Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (2008) and starring Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien.
Okay. So. I have issues with the whole comic-turned-movie thing. I willingly admit it. It’s not just the fact that these movies have a tendency to get really silly… As you pretty much can expect from the idea of grown men putting their underwear on outside their stretchy tights. It’s more that they either do nothing with the characters or they don’t spend as dime on the script in order to blow their wad on the effects, or they don’t give a rat’s behind about the story in order to delve into the characterization of characters that have… uhm, very little depth.
So it’s surprisingly rare that you get a movie like this one that manages to do a good job of the visual as well as the story and use the characters in a clever way.
Hellboy is fantastic to say the least and it could have been blatantly cheesy and silly, but it somehow manages to tread that fine line and come out smelling like roses. Ron Perlman is all padded up, but he manages to carry the armour without becoming two dimensional and watching Hellboy and Abe get drunk on beer and sing Barry Manolow’s “Can’t smile without you” while musing on their respective love lives is just funny as all get out, seeing as how they manage to look about seventeen years old both of them.
The visuals are stunning. That’s really the only word for it. They’re right on the verge of heavy unreality the whole time, but somehow manage to seem credible as an alternate reality coexisting with ours. It’s less glossy than other similar alternative worlds I’ve seen, which is a bonus. There are a couple of things I personally could have done without, but I’m not going to gripe about that when the overall is so spectacular.
Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is a surprisingly soft-spoken bad guy despite his sword wielding and actually comes off as someone with an agenda that isn’t as far fetched or foaming at the mouth as some villains. It makes the plot better that he has cause to be doing what he’s doing. His twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) gets caught in an impossible situation and again, this actually gives depth to the storyline.
This is all good fun in the best possible way. The bad guys are really good and the good guys are bad ass. It’s visually imaginative and down right pretty at times. Hellboy is funny and sarcastic and still just a guy, despite the skin tone and the filed down horns. There’s no dead time and you don’t find yourself looking at your watch or yawning.
As long as you take that Coleridgean leap of faith and submit to the willing suspension of disbelief you’ll have a good time.
You can’t really ask for more than that.

Mule

Albino Alligator

Albino Alligator (1996) is actually directed by Kevin Spacey.

It stars Matt Dillon as Dova, Gary Sinise as his brother Milo, William Fitchner as Law. These three guys are trying to burglar a warehouse of some description, but trip the alarm. As they try to get away their car is mistaken for another criminal’s and they end up taking refuge in a bar – one that does not have a backdoor.

The botched burglary quickly turns into a siege situation when the police surrounds it.

The few people in the bar are Janet Boudreau played by Faye Dunaway, Danny (Skeet Ulrich), Jack (John Spencer), Guy Foucard (Viggo Mortensen and Dino (M. Emmet Walsh).

This is basically a set-piece. One we’re in the bar, Dino’s, we’re not getting out. It takes place in New Orleans, but we don’t really get to see much of the city, which is too bad, but there you go.

One of the reasons why I mention the cast so specifically is that this is a set piece. It might as well have been played out on stage. It’s got that close and intense ensemble focus. And it is character driven to an extent that really takes a solid cast to pull off. And they do. Oh, boy, do they ever.

I’m not surprised that the material is treated this way at all. You’ve got an actor turned director at work here which means the focus is going to be on the performances and I really like that.

This is not a big action splash, though there is plenty of violence and blood. But the main focus is on the dynamic between the characters and this is one of those things that takes so many twists and loops and doubles back on itself so you can’t really not get sucked into it. The pacing is spectacular. It’s like a tightening fist that eases off a little only to get a better grip to squeaze all the harder.

There’s not a single moment of dull transport anywhere in any of this. Every moment is a moment unto itself and there’s a sense of generosity among the actors where they help build each other up instead of trying to outstage each other.

