Mobile NetFlix Reviews #7
Mixed bag of old and new this time.
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM: * * * *
Highly enjoyable ultra-assassins facing off against each other. I love the way they all have the same little one-shoulder backpacks with collapsible super-sniper guns in them. Excellent car-on-car violence as well. Biggest flaw is that a super-spy story always suffers when it's clear, at every moment, that nobody else in the story is anywhere near as badass as the protagonist. Sure, he should come out on top and all, but at least make him have to work really hard at it.
VIDEODROME: * * * *
I saw this as a teenager on late night TV, all cut to hell. Decided it was finally time to go back and actually plow through it as it was meant to be viewed. Whee! Thirty years later, this film is weird and messed up in a bunch of ways it wasn't originally intended to be, and almost quaint in other ways that were probably really insanely edgy at the time. (Or maybe they weren't all that edgy even then; I honestly don't know.) Piercing play for the endorphin rush? Cute. Licking a stranger's blood off the needle? AAAAAAAA! Shoving video cassettes into body orifices, fortunately, retains its original revulsion. On the other hand, after years of Haliburton/Gitmo and terrorist execution footage on YouTube and a neverending streaming marquee of shock-and-horror headlines pioneered by Fox News, the film is both amazingly prophetic and incredibly naive in its premise. Through the whole thing, I was practically crushed under the sense that this film manages to feel like it should be remade for the Internet Age... but doesn't actually. (And perhaps EXISTENZ is the demonstration of how true that is; I haven't seen it yet but I'm told it's remarkably similar.) And honestly, the best possible remake of this film probably already exists... in comic book form, under the title THE INVISIBLES.
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: * * *
Watched in preparation for our own trip to Barcelona, which we expect to be a great deal less tempestuous. I pretty much disliked every character except Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who were fantastic, especially together. Actually, "disliked" is the wrong word. I just didn't really care about the rest of them or their self-inflicted baggage. Everyone felt implausible... which is par for the course in a Woody Allen, so I can forgive that actual, just as I can forgive the fact that everyone actually sounded *like* Woody Allen. Even Scarlett Johansen, which is quite a feat I guess. But mostly, eh, I didn't really care if anyone was happy or sad in the end. And the narrator voice - almost every use of which felt to me like a patch over an inability to convey what was happy from the film and dialog itself - irritated me so much, it almost drove this down to two stars. Among the worst VO narratives I've ever witnessed. See it for Bardem and Cruz.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II: * * *
More super-spy action. But didn't we see this "Moonraker"-esque bioweapon plot already done better in XXX (* * * *)? Oh, actually, a quick check of IMDB shows that XXX came after. Anyway, John Woo used to make really great, insane films but then he came to America, sadly. A few good action scenes, here and there, but overall the film is full of false dilemmas and artificially enforced (for the sake of plot) choices by characters. The bad guys were clearly leaving sloppy evidence all over the place and made mistakes early on that forced them to have to take extra steps later on, giving Tom Cruise ample opportunity to finally catch up and stop them. I guess I just wasn't that impressed with them. Or the film. Also, some of the gags that were actually effective in the first film - like Cruise doing a disguise switcheroo with one of the bad guys - are so totally unsurprising in this one that I practically yawned when it came up. But I hear III was better, so I'll get around to it. Or maybe I'll dive back into Cold War stuff some more.
ROBOCOP: * * * * *
I didn't feel so bad about how mediocre the Stallone JUDGE DREDD (* * *) effort in the 90s was because this film already existed. Every so often, there's a movie that you just know is going to be horrible, absolute crap, because of the trailers and posters and such. But for whatever reason you decide you're going to subject yourself to the pain anyway. So you convince a bunch of your friends to come see the pain with you. And then you all go see it and it turns out to be freakin' brilliant, the kind of thing you want to immediately go right back into the theater again to see again, and all your friends that grudgingly agreed to be talked into seeing this movie with you now think you're some kind of movie quality prophet for having picked such a winner movie. Yeah. ROBOCOP was one of those movies for me. Probably the only film of the 80s that really knew what to do with cyberpunk. Also possibly the only SF film ever made that *still* feels like it's pitching a plausible future *even now*.
THE OFFICE SEASON 4: * * * * *
We'd seen pretty much all of these when they originally aired - having finally gotten onboard with watching the series by the time S4 began - but wanted to take in all the extra scenes material.
