"I read your book." | Sung J. Woo

I thought it might fun to usher in the new year by watching the film 2012.  Neither my wife nor I had seen it, and since this year has been purported to be the end, why not?

We had a great time.  It’s Hollywood by the book, but oh, the carnage!  I couldn’t get enough, and was so inspired that we kept going with more doomsday picks.  As always, haikus to the rescue.

	It ends with a bang: an orgy of destruction and it’s fun to watch.
	A procedural in planetary wreckage ‘Nauts to the rescue.
	It begins like art light, funny, then turns Lars-dark Yes, depression sucks.

I suppose I was in a vegetative mood, because I spent an inordinate amount of time watching bad movies this past week. Some were chosen for their badness; others just turned out that way.

	Road House Dalton the bouncer does tai chi without his shirt and kills half the town. The level of acting in this movie is just incredibly bad.  I’m not talking about the leads, Patrick Swayze and Ben Gazzara, but the folks who have three or four lines.  A movie like this made today would feature better secondary actors, which leads me to believe that the acting profession has markedly improved in the last twenty years or so. I was surprised at how violent this film got towards the end.  I guess I shouldn’t have been, but ratings do tend to soften with time (like Midnight Cowboy bearing a ridiculous X rating).
	Showgirls Dog Chow and Ver-sayce Cavalcade of T & A This is not acting. The lines are ridiculous, the acting is so over-the-top that it would clear Mount Everest.  But one thing you cannot say about this movie — it is never boring, and therefore, I’d highly recommend it.
	MacGruber What this film needed: toothpick, tube sock, bubble gum and a few more jokes. There were a few moments where I laughed, but the movie just isn’t funny enough.  The highlight without a doubt is Ryan Phillippe paging through MacGruber’s journal.
	Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen Click the Fast Forward when watching this non-action film in record time. Jet li’s Fist of Legend is my favorite Chen Zhen story.  I’m a huge Donnie Yen fan — if you haven’t seen Kill Zone or Flash Point, they’re absolute gems.  This one had a few nice action sequences, but the rest of the film is forgettable.
	Batman: Year One Bryan Cranston makes a gruff Lieutenant Gordon to a weeny Wayne. A faithful adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel.  It’s a decent film, but the guy who does Batman’s voice is wrongly cast.
	The Wicker Man (2006) Some films are so bad their ineptitude is good. I wish this were worse. The scenes of this movie that are on YouTube, such as Cage beating up Leelee Sobieski in a bear suit, are funny, but the humor unfortunately is derived from their lack of context.  There’s no question the scene is silly, but within the movie, it makes more sense, and therefore, not really funny. This actually was not a bad movie for the first half of its runtime.  And even the latter half isn’t a total failure — it was more along the lines of being ill conceived.  Let’s just put it this way: it’s no Showgirls.

Balleri-Nina
Breaking, broken, soul en pointe
Oh, to be Swan Queen.

I can’t imagine this movie being everyone’s cup of tea.  In fact, I can see many people averting their eyes from the screen.  There are moments here, as there were moments in Darren Aronofsky’s previous films like Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, where human flesh is mutilated to cringing levels — skin ripping like Scotch tape, a cheek turned into a canvas for a bout of self-stabbing.  At times, Black Swan is a full-blown horror movie, but the horror is somehow worse because the monster is within the mind of poor Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman).

It really is a horror movie, with most of its trappings — character backs away and into the arms of something/someone unpleasant, a chase in pitch-black darkness, discordant injections of noise to pump up the fear.  And yet Black Swan is more than that.  It’s a pointed, grueling character study, and boy, does Portman ever come up big in the acting department.  There’s not a single second when she isn’t Nina, and from the get-go, you can feel her confusion, her pain, her relentless drive to become someone she knows she’s incapable of being (and yet has to, somehow).   There are many shots of her smiling through misery, and each one is more heartbreaking than the one before.