Fitchner’s portrayal of Law as a sociaopath Lizard-king sprawled and lazy one moment, violent and unpredictable the next it down right chilling. Fay Dunaway’s Janet is the tough cookie who has seen a few things and will do whatever it takes to get herself and her boy out alive. Right from the first get-go when the three outlaws come through the door and wave a gun at her she takes it all in her stride, and it’s no accident that she is smart-mouthing Dillion’s character while framed by a Humprey Bogart poster. She’s got moxy.

The interaction between an increasingly weakened Milo (Sinise) and an increasingly boxed-in and scared Dova (Dillon) is also extremely well played. And they’re starting from a bad place, trapped and growing more desperate by the moment. Now, as brothers they’re obviously different, but they’ve also got that slightly twisted loyalty that means Dova can promise never,  never to hurt his brother in one moment and then point a gun at his head the next. And Milo is the voice of reason the whole way through. Obviously intelligent and with a very clear line between what he will and will not do. He emphatically does not want to kill anyone. Dova is more of a pragmatic moralist and Law, well, he plainly doesn’t give a fuck. He only wants to be sure that he is not going back to prison.

Guy (Viggo Mortensen) is sat in a corner for much of the action, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there, a sly tilt to his eyes occasionally until you get the next piece of information on his character that sparks the action off in a new direction.

You know right from the get go that this is not going to end well.

That being said you really have to hold on, because there’s really no way of predicting the many spectacular ways in which it will end badly for all involved. You keep oscillating back and forth on who will be left standing, if anyone at all.

Every character has his/her own story and their own back-story which plays into the action in integral ways. Little things that seem like off hand comments about coffee or shooting pool turn into something bigger later down the line with the kind of icy precision you’re used to from Hitchcock. It makes it necessary for the viewer to pay attention. Again, I like that.

Visually, the camera glides around in a overtly scenic way in the opening sequence, but again, once we get inside the bar it pretty much stays out of the way… close-ups are used in a way that focuses on the emotional state of the characters, but it actually keeps to the old rules of decorum, carefully averting it’s eyes from the bloodier scenes. Just as you might suspect, that makes it all worse. It’s stylish and smart and handled with a great deal of intelligence, but for some reason I totally expected that from Spacey.

I like the overall impression and I like the way the subject matter is treated and the actors all do a very good job. I hate to be so damned agreeable about it all, but yeah, it is that good. And then some actually.

Watch it. You kind of have to.

Mule

The Hard Word

The Hard Word (2002) directed by Scott Roberts is a an Australian heist movie starring Guy Pearce as Dale, Damien Richardson as Mal and Joel Edgerton as Shane, the three Twentyman brothers. When the movie starts the three brothers are in jail. The warden, their crooked lawyer, Frank (Robert Taylor) and the police are working together so every once in a while the brothers are let out to rob a bank, or a bookie, or whatever target seems suitable.

To make things a little more complicated Dale’s wife Carol (Rachel Griffiths) is cheating on Dale with Frank. Carol comes across as a misguided gold digger, but with a severly shrewd bent.

Okay, so first of all – I really like the idea of an Australian heist movie. It’s got a different look and feel from the American ones, and that comes across really well. Sydney and Melbourne are the main locations, apart from the prison. The dynamic between the brothers is played well, with each of them true to their specific attributes.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Guy Pearce look scruffier, and it works really well.

The action is also works well to a certain point. It’s a pretty classic escalation with the three brothers caught in a situation they can’t get themselves out of. The jobs get progressively bigger, hunting that ‘big score’ that’s going to let them retire.

Dale’s treacherous wife and their crooked Frank the crooker lawyer are in no way lovable, but the quality of the acting makes their interaction at least understandable.

The brothers are sympathetic though, all the way through. The reason they’re allowed to continue their activities is basically because they’re good at what they do and no one gets hurt when they rob people. The last big score is one of those things, though, that requires more people and takes place outside their normal zone of operations and it does, predictably, go wrong.

I’m not going to give away the ending, save to say that this is one of those movies that actually ends twice.

