I write this review a few days after seeing Knight and Day. Action-adventure is one of my favorite genres, so I was really excited to check this one out.
I already know it has become a flop and according to Wikipedia is the “worse [box office] result for an action film starring Tom Cruise in 20 years.” Well, I loved Knight and Day and can’t really put my finger on why it flopped. It was a light, fluffy action-film, with two A-list stars, with one of the great, active directors.
So who fucked up?
Well, let’s start with he story. The story is stupid and needs to be. Tom Cruise’s character, Roy Miller, and Cameron Diaz’s character, June Havens’, meet in an airport and ultimately experience a plane crash after Roy’s attempted assassination. Roy is a secret agent. Roy is after something. June gets involved. What is the something? Doesn’t matter. The story is about the romance and action, everything else is out of focus.
It is the ultimate Mcguffin. Google defines a Mcguffin as, “coined by Alfred Hitchcock, is a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but is otherwise unimportant.” Perfect definition. Think of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction or the stolen money in Psycho.
So we got a great popcorn set-up. What’s next: The flirtations between A-list performers Diaz and Cruise. They are great. They’re both beautiful people, in beautiful locations.
Hmm… maybe it was the director James Mangold? Nope. He’s a genius. This movie is beautiful, especially for an action film. The action takes place in front of the camera and the editing is totally reasonable. Bayhem editing is no where to be seen. Mangold is real talent. His 3:10 to Yuma is one of the better action films of the past five years.
Ugh. What then?! The special effects? They look sexy. A little too computer generated at moments, which is fine, but often the actors don’t look like they share the same space and time with the effects. But they work. Effects aren’t supposed to look real, they’re supposed to be sexy. They brought the sexy.
Hmm…marketing? Nope, I watched Diaz and Cruise do a live action stunt on TV to promote the film. Cool.
So what I break it down to is one of two things: Either Cruise and Diaz aren’t A-listers, which I accepted as a necessary truth, or producers can no longer release a huge blockbuster without a pre-existing audience.
I’m admittedly confused about this, because technically being an A-list actor means you already have a pre-existing audience. Kind of. But if this were true, Avatar wouldn’t go on to be a billion dollar film. Perhaps the genre had a pre-existing audience? Science-fiction does well these days and I imagine Inception will be a top twenty highest grossing film as well. (Another original work)
I guess what I take away from this “review” is that I sympathize deeply with the often vilified studio executive. Many of which get fired for flops like Knight and Day. When it is largely no fault of their own. Audiences complain that Hollywood doesn’t take chances, but in many ways I don’t blame them. This movie seemed like a guaranteed winner at the box office, it was not taking a chance, but flopped.
With Twilight and The Last Airbender coming out this week Knight stands little chance of regaining its footing at the box office. Maybe Cruise is considered too crazy and Diaz’s face too wrinkly. They have the combined age of 84. That is kinda’ old to be sexy.
Release Date: June 2010
Collin Says: B
You’ll Say: B+
By Collin, on June 25th, 2010
Karate Kid
Karate Kid, or Kung Fu Kid as it is called in Asia, is a beautiful film. It is also set in Beijing, which is a beautiful place. I’ve been to Beijing before and I would have thought that wide, sprawling shots of the city would look like a cigar bar. It makes you wonder how they got the shots through the smog. Maybe the air has been cleaner since the Olympics?
I liked this film a lot better than the first one. Throw me on the cross, but I did. I don’t like Ralph Maccio, I don’t like stupid eighties cliches, and I certainly don’t like the directorial style of the original Karate Kid, which might be called minimalist. Karate is also pretty lame, not enough ass-kicking involved. Yes, it was low-budget and likely invented the cliches I despise, but it doesn’t hold up. Avildson made two other famous films, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, both of which are wonderful and timeless. But enough about the original…
The new film stars Will Smith’s kid Jaden Smith, who blew my fucking mind as Dre Parker. I loved him in this role and might even go see future films solely on the grounds that Jaden is attached. He delivers big time in a movie where he occupies most, if not all, of the scenes. I read this article from CNN discussing people who have been slamming the little dude for riding the fame of his father into super-stardom. The article suggests that people are offended by the fact he’s cocky, self-assured, and outspoken. Really? Like REALLY? What other type of personality can handle the pressure of having to deliver on a forty million dollar production, set in another country, and acting across from one of the world’s biggest stars in Jackie Chan?
