The Film Thugs Movie Show

Based on the recent Uruguayan film La Casa Muda, filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau bring us Silent House. The story revolves around a young woman, her father and uncle cleaning out her childhood country home in preparation to sell. Employ the device of “damned squatters” into the script and you now have reasons for boarded up windows, electricity on the fritz, and “Lock all the doors behind you, missy! Those dammed squatters could be dangerous!” Uh huh, I didn’t buy it either. Much like the pair’s previous work Open Water, this film is one big conceptual gimmick. No water or sharks this time just 88 minutes of what is constructed to appear as one continuous shot. Master filmmaker and Film Thugs patron saint Alfred Hitchcock used this same technique in Rope. I served with Rope, I knew Rope, Rope was a friend of mine. Silent House, you're no Rope. This flick doesn’t waste much time getting started or getting dark either. The uncle goes into town, a bump is heard upstairs, Dad gets a bump in the head and we’re off to the races. Our girl, portrayed quite well here by Elisabeth Olsen (yes, sister to the same Olsen’s), is then stalked about the darkening house by who the hell knows to partially good effect until we all hit our collective heads on the door frame of explanations - big dumb explanations. My major complaint lies not with the acting in Silent House but rather with its execution. The other performances are serviceable and Olsen is really quite compelling in her role. My bitch is with the lack of scares. This is essentially a “haunted” house walkthrough. Give the audience some gags! If you want to enigmatically weave a horrifying story of childhood trauma, there is always Lifetime Movie Network. You’ve got 88 minutes of device to spook the hell out the ticket holders to the point that they run out to tell their friends what a great and scary time they all had. Hopefully, those folks will then fill the next showing’s seats. This picture does not get the job done. The movie does have a few moments but nothing that will keep anyone talking or any more money coming in. Silent House believes itself to be smart and scary but ultimately it is neither. - Clarkson Campbell

Drive

Have you ever gone to the video store with no real idea of what you want to watch and just wandered until something caught your eye? Not a new release, but a catalogue movie hidden deep within the stacks of forgotten film. Maybe it’s one of those movies from your childhood that you’ve meant to watch but just never got around to and you decide to give it a go. Then you get home and put it on and are greeted by a wave of nostalgia. Remember when movies looked like that? Remember when action scenes were shot that way, or opening credits looked like that, or the music that sounded like it did, or any number of other things that transport you back to years ago?

That is what I felt like watching “Drive.” Right off the bat I felt like I was watching a movie Michael Mann directed in the mid 80’s and just forgot about until this year. This film is quiet, moody, exquisitely shot, and captures the visual and emotional aesthetic of my childhood.

The story is simple; Ryan Gosling is a stunt driver who sidelines as a getaway driver. He has a code (You don't need to know the route. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own.), he has a small circle of trusted allies, and he does not venture one step outside of either one.

Until he does… and then things get complicated.

I could go on, but I won’t. Needless to say, there is nothing more dangerous than a man with a code who gets pushed too far.

What I find most beautiful is that this is a movie that someone filed a lawsuit over. A woman tried to sue because:

– Drive was promoted as very similar to Fast and Furious, when in actuality, it wasn’t.

– “Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film, for reasons including but not limited to Drive having very little driving in the motion picture.” (emphasis mine)

That’s right, for some reason a person tried to sue because a movie wasn’t ENOUGH like Fast and Furious. I have always thought the opposite would be more appropriate. However…

“Drive” is an outstanding movie, but I can completely understand someone not loving it, unless it is for the reason above. It’s has a very measured pace, there is a lot of silence, and it doesn’t follow a traditional hero’s journey. It’s about an uncomplicated man with uncomplicated goals who has to deal with complications.

To simplify, this movie is the child of Michael Mann’s “Thief” (the visual style and some character elements), Walter Hill’s “The Driver” (narrative and character elements), and Jean-Pierre Mellville’s “Le Samourai,” (overall style and feel). If you know of and like any of these films, then you will probably enjoy “Drive,” and vice versa.

The best way to sum it up is to say that this film isn’t what you expect. Even if you think you know, you really don’t. It’s measured and brutal, but quiet and tender at the same time. It is technically brilliant (the lighting and shot composition are jaw dropping), the acing is… I don’t even know where to begin. I could not name the best performance in this. Gosling is unbreakably solid as “Driver,” Bryan Cranston shows why he is an Emmy factory as Gosling’s mentor/agent, Albert Brooks upends every expectation you have for him as the brutally efficient crime boss, Ron Pearlman takes his creepy asshole character to another level, and Carey Mulligan provides enough innocent kindness to offset the brutality of Gosling’s world.

