A Host of Disappointments

I think I might drop this feature going forward and instead focus on writing longer reviews of the movies I watch. An advantage of this is that I'll be writing right after seeing the movie and not struggling to recall salient points. Also, it will give me more content (and more content means more page views HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!). So, we'll see how that goes...

Mission: Impossible II -- John Woo

I'm not terribly well-versed in the ouvre of John Woo. He's always been kind of a caricature to me what with the dove trademark. In fact, until last year, I'd only seen Broken Arrow yet I'd made loads of jokes about the doves and his ridiculous action. I'm still a bit of a Woo neophyte, but I've seen Hard-boiled and The Killer and if there's one thing I've taken away from watching his movies it's this: John Woo makes absurd movies. That's not a pejorative statement by any means. They are quite a bit of fun, just devoid of anything but the aforementioned ridiculous action. The sense of playfulness of the first film is traded for doves and slow-motion. Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt seems less a human than a vessel for weapons to go off. I expect this to be my least favorite of the series (Simon Pegg is added to the cast in III, so how can that not be more fun?). Also, Ethan Hunt is pretty good at completing these "impossible" missions.

Night Moves -- Arthur Penn

The critical reaction to Night Moves appears to place it in the underrated/cult classification, but I found it to be a disjointed mess of plots, few of which hold much interest. There is no flow to the story, editing, or dialogue. Half the time it feels like people are speaking in riddles and there's a jarring discussion of a chess move that exists solely to be a metaphor (and to give the movie its title) since there's no indication that Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby even likes chess, let alone is a student of it, until that moment. I did find Moseby's acceptance of his wife's infidelity and willingness to work it out with her to be refreshing and unexpected, so it's got that going for it. I also had a good time imagining that this Moseby is the father of How I Met Your Mother's Ted Moseby.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams -- Werner Herzog

This might be one of my biggest disappointments in the last few years of movie watching. I love Herzog's films and I haven't seen a documentary by him that wasn't amazing until now. It's not that Cave is bad, it just starts to feel completely redundant. There's only so much time one can spend looking pans across the cave paintings until one says, "yup... I get it." Maybe I'd feel different had I seen it in 3D, but I felt like I was watching a Discovery Channel documentary, not a Werner Herzog exploration of Ecstatic Truth. I almost feel like he recognized this, which is why he put the albino alligator epilogue in.

Hanna -- Joe Wright

Another disappointment. Hanna starts out pretty great, but the minute Hanna meets the British family, the film grinds to a halt. Maybe it's that the family is filled with one-dimensional cartoons of people or just that the daughter Hanna befriends is one of the more obnoxious characters to appear on screen last year, but the good will I felt toward the film was sapped away by the minute. Fortunately, the action scenes are uniformly bad-ass and Wright does a nice job with the camera, particularly moving through the Grimm's amusement park (upside-down shot aside). My biggest issue with Hanna is that it feels more like a style exercise than a movie with something to say. That doesn't make it bad, just middle-of-the-road. Plus, the lack of subtlety in bookending the movie is glaring and inelegant. 

The Devil and Daniel Johnston -- Jeff Feuerzeig

Daniel Johnston is a fascinating and infuriating person to learn about in this documentary. He as severe mental issues that make it hard to sympathize with him since he treats his friends and family so horribly at times, but he's clearly disturbed and needs your sympathy. It's very strange to see an artist who is so respected live at home with his parents well into his 40s, but such is his life. Johnston is the perfect subject for a documentary. I just wish I cared at all about his music. Not long ago, I downloaded a bunch of his stuff and have been struggling to eradicate it from my iPod since (the labeling of the tracks is occasionally mystifying). He sounds better when playing piano than guitar, but it's a struggle to listen to and I can't help but feel many people appreciate him more for his legend than his music. If you like his music, then you will love this documentary. As it stands for me, it's good and worth seeing.

Silverado -- Lawrence Kasdan

I didn't always like westerns, but after a class and exploring some of the more famous works in the genre, I've grown to quite like them. One of my professors referenced Silverado as a pretty great return to the dormant western form, so it's been on my radar for a while. Now that I've seen it, I have to agree. The landscape and sets are very impressive (and reused) and the cast is pretty great (in addition to being an asset for any "Six Degrees of..." game, the cast doesn't date the film as much as say, the cast of Young Guns, either). I'm very surprised I hadn't sought Silverado out earlier when I was at my peak Monty Python obsession since John Cleese makes an (all too brief) appearance. The film strains credulity in the ways the paths of the heroes diverge and converge, but it's not so glaring nor is it unexpected since we know they can't be gone for long. Silverado is a solid and competent movie with some beautiful shots (though Kasdan falls short in a few shots where he seems to be channeling Leone).