CASHBACK: * * * *
I think NetFlix recommended this to me because I have a weakness for quirky indie films with unnecessary T&A in them. I thought it might be a weird and slightly creepy little thing about loneliness and obsession, but hey: indie film with lots of T&A, apparently. The first fifteen minutes are a really irritating meditation on how horrible your first real serious breakup is, and I thought it was going to bug the crap out of me and I did not have high hopes. Then it has its unnecessary T&A fragment. And *then* it turned out to be a really cute and sweet story about, you know, every-day sort of relationship happiness, which was fine. And some really, really well done bits of comedy - especially the football game against the rival store and every single moment of Brian the Kung Fu Master. Not particularly ground-breaking as a love story and by the end things pretty much just work out okay for everyone on their own... but overall, funnier and more charming than I expected, plus a little bit of obsessive T&A early on. So, you know, pretty much win across the board.
EKSTASE: * * *
1933 Hedy Lamarr film, before she came to America and helped invent a torpedo remote-control mechanism. Practically silent - there's maybe three dozen lines of dialog in the whole thing - and almost all its most potent sequences are entirely so. Has a really great ending point... and then one additional sequence that really made no sense to us at all. An interesting side-effect of the film's age is that there are a few instances where the film establishes change of setting with a series of set shots... but the artifacts shown in the images are so removed from anything contemporary that instead of helping establish the setting, they actually somewhat obscure it. What are those things hanging there? What are they for? In 1930's Czechoslovakia, apparently, it made sense; now it just baffles. Also interesting was how much Emil's sterile home looked like it was furnished with modern Ikea (as compared to Eva's father's quite traditional, lavishly rich estate).
EXISTENZ: * * *
Naw, this isn't a remake of VIDEODROME. It's a sequel. I think it's literally a sequel, set in real time - 17 years - after its predecessor. Unfortunately, I don't think it adds enough to the mythos; it just sort of noodles around in body-anxiety imagery, and the overtly self-aware reliance on macguffins to end-run around sensible plot (primarily the oft-used "we're acting like this because it must be what our characters are programmed to do" gimmick) grated. 1999 was the year of "real life is just another virtual world" movies, but I have to say: I liked both THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (* * * *) and THE MATRIX (* * * * *) better - the former for its simple and direct noir, the latter for, you know, about twenty different things that were all exactly what I like in movies.
CRANK: * * * *
Watched on flight to Spain, on my phone. This was exactly as my friends claimed: a terrible movie that has to be seen. Brilliant idea, really: let's remake SPEED, only doing away with that cumbersome bus. Make the protagonist's body the bus! I knew I was going to like it the moment he crashes the car through the mall doors while talking on the phone to his doctor about his symptom set, which is, like, only ten minutes into the film? Marvelous.
------
For consideration: more movies watched on airplanes; recent stuff
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM: * * * *
Highly enjoyable ultra-assassins facing off against each other. I love the way they all have the same little one-shoulder backpacks with collapsible super-sniper guns in them. Excellent car-on-car violence as well. Biggest flaw is that a super-spy story always suffers when it's clear, at every moment, that nobody else in the story is anywhere near as badass as the protagonist. Sure, he should come out on top and all, but at least make him have to work really hard at it.
VIDEODROME: * * * *
I saw this as a teenager on late night TV, all cut to hell. Decided it was finally time to go back and actually plow through it as it was meant to be viewed. Whee! Thirty years later, this film is weird and messed up in a bunch of ways it wasn't originally intended to be, and almost quaint in other ways that were probably really insanely edgy at the time. (Or maybe they weren't all that edgy even then; I honestly don't know.) Piercing play for the endorphin rush? Cute. Licking a stranger's blood off the needle? AAAAAAAA! Shoving video cassettes into body orifices, fortunately, retains its original revulsion. On the other hand, after years of Haliburton/Gitmo and terrorist execution footage on YouTube and a neverending streaming marquee of shock-and-horror headlines pioneered by Fox News, the film is both amazingly prophetic and incredibly naive in its premise. Through the whole thing, I was practically crushed under the sense that this film manages to feel like it should be remade for the Internet Age... but doesn't actually. (And perhaps EXISTENZ is the demonstration of how true that is; I haven't seen it yet but I'm told it's remarkably similar.) And honestly, the best possible remake of this film probably already exists... in comic book form, under the title THE INVISIBLES.
