Film Review: St. Vincent

Bill Murray is something of an indie darling, so to see that he starred in 2014's St. Vincent was no surprise. I wouldn't be surprised if director/writer Theodore Melfi had the SNL alum and Wes Anderson favorite in mind when penning the screenplay about the grumpy, boozy codger and his grandfatherly relationship with a neighbor boy. It's good that Melfi snatched up Murray. I'm not sure how well the movie would've worked otherwise.

Beyond Murray, the casting is solid. Melissa McCarthy puts on an endearing performance as a struggling single mother, and Chris O'Dowd plays a smart-ass priest/teacher at a Catholic school. The strongest performer here next to Bill Murray is newcomer Jaeden Lieberher as a young boy named Oliver whose begrudgingly taken under the nicotine-stained wing of Murray's Vincent. He learns of the finer things in life from Vin, such as fighting and gambling. He even meets Vin's softer alter-ego, a man whose wife has forgotten who he is from the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease.

It's in the few moments we see of Vincent and his wife that we see a completely different character than the callous old dude in camouflage cargo shorts. He becomes a perfect gentleman. His behavior is so starkly different that it's hard to see him bounce back and forth between hardass to softie, but we can allow it only because of Murray's performance. We can't see Murray as the asshole the entire time because we know he's going to be alright at some point. There's some tension lost, but it's made up for in the genuine camaraderie that we witness between Vin and Oliver.

It's not a gamechanger, and the plot feels somewhat predictable at times, but St. Vincent is still a satisfying slice of movie that should be given a chance. It's not often you get to see Bill Murray pal around with a kid and a stripper.

I Laughed at a Sentient Sapling Dancing to the Jackson 5: Guardians of the Galaxy Review

Needs more Peter Serafinowicz.

By all means, it should not have succeeded. Andy Dwyer of Parks and Rec should not be a roguish space hero. The guy who made Super should not do a comic book movie. Vin Diesel should not be a tree. A talking, gun-toting raccoon should not work. And yet, in spite of all these and many other factors, this movie works even better than the rest of the Marvel catalogue. Yes, even The Avengers.

Guardians of the Galaxy is and isn’t a superhero movie. It’s an epic space opera that makes for a better Star Wars movie than the Star Wars prequels. Our Han Solo-type is out to make a buck and look what happens—he gets embroiled in a desperate attempt to save the galaxy from certain destruction. He even makes a few buddies along the way. And yet, somehow, all of this is happening in the same universe in which an eccentric arms manufacturer teams up with a Norse god, an irradiated strong man with rage problems, a thawed out WWII super soldier—maybe it’s not so crazy.

But the film itself is insane, or at the very least weird. A lot of effort went in to making this alien and spacy. We don’t need to be told this is in a galaxy far, far away. The images do it for us. Humanoids of varying shades and hues walk in the backgrounds and foregrounds, and the locales are peppered with utopian futuristic architecture and gritty spacer aesthetics. There’s an entire sequence that takes place in a dead giant being’s head that’s being mined out for its riches. It’s reminiscent of the magazine Heavy Metal if its content was toned down for PG13 audiences. It’s very much a comic book movie, and it’s perhaps the best at being that.

The movie serves as a further evidence that the Marvel film brand is stronger than ever and almost certainly stronger than D.C.’s. Marvel was willing to take a risk on an unproven intellectual property, knowing full well that if it fails they’ve got the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fall back on. Meanwhile, D.C. struggles to slap together a Batman and Superman movie without doing anything to string them together beyond keeping the same Superman actor. It’s this brazen confidence in Marvel’s property that no doubt supports Guardians’ success.

Chris Pratt does a fine job as Peter Quill, earth boy raised by space scavengers. He’s as hilarious as we’ve come to expect given his performances on Parks and Recreation and in The Lego Movie. Bradley Cooper plays the mouthy anthropomorphic raccoon Rocket who was not as annoying as I had expected. For a tree, Groot is surprisingly emotive, though more of that is owed to the animators and not necessarily Vin Diesel’s performance, though that’s not to say he did terribly. He did fine for a talking tree. Dave Batista plays our psychopathic strong man bent on vengeance, and for as angry and serious as he was, he chimed in with some great comedic moments for himself. The weakest performance here seemed to be Zoe Saldana as Gamora, due in part to her noticeably less frequent comedic timing than the rest of the characters. She plays the vengeful assassin lady admirably, but she doesn’t seem to have as much fun as the rest of the actors.

