Push

(Not based on a novel by Sapphire)

When Push first came out, I categorized it to myself as a guilty pleasure. Sure, the movie was fun, but at the time I thought of it as the sort of movie studios make when they realize something is "big" or "in" at the time. Around it's release, The X-Men and Spider-Man franchises had already hit their apexes, and the show Heroes still felt like it was one season away from re-capturing the charm of the first season. In other words "ordinary people dealing with superhuman abilities" was "in" and Push was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.

The film centers around a group of ex-pat Americans (played by Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning) in Hong Kong with telekinetic abilities who are trying to lay low from a government agency called Division that wants to harness their powers. Take away the Hong Kong part and the plot sounds suspiciously like the first season of Heroes. In fact both stories heavily rely on characters with the ability to draw future events to move the story along, but while Heores's future predictions were drawn by acclaimed artist Tim Sale, Push's predictions were admittedly bad sketches done by Dakota Fanning's character. Probably because of this similarity, I brushed it off in my mind.

Then about a year after it's release, I watched Push again and realized that I actually liked it on it's own terms (and that Heroes had gotten embarrassingly bad). For one thing, I realized it wasn't an attempt at doing a superhero movie without a comic book franchise to back it up. Instead, it's more like an espionage movie with superpowers. The characters aren't constantly blasting each other with fireballs and what not, instead everybody is trying to outwit everybody else. The fight scenes that do ensue are reasonably good, in particular the ones involving a silent blonde guy that repels bullets with his mind, but the focus is more on the characters than the action.

Now, I will admit that this movie has some serious flaws in its execution, but if you accept them ahead of time, you can still enjoy the movie. For one thing, the movie starts off with Dakota Fanning explaining the mythology of the movie; what kinds of powers people have, what they're called and so on. It's an unnecessary info dump one that a better director would have let the audience figure out on its own.

The plot also becomes a bit too complicated towards the end on account of some characters' abilities to see into the future, and other characters' abilities to use mind control. The characters all come up with elaborate methods of side stepping each others' powers that make it easy to lose track of what's going on. But hey, even The Dark Knight got damn hard to follow halfway through, (can anybody honestly explain the Melvin White part?) so I say cut the little guy some slack.

Lastly, it's obvious that the producers had every intention of making this into a franchise. The ending is a bit abrupt and left open for the clear purpose of it leading into a sequel. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to this actually, but a tighter ending would have been nice. On the plus side, rumors have been circulating that this film has become enough of a sleeper hit on DVD that the story might get continued as a TV series.

Overall, Push isn't some sci-fi epic that everybody should have seen but didn't. Rather, it's more like the film Equilibrium, in that it's a fun action flick that could have been done better but it's entertaining enough as is. You catch it if it's on cable, or put it in your Netflix queue and pop it in on a weekday night when you feel like an action movie you haven't seen before. Not something you necessarily go out of your way to see, but you'll enjoy it when you get around to watching it.

And it's got Djimon Honsou in it. Yeah, he's been in the occasional bad movie, but have you ever seen him play a role badly?

Bowfinger

Comedies seem to have a short shelf life. They either need to have just enough dramatic moments to win the favor of mainstream critics, or be quotable enough drunk people can recite half of the lines in lieu of actually being funny themselves. (Old School being the ultimate example of this.)

So, I think every now and then I should bring up a comedy on this blog that you've probably already heard of, then promptly forgot about for no reason other than that some idiot hasn't been quoting it for the past decade. Today's entry: Bowfinger.

A few days ago, I watched this for the the first time in ages, and for a ten year old movie, it held up pretty well. The film follows director a hack director named Bobby Bowfinger (played by Steve Martin) as he tries to make an action movie starring the biggest actor in Hollywood, Kit Ramsey (played by Eddie Murphy) without his permission. On top of that, he starts out with only two actors and one crewman.

Director and screenwriters Frank Oz and Steve Martin don't just rely on the premise for one set of gags that they try to milk for an hour and a half. Instead they play it from all angles. Bowfinger keeps finding new ways to lie to his cast to explain Kit Ramsey isn't interacting with them unless the cameras are rolling. Kit, who is paranoid, thinks that aliens are stalking him, not realizing they're actors trying to improvise a sci-fi thriller around him. Heather Graham plays a girl from Ohio who tries to sleep her way through the cast and crew until she can figure out who can help her break into the movie business.

