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There is not much of a storyline to Lone Survivor directed by Peter Berg. Just based on the title alone, we are already fully aware of the film’s ending. A Four man team goes into battle. Three of them die. Only One survives. The pre-action first act is pretty weak. It’s the same old ultra-patriotic, Navy Seal prestige banter complete with a rookie giving a front-of-the-class speech defining his role as a Seal Diver. In the mission briefing the target Afghans are portrayed as cliché plot devices. Never is there a mention that these Afghan’s are actual humans whose country the Seals are currently occupying, and are currently planning to kill. Scenes like these are not usually later redeemed, but as soon as the four Seals drop into the field, the tone of the film changes. What makes the film Lone Survivor a good film is 100% in its execution. The performances of all the actors, the special effects and stunts, the lighting and the sound, the fancy camera work and exotic scenery, the violence, equal the actual enactment: a very powerful, non-partisan, grim portrayal of modern ground combat. Once dropped in the field, the Seals encounter innocent civilians. Faced with the ethical decision of whether to execute them or free them, the Seals let them go. This is truly a controversial choice. Acting differently surely would have produced a different, less deadly outcome (for the Seals at least). Any logical viewer will afterwards struggle to justify why the Seals made the choice they did. Why would they sacrifice themselves for the innocents? It is almost nonsense, but in war decisions are made on the fly, and this is what happened. Within minutes the freed civilians alert the troops, and an army of hundreds of heavily armed men surround the group of 4. This when the action starts. It begins with the exchange of long-range rifle fire but soon the Seals are surrounded and flanked fiercely. As the battle shifts positions we encounter scenes where Seals must make split second decisions between particularly gruesome tasks. Which is less likely to kill me? Pushing forward and engaging in fire where I am extremely outnumbered, or throwing myself down this 50 foot rock face? The unfolding of this battle, and that is to say two-thirds of the film, really cannot be described in words. The battle truly is the film. It is an attempt at the depicting the intensity of real combat, and myself having zero experience in real combat, I think Peter Berg is very successful in portraying it. Their radio signals having been lost, their back-up firepower having failed them, and every other piece of bad luck imaginable having occurred, the battle ends. The Seals literally having fought to their deaths.

Nearly everyone knows the rules, number one of which I’m about to break. What do you do if you’re sick of your boring, pathetic life? In the most cathartic, DIY approach possible, Fight Club answers this question: you change it. The absolute prototype of an existential thriller, it wouldn’t be taking too much of a leap to suggest that Fight Club is one of the best films ever made. Jim Uhls’ excellently adapted screenplay of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel (this is the only major work by Uhls that I can find), this thriller has been exciting male audiences the world over since its release in 1999. Even Palahniuk himself said the film was amazing. In fact, he admitted that film was so good, the book in comparison made him feel ashamed. A nameless, pitiful, seemingly friend and family-less Office worker (Edward Norton) suffers from insomnia. True to Palahniuk’s style, the solution to the insomnia comes in a bizarre way. He finds relief by attending support groups for diseases, diseases he doesn’t have; these people really listen to him, and afterwards, he sleeps. At these meetings he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Character), a nemesis and lover, and it is through her that Mr. Office worker discovers his true self, but not until after he’s transformed more than just his own life. Mr. Pitiful Office worker meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Durden helps Mr. Pitiful Office worker admit to his misery once and for all. Channeling their suppressed male aggression in its rawest form, they start fighting each other. Soon Mr. Pitiful Office worker realizes that he and Durden are not alone. Men, downtrodden, tired of their insignificance as worthless individuals all aim to do something greater. They jump at the chance to vent their primal steam, and the solo fights turn into group fights. Durden’s vision eventually transcends aggression in its physical form and becomes something much greater, a community where the individual ceases to exist. As part of this whole, every unnamed member is an equal and significant contributor, and it is through the whole that the individual finds meaning. As part of the whole they are changing the future together. This movie is a directing marvel. With time shifts, psychological manipulations, and very meticulous scene planning, we are kept on the edge of our seats for the entire film. Accompanied by the pounding soundtrack composed by the Dust Brothers, Fincher achieves the rarity of making a movie better than a book. Fincher turns the concrete basement of Lou’s Tavern into perhaps the most famous arena in all of modern film. The house on Paper Street, a lone abandoned mansion, becomes a factory of redefinition, of reinvention. In the final scene an amazing mesh between the visuals and the music, The Pixies’ “Where is my Mind,” Fincher creates one of the most stunning combinations of sight and sound in all of film. And it's a pretty damn good ending to the plot too. The most memorable scene is when Durden is behind the wheel of a car full of passengers. He buckles up, pins the gas, and lets go of the wheel. The car veers off the road and crashes, flipping multiple times. We are force fed the hard truth here. The Fight Club mantra: to change to our lives we need to rid ourselves of our past failures, forget the job, the kids, the car, the living room, the flat screen HDTV, and just let go. You are not your f'cking khakis.

2013’s most surprisingly awesome film was Pacific Rim. How did I miss this? Well… Even though it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, who has to date made only excellent films, the trailers and the marketing for Pacific Rim did not do the film justice. There was only a bare-bones connection linking del Toro’s star power to this film. For the average person who may know del Toro’s other films, Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy 1 & 2, but not his name, the little “directed by” box at the bottom of the promotional poster would not have rung any bells, at least not in the same way a giant “From the Director of…” promotion would have. Still, I know del Toro by name and I still didn’t realize this was his film. Wayyy after it was already out of theatres I watched it on a plane. It was great. Not only did the marketing not exploit any of the film’s star power, it didn’t even really give us any idea what it was about. The trailer just showed huge metal warriors battling Godzilla-like creatures, much in the fashion of recent mindless action movies such as Battleship (I did actually enjoy Battleship) or anything from the recent Transformers franchise. I hypothesis that this complete disconnect must have been intentional. In this way Pacific Rim attracted the same audience as the previously mentioned movies. A huge audience base that is easily swayed and turned on by special effects, battle scenes, and stuff blowing up, but they are potentially turned off by something that could be considered “cinema,” or too arty. This audience needed to be brought in from the beginning. As for the more savvy movie-goers, although turned off by the meat head marketing, they are generally more inquisitive than the average Transformers fan, and so it seems the producers relied on these movie-goer’s inquisitive nature. Since it’s an actual good film, the savvy will find their way to it eventually. This film’s crappy marketing was actually a ploy to lure multiple demographics in subliminal ways, and thus mucho bank was made. Just a hypothesis. FYI: According to ****, Transformers2 was the highest grossing, most negatively rated film in history, so getting the Transformers audience was just good business. The fact that the movie is also good is just a rare and wonderful freak, but not accidental, occurrence for the Transformers audience. What makes Pacific Rim so great? Using a montage sequence and voiceover, in the first five minutes of the film we learn all about the world that Earth has become. Monster Kaijus have invaded from a dimension shifting portal in the ocean, humans have built fighting machines called Jaegers to combat the Kaijus, and this on-going threat, the conflict between the two entities has eventually just becomes a routine part of common culture. Then suddenly things change. The set designs are spectacular. Hong Kong is specially tailored here to fit a Kaiju bashing society. The encampments where the machinery and pilots are based is a gloomy complex that looks like the inside of a submarine. Being a big budget action film, Pacific Rim relies heavily on computer-generated graphics and spectacular special effects for its visual telling. Truthfully I have no idea how any of these action scenes would have been shot as almost every one is an epic between giant monsters, earthy and not. But it is not the visuals alone that make this a great movie. Transformers has great visuals. It is the script that is so awesome. Co-written by Travis Beachman and del Toro, it is a sci-fi monster movie, but it is the nuances that make the film so much fun to watch. All the intricacies of the world. For instance, two people whose brain functions combine in a process called “the drift” pilot Jaegers. Pilots’ ability to drift effectively in unison is what creates great pilots. The drift is probably the single coolest thing about this film, and the idea is used later for purposes even crazier. The Kaijus become so powerful that mankind is forced into a final standoff using all the remaining Jaegers against multiple super strong Kaijus. The prospects for humanity’s survival look grim. In final act of the film a spectacular twist takes place thanks to some unlikely scientists, and the fate of all humanity hangs on their wild hunch, the functioning of the aging military machinery, and the drift between the last two standing Jaeger pilots. I wish I had seen this film in theatres. Let's see if Pacific Rim 2 ever makes it from the hard-drive on Travis Beachman's desk to the screen. This time, I'd give it a chance.

