Saturday, August 27, 2022

The Long Walk (Bor Mi Vanh Chark)

 The Laos countryside fifty years in the future looks very much like the Laos countryside a hundred years in the past. A little future-tech intrudes into this impoverished pastoral every now and then - people have displays running on their arms, or pay for stuff by holding their wrists up to scanners - but other than that their houses are still rickety wood and wicker structures that might as well have been the same three (or thirteen) centuries earlier. They still struggle to eke out a living from subsistence farming, and sell their produce on a wooden stand on the roadside in the same way their ancestors have going many generations back.
 It's a shrewd, very real point in a movie full of very shrewd, very well observed moments.

 The Long Walk does have some science fiction elements, but they're used as a backdrop to a puzzle of a story that straddles the line between drama and horror (leaning heavily towards the drama side of things.)
 It's a quiet, smart movie that lets you figure out what's going on in your own time.

 An old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives on a small house on the outskirts of a village, making a meager living of selling bits and pieces he scavenges on the countryside. He's also able to see ghosts, one of which (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on the walk between his house to the village since he was a little kid.


 Saying more would edge into spoiler territory, as much of the joy in this film comes from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together yourself. Answers come slowly - ghosts don't talk, and the old man is pretty laconic - but they do come, and once assembled they resolve into an intricate, affecting character study that's spliced with a neat, thematically appropriate time travel story.

 Besides the ghosts you get a lot more blood than you'd expect, but as a horror movie it doesn't really go for scares. It's gorgeously shot with a lot of sun-drenched, verdant scenery, but when it goes dark it can be very effectively creepy. It's really hard to make a compelling film out of a script that holds back so much information for so long, so major props both to scriptwriter Christopher Larsen and director Mattie Do for pulling it off so beautifully.
 The acting is great. The Old Man oozes grief and resentment, making all the horrible decisions he makes a little more poignant and understandable, Ghost Girl does so much just with her eyes, and little kid is heartbreaking at points. (none of the characters are ever named.)

 I do have one problem with one of the plot developments, but guess it wouldn't be a proper time travel movie if it made sense.

 Saying that this is the best Laotian movie I've ever seen is not high praise, since I think it might be the only Laotian movie I've seen, but it's definitely one of the best movies I've seen this year. Absolutely recommended.

Firestarter

  I like Stephen King. The man has written a lot of crap over the years, but the quality of his good stuff more than makes up for any missteps; Hell, his first eight books alone are an incredible run of classics, lifetime pass material as far as I'm concerned. Included in those novels is 1980's Firestarter, a killer yarn about a prepubescent pyrokinetic and her telepath dad on the run from a shadowy government agency that is behind the experiments that caused their powers and considers them its property.

 It's not an easy story to adapt. What feels like the second half of a very long novel has the two main characters incarcerated and is mostly about psychological manipulation, which is never very cinematic. The infamous '80s adaptation is a snoozefest whenever there's no fire or George C. Scott on screen. But it's such a good novel, you'd think if they tried again with a proper budget and a smart scriptwriter this would work.
 Well, tough luck- this time around Firestarter was produced by Blumhouse with their usual shoestring budget, and it was shepherded to production and co-written by... Akiva fucking Goldman. Better luck next time. Maybe in another forty years.

 While the novel dropped you straight in the heat (ha!) of things, this adaptation starts things out with pre-teen Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and her parents (Zach Effron and Sydney Lemmon; They keep the mom alive for the first act here) living as a semi-normal family in the burbs.
 Charlie's fire powers are bubbling under the surface, though, and are getting harder and harder to control. It comes to head at an incident at school and The Shop is alerted to their presence.

 They choose to send agent Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) after them, who deserves special mention. He was memorably played in the '80s adaptation by George C. Scott in indianface with psychotic conviction and a serious hunger for scenery. Here he's... not as memorable. He's given his own telepathic powers this time around, and a history (he was kicked out of the organization, and before they call him in again he was working as a janitor. Umm... Badass?)
 We get treated to a pan through his loft-like digs, which... includes a drawing board full of childlike 'creepy' drawings - you know, the shitty horror trope they always use with possessed/demonic/haunted kids, but in this case drawn by an adult. It's original, I'll grant them that.

I think they're setting up his upcoming obsession with Charlie, but like everything
else in this movie it's undercooked to the point of being laughable.