At the end, I’m left wondering how this film will merge with the rest of the MCU or if it even has to. Word is we have a sequel in the works for Guardians already, and while I’m happy to hear it, I’d be even happier if they keep it on that end of the galaxy and not ours. There’s so much more to see in Guardians’ self-contained universe. We could use a good space opera franchise right now, especially when we’ve been burned by other space opera franchises in the past. 

Unconventional and Improvised Weapons, The Sequel: A Review of The Raid 2

Now with less subtitle!

I was at friend’s apartment when his roommate emerged from his room with a face of satisfied exasperation. “What did you watch?” my friend asked. “The Raid,” the roommate said. Only a couple months later, the movie showed up in the Redbox near my apartment. I rented it, and then never returned it. They charged me full price for the movie. I was okay with that.

The Raid 2 I will be returning to the Redbox, but I hope to buy it later. As a sequel, it does everything it should: expands the scope of the film by upping the blood, multiplying the cast, and leaving the setting of the original. There are moments in the first movie that might make you cringe, but there are scenes that could make you outright queasy. And there’s a lot of them. For instance, in the The Raid, there’s a part where our protagonist Rama hides behind a wall from a machete-wielding thug. Suspicious of what might hide behind the wall, the thug stabs randomly. One stab grazes Rama’s cheek, and Rama must then wipe the blood off the blade as it’s retracted not to give away his presence. It’s a scene that works on multiple levels, but most importantly the fact that this is a wound that people can relate to. It’s not a terribly deep cut, and the pain is familiar enough that it might recall a memory to a previous cut. Cue the cringe.

None of that occurs in The Raid 2. The violence here is gritty but borderline fantastical compared to that of the original. It seems outrageous at times, but it’s mesmerizing to watch. There’s a scene in which a woman wearing sunglasses armed with two claw hammers takes out at least six men with Japanese daggers. The camerawork is intimidate since we’re on a subway train, and the woman makes liberal use of the claw side of the hammer. As you can guess, blood comes out in buckets during this scene, and it lasts all of about a couple minutes. The sounds, the close-ups of hammer claws buried into necks are harder to watch than in the first movie. Then again, The Raid 2 is more dangerous. The stakes are higher.

The Raid 2 is an immediate continuation of the first film. The traitor of the first film is seen at its beginning, and Rama is convinced to assist a cop with infiltrating a mob. His only qualifications for this are that he can kick a metric ton of asses and that he came out mostly unharmed from the titular raid of the first film. Of course, the cop makes a deal Rama can’t refuse: he’ll protect Rama’s wife and son. The wife is pregnant at the beginning of the first film. Rama is established as a family man both in trying to retrieve his gangster brother and saying reserved goodbyes to his pregnant wife. The family man angle is turned against him in The Raid 2, which makes Rama’s plight all the more engaging.

There’s even a running theme of distant fathers throughout the movie, as Uco vies desperately for his gangster father’s approval, a shabby hitman wants to reconnect with his son, and Rama stays in quiet contact with his wife. Due to this desire to introduce more plot and conflict, the film suffers at time in its pacing. At nearly two and a half hours, it’s a gamble to increase the exposition in a film that about dudes beating up other dudes, and the moments of downtime takes away that breakneck pace that we get in the original film. Also, dad conflicts are too convenient for a movie like this, but it helps to emphasize Rama’s concerns about staying alive long enough to be a dad.

Beyond fatherhood, Rama also evolves in fighting style. He takes on the persona of Yuda, a young hood who ends up in prison kicking the crap out of someone. He then befriends Uco, the heir of a crime family in Jakarta, in an attempt to infiltrate Uco’s syndicate. When not fighting, Rama comes across as an earnest worker doing the best that he can. However, when locked in combat, he becomes more brutal, nearly sadistic, than we see in the first film. In The Raid, he’s fighting for survival. In The Raid 2, there’s something else. It’s never clear if this propensity to violence is merely him maintaining his façade of Yuda, but it’s clear that we have a different Rama than in the first movie.