As an elderly woman lies on her deathbed she recounts the peculiar story of Benjamin Button, a man whose life is inexplicably tied to a mysterious backwards-running clock. After Benjamin’s mother dies in childbirth, the father abandons baby Benjamin because of his stark physical defects. Luckily Queenie, a black woman who manages a senior’s care home, finds newborn Benjamin and raises him herself. For the rest of his life Benjamin calls Queenie mother. When Benjamin is born, he emerges prematurely aged. Medical tests show that he has the physical characteristics of a person in his eighties. Originally penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, makes Benjamin Button tells a peculiar life story that forays in the world of the fantastic: the crux of the story is that, just as the clock ticks backwards, Benjamin too ages in reverse. He gets younger and younger over time. The task of dealing with this massive disconnect between his physically aged exterior, and his inner infantile self, forces Benjamin to attempt to act like an adult (to match his aged exterior), but no matter how hard he tries his true inner child shines through, especially whenever it comes to booze and women, areas where he has zero experience. Benjamin wins the adoration of most every character he meets, and along the way he breaks through the prejudicial barriers that age and race typically erect. This film is a diversion for Fincher. Many of the defining qualities of David Fincher’s films are not so very present in Benjamin Button. This charmed, almost magical tale shares none of the characteristic of other Fincher scripts. It is not filtered through the darkened lens of hyper awareness; there is none of the desolation and bleak deconstruction of modern culture that fills Zodiac, the most recently released Fincher film before this one. Benjamin Button seems to be the only film in Fincher's body of work that is not a dark, psychological thriller. Here, Fincher proves that he can work in drama just as well as he can work in action and suspense, however he does have expert help. The director of photography Claudio Miranda, who had worked on a number of Fincher’s earlier pictures, sets the tones and temperature of the images so they project like a thriller, dark with shadows, slight, almost sepia toned. A highly refined picture quality. Once again, this film features Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, the brilliant editing team that would go on to win multiple Oscars for best editing in The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They brilliantly let visuals alone tell as much of the story as possible. As with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Benjamin Button has tons of shots and locations. The exact opposite of Panic Room. Eric Roth & David Fincher The technique of recounting the story through recollection as a series of flashbacks, as well as Benjamin’s unexpected success despite his handicap, make Benjamin Button bear an off-putting resemblance to the structure of Forest Gump (1994). This is no coincidence. The same writer who won an Oscar for his Forest Gump screenplay, Eric Roth, is also the writer of Benjamin Button. As characters both Forest and Benjamin worked on boats, both took part in World Wars, and both perpetually pursue women from their childhood. What is great thought is that Fincher is able to divert this potential redundancy. While Forest bumbles along, simply falling into phenomenal situations, Benjamin paves his own way. It’s existential drive versus dumb luck.

In a dark, dangerous San Francisco lives Nicholas Van Orten (Michael Douglas), a very rich businessman and a total loner. He doesn’t come across as pathetic, but as rather as stern and cold, and blatantly unhappy despite the lap of luxury in which he lives. Sensing Nicholas’ unhappiness, Nicholas’ wild and über ostentatious brother Conrad (Sean Penn) appears and presents Nicholas a birthday gift, a gift that is sure to add some excitement to Nicholas life, and lift him out of the depressive fog that he carries around everywhere. Along the way we learn some little bits of information about Nicholas’ life, but not much, which is nice because his past doesn’t really seem to matter anyway. Fincher takes the character and forces him to deal strictly with the present time. All past regrets, misdeeds, and sins fall away when you are literally fighting for your life. Conrad’s gift is a game. A set of real life, role-playing scenarios designed and executed by a company alleged called CRS. We don’t know what CRS is, and neither does Nicholas, so when bizarre happenings start to occur, such as the nightly news anchor breaking character and speaking directly to Nicholas in his living room, Nicholas cannot tell what is really happening. Is this part of the game? Or am I hallucinating? Soon the puppet masters at CRS crank up the intensity of the events. There are numerous attempts on Nicholas’ life. At one point he wakes up in Mexico after having been buried alive in an underground tomb. The occurrences are so extreme, that as an audience, we are just as confused as Nicholas. It is real? Or is it a game? It is impossible to tell, and this is what makes this film so much fun to watch. The world that CRS tailors to its clients is very cool and well put together. Even though Nicholas is told distinctly that the CRS game will begin, and it is not until after he is told this that strange and dangerous things start to happen, we are still unsure if it’s game or reality. Fincher is essentially blurring our understanding of the common philosophical conventions of cause and effect. The Game is a good thriller, and an entertaining watch. The production value of the film is excellent. It projects on screen in dark, shadowy tones, mixed with diverse textures setting one scene to next to a another composed completely different. The film is full of interesting settings from Nicholas’ mansion, to a Mexican border town, to meetings in coffee shops, to cabins in the woods, but despite the actual events taking place being very entertaining to watch, the film never really establishes what truth it is trying to convey. The ending is disappointing. We are not left with any kind of substantial meaning. The CRS experience is meant to be a massive, over-the-top shock to the nervous system. This shock forces one, Nicholas in this case, to decide whether he wants to fight to stay alive, or let go and die. Maybe we are supposed to take the hint and choose to live now, even though we don’t have CRS to break us out of our depression and lethargy, as individuals, or as a whole society. But this might be pushing the limits of interpretation. Despite the absence of the deeper themes, such as investigating the pointlessness of existence as in Fight Club, or the proving the worthlessness of humanity as in Seven, The Game is still great watch. Once the film ends, it doesn’t linger for days in the front of your mind like the best thrillers, but while your watching it you’ll be on the edge of your seat, never knowing what it going to happen next.

