Tag: John Malkovich

Deepwater Horizon

Peter Berg’s exploitative disaster film is confused and cliche.

deepwaterhorizonposterPeter Berg’s “Deepwater Horizon” might just be the most confused, peculiar, conservative Americana cash grab in recent memory. It’s staged like a gritty, exploitative war film in the vein of Berg’s “Lone Survivor,” and yet it’s the story about the worst oil spill in history? There’s almost no mention of the environmental damage of the spill, and the people involved are all scientific technicians, and yet they behave like salt of the Earth, blue-collar Marines? And the movie’s biggest enemy is actually big business? Not to mention it stars Mark Wahlberg?

Labeling “Deepwater Horizon” as a movie that’s pandering to a certain sector of the American public may be reductive, because the movie’s real problem is that it isn’t about anything more than a tragedy. Like a Transformers movie, it’s obsessed with metallic carnage and special effects even before everything goes to hell, and it’s loaded with mechanical jargon as if the way in which an oil rig works is interesting enough to anyone on its own. “Deepwater Horizon” wants to praise human sacrifice, but it stops short at exploring the mental struggle heroes face or examining their values. Continue reading “Deepwater Horizon”

Rapid Response: Dangerous Liaisons

“Dangerous Liaisons” knows just how ridiculously soapy, ridiculous and steamy it is, and Stephen Frears’ movie works better than the play.

What’s great about “Dangerous Liaisons” is that it knows just how soapy and ridiculous this all is. It’s set in stuffy, aristocratic France, but everything about this story is sex, love and revenge all the time. It’s absurd, but here, it works.

I saw an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play of the same name (he’s also the screenwriter) and think it’s a lot better as a film. The play is all talk and gossip. It’s bogged down under names and archaic language. The elaborate web of steamy fucking becomes impossible to follow in that setting. Here however, Frears’s cross cutting does the story wonders. He jumps from bed to bed, drawing room to drawing room and keeps the many liaisons, dangerous or not, in check. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dangerous Liaisons”

Rapid Response: Being John Malkovich

Few films are as wistfully inventive, bizarre and darkly silly as “Being John Malkovich.” Surely there is something else like it that hasn’t been directed by Spike Jonze or written by Charlie Kaufman, but then, I’m at a loss to say what. Yes, there have been movies that have incorporated puppets into their movies before, but to the balletic and elaborate extent that even goes as far as opening Jonze’s film? I think not.

When I first saw the film about a year ago, I thought of it as something of a mini-masterpiece. I mean, I had never seen anything like it. I’m not sure I loved the entire movie as much as I once did, but there are segments in this movie that have enchanted me and taken my mind to new places like never before.

It’s also really friggin’ funny and weird. This is the type of movie with cerebral and odd sight gags and mind-trip themes that beg to be analyzed, but you’ll have more fun if you don’t. Jonze is a pro at coyly amusing you with one of his visual tricks and then shocking you with the next. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Being John Malkovich”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is a mind-numbing, relentless, annoying, incoherent, bloated and overall poorly made film that only surpasses the abominable first sequel to this franchise possibly for the reason that it is less racist. This series’ enduring popularity is evidence that the blockbuster crowd has become no less robotic and drone like than the monstrosities on screen.

Michael Bay’s second “Transformers” film, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” left me immensely angry, with myself for having sat through it, with so many others for having enjoyed it and with Bay for having ever made it. I had never seen a film as long or as overstuffed, and it earned a place in bad movie history since.

Now here we are two years later. “Dark of the Moon” was not enraging but depressing in its repetition of the same scatterbrained sense of humor, inconceivable plot, cinematography that blatantly defied cinematic staples and worst of all, tedious, unmemorable, bombastic and endlessly long battle sequences. Continue reading “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”