 Also, how can he afford that apartment and all those boots on a janitor's salary? In this economy?

 Before The Shop sends rainbird after Charlie's family, though, we get a discussion on parenting a pyrokinetic child - should we have her bottle up her powers or, as mom says, teach her to use them? It's not exactly a riveting scene, and seems to maybe be setting up a running theme (parental fears of your kids doing things they'll regret or hurt them, maybe?)
 Except no, the mom was obviously right and after she's killed, dad starts showing little Firestarter how to start fires. Just the script wasting your time, again. Same with trying to teach her child responsibility: never kill people with flames, promise me, etc etc. You'd think that's important too, except nah. It's mentioned a couple of times later but isn't really important or anything and people are burned with abandon whenever the scripts needs it.

 So finally Firestarter and dad are on the run. We've caught up with the start of the novel!
 They crash on a poor farmer's house (they kept this bit in the previous adaptation, too), but the goon catches up, captures dad while Charlie hides out in the woods. Later, guided by visions Charlie finds The Shop headquarters and burns some fools, her dad dies, and she goes mental, burns everything and everyone.
 There's some head-scratchingly stupid business with Rainbird and then credits roll with the abruptness of an 80s movie.

 As a story, it's... bad. So fucking bad. It doesn't capture anything of what made the novel memorable, and the changes it makes are so inept and half-assed it's kind of embarrassing. The acting is all over the place, but honestly: much as I don't have a particularly high opinion of Zach Effron, I wouldn't blame him or any of the other actors. Not with the material they're working with.
 I mean, they have poor Charlie say "liar liar pants on fire" to someone before incinerating them. They even thought it was worth putting it in the trailer! Screw this noise.

 The music, provided by John Carpenter among others, is pretty good, but nothing special. Some of the fire effects are also cool, especially one scene where they're clearly using a flamethrower. Most of the other fire-heavy scenes are as underwhelming as the drama, due to obvious budget limitations. The filmmaking is indifferent, without any cool or memorable scenes.
 Respect is due to the makeup team, though: the burned flesh effects are effective and very painful-looking. The best scenes in the movie are easily the ones where lil' Firestarter has to deal with the aftermath of her firestarting of living things.
 As in The Innocents, there's a very cruel scene involving a cat. Dammit superpowered children, what do you have against cats? I hope they go all Sleepwalkers on your asses.)

 This never looked good, and yep, I can confirm that it fails to meet even the lowest of low expectations. Go watch The Innocents for your psychic kid fix instead. Or Carrie, or The Shining, or Midnight Special. Or even the 1984 version of Firestarter which at least has some really good pyrotechnics.
 Or, you know, just go read the damn book.

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Bullet Train

 It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as desperate to be hip and funny as Bullet Train. It fails on both counts. But more disappointingly, it doesn't deliver a lot of great action, either.

 This is specially disappointing, as it's directed by David Leitch, who with co-director Chad Stahelski led the western action film renaissance with John Wick (Fury Road came a year later and stole their thunder(dome), but that's no slight on their impact).
 Leitch went on to do Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 -both excellent- but this is far closer to Hobbs and Shaw: unfunny, bloated, and so fucking full of itself.


 Brad Pitt plays an operative code-named Ladybug who is sent to board the titular bullet train in Tokyo to retrieve a McGuffin stored somewhere on board. Brad Pitt's schtick (and everyone has a schtick here, it's that sort of movie) is that he's a kind goofball motormouth with a metaphysical, chronical run of bad luck, and a hard-on for self-help.

 The briefcase, it turns out, contains a buttload of money in bills and bullion to pay for the ransom of your stereotypical badass yakuza overlord's son. As it turns out, there's a few assassins, mercenaries and assorted miscreants on board the train, and most of the movie's overlong second act consists of untangling all the parties' motivations as the fight and make alliances with each other.

 Once the plot is untangled, then the movie finally settles down a little bit. With clear(er) motivations and on-track to a final confrontation against the big bad, the movie gets a lot better and finally delivers on some cool action, but by that point it's too little, too late.