Thanks to David Fincher, the world now has Rooney Mara to admire (and stare at). She plays the Goth misfit Lisbeth in this film, her first lead role, and she’s actually pretty good. She does revenge particularly well. A fierce character, while not dominating every scene, Rooney dominates the film. She is the one we think a hour later. I will not try and compare her performance with Noomi Repace's, whom I also love to watch. Both do Lisbeth their own way. When Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) gets into some political hot water and needs to get out of Stockholm, he takes a job as an investigator in the Swedish countryside trying to solve the mystery of a disappeared girl, but there are people that do not want him to to find the answers. Eventually he teams up with Lisbeth and they work on the case together. In the first part of the film, the intersecting story lines between the two main characters are done with skill. Many scenes are not action or dialogue based, yet all they all add to the story. The decision to film this version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Sweden, as opposed to swapping it out for some American city, was a well made one. Since so much of the story is told in images, kudos goes to the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall. Both are long time collaborators of Fincher, and they’ve both won multiple Oscars, including one for this film. I get the suspicion that they worked extra overtime on this movie; there are just tons and tons of scenes, a complete 180 from the style of Panic Room. The chemistry between Rooney and Craig really builds throughout the film as the two work great together. The irregularity of the pairing makes it much more interesting and intriguing to follow than most typical, on-screen romances. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most depressing of all Fincher productions, but it’s still pretty low down there, and I mean this in the best way possible. It’s either always raining or cold outside while sometimes this envorinment is contrasted against interior scenes that are pristine, white, clean. Tension. Clean rooms don't seem to apear often in Fincher films, and as expected there are many others that are dark and dirty. The film ends in a reasonably satisfying way leaving us hanging, waiting for the sequel. Errata: I could have gone without the final Stockholm scene when Lisbeth is riding her motorbike through the streets as it snows. A similar situation occurred in The Wolverine (2013) where Logan rode a motorbike through the mountains in Japanese winter. These situations would never occur. Motorbikes and snow are never a very convincing combination (for me anyway).

Now that the criminal mastermind flick has become a set type, widely overdone, this film tends to get easily shrugged off as yet another film about an ultra-intelligent serial killer who is always one step ahead of the cops, yes just like Seven. Still though, this film is quite different. Zodiac has nowhere near as much internal darkness bursting from its seams. But Zodiac is dark, just not Seven dark. Even though Zodiac is still a murder-thriller, it’s tone compared to Seven, is a like a lovely ray of sunshine. Being that this storyline is all loosely based on actual events, enacting the film out in the time period during which it occurred, the late 60’s-early 70’s gives the film a freshness, a nostalgia that seems to come with those decades. The plot: In an age before mail bombs and anthrax scares, a killer toys with his pursuers by leaving complex clues just above their tracker’s radars, just out of reach of their capabilities, the chase then becomes perpetual, the madness wide spread- reporters, cops, victim’s families, all exposed to the madness. Society engulfing. The lighting, the darkness, the shadows, the string dissonance, and the rain of course: all hugely important to Fincher’s work, perhaps his most important set of tricks, perhaps they could even be called Finchinian, or would it be Ficheresque? They pop up in all this films. In the real tense bits we get close, claustrophobic shots, bare-bones dialogue, tense body language, the potential victim’s fear seeping almost literally thought the screen, then BAM! Scene complete. No sentimentality. None of Fincher’s tactics in creating suspense come across as clichés. These are textbook lessons in how to frame a successful suspense scene. In a thriller the actor is a part of the puzzle. Like a part of complex musical arrangement, all the players need to play their parts perfectly. In thrillers the character is thrown into an extreme situation, an abyss created by the filmmaker, and Zodiac, unlike Panic Room, is a bottomless abyss. Great performances are made by the actor’s that find the rawest, ravenous ways to claw their ways out, even if the character fails. During Zodiac, Jake Gyllehaal was still coming up in the ranks. He had not fully moved on to the badass action hero roles he plays today and in his underling position in the film, as a cartoonist constantly getting in the way of the “real” reporters, he becomes an interesting underdog of a main character, even though he’s not supposed to be the main attraction. A pleasure to watch, we know, and he knows, he is in a subservient role and he never breaks out of it . Thrillers are the king of film as the symphony is king of music. Great symphonies are difficult to execute. So many elements, so many moving parts, everything must align perfectly, so when that moment of suspense is created, in both thriller and symphony, whether scene of movement, we stand in awe. Zodiac has those moments.

In slasher flicks like Scream (1996), break-ins are single scenes. Heist flicks like The Bank Job (2008) or The Score (2001) spend most of the films planning out the break-ins, and then only a scene or two actually carrying them out. So the fact that aside from the very beginning, Panic Room is just really one long break-in scene always made the film seem like a silly waste of time. I mean, it gives the whole plot away right in the title. A couple of thieves arrive and tear up the place, the family hides, problems occur. Hurray. The coincidence of everything just-so-happening to be available at the exact right time: the happenstance of the break-in coinciding with the idea that the house just so happens to contain a panic room, this seems too much to handle. Yet all the mighty forces align and provide the viewer with an experience that is actually quite satisfying. Although not an overly complicated plot, the script is very well written and includes explanations for exactly why these happenings occur as they do. For skeptic viewers like me, who usually find unexplainable exceptional coincidences a deal breakers, David Keopp’s logical, explanatory script (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible) provides answers, and an excellent foundation for David Fincher to build his dark mess. (IMDB says Keopp got 4 million bucks for the script, so….). Seemingly, this film takes the primal fear of invasion, bad people coming into our homes in the night and doing bad things to us. But rather than exploit the concept a has been beaten to death, Panic Room does not rely on the traditional fear of invasion. It adds dimension, reason, even a kind of logic explaining how this whole event could have turned out right for everyone, if only it could have unfolded just a single day earlier. It is in considering the film’s simplicity that the profound difficulty of this film’s production is most realized. The decision for the director and crew to call “that’s a wrap” must have been murky one. Unlike any of Fincher’s other films, Panic Room is shot entirely on only one set, in linear time, and deals with only with a single event. It is minimal in its approach, like a play. It is essentially all based on the interaction of the actors stage together, almost. Forest Whitacker, Jodie Foster and even Dwight Yoakam all crank out great performances, but Fincher’s dark, perfectly influential shots, using unusual angles, intercoms and video cameras, small vs. open spaces, and of course, darkness and rain are what make this cinema, and not theater. Aligning open frames with great musical peaks, the score by Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) intensifies the single track plot of Panic Room, pushing it along as a series of arcs, suspensefully running up and down, each arc increasing in intensity, until the film hits the peak, and even though we knew all along what was coming, we are still very satisfied with when it finally does.

