Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – Review

Comic book movies are everywhere nowadays, but the only companies you really see flooding the market are Marvel and DC. There’s so many more companies with so many more stories to tell, so I always welcome a world that I’ve never had the pleasure of traveling to before. In 1967, the comic series Valérian and Laureline was created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières and ran until as late as 2010. This series tell the story of special spacial-temporal agent Valérian and his partner Laureline as the travel time and space protecting the universe. There’s so much material to work with and with someone like Luc Besson in the director’s chair, I was all for this. Besson’s work has been known to be hit or miss, and this one is a slight miss for me. He was on the right track with something that could’ve been a modern day space epic, but got way too distracted somewhere down the line.

After being awoken from a dream where a planet and its inhabitants are destroyed, Special Agent Valerian (Dane DeHaan) along with his partner Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are assigned to infiltrate a black market ring and extract an object called a converter. After completing the mission and being nearly killed in the process, the duo return to Alpha, a giant space station that is the home to millions of people from many planets, hence the nickname of the City of a Thousand Planets. The agents are informed by Commander Filitt (Clive Owen) that there is an infection spreading on the space station which is a major concern to all the races that live on the space station and that this converter may be the key to stopping it. During a meeting with the representatives of the station, Filitt is attacked and kidnapped by the same people that Valerian dreamed about. With the converter and their Commander missing, Valerian and Laureline have to travel into unknown territory on the space station, avoid the seediest of characters with ulterior motives for the agents, and uncover a major conspiracy that could potentially destroy Earth’s relationship with the other planets.

The first 40 to 45 minutes of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets had me hooked. I was loving the visuals and the world that was created for this movie. It was definitely a film to see in 3D, and I found myself easily getting lost in the environment. This is a stunningly beautiful movie with some of the best special effects you’ll see all year. There was a real sense of swashbuckling adventure that can easily serve as a reminder as to why I love action adventure movies, especially in heavy science fiction universes like this one. I was really prepped for a rollicking time at the movies with this, but we weren’t even an hour into this movie’s bloated 2 hour and 17 minute run time. Once we get to Alpha, things start going sour and that heavy feeling of disappointment began weighing down on my chest.

Let’s rewind a little bit here. While the first hour or so of this movie is solid action and adventure, I do have to talk about Dane DeHaan as Valerian. There’s something about how he delivers his lines that’s a weird combination of overdone and totally dry. It’s like he’s enthusiastically underperforming at every chance he gets. It was an awkward performance, and while he did fine at the more action oriented work, his lines with Delevingne were just awkward. Part of this may be because they had very little chemistry and the writing was just plain weird and on the nose. Cara Delevingne is a lot more tolerable than DeHaan, and her scenes provide some of the funnier and more memorable parts in the movie. There are a couple memorable performances by Ethan Hawke and Rihanna, but they are completely pushed to the wayside and forgotten about as soon as their minimal usage is complete. It’s unfortunate that some of the best characters get so easily forgotten about. I’d like to say something about Clive Owen’s performance, but it was so standard, there’s really nothing to comment on.

Back to the plot and all of its shortcomings. Once Valerian and Laureline make it to Alpha, I expected the plot to thicken from there. It does start to get intriguing, but after the Commander gets kidnapped the movie devolves into a series of scenarios that don’t really have a connection with the main plot involving the converter and the aliens from Valerian’s dream. First Valerian gets lost then Lareline gets lost and then the plot gets lost and I just started losing interest. I haven’t seen a movie this distracted in a long time, but to be fair there’s a lot of really cool stuff to look at on this station it’s pretty easy to get lost. Once the plot finally refocuses I was relieved but I kind of lost interest in it at that point. It took a while to really get myself invested in what was happening after being sidetracked for so long.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is ultimately categorized as a disappointment for me. The action is a lot of fun and the special effects are fantastic. There’s nothing wrong with the world that Besson created, but there is major problems with how he tells the story and the how he wrote the characters. Dane DeHaan is pretty bad as Valerian and it was hard to get back on the main plot after aimlessly running around Alpha for so long. I had much higher hopes for this movie, but it’s a classic example of style over substance used poorly and storytelling that is shot out of an airlock.