“Oh, he’s cocky.” No fuckin’ shit he is. If he wasn’t, he’d be in his trailer having nervous breakdowns vomiting every morning due to fear. This little guy plays a quick-talking, funny, emotionally vulnerable kid. While also bringing a physicality to the role that the original was missing.
Jackie Chan’s performance also surprised me. Jackie Chan is one of the world’s greatest action stars. He reinvented martial arts films by inventing comedy Kung Fu movies. I was disappointed that Chan was relegated to toning down his tongue- in-cheek personality, a personality which made him a super-star. His performance is instead a tragic one, a mistake which remains the largest error with the film. I wanted desperately for him to punch someone and shake his hand comically in pain.
The cinematography of this film blew me away. The meticulous lens flares, the beautiful wide-shots, the fight sequences were shot with urgency, but not edited like a Michael Bay film. It was a lot of fun to watch a truly talented cinematographer nail the look of a film. And like I said, China is gorgeous and the filmmakers know it.
Another thing of note, the movie was made on a relatively reasonable, but not low, budget of forty million dollars. So many summer films feel obliged to spend over a hundred million dollars on a film to get a hit.
New plan: Keep the budget low, find great actors who don’t charge twenty million dollars a film, deliver a great story and visuals with camera techniques, not technolust, and you’ll have a hit.
Also, to answer critics of the film who take issue with the fact that it is called Karate Kid, when clearly they practice Kung Fu: Their criticisms are justified. In this article, Jackie Chan says this when considering what the film will be called: “Probably ‘Kung Fu Kid’ in China and ‘Karate Kid’ in America. Maybe a different title? I don’t know. But mostly we’ve called it ‘The Kung Fu Kid.’”
I think the filmmakers should have scrapped the Karate Kid name, taken it as read that they were making a sequel, and gone in the direction that it was a remake but with Kung Fu as the martial art. Then they wouldn’t get as many people crying heresy that they’re remaking a “classic.” They would have less people giving the film a 1 (1,500 people) on IMDB. Consequently, there are also 1,700 people who gave it a 10 and very few in between. Love it or hate it I guess.
Release date: June 2010
Collin says: B+
You’ll say: B
By Collin, on June 8th, 2010
Splice
I write this the Monday after Splice premiered in the United States to only 7 million dollars in box office sales. What a fucking shame. This only lends justification to executives who will only green light shitty horror films aimed at an immature audience. What immature audience you ask? Well, people who made My Bloody Valentine 3-D a 100 million dollar success, that’s who. Immature doesn’t mean young – it means fucking stupid. Stupid people think that movie is good, and smart people think Splice is good. Simple as that.
I hate being pompous, but when I saw Box Office Mojo’s numbers for Splice I became jaded. Splice is smart, twisted, and fucking brilliant. It even sold out a bit at the end to give the audience a few scares and some violence.
The film is directed by Vincenzo Natali the Canadian director of Cube, another smart sci-fi film. What I don’t get is why fans don’t come out and support these types of movies. People who like sci-fi films like this don’t need to have the movie marketed to them. They’re nerds and weirdos who are already surfing the net for the next crazy film. So why did this one not work out? 7 million in their big opening weekend means this film will likely fail and it doesn’t deserve to. It is smart, well acted by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, and technically sound. It involves a cool mutant that has been spliced together with human DNA and a cocktail of other genetic material. The mutant even looks kind of hot. There is freaky sex, gross out moments, and good special effects.