Thomas Vinterberg- This film dredges up the "other side" of sexual abuse accusations, a much needed discourse that we all choose to ignore. This is what can happen when our rampant paranoia that every man over the age of 15 is a pedophile. How many innocent men have paid a price, but committed no crime?

One of Terrence Malick's first features. Amazing portrait of the United States agricultural machine in 1918. This film is a masterpiece that captures the early 1900's exactly as it was. Added to that a terrific script and cast. Visually Stunning!

The simple truth speaks. Breakout hit from first time filmmaker Ryan Coogler uses the truth of a story to make this excellent, yet simple film. It is the portrait of a kid who is set on turning his life around, but never gets the chance. It all ends in tragedy.

A simple story from Turkish Director Nuri Bilge Ceylon: a man tries to cope with his life in the dismal conditions of an Istanbul winter. He's successful, but unhappy. Beautifully shot. Simplistic in story. Great performances by the cast. A must see for any Ceylon fan, or fan of foreign film.

Maybe not understanding all the programming and math involved in the technical side of the project makes me feel like an idiot? I have no idea what any of equations or algorithms mean, or how to write script. Maybe I’m a little jealous because I never got to go to college parties as glamorous as the ones in this film? Or maybe the problem is that the subject matter it just so banal that despite the quality of the production, this film is lost on me? I have a problem with this film that is so full of maybes. And yet for all its weaknesses, it won three Oscars, albeit one of them was for Baxter and Wall's editing, which is superb. Both editors have worked on numerous Fincher productions. None of the actors are convincing at portraying the real people they are supposed represent. Maybe that’s the point? They are attempting to play versions of Zuckerberg and Co. that seem more interesting than the real, live versions. I guess I see the reasoning behind this. As activities, creating companies, programming computers, or writing software, no matter how profound, aren’t exactly as riveting as invading Bin Laden’s compound, or smuggling blood diamonds out of Liberia. Still, I am no fan of Jesse Eisenberg. His success is baffling to me. He was for a while a Michael Cera impersonation gone wrong, now, whatever he is, he does it well. He sells tons of tickets…but none of them are to me. The best part about this film is that it has Rooney Mara, briefly. Later she becomes Lisbeth in Dragon Tattoo. The most interesting thing about this film is simply that it exists and was so successful. Rather, that a production company actually paid David Fincher to try and create a full-on thriller packed with betraying, greedy, snarky little boys either getting their way, or losing millions of dollars. Poor babies. Even if in the end Zuckerberg did create something monumental, so what. It's just a monument to a monument. What does any of this represent? How does any of this change the world? It’s not like Facebook has cured any sick people or stopped any wars. It’s arguably even created a recent few (of both).

If Fincher didn’t invent the convention of the brilliant serial killer always being just one step ahead of the police, he unquestionably perfected it here. This is the twisted psychopath unleashing his vengeance upon the deserving, avaricious world at its absolute best. And this remains Fincher’s best film. Two cops in New York are hunting a serial killer. The presence of the killer is momentous even before the detectives track him down, once caught, the killer is channeled through Kevin Spacey with a disturbingly authentic evil calm. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker, this amazing original script that was almost never made. Walker wrote it as an original screenplay around 1991. Apparently he was quite depressed at the time. New Line Cinema bought it, but it took years before it went into production Walker went to work on other projects thinking the script would never be made, but it was. It was released Sept 22, 1995. By using the seven deadly sins as the basis for justifying the killer’s prerogative, the film’s plot is definitely one of the best around, added to this amped up, excellent performances by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, the production comes off flawlessly, but Seven is so haunting and goes down as one of the best Thrillers of all time because of Fincher’s vision of a hellish New York. This world is poison and Fincher makes it seep. The grit and grime of the crimes scenes combined with filth of the city streets, alleyways, rooftops, constantly being pounded with rain, darkness engulf even the few happy moments of the film. So much of this film’s beauty is in the compilation. The sets and lighting are so complex that making Seven must have been the result of a finely tuned crew, each member bulked up on their own creative genius. It is how everything, every element aligns perfectly that makes Se7en such a phenomenal filmmaking achievement.

Totally under-appreciated and misinterpreted film. This is one of my all time favorite movies, yet I have a hard time defending it now as a serious piece of cinema, and I'm not sure why. It gets low ratings on all the major film sites despite tons of great actions scenes, a huge overarching story line, great attention to detail, and a terrific performance by Christian Bale. The Story: The dictator ruled state of Libria force-feeds its citizens drugs to suppress their emotions, and in fact, feeling emotion is entirely illegal. Punishment is death. Overactive emotions have been known to cause many of humanity's previous atrocities and wars, so to vanquish emotion is to therefore benefit humankind. There is a method to the madness; this film is set right after world war III, and emotion suppression is modern humanity's solution for preventing world war IV. Of course there are those that do not see this repression as a benefit and so an underground resistance forms. Although the plot is excellently executed, the dystopian theme comes across as just a little bit too close (for some, not for me) to an exact replica of an Orwellian model. Equilibrium has been accused of being unoriginal, a mere mishmash of well-known various Sci- Fi stories. I was never bothered by this mishmash. Examining the film shows there are more than enough original features, features that people must be overlooking when judging, because the originality more than counter balances the borrowed material. The top ranking law enforcement officials are (I think very cleverly) called Clerics. They employ the use a fictitious fighting style called the Gun Kata. The Gun Kata a major part of the film and makes for some amazing scenes. The details about the world are so specific that it really is an amazing accomplishment on writer/director Kurt Whimmer's part. Whimmer makes a living mainly as a writer, Equilibrium being one of only two major features he's directed. As I said earlier, Christian Bale gives a great performance, handling almost all the fight scenes himself, and due to budget constraints, only being allowed a handful of takes to get each set of complex choreography right. Director Whimmer makes excellent use of light and space, pleading his case for humanity's right to "feel" as light peeks through the drab gray tones of the photography, rarely, but just enough. Equilibrium is the biggest box office flop of a film I can think of. For how epic it is, the 20 million dollar budget seems miniscule, but its total to-date gross is $1.2 million, a totally pathetic ratio. Equilibrium appeared around the same time as the Matrix was doing its thing and so Equilibrium got very little press. The two films share a similar vibe and since Equilibrium came out second, it loses points for originality, and even though The Matrix is undoubtedly a great achievement, Christina Bale is hands-down the better lead (I'm not too fond of Keanu Reeves). Just based on that fact alone Equilibrium is worth checking out.

