New York, I Love You

This movie was about to expire on my Netflix Watch Instantly queue, which is my reason for watching it tonight rather than waiting for some other night when I might be in the mood to see something terrible.

Ok, "terrible" may not be the most accurate way to describe this amalgamation of short films but seeing as how romantic film is not ever at the top of my "must watch" list I am still confused as to how this even made it into my queue.

Speaking technically, most of the shorts were beautiful; New York City was done justice by these directors.  As to the writers... well... this subject matter just isn't my thing.  As a side note, I did think that Paris je t'aime was better overall.

HOP - Haywire and Contraband

This was sort of an unfortunate hop.  Not terrible across the board, but just bad enough to be considered unfortunate overall.


HAYWIRE - What a bad way to start off a happy fun night of hopping.  I literally cannot think of one good thing to say about this movie.  In fact, if I go into detail about all the really crappy aspects of this film we will both be here a while.  Instead, let's try a more concise, bullet-point format:

-       worst ADR ever, everyone sounded like they were in a different room from one another when speaking right next to each other

-       musical score did not match at all, it was “comedic heist” when the scene was simply “chick walks down street”

-       Gina Carano, the lead, seems to have been hired for her ability to kick things rather than any acting quality… overact much? makes sense when you look at her bio...

-        dialogue like "surrender now if you want to live" and (cut to extreme close on someone's face) "you better run" made it hard to take seriously

And don’t get me started on plot holes, or story aspects that literally made no sense.  Wait, I thought of a redeeming factor!  It was only an hour and a half long.

CONTRABAND – Giovanni Ribisi cracks me up.  No matter what role he plays, he always sounds like a cracked out gangster, and at least now in this film he is allowed to embrace his natural inclinations.  I have a love-hate relationship with Mark Wahlberg, admittedly mostly hate, but he wasn’t half bad here.  And I always love Ben Foster, even in his bad movies (of which I would not consider this one of them).  Compared with Haywire this movie was Oscar-worthy, but on a normal scale I would consider it solidly watchable.

Revolver

This is the type of movie that makes me feel dumb.  As if the filmmakers, in this case director Guy Ritchie and writer Luc Besson, are at genius level IQ and watching their film is like trying to read Tolstoy in Klingon.

The film starts off normal enough and as the viewer you think you get it, then before I knew it I found myself looking for loopholes and subplots and double-crossings, even going so far as to suggest that the film is a dream or weird hallucination.  At the very end of the film, as the credits roll, there are snippets of interviews with psychologists talking about the subconscious and the "ego"... to my credit I did take Psych 101, but that was at least five years ago and my memory of Freud and his theories is shaky at best.

Anyway, I have gotten sidetracked.  Bottom line, if you want to challenge yourself and your creativity then watch this film.  Ritchie is clearly making a statement about peoples' preconceived notions and expectations, leaving an infinite void you could fill with analyzation and interpretation.  Perhaps you remember more of freshman year psych than I do...  

The Debt

This was a good movie.  Well, up until the geriatric fight at the end, but other than that... Solid acting, captivating plot, and quality storytelling mixing together both past and present.  Would have liked a little more Sam Worthington, but Helen Mirren and her movie counterpart Jessica Chastain, were quite compelling as the female lead.  I finished watching the film wanting more... more of the story, more of the characters, I wanted to go deeper into their psyche and how they were affected by the difficult task handed to them.  It was top notch, I just wanted more of it haha

Incendies

Not sure why it has taken me so long to write this post, having watched this movie at least a week ago; maybe I just needed the additional time for processing...

Since this gripping film takes place primarily in the Middle East, I never would have guessed that the film itself is Canadian in origin.  But that factoid aside, I have to say that Incendies was not an easy watch (and let me just clarify that I am referring to content, not anything negative to say about the actual filmmaking). Most of the time I pick up rather readily on film cues and foreshadowing, but I will be the first to admit that I did not see the end of this film coming until it was right on top of me.  The story is engrossing, sometimes touching, but more often in a you-know-the-trains-are-about-to-collide-but-can't-look-away sort of way.  You know as the film progesses that all signs point to something quite shocking being revealed, and your curiosity strains at the bit.

Incendies is not an easy watch, but it is a wholly worthwhile one.

Blow Out

This film, directed by the great Brian De Palma, has an odd feel about it.  While watching, I had trouble really grasping if this was supposed to be some kind of parody or if the film was expected to be taken seriously!  Mainly because the script/acting was so terrible... very sad for John Travolta.  BUT then it hit me - Antonioni's Blow-Up!  This 1966 film is about a fashion photographer who discovers he has caught a murder of a young woman on some film he shot in a park, while the 1981 movie makes Travolta a film sound recordist who is recording late one night and discovers that a car accident was in fact a murder.  Both movies are about the innocent bystander who gets caught up in a conspiracy after unwittingly capturing a murder on his professional medium.  However, if I had a choice to watch only one, hands down Antonioni over De Palma.

P.S.  Worst poster ever hahaha

Abduction

I seriously considered writing off this movie and not posting about it, it is sort of embarrassing to admit to watching, but I promised myself I would post about every new movie I view, so here it is:

Going into this film I knew I had no love for Taylor Lautner, but I find it hard to resist the draw of any movie where "action" can be counted as one of its genres.  However, I seem to be on a roll here cause Abduction was just about as bad as Conan.  This Lautner guy is a really terrible actor!  You can clearly see the struggle on his face as he tries to decide if the acting moment calls for "angry face" or "sad face", or one of the three other face-options he has in his retinue.

But shoddy teenie-bopper acting aside, the rest of the movie did not hold up either.  Most noticeably, it appeared to be directed and edited by a first-year film student.  An untalented first-year film student.  John Singleton may have pulled it off for Shaft and Four Brothers, but seriously dropped the ball on this movie.  Maybe once he realized what he had signed on for, and who with, he figured no one would watch the dang thing anyway...

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

I saw the original 1982 version of this film ages and ages ago, and don't remember much about it other than minimal speaking, and Arnold.  But after watching this new version, I cannot imagine it was any worse.  This movie was so dreadful that I don't even want to waste time writing about it.  Ragging on a ridiculous bad movie is often fun, but this was so bad I am depressed and don't want to think on it any further.