So what went wrong? Marketing? Laziness on the audiences part? Did Shrek steal some of the core audience? Or are American audiences incompetent and only go to see science-fiction with lucrative marketing tie-ins, as well as techno-lusting three dimensions
Release date: June 2010
Collin says: B+
You’ll say: B+
By Collin, on June 7th, 2010
The Secret in Their Eyes
Can a five minute sequence win an Oscar? Probably not. But one five minute, uncut, special effects sequence in The Secret in Their Eyes definitely wowed cinemaphiles the world over. It certainly made me scratch my head.
When I see Optimus Prime transform, I know how they did it: 3-D modeling and thousands of computers rendering complicated elements for months on end. Simple. That doesn’t mean it isn’t totally badass. It certainly is. But I love a little filmmaking trickery.
The chase sequence in this film is one most extraordinary scenes in past memory and is an odd combination of practical camera tricks, complicated camera tricks, and subtle CGI. Filmmakers around the world are obsessed with showing off what they can do with faked/real single shots. I’ve included a few of my favorite at the end of the article. Common viewers don’t really care about that type of shit though, so it really is just filmmakers winking at each other.
Moreover, The Secret in Their Eyes beat out White Ribbon for the foreign film Oscar. It isn’t hard to see why. White Ribbon is a challenging film. Its style is antiquated, complicated, patient, and meticulous. As is the craft of The Secret in Their Eyes, but Secret is much more accessible.
The film opens in the year 2000 where Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is writing a book about a murder/rape he investigated in the seventies. It is easy to tell that this investigation still haunts him over three decades later. It isn’t clear why. The film also opens with an extraordinary sequence of blurry images that push and pull out of focus as a man boards a train. It must have been done with green-screen or something. Shit is crazy.
Moreover, the film cuts back and forth from the modern era to the murder case. In the past Benjamin and his assistant Pablo (Guillermo Francella ) are two investigators who don’t seem to take their job too seriously. Or maybe they’re just not supposed to.
We get the impression early on that the rape case is not going to work out well. The investigators’ office is a sea of stacked documents, bureaucratic papers, and is just a chaotic atmosphere overall. Every time the phone rings, Pablo answers with a fictitious business name. He and Benjamin avoid doing work and speaking to people like they’re avoiding the plague. It almost seems like that is why they’re there, to avoid doing their job. Maybe it is?
Even when we meet the straight-edge Judge’s assistant, played by drop-dead gorgeous Soledad Villamil, we sense that avoiding work is commonplace, if not procedural. The director brilliantly frames shots of the stacks of documents with the characters in the film. As if the documents are characters themselves and the filmmaker is merely doing a subjective over-the-shoulder shot.
Then the murder/rape happens. The filmmakers do a good job to show how disturbed Benjamin is by this. Something in his mind clicks. He has to solve this murder. There are political undertones to this film which could almost be called didactic, but don’t worry, this is purely a whodunit.
But a truly spectacular whodunit. This type of film would never be made in the States. It is stubbornly patient and doesn’t allow the audience any clues to where it might lead. Its makers know the power of film language and what properly executed film techniques can say to an audience.
It is hard for me to say exactly what kind of tone the film takes. It is very Coen Brotherish with is combination of violence, comedy, suspense, romanticism, visual flair, and drama – all of which somehow mesh into one of the best films from last year. Regardless, at least rent the damn movie for the chase sequence – god damn – it is audacious.
Release date: Varied throughout 2009 and 2010.
Collin says: A+
You’ll say: A
My favorite long takes:
Tony Jaa giving boners to action lovers across the world in The Protector:
My hero Alfonso Cuaron and his emphasis on long takes in Children of Men:
My third choice was the Dunkirk scene from Atonement, but Youtube blocks them all from the United States, so I feel obliged to at least link the beautiful song playing during that scene.
The last, and by far my favorite: Y Tu Mama Tambien
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