I was able to stomach Drive. Maybe I even kind of liked it. There were some parts of Drive that kind of maybe even kicked a$$, like the opening scene So, I really wanted to like this film, or at least, at the bare minimum, make up my mind after I'd watched it, but I just could not do it. I had to bail out when the ridiculous mother enters the picture. I love that it's set in Bangkok, and all the aura that this could provide, but besides potential, which is never developed, there is little else of value. The charters don't treat the country with respect, and if this is supposed to be some kind of statement, it fails in all possible intended variations. All the ridiculously over done, tyring-to-hard scenes shot with weird lighting when normal lighting would have sufficed idiotic. The overexposed, deep colours of the hotel are not artistic but stupid. What the heck are Gossling and his crew doing in Thailand anyway? So many more complaints than this, but it's all the time I'm willing spend analyzing this very disappointing film.

In this 2012 film, Director Robert Zemeckis shows-off his filmmaking chops in the film’s first forty-five phenomenal minutes. The plane crash in Flight is spectacular and original. A fresh new take and a welcome addition to the genre, it’s unlike any other plane crash I’ve seen before. Preparing for its final decent into Atlanta the MD-80 aircraft of Southjet Flight 227 severely malfunctions. The elevator, the hinged wings on the plane’s tail stick downward, sending the plane into a steep dive. A disastrous crash is almost certain, but with ace pilot Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) at the controls, he and his crew pull off a remarkable feat and save hundreds of lives. After the gripping first act, the rest of film the film is propelled forward solely by Washington who is in fine form, yet despite this, the film mostly drags on. Many long, unnecessary, and awkward scenes could have easily have been cut, and the film would have been better for it. Parts of the back-story of Whitaker’s life work great, while others are just too convenient to be believable. Flight tries to be more than just a plane crash film. The film delves deep into the destruction alcoholism can cause, and also attempts to tackle the question of what it is to be a hero. While drudging up some very interesting and heavy material, considering the film’s length of 2hr 18min, a much clearer statement of intent would have been nice. Since Captain Whitaker is an alcoholic, there is a ton of backlash against him, but the dialogue on the subject of whether or not a drunk can be a hero, is far from concluded.

Another film about the human spirit’s ability to persevere we do not need, yet here we are again. In the straights on Sumatra off the coast of Indonesia a lone sailor (Robert Redford) awakens to find his sailboat's cabin filling fast with ocean. A massive whole has been torn through the side after a freak, overnight collision with a rogue shipping container. In the vastness of the Indian Ocean the spectacular odds of this collision’s happening seem staggering, and yet this is only the beginning of the misadventure. After patching up the side of the boat, even despite the total loss of all modern navigation equipment, the danger seems to cease. For a moment it seems like all that’s left is for the lone sailor to venture into the nearest port and seek repairs, but of course we know this is not the story. It is as if the hulking metal mass has delivered upon the lone sailor a divine wrath from which there is no escape. When we see the container, a faceless representation of some mega conglomerate, smashed through the side of the delicate sailboat, sweatshop-produced shoes spilling out into the ocean, the irony is overwhelming. The very world the lone sailor has set out to get away from has tracked him down. Before we start the film, just from the title alone, we know what the outcome will be, yet despite the unoriginal plot and standard shipwreck story conventions, the film succeeds. Fantastically succeeds. Almost completely devoid of dialogue, Robert Redford exudes a stolid, matter-of-fact persona in the face of catastrophe. He toils steadily, remaining steadfast in his manner. It is exhausting just watching him labor endlessly and even though he is performing, this performance cannot really be considered acting. Simply going through the motions of this role is enough to exude awe, especially when he is being thrown around wildly by the untamed, open ocean; the work that it must have taken to play this role is obvious and seems to strip away acting practices; what we really see is a man just trying not to die.

A very one-sided, biased take on a genius of a driver. It plays up the drama between the drivers at bit much at times when it could have focused more on Senna's struggles with the Williams mechanical team. Although it was interesting to see here where Senna came from, and his struggles through the ranks, the film was not able to capture him on an intimate level. He always remains as a distance, untouchable celebrity. Still, not bad for a film made out of decades old footage. The film did tend to drag on however, and certain parts, especially some of the stuff that had nothing to do with racing, could have easily been cut out (I skipped through some parts myself). I was left wondering how such a stunning driver could be defeated by such a seemingly trivial problem. As troubling as it is that the exact cause of the crash is not known, it is a reminder that he was human, but there is some comfort in know that he died doing not only what he love, but what he had to do.

After failing to market the machines commercially, the inventors discover something shocking, they’ve actually created time machines. In a non-descript storage facility in the suburbs sit these mysterious machines, the culmination of hard work done at nights and on weekends; the capital for the machine’s production, all the funds the group could muster. Conscientious from the beginning, the men predict the dangers of their creation. They profess their not wanting to alter the past. They try to keep the project quiet, under wraps from world, but things easily get out of control amongst themselves. Aghast at their errors, they try to set things right, but since time travel functions according unknown sets of laws different from those of linear time, the concocted logical solutions to their problem end up becoming just additional steps towards disaster. Supposedly made for only $7000, this film is a marvel. Not only is it a fascinating story, the camera work and the production value is very good. With long scenes, and thoughtful performances by the cast, this quasi Sci-fi/Arthouse film is a visual pleasure to watch. It doesn’t screen as a low budget thriller. While Director/Writer Shane Carruth’s vision isn’t exactly crystal clear, and this mystery is part of the charm. For a film about a complex subject like time travel, the success is in Carruth’s ability to purvey the concept with very little flare. Everything seems to have aligned perfectly here. That is not to say it is the greatest film ever, but for a movie about such complicated subject matter, the bare-bones approach is very interesting. The script and characters talk about what they know. A narrator fills us in on a few more key details. Then the rest we are left to figure out on our own. As a sci-fi thriller this film works very well.

