The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Saw this version of Robin Hood on TCM a few weeks back.  Just a great, classic movie, and a triumph of early Hollywood.  The cast (Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone), the technology (restored Technicolor looks great even in standard def), the action scenes, and an engaging adaptation of the English legend.

4 of 5 stars (outstanding, merits repeat viewing)

State of Play (2008)

We watched State of Play, the 2008 political thriller starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck, last night.  It was okay, not outstanding.  Probably my biggest problem was Ben Affleck being kind of awkward in the role of a do-gooder Congressman caught in a scandal.

The plot is a variation of the standard “evil company threatening the public interest for profit.”  I think it obscures things too much during the bulk of the movie to set up the twist at the end.

The film is bumped up for me by Crowe, and the use of the Americana Hotel for a critical scene.  It’s a couple blocks from where we live, and we stayed there once for a few days while we were getting wood floors installed in the condo.

3 of 5 stars (worth a Netflix rental)

Patrick Swayze RIP

Male Hollywood stars pack on pounds

The New York Times explores the trend of heftier leading men.

Video: Trailer for Rollerball (1975)

This one gets me nostalgic for 70s science fiction.

Movie: The Dark Knight

Rented The Dark Knight this weekend. In this case I’m totally out of sync with popular and critical tastes. I was somewhat engaged at the beginning of the picture, but think that it mostly spins its wheels for two and a half hours.

It’s way too long. It almost seemed like they needed to keep going in order to spend out the effects budget. The action sequences are repetitious to the point of monotony, along with the plot. Batman and the police move on the bad guys, the Joker outsmarts them, Batman comes up with a technological fix to give him the upper hand, there’s an action sequence that ends with an inconclusive confrontation between Batman and Joker, cut to Bruce Wayne having a tortured dialogue with Alfred or Rachel where he’s questioning himself…keep repeating.

There are some great actors in this, but for the most part they don’t have much to work with. Heath Ledger’s Joker is the most interesting characterization, but doesn’t get enough help from the rest of the movie to make it onto the list of all-time memorable screen villains. I didn’t find the transformation of Aaron Eckhart’s character (Harvey Dent, the crusading DA) particularly credible. I don’t mind Christian Bale, but don’t find him especially compelling here.

The film also falls short as a supposed “complex morality tale,” and takes itself way too seriously. Batman is really a good guy, but the only way to keep Gotham City’s social order together is to make everyone think of  him as a bad guy. And it’s pretty easy to manipulate everyone into thinking this even though Batman is the primary force keeping Gotham from being completely overrun by violent criminals. The police are mostly corrupt.

The aerial scenes of Hong Kong and a few very good effects sequences are the only redeeming aspects of the movie for me. 

Certainly, I’m not the target audience for this movie. I’ve missed most of the live-action, effects-driven, comic book adaptations of recent years (e.g. the Spiderman and X-Men series), but I thought that Batman Begins, the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie of a few years back, was substantially better than The Dark Knight.

Rating: One out of five stars (bleh).

Movie: The Wrestler

Saw The Wrestler Friday night, and think it’s really very good.  Check Mick Foley’s review in Slate.  I didn’t realize that it takes place in Central New Jersey and that I’d be familiar with some of the locations, particularly Asbury Park.  Well-acted, well-paced, doesn’t make any obvious wrong-moves, and has several memorable scenes.  4 out of 5 stars (outstanding, merits repeat viewing).

Movie: Battle Royale

Battle Royale is perhaps the best known Japanese cult film of recent years. It was released originally in Japan in 2000. Directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku, one of the great directors of 60s and 70s yakuza movies, the movie is based on a novel by Koshun Takami.  In a near-future Japan where kids are unruly, a class of 9th graders is shipped to an island and thrown into a contest in which they are forced to kill each other off over the course of a couple days until only one remains.  

Except for a few minor plot anomalies that come from translating the book to film, this works very well as an action-thriller. There’s quite a bit of violence, as you might expect, but it’s not all that over the top. Well-acted (Beat Takeshi is great as the kids’ former teacher, who oversees the whole thing), nicely paced.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars (outstanding, merits repeat viewing)

Movie: Versus (Director’s Cut)

 

Versus

Versus is Ryuhei Kitamura’s yakuza-samurai-zombie flick released in 2000. An isolated area of Japanese forest is a portal to the “other side,” turning those killed there into zombies.

The film has some laughs (the yakuza with the green shirt) and other redeeming moments. Just about all the characters are self-consciously cool and have great hair until they’re turned into zombies. The film drags a good deal more than it has to, denying it upper-echelon cult status. 

Rating: 3 of 5 stars (worth a Netflix rental)

Movie: Frozen River

Frozen River is a dark drama about two poor women, one white, one Mohawk, who get caught up in smuggling illegal aliens into New York from Quebec across the frozen St. Lawrence river. It’s pretty good. Well-acted (one of the leads was Melissa Leo, who was in the outstanding crime series Homicide). A couple of the plot twists were barely plausible and the ending was softened up.

Rating: 3 of 5 stars (worth a Netflix rental)