Final Grade: C

Dunkirk – Review

The Dunkirk Evacuation, which took place in late May and early June of 1940, is an event which the late Winston Churchill deemed a “military disaster.” Even with that infamous description attached to it, it has become known as The Miracle at Dunkirk because of the amount of British Allied forces that were saved despite the odds due to bravery from the British Navy, Air Force, and civilians who were all too willing to help. It’s an incredible story and it’s a story that has now been scooped up by film making master Christopher Nolan, who not only succeeds in telling stories, but also sculpting them to feel new, unique, and memorable. Listen, The Dark Knight is a fantastic movie, Inception killed it in the imagination department, and Memento completely reinvented how to tell a simple narrative. That being said, Dunkirk may be Nolan’s masterpiece.

The story of Dunkirk is split up into three separate narratives that become interweaved as the movie goes along. The first story that is introduced is that of a British private named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead). Tommy narrowly escapes Nazi forces and finds himself on the beach with thousands of other British and French soldiers waiting for evacuation. Throughout the next couple of days, Tommy must survive bombings by German planes, submarine attacks on their ships, while also navigating through an environment where everyone is fighting desperately to survive. The next story is that of Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and family friend George (Barry Keoghan) who use their small civilian boat to sail to Dunkirk and rescue whoever they can. Along the way they find a soldier (Cillian Murphy) who’s ship was sunk by the Germans and who is also suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress. Finally, we come to the eyes in the sky. Royal Air Force pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) and his partner take on numerous German bombers in order to protect the civilian ships and the troops on the beach. This becomes a much harder task when his fuel gauge gets destroyed and he has to rely on memory to know how much fuel he has left.

Dunkirk is almost more than a movie. It’s an experience of sight and sound that is above the norm when compared to most of my trips to the theater. It’s almost as if the movie just wrapped around me and didn’t let up until the very last frame. The first shot of the film pulled me in immediately. It feels so sudden and unnatural, but at the same time beautiful. It sets the tone perfectly for the rest of the film. The camera swoops around the skies with the planes and runs along the beaches with the soldiers all while the devastating sound effects complete the audio/visual immersion. I don’t think I’ll be getting the sound of the German planes out of my head anytime soon. Even though that horrifying whine steals the show, the other planes, gunshots, explosions, and ricochets boomed out of the sound system and made me jump a few times. Finally I have to give major credit to Hans Zimmer for his subtle yet intense score that moves with the plot perfectly.

Something that really surprised me about Dunkirk is the way the story is told. Nolan is known to tell intricate stories, and his earlier works like Following and Memento especially play around with narrative structure. While Dunkirk isn’t quite as broken up as Memento, it still has a unique flow to it. The soldiers on the beach have a story that lasts a week, the civilians in the boat span a day, and the pilots span an hour. This really enhances the story because we’ll see something happen through the eyes of one character and then later on in the movie we’ll see it again from a different perspective. This gives the viewer a fuller view of the event as it happened. It’s also just a lot of fun putting the pieces together as the movie goes along. It was a little bit confusing at first, but I got into it pretty quickly. Could the movie have been told in a linear way? Yeah, I’m sure it could have been but I’m also glad it wasn’t.

A complaint I’ve been hearing is that there isn’t enough character development. This kind of confuses me because I never really looked at this movie as being about the characters, but more so about the events that happened on those brutal days and nights in Dunkirk. The characters in this movie serve as archetypes for real soldiers. From the PTSD ridden soldiers to the heroic English civilians, these characters represent many. This doesn’t mean there aren’t some great performances, however. Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and Cillian Murphy are the real powerhouse performances in this movie, but there wasn’t a shaky actor in the bunch. I really don’t mind not seeing their backstories or what became of them or what their motivations for their actions were, and honestly there just wasn’t time in the narrative to slow down.

Dunkirk is a masterpiece of epic proportions and is quite frankly the best work I’ve seen from Christopher Nolan. This has been a pretty strong summer with the movies I’ve been seeing, but nothing can top this one. If another movie comes along this year that hits me as hard as Dunkirk did, I’d really be surprised. This is a movie that can’t be missed. It tells an incredible story of survival, but it also reworks the tropes of the war genre in ways that I haven’t seen done before. This film is outstanding and I can’t wait to see it again.

Final Grade: A+

La Vie en Rose – Review

If someone were to make a list of iconic singers from around the world, I can guarantee that Édith Piaf would be close to the top. Piaf’s unique voice and graceful stage presence made her an international success until her untimely death at the age of just 47. Even today, her music can be found in movies, television, and commercials which shows that even though she’s no longer with us, her musical legacy is still strong. Something that reinforced this was the 2007 film by Olivier Dahan, La Vie en Rose. This film tells the life story of Édith Piaf, which includes incredible joy and overwhelming tragedy. It’s definitely a story that had to be told.