The brothers lose their money, they get ripped off by Frank (and to some extent Carol) and that’s where all this could have ended. It doesn’t though. And that’s too bad.

I get the feeling that we like the Twentyman brothers a little too much to leave them high and dry, so there is a happy ending, after a fashion. But it feels more like an afterthought than a planned ending, if you catch my drift.

The strong points are basically the characterizations and the fact that you get the sense that these are actual people rather than stereotypes. There’s not a lot of hard talk without any follow up and there are a million little details that are really great – like the fact that one of the brothers gets food poisoning from sausages cooked special for him on his birthday in prison, and because of that they almost miss the big job in Melbourne. It’s just one of those stupid things that could happen and that adds a sense of reality to a movie like this one.

I’d recommend it for that alone. It manages to give a unique feel to a movie that could have been terribly trite and tiresome.

Mule

Harsh Times

Harsh Times (2005) by writer/director David Ayer stars Christian Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a former Ranger hourably discharged after six years of service. He is currently living in Los Angeles and wants a career in law enforcement. His best friend Mike Alonzo, played by Freddy Rodriguez, just wants a job so his wife Sylvia (Eva Longoria) will get off his back.

Jim has a girlfriend in Mexico, Martha (Tammy Trull) that he wants to marry and bring across the border. That is why he’s so desperate for work.

This is extremely fast paced, skillfully cut and very rough.  It gives an excellent impression of things spinning out of control, which they do for Jim.

While waiting to see if he’s been accepted into the LAPD Jim goes about his business,  which largely consists of petty crime, drinking, smoking pot, waving his gun around and getting his friend Mike into trouble.  Jim has the kind of bad dreams that you wake up from shaking, sweating and screaming, but insists that he’s fine.

Whatever his experiences were in the war they have certainly left him with a bad case of  post traumatic stress but judging from what his friends say about him he’s always been a little wild and this merely seems to add to that.

In comparison to the life Jim’s living in LA, the girlfriend Martha’s place in Mexico is very much a paradise. Low tech, few people, poor, but hopeful.

Watching Bale I am again amazed at how good he really is at this kind of thing. The Spanish is perfect, his accent never slips. He can portray a guy that goes crashing through five emotions in thirty seconds and lands at violence with diabolical accuracy. Jim loses control over small things, but remains disturbingly calm in the face of guns and violence, of which there is plenty.

His friend Mike only wants to get a job and make his wife happy, but you can see how he gets swept up in Jim’s wake. Rodriguez does a good job as well as the “straight man”, not that that’s a completely correct term here. But watching his reactions to Jim you can see how close to the whirlwind he’s standing and how it affects him. He comes close to losing his wife and everything he’s worked for as  a consequence of this friendship.

Right from the get go you get the sense that this is a downward spiral, spinning hard. Jim can’t wait to selfdestruct and the only question is how many he will take with him and that makes it painful to watch.

The brief respite Jim and Mike get in Mexico is as close to idyllic as anything can get, right up to the point where Jim’s demons take over. At that point he has been offered a job by the Feds as a “contact” in Colombia and he refers to himself as “a soldier of the apocalypse”. He has been adviced that he shouldn’t marry, so he’s going to have to forsake the only good thing in his life, Martha, in order to get a job.

His friends tell him that he’s making the wrong choice. It’s obvious to anyone that he’s making the wrong choice.

At the same time there is no way he’s going to be able to hold on to the normal life he thought he wanted, too badly damaged already. He makes the choice most likely to get him killed and even then it can’t seem to happen fast enough.When Martha tells him she’s pregnant, he snaps.

In the end Jim never even makes it to the training facility in Georgia, circumstance eat him alive before then. And it has some very bad ramifications for Mike as well.

All in all, this is a movie for those who don’t have a problem with violence and moral ambiguity, or a lead character who is actually not very likable. The dialogue is rife with derogatory comments on any- and everything, up to and including the law enforcement, which is not portrayed in a very favourable light here.