 Because to get there you need to get through a gauntlet of cutesy humor and running gags (that name is doubly deserved here- they are run into the fucking ground!) delivered with an obnoxious grin and wink by a script trying so hard to be cool and clever that you can taste the flopsweat.
 There are some good gags in the mix, and some others that I appreciate on paper, but the miss-to-hit ratio of the jokes is unacceptable. The tone of the movie is even worse - it feels like it's pointing out every little thing it does and singling it out for praise. The script itself is built around fate and luck, which is fine but means that the plot is built around little connections and coincidences that the movie will highlight and then get back to with quick flashbacks when it comes up again. Like an annoying, eager-to-please kid showing you his... fidget spinner collection or whatever kids are into these days. And of course, if you think about details beyond the ones that the plot specifically set up it all comes tumbling down, but hey.

 I personally didn't find the action very appealing; it's gruesome, fun and it's always clear what's happening to whom, but a lot of the connective tissue within the fights seems missing- mostly I assume to focus on funny (or "funny") beats and a quick rhythm. I appreciate they're trying something new a bit outside the 87North signature style, but until some bits close to the end I just didn't think it was memorable at all. 

 There's a lot to like in this movie, even while it's being kind of insufferable. Pitt and Bryan Tyree Henry (PaperBoiiii!) are excellent and often funny even when saddled some truly dire lines, which is a testament to their talent and charisma. Zazie Beetz barely registers. Poor Hiroyuki Sanada (TwilightSamuraiiii!) just gets to look cool with a cane/katana combo and provide exposition, but he hogs all the best action scenes.
 The rest of the cast don't fare so well - Aaron Taylor Johnson is kind of annoying in a kind of James MacAvoy type role, and I really disliked Joey King as a teen sociopath. Happy to chalk that down to the script rather than the actors, as even the conceit for King's character is pretty lame.
 Oh, and we also get surprise Michael Shannon! He proceeds to Shannon things up admirably, but he's been better deployed elsewhere. 

Surprise Michael Shannon! is the best surprise.

 It's a handsome-looking movie as well, overtly artificial looking at times but you can at least tell they were going for an aesthetic. As with Deadpool 2, I appreciate when expensive special effects scenes are used to sell goofy slapstick jokes like Pitt banging his head against random objects in an extended slow motion (and CGI-heavy) scene. 

There are also some genuine moments of cleverness buried in the script - even an extremely cutesy and tiresome schtick where Tyree Henry keeps classifying others as Thomas the Tank Engine characters makes for some surprisingly fun twists in the story, but only after it's been used as exasperatingly as possible. And as mentioned above I did like the final act. Movies that end well are easier to forgive, but all in all this was pretty damn disappointing.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

The Innocents (De uskyldige)

  Kids can be the worst. I know two normal, mostly well-adjusted people who killed a bunch of baby chicks as kids - one with a hammer, the other by stomping on them with his new boots. Sometimes torture and murder seem like a good idea; Some kids don't know any better.

 The Innocents understands this. It should surprise no one that a Norwegian film with a premise that might sound a little like Stranger Things ends up being a deeply fucked up movie that, to put it mildly, does not shy away from some horrifying violence inflicted on animals, little children, and a couple of bystanders. But damn if it isn't a great movie.

 Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is a... morally challenged little girl (I'd go with little piece of shit) that is introduced as she's painfully pinching her autistic sister (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad)'s leg just to see if she can get a reaction.
 Her family is relocating to an apartment block on what seems like the outskirts of the city, and everyone else seems to be on holiday. As Ida explores her new place and environs and makes new friends the film does an outstanding job at capturing the feel -the uncanniness- of being a kid in a strange place. The focus drifts from kid to kid, and sometimes to the adults in their life with an impressionistic bent that reminded me a little of The Tree of Life.

 Soon she meets and becomes fast friends with Ben (Sam Ashraf), who shows her a neat trick: with a little concentration, he can  change the direction of falling objects just by concentrating on them. On a darker note, little Ida's moved on to doing some really horrible shit to her sister - out of boredom, curiosity, resentment... it's not like she's thinking these things through. And with Ben, who's a tiny ball of grudges and sociopathy, they work their way up to some light cat torture and murder.


doesthedogdie.com confirms this cute lil' fella does indeed die, and that it's (sic) very grafic.