The film begins with a sick looking Édith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) taking the stage for a concert, and quickly fainting during a song in front of a large audience. The film then cuts back to 1918 when Piaf was just a young child who is left by her parents to live with her grandmother in a brothel in Normandy. As the years go on, Piaf makes a meager living singing on the street, but is soon found by Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) and invited to sing at his club where she quickly becomes something of a local celebrity. As time goes on, her fame increases and travels around the world, including New York City, where tragedy hits hard when she loses the love of her life, Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), in a plane crash. Finally, back in France towards the end of her life, it’s clear that Piaf’s abuse of prescription drugs and alcohol have taken a huge toll on her health, and the devastating realization that soon she will no longer be able to sing anymore.

This is a hard movie to summarize because it tells so much of a person’s life. This is a pretty long movie, clocking in with a run time of almost two and a half hours, but even then I feel like there may have been more to be told. That works to the film’s credit since I was intrigued by the subject and the handling of Piaf by making the icon into exactly what she was: a human being. While I love the way Piaf is depicted in this movie, I wasn’t really a huge fan of how the story was told. The film starts towards the end and then jumps back to the beginning for a while, and naturally progresses from there. That’s all fine, but as the movie goes on it jumps back and forth and then introduces an even later timeline, and then starts jumping around even more rapidly. Towards the end of the movie, I jumped around so much that I was sometimes confused with where and when I was in the story. I understand that this was a way for the film makers to get in as much of the story as they could, and I’m ok with a cut up timeline, but this was just way overdone.

It’s impossible to talk about La Vie en Rose and not talk about Marion Cotillard. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest screen performances of all time. When you’re watching the movie and getting more engaged in the story, you forget that you’re watching Cotillard playing Édith Piaf and are actually watching Piaf herself. I know that’s how I felt. It’s a complete transformation from one person into another, and it’s truly incredible. Not only does she nail Piaf’s voice (although the singing was dubbed), but also the way she stood, small mannerisms that she had, and even small changes to her face that made all the difference. With a movie like this where the character was a real person whose life was filled with such success and tragedy, it’s important to believe what’s happening. Cotillard’s performances made this a very easy film to believe and get lost in. She is a marvel to watch, and earned the Academy Award for her performance, which is one of the few times someone has won this award for an entire foreign language role.

La Vie en Rose also is just a beautiful looking movie, even in the beginning when a young Piaf is living a life on the streets in Belleville to the more upscale life that she led in New York. The set design is all fantastic and the costumes work great with the different decades that Piaf lived through. There’s just so much wonderful stuff to look at, and I have to give a lot of credit to Olivier Dahan and his direction for adding something more to the design. At first, I thought the directing was nothing special, but that’s not the case. It’s understated and controlled and never takes the style too far. One of my favorite scenes in the movie happens during a devastating moment in Piaf’s life, and instead of cutting, the scene follows Piaf through her entire apartment and catches the entire range of emotion in her performance and the atmosphere surrounding the incident.

La Vie en Rose is not without it’s faults, but it’s a movie that truly captures the tumultuous life of an icon of music. This is a frustrating movie to sit through, at times, because how the story keeps jumping from the past to the present to the future to the past then who knows where. If that was just toned down a bit, the movie would have been improved. Still, Cotillard’s performance, the production design, and Dahan’s skilled directing make this an above average biopic.

Final Grade: B+

Blood Ties – Review

A little while ago I reviewed a movie called Contraband, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, which was based off of an Icelandic movie called Reykjavik-Rotterdam, also starring Kormákur. I wasn’t a huge fan of Contraband, and now we have a very similar situation. In 2013, Blood Ties was released which was directed by Guillaume Canet. This movie is actually a remake of a French film called Deux frères: flic & truand, also starring Canet. Much like my reaction with Contraband, I thought this was a pretty subpar film, even though there were a few great scenes and memorable performances. It just wasn’t enough to completely save the movie.

The year is 1974 and small time criminal Chris (Clive Owen) is released from his 12 year prison sentence with the hopes of starting his life anew. Part of this means reconnecting with his estranged brother, Frank (Billy Crudup) a New York policeman who disapproves of Chris’ choices and lifestyle. While trying to hold onto a job, Chris once again falls into a life of crime, but also catches the eye of Natalie (Mila Kunis). The two quickly begin a serious relationship, but Chris’ criminal doings often put a strain on it. Meanwhile, Frank begins to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Zoe Saldana) after her husband Anthony Scarfo (Matthias Schoenaerts) is arrested by Frank. As the two very different brothers try to keep their lives on track, they are frequently getting into small battles with each other, with much more extreme violence always seeming to lurk around the corner.