Of course, being an Eddie Murphy movie from the 90's, it was still during that era where he had that thing for playing multiple roles in the same movie. So, in addition to playing action star Kit Ramsey, he also plays a lookalike hired to play Kit when Bowfinger can't figure out how to get the real Kit into some of the scenes. While the multiple-role thing might have gotten a bit annoying in some of his other movies, it works in this movie because it makes sense plot-wise.

In both personas, he manages to steal the movie. As the real Kit Ramsey has great stretches of dialogue where he goes on paranoid rants, like one where he deems a script racist because the letter "K" appears in it a number of times that's divisible by three, which he interprets as meaning that "KKK" is subliminally encoded in the script over 400 times. As the Kit Ramsey impersonator, he's massively awkward, doing stuff like endlessly giggling when he has to do a sex scene.

I think this is also the film where both Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy peaked at. After this, Steve Martin either did family comedies, supporting roles or serious performances. I'm not sure anybody even remembers his serious roles, and he had a few alright movies among his family movies and supporting roles, but nothing as hilarious as this. As for Eddie Murphy, aside from his voice work as Donkey in the Shrek movies, the decade that followed was filled with tragically bad buddy movies and family movies that at most reached a level of "alright." Yes, he had that Oscar nominated performance in Dreamgirls, but this was his last comedic performance that would make you genuinely laugh out loud.

Millions

I've been meaning to review a lot of movies by director Danny Boyle on this blog. He's been making movies since 1994, and pretty much all of them have been good. The exception is his film The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which tried to hard to be flashy. He's most well known for his films Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire. If you've seen those movies, you'd know they're pretty adult fare, which is why many of his fans were surprised in 2004 when he made the family friendly Christmas movie, Millions.

I suppose technically speaking, this isn't so much a Christmas movie as it is a movie set at Christmastime. The distributors clearly thought so, since in America this movie was released in the middle of the summer, but the story just feels a bit more relevant in the holiday season.

Millions is set in the UK in the month leading up to it's changeover from the pound to the euro as its currency. Two kids, Damian and Anthony come across a duffle bag full hundreds of thousands of pounds in their backyard, which they realize they have to do something about soon as it will be worthless when the UK switches to the euro. Anthony, the older brother, wants to spend it and invest it and Damian, the younger brother, wants to give it to the poor.

I should also mention that Damian is frequently visited by visions of saints who explain their personal histories to him.

Millions doesn't resort to the obvious cliche where everybody realizes it's better to give to others than to spend on yourself. It actually becomes a rather complex morality tale, but you should have guessed that it was going to be complex when I told you that it was a family movie that involved changing foreign monetary systems as it's central premise.

Both brothers agree to keep the money secret, though Anthony doesn't waste any time buying fun gadgets and bribing his friends. On the other hand Damian has a bit of difficulty giving away his share, since a grade school kid can't really go about handing out money without raising suspicion. It's not long before things get out of hand for him and everybody feels entitled to some portion of the wealth.

If you've seen any of Danny Boyle's other movies, you'll definitely recognize his directorial style in this one. There's plenty of slick editing and music choices all along the way. One of the most energetic scenes is when the boys learn where the money actually came from, which is set to Muse's song "Hysteria."

The movie is family friendly, but it's complexity may mean that parents watching it with their kids will find they have a lot of questions to answer afterward, probably the largest one being whether or not you'd keep the money for yourself or give it away.

Another heads up: this movie will probably put you in a philanthropic mood afterward. The movie never outright preaches that giving is good. Instead it makes an argument about what one really can do by using money wisely. Keep it to yourself and it's useless. Give it away thoughtlessly and people start expecting it. Somewhere in between, it argues, you can afford to help somebody out while enjoying yourself.

In keeping with that theme, the DVD contained an insert suggested making a donation to Heifer International if you felt inspired by the movie to do some giving. Even if the movie doesn't seem like your cup of tea, at least look into the charity.