Nicolas Winding Refn is a master of atmosphere. His earlier works (“Valhalla Rising,” and “Bronson”) are clinics in measured pacing and immersive mood. With “Drive” he takes his work in a different direction and does so with incredible mastery. His movies are not for everyone; he makes measured, moody films that breathe and give you time to think. If this sounds good, then check it out. If not, be forewarned and don’t try to sue anyone.

In the world of screenwriting there are a lot of rules and guides. A lot of them are just basic narrative theory re-branded and given a catchy name so that they can be turned into one of countless books on the subject. There are a metric ton of these books even though they all say basically the same thing.

Basically, a standard, narrative script breaks down like this

Exposition- Introduce the who and the where

Inciting Incident- Something happens that starts our hero on his quest

Rising action- All the stuff that happens as our hero becomes a hero

Climax- The problem introduced in the Inciting Incident is solved

Falling action- How is everything immediately after

Dénouement- How does it all turn out

Now, this is not the only way to tell a story, but it is a very solid guide. You don’t have to follow page counts or anything like that, but if you look at most good movies or novels or stories in general, they follow this basic structure. Not to say that the writers are hacks or unoriginal or formulaic or anything like that, but stories do have a structure that makes them work.

There are some other rules like…

Don’t have voiceover that tells us what we just saw or are about to see.

Don’t use voiceover in place of actual plot or character development. Let us see things develop, don’t just have people talk about it.

Enter every scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Basically, don’t waste time.

Each scene and character needs to have meaning to the story.

Don’t have people talk about things that you could show instead.

There are a lot more, but these are just a few of the myriad guidelines for writing a good story. And, the are just a sampling of the guidelines completely ignored by the writers of “Green Lantern.”

I put off seeing this thing for a while because it looked God-awful. Really, did you see the ads for this thing? They reminded me of the Cherry Dr. Pepper ads they did with Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas. I didn’t know if their goal was to entice me to purchase a product, or to completely recoil in horror. But I decided that I couldn’t pass judgment without having seen it.

That being said… it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Some of the performances were pretty good, some of the visuals were pretty cool, and as a first draft of a script it was passable. I could honestly see this script reworked and honed into a really solid and entertaining movie. Sadly, they didn’t choose to do that. They chose to film a rough first draft. And therein lies the problem.

Were I to teach a class on how not to write a script, I would use “Green Lantern” as my guide.

The story telling is amateurish, poorly developed, and dull. The movie clocks in at 114 minutes, which is not a bad run time, except that there is maybe 80 minutes worth of actual movie in it. I don’t mind longer movies, but there had damned well better be reason for the time. Take “Captain America: The First Avenger,” for example. It was 10 minutes longer, and while it wasn’t great, it used all 124 minutes. Yeah, it had problems, but it didn’t waste your time.

What do I mean? Well, at 114 minutes there is enough time to develop your back story, set up your protagonist, flesh out your antagonist, and get your story rolling. In this film they relegate the entire back story to voiceover, then throw you into the middle of an unclear. And so that I am clear, the scene is unclear BECAUSE of the voice over. How much time has passed since the events of the voice over and the start of the movie? Wouldn’t the story be better served if we saw Parallax become this bad guy? Then we could see him lose to Abin Sur, be imprisoned. Then we could have some real development of the bad guy and he could be something more than “big ball of evil pollution in space.”

Speaking of, why were the Lanterns at his prison in the first place? There was no reason given at all. They showed up and facilitated his escape because the story needed him to escape. Other than that… no reason.

Speaking of no reason, what was the purpose of Hector Hammond? He is set up as being a quasi-antagonist, but he doesn’t serve any real purpose. At the beginning he is completely benign and somewhat of a loser. Then he is infected by the big bad guy and becomes… well kind of grosser and… I am still unsure why he was there. He does some sporadic mind reading, uses his powers for… well, general mayhem, but ultimately he doesn’t serve any real purpose. Were you to remove him from the plot entirely it would have little impact on the plot, except that there would be a few action set pieces missing.

Then there is Hal Jordan. In the world of Green Lantern, this guy is the homecoming king. But in this version there almost no time spent developing him. He is a bit of an asshole who takes unnecessary risks (One of the first things he does is use his wingman as bait in a training exercise, then does nothing to capitalize on the situation. To be clear, he lets his partner get shot out of the sky for no reason at all. Yeah hero!? Then we see him freeze up under pressure and are given to believe it has something to do with his father. Oh, and the father flashback… was it supposed to be funny? Because it was. Not in some, “oh look at me, I’m so cool laughing at an emotional moment” but in a “this is so very earnest and over the top in its attempted emotional manipulation that it is now the most genuinely funny thing I have ever witnessed” way.