In spite of the film’s iffy pacing, The Raid 2 must be praised for its cinematography. Color palettes are played with in a noticeable and intriguing way. One setting in particular is saturated with red, giving the impression that the film is culminating to a bloody conclusion, which is accurate. That camera work has its moments of shakiness but it’s never in a nauseating way. There is, however, a car chase that does some bold moves with camera work in which the camera seems to fly into the passenger seat of a car but from a great distance in front of that car. A moment like that car chase reminds me why I was excited about the movie. The Raid 2 is the bigger, badder sequel that we thought we wanted. It’s still immensely fun to watch, but in trying to make more plot, it loses the charming relentlessness of the original. 

Chris Evans' Beard is Neatly Trimmed in the Post-Apocalypse: A Review of Snowpiercer

Let's play Count the Hatchets.

I often gauge the quality of a movie on how much it keeps me from breathing. The death of brain cells from lack of oxygen might play into that, but this is not a self-diagnosis of brain damage. To get lost in a movie so deeply so as to forget to do such an involuntary action as taking a breath is a hell of a thing to experience. It's a reminder that you're watching something special, maybe even important.

Snowpiercer is special. Usually when a movie captivates me so fully, it happens midway through. Peckinpah's Straw Dogs stopped my breathing in its final act as Dustin Hoffman defends his domicile from the horde of angry drunken Englishmen. The Evil Dead remake of 2013 had a similar effect. The original Old Boy's famed hallway fight didn't even let me blink. Intensity that locks you in and refuses to release you until it decides--that's what these movies share. That's what Snowpiercer has. And a lot more.

Snowpiercer is the marriage of South Korean film sensibilities and French graphic literature. Director Bong Joon-ho, best known for his monster-movie-with-a-message The Host, extracts some fine performances from Chris Evans, Octavia Butler, and Jamie Bell. All of whom play passengers damned to the back of the train carting the remnants of humanity for eternity. Song Kang-ho, lead from The Host, and Go Ah-sung portray a father-daughter pair of drug addicts. Their relationship is genuine and heartwarming without verging onto the sentimental. The strongest performance by far comes from the villainous mouthpiece for the front of the train--the upper crust of society--played by Tilda Swinton. She brings a religious zeal to her character that really drives home the idea that there's a spiritual necessity for an established class system.

It is in this class system we find our strongest conflict: back vs. front, lower class vs. upper class. Out of this conflict, we get some mesmerizing fight sequences. The progression almost plays out like a video game: the ragtag group of caboose dwellers must make their way through several train cars, each one with a different purpose and aesthetic. Their first destination? A prison car. The next? The water treatment car. The further up the line, the cleaner and brighter the cars get. The contrast between rear and front emphasize that the front folk live in a facade, completely oblivious to the plight of the rear.

The first push towards the front immediately reminded me of Old Boy's hallway fight: tight quarters and improvised weapons. Only here, the close quarters are emphasized with tight shots convulsing with the train rumble and the desperate push towards control. Here's where I stopped breathing. The tension builds as we see the characters go through a routine we've already seen play out twice. We know things are a little different as they've dragged barrels out from the rear. When the timing is right, the revolt goes off like a short fuse.

There is some philosophical meat to chew on, and nothing terribly subtle. Thinly-veiled allusions to order and necessary placement appear as if they're meant for meditation but in truth feel more like glorified elements of foreshadowing. That's not to say that they're intellectually unstimulating. In spite of their overt presentation, the ideas of class and order are expressed in bleak but uncertain terms. In keeping with a dystopian spirit, those in control may be brutal but not completely malevolent; they believe in order and its need to keep things in line. It's hard to sympathize with those at the top, but we're not meant to.

In accordance with the Netflix method of rating movies, I give Snowpiercer four stars ( * * * * ), meaning, "I really liked it."