Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
October 15, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I hope I don't barf in my space suit.

We watch movies.

Kim Hollis: What movies have you seen lately? What did you think?

Edwin Davies: In the theater I have seen End of Watch, The Master and Looper, which I liked, adored and loved, respectively.

William Friedkin wrote a tweet earlier this week saying that End of Watch is one of the best cop movies ever made and, with all respect to Mr. Friedkin, that's bullshit, especially coming from the man who made the best cop movie ever, The French Connection. That's not to say it the film isn't good, it is. It's a solid cop movie with two very engaging performances, but there's not much new in it, contentwise, and the found footage angle becomes so irrelevant to the actual film that I don't really see why it was included at all. David Ayer has made a name for himself as a chronicler of modern policing, and all I could think whilst watching End of Watch was that Training Day covered a lot of similar ground in a way that was much more interesting and engaging.

I'm a massive Paul Thomas Anderson fan and I've been eagerly awaiting The Master for about three or four years now, through all its production and financing woes, so I was pretty excited to check it out. It surpassed and subverted my expectations by being nothing like what I expected, yet exactly what I didn't realize I wanted. It's a difficult film, but one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about, and those are the exact qualities that will either cause people to love it or completely dismiss it. For me, it confirms that Anderson is pretty much the only game in town as far great American directors go.

Finally, Looper was just wonderful. I've been a big fan of Rian Johnson ever since I saw Brick on its opening weekend in Britain and it feels so great seeing him make a film that's so wildly ambitious and clever which has also, somewhat improbably, become a mainstream hit. It's a piece of dense, heady science fiction that doesn't skimp on the action, but which also manages to find a strong emotional core to ground its talk of destiny and free will. A real joy.

I also caught up with Dark Shadows, which was a mess but benign; Searching For Sugar Man, which is a brilliant documentary that everyone should check out without reading anything about it because it would spoil some of the fun; and Eight Men Out, John Sayles' film about the Blacksox scandal, which I loved despite having no interest in baseball and only passing interest in gambling.

Felix Quinonez: I saw Liberal Arts and I liked it a lot. It was nothing extraordinary but it was very pleasant. I definitely thought it was a lot better than Radnor's previous directing effort, Happythankyoumoreplease, which I found a bit pretentious. A lot of what I liked had to do with the performances. Elizabeth Olsen is great in the movie and I hope she has a long career and Radnor is good too. The movie also has a strong supporting cast. Aside from the performances I really liked how it captured the feeling of college. I liked that it caught the excitement of being in it through Olsen's character. And through Radnor's character we get to see the nostalgia that some of us feel towards it after graduating. It's not the most memorable movie but it is definitely enjoyable.

I also saw The Dark Knight Returns Pt. 1. I love what DC is doing with these animated adaptations and they have improved so much since Superman: Doomsday. With The Dark Knight Returns, they are adapting Frank Miller's classic graphic novel of the same name. And they do a phenomenal job. My initial complaint was the fact that they split it up into two movies. I know that they like to keep these movies about and hour and 15 minutes but they could have made it two hours and no one would have complained. But I guess they can sell two DVDs this way. That being said, the movie is phenomenal. They split up the story in a way that it actually does feel like a whole movie rather than ending on a cliffhanger.

The voice acting is great. Peter Weller portrays Batman and he does a phenomenal job. The art is fabulous. As much as I love Frank Miller, sometimes his art bothers me. That was the one thing I didn't like about The Dark Knight Returns (the graphic novel) but on the movie adaptation they use a similar look but a lot more polished. But the thing that surprised me the most was how cool the score is. I really can't say enough good stuff about this, go check it out. Now I just can't wait till the second part comes out.

Max Braden: I did not expect too much from End of Watch because it looked to me like just another cop drama, but I was impressed. Gyllenhaal and Pena have great chemistry, and the best parts of the movie are them just being stupid/funny/macho/flawed/human. It's not quite as plot driven as Ayer's other cop movies like Training Day and S.W.A.T., but I liked it more than Dark Blue.

Looper also surprised me in a few ways. There's more sci-fi in it than appears in the trailer, but this turns out to be one of the best parts of the movie, and the child actor featured in the second half is perfect for the role. There are also a lot of great visual effects in the second half. I was a little let down by JGL because it seems he's trying to hard to look like Bruce Willis, including something under his upper lip? Bruce's character also takes on a mad-scientist type justification for his actions which make him unsympathetic. And of course there are some logic problems. But I liked it overall.

