Author: Jandy Page 84 of 145

Night of the Hunter River Sequence

On September 24, 2010

I just posted a little article on Row Three with a triple feature of mesmerizingly weird films featuring children, with one of the films being the wonderful, uncategorizable The Night of the Hunter. I won’t crosspost it here because it’s closely tied to a rep cinema programming series of posts we have there, but I figured I’d go ahead and share what I think is the most memorable sequence from the film (out of a BUNCH of memorable sequences) – the meditative and nearly surreal river trip the kids take toward the end of the film. It’s not really a spoiler to watch this section if you haven’t seen it, and I think it’s beautiful even out of context. But I have a thing for moody cinematography and kids singing haunting songs.

This was the moment I fell in love with the film the first time I saw it; it’s sort of a turn, too, as the film moves from being a heightened melodrama/horror/film noir film into something more along the lines of a fable or morality play, though like I said, it’s really hard to categorize. Watching it a second time brings out more of this fable-like quality in the first half as well, once you know to look for it. The Night of the Hunter comes out in a Criterion edition (both DVD and blu-ray) in November. You can bet I’ll be picking it up.

Chuck 4×01: Chuck vs. the Honeymoon

By Jandy

On September 23, 2010

In Television

spoilers abound

The writers of Chuck have proven themselves to be quite good at reinventing the show, especially with the huge move from Chuck-the-geeky-spy-asset who needed to be saved all the time of the first couple of seasons to Chuck-the-suaver-but-still-geeky actual spy and kung fu master of Season Three. This year, Chuck starts out not being a spy, having promised his sister Ellie that he’d get out the dangerous business. However, he also found a spy lair underneath his apartment and evidence his mom was a spy and may not have simply left their family years ago as he and Ellie always thought. THE PLOT THICKENS.

So this season starts, and we’ve got a tantalizing new direction to consider – Chuck as rogue spy, following in his father’s footsteps to learn the truth behind his mother’s disappearance. What we actually get in the episode – Chuck and Morgan floundering around, ending up working the same case that Sarah and Casey are working from the CIA side, and Chuck eventually…tada…becoming an official spy again. Yes, already. no, I’m not really happy about that. I really dislike it when shows set up a big change in a season finale and then use the first couple of episodes of the new season to basically reverse it back to status quo. What was the point?

Anyway, we do get some cool things. Chuck’s mom is Linda Hamilton, which is awesome. And she seems to be awesome, potentially kidnapped by enemy spies, or potentially IN CHARGE OF the enemy spies. Who can say? It’s a bit of an Alias retread perhaps, but we’ll see how it goes. Looks like Chuck’s going to try keeping his being a spy again a secret from Ellie, but I hope that doesn’t last too long – he really ought to tell her. The show thinks it can’t survive without secrets, but I think it can. Look how much more awesome it got after Devon found out about Chuck.

Oh, and the BuyMore is a full-on CIA facility now. I kind of love that. I was wondering how they were going to continue the show with the original main location demolished, but this is definitely a cool direction to go with that. We’ll see how the CIA-ization of the show works, though, because a lot of the fun of the earlier seasons was balancing the CIA stuff with the real-life stuff. And Chuck seems less geeky/goofy this year. NEED MOAR GEEKY/GOOFY CHUCK.

So first episode, a little rocky for me, but I’m still on board. I think they’re just growing into the new situation, but they need to let it be that, a new situation, and not try to pull it back into situations we’ve already seen.

Fall TV Is Upon Us Once Again

By Jandy

On September 19, 2010

In Television

This year I’ve decided to watch less TV. I decide this every year, and somehow end up with roughly 17-20 shows I try to watch anyway. Sure enough when I added up all the ones I want to check out this year, I ended up with seventeen. But I’m pretty serious about cutting back, even if it means leaving behind some things.

Definitely Watching – Returning Shows

These are the shows that I just can’t bring myself to give up.

Fringe

Possibly my most-anticipated returning show this year. Season Two stepped up to the place something fierce after a rocky first season, and last year’s finale had me salivating to return to the Fringe universe – or should I say universes. Fringe is probably the best sci-fi you’ll see this fall, and is starting to get enough ideas going that it may make it onto the list of my all-time favorite sci-fi shows, if it can keep up S2’s momentum.