To me this movie stands and falls with Bale and Rodriguez. Had it not been for these two actors this could have been a total dud.

Mule

Ripley Under Ground

Ripley Under Ground (2005) directed by Roger Spottiswoode stars Barry Pepper as Ripley, Jacinda Barrett as Heloise, Tom Wilkinson as the detective John Webster. The other principals are Douglas Henshall as Derwatt, Alan Cumming as Jeff Constant, Claire Forlani as Cynthia and Ian Hart as Bernard Sayles. Willem Defoe plays the art collector Neil Murchinson.

The story begins with Ripley on his way to an art gallery to see the exhibition of Derwatt’s work. Due to unfourtionate circumstance, a marriage proposal untimely delivered and then refused by Derwatt’s gold digger girlfriend Cynthia and a bad car crash, Ripley becomes involved in an art scam.

The idea is simple. Derwatt’s body is stashed in Jeff, the gallery owner’s country house, in a big freezer. The four friends Jeff, Cynthia, Bernard and Ripley decide to withhold the news of Derwatt’s death until all the paintings have been sold.

On the same night Ripley meets the lovely Heloise, a french student, and falls in love. Or what you will. He is after all supposed to be a psychopath, and if you look at the pathology that is supposed to be a tricky proposition.

The rest of the movie is one long complicated series of circumstance and accidents and bloody deaths all very neatly contrived to increase the sense that maybe Ripley won’t get away with this at all.  He is portrayed as more misfourtionate than mischevious.

The 1999 movie The Talented Mr. Ripley was to my mind a neat, stylish and very dark movie. It had a much more serious tone. I liked it well enough to venture into this one as well.

My response to this movie is not surprising if you take that into account. I find myself watching with a slightly inquisitive tilt to my head. This is a comedy. A very dark, messed up and bloody comedy, but a comedy none the less. Despite the cast, which contains some very good actors, the it feels hectic and contrived. Barry Pepper with his shirt off holds very little fascination for me, and yet the viewer is graced with that view quite a lot. Enough that I would remark on it as being gratuitous.

Not only is it a comedy, but it reverts to slap-stick in a couple of scenes. Ripley going at Derwatt’s frozen corpse with various implements to get him out of the freezer and then falling down the stairs with the corpse in his arms so that various appendages break with a popsicle crunch is a dark kind of slap-stick.

It’s not what I expected, nor frankly, what I wanted out of this movie. Assumptions are of course never a good thing, but like I said I had The Talented Mr. Ripley in the back of my head when I picked this movie up.

I don’t mean to convey that I was not entertained.

But if you want dark, bloody and funny I suggest you watch the TV-series  “Dexter” instead, with the far superior quality psychopath Dexter played by Michael C. Hall. It is put together in a much sharper and frankly more intelligent way.

All in all I find the performances cartoonish and the acting constantly on the verge of being down right silly. There are moments, of course, when it all seems solid, but on the whole I recommend you stick to the first movie.

Mule

Shadowboxer

Director Lee Daniels has done some interesting things in this 2005 movie starring Helen Mirren (Rose), Cuba Gooding Jr (Mikey), Vanessa Ferlito (Vicki) and Stephen Dorff (Clayton).

First things first – Helen Mirren is an acompished actress in her own right. She has had a long and varied career already with a wide variety of roles that include everything from Super Intendent Jane Tennison to the Queen to Shakespear and well,  everything in between.  Here she playes a hit woman with an interesting background, and the odd thing is – the role is perfect for her.

Rose is struggling with cancer and the notion that there is a definite end in sight. She has killed indiscriminantely, or so it seems, for most of her life and is hardened to it in a way that’s down right uncanny. At her side she has Mikey, the son of a man she used to “go with” and whom she sort of inherited when his father was killed. Mikey is the Shadowboxer the title refers to.