Taken 2 is more of the same in the way that Safe House and The Bourne Legacy are repeats of the first Bourne: good, fine, watchable, but lacking the special spark of the first movie. Neeson is very good at projecting an intimidating presence and confidence, so it's worth watching just to see him work the role.

Recently seen on DVD:

What to Expect When You're Expecting - Kendrick's serious storyline is the highlight, and the husbands are mildly amusing, but the rest is too manufactured.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax - I think I liked one of the rock songs, but I was otherwise unmoved.

6 Bullets - a straight-to-DVD title with Jean-Claude Van Damme basically recreating the Taken plot. And man, Van Damme is good. There's also a nice twist in his first mission that puts a fine point on the reality of taking a guns blazing approach. This is worth renting.

The Cabin in the Woods - Most people I know highly recommended this horror/comedy genre mashup, so I went in with slightly too high expectations, but it's still good. The control room scenes are great and the one where they dance along with the girl in the cabin, no matter how brief, is one of my favorites of the year.

Hysteria - A historical retelling of how the vibrator was invented. I like anything with Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Salvation Boulevard - Pierce Brosnan reteams up with Greg Kinnear in religous/accidental-murder plot. I expected good things from them after The Matador, but I fell asleep.

Freelancers - A straight to dvd title with 50 Cent starring as a cop getting corrupted by De Niro. It's better than average.

Darling Companion - Kevin Kline puts up with Diane Keaton's obsession with finding a dog better than I would, and I like dogs.

Life Happens - A straight-to-DVD single-mom comedy drama with Krysten Ritter, Kate Bosworth, and Rachel Bilson. Whatever faults the movie had I didn't notice because I was too busy taking in the hotness.

Damsels in Distress - A comedy starring Greta Gerwig in college. It's very offbeat, but can be very funny with its deliberate dialogue, as if Woody Allen had remade Clueless.

Red Lights - De Niro plays an intimidating blind psychic and would have made great scenes with Sigourney Weaver's scientist skeptic, but she's out of the movie too soon. The final plot twist should have been the full storyline.

Snow White and the Huntsman - Dull, dreary, miserable, and a waste of time. Does any viewer get to the end credits and actually think "wow, that was a movie worth making"? I couldn't stand Stewart or Theron.

The Babymakers - A straight-to-DVD comedy from the Broken Lizard troupe starring Paul Schneider trying to get his wife Olivia Munn pregnant and resorting to robbing a sperm bank to get it done. They have fun chemistry together. This is worth renting.

Kim Hollis: I really enjoyed Looper, which is a moody, atmospheric time travel film that deals with questions of predestination and also has an odd (if off-putting, mainly because it's unpalatable at moments) moral core. I agree that the kid in the movie is simply terrific. I always wonder how people elicit such spectacular movie performances from children that age. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is solid, and Bruce Willis has a sadness about him that works quite well for the character. He kind of plays it similar to his character from Sin City in some ways, and since Looper is really a noir-ish science fiction, I guess that comparison makes sense.

I'm going to go straight ahead and say that everyone should go out and see Argo, which is a tense, intelligent thriller that should give us all proof positive that Ben Affleck is a truly talented director. I think people were somehow thinking that his first two films weren't necessarily indicative of what he could do and shrugged them off (I'm really not sure why). He's really maturing.

Resident Evil: Retribution is more of the same, but I'm a sucker for these films even when they're over-the-top ridiculous. And don't doubt for a moment that Retribution is absolutely over-the-top ridiculous. It's pretty good fun, but I did find myself feeling oppressed by the repetitiveness of it some point during the third act. Even so, it's one of those movies I'll probably watch when it's on the movie channels, at least partly because I think Boris Kodjoe is hot.

I caught Katy Perry: Part of Me a couple of weekends ago, and I was pretty surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I only know one or two of her songs, but I do think she's an interesting talent. She's very comfortable with who she is. Also, if you're just looking for something that will draw your eye to the screen with absolutely mesmerizing color, Part of Me is perfect. You definitely don't have to be a fan to enjoy the film.

Safe was a movie that I really only sort of watched. I like Jason Statham, but the film was just far too violent. I guess sometimes I can deal with violence in films, so I'm not being all finger-wagging here, but in Safe it felt truly needless.

David Mumpower: I don't know exactly why but I watched a set of J films recently. Joyful Noise was a precursor of sorts to Pitch Perfect, albeit not targeted to teens as directly. The movie is exactly what you expect it to be. The focus here is on the music. I must admit that I downloaded Man in the Mirror first before eventually buying the entire soundtrack off of Amazon. So, that was mission accomplished for the sound crew.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a sequel to a movie that far better than it had any right to be. All of the whimsy and cleverness of Journey to the Center of the Earth is replaced by lowest common denominator shenanigans that caused me to wonder if Luis Guzman fired his agent directly from the set or waited until after the shoot. His role demeans all of us, not just himself. Ah well. At least The Rock is always funny.

