Before I go
In my post about style and substance in holiday movies, I guess it would've made sense to mention Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but it's another one I kinda-sorta forgot I saw. I get the sense that the prevailing objection to the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey version of Sherlock Holmes is how jazzed up it is with faux-steampunk and speed-ramping and Ritchie-ish pyrotechnics, even though Ritchie's pre-Sherlock movies were not really known for their massive explosions, and the MTV style stuff they were known for are not as present as they were in Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Maybe that's why I don't really have a problem with any of Ritchie's amped-up filmmaking techniques. They're kind of cheesy, sure, but pretty well-executed for that sort of thing; you can usually tell where the characters are and what's going on, and it often looks pretty cool. The action-adventure components are not my problem with Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes series and I certainly can't argue with the Downey/Jude Law chemistry as a nice take on the Holmes/Watson relationship. The problem for me is the movie's resolutely boilerplate approach to what happens in between the explosion and banter, and its superficial, repetitive way of expressing the Holmes way of thinking.
A Game of Shadows makes the now-classic sequel mistake of assuming the earlier movie's big box office was a tacit request that the second movie be pretty much exactly the same, but slightly moreso. In this case, "moreso" means a bit more action, a better villain, and an investigation even more perfunctory than before. We're two movies into a Sherlock Holmes franchise that has yet to craft a single memorable mystery; instead, the supposedly brilliant Moriarty is saddled with a grand evil plan out of roughly half the action-adventure movies of the past ten years (pulling the strings to pit countries against each other in a massive war, and profit from it! You get the feeling that Ritchie and company think that because this movie is set before all of the other movies that use this plot, it somehow counts as getting to it first). On the level of silly, nice-looking semi-fantasy adventures, I enjoyed Game of Shadows about as well as the first movie, but there's something a little tedious and workmanlike about it, too, which is a weird quality for a would-be crowd-pleaser. There was an opportunity to improve upon the first movie, and no one took it
Then yesterday, Marisa and I closed out the moviegoing year with a double feature of movies given an "F" by the AV Club. It got me thinking about the awarding of an F (or for that matter A/A+) grade; I feel like at those extremes, the movie has to go beyond normal boundaries of like/love and dislike/hate to achieve a more special version of either for the viewer. While Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close didn't quite get there for me -- it didn't hit that perfect spot of super-loathing -- I can absolutely understand the feeling. I don't object to the use of 9/11 as a major plot point (though having seen the two movies based on his novels, neither of which I've read, I am getting pretty suspicious of Jonathan Safran Foer's mass-tragedy fetish), but at least in movie form, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close just does not know when to quit. The last thirty or forty minutes alone feature no less than five major revelations or discoveries that are supposed to prompt us to tear up and perhaps clutch the movie to our chests, smiling through the tears, just like the characters onscreen are doing. I might've been moved if I had time before getting smothered with more and more.
Or maybe the distance was due to the main character, Oskar Schell, a precocious kid of, I realize as I write this, indeterminate age, due to his utter lack of believability as an actual child (OK, IMDB says nine. I would've also accepted seven, eleven, pretty much whatever). I don't know if it's Foer's doing or Eric Roth's error in adapting the book, but Oskar comes across as a bundle of quirks and tics, to the point that the movie must explain some of them directly, sometimes belatedly, in keeping with the generally sloppy, uneven pacing. I don't blame Thomas Horn, the young actor who has to play this contrivance of a character, because the kid is saddled with multiple, extensive scenery-chewing breakdown scenes that might wound even the most experienced performer.
More experienced performers, meanwhile, from John Goodman to Jeffrey Wright to Viola Davis, get frustratingly little to do. Tom Hanks does the best work as Oskar's (saintly, Hanks-like) father, who dies in the 9/11 attacks and sets the curlicued yet weirdly predictable story in motion, but everyone else is in and out as the movie follows Oskar's whims. Again, a child's point of view is not a problem for me, nor is a precocious/quirky child, but instead of drawing me into Oskar's world, the movie just emphasizes how utterly fake and writerly all of its sincerity and grief and healing is. OK, maybe I did come close to hating it, after all.
I can similarly understand the impulse to fail The Darkest Hour because the movie is just a stunning failure of big-studio moviemaking. Well, medium-studio moviemaking: it's a Summit Entertainment movie, and frankly, it's like a horrible realization of the kinds of movies I'd joke about Summit making with their influx of ill-gotten Twilight cash. Not that much cash was needed: Box Office Mojo says the movie cost $30 million, but it looks like it was made for maybe a third of that. I'll save more detailed observations for my full review, which I'll try to write this weekend, but this movie achieves nearly Mystery Science Theater 3000 levels of writing and directing; if not for the semi-professional (stress the "semi") production, it would not be out of place as a forgotten D-movie from the fifties. As is, it could almost pass for a SyFy original. Imagine if Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thirlby (each, due respect, never worse) weren't in it. It all makes me pretty nervous about Prometheus, the Alien-related Ridley Scott sci-fi movie co-written by the author of this terrible screenplay.