It’s a movie about the pursuit of perfection, of sacrificing your very soul to achieve your dream.  But like I said, it’s also really, really scary.

I’m glad I saw Black Swan, but I’m also glad I won’t ever see it again.

Floating and bundling
a stack of sleeping bodies
Only in a dream.

We caught the matinee of Inception at the NYC AMC Loews in Lincoln Center yesterday, to watch the movie in real IMAX format.  The marketing folks have done their job, because it’s been a long time since I’ve been this drawn to see a film.

By the way, I’ll be talking about the plot of the movie quite a bit here, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading…

Maybe it was all the various temporal trickery that’s discussed in the dream-within-a-dream mechanics, but I couldn’t believe how quickly the two-and-a-half hours passed by.   There’s nothing quite as satisfying as surrendering yourself to the big screen to the point where you lose track of time.  Even though Inception details a fair amount of exposition via Ariadne, it also has plenty of action to keep it chugging along nicely, and as a popcorn movie, it succeeds brilliantly.

My first gut reaction was astonishment, astonished that Christopher Nolan was able to get funding to make a blockbuster with brains.  Inception is not as complicated or ingenious as Memento (and therefore ultimately not as rewarding), but how in the world did he convince the producers to drop that much cash?  Of course he’s proved his big-budget chops with the two Batman movies, but still, major kudos.

There was lavish praise heaped upon the film before it even opened, and though some of it is justified, I feel that the accolades were also a by-product of the terrible movies that have populated the theaters this summer so far.  Because as interesting and creative as Inception is, I didn’t feel knocked out by it, unlike some of the previous films that traveled similar territories: Dark City and The Matrix.  But those movies didn’t have the hype machine working overtime, either, so there’s the expectation factor to consider.

Still, I’d take a single Inception over a thousand Transformers any day.

Favorite part of the movie: Arthur’s floating sequence in the hotel, where he ties up his sleeping compatriots in preparation for the “kick.”  More than any other part of the movie, that bit seemed so utterly dreamlike.

Unintentional recall of another film: When Cobb lets go of Mal, I was reminded of the scene in Titanic, where Rose lets Jack go.  I guess it was Leo’s turn to do the letting go this time.

Unintentional recall of a TV show: The final scene with Fischer and his father, which takes place inside the vault, reminded me of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck in its deactivated state.

Minor linguistic complaint: I’m a fan of Ken Watanabe, but his accent was difficult to decipher at times.  The funny thing is, he had a large part in The Last Samurai, and I don’t recall having trouble understanding him at all back then.  Did he have a better dialect coach for that movie or something?

Congenial ambiguity: In all the forum posts I’ve read, the reaction has been remarkably similar.  When the film cuts before the top stops spinning, there were light chuckles all around our theater, too.  Why is it that people didn’t rage against the ambiguous ending, like the way so many did when The Sopranos silenced to black?  Is this good or bad?  You can take it either way, I suppose.  Perhaps the audience didn’t care enough about the characters or the movie to have a strong reaction.  Or perhaps they were content with not knowing, happy to leave the theater with a question mark.  Whatever the reason, I love the idea of all the people exiting the shared dream of the movie’s fiction with satisfied smiles on their faces.

It’s been a while since I had time to watch four movies over a weekend.  Movies are fun!  I should do this more often.  Some of these have been on the backburner for a while; we’re talking a couple of years.  These haiku are not exactly reviews, just reactions.

	The Hangover Not really sure why I didn’t find this film funny Old School, that I liked
	Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Chris “Charlie Nash” Klein when his nostrils flare out, they’re Holland and Lincoln
	Death Sentence Kevin Bacon is Charles Bronson with a conscience Still he kills a bunch
	Crank: High Voltage Ten times funnier than The Hangover, enjoy the Godzilla scene

Of the four films I saw, Crank: High Voltage was my favorite. It’s just a crazy movie from start to finish. I wasn’t a huge fan of the first one, but this one is a ten in my book.