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Feb. 15th, 2012
The Artist
So we've finally figured out that we can tolerate French people so long as they don't talk, ever. Just, not one noise.
Underworld: Awakening
Okay, I know I'm probably easier on genre movies than most, but even for me, the Underworld series has always been a crappier, less feminist version of the Resident Evil movies, and those were B-movies to begin with. Awakening is where we hit the sell-by date. As over-convoluted as the other movies were, they did have a throughline. Werewolves and vampires exist. Vampires enslave werewolves. Werewolves rebel. Heroine is a vampire badass who learns that the vampires are full of shit and sort of accidentally joins the werewolf resistance, in that she never actually joins them, but she does kill two out of three of the vampire Big Bads. That's basically the first two movies. And the third movie was a prequel all about how the vampires screw over the werewolves and how justified the werewolves are in seeking revenge.
Well, Awakening is about how a bunch of evil werewolves have taken over the world of the budget-conscious future (in the next twenty years, apparently humanity will invent new cell-phones. That's. About. It.). And Selene kills them on behalf of the vampires who previously screwed her over and ruined her life. Even at the end, she's talking about how she's going to help the vampires rule the world again. How weird is that? It's like if they made a new Star Wars movie where the Jedi were a bunch of unemotional zealots who liked to kidnap little kids from their parents and indoctrinate them into their weird loveless religion, while the Sith were a pair of persecuted underdogs who had to--okay, bad example.
It's like if they made a new season of Avatar: The Last Airbender where Prince Zuko woke up from an iceberg to find the Fire Nation in decline, so he decided the best thing to do would be to help them retake the world. I mean, just on a basic thematic level, it's like the entire lesson of the first three movies is getting ignored so werewolves can be the villains now.
Special notice to 1. the big moment where Selene gets back her trenchcoat, which is apparently an official piece of Death Dealer merch, then immediately loses it so the camera can go back to giving ass-shots. 2. Selene gets a daughter, who has a British accent despite being raised in an American laboratory all her life. I guess that stuff's in the genes.
Haywire
This is a tough one. Okay, this movie is unsatisfying. And I need to explain to you why that is even though this is full of good stuff. Like, if Selene in Underworld is hypersexualized (she wears a corset OVER a catsuit, people), Gina Carono is sexualized just the right amount in this. She looks good, she grabs the occasional hot guy for a quickie (we're going with Channing Tatum being cute, right? That's the consensus? And not him being an anthropomorphic Tetris piece?), and she does not waif-fu even a little.
The thing is, though, Soderbergh isn't making a straight action movie. He's bringing in an arthouse sensibility, like Nicholas Winding Refn did with Drive, only there the movie had the story and the performances to support that level of conceit. And Haywire just doesn't. I don't know what it's going for.
Not to be mean, but for one thing, Ryan Gosling is a better actor than Carono. And that's fine, it's her first movie. Just, maybe the movie should let her hit stuff instead of giving her long sequences of being quietly contemplative or driving around or whatever? Actually, Carono is a very charismatic performer, yet her character is completely stoic. I get that, she's not Meryl Streep, they don't want to make her do much heavy lifting, but they could still try to give Mallory Kane a personality.
Another thing is that there just aren't a lot of fights in this movie. And in place of that, it's not like we get the tension or character-building that Drive did. We just get a spy movie going through the motions. It's practically the most generic thing ever, and maybe Soderbergh is trying to make a point by taking the most generic thing ever and doing it with a woman instead of Sam Worthington (hey, Gina Carono knows muay thai and she can do an American accent, that puts her two up on him), but it falls flat.
I don't want endless talking about which of the people we don't care about betrayed Gina Carono, who we don't care about. You're not making Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here, you're making Kickboxer Kickboxer Kickboxer Kickboxer. And having Carono get into parkour chases and gunfights and car chases? Could you imagine a Jackie Chan movie where he picks up a machine gun and blows some thugs away? No! You go to a Jackie Chan movie to see Jackie Chan do kung-fu.
Maybe it's just that they cast "real" actors in all the parts instead of stuntmen. I don't see why you would cast Ewan McGregor to show up for ten minutes and deliver twenty lines when you could hire Michael Jai White or Scott Adkins, have him do just as good a job delivering the lines, and have him do an awesome fight scene with Gina Carono. Carono's not going to out-act Ewan McGregor her first time at bat, but she can definitely outfight Adkins. Same with Channing Tatum, who can't even act that well (making him something of a morality pet to Carono is objectively the movie's biggest failing). But I am cool with Michael Fassbender, who I guess has succeeded Clive Owen as Hollywood's go-to Not!JamesBond and who gets the movie's best fight scene with Carono. Now there's a guy who knows how to hit women.
Oh yeah, I went there.
But instead, the movie paints Carono as the most boring invincible hero this side of Steven Seagal. Maybe that's what they're going for, maybe that's what all of this is going for, but I don't get why we have to spend two hours going to such lengths just to deliver a single line like "Don't think of her as a woman" and consider that a feminist message. If you want to say "Women can kick ass too!", then show them kicking as much ass as a man. Not that hard.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Fine. Shoot me. But it was fun. I guess I'm predisposed to like a movie geared around classical literature rather than toys from the 1980s or whatever Lovecraftian abomination the Chipmunks are. But for the price of admission, you get…
1. The Rock punching a giant iguana.
2. The Rock bantering with Michael Caine.
3. Luis Guzman having a man-crush on the Rock.
4. The Rock playing the ukulele.
5. Vanessa Hudgkins in shorts and a tanktop. This is where not watching High School Musical pays off, because I have no compunctions about lusting over the cute tween from those movies. She played Zac Efron, right?
Lest you think I'm being sexist there, the movie also features The Rock playing a loving husband and responsible father. Ladies, tell me that isn't your catnip.
