If you were like me, you MARVELED at the effectiveness of Will Smith and director Gabriele Muccino’s “The Pursuit of Happyness,” wondering HOW they managed to remove every shred of false emotionality, cheese, heavy-handed symbolism and sappy sentimentality from a project that was PRIMED for them. Now, we have our answer: They saved it all up and used it to make THIS stumbling mess of Oscar bait.

Here’s a movie that almost plays out like it was made on a dare: “Bet you can’t make a maudlin tearjerker about a messianic IRS agent; bonus points if you can make a jellyfish a pivotal element.” As it turns out, you CAN do this… you just shouldn’t.

The hook here is supposed to be that the trailers have you wondering what the hell the film is actually about, and that it doesn’t all “come together” until the final “shocking” ten minutes or so. Maybe that part will work for you. Honestly? I was pretty sure I’d figured out the story from the first trailers, and was surprised to later find out it was supposed to be vauge. Oh, well.

To be sporting, I won’t tell you anything about the main plot other than what WAS shown plainly in the trailer: Will Smith is a mysterious, soft-spoken man with IRS credentials and apparently great wealth who’s smarting emotionally over some yet-unrevealed personal moral failing in his recent past. He spends the film investigating and meeting various sick people in need of organ transplants, ‘testing’ their worth and situations for a yet-unrevealed reason. Whatever it is, it involves a rather unorthodox promise to help made by his friend (Barry Pepper) and seems to be complicated by his development of a romantic interest in one of his subjects: Rosario Dawson as a young woman in need of a new heart. Okay. That was the trailer. Do YOU have some inkling as to what the “big idea” might be? Ah, good. So it’s not just me.

Anyway… I don’t think it’s a bad idea for a movie, myself, but the end result is torpedoed by a treacly, predictable series of scenarios and disasterously heavy-handed symbology. The story views Smith’s character a martyr figure, fine – but does he REALLY need, in addition to all his other skills (he can, for example, repair a century-old machine he’s never heard of just by studying it VERY intently and stopping off at the Home Depot) the seemingly supernatural ability to tame misbehaving dogs, understand the unspoken thoughts of an invalid old woman and even pull miraculous gardening solutions out of thin air? Memo to Mr. Smith: Messiah complexes tend to get movie stars into trouble. See Cruise comma Tom, Gibson comma Mel.

Wow.

The Screwattack.com Gaming 1337 awards have moved on to the finals, and thanks to all of YOU… I made it in. “Game OverThinker” is one of the FINAL THREE nominees for “Best Gaming Show;” alongside Mega64 and Unforgotten Realms.

WTF? Look, I’m not going to put on some bullshit humble-face and pretend like I don’t bust my ass on these things or that I don’t think I do a damn good job most of the time but… seriously? The HELL am I doing nominated alongside Mega64 and Unforgotten Realms??

Anyway, this DOES mean I’ve got to gently ask you all to once again head over to… http://screwattack.com/Vote

…and vote for GAME OVERTHINKER for “Best Gaming Show” (and whoever else you like for everything else.) Thank you all so much, what a great Christmas gift I genuinely was not expecting.

Hey, I saw something early! Good for me!

As the barrage of trailers have now informed you, this is the story of one Col. Klaus von Stauffenberg, a German military officer who joined and subsequently spearheaded an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and stage a military coup against the Nazi Elite. You are aware, one hopes, that this didn’t work.

So, here’s a challenge facing anyone trying to film this story: Everyone knows Hitler wasn’t assassinated, so even if you’ve never heard this particular story you know how it ends. There’s two ways, then, to make this work as a narrative (as opposed to a documentary). Option #1: Make a sprawling, likely lugubrious epic that sets up all the context and backstory explaining how things got to this point, who these conspirators were and why they chose this moment to act which won’t be especially riveting but will tell a fascinating historical tale. Option #2: Cut out every shred of context, larger-themes, ANYTHING that isn’t directly related to the forward-momentum of the conspiracy and hope that avoiding context will let the audience briefly forget that they already know the ending and can get wrapped up in the thrill of the chase.

“Valkyrie” goes with Option #2.