I want to get the good stuff out of the way first. The whole reason I was drawn to this movie in the first place is the outstanding cast. Besides the name I’ve already mentioned, the movie also stars Marion Cotillard as Chris’ ex-wife and James Caan as Chris and Frank’s father. Each and every one of these actors give great performances. Owen gives a very subtle but believable performance as Chris, which only reminded me why I think he’s one of the better actors working right now. I also have to give a lot of credit to Saldana for really owning her role, and I’m confident in saying she gives the best performance in the entire movie. Crudup also has a strong performance and plays all of the complications and troubles of Frank very well. There is absolutely no faults to be given to the cast, and they’re probably the only real reason to watch Blood Ties, to see these A-list actors in a role you’ve probably never heard they were in.

The biggest problem I had with Blood Ties is that I felt I was watching it for the thousandth time when this was the first time I ever saw it. This is a story that has been told countless times in a variety of different ways, and for the most part, much better. This movie is a remake, but it feels like it could be a remake of many other different movies. The whole crime genre has a lot of cliches attached to it, and Blood Ties seems to be an amalgamation of all of them. It’s actually pretty astounding how familiar this movie is. From the two brothers with different ideals, to the aging father who actually does know best, all the way to love triangle with criminal elements. It’s all been seen before.

The characters themselves also sort of lend to the problem of familiarity. While they were interesting at points, I could tell exactly where their paths were going to lead. Crudup’s character is the most fine tuned person in the whole movie, and while some of his arc is predictable, he plays the role with confidence and makes the movie all the better for it. The same can be said for Saldana’s character, who shares a very similar and close arc with Crudup. The biggest disappointment is Owen’s character who is, for the most part, completely one dimensional. He’s the criminal with the heart of gold, and it’s such a tired cliche, I really couldn’t get into his character despite his performance being strong.

I really wanted to like Blood Ties a lot more than I did. I mean, just look at the cast. It’s absolutely fantastic, and all the actors do a fine job. The problem is that the whole story it’s trying to tell is played out and has become far too predictable. If you’re going to tell a story like this, there has to be something in there that disrupts the formula and adds something new. This film felt like a clip show of cliches that other movies perfected. I can’t even say this movie’s worth watching for the cast because it feels like more of a chore than entertainment.

Sheitan – Review

Some of my favorite horror movies come out of France. For example, there’s the more modern horror flick High Tension, but also a more classic example like Eyes Without a Face. That’s what brings us to the French horror/dark comedy Sheitan. I was first interested in this movie when I saw that Vincent Cassel was playing the psychotic villain, a role that I have yet to see him play to this degree. Developed by an underground group of French videographers, Sheitan is a movie that is made exactly how the developers wanted it to be made and without any major interference from studios. The end result is something disturbing, hilarious, and unique.

While at a Parisian night club Bart (Olivier Barthelemy), Ladj (Ladj Ly), and Thaï (Nico Le Phat Tan) meet two girls, Eve (Roxane Mesquida) and Yasmine (Leïla Bekhti). After Bart gets kicked out of the club, Eve invites everyone back to her family’s mansion in the country where they can continue the party for as long as they want to. Upon their arrival, the group meets Joseph (Vincent Cassel), the groundskeeper that tends to the house for Eve’s family. As the day goes on, Joseph introduces the group to the people of the village who are all some sort of demented, but things get even weirder that night when they all go home for dinner and it becomes clear that Joseph has something sinister in mind for all of them.

This is one hell of a bizarre movie, and for that reason I give it a lot of credit. It’s a great blend of horror and comedy while still sustaining an ominous atmosphere throughout its entire run time. The story is told in a very weird way, which I will return to later, but I was compelled to stay with this movie until the end. Sheitan slowly but surely leads you on and drops a few clues here and there as to what Joseph has up his sleeve for the unsuspecting group of friends. That being said, this movie also works as a mystery of sorts because the whole time I was trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on. When I finally figured it out, it was so rewarding because I got to see my theory play out in front of me.