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: * * *
Watched in preparation for our own trip to Barcelona, which we expect to be a great deal less tempestuous. I pretty much disliked every character except Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who were fantastic, especially together. Actually, "disliked" is the wrong word. I just didn't really care about the rest of them or their self-inflicted baggage. Everyone felt implausible... which is par for the course in a Woody Allen, so I can forgive that actual, just as I can forgive the fact that everyone actually sounded *like* Woody Allen. Even Scarlett Johansen, which is quite a feat I guess. But mostly, eh, I didn't really care if anyone was happy or sad in the end. And the narrator voice - almost every use of which felt to me like a patch over an inability to convey what was happy from the film and dialog itself - irritated me so much, it almost drove this down to two stars. Among the worst VO narratives I've ever witnessed. See it for Bardem and Cruz.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II: * * *
More super-spy action. But didn't we see this "Moonraker"-esque bioweapon plot already done better in XXX (* * * *)? Oh, actually, a quick check of IMDB shows that XXX came after. Anyway, John Woo used to make really great, insane films but then he came to America, sadly. A few good action scenes, here and there, but overall the film is full of false dilemmas and artificially enforced (for the sake of plot) choices by characters. The bad guys were clearly leaving sloppy evidence all over the place and made mistakes early on that forced them to have to take extra steps later on, giving Tom Cruise ample opportunity to finally catch up and stop them. I guess I just wasn't that impressed with them. Or the film. Also, some of the gags that were actually effective in the first film - like Cruise doing a disguise switcheroo with one of the bad guys - are so totally unsurprising in this one that I practically yawned when it came up. But I hear III was better, so I'll get around to it. Or maybe I'll dive back into Cold War stuff some more.
ROBOCOP: * * * * *
I didn't feel so bad about how mediocre the Stallone JUDGE DREDD (* * *) effort in the 90s was because this film already existed. Every so often, there's a movie that you just know is going to be horrible, absolute crap, because of the trailers and posters and such. But for whatever reason you decide you're going to subject yourself to the pain anyway. So you convince a bunch of your friends to come see the pain with you. And then you all go see it and it turns out to be freakin' brilliant, the kind of thing you want to immediately go right back into the theater again to see again, and all your friends that grudgingly agreed to be talked into seeing this movie with you now think you're some kind of movie quality prophet for having picked such a winner movie. Yeah. ROBOCOP was one of those movies for me. Probably the only film of the 80s that really knew what to do with cyberpunk. Also possibly the only SF film ever made that *still* feels like it's pitching a plausible future *even now*.
THE OFFICE SEASON 4: * * * * *
We'd seen pretty much all of these when they originally aired - having finally gotten onboard with watching the series by the time S4 began - but wanted to take in all the extra scenes material.
CASHBACK: * * * *
I think NetFlix recommended this to me because I have a weakness for quirky indie films with unnecessary T&A in them. I thought it might be a weird and slightly creepy little thing about loneliness and obsession, but hey: indie film with lots of T&A, apparently. The first fifteen minutes are a really irritating meditation on how horrible your first real serious breakup is, and I thought it was going to bug the crap out of me and I did not have high hopes. Then it has its unnecessary T&A fragment. And *then* it turned out to be a really cute and sweet story about, you know, every-day sort of relationship happiness, which was fine. And some really, really well done bits of comedy - especially the football game against the rival store and every single moment of Brian the Kung Fu Master. Not particularly ground-breaking as a love story and by the end things pretty much just work out okay for everyone on their own... but overall, funnier and more charming than I expected, plus a little bit of obsessive T&A early on. So, you know, pretty much win across the board.
EKSTASE: * * *
1933 Hedy Lamarr film, before she came to America and helped invent a torpedo remote-control mechanism. Practically silent - there's maybe three dozen lines of dialog in the whole thing - and almost all its most potent sequences are entirely so. Has a really great ending point... and then one additional sequence that really made no sense to us at all. An interesting side-effect of the film's age is that there are a few instances where the film establishes change of setting with a series of set shots... but the artifacts shown in the images are so removed from anything contemporary that instead of helping establish the setting, they actually somewhat obscure it. What are those things hanging there? What are they for? In 1930's Czechoslovakia, apparently, it made sense; now it just baffles. Also interesting was how much Emil's sterile home looked like it was furnished with modern Ikea (as compared to Eva's father's quite traditional, lavishly rich estate).
EXISTENZ: * * *
Naw, this isn't a remake of VIDEODROME. It's a sequel. I think it's literally a sequel, set in real time - 17 years - after its predecessor. Unfortunately, I don't think it adds enough to the mythos; it just sort of noodles around in body-anxiety imagery, and the overtly self-aware reliance on macguffins to end-run around sensible plot (primarily the oft-used "we're acting like this because it must be what our characters are programmed to do" gimmick) grated. 1999 was the year of "real life is just another virtual world" movies, but I have to say: I liked both THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (* * * *) and THE MATRIX (* * * * *) better - the former for its simple and direct noir, the latter for, you know, about twenty different things that were all exactly what I like in movies.
CRANK: * * * *
Watched on flight to Spain, on my phone. This was exactly as my friends claimed: a terrible movie that has to be seen. Brilliant idea, really: let's remake SPEED, only doing away with that cumbersome bus. Make the protagonist's body the bus! I knew I was going to like it the moment he crashes the car through the mall doors while talking on the phone to his doctor about his symptom set, which is, like, only ten minutes into the film? Marvelous.
------
For consideration: more movies watched on airplanes; recent stuff