Community

I never would’ve guessed it going into last year, but freshman sitcom Community consistently out-classed its more established siblings on NBC’s Thursday line-up, offering a witty and satirical look at self-absorbed types going back to community college. There’s far more here than meets the eye, and if the writing stays half as strong this year as last, I’m totally in.

Castle

Usually I start each year with several crime procedurals, because they make me happy. Generally, they fall off my schedule fairly quickly as my time runs short, though. Castle is one that hasn’t, because its combination of mystery/procedural, comedy, and character development hits that sweet spot that most procedurals can only manage for a few episodes at a time before it gets old. Thanks to the actors and snappy writing, so far Castle has stayed fresh, and I look forward to seeing much more Nathan Fillion on my TV.

Chuck

I very nearly threw Chuck over when it spend way too long waffling on the will-they-won’t-they of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship. Now it seems they’ve firmly moved on from that and tied it up in a very satisfying way without letting it get boring, plus the setup for this season, with Chuck probably going rogue, looks to take the show in a whole new direction. This is one show that manages to reinvent itself almost every season and make it work. But if they do start waffling on Chuck and Sarah again? I’m probably out.

Sanctuary

Syfy shows have been doing right by me lately, and I’ve just about caught up S2 so I can start right in on S3 when it starts (S1 and S2 are on Netflix Instant Watch). It’s not a great show, but it’s fun, geeky, B-movie-like, Nicolas Tesla and Jack the Ripper are characters, and with Warehouse 13 finishing up its season next week, I’m going to want something in this wheelhouse around.

(Also Parks & Recreation is a definitely watch when it returns in spring. I’m still a little miffed at NBC for delaying it.)

Trying Out – New Shows

The Walking Dead

AMC does zombies? Based on a graphic novel series? Seems a little outside their wheelhouse, but so far every original AMC show has been 100% awesome, plus I gotta check out what they do with the zombies. The trailers released so far look pretty darn good.

Undercovers

J.J. Abrams + spies = I will at least give it a try. It may be nothing more than Alias-lite, and it’s not like we haven’t seen the married spy angle in countless other shows and movies, but from the clips I’ve seen, looks like there’s a nice mix of action and humor here, with good chemistry between the leads. We’ll see how it goes, but I can’t skip a J.J. show.

Nikita

This one has already started, and I have the episodes recorded but haven’t watched them yet. Not an auspicious beginning of keeping up with TV this year. But so far reactions from people who like TV I like are quite positive, and have increased my interest. I love spy shows, and I don’t have any nostalgic connection to the earlier series (no one seems to be mentioning the Luc Besson film, which I have seen, but didn’t love), so I’ll be coming into it fairly unbiased, aside from my general bias against CW shows.

No Ordinary Family

Looks like a live-action The Incredibles, with a family suddenly getting superpowers and having to figure out what to do with them. This could really go either way, but with Julie Benz and Michael Chiklis as the parents, it definitely seems worth a shot. The really REALLY bland marketing so far is not encouraging me, though.

Boardwalk Empire

Martin Scorsese producing an HBO show sounds like a winner right out of the gate, and the period Atlantic City setting is attractive to me, too. Of course, I don’t get HBO, so I may not actually be watching this right away, but if I did, I would be.

On Notice – Returning Shows

These are shows I’m going to probably start watching, but whether I keep watching them will depend greatly on how much time I have and how compelling they end up being for me this year.

Caprica

We thought this was going to be a mid-season return, but turns out Syfy is starting it later this fall after all. Good thing, because hopefully it can get enough legs this way that they’ll renew it. And hopefully it will deserve renewing. It has been a pretty slow burn, but there’s so much percolating in there that I love that I really hope it comes into its own this year.

Stargate: Universe

I enjoy SGU quite a bit and it filled a space-travel-sci-fi-shaped hole last year pretty well, but I’m not going to be too upset if I can’t make time for it this year. I’m going to try, but no promises, unless the writing turns really compelling. It had a couple of really good episodes last year, but tended to meander and backtrack a bit overmuch.