Like I said, one of the main reasons I wanted to watch this movie was to see Vincent Cassel act like a lunatic, and he sure delivers a memorable performance. In fact, I might say it’s one of my favorite horror performances. There are times where I no longer saw Cassel, but was sure that the character of Joseph had completely taken over. The constant smile that is smeared across his face is made even more eerie by the face crooked teeth Cassel wore for filming. Much like the entirety of Sheitan, Cassel is both horrifying and hilarious. I also have to give credit to the rest of the cast for adding an extra layer of character. Each person felt different and important to the story.

Now, the way the story is told felt very odd. It seemed like for a very long time, nothing was really happening. In fact, the movie only starts getting really intense during the third act. This was both a good and a bad thing for me. It was good because it made me feel like I was being led along this dark, winding path to some conclusion that I couldn’t even imagine. On the other hand, I started to feel just a little bored towards the middle of the movie. I’m still pleased that the film makers decided to take their time telling the story. Even though there were some boring moments, they never bogged the movie down and I feel like they still helped create a feeling of suspense that made me have to know what happened next.

Without knowing anything about it before watching it, I can say that Sheitan is a wonderfully underrated movie. It doesn’t even seem to have garnered a cult following, even though it definitely deserves one. It not only works as a grotesque piece of horror, but also a dark comedy full of complete lunacy. The art design and cinematography was even impressive. To all the horror fans out there who are looking for something off the beaten path, Sheitan may be just what you’re looking for.

Caché – Review

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (I’m partial to the 2007 version) is one of my favorite films of all time, and I’ve been severely slacking at watching some of his other works. I’ve finally gotten around to it with his 2005 critical success Caché. This film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and many critics call it one of the best films of the 2000s. All of those critics kind of have to slow down a little bit there. Caché is a very interesting and complex film when all is said and done, but it’s also extremely pretentious and often feels like a chore to sit through. The real joy of this movie comes through when you begin thinking about it after the credits roll.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juiliette Binoche) Laurent are a upper middle class family living a relatively quiet life in Paris. Georges is a talk show host on a public television station, Anne works as a publisher, and they both have a 12 year old son named Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). That quiet life soon gets uprooted when they begin finding videotapes from an anonymous stalker showing up at their doorstep. Why they are being recorded and who is responsible forces Georges to look back into his past and come to learn that actions he did when he was just a young boy could be the cause of the family’s stalker finally taking his revenge.

Caché is a very smart and well executed thriller that definitely does not fit the Hollywood definition of what a thriller is supposed to be. I highly respect Michael Haneke for stepping outside what is considered to be the genre conventions. Haneke said in an interview that he didn’t want the viewer to figure out what the one possible answer is to the mystery of this movie, he wanted people to accept all of the possible answers. This makes for some ingenious movie making, but to me it didn’t hit the mark well in the entertainment department. In my opinion, there are two kinds of art house movies. There’s a movie like Drive or even Requiem for a Dream. Those movies are “artsy.” Caché falls into the other category that I like to call “artsy fartsy.”

Technically speaking, though, the movie is really cool. The very first shot lasts a few minutes, and just shows the front of the Laurent’s house. It’s a great opening shot and got me in the mood to see how Haneke’s artistic vision would help tell the story, but this trick is used a few times too many. The film is also shot on video, which is actually an appropriate choice since the whole plot revolves around videotapes being delivered to this family. All of the artistic qualities that are in Caché do enhance it and halp it stand apart from more run of the mill thrillers. I’m just saying that for me some of it was a bit too much for me.

I will praise wholeheartedly the performances in this movie. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche work perfectly together and both of their performances are very natural and feel very real. The same can be said about everyone in the movie, even the younger actor, Lester Makedonsky. Someone who really steals the show every time he’s onscreen is Maurice Bénichou, and while he’s not present very much, every scene he’s in is memorable.

This was a strange review to write because I liked Caché more as I thought about it, but as I was watching it, it felt pretty tiresome. This may be because the real payoff is looking back on the entire thing and putting all of the pieces together instead of just being confused the entire time. There’s that and the fact that Haneke goes a little overboard with long takes of nothing, which he is actually also guilty of in Funny Games, which I love. Caché is a memorable movie that is in the same vein as Hitchcock, but watching it is nowhere near as entertaining as it probably should be.

District B:13 & District 13: Ultimatum – Review

What happens when you have action film master Luc Besson and combine his talents with gravity defying parkour and limb snapping martial arts? The result is an action movie that seems to have been forged by the gods for the gods, high on top of Mount Olympus. District B:13 is a prime example of how action films should be made, and like many action movies, it got a sequel. District 13: Ultimatum is also a marvel because it’s a sequel that actually compliments the first film well instead of just getting pooped out in the name of money.