John Carter was a pleasant surprise. I had the lowest of expectations for the film. I mentioned in the previous conversation that I wanted Battleship to be worse than it is in order to at least have some fun with the awfulness of it. Battleship falls somewhere in the range of mediocrity. John Carter rises quite a bit above this. I would describe this science fiction title as an unexpectedly faithful adaptation that demonstrates the whimsy that caused the books to be so popular. The visuals of the movie are so good that I plan to buy the 3D disc at some point. I think it rivals everything other than Prometheus thus far in 2012. John Carter deserved a better fate.

One for the Money is disposable yet I consider this a huge step up from Katherine Heigl's total filmography. Only The Ugly Truth and this movie border on watchable. I still think the movie would have been more entertaining with a better lead than her. This adaptation kills the franchise right off the bat but it's tolerable in terms of quality.

Katy Perry: Part of Me accomplished two feats at once. First of all, I found myself enjoying the music catalog of the artist quite a bit more than I had in the past. I recognize that the purpose of the movie is to reinforce the idea that Perry is a down to Earth celebrity that the world should love. I bought in. I guess I was incepted. Second of all, I really, really, really wanted to punch Russell Brand at multiple points in the movie. Here is a woman experiencing unprecedented success. All she wants is to share these moments with her significant other. His constant absence and the hurt it caused her was infuriating. Brand loves himself more than he will ever love anybody else. I'm now glad Arthur failed.

In preparing for Resident Evil: Retribution a couple of weeks ago, I watched a horror double feature of Piranha 3DD and Rec 3. I had mentioned previously that I enjoyed the first 40 minutes or so of Piranha 3D before the movie took a turn for the heinous. Piranha 3DD does a better job in navigating that fine line between camp and awkward self-parody. David Hasselhoff has a lot of fun demonstrating his (perceived) relevance to a small child.

Rec 3 is wild. Imagine a zombie film featuring The Bride. That's the concept here and it *works*. A wedding becomes ground zero for a viral outbreak. This semi-justifies a bridezilla's self-absorbed behavior as she attempts to reconcile the expectations for her special day with the reality of brain eating. Even at 85 minutes, the movie drags quite a bit but its best moments are spectacular.

Resident Evil: Retribution is this franchise's response to The Matrix. As long as you don't concern yourself with the laws of physics violated (like how does a simulation create real bullets that can kill human clones?), the movie is satisfying. Over the course of the first four movies, various characters have been killed in order to heighten tension/conflict. Via clones, all of them are allowed to return, which I welcome. Michelle Rodriguez's elimination in the first movie was a mistake Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson have clearly regretted. This decision allows them to overwrite it. A movie based upon a videogame shouldn't fixate on niggling details anyway as seemingly dead enemies return all the time. I like that they finally celebrated this. Resident Evil: Retribution is solely for lovers of the franchise such as Kim, Shalimar and myself but it's very satisfying for those of us who are.

Upon first blush, I do not believe I like Argo as much as director Ben Affleck's previous film, The Town. Of course, that's one of my favorite movies of the past five years. So the fact that it is even in that conversation speaks volumes of its quality. My one quibble with Argo is that so much tension is eked out of the premise that I experienced a couple of "OH COME ON!" moments. These took me out of the movie at a time when the drama should have been intense. Other than this, the movie is a perfect example of the real life drama that occurs when nations have conflicts with global repercussions. What Canada did in this particular instance is the stuff of myth and legend. And Tony Mendez is one of those unknown spooks who demonstrated the American Dream by actions, not words. Argo is one of the most important movies of 2012. If you have not watched it yet, please do so at your earliest convenience.

Finally, I am not with the group on Looper. This is the rare example that too much creativity can be every bit as detrimental to a product as not enough creativity. This movie is a glorious mess of conflicting ideas, all of which create showy scenes and interesting characters, none of whom is worthy of rooting for. I remarked to my wife with about 15 minutes left that I had no idea exactly what the director wanted me to be rooting to have happen. The moral ambiguity of everyone involved creates a sterile atmosphere on top of the extreme violence of the film. It also features one of the most loathsome actions ever performed by a protagonist (anti-hero?). The movie irrevocably lost me at that moment. I think Looper is huge disappointment and I will add it to the list alongside Gattaca and Dark City as a heavily praised science fiction movie whose critical popularity flies in the face of its quality.