Survivor: Nicaragua

I’ve had a soft spot for Survivor the last few years, even though I didn’t watch it for the first several seasons. Last season was really good, with the two all-star teams, but I’m afraid it can’t really come up to that again. Survivior is my go-to “I’m too drained to watch anything else tonight” show, but there’s so much on Instant Watch now that I’m likely not to need it for that.

30 Rock

Oh, 30 Rock. I love you, but the last year or two have been a little lackluster. Both of the two newcomer shows to NBC’s Thursday night outshone even you, and I can’t promise that I’ll keep you if you don’t step it up.

How I Met Your Mother

This is a comfort show for me. I love the characters, but the storylines haven’t really been grabbing me for a couple of years. These are the kind of cuts that are hard to make, but especially since this isn’t available on hulu, I’m likely to leave it behind.

Family Guy

Family Guy is one of the few shows that I don’t care about watching in order, or if I miss an episode. So I’ll probably keep it in my hulu queue just for those times when I have 20 minutes and need some quick laughs, but it isn’t something I’ll feel the need to watch every week.

The Office

*sigh* This one’s hard, but I haven’t really been enjoying it for a couple of years. It’s time to cut the cord. Unless Amy Ryan comes back, which it seems like may happen from last season’s finale. Those episodes I might watch, even though it seems like a rather desperate attempt to recover the one thing that was good about the show the last couple of seasons.

The Amazing Race

I get a kick out of the whole traveling-around-the-world aspect of the show, but the last couple of years the format has been getting really stale for me, and the contestants more and more annoying. Not really worth it anymore.

Tentatively Checking Out – New Shows

Checking these out, but I’m not totally convinced they’re going to stay on my schedule.

The Event

Heh, yeah, so this is the only one that ended up down here. I will probably check out an episode or two of this, but the marketing is sooooo earnest and sooooo “this is the next big show” that I’m pretty dubious. My guess is it’ll turn out exactly like FlashForward did last year. In other words, not good.

Review: A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop

By Jandy

On September 15, 2010

In Film

[Rating:4/5]

originally posted on Row Three

Six words that don’t fill me with a lot of confidence: “Remake of a Coen Bros. film.” Four words that do fill me with a lot of confidence: “Directed by Zhang Yimou.” So I was a little torn on what to expect from this film, a period China-set version of Blood Simple. But I figured if someone as stylish and individual as Zhang Yimou wanted to remake the Coen Bros., he probably had some interesting ideas to bring to it, so by and large I was cautiously optimistic. Turns out, that optimism was not misplaced, because I quite enjoyed this both on its own and in relation to the Coen film.

The broad-stroke story remains largely the same. The wife of a small business owner (in this case, the remotely situated Wang’s Noodle Shop), tired of her husband’s abuse, begins an affair with Li, one of the employees. When an unscrupulous guard captain tells Wang what’s going on, he hires the captain to kill the pair of lovers. But there are double-crosses and mistakes and plot twists aplenty in store before all is said and done. But what was formerly a darkly comic noir film has become a bright comic action film, while still retaining the sense of absurdity and morbid inevitability.

Zhang has added another pair of employees who act as slapstick comic relief, a bumbling man-child and a rather hysterical young girl who complicate the plot greatly by trying to break into the boss’s safe to “steal” the back wages he owes them. But the captain has already turned the tables on the boss by this point, and his world-weary but taciturn annoyance at being constantly interrupted as he’s finishing up business worked well for me, though he’s very different from the Coens’ smarmy detective. A lot of the film takes place in silence or nearly so, and a lot depends on the actors’ physical presence to communicate humor, danger, fear, etc, and they all do a fine job making the film consistently engaging and often surprising.

A lot of people are going to complain about the slapsticky nature of the additional characters, as well as Li quite often, but within the world that Zhang has created, it works well and I found it genuinely arresting. Even more arresting are the simply gorgeous landscapes in which all of this takes place, in the deserts of rural China. The red and cream-striped rolling hills, with the sun rising and setting over them, and our characters often nearly swallowed in them as they try to keep their heads in increasingly absurd and hostile circumstances, are breathtaking – not that I expected anything less from someone as known for his use of flamboyant visuals as Zhang. As far as the slapstick goes, if you make it through the first ten minutes (when the wife purchases a pistol from a traveling Persian salesman), you’ll be fine. Also, despite the quick slapstick of some sections, Zhang takes his time with others, with several of the suspenseful scenes drawn out to almost ludicrous deliberateness.