For some reason this is followed up with a Jordan family scene that doesn’t really serve any purpose and isn’t referenced in any way at all again.

All this leads to Hal being chosen as a member of The Green Lantern Corps, a sort of intergalactic police force powered by a the force of will. It’s a really cool idea, but it’s handled kind of shoddily.

Incidentally, the first thing Hal does with the ring is to beat up three guys who he got fired earlier in the day by being a bit of a showboating prick. So, he costs these guys their jobs, and then uses the almighty power of “will” to throw a beating on them. I’m oddly ok with this. Oh, and he costs this company a military contract that they later are celebrating getting…. So, there’s that.

Hal is taken to the home planet of the Lanterns where he is told that he isn’t really good enough. They train him for about two hours, then he quits but keeps the ring. This is followed by some more scenes that are unnecessary….

You know what, it’s just bad. Ok. I mean, I could sit here and go on and on about how poorly constructed, unnecessary, convoluted, and full of plot holes it is, but what’s the point. I don’t want to write that, and you don’t want to read it. Actually, read this. He did a much better job than I could. This is an “and then” movie. Scenes start and stop for no reason, events don’t build, motivations aren’t made clear, and there is no attempt made at dramatic tension or personal growth (because you have to have development for there to be growth).

Here’s how it should look. This happens, therefore this has to happen, but then something else happens, therefore this has to happen.

Things build, situations change, people react. This makes for a tight story that moves.

“Green Lantern” looks different. This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens… then it’s over.

Nothing builds, scenes are unnecessary, people act because they have to for the story to move forward. This makes for turgid, boring, and dull filmmaking.

Here’s how it breaks down. If you are interested in the cinematic equivalent of an unemotional fireworks show, you could do worse. Just be warned, there are a lot of really dull talking scenes between the pretty pictures.

This movie is like Ike Turner. Ike was married between 5 and 13 times (depending on your sources) and was known to be an abusive prick. Yet, after Tina, there were still 12 women willing to marry him. Basically, that is Green Lantern. No matter how many bad reviews it gets, there are people who are going to want to see it.

So, embrace the mediocrity and enjoy. Just don’t kid yourself that it’s anything more than a few flashy computer effects, because it isn’t.

Cowboys and Aliens

High concept is a hard term to pin down. At one point it was basically just one movie mixed with another movie, or a concept from one film placed in a different location. The beginning of Robert Altman’s “The Player” is full of high concept pitches. “It’s like ‘Ghost’ meets “The Manchurian Candidate,’ but funny, and with a heart in the right place.” “Well, ‘funny political,’ doesn’t scare me ‘political political’ scares me.”

For years “Die Hard” was the benchmark of the high concept.

It’s “Die Hard” on a cruise ship!!! Or…

“Die Hard” in a high school!!! Or…

“Die Hard” on a mountain!!!

Then it morphed into an idea that could be communicated in one or two sentences… that blows your mind!!!

Imagine a world where everyone tells the truth all the time, and nobody is capable of lying. Then, one day, a man tells the first lie.

A by the book cop gets a rouge partner who plays by his own rules.

There are a bunch of snakes on a plane.

A seemingly harmless thing becomes a murderer.

High concept doesn’t mean bad, far from it. High concept is just a BS marketing idea that is pushed as if it has some sort of substance. It is, essentially, distilling a movie down to its most basic elements. I’m not even talking plot, I’m talking situation.

Yeah, “Die Hard,” can be described as ‘tough cop on the loose in a building full of terrorists,” but that doesn’t really describe it. It’s more ‘tough cop who is on the outs with his wife is running free in a building where a group of terrorists are holding a group of people, including his wife, hostage in an attempt to pull off a massive heist, and said cop is the only person who realizes what is going on and has to stop them in order to save the lives of all the hostages and hopefully his marriage as well.” There is a lot going on there.

Bad high concept is when there is little more than the situation. What does this have to do with “Cowboys and Aliens,” you ask…

I am going to approach this review differently. About a year ago Brad Brevet wrote this fantastic article “Top Ten List of Worst Excuses Made for 'Bad' Movies,” that I will be referencing during this review, as I can already hear people gearing up to discredit my opinion with almost all of these.

1) "YOU JUST DON'T GET IT."

That might be the case, but what was there to get here? The plot didn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, there are aliens who came here to steal our gold and kidnap people for some reason that has something to do with experimentation. A guy gets away with one of their steam punk laser bracelets and all hell breaks loose.