So we've finally figured out that we can tolerate French people so long as they don't talk, ever. Just, not one noise.
Underworld: Awakening
Okay, I know I'm probably easier on genre movies than most, but even for me, the Underworld series has always been a crappier, less feminist version of the Resident Evil movies, and those were B-movies to begin with. Awakening is where we hit the sell-by date. As over-convoluted as the other movies were, they did have a throughline. Werewolves and vampires exist. Vampires enslave werewolves. Werewolves rebel. Heroine is a vampire badass who learns that the vampires are full of shit and sort of accidentally joins the werewolf resistance, in that she never actually joins them, but she does kill two out of three of the vampire Big Bads. That's basically the first two movies. And the third movie was a prequel all about how the vampires screw over the werewolves and how justified the werewolves are in seeking revenge.
Well, Awakening is about how a bunch of evil werewolves have taken over the world of the budget-conscious future (in the next twenty years, apparently humanity will invent new cell-phones. That's. About. It.). And Selene kills them on behalf of the vampires who previously screwed her over and ruined her life. Even at the end, she's talking about how she's going to help the vampires rule the world again. How weird is that? It's like if they made a new Star Wars movie where the Jedi were a bunch of unemotional zealots who liked to kidnap little kids from their parents and indoctrinate them into their weird loveless religion, while the Sith were a pair of persecuted underdogs who had to--okay, bad example.
It's like if they made a new season of Avatar: The Last Airbender where Prince Zuko woke up from an iceberg to find the Fire Nation in decline, so he decided the best thing to do would be to help them retake the world. I mean, just on a basic thematic level, it's like the entire lesson of the first three movies is getting ignored so werewolves can be the villains now.
Special notice to 1. the big moment where Selene gets back her trenchcoat, which is apparently an official piece of Death Dealer merch, then immediately loses it so the camera can go back to giving ass-shots. 2. Selene gets a daughter, who has a British accent despite being raised in an American laboratory all her life. I guess that stuff's in the genes.
Haywire
This is a tough one. Okay, this movie is unsatisfying. And I need to explain to you why that is even though this is full of good stuff. Like, if Selene in Underworld is hypersexualized (she wears a corset OVER a catsuit, people), Gina Carono is sexualized just the right amount in this. She looks good, she grabs the occasional hot guy for a quickie (we're going with Channing Tatum being cute, right? That's the consensus? And not him being an anthropomorphic Tetris piece?), and she does not waif-fu even a little.
The thing is, though, Soderbergh isn't making a straight action movie. He's bringing in an arthouse sensibility, like Nicholas Winding Refn did with Drive, only there the movie had the story and the performances to support that level of conceit. And Haywire just doesn't. I don't know what it's going for.
Not to be mean, but for one thing, Ryan Gosling is a better actor than Carono. And that's fine, it's her first movie. Just, maybe the movie should let her hit stuff instead of giving her long sequences of being quietly contemplative or driving around or whatever? Actually, Carono is a very charismatic performer, yet her character is completely stoic. I get that, she's not Meryl Streep, they don't want to make her do much heavy lifting, but they could still try to give Mallory Kane a personality.
Another thing is that there just aren't a lot of fights in this movie. And in place of that, it's not like we get the tension or character-building that Drive did. We just get a spy movie going through the motions. It's practically the most generic thing ever, and maybe Soderbergh is trying to make a point by taking the most generic thing ever and doing it with a woman instead of Sam Worthington (hey, Gina Carono knows muay thai and she can do an American accent, that puts her two up on him), but it falls flat.
I don't want endless talking about which of the people we don't care about betrayed Gina Carono, who we don't care about. You're not making Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here, you're making Kickboxer Kickboxer Kickboxer Kickboxer. And having Carono get into parkour chases and gunfights and car chases? Could you imagine a Jackie Chan movie where he picks up a machine gun and blows some thugs away? No! You go to a Jackie Chan movie to see Jackie Chan do kung-fu.
Maybe it's just that they cast "real" actors in all the parts instead of stuntmen. I don't see why you would cast Ewan McGregor to show up for ten minutes and deliver twenty lines when you could hire Michael Jai White or Scott Adkins, have him do just as good a job delivering the lines, and have him do an awesome fight scene with Gina Carono. Carono's not going to out-act Ewan McGregor her first time at bat, but she can definitely outfight Adkins. Same with Channing Tatum, who can't even act that well (making him something of a morality pet to Carono is objectively the movie's biggest failing). But I am cool with Michael Fassbender, who I guess has succeeded Clive Owen as Hollywood's go-to Not!JamesBond and who gets the movie's best fight scene with Carono. Now there's a guy who knows how to hit women.
Oh yeah, I went there.
But instead, the movie paints Carono as the most boring invincible hero this side of Steven Seagal. Maybe that's what they're going for, maybe that's what all of this is going for, but I don't get why we have to spend two hours going to such lengths just to deliver a single line like "Don't think of her as a woman" and consider that a feminist message. If you want to say "Women can kick ass too!", then show them kicking as much ass as a man. Not that hard.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Fine. Shoot me. But it was fun. I guess I'm predisposed to like a movie geared around classical literature rather than toys from the 1980s or whatever Lovecraftian abomination the Chipmunks are. But for the price of admission, you get…
1. The Rock punching a giant iguana.
2. The Rock bantering with Michael Caine.
3. Luis Guzman having a man-crush on the Rock.
4. The Rock playing the ukulele.
5. Vanessa Hudgkins in shorts and a tanktop. This is where not watching High School Musical pays off, because I have no compunctions about lusting over the cute tween from those movies. She played Zac Efron, right?
Lest you think I'm being sexist there, the movie also features The Rock playing a loving husband and responsible father. Ladies, tell me that isn't your catnip.