Let’s start in 2004 with District B:13.

 

In the not too distant future of 2010 (remember this movie was made in 2004), the French government constructs a wall around a particularly violent ghetto, District 13. Three years later, most government run buildings and organizations, including the police, have disappeared from the ghetto leaving the people to fend for themselves. Leïto (David Belle) is a “criminal” from the ghetto who spends his days fighting against the gangs that run the city. When he finally gets mixed up with drug lord Taha (Bibi Naceri), his sister is taken and turned into an addict. Leïto soon meets police officer Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), who has a mission to infiltrate Taha’s gang to procure a neutron bomb that belongs to the government, but is set to go off within 24 hours. Taha wants the bomb, Leïto wants his sister back, and Damien wants to complete his mission, so the two team up to bring Taha’s reign of terror to an end and save Banlieue 13 from certain destruction.

This movie is, in my definition, a perfect action film. It’s fast, over the top, and well edited and shot. The parkour scenes flow together very smoothly thanks to Pierre Morel’s direction and steady hand behind the camera. The film editing also works with the kinetic movement of the characters and the narrative, jumping from scene to scene with chaotic precision. The stunts were also all choreographed by one of the costars, Cyril Raffaelli, and his work is out of this world. Not only are the action scenes some of the most unique martial arts you’ll see, but the parkour literally seems to defy gravity at times. There’s so much to look at and laugh in amazement.

District B:13 pretty much has everything you’d want in an action movie. I’ve heard complaints that the story is pretty weak, and I’d have to agree that it does have a very weak story. Let’s be honest though, I wanted to watch this movie for the action and the stuntwork and some cool cinematography. That’s exactly what I got, and the story is passable with a pretty strong message at the end. This is a movie I’ll be sure to watch over and over again.

In 2009, District 13: Ultimatum was released, which reinforces the theory of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

After waiting three years for law and order to finally come to District 13, Leïto recognizes that it may never come and still works at bringing down corruption wherever he finds it, from police to drug lords. Leïto soon finds himself in the possession of a video that proves corruption on a massive scale stemming from the government’s sort of private secret service. Damien, who is needed out of the picture, is placed in jail and is in need of Leïto’s help. As if breaking out of jail wasn’t hard enough, they are soon faced with a much bigger problem. The leader of the the department titled DISS, Walter Gassman (Daniel Duval) is working to get the president (Philippe Torreton) to bomb sectors of District 13 to create a new section of high rise apartment buildings and businesses.

As you can probably surmise from that summary, this sequel is a lot more intricate and complex than its predecessor, which isn’t necessarily the best thing for a movie like this. What made the first film such a success was the acrobatics and well choreographed fight scenes, not an overly complex story of interdepartmental corruption. Sure, that was part of it, but it didn’t completely take over the movie. Do not get me wrong, though, this is still a superior action movie. The fight scenes are still completely off the wall, if not as skillfully shot and there is even a great use of vehicular stunt work, which was probably the most memorable part of the movie.

District 13: Ultimatum doesn’t quite match the level that the first film did, but it is a worthy sequel. The action and choreography gets a little bit bogged down with a convoluted story that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, and feels a bit recycled at the same time. It was still great seeing the two protagonists teaming up again to save District 13 once again. The simplicity of the story worked well in the first one by allowing it to keep up a fast pace. This one is not as fast or exciting, but still worth a watch.

District B:13 and District 13: Ultimatum are great examples of how to properly do an action movie, and even how to construct a sequel that doesn’t feel forced. This is why I consider Luc Besson to be the king of the action genre and that the best action movies do seem to mostly stem from Europe.

 

The Tenant – Review

Roman Polanski. How many times have I talked about him on this blog? While he has dabbled in a lot of different genres, I’ll always remember him for his psychological horror/thriller films. Starting with Repulsion in 1965, Polanski started a trilogy of horror films that dealt with psychological torture in urban environments, especially in apartments. He continued this work with his 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, which is the most memorable of the three and is considered a horror classic. Finally, in 1978, Polanski ended the trilogy with the most enigmatic entry, The Tenant. I didn’t really expect a whole lot from this movie, considering the other two, but this proved to be the most difficult movie for me in the entire trilogy.

Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski) is a timid file clerk who defines the term “pushover” who is need of an apartment. As luck would have it, he finds a cheap one that has become vacant after the previous tenant committed suicide. After winning over the miserable landlord Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas), Trelkovsky moves into the apartment and begins getting constantly hassled by his neighbors from all sides for his being too loud, dirty, or having people over. The hassling becomes so persistent and obscene that Trelkovsky begins to suspect that the other tenants are trying to drive him to suicide by slowly turning him into the deceased tenant. As the paranoia begins to mount and Trelkovsky’s sanity slips further and further, he soon finds himself becoming lost in the character that he fears is being created for him, and the line between reality and fearful hallucinations become less and less noticeable.

Let’s get it out of the way from the start. The Tenant is a super weird movie that made me question what I was looking at more than once. That’s not to say that the other two entries in the trilogy aren’t weird, but this one just goes off the walls bat shit insane. There’s plenty of positives to that which I’ll get to later, but I want to get passed the not so great stuff first. For one thing, the movie has no clear way to tell what is real and what is in Trelkovsky’s head, and that’s fine. What isn’t fine is that the ending neither reaffirms or denies anything that has been seen or heard. It simply doesn’t make sense, and only seems to be in the movie to make the viewer scratch their head in utter confusion. The movie also spends a lot of time not really doing anything, making it feel a lot slower and longer than it wants to be. But that’s really where my negatives end.

I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about the state of so called horror movies these days, and its really hard to get away from that mindset after seeing a movie like this. This movie does exactly what a horror movie should do, and that is to create genuine fear, this time by using our fear of shit neighbors, letting other people bully you, and paranoia in the purest form. Where this movie succeeds is in its ability to frighten an audience without being loud. Delirious hallucinations in a run down bathroom and finding yourself spying on yourself is so twisted and weird that it succeeds in scaring more than any jump scare or spooky ghost. It’s a mental state that no one wants to live through, but how do you know you aren’t paranoid already? Confusion is more terrifying than something you can see.

There’s a lot of things that I should probably say about this movie, but after everything I’ve already said about, I don’t know how much more I can add. All I can say is that this movie is really, really weird and there’s plenty of scenes that really stick out in my head. That may actually be the strongest part of this movie, just how many memorable scenes there are and how original they seemed. The hieroglyphics in the bathroom and the tooth in the wall are just a few, not to mention a group of sadists playing with a human head in the courtyard.

While The Tenant certainly isn’t Roman Polanski’s masterpiece, it is still a film that shows how much he should be respected as a film maker. My only real gripe with the movie is the overly complicated ending and the amount of time spent doing nothing. Still, there are so many memorable and freaky scenes that it should be enough to create at least one restless night and things possibly hiding in the shadows. If you like horror films, this is a must see.

The City of Lost Children – Review

Every so often a movie comes around that goes way, way, way over the top with just about everything, and in The City of Lost Children it almost is enough to make you tired. Directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet completely blast your audio and visual senses. Anyone familiar with Jeunet’s other works like Delicatessen and Amélie may not be too surprised by this. This film is a milestone in terms of imagination and art direction, but it unfortunately lacks a little in the story department and all of the gizmos and what-have-yous often became distracting.

The children of an unnamed port city all seem to disappearing one by one and all too quickly. No one knows why this is happening, but if they were to look out into the ocean they would find a rig where a mad scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork) has all of the children held captive. Krank’s plan is to use a device to extract the dreams of the children since he is unable to have any of his own. Meanwhile, a carnival strongman, One (Ron Perlman), sees his little brother get kidnapped to be taken to the rig. He soon joins forces with a little girl named Miette (Judith Vittet), an orphan who is also a member of a thieves’ guild. The two begin investigating the kidnappings which will ultimately lead to a showdown with the mad scientist, himself.

The plot of this movie is so stuffed, I feel like I’m leaving so much story information out. This is a two hour movie, but it could have easily gone on for four since there seemed to be just so much going. There’s a group of clones (all played by Dominique Pinon) who have a crazy backstory, conjoined twins that run the thieves’ guild, a tick with murderous powers of motivation, and a talking brain in a fish tank with speakers! WHERE CAN I EVEN BEGIN?! Like I said before, the imagination that went into making The City of Lost Children is mind blowing, but there’s so much there that the story sort of suffers.

 

Every corner, every inch, every possible place for negative space in every scene is filled with some sort of gadget or device or weird looking person that there were times where I didn’t even know where to look. There is so much going, and I say that in one of the most extreme ways I could possibly say it. About half way through the movie, I started feeling like I was confused or missing something, but it turns out I was right on on pretty much all accounts. There’s just so many odd characters with different stories and contraptions that it all kind of detracted from the main story about a mad scientist kidnapping children to extract their dreams, which is cool enough. You don’t really need more than that, but this movie literally seems to have everything in it. This isn’t always a negative though.