You’re right. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why they were taking people in the first place. I didn’t get why Daniel Craig was wanted for the murder of a woman when, as the movie clearly shows, there is no evidence of her being murdered. I didn’t get it because it made no sense. What was the point of Harrison Ford’s son other than to force attention to Daniel Craig and kick the plot off?

Your right, I didn’t get it.

2) "IT'S NOT AS BAD AS PEOPLE SAID."

It kind of was.

3) "YOU HAVEN'T READ THE SOURCE MATERIAL! YOU'RE NOT JUDGING IT PROPERLY!"

OR… YOU CAN'T JUDGE IT BASED ON THE SOURCE MATERIAL. THE BOOK IS ALWAYS BETTER!

OK. My bad. I thought it was a movie, but I am apparently wrong. Precisely what part do I need to get a clearer understanding of? The cowboys or the the aliens, because neither one made much sense.

4) "YOU WENT IN WANTING TO HATE IT!"

Actually, I did not. You see, when looking at a movie called “Cowboys and Aliens,” I thought, “Wow!!! This is going to be so much fun!” I LOVE cowboy pictures and enjoy sci-fi movies. This seemed like a really good idea that I could easily love.

The problem is, it wasn’t good. I was bored out of my mind. All I wanted was a fun movie with cowboys and aliens in it. What I got was a boring movie with cowboys and aliens in it.

5) "YOUR EXPECTATIONS WERE TOO HIGH."

They really were not. It’s called “Cowboys and Aliens” the only expectation I could have had going into this was “Man, this is gonna be a hell of a lot of fun!!!” Not to repeat my point too much, it wasn’t fun.

So, at this point I think my chief complain should be clear. This movie was a boring, confusing mess. It starts out with a bit of promise, but then a majority of the potential is just dropped and it becomes a run of the mill “men on a mission” film. Except that it isn’t. It becomes a collection of slow, unnecessary expository scenes that culminate in one of the oddest final battles I’ve ever seen.

Question:

Why do aliens that have mastered interstellar travel, laser based weapons, electromagnetic mining (?), and countless other high tech devices, why do they run into battle naked? These are incredibly technologically advanced beings that are inexplicably primitive naked dog men. They have flying ships that shoot lasers, why are they running naked and unarmed into a group of people firing guns at them. I don’t care how many lasers or space ships you have, if you are naked… odds are you will feel the impact of the bullets.

This move was an absolute tee ball home run gone wrong. You are combining two of the most storied and beloved genres in history. This should be a no-brainer. But somehow we get this. How?

Well, let’s take a look at a part of the IMDB page to shed some light on this.

Writing credits

(WGA)

Roberto Orci (screenplay) &

Alex Kurtzman (screenplay) &

Damon Lindelof (screenplay) and

Mark Fergus (screenplay) &

Hawk Ostby (screenplay)

Mark Fergus (screen story) &

Hawk Ostby (screen story) and

Steve Oedekerk (screen story)

8 writers. EIGHT!!! And that is just the credited rewrites. You have to show a 50% contribution to a screenplay to get credit, so that means even if everyone was working in pairs you have 4 groups of people rewriting at least half of this script. How can you expect a well paced, coherent narrative when you have the creative equivalent of the game “Telephone,” being played.

Sadly, this is the problem with a lot of the big budget movies coming out these days. Instead of focusing on one solid story you get a bunch of writers fighting to get their name on the project so they can make some more money on it. Not that I can fault them, I mean it’s a job. So you get one guy who thinks that having a lot of Harrison Ford’s son seems cool, and another who thinks that adding more with Adam Bench would underscore things better. Then another person thinks that it would be great to include the Sheriff’s grandson… and not really spend any time discussing why his parents aren’t there. This movie is rife with subplots that don’t go anywhere, characters who don’t really need to be there, and scenes that take WAY too long, and suddenly what started as a really cool concept with potential to be a really fun movies, instead becomes a rudderless, incoherent, and worst of all booring mess.

Super 8

Some movies are victims of their own hype. Don’t get me wrong, some over hyped films are still amazing and reach their levels of over exposure due to their quality. Films like “The Dark Knight,” “Terminator 2,” and “The Matrix,” all had unrealistic amounts of buzz surrounding them. But they endure because they are fundamentally good movies.

Hype in general tends to make me shy away from films. I didn’t see “Trainspotting” until it was out on video for months because for me it had become less a movie and more a series of posters that guys in the dorm had because it made them seem deep and interesting. But when I finally saw it I understood where the hype came from.

I think the problem with film hype is when it comes from the wrong place. There are some movies that attempt to build buzz by pushing things that are completely irrelevant to what the film is. Studios attempt this all the time and are, more often than not, unsuccessful with it. This is why you hear things like…

“From the studio that brought you…”

“From the producer of…”

“From the mind of…”

“From the visionary mind of…”

Hell, even “Death to Smoochie” was pushed as being “From the twisted mind of Danny Devito…” which is officially in the running for best sentence ever used on TV.

