark Knight) even throughout its somewhat sluggish 2 hour and 41 minute runtime. As a side note, it was also great (since I’m rewatching LOST) to see Sayid defusing a bomb toward the end of the film (if you haven’t seen the show, first: just start, but second: know that that’s standard every other episode practice towards the end of the series).

At the end of the day though, The English Patient is little more than average (good, but average). Unless you’re trying to watch every movie to win Best Picture, it’s easily skipable. Again, not to come down hard on it, there are just many better ways you could spend 2 hours and 41 minutes of your time.

7/10 

How to scare off your daughter’s boyfriend by Martin Lawrence & Will Smith.

My buddy Dave from Field & Stream posted this unique movie trivia quiz for the true gun aficionado. I only got about 4 right, see how well you do!

I know, it’s been a while.

One night I casually threw on the LOST pilot episode and I’ve been re-tearing through the series ever since. I’m about midway through season 5 (of 6) now… which, because I’m such a sucker for time travel stories is my favorite season… but last night I decided to take a time out and watch Wings. To be fair, Wings wasn’t the first movie I saw since my last post, I also saw Mystery Team… but I’m not dignifying Mystery Team with a post… so Wings it is.

Wings is a silent movie from 1927 that has the distinction of being the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (technically it was called Best Production then, but whatever). It’s also one of the first mainstream films to feature nudity (although you really have to run the DVD in slow motion if you want to get even an OK look at it) and probably the first to feature a guy/guy kiss (it’s not really what you think though, it’s more of a friendly deathbed kind of thing). It’s a war movie about two guys (Jack & David) who go off to fight the Germans in World War I. They’re both chasing the same girl, but she only loves David… luckily there’s another girl who loves Jack… not to say that this ends in a neat, happy bow, though.

The movie has some awesome fighter-plane sequences (especially for the time), and action-packed land-fighting scenes as well, but it’s hard for me to recommend Wings to you. At two and a half hours, it definitely drags on what should have been about an hour and a half story, which can be a little harder to tolerate in a silent film. I could easily recommend better war films, better romance films and better silent films… in fact… Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans lost the Best Picture Award to this that year and that REALLY surprises me because (silent or not), I’d recommend Sunrise to anyone.

I hate to speak negatively of Wings, since at the time, I’m sure this was an amazing movie, but unlike many masterpieces of the era, it hasn’t exactly aged well. If you’re going to watch it, I guess it’s going to have to be for the historical significance… at least I’m one movie closer to seeing all the Oscar winners, though.

See you after I finish LOST!

6/10