Nutcracker: The Motion Picture

From the Creator of Where the Wild Things Are

The holidays are a strange time for movies. For one thing, Christmas movies are only really watchable around the month of December. (Something just feels weird about watching them any other time of the year, but I just can't put my finger on it.) This means that movies themed around Christmas really only have one good month to find their audience, and have to make such an impression in the public's mind as to be remembered again a year later when it's time for them to be released on home video.

Of course, many succeed in this task. It almost seems like a sacrilege not to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation annually, and Love Actually is fast becoming a modern classic in its own right. Yet we're still treated to numerous movies that bastardize classics (Ron Howard's version of The Grinch) or at least make them feel eerie and alien (The Polar Express) or otherwise try to knockoff Christmas Vacation. (Deck the Halls, Christmas With the Cranks, etc.)

So this month, I'm going to try and shed light on as many under appreciated Christmas movies as I can, starting with the 1986 film, Nutcracker: The Motion Picture.

What makes this particular version stand out is that the production, originally created for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, was designed by Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. Like many projects helmed by artists with distinctive touches, every scene bears his signature style, with backgrounds and costumes that look like they were lifted right out of his picture books. Not surprisingly, he later illustrated a version of the E. T. A. Hoffman story based on the artwork he created for this production.

This version also stands out because the filmmakers truly shot this as a movie, instead of just filming a live performance of the production. In adapting the ballet for screen they didn't limit themselves showing things that could be done on stage. Instead they took advantage of the camera's ability to show close subtle interactions between characters, as well as a few creative scene transitions.

That being said, it still retains the feel of a production meant for the stage. The effects are low budget, but executed in a manner reminiscent of Bram Stoker's Dracula or a Wes Anderson movie. In other words, it's very theatrical. For example, the second act opens with a shot of Clara and the Nutcracker Prince sailing along the ocean. The set is perfectly framed on all sides by a featuring Sendak's designs, while the boat and waves are all done with two dimensional cut outs. Instead of looking like a cheap effect, the result is an a moving illustration.

For anybody who is seriously familiar with the Nutcracker ballet, I should mention this version does some unique liberties with the art direction and story. Maybe not to the extent of the sexualized, Dickensian vision in Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker! but something unique nonetheless. Instead of the second half being set in a candy land like most versions, it's set in some exotic Turkish land, and instead of it being ruled by the Sugarplum Fairy, it's ruled by a strange version of Herr Drosselmeyer.

If you're not at all familiar with the Nutcracker ballet, this version is easily one of the better filmed versions you will come across, so it's the best place to start.

Now for a bit of bad news. This version isn't currently available on DVD. However, it is available for purchase or rental on iTunes, and can also be seen on Hulu.

Stephen King's The Mist

Yeah, I was surprised by this one too...

When I first saw the ads for this one, I just rolled my eyes. Maybe it was just the fact that for every well made Stephen King adaptation there is, there are a slew more memorably bad ones. More likely it's because this movie was released about a year after the The Fog, a horrendous remake of the John Carpenter movie with a similar premise. I probably would have forgotten about it entirely had it not been for a good amount of internet buzz legitimately praising as being a modern classic. When it came out on video, I kicked myself for not getting in on the ground floor of this one.

I tried to spread the gospel of this movie before starting this blog, but every time I tried explaining it to people, they kept assuming I was talking about the remake of The Fog. Once I cleared it up with them that it wasn't The Fog, they then assumed it was a shitty knock off of The Fog. So here I am breaking down reasons why you should see this movie.

1. It's not The Fog.

Seriously. It has nothing to do with it.

2. It's written and directed by Frank Darabont.

Don't recognize that name? He's the guy who gave us The Shawshank Redemption (which, interestingly enough, is another movie based on a Stephen King story that was initially overlooked) and The Green Mile. If you've seen either of those, this should be pretty self explanatory.

3. It's a damn good thriller.

Okay, here's where I'm going to devote the bulk of my efforts. This movie is essentially a B-movie made better than anybody should have ever made one. After a devastating storm hits a small New England town, (for any Stephen King fans out there, yes it's Castle Rock,) a mysterious mist rolls down from the mountains. The town residents find themselves trapped in the local grocery store when a man runs inside, covered in blood, claiming something in the mist is killing people. The "something" turns out to be a horde of alien creatures.