 Meanwhile her autistic sister Anna establishes a connection with Aisha (,Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) another neighboring kid who has some empathic and telepathic abilities. When they all get together they seem to potentiate each other's powers. The rules for this. as befits a movie about kids playing around who don't see anything too strange with psychic abilities, are loose and ill-defined, but Anna is also revealed to have a mixture of telekinesis and other powers. She also starts to break out of her shell slightly, murmuring a few words and responding to the environment. Ben is the one most strengthened by all this, and he soon starts developing fun new powers like mind control... and using them in the sort of terrifying ways you'd expect from a budding little psychopath.

 The suspense here is outstanding. It's a violent movie, but its most effective, wince-inducing events either happen off-screen or as a quick flash of gore; they work particularly well because the movie carefully sets them up, either by piling on aggravating circumstances or by giving you all you need to do the math before it arrives at the result: You know this kid holds a grudge towards these football playing kids. You've been shown he can snap a thick stick in half with his mind. And now the camera following the football game is focusing on these kids' legs...
 And it's made even more unsettling by the film's willingness to linger on the physical and emotional aftershocks of its events. It's a cruel and unusual movie. Or, you know, cruel as usual for a Scandinavian movie.

  The movie -on paper- eventually resolves into a Stephen King-style showdown between the evil kid and the good kids, with Ida realizing maybe actions have consequences. But The Innocents remains steadfastly low-key, with an excellent subversion of a grand finale so subtle only kids notice that something's going on.

 Torture and murder can seem like a good idea to some kids, they don't know any better. That maybe some of them can learn and grow up... that's as good as it gets here.

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Nope

 The prologue to Jordan Peele's third film is a flashback to a TV show set where a monkey's gone rogue and killed/maimed a bunch of people. The camera lingers on one woman's shoe, perfectly and improbably balanced upright on its heel in the middle of the carnage and chaos.

 I've tried to avoid reading up on the film before watching it, but I did see mentions of this shoe a few times; People suspect a deeper meaning, and have come up with different theories about it.
 I do think it's explained away in a line of dialog later, when a character asks something along the lines of 'what's the opposite of a miracle?' It also reminded me of that scene in Us where a frisbee lands in a blanket, perfectly and uncannily matching the towel's colorful circles pattern.

 Maybe (probably) I'm just missing something and it does have thematical heft, but my feeling after watching Nope is that the shoe is just a weird, jarring image to induce unease. It later shows up on an uncomfortable scene, but I don't think it's got a coherent theme or message.

  All this is a long way of saying I think Nope is mostly free of the deeper meaning that buoyed Get Out and Us; The director has gone on record saying that he wanted to do old school spectacle in the style of movies like Close Encounters or Jaws, and what do you know! Those are the two films I'd most likely compare this against. And while there are plenty of themes in display (the relationship between beasts and their trainers, the search for fame) they don't really cohere into any clear message.

 But even if it's not as good as its inspirations or the director's previous films, it's still a huge amount of fun, has great characters and dialogue, and is chock full of beautifully filmed, glorious weirdness. And it's creepy as all hell.
 The film's tone is tightly controlled and full of memorable imagery, even if the links between these images aren't as solid as they could be. It starts out a bit slow, but the characters are likeable and funny enough to carry it until the plot kicks into overdrive.


 Em and OJ (Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya, both excellent) run the Haywood ranch after their father (the legendary Keith David) is killed by a Fortean rain of coins, keys and other random objects. OJ is the dutiful son, laconic and responsible, trying to keep the ranch going, while Em is the unreliable motormouth pseudo-grifter who considers the ranch her side-gig. Soon they become convinced the ranch is being stalked by a UFO, and are joined by the electronic store employee that installs some high tech cameras for them as they try to get footage of it.
 Their neighbor, a former child star (and survivor to the TV set massacre from the prologue) will also be an important part of the story.

 To go much further would mean going into spoilers, but after a bit of a slow start it becomes clear that the aliens are definitely not friendly, and the Jaws parallels come to the fore. There are a lot of weird, wonderful scenes, a lot of good suspense and general creepiness. Honestly, some of the images are so bold that they're kind of ridiculous - but that's the best kind of ridiculous!
 Both Get Out and Us were heightened by the parallels Peele established to Racism or privilege - I mean, they worked on their own, but the fact that there's a literal and a symbolic level helps shrug off the fact that, well, a goofball secret society worked out how to do consciousness transplants, or the ridiculously fantastical premise behind Us's Tethered. Here there's no such safety net; Sometimes aliens are a parable for immigrants, discrimination or simply the other. And sometimes, they're just sky sharks.