It’s a well-made mechanical thriller, it just doesn’t have any real heft to it. There’s no real depth or character to any of the players or the film they inhabit: Tom Cruise – as Stauffenberg – steps onscreen, announces that he’s decided that Hitler must be stopped, and spends the rest of the film plowing ahead toward that goal. The movie follows his lead. Who were these guys? What were their motives aside, from the general “Hitler was bad?” No time for that – it’s just straight-on through the exciting parts of what’s ultimately a pretty damn clever power-grab.

Up to a point this all works, the movie is exciting and goes along quick and agreeably… there just isn’t anything to hang onto after it ends. Change the costumes and this could be the second and third act of an Ocean’s Eleven sequel.

Sidebar: I hate being sick. Hate it. Hate not having any energy. Hate not being in control of my body. Hate losing whole days (or several days) to just sleeping and waiting for everything to repair itself. I can’t believe I used to WISH for this shit just to get out of school. The FUCK was wrong with me??

Anyway…

“The Tale of Despereaux” looks like it took forever to make, so it’s probably unfair to suggest that it’s bearing more than a passing resemblance to something a cynical team of executives would concoct if told to create “Ratatouille meets Harry Potter” is anything other than coincidence. Especially since, in spite of how it eventually shakes out (SPOILER ALERT: less than wonderful) there’s a tremendous amount to be admired in it. Here’s a non-Pixar animated film that takes itself seriously, doesn’t talk down at all to it’s young audience, nails a kind of lyrical fairy-story melancholy seldom attempted outside of Hayao Miyazaki and – best of all – doesn’t contain a SINGLE obnoxious pop-culture reference. It’s just too bad it’s so structurally unsound.

It’s one thing for a family film to have a deep, layered plot… it’s quite another for it to have a plot so convoluted and confounding that it would be frustrating to follow in an “adult” film. There are about five major characters at the center of five individual story-arcs with their own origins, motives and goals; and aside from key plot-points they don’t really connect to one another all that much. There’s enough material here for an entire season of a half-hour TV show, and it’s all haphazardly crammed into a single movie.

Briefly: There’s a kingdom called Dor, where everyone loves soup. During a big soup festival, a friendly rat named Roscuro accidentally falls into the Queen’s bowl, inducing a fatal heart. This throws the King into depression, leading him to banish all rats to the dungeon – where even gentle Roscuro is forced to join a barbaric feudal society of vermin – and ban all soup – which leaves the Royal Soup Chef despondent and estranged from his assistant, a ghost (unexplained) made of vegetables. Meanwhile, a big-eared mouse named Despereaux keeps getting in trouble because he wants to be brave and knight-like while mice are supposed to be timid and fearful. He befriends the castle’s Princess, a no-no which gets him banished to the dungeon in time to ALSO befriend Roscuro and hatch a joint plan of attonement. Also involved are an evil Rat King (who’s name I’m not sure was ever said aloud) who placates the rat horde with gladiator games and a miserably-backstoried servant girl with a creeping case of Princess Envy. If you’re noticing that Despereaux seems to comprise the less-interesting part of his own tale, you’re halfway there.

The movie has all the hallmarks of a lengthy literary adaptation being crammed into a “highlight reel” of a feature film, and a quick Google informs me that it’s indeed based on a Newbury Award winning book… which, puzzlingly, seems to be summarized as a lot LESS convoluted than the movie. Either way, there’s just not enough room for anything to BREATHE.

It all seems to be working fine up to a point, with a nice deliberate pace that takes time introducing Roscuro (who’s really more of the movie, to be honest) and the rest of the supporting cast and their stories before even getting to Despereaux (who never really gets away from being Reepicheep without the entertaining egomania.) But the cracks start to show in the second act. Without spoiling, the story requires two of the good-guys to take an INCREDIBLY dark, tragic character turn that the film doesn’t leave enough room to fully explore – instead of a natural progression of bad decision to realization to redemption, it seems more like two major characters go momentarily insane and then get better right away for the finale.

And I’ve STILL got no idea what was up with the vegetable-man!

It’s a great looking movie and an admirable try… but it falls apart.

Hey, look what I done.
http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2008/12/episode-sixteen-holiday-show.html

SPOILER WARNING

Somewhere inside this bloated, unpleasant movie is a genuinely interesting science fiction tale struggling to get free – it fails. To watch it is to watch potential die under pressure from mandate: A nifty-sounding idea (an extraterrestrial Noah’s Ark retelling in which humanity tries to talk an alien god-figure out of his doom-flood decision) dies painfully from contorting itself into a LOUSY idea (an ID4-ized rehash of the same-named 1950s scifi classic.)