While the premise is strictly B-movie, the characters are developed up to A-movie standards. The heros, played by Thomas Jane and Laurie Holden, aren't a pair of hard-asses with quotable one-liners. Instead they're believeable as ordinary Joes who find themselves the voice of reason in and increasingly maddening situation.

There's the skeptic, a New York City lawyer vacationing in town. While B-movie skeptics tend to have the strange ability to doubt that the monster/demon/phantom attacking people is real, even when the evidence is staring him/her right in the face, in The Mist, we can kind of see the skeptic's point... for a while at least.

But the real surprise is how this movie uses the token religious nut, Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden. She starts out as a simple cliche. She's the one who starts shouting bible verses in the background when it's apparent that monsters are among them. Yet as the movie progresses, she steps out of the background and emerges as the main villain, one worse than the monsters outside.

She begins to convince the people trapped within the store that the monsters are a punishment from God, whipping them into a frenzy that anybody who doesn't side with her must be sacrificed. This of course leaves the heroes in a catch 22 situation, where they can either be killed by the monsters outside, or killed by the people in the store.

As a horror movie, The Mist isn't really scary, but as a thriller, it's a genuine nail biter. Be warned that it's also frustrating to watch. You'll probably find yourself wanting to kill Mrs. Carmody halfway through the movie, yet find yourself feeling as helpless as the other characters in doing something about it. As for the monsters, while they aren't the focus of the film, when show up onscreen they're convincingly frightening, a rarity for sci-fi movies.

By the way, should you end up watching this and decide you want to own it, there's a two disc collectors edition available with a black and white version of the film included.

RocknRolla

Dear Guy Ritchie,

Welcome back.

Signed,

An Avid Film Buff

When Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels first came out, director Guy Ritchie was hailed as the next big filmmaker. His follow up, Snatch, proved he was deserving of that acclaim. He knew how put together a film so that everything; the acting, the editing, the music and the dialogue, all had the same aggressively cheeky tone to it. It's no wonder that of all the short films made for BMW's 2001 web series, The Hire, Guy Ritchie's entry is probably the only one still being talked about. I've included it in its entirety below.

Then, he got serious with Madonna, and together they released the romantic comedy Swept Away, which I haven't seen, but I understand is considerably less awesome than the film above. Things got worse with his follow up film, Revolver, a Kabbalah allegory that drowns in so much symbolism and has so many twists and turns, I don't even know what plane of existence it's supposed to be set in.

But then he made RocknRolla, and everything was alright. He went back to the formula that made him big in the first place: Crime + comedy + twisting plots + big ensemble cast. (Revolver lacked the comedy portion.)

Still, despite the critics recognizing that the Guy Ritchie we used to know and love was back, and a fair amount of TV spots being run for it, RocknRolla was given a limited release, making it more of an art house movie. The film went in and out of theaters without a lot of people noticing.

Like Lock, Stock... and Snatch, RocknRolla has a lot of overlapping stories about criminals screwing each other over. There's Lenny Cole (played by Tom Wilkinson) a real estate baron who manipulates the system so he's in control of any deal that goes down in London, his son Johnny Quid, a junkie rocker, and the Wild Bunch (lead by Gerard Butler) a group of criminals for hire.

A Russian developer does a deal with Cole, and as a sign of good faith he lends Cole his lucky painting, which is promptly stolen by Johnny Quid. While Cole is having his men look for his son, the Wild Bunch are stealing money from the Russian to pay off money they owe Cole, using tips from the Russian's accountant (played by Thandie Newton). Artful swearing and occasional gun battles ensue.

For fans of Guy Ritchie's other movies, in terms of tone this one falls somewhere between Lock, Stock... and Snatch. It's lighter in tone than Lock Stock... but compared to Snatch it feels a bit scaled back. Aside from Jeremy Piven's and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, this one mainly avoids American actors. The low level criminals have dumb moments but they don't match the total stupidity of Vinny, Tyrone and Sol, (the trio of thugs from Snatch tasked with kidnapping Franky Four Fingers.) It's definitely a funny movie, but there are notably fewer laugh out loud moments, possibly due to the subplot involving Johnny Quid being a drug addict.