Monk Comes Down the Mountain

  When the shifu of a small mountain monastery announces that due to economic troubles they will need to throw out one of the acolytes, the titular monk He Anxia (Baoqiang Wang) starts a fight with all the other monks to prove he should stay. The fight is a knockout - fun, funny, and full of great wirework and cool moves. Once it's over, the punchline is of course that it makes the shifu realize that He Anxia is ready for the outside world, so he promptly boots him out.


 So down the mountain comes the Monk, and ends up in a 1930's style large Chinese city. Having lived in a monastery all of his life, he has no idea how to live within society; when his unwitting acrobatics cause someone to throw him some coin, he returns it, asking 'what's that for?'

 As soon as he's hungry he decides to steal some chicken from an older man. A chase ensues, and by the end the man, a local doctor takes him in. He Anxia takes to the man as a surrogate father, and gets enmeshed in his life and business: there's a young, pretty wife, a ne'er-do-well younger brother she's having an affair with, cash problems and a secret stash of money. The movie threatens to turn into a noir for a bit, but the whole thing is resolved within half an hour.

 So that whole episode living with the doctor ends up with the Monk doing something he regrets, leaving him a bit untethered. His actions seemed a bit out of character for him, but then again, he was way out of his depth and being rash and quick to judge was an established character trait. So it kind of tracks. In any case, He repents but has no real way to make amends.
 I should probably say that up until now all this is perfectly entertaining, and surprisingly... subdued compared to other Chinese films. There's a lot of humor and melodrama, and it's definitely a lot more heightened and broad than what we're used to, but not as much as a lot of other wuxia films.

 The real plot of the movie kicks when the Monk witnesses a young man killed by his shifu in a private martial arts duel. This fight marks a shift in the style of the action, and thing get a little dragon-ball Z from here on. He Xia chances into an escalating series of feuds between the different students of a splintering kung-fu school; As the movie goes on the action gets even more fantastic, and soon escalates again from super-powered hand to hand combat to straight up superhero shit with people launching elemental barrages at each other. It's really good for what it is, still full of stunts, cool wire work and fun ideas, and obviously this style has its own long-standing tradition, but I much prefer the earlier, more grounded action.

The Harry Potter school of Kung Fu

 The effects... well, I'll just make the clichéd observation that Asian moviegoers sure seem more accepting of cheesy-looking CGI than we are. I mean, this seems to be a legit superproduction, and the effects are much better than usual for its genre (and leagues better than something like, say, Carter); but even a lot of the good stuff looks very artificial, and some of it is pretty bad. So if that sort of thing is a deal breaker for you, beware. The sets, cinematography, and physical effects are all great.

 The drama itself is where the movie really stumbles. It remains likeable for a while, and I think I was able to follow the plot throughout (which is not always the case for me with Wuxia/Xianxia movies). But it keeps changing the stakes and adding brand-new, important characters we're seemingly supposed to care about right up to the end. Poor He Anxia ends up being more and more of a bystander as other people take center  stage.
 There is at least a through line in that it's all about He Anxia's journey as a monk, going through a bunch of different masters, and there's a lot of Buddhist mystical lessons mixed in, but I didn't find it very compelling - I did make it to the end, and enjoyed it overall, mostly from the goodwill it accrued during its tighter first half.

 It's no surprise to learn it was based on a bestselling novel*. The movie reeks of an adaptation made for those who are familiar with the material, and seems terrified of making any cuts.
 It would benefit hugely from dropping a few developments or amalgamating some characters... but as it stands it's a bloated mess that's happy to  throw in completely extraneous scenes and subplots like some business with corrupt police or a standalone WW1 flashback that adds absolutely nothing to the plot (except some eye-popping explosions; this is definitely a big budget movie.)
 And there are some weird asides that don't fully work either, like a weird 'humorous' drug trip scene (that also deforms their faces for some reason). Or a romantic interlude that is.... very much not romantic.

This is your face, on drugs

 A shame it couldn't keep its scope reined in. It's unfair to  judge the movie for failing to be what I wanted it to be, but I don't think it really works on its own  terms either, except maybe as an attempt to map to images the contents of a book on as near a 1:1 basis as possible. I can't know if that's the case, or how successful it is in that respect, but as a stand alone story it starts out strong and then fizzles away in a number of ultimately unsatisfying directions.