Also: Animals! The best one around is War Horse, not the best Spielberg movie but extremely well-made. We Bought a Zoo is by another director I love, Cameron Crowe, and the results are not so impeccable. Further down the food chain: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked exists. Yep.
I think that about does it for 2011. All of the other '11 movies I need to catch up on will be seen via DVD screeners or Netflix streaming in six to eight months.
A Game of Shadows makes the now-classic sequel mistake of assuming the earlier movie's big box office was a tacit request that the second movie be pretty much exactly the same, but slightly moreso. In this case, "moreso" means a bit more action, a better villain, and an investigation even more perfunctory than before. We're two movies into a Sherlock Holmes franchise that has yet to craft a single memorable mystery; instead, the supposedly brilliant Moriarty is saddled with a grand evil plan out of roughly half the action-adventure movies of the past ten years (pulling the strings to pit countries against each other in a massive war, and profit from it! You get the feeling that Ritchie and company think that because this movie is set before all of the other movies that use this plot, it somehow counts as getting to it first). On the level of silly, nice-looking semi-fantasy adventures, I enjoyed Game of Shadows about as well as the first movie, but there's something a little tedious and workmanlike about it, too, which is a weird quality for a would-be crowd-pleaser. There was an opportunity to improve upon the first movie, and no one took it
Then yesterday, Marisa and I closed out the moviegoing year with a double feature of movies given an "F" by the AV Club. It got me thinking about the awarding of an F (or for that matter A/A+) grade; I feel like at those extremes, the movie has to go beyond normal boundaries of like/love and dislike/hate to achieve a more special version of either for the viewer. While Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close didn't quite get there for me -- it didn't hit that perfect spot of super-loathing -- I can absolutely understand the feeling. I don't object to the use of 9/11 as a major plot point (though having seen the two movies based on his novels, neither of which I've read, I am getting pretty suspicious of Jonathan Safran Foer's mass-tragedy fetish), but at least in movie form, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close just does not know when to quit. The last thirty or forty minutes alone feature no less than five major revelations or discoveries that are supposed to prompt us to tear up and perhaps clutch the movie to our chests, smiling through the tears, just like the characters onscreen are doing. I might've been moved if I had time before getting smothered with more and more.
Or maybe the distance was due to the main character, Oskar Schell, a precocious kid of, I realize as I write this, indeterminate age, due to his utter lack of believability as an actual child (OK, IMDB says nine. I would've also accepted seven, eleven, pretty much whatever). I don't know if it's Foer's doing or Eric Roth's error in adapting the book, but Oskar comes across as a bundle of quirks and tics, to the point that the movie must explain some of them directly, sometimes belatedly, in keeping with the generally sloppy, uneven pacing. I don't blame Thomas Horn, the young actor who has to play this contrivance of a character, because the kid is saddled with multiple, extensive scenery-chewing breakdown scenes that might wound even the most experienced performer.
More experienced performers, meanwhile, from John Goodman to Jeffrey Wright to Viola Davis, get frustratingly little to do. Tom Hanks does the best work as Oskar's (saintly, Hanks-like) father, who dies in the 9/11 attacks and sets the curlicued yet weirdly predictable story in motion, but everyone else is in and out as the movie follows Oskar's whims. Again, a child's point of view is not a problem for me, nor is a precocious/quirky child, but instead of drawing me into Oskar's world, the movie just emphasizes how utterly fake and writerly all of its sincerity and grief and healing is. OK, maybe I did come close to hating it, after all.
I can similarly understand the impulse to fail The Darkest Hour because the movie is just a stunning failure of big-studio moviemaking. Well, medium-studio moviemaking: it's a Summit Entertainment movie, and frankly, it's like a horrible realization of the kinds of movies I'd joke about Summit making with their influx of ill-gotten Twilight cash. Not that much cash was needed: Box Office Mojo says the movie cost $30 million, but it looks like it was made for maybe a third of that. I'll save more detailed observations for my full review, which I'll try to write this weekend, but this movie achieves nearly Mystery Science Theater 3000 levels of writing and directing; if not for the semi-professional (stress the "semi") production, it would not be out of place as a forgotten D-movie from the fifties. As is, it could almost pass for a SyFy original. Imagine if Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thirlby (each, due respect, never worse) weren't in it. It all makes me pretty nervous about Prometheus, the Alien-related Ridley Scott sci-fi movie co-written by the author of this terrible screenplay.
Also: Animals! The best one around is War Horse, not the best Spielberg movie but extremely well-made. We Bought a Zoo is by another director I love, Cameron Crowe, and the results are not so impeccable. Further down the food chain: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked exists. Yep.
I think that about does it for 2011. All of the other '11 movies I need to catch up on will be seen via DVD screeners or Netflix streaming in six to eight months.