All of the performances in this movie are good, but special attention should be called to Toby Kebbel who plays Johnny Quid, and Mark Strong, who plays Archy, Lenny Cole's right hand man.

Strong has been around the film industry for a while, but aside from his role as Septimus in the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, he hasn't had any previous major film roles yet. Here, Strong stands out like he's been a top billed actor for ages. He plays his role the way the way you'd expect somebody like Willem DaFoe or Michael Gambon to play it, commanding complete control over the scene. It's no surprise that for his next movie, Sherlock Holmes, he gets billed alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in the trailers.

As for Kebbel, he's new to the game, but he's going to go far. Somehow, his portrayal of a junkie rockstar bounces back and forth between a tragic figure and a slapstick cartoon character. In the scenes he shares with Mark Strong, it's like watching two legendary actors at work.

If you missed this one when it came out, you should definitely bump it to the top of your viewing list, especially if you're into crime movies and definitely if you're among those people excited by the prospect of a sequel to Boondock Saints.

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit

For ages, Disney pretty much had a stranglehold on the animated family film market. No matter how good or bad something another studio put out was, it could never hope to get the level of public recognition as a Disney movie. Dreamworks finally broke through that barrier with its computer animated hit, Shrek, and has enjoyed success ever since... mostly. While its CGI efforts have have been rolling in money, Dreamworks' non-CGI cartoons have largely gone unseen by mass audiences. It's a shame because some of those movies represent the studio's best work, such as the Academy award winner for Best Animated Feature of 2005, Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit.

Wallace, an absent minded British inventor, and Gromit, his considerably more level headed pet dog, were previously the stars of a trio of award winning short films. It seemed logical that they were deserving of their own feature length film. The movie features them as a pair of humane exterminators, helping their neighbors protect their crops from rabbit infestations. Wallace gets the idea to use mind control on the local rabbit population to stop them from eating crops, but the invention he designs for the task doesn't work right and instead creates a giant were-rabbit that terrorizes the village (in a completely harmless family friendly way.)

There's a steady stream of humor, but unlike a lot of Dreamworks' other animated films, it's not centered around pop culture references or songs that were tearing up the European dance scene five years ago. Instead the filmmakers opted for a more vaudevillian/Looney Tunes style of humor. So, expect a fair amount of food being thrown in faces, muskets being fired and one instance of cross-species cross-dressing. (Hey, it worked for Bugs Bunny).

The great thing about that is it gives the movie a timeless feel. You could show this to somebody 50 years in the past or the future and they'd enjoy it on the same level as somebody today.

Granted the characters are all British, but the filmmakers were fully aware that this movie's largest audience would be stateside, so the accents aren't too thick. Of course with British characters, one can expect British humour. In addition to the slapstick, there's a fair amount of subtle jokes in the way of visual gags and word play.

If I had to guess why this movie didn't end up getting lots of public recognition, (though clearly it got the critics' attention) I'd say it was probably due to its release date and the marketing behind it. For one thing, it came out in October. This makes sense, seeing as how the whole giant monster rabbit lends itself to the Halloween market, but that's also a traditional dumping ground for movies the studio didn't think were good enough for the summer or holiday movie season.

Second, the characters don't exactly lend themselves to the marketing blitz usually associated with animated movies. This isn't an "event" movie that easily lends itself to action figures, children's bedspread sets and the usual merchandising gimmicks. (I hear Disney actually had a lot of the same problems when it came to promoting Up and Ratatouille.) It's a pretty small scale story that spoofs more epic movies without trying to be epic in scope itself.

Personally I'd recommend this movie for lots of people, and not just people with kids. It's great for anybody really just looking for an hour and a half of good clean slapstick fun. I mean, I like my comedy to be edgy and over the top too, but it's nice to see a comedy on occasion that isn't mean spirited.

If you do like this movie, you should also check out the other Wallace and Gromit shorts, A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, all of which are available in a single collection on DVD.

Image Courtesy of Dreamworks SKG and EW.com