 *The novel was written by Xu Haofeng, an author who's since made a few martial art movies of his own I intend to watch soon-ish; I've read good things about them.

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Prey

 Prey is a pretty damn good entry in the Predator series - third best, by my reckoning: Not as good as one, not as fun as two, but way more entertaining than Predators. And it tells a coherent story, so it beats The Predator by default.

 Like the other entries, Prey doesn't feel the need to serialize - there's a few ties to the other films, but it's mainly another story of another thrill-seeking predator coming down to earth to have a go at the deadliest game. There's no flourishes or subversion like on any of the other sequels, it's a back to the basics retelling of the first movie with a comanche woman as the protagonist.

 It's set in the American great plains in the 1700s, which allows for some beautiful wilderness backdrops. Young Comanche Naru wants to be a hunter, but fails the ritual of passage to become one (hunting something that might hunt you back) partly because of some Predator-related shenanigans far in the horizon. This sets her on a path to prove herself against this alien asshole who uses much more advanced technology to brutally murderize a small village's worth of comanche hunters and french trappers.



 She's a likable character, and her underdog status throughout the movie is very effective at making us root for her. She gets hurt, fails a few times, runs away a couple more, but 'sees more than others do' as her more successful hunter brother puts it. That sets the stage for a final confrontation where she uses stuff she's learned throughout the movie to win the day.
 The script is pretty good a seeding little details that will later come back. I also enjoyed how... procedural it is at points, for lack of a better word; a surprising amount of time is dedicated to the building of a stretcher or a rope for a tethered throwing axe, for example, and there are lots of shots of gathering herb,s and checking out broken twigs or tracks on the ground. It's cool that it seems that not a lot of predator safaris have stopped on earth at this time, so the predator is working out the food chain.
 The photography is excellent and the action is well choreographed, fun, and well shot. This is a good, lean, old-fashioned action movie.

 Its main problem is that... while all the other predator sequels tried to bring their own ideas into the mix, but this really is Predator again with another setting/character. The first movie's big thing is the realization that being a soldier with all the firepower in the world means jack shit against a predator, and I didn't feel this one has anything comparable; Naru begins wanting to be a hunter, and ends the movie a hunter. The script is well constructed, with a lot of little parallels and reference to the predator/prey motif (it does get to be a bit too much by the end, with Naru explaining it out loud for anyone who wasn't paid attention) but that's not enough to compensate for this central lack of identity.

 It's a minor problem, as is the film's mid-level budget; the effects aren't up to the task of animating real-looking animals, which are always teetering right at the edge of uncanny valley, and the CGI gore is fun but a bit fake looking at times. I had some bigger problems accepting the God-of-War tethered axes, which felt at odds with the more realistic tone of the rest of the film, or a scene late in the movie where Naru outright John Wicks a bunch of people attacking her at the same time. It's a completely unnecessary scene that kind of punctured my understanding of the character. Then again, it is a fun fight scene, and it's triggered by the need to rescue a dog, so I really shouldn't complain.


Stray thoughts:

 This movie has a great scene where a bear almost revenants the predator. I kind of wish it would have, with the movie taking a weird turn there: Naru joins up with other predators to hunt the bear, who had swallowed the predator's shoulder launcher and can now shoot arrows out of its mouth. Or -even better- Naru joins up with the bear to kick the other predators' asses.
 In any case, that scene ends with the predator holding up the bear's carcass, and getting splattered with its blood, revealing its shape over its cloaking device. That's very similar to a scene at the beginning of The Predator, and I wonder if it will be a recurring thing from now on. I'd honestly like that.

 A bunch of years back a British celebrity caused a minor outrage and a lot of criticism by describing his elephant hunting antics, and even musing on how it would feel to kill a man. I wonder if that's how all the other Predators in Predator Prime or whatever feel about the Predators we get to see in these movies, as a bunch of yokels/and or overprivileged asshats, out on overcompensating little trips. Did the Predators from the second movie go back to their homeworld just to shuffle back into mundane little lives? That's my pitch for the next sequel.