In case it’s been awhile (or never) on your end, the original film details the arrival of alien ambassador Klaatu and his robot bodyguard Gort, come to inform humanity that we’ve got another thing coming if we think the rest of the galaxy will ALLOW us to develop space travel before we get our pesky Cold Warrin’ ways under control.

This time around, environmental destruction has, of course, supplanted the Cold War and Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) isn’t at all in a diplomatic mood. As it turns out, The Aliens have decided that our planet-destroying ways pose too much danger to all the OTHER species on Earth, so we’re too be wiped out while he spares samples of the others. This is where the new Gort comes in – he starts out looking like the original, then winds up as something completely different.

Oddly enough, it’s the callbacks to the original film that drag it down – the “new” elements are almost uniformly interesting and provocative. The new Gort looks cool, but the effects used to realize him are awful and it makes no sense for him to spend two acts of his existance looking like a forty-foot version of the original. The film takes a long detour wherein an elderly scientist (John Cleese) tells Klaatu’s human pals stuff we’ve already figured out just so they can do the “blackboard bit” from the first one.

The director is Scott Derrickson, who made the similarly-squandered “Exorcism of Emily Rose” a few years back. Interestingly, this now means he’s been responsible for making preachy, poorly-made genre films for both the Right AND the Left – way to branch out.

Skip this.

I have what I’d like to call a Death Row outlook on movies for the most part, in that I’m generally interested in the execution above all else. In other words, I’m not of the opinion that the subject matter should either make a film innately “better” or excuse flaws – a well made, exciting movie based on a video game is in my mind superior to a poorly made, boring movie about (just for example) the Holocaust.

“Milk” is the sort of film that provides the exception to my rules, or at least makes me want to make one. On the one hand, it’s a wholly conventional, by-the-numbers recent-history biopic straight out of the playbook. You know the drill: cut-in newsreel footage, era-appropriate music, everything timed out EXACTLY as you expect. Never heard of Harvey Milk? No problem – just imagine any recent bio movie if it had been about a gay political activist in 1970s San Fransisco and there you go.

On the other hand… I think that’s kind of the point. Director Gus Van Sant etc. all seem to understand that the particular Civil Rights struggle in question here is still very much a struggle, and the principal aim of the film appears to be making a “gay rights movie” that can be understood, accepted and embraced by a “straight” mainstream audience. Call it subversion-by-conventionality, but it’s definately there.

The whole thing is anchored by a simply fantastic lead performance by Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, an SF camera store owner who stumbled into activism on the way out of the closet and found he had a knack for it – transforming the city’s Castro Street “gay ghetto” into a political powerbase and remaking himself into the firebrand of the then-burgeoning Gay Rights movement. I know people don’t “like” Penn… some for better reasons than others, but you can’t say he doesn’t have the talent to make you forget for a few hours. This is his best work in years – though I’d be remiss not to point out that big chunks of the film are stolen right out from under him by Emile Hirsch as a kid who goes from jaded young hustler to super-saavy political operator as one of Milk’s protege’s.

It’s Penn’s show, but the film does do an overall solid job of setting the tone and immediacy of Milk’s too-short moment and, yes, framing the events in a way that strips away the sensation and “other-ness” to allow a wider audience to hear it’s message. And it’s not shy about playing with some of the less clear-cut events in question, such as the unlikely ally by-then-Assemblyman Milk has in then-Governor Ronald Reagan during Milk’s career-defining battle against Proposition 6 (a bill to allow the for-that-reason firing of gay schoolteachers.)

Where it stumbles a bit is with Josh Brolin’s character of Dan White, a fellow Assemblyman who plays a key but tragic role in Milk’s final days. The film wants White to be an important character throughout the story, but never really finds a through-line despite Brolin’s winning performance. At the end of the day, he’s in too much of the film to have his ultimate motives/issues left so ambiguous.

This is a good one.

A young man in his 20s is kicking ass as a contestant on a locally-produced version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” In between tapings, he’s interrogated by the police over suspicions that he’s cheating because he’s from a poor neighborhood and thus they don’t believe he can possibly have the education to know the answers he knows. He’s not cheating, of course – it’s actually all some kind of amazing divine luck: ALL of the seemingly-difficult answers are burned into his memory thanks to popping up in the major events of his colorfully hardscrabble Dickensian life – what other kind do poor Movie Kids have, after all. Isn’t that something else? His account of these events to the authorities forms the narrative structure of the film, a tale of too-clever-by-half kids making do with what they can, amazing encounters, narrow escapes and, of course, The Girl.