On what is supposed to be Rose´s last job the duo is sent to dispatch of a local gansters cheating wife and when Rose is actually pointing her gun at the woman, Vicki, she gets out of bed revealling a very prominant belly – and Rose, the perfect predator professional, can’t kill her. The scene might still have ended bloody if it wasn’t for the fact that Vicki’s water breaks and she goes in to labour right there.

Rose decides to take mother and child with her and Mikey simply obeys, because that’s the way things are.

Okay, so this is far fetched and clearly not an easily classified movie. Whoever came up with the casting suggestion of Helen Mirren has definitely made it a much better movie than it could have been. Cuba Gooding Jr also gives a very good performance, unlike what I’ve seen before. He plays Mikey very quietly, not overly expressive, or ganster tough. The relationship between Rose and Mikey is obviously a very complicated one, made more interesting by the fact that she is dying.

Vicki (Vanessa Ferlito) sort of inherits Mikey and his dubious protection, which turns out to be a bit of a double edged sword. Vicki’s ganster husband who put a contract out on her is played by Stephen Dorff. Ferlito is mostly just a damsel in distress, which is somehow made more obvious by the fact that every scene she has with Rose displays the difference between a strong, competent, grown up woman and a pretty face.

Dorff is one of those actors who has given some spectacular performances (Backbeat, for instance) but mostly I feel he’s been stuck with the bad boy psycho wild card roles. He does that here too, and does it unusually well, but it is not by any means a surprise to see him acting out. Although we do get to see a bit more of him than we bargained for…

On that note, by the way, there seems to be a undercurrent of worship of the male form, which becomes noticable in the slow motion camera panning over Cuba Gooding Jr in the shower, or his strip tease seduction scene.

Estetically this movie borrows soft lens shots from the tritest of romances and a looming, dark atmosphere from introspective film noir and somehow makes it work. It is very pleasing to the eye and you get the feeling there is a definite thought behind every shot, not only in terms of story telling, but also when it comes to the visual aspect.

There is also a philosphical aspect, it deals with how violence is inherited and perhaps inate and with what that can do to people, but it is not dealt with as if it were a moral tale, luckily. You cannot condemn and glorify at the same time without it leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the spectator, and this does not do that.

One point of critiscism could be that it tries to do a little too much, that it is a little too ambitious, but it still works. If you want straight up action this is probably not the best movie to choose. So it is one of those movies easily classified by all the things it is not.

Well worth watching none the less. I mean Helen Mirren sneaking in to the house of the first mark barefoot with a big gun? You have to love that.

Mule

Danny the Dog

Director Louis Leterrier has taken a script written by Luc Besson and made a rather odd and funny gem of a movie starring Jet Li (Danny the Dog), Bob Hoskins (Bart), Morgan Freeman (Sam) and Kerry Condon (Victoria). The movie was written exclusively for Jet Li, which in and of itself is rather astounding.

Because of his Wushu background Jet Li is not one of those performers you think of as an actor first. He is much to good at what he does in the martial arts fighting film category, but as I think we all can agree there is more to even a good fight movie then just the fancy moves, which is why certain performers do better than others. This is the movie that shows that there is more to Jet Li than just the amazing speed and agility we’ve come to expect.

Danny the Dog has a basic premise the idea that you can take a young boy and train him basically to be your pitbull, which is what Bart (Hoskins) has done. He unlatches the collar around Danny’s neck and basically says “sick ‘em” and Danny doesn’t stop hitting until he gets the command to stop. He is treated like a dog, sleeps in a cellar and gets kicked around and treated like a dog. That is to say, he doesn’t get treated lovingly and with a firm hand, he is just expected to perform. At one point in  the story Bart even says “I own you”.

Bart is a criminal and has a criminals agenda. He basically uses Danny to scare people. When he gets ahead of himself a rival gangster takes revenge in a drive-by shooting and Danny is let loose in the world. Danny gravitates towards a warehouse full of pianos where he has previously encountered Sam (Freeman), a blind piano tuner. Sam takes him in. Slowly Danny becomes more of a man and less of a dog.

