Another round of capsule reviews; I’m off to a conference soon, and hopefully August will provide an opportunity to return to Hogwarts for the last time. For the record, I’m all superheroed out – I blame it on “Chinatown”. I’m not seeing “Green Lantern”, “Captain America”, etc – I hope I can manage some excitement for “The Avengers” next year. (More on my ‘disinterest’ in a forthcoming post.)
For now, let us talk about technology and magic.
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| Image: www.old-computers.com |
David Fincher’s “The Social Network” is, for most of its running time, testament to the filmmaker's ability as master visualist. I’ve followed Fincher with great interest through his masterful “Seven”, his commercial efforts such as “Panic Room” and the impressive, intelligent anti-serial killer serial killer movie “Zodiac”. Now that the hype has died down and the Oscars are all but a distant memory, “The Social Network” is a nearly brilliant film that’s not quite on par with Fincher’s best efforts. In telling the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (a chilling Jesse Eisenberg), Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin make for a mostly riveting narrative that constantly plays friends and enemies off of one another. The film’s opening scene – a date gone wrong – is the key to the whole film, and ignites the film with such energy that the slowed down third act disappoints, especially given the over explanatory ending. Kudos to Reznor and Ross for an immersive ambient soundtrack.
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| Image: www.absoluteanime.com |
Kim Ji-woon’s “A Tale of Two Sisters” (2003), an atmospheric ghost story, is my least favourite of his films due to its predictability and unnecessarily delayed ending. That said, it’s still a good supernatural thriller where Su-mi (Su-jeong Lim) and her sister Si-yeon (Geun-Young Moon) return to the dark home their father shares with their stepmother. All the characters seem slightly skewed from the get go, and the house itself, where most of the action is set, is scarily underlit. Unlike in the indulgent “I Saw the Devil”, Ji-woon makes good use of silence and a slow pace to ratchet up the tension. (The was recently remade as the American “The Uninvited”, unseen by me.)
Park Chan-wook’s “Joint Security Area” (2000) starts off like a typical military thriller – remember “Basic”? “The General’s Daughter”? – when a bloody crime is committed in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. The usual outsider figure, here a female investigator, Sophie Jean (Yeong-ae Lee), is commissioned to investigate why Sgt. Su-Hyeok (Byung-hun Lee) killed four men. The film introduces an unexpected humanity in its second and third acts, and by the end the film has shifted from taut thriller (despite some terrible accents as some European actors attempt English) to a surprisingly moving drama. Fans looking for an earlier version of “Oldboy” will be sorely disappointed.
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Jim Caviezel stars as a humanoid alien in Howard McCain’s culty SF-adventure “Outlander” (2008). Kainan (Caviezel) crashes his spacecraft in a lake close to a Viking village. Yes, a Viking village. At first the natives do not trust him and believe him to be a spy for their tribal opposition, but slowly Kainan wins over their ruler (John Hurt in the Pained Elder Anthony Hopkins role) and his feisty daughter Freya (Sophia Myles). Kainan knows that there is a greater threat to Viking existence than tribal differences: there is another alien, the monstrous non-humanoid Moorwen, who thrives on the flesh of the living and the dead. I could not resist “Outlander’s” charms – aliens and Vikings in the same movie! – but the film is ponderous and utterly formulaic. A DVD blurb calls it “Braveheart meets Predator”; the film pales in comparison to both those movies, though it’s much better than “Aliens vs Predator”. While the Viking setup looks convincing enough, the special effects, especially those constructing the Moorwen, are rather terrible. Most of the time it looks like the Vikings are up against a giant lizard that swallowed a whole lot of fireflies. At least there’s a drinking game: every time a character in “Outlander” refers to Kainan as “Outlander!”, take a shot. If the word is exclaimed particularly loudly, take two shots.
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Finally, Michael J. Bassett’s “Solomon Kane” (2009) stars James Purefoy (the randy Mark Anthony in HBO’s “Rome”) as an English soldier in the 1600s. Kane is responsible for some great victories in the name of his country, but these victories come at a price: Kane, you see, is a cold blooded, brutally violent killer, and he soon finds his soul damned to hell. After coming face to face with a representative of the devil, Kane valiantly tries to redeem himself and save his soul. When a great evil sweeps through England, Kane finds that you sometimes need evil to fight evil, and a return to his old ways is on the cards. Purefoy makes for an entertaining hero, while Bassett (adapting from Robert E. Howard’s source material) directs with an appropriate sense of scale and spectacle as befits the material. I haven’t had this much fun with dubious material since, well, the original “Conan” movies. The story is predictable but the cast pulls it off with such conviction, and the film is so clearly made with reverence for its protagonist and his supernatural-infused world, that I was spellbound for nearly two hours. There’s some solid character work from the late Pete Postlewaithe, and the villain is someone worth fearing. Note that the film’s particular religious inflection may offend some viewers.