This should REALLY suck, right?

Re-read the above description, keep in mind that this film has been released NOW as opposed to forty years ago as a Tommy Kirk vehicle, and tell me you’re not inclined to expect complete and utter pablum likely starring some Disney Channel teen idol looking for a film career. BUT… and it’s a big but… the film in question takes place amid the slums of modern India. See? Now you’re suddenly more interested. What a difference a gloss of exoticism makes on these tired Western eyes, no?

It also helps, of course, to have Danny Boyle directing.

The story is, no joke, exactly as I laid it out above – but the location makes all the difference. The sheer SCALE of the centuries-established poverty of the Bombay (soon to be Mumbai) slums is unlike anything most people have ever seen… a “poor neighborhood” the size of a “poor continent.” Scenes of the poor and/or orphaned children clambering across massive industrial pipes the size and length of the Great Wall, or picking through a dump so vast they can/have-to literally camp out while crossing it are the stuff you’d see in a surreal dream-sequence – except it’s real. This is “showy” filmmaking that goes back to the days when we were still figuring out what filmmaking WAS: Want them to snap to attention during a story they’ve heard a billion times before? Shoot it somewhere REALLY interesting.

It’s almost something like a family film… but, though it’s not especially graphic things get REALLY intense a lot of the time. The requisite child-exploiting bad guys of the first act are a really sick pack of scoundrels that would likely cause Oliver Twist and David Copperfield to mess their knickers rather than crack wise; and like most life-stories about poverty-stricken youth it morphs into a gritty gangster saga in it’s second half. It’s also pretty unsparing in it’s depiction of Indian Police “interrogation” techniques – if this is how they handle suspected TV Game Show cheats, I don’t think anyone has to worry about the Mumbai terrorists “getting off easy.”

But, it finally manages the trick of being uplifting and even joyous despite the occasional spurts of darkness WITHOUT becoming cheesy or treacly. I’m gonna call it “reccomended” (not that you’ll need my encouragement when the innevitable Awards showers begin.)

The first thing to know about trying to get “into” Anime is that unless you’re ALSO going to try and absorb every single facet of Japanese popular fiction from about the end of WWII on, you’re NEVER going to know “enough.”

Case in point: Up until about fifteen minutes ago, I was unaware of the existance of something called “Yatterman” – though it’s apparently HUGE in it’s native country. I’m aware of it as of now because it turns out that batshit-insane Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Miike (“Audition” would be his best-known work over here) has turned in a big-budget (for Japan) live-action adaptation. One of the most interesting developments in genre film in recent years has been the revelation that Miike’s gonzo stylings – previously used exclusively in service of just about the most violent, surreal, graphic, horrifying and yet brilliant/frequently-hysterical movies you’ll ever see – are a near-perfect fit for children’s films; first-evidenced in “The Great Yokai War.” This film looks for continue the trend.

Here’s the trailer:

Anyway, as if a new Miike film wasn’t a mandatory must-see ANYWAY, a quick jaunt to Wikipedia informs me that “Yatterman” is apparently about a boy/girl duo of globe-trotting inventor/heroes who’s primarily transport/weapon is a giant robot dog that transforms into an all-terrain rescue vehicle. Their enemies are a Boris & Natasha-style trio of heavies led by a femme fatale who dresses like an even-more-fetishized “Batgirl.”

Yeah. Seeing this as soon as possible.

So, apparently, “Jurassic Park 4” ain’t gonna happen: http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=51101

Well, that sucks.

But… can I just ask, now that apparently the ONLY franchise about dinosaurs allowed to exist in an era where you can CGI up an army of them for less than it costs for a Jim Carrey walk-on is done with… CAN WE GET SOME MORE FUCKING DINOSAUR MOVIES NOW, PLEASE?

Seriously. Back in the 50s and 60s when all anyone had to work with were expensive, time-consuming suits, stop-motion puppets and intricate miniature photography we were getting like 30 to 40 dinosaur movies a year. But today? Nothing. That’s fucking criminal. And don’t tell me the audience isn’t there… “Dragon Wars” was HUGE internationally. Someone get behind a camera and get this shit done.