The fact that the Hunger Games stories are not crushed by their own weight is mystifying, and an achievement. It seems crazy that a film whose ideology is as savagely brutal as the fictional Games would become such a hit. Despite all its violent connotations and tyrannical regimes, the film comes off as the year’s pinnacle of entertainment. Maybe the allure lies in ourselves? We project ourselves on screen. We are Katniss fighting back against the oppressors. The film’s core audience is essentially the same demographic that would be sacrificed if such games were ever to become a reality, so maybe everyone is really just preparing for the future? When the Games start, we’ll know what to expect. According to IMDB, Post-apocalyptic thrillers are not particularly big money makers; The Hunger Games franchise being the only series that nearly approaches real commercial heavy weights. The first two Hunger Games installments together hold the top grossing spots in the genre, but even then, they don’t come near grossing anything like the top 50 overall films. Avatar and Titanic are the top two. Both have over two billion worldwide gross. Still, Hunger Games has a hard-core devoted fan base that rivals even Twilight. At the Los Angeles premiere of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, young fans camped out for three days just to be front and center on the red carpet, catching glimpses of the film’s stars. The best scenes of the film visually were the ones shot in the districts. The New Yorker review describes these scenes like “Eastern-bloc depression…drained of vitality,” but Katniss is exactly the opposite. As a hero she is so strong that alleviates the vitality drainage. Once we leave the districts, the filmmakers deflect the intensity of the subject matter using Katniss as a distraction. Katniss keeps the film from being engulfed into an R-rated abyss. I love R-rated abysses, but they don’t draw fans like Jennifer Lawrence’s strong performances in these PG-13 flicks. There were some weaknesses. The coincidence that Katniss and Peeta would be drawn back into the turmoil was too much, an obvious excuse just to get Katniss back in the ring. How is that we didn’t hear of these conflicts in the past film? Surely Katniss and Peeta would have the known the traditions of the world they live in. Also, why are all the people in the capital dressed so outlandishly? How do they assemble for all public events in perfect symmetry? Why is the President’s only concern with the games? Doesn’t he have other duties? What the story lacks in depth, and it certainly does lack, it makes up for in action-packed, well-shot scenes. Despite an appearance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the gamemaker, the curves thrown at the participants in this rendition of the Games weren’t as exciting as the first film. The most annoying thing in the film was Peeta Malark. He is a weakling and not an interesting character. On the battlefield he hardly contributes. He seems to function only as a male counterpart to Katniss in the political spectrum as Katniss ends up fighting battles for two in the forest. Overall The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was worth the price of admission, and at 2 hours 26 minutes, it flies by quick.

Drugs and depression. Steven Soderbergh takes both subjects head- on in Side Effects, a film that examines how the lives **** of individuals inevitability become tied together by mental illness and chance. Emily Taylor’s (Rooney Mara) life is on the brink of total collapse. After waiting four years for her husband to get out of prison, her depression finally overtakes her. She ends up in the Emergency Room after a failed suicide attempt. Here she encounters Doctor Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Jude Law doesn’t seem a likely psychiatrist, but it doesn’t matter, he pulls it off and all the other characters fall into line around him; although Jude Law is the heart of the film, Soderbergh is undeniably at the helm here. He is the brain. Soderbergh’s characters habituate their New York City with 100% believability, believability so intense in fact, it is haunting. The viewer envies the characters and their glamorous lives, even more so as they destroy themselves. The viewer needs to remind themself that these characters do not exist, and this is a fiction, be it an excellently written one by Scott Z. Burns. As a screenwriter I watch this film as a lesson in how to build intersecting plot lines. Banks comes across as a doctor legitimately interesting in helping people, so when Emily claims to be living in a depressive fog Banks takes on the task of trying his best to help her. Emily’s condition begins to improve, but in the midst of the improvement tragedy strikes, and it threatens to bring down both patient and doctor. As a psychiatrist Dr. Banks did what psychiatrists do, he prescribed drugs. Then more drugs. Then even more drugs. Even though it seems absurd at times just how many medications are being dolled here, for anyone who has ever experienced psychiatric treatment, they will realize that these procedures are standard. So is this a jab at psychiatry’s habit of throwing handfuls of pills at people in mental distress? However mind-boggling it may be that the treatment for nearly every mental condition is medication, this film doesn’t come across as serious critique of psychiatric drugs, or the pharmaceutical industry. There is a fog covering the whole film, figuratively in the melancholic tone, and literally in the shades of grey of the cinematography. This fog further complicates an already complex plot, but once you can piece together what has occurred, as I did hours afterwards, you will not be able to shake this film’s dark presence. In the end it is not drug use that is being criticized here, but rather the avaricious **** void, the characters' needs to engulf their surroundings, and the sociopathic culture that made them this way. Amazing!

The best thing about Paul Greengrass’ new action thriller Captain Phillips is that it is actually about Captain Phillips. No, this is not a joke. Phillips is an adept ship captain for the huge shipping conglomerate Maersk. He assumes his role aboard a freighter docked in Oman bound for Kenya, and this route is straight through the Gulf of Aden, past Somali, the most pirate infested piece of ocean in the world. I assume most viewers entering the theatre already know that this film is about pirates attacking a ship. The film does fulfill this expectation in the first act, but from there everything that happens is as unpredictable as is possible to be unpredictable. First of all, kudos to the trailer’s producers and marketers for selling this film as a conflict totally based upon on the hijacking of a ship. While this is the first major conflict of the film, it is not the only one. As the ship’s hijacking unfolds, and errors occur, whole tangential series of events and complications are created. Greengrass takes these tangents to a place we never could have expected, and all of a sudden we have an unexpected thrilling crisis of a film. Overall it’s a simple story, but it’s so creative in its originality and unfolding that I was on the edge of my seat the whole film. Since it’s based on a true story I guess Greengrass shouldn’t get all the credit. A lot of the credit must go to one the two scriptwriters, Richard Phillips. He adapted this script from the book that was based on true events. Second of all, there is a storyline involving the Somali’s and the world they come from. It was a great idea to include this. We are shown that Somali pirates are not just pure evil, but are in many ways forced into the acts of piracy they undertake. In a extremely revealing scene Phillips and Muse, the head pirate, reveal how higher levels of bureaucracy influences both their lives, they both have bosses they say. In a moment of cinematic excellence, Greengrass actually makes the viewer feel sympathy for Muse despite the fact that he is a maniacal, automatic weapon toting killer who hijacks ships. Sir Greengrass, very well done. There has been a concern over this film’s release though, and this raises the question that all art needs to consider: do the events of the film/artwork that declare themselves as true have an obligations to actually be true? Or can anyone declare anything and make into a work in itself? This though comes from media attacks on the real Captain Phillips. According to The Guardian, apparently Captain Phillips himself was not the hero he is portrayed as in the film. He was a notoriously difficult captain to work for, and by sailing too close to Somalia some say he was the cause of the whole incident. Debate aside, very good film.