As it stands, this movie is all about the style and art design which is beyond impressive. Being made in 1995, the film makers relied strongly on actual sets and practical special effects and make up. Much like John Carpenter’s The Thing, I would put The City of Lost Children on the movies that go above and beyond what is expected of special effects of the time. It all looks so amazing, and seems like it could possibly exist in some demented alternate reality. That’s really what watching this movie feels like. A step into a world that’s almost ours, but at the same time is completely different. It’s a modern day fairy tale.

You could compare this movie to the works of film makers like Guillermo del Toro, Terry Gilliam, or even David Lynch. Still, it has the names and style of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet all over it. This is a really impressive film that is like nothing I’ve really seen before in terms of style, but as someone who loves a good story I was a little disappointed with the narrative. Don’t look at The City of Lost Children only as a story, but as a huge artistic achievement. With that in mind, this is a movie that is sure to make you gasp, laugh, and maybe even cringe.

Black Moon – Review

Experimental film is a really weird area of cinema that has its really hard core, die hard followers and plenty of critics and skeptics who really can’t get into it at all. I, personally, think that experimental film making can be really cool when done by the right artist and done correctly. Of course it helps if these experimental films dabble with surrealism, but that’s just my own personal taste. One name that doesn’t really come up in  conversation about this kind of film making is French writer/director Louis Malle. Malle is best known for films like My Dinner with Andre and Lacombe Lucien, along with his many documentaries. In 1975, however, Louis Malle made a film called Black Moon, a surreal trip with hints of Lewis Carroll that isolated many critics and audiences, even still today.

 

In a post-apocalyptic world, men and women are engaged in a brutal war against each other. Lily (Cathryn Harrison) is a teenage girl who is fleeing the countryside to get away from the war soon finds herself at a mansion in the middle of nowhere after she was chased by the opposing soldiers. As she begins exploring the house she meets a strange old lady (Therese Giehse) lying in a bed, who’s only friend is a rat and who keeps contact with the outside world through a ham radio. She also meets a brother (Joe Dallesandro) and sister (Alexandra Stewart) who looks very much alike and may actually be the same person. Finally, she meets many talking animals and plants, including a unicorn, but all of this doesn’t matter once the war begins getting closer and closer to the mansion.

This is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in a long time, and I went into Black Moon not knowing anything about it. As far as this film goes, I think this was a really entertaining film for being an experimental movie. There was enough weird things going on in it to keep me interested and the whole backdrop of a war between men and women was an interesting thing to see, especially with both sides being equally menacing. Being made in the mid-1970s, Malle wanted to make a sort of statement on the new wave of feminism going on, but the way he does it is smart. Both sides of the war are equally brutal and unforgiving towards each other, with scenes of violence being committed by both genders.

Being a movie with very little dialogue, the sound design is very impressive and perfectly makes up for how little actual talking there is. It’s really amusing whenever an animal talks, and can be kind of weird when flowers and grass cry out in pain when they are being stepped on. Even the bugs can be heard, their tiny mandibles scratching on the rocks that they scurry across. Along with the awesome audio is some really impressive cinematography by Sven Nykvist, who often collaborated with Ingmar Bergman. The film has a very muted look to it, emphasizing the time of year and the mysterious war alike. His cinematography really succeeded at putting me in the movie, and worked very well with the sound design to be very immersive, if not just as strange as everything else.

Now, even though the cinematography, sound, and strangeness is all very appealing and made for an entertaining movie, Black Moon can become pretty tiresome after a little while and may require more than one sitting to finish. This is a pretty average length movie, but there really isn’t any story and a lot of just running around around the house seeing weird things. That’s why most surrealist and experimental films that people talk about, like the overly obsessed Un Chien Andalou and La Jetée, are short films. The film makers got their points across in a short amount of time so our brains didn’t feel like mush at the end of the movies. Black Moon goes on and on, and a break is recommended to more easily get through the film.

Black Moon is one of those movies where you need to be careful because it is far from a traditional film. It’s Louis Malle’s trip down Carroll’s rabbit hole where the result is a surreal metaphor for gender relations and sexual discovery. Very 1970s if you ask me. I enjoy films like this because they challenge me to look deeper into the odd events and figure them out, even though this one is a bit more explicit than most. If you enjoy the work of Buñuel, Dali, or other surrealists, you ought to check out Black Moon.