Bart has survived his ordeal and by accident one of his henchmen finds Danny and brings him back to the life he used to lead. This does not end well. There really is no way it could.

So what does this mean in terms of what the film offers?

Well, we get spectacular fights all engineered by marital arts choreographer Yuen Wo-ping who was also involved in Kill Bill, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger… just to mention a few. And the fights are really down and dirty. It’s definitely not spiritual high grade fighting, it’s more street fighting with an excess of brutal blunt force. Even the pit fights are really dirty. there are of course pit fights. Danny is just a pitbull after all.

You also get the exploration of why Danny is the way he is. He starts looking for his childhood memories, which have more or less been burnt out of him.

Danny is so childlike, so simple that it is actually quite funny to see his reactions to little things like experiencing vanilla ice cream for the first time. Brain freeze and all. And this is brought out even more as Sam and Victoria start building him up as a human being. It’s charming and sweet, and I have to say, quite surprising. The director makes a point of saying that for Jet Li language is the biggest barrier and it is easier for Li to convey things with his eyes than through speaking. They make the parallel with Buster Keaton, which is actually quite interesting in and of itself. And valid. Jet Li doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, but he is very expressive. And it works. It really does.

The special effects are very well executed and just enough that you can have that sense of what is going on and still not get sidetracked by them. The camera work in the fight sequences is of course pivotal but there are other scenes that also rely heavily on the visual to convey what’s going on in Danny’s head.

Music plays a big part in this story, since Danny ha a affinity for the piano, Sam is a piano tuner and Victoria is a piano player and Danny’s mother was a piano player as well. So there is Mozart which is always nice.

Sam (Freeman) and Bart (Hoskins) are the two different fathers, or masters, representing two different ways to approach the role of top dog. One rules by fear, one by love. Danny responds to them differently as you would expect and this too actually works very well.

There is quite simply a lot going on in this movie. Much more than you would expect. It is a complex mixture of genres and themes, set in an undefined city at a non defined time and just outside the realm of reality. And stellar performances all around. Definitely something for those of us who like the genremix and enjoy seeing performers go outside the box. Oh, and not for the faint of heart – because the fighting is quite brutal.

Well worth seeing.

Mule

Intermission

Director John Crowley and writer Mark O’Rowe have put together an interesting mix of comedy, action and romance with the movie Intermission (2003). The cast consists of Colin Farrell as Lehiff, Cillian Murphy as John, Colm Meaney as Jerry Lynch and Kelly Macdonald as Deirdre amongst others.

The story takes place in Dublin, Ireland and focuses on the everyday, working class side of society. The protagonists work as grocery clerks, busdrivers and police. It’s fairly gritty in style and works with more of a realistic look than an epic one. It serves up a slightly wicked sense of humor, and is quite dark in its moments.

The opening scene with Colin Farrell is a good indication of what is to come. Farrell’s character Lehiff seems to be chatting up a young lady in a shop, talking about true love and soul-mates, but the minute the store empties of customers, he viciously beats her and robs the till. It is done with the kind of callous brutality that actually constitutes real crime and as such it is quite realistic.

This is one of those stories where a group of characters lives intersect in interesting and unexpected ways. Sometimes those things can be quite pretentious and over elaborate, but this one works. It never crosses the line into feeling contrived and corny.

The whole thing gets started because John (Murphy) decides to test his girlfriend by offering to “take a brake”. That’s a classic mistake, becuase she says yes. What he wants is of course for her to say no. And this has strange and far-reaching ramifications, that escalate to kidnapping and murder.

Never mind the tough guy cop and the journalist who wants to play in the big league. We also have the emotionally wounded young lady who manages to go from closed off to full on heroine when a bus turns over.

This is a quirky, unexpected and charming piece of work. I like the fact that it won’t submit to easy classification, or conform to type.

So if you are in the mood for something that’s a little like life in its absurdity, has fun and games and violence and a screwed-up sense of realism I strongly recommend this one.

Mule