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Carter (Kateo)

  Carter is a new netflix-produced movie by Jung Byung-gil, his follow up to the awesome Villainess. That movie was made semi-famous for its initial scene, an extended first-person action sequence that followed the protagonist through a bunch of shootouts and hand-to-hand fights and smoothly transitioned to a huge brawl at a gym/dojo. (It's actual lasting claim to glory would actually be a motorcycle chase with katanas that was a referenced on the third John Wick.)

 This new one is what the Villainess would have been if it had put quantity of action at all times over its overall quality. It's an interesting experiment, and honestly, it works for me. Mostly. Almost wholly.
 The entire film is made to look as if it was one continuous shot, but without any pretense that that's what it's actually doing (1917, this ain't) - its trickery is quite transparent; but the camera moves are meticulously planned, constantly in motion and very dynamic (the focus depth changes often, as does even the texture, from GoPro style shots to hyper-clear CGI of varying quality to more professional-looking stuff.) A lot of the film's (clearly insufficient) budget clearly went to support this illusion of seamlessness, which leads to a lot of bad compositing and  pretty piss-poor effects work. So it goes for the action, which very often looks, well, cheap and pretty crappy. Quantity over quantity; why have a couple well realized, realistic looking scenes when you can have them in bulk, and cover most of your running time instead? The movie makes the conscious choice to take the hit and have some truly dire effects now and then, some unsatisfying bad physics to the stunts, some very... videogame-looking mayhem.

 I know this is an old chestnut, but seriously. this one really does look like a video game at times - right down to the transitions from when you're watching a cutscene to when you get to control your character, which I'd never seen replicated in a movie before. So many of the effects are very deep into uncanny valley. So why did I like it? Why would I ever give this a pass when I hated this sort of shit so much in, say, Uncharted, or the vehicle scenes in Train to Busan: Peninsula? (or, to be honest, many of the later Fast and Furious movies).

Kerrrr-Splat!

 For me at least it's energy and enthusiasm. It's like the filmmakers went all out, making these compromises with the full understanding that they would sometimes look like shit, and not caring about it. Or maybe they ran out of money as they began post-production. I'm perfectly fine with the end result, in any case.

 An example: early on during an action beat the camera pans up to the sky, focuses on an extremely shitty looking bird (it looks like someone drew it in with a black sharpie!) It's kinda laughable. But that bird serves as the focus as the scene transitions to a drone shot looking down as a bunch of mooks converge on a building, a literal bird's eye view of the situation. There's a sense of planning, that the movie is busting its ass overtime trying to show you cool shit.

 And there is so much cool shit here. The violence is inventive and gruesome, and often laugh-out-loud audacious; while the camera is rarely still for any amount of time, the blocking is good and it's always clear who is shooting/stabbing/body-slamming whom; it gives the film a lot of momentum, especially as the chases and action scenes fade into each other.

 Yes, there are a couple of times the movie stops dead for an exposition dump, or a couple of truly, truly bad sequences (there's a really terrible free-fall scene that of course Netflix shows as a preview of the movie, because Netflix is operated by idiots. And also a motorbike chase that mirrors the one in the Villainess except that it's shit, though at least its conclusion made me laugh.) And the plot doesn't really provide much of an excuse to care about anything that happens (it's a mixture of elements from the  Bourne films, plus Total Recall, plus rage-virus-zombies) until the last half hour or so.

  It's nuts, and I can perfectly understand why someone wouldn't like it; It made me think of Michael Bay several times (with a fraction of the budget but better technical chops.) It also reminded me of the camerawork at the end of I Robot, of all things. And Hardcore Henry. Which... well, would very understandably put some people off. Maybe the best way to think of this would be as more of a music video, something that's heavily stylized and shooting for something other than realism - balls out, impressionistic, constant action. Its energy is infectious.

 I mean, did I tell you about the first chase scene where a few vans try to box in the protagonist on a delivery bike in narrow Korean streets? Or a later one involving a truck full of pigs and a whole bunch of pursuit vehicles? There's a bit where someone is jumping between soldiers hanging from cords from helicopters while chasing a speeding train, and one where a guy uses a motorbike as a stepping stone while it's mid-wreck, sliding on the tarmac at high speed, to jump into a van. Two separate scenes with people jumping between moving vehicles and punching each other senseless.
 Awesome shit- the reason we watch these things in the first place, right?