I watched Blood Simple a few days after seeing A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, and was intrigued with how many little moments Zhang took directly from the earlier film (especially in the final sequence as the wife defends herself) but transformed them to live comfortably within his film’s world. This is a fine example of a film that’s both true to its source and unique to itself, obviously a Zhang film through and through, while still honoring the Coens’ original. It’s not perfect – I wish the wife had been given more agency, and the motivation for the captain’s apparent cruelty is not particularly well-realized – but on a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment basis, the film is more than enjoyable, as long as you’re willing to let it deviate wildly from the tone of the original.

Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

By Jandy

On September 12, 2010

In Film

[Rating:2.5/5]

originally posted on Row Three

It’s a little bit pointless to review Resident Evil: Afterlife, which is why I didn’t even bother seeking out the Rotten Tomatoes score or any other reviews before rushing off to see it opening night. I mean, this is the fourth Resident Evil movie, with basically the same team behind all of them, though directors have changed a few times. You pretty much know what you’re getting into when you buy a ticket for this. If you expect much more than Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter looking hot and kicking zombie ass while spouting ridiculous dialogue in a series of loosely tied together scenes, you’ll probably be disappointed. If not, enjoy it for the even sillier-than-most B movie it is.

Resident Evil: Extinction ended with classic sequel bait, with Alice (Milla Jovovich) promising to find Umbrella Corp bossman Wesker in his underground Tokyo lair and wipe him out, with the help of the army of clones Umbrella had been building to try to find a cure for the T-virus. Resident Evil: Afterlife picks up the story right there, with an all-out attack on Umbrella Tokyo. But Wesker gets away, destroying the facility behind him, and Alice (re-humanized by an injection that neutralizes the T-virus in her) sets off to find the rest of the Extinction group who had left to find Arcadia, a promised infection-free haven. Things don’t go as planned, Alice and Claire (an awesomer-than-I-expected Ali Larter, almost upstaging Milla a time or two) end up with another small group of survivors and eventually face off with Wesker again.

It’s all pretty standard go-here-do-this, wait-do-this-other-thing-first storytelling that betrays both its video game roots and the rather unimaginative writing of Paul W.S. Anderson, but we’re not here for story. Which is good, because a lot of it is really dumb. I mean, there’s a radio transmission promising a place with no infection, where there is safety, food, and water, and it doesn’t even OCCUR to anyone in the group that this could be a trap? Not to mention all the times that things happen without explanation, motivation, or logic. (Where did the giant hammer-wielding monster come from? One can only assume an offshoot of the Nemesis project from Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but there’s no real basis within the film for that assumption.) Or all the times when they’ve been working toward one thing and then just move on to some completely different plan. But there’s a point at which such earnest silliness in storytelling ceases to matter and almost makes the film more fun. I’m not putting Resident Evil among the class of films like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Troll 2, but I will say that it makes it a lot more fun to think of it that way when you’re watching it.

I do wish the action sequences, since that’s what I was there for, had been a little more intense and extensive – there were very few sequences that felt like they had any stakes, only a couple of Alice fighting her way hand-to-hand through a zombie onslaught, and most of them had too little build-up and were over too quickly. I think part of this might have been because of the 3D, actually – the fight choreography wasn’t nearly as intricate even as in the earlier films in the series. I watched it in 2D, so I can’t vouch for the 3D, but based on 3D films I have seen, fast-moving action scenes with lots of choreography might not work as well since it’s so much harder to focus quickly. (And yes, I will quite possibly go back to see it in 3D next week sometime.)

So yeah, it’s not a very good movie, but if you’re a fan of the series, or of Milla Jovovich, it’s not going to matter. You’re going to see it, and you’re probably going to enjoy it. If you’re not a fan of either of those things, you’re better off spending your money on many other things. If the screencaps and trailer alone are enough to get you pumped, this is a movie for you. If not, don’t bother reading my words. This is not a movie about words. Personally, I had a great time watching it, and will watch it again, but I can also pick apart what was wrong or could’ve been better about almost every scene. It’s a critical conundrum, but one I’ll live with.