But really, what does all this have to do with the film itself? Does the studio really matter? How about the producer? Is there another place that a story comes from, or do we really need to specify mind?

It always reminds me of a Wayne’s World sketch from SNL when they were talking about the ads for “Carlito’s Way,” that flashed Pacino’s screen credits.

“Serpico,”

“The Godfather”

“Dog Day Afternoon,”

“Yeah, I noticed they didn’t say ‘Cruising.’”

Trying to push a movie like this is odd. Especially when you are using something that is not really tied to the person in question’s specialty.

So when “Super 8” came out and it was hailed as being “Produced by Steven Spielberg” I had my doubts.

Make no mistake, Spielberg is… well, he’s Spielberg. He is one of the undisputed masters of American cinema. He’s like Athena; he just sprang from the head of Hollywood fully formed and amazing. But has anyone ever hailed his producers talent? Not that he isn’t a great producer, but it’s like Bruce Willis’s band. No matter how good he is at it, you will never see him as a rock star (Note that I didn’t use “Billy Bob Thornton” and “The Box Masters” on this one, because I know he’s touch about his film and music career being mentioned together.).

So we have Spielberg as a producer, which is fairly meaningless in terms of anything other than being able to put Spielberg’s name on the film, and J.J. Abrams on as director.

Abrams is an interesting selling point because he is far more successful as a producer. Yes, he is a writer and a director, but his big successes have come from his producer work.

Don’t get me wrong, they are both accomplished in their respective roles, but it felt very much like there was an attempt to make this movie based on the names, and just the way people were used in this film… I don’t know.

Add to it that Abrams kind of has a problem with the third act. If you look at his work up to this point he had “Felicity,” about witch I know nothing other than it has a woman named Felicity in it (Or it is a meditation on the subject of Happiness. I don’t really know.), “Alias,” which started off really strong, got stronger, and then kind of fell completely apart, “Lost,” which was… well, I watched a few episodes of it, but I picked up very quickly on the “we have no idea what to do with this story and are making it up as we go along” aspect of it (I know it’s cliché, but it is also true.), and “Mission: Impossible 3,” which I thought was fantastic (Though a bit “Alias”-ey, but without Jennifer Garner in lingerie.), but it did start to lose its grip in the final third.

So, we have one of the masters of visual storytelling producing a fantastic producer who has issues with third acts on a film with an advertising campaign that stressed ambiguity. Let’s just say I wasn’t overcome with desire to see it.

But, I recently relented and decided to check it out, and I was pleasantly surprised.

On the surface it’s kind of a harder edged “E.T.” You have a child centered narrative, a mysterious alien, and an overwhelming authoritarian governmental intrusion. There isn’t the same sense of innocence here though. These kids live in a very real world where very bad things can and do happen. They still have the childlike wonder and all, but it is tempered with more reality than Eliot’s world was.

We have a group of kids working on a super 8 horror film for a competition who sneak out one night to use a passing train to add production value to their film. They see something they shouldn’t have and things progress from there.

There are a lot of good things going on here. The acting is fantastic. I normally cringe at adolescent actors because they tend to do kind of a half assed approximation of how kids their age act. That is not the case here. All the kids actually come off as real people reacting to their world in a believable way. It’s pretty amazing. Kyle Chandler knocks it out of the park. Yes, there are some echoes of Coach Taylor (If you don’t get that reference, stop reading and go watch all of Friday Night Lights. It’s ok. I’ll wait…. See, wasn’t he amazing?), but that’s not so much him as it is the part. It’s a guy who is similar to Coach Taylor, but isn’t Coach Taylor. It’s a slight distinction to make, but it’s there. The overall plot is interesting and well delivered as well.

There are some nagging points though. Ron Eldard shows up as the father of Elle Fanning’s (Who shows that Dakota isn’t the only member of that family with talent.) character and provides a kind of anticlimactic plotline. Chandler’s character hates him, and it is established early on that he is in some way connected to the death of Chandler’s wife (The mother of our protagonist.). But the back story they develop is weak and not compelling, thus making some of the later plot developments less powerful than they should be.

This film is odd because I though it was a good film but I felt like there were a few points that could have been fine tuned to make it a great film. If you are a fan of sci-fi it is definitely worth your time, but you don’t have to love sci-fi to like it. There is a very human story being told here that is very accessible. In the end, I think this film would have been better served by downplaying the producer/director wunderkind connection. Sometimes, letting the story stand on its own is a better way to go.