For any film fanatic that also happens to be an Orson Scott Card fan, Ender’s Game was the type of film that warranted the hanging of a calendar on the wall and blacking out the days until the film's November 1st release date. I was this excited for months about the film, and yes, I saw it opening night. But after having seen it, I say with dismay that although the admission may not have been a total waste of money, it may have been better spent on a few drinks at a bar, or on a Shake Shack dinner (for the non- drinkers). I was just so unexpectedly un-enthralled that I’m still in shock. The film opens with Ender Wiggin as his parent’s third child in a world where thirds are not highly regarded, yet a prestigious military school’s administrators monitor Ender’s life via hidden cameras, and through this observation witness the potential genius within Ender. But whatever they notice, it is not shown to the audience. Nonetheless Ender leaves his family behind to study at this elite training school where plans are secretly being made; Ender will train to become the next great commander of the Earth fleet. While at battle school Ender meets the legendary Mazer Rackham, a famous Maori warrior whom singlehandedly defeated the aliens previously, when they attacked Earth. Rackham’s job now is to mentor Ender, to prepare him for the greatest battle of his life. Director Hood’s rendition of Ender’s Game does just adequate justice to the original plot of the book. I pined for a grittier, R-rated Prometheus or District 9-ish kind of rendition, and instead I got something related more to Will Smith’s Independence Day. There were no gaps left in the timeline of the film, gaps necessary to explain how Ender could possibly have become a fleet commander at all. As Director Hood portrays it, the audience sees Ender go from cadet to commander overnight, almost literally. No human past, present, or future, (not even Ender) could pull that off. Blasé scenes are followed by descriptions of grandeur that made me wonder if I had just watched the same scene as the military commanders. In front **** of new recruits Ender is praised by Officer Graff (Harrison Ford) for his intelligence, a set-up for later peer torment? But the intelligence Ender shows here is hardly praiseworthy. It’s just a smart-alecky remark about zero gravity. Later, when Ender is confronted by a gang of boys, whom he ends up defeating, the fight is not convincing, yet again, administrators swoon. This type of device, apathetic scene followed by glorious praise occurs over and over throughout the film. Descriptions of awe are purveyed when no actual awe has taken place. Asa Butterfield's unmoving performance is largely responsible for the film’s failure. He is not a convincing Ender, and so all his examples of greatness seem staged. Every time Ender does something “miraculous” and is praised for it, it’s reminiscent of the medieval age; a king’s steward dolloping out praise at every instance to keep his majesty satisfied. Harrison Ford is also pretty terrible. Come to think of it, pretty much all the acting, except Ben Kinglsey’s is bad. Errata: Ender spends significant amounts of time whining about the administration blocking his email account. What does this have to do with the plot? Nothing. Since when do starships send and receive email? They don’t. There’s ansible technology in this world people! (machines capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication) Starships are way past “email.” Overall, I’d say Ender’s Game was only kind of bad, but it so totally not awesome. PS- I love that some people have rated this film as a zero. That is awesome!

Enough Said focuses mostly on the day-to-day struggles of Eva, a message therapist, and as the film plays out it attempts to highlight the beauty of the unlikely formation of serious romantic relationships and their fragility. Eva and Albert, two divorced, middle-aged cynics with children from past marriages meet at a party, go on a few dates, and eventually end up forming a serious romantic relationship. This is a sweet idea in itself, but Eva’s character is just generally uninteresting. She is picky, negative, and skeptical. When problems occur between her and Albert, we the audience are supposed to feel pity, or empathy maybe. But it’s impossible! It seems as if the characters are purposely crying for pity. They mope, they whine, they feel sorry for themselves. Both Eva and Albert have pretty great lives actually, and come from respectable ranks of society. They have good jobs and nice families. How are we supposed to feel pity for characters when the characters portrayed as pathetic are not pathetic at all? Their situation may be realistic, but in the supporting context, these characters are impossible to care about. Eva egomaniacally brings on all her own misfortunes. We see her make bad choice after bad choice until she has ruined all her personal relationships. Eva the character is a dunce, but Dreyfus’ acting in the role is fantastic. This is a serious paradox! I went to see this film for two reasons, because it got great reviews and because of James Gandolfini. Unfortunately, the reviews were wrong. Great performances by Dreyfus and Gandolfini are forced to cohabitate with the terrible, mundane plot. The reviews of Enough Said painted it was some kind of quirky little indie film, something Squid and the Whale-ish (even though I don't like Squid, I like that genre), but really it is just a story about the unlikely romance between two people i.e. a romance film. Most enraging is the depiction of how the characters are totally responsible for screwing up their own lives. Viewers who consider themselves unlucky may not agree that relationships are this black and white; simply making the right choice, or do the right thing and everything will be great. I don’t like to see charters on the screen fall from grace because they fly to close to the sun; I like to see the sun explode and engulf the character in flames. Whatever it was the film's producers were trying to evoke in me, they failed at it.

Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners is way better than it looks in the trailer. The trailer seems to give away all the secrets of the film upfront; it portrays the film as lacking depth, but in reality, it’s just the trailer that misleads. There is much more to Prisoners than one may anticipate. The film star’s Hugh Jackman (surprise, surprise) as Keller Dover. Jackman is having an over-exposure problem at this moment in his career. As the actor seems to appear in every other film released these days, this creates questions that shouldn’t exist like, “What is the Wolverine doing in this movie Prisoners?” Nonetheless Jackman delivers a solid, if not dimensional performance. His energy keeps the movie constantly driving forward. The film opens with two working class families getting together to celebrate Thanksgiving. Festivities abound, but while the responsible adults of the film have their attentions focused elsewhere, their two little girls run outside to play, unchaperoned. By the time the girls’ absence is noticed, it’s too late. The girls are gone. They have been taken. The major conflict of the film then is how to get the girls back alive. This job falls on Detective Loki, (Jake Gyllenhaal) but when Loki fails to produce results quickly enough, Keller Dover decides to take the search for the girls, and for civil justice, into his own hands. Performance-wise, Gyllenhaal as Loki is the highlight of the film. He maintains a subtle, calm composure, which contrasts Keller’s (Jackman’s) constant flying-off-the-rails. Loki shows a certain vulnerability while still being able to pull off fast-pace action sequences in an authentic, belivable way. He is very enjoyable to watch. The actual visual experience of Villeneuve’s films is very important. His 2010 film Incendies made full use of wide and vast cinematography applied in exotic landscapes. This visual imagery captivated, but all the technique was there to serve the story, the plot developments, the characters. Incendies is a masterfully crafted tragedy and Villeneuve’s commanding technique is evident too throughout Prisoners. Like Incendies the filters and tones that are applied to the film, as in the actual visual images on screen, are gloomy and sepia-toned. There’s not a single sunny sky, a warm day, an orderly room. Sets are designed to feel dark and empty, the best scenes use sets that play with space, showing both the abundance of vacant space for some characters, while still emphasizing the feeling of enclosure felt by others. The use of light and dark, order and disorder, space, all things that cradle the actors performances, are created by Villeneuve, expertly. The suspense of the film continues all the way to the very end as Keller Dover’s untamed compulsion to find the missing girls leads to a perfectly executed, nail biter of an ending.

Gravity attempts to portray what astronauts would actually encounter on space missions, how space walks would actually unfold, and the hostility of the environment of space towards anything resembling Earthling life. The ninety or so minutes of Gravity are the linear unfolding of a series of destructive events in the lives of Astronauts Ryan (Sandra Bullock) and Kowalski (George Clooney). Director’s Alfonso Cuarón’s hones in on these destructive events, treating them as a single, passing moment in time. A moment of crisis. As far as doing anything in space is ever considered routine, Gravity opens with a group of astronauts undertaking what seem to be standard, routine repairs to the outside of their ship. The tone is jovial, if not a little tense as Clooney zips around the ship’s vicinity with a jet pack jokingly. He wants to break the current space walk record of seventy-five minutes. But Mission Control suddenly issues a warning. A massive field of space debris is headed straight for them. From here on, only chaos reigns as Cuarón begins to eliminate all probable positive outcomes, one by one. After the astronaut’s ship is destroyed beyond repair Ryan and Kowalski attempt to propel themselves a floatable distance to a space station. As they push forward through space’s vacuum, towards their beacon of hope, space’s vastness and hostility are emphasized, along with their minisculity; “I hate space,” says Ryan somewhat lightheartedly. This comes after she has just been precariously saved from a perpetual spinning away into deep space, a particularly claustrophobic moment of the film, or rather, a moment in extreme of claustrophobia’s exact opposite. Gravity has all the individual parts of a film rated high, near a 10, but once the parts are assembled, the whole is not equal to the parts. Even though the film is shot in space, and is set to depict a realistic portrayal of how events like these could take place, the film is really just about Ryan, a single human’s struggle to survive, and then with this revelation the epic space setting becomes incidental. Problem: Ryan is not an interesting character. She seems ill prepared for such a dangerous space mission, and when she talks about her daughter, in a moment that I assume is used to attempt to ground the film in reality by showing us the why, we don’t care about her daughter. The current situation at hand is much more interesting. Including this talk about life back home was a mistake that took me out of the moment. I don’t care about Earth here; I care about this amazing crisis taking place just above Earth. A space movie should emphasize themes bigger than the individual. The mission should be more important than the life of the astronaut. Simply making it back to Earth alive is not an exciting enough conclusion. Although maybe the best of her career, Bullock still delivers a subpar portrayal of a character that is herself subpar. I loved Cuarón’s Children of Men and I feel here Cuarón’s work is great. From a technical perspective, Cuarón’s filmmaking is incredible, the cinematography stunning, the portrayal of space amazing, so what went wrong? Besides a storyline that fails to transcend human matters, a factor that Cuarón may have been able to gloss over under different circumstances, when a film centers on a single actor, and that actor is Sandra Bullock, to quote Yeats “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Christmas came early for me this year. I didn’t know there was a third part to the franchise, so finding out about ­Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas made my of October. That said, I watched it on the fourth of the month, so… This particular installment of the Harold and Kumar series takes place over an entire day just before Christmas. After Harold and Kumar’s last adventure, Escape from Guantanamo Bay, it seems the duo had become estranged. Since then Harold has grown-up, given up the stoner life, and become a respectable citizen. Then, out of nowhere the good ol’ Kumar shows up and burns down Harold’s Christmas tree with a massive joint. Harold desperately needs a new tree, but finding one is not as easy a task as it sounds. Their adventure begins. What ensues during the quest to find this tree is either comic genius or just utter crap. I propose it is solid mix. First, there is a toddler that gets high on at least three types of drugs. Then Harold and Kumar themselves get drugged, drugged into a random “claymation” sequence in fact where they are almost killed by an Abominable Snowman. Then, they almost get killed again, this time by some gangsters. Thanks to the veritable array of ethnicities in the film there are some hilarious race jokes that come across nicely, but the highlight of the film must be when Harold and Kumar have a run in with “America’s Sweetheart” Neil Patrick Harris. Yes! The Neil Patrick Harris. This is his third appearance in the Harold and Kumar franchise, and also weirdest because in Guantanamo Bay, Harris was killed with a shot gun by hookers. Errata: Post-credits in Guantanamo Bay NPH is shown getting up off the lawn having survived multiple shot gun wounds to the back. No mention of NPR's miraculous survival is made when the trio are reunited in the Christmas film.

When a sci-fi movie achieves a certain degree of excellence I have special category of greatness where I place such films. Europa Report, the little known sci-fi film of summer 2013 is placed squarely in this special category. The farthest than humankind has ever traveled; Europa Report takes us to a moon orbiting Jupiter where researchers believe there may be life. As a crew of scientists and engineers depart Earth they tread the well-worn path of many a space movie. Traveling to Europa the crew have their squabbles, their celebrations, their successes, their letters and videos made for loved ones on earth. Then lines go dead. They loose all contact with Earth. They have every possible gear malfunction imaginable, including a few mental and emotional ones. Director Sebastian Cordero permits this display, the usual psychological strains the typical sci-fi film character faces, but Cordero keeps them to a minimum. He does not rely on these typical factors to carry the film. The clichés become less and less important as the adventure of the actual mission intensifies Once on the crew arrive on the moon Europa everything goes wrong. When characters we’ve become fond of start dramatically disappearing we realize this is not a story about the power of the human spirit’s ability to overcome all odds. This is intended as a realistic portrayal of a real mission. What it would actually be like to venture to the far reaches of our solar system. It is a stunning achievement. For 10 million dollars this film transcends basic film devices. The Astronauts’ struggles to survive become incidental. Europa Report takes us past the mere human crusade of survival. Way past. Errata: Surprisingly the crew miscalculates the temperature of Europa as absolute zero. Absolute zero is a scientific impossibility according to the Smithsonian. Particles no longer move and energy is no longer transferred. At absolute zero, the principle that prevents perpetual motion from existing which is also used as an adjective to describe the decent into disorder- entropy- reaches its minimum value. The scenes on Europa are overflowing with entropy, so this absolute zero declaration is blatantly false. 8/10

Rains drops shine like diamonds. A choreographed battle becomes a dance of graceful, powerful movement. The violence becomes beautiful. With this incredible fight scene director Kar Wai Wong opens The Grandmaster. Then Wong replicates the same techniques over and over again, ad nauseam, expecting fancy camera angles and beautiful set designs to carry an entire 90-minute feature. The result, a film where absolutely nothing happens. Phillipe le Sourd’s cinematography here resembles that of Christopher Doyle’s in Hero (2002). That is to say, it’s amazing, but just in case we didn’t recognize its amazingness in the first scene, the second scene, or even the tenth, scene Director Wong insists we better recognize. Wong pummels the viewer with le Sourd’s blazing techniques. Identical shot after identical shot render le Sourd’s imagery utterly meaningless. This film stars the great of Zizi Zhang of Crouching Tiger (2000) and Hero fame. Here she plays a supporting character, and, oh yeah, is totally wasted as an actress. The disorganized mess of direction spends more time showing slow motion side angles of her pretty face than probably any other single device in the film. Zhang’s combat is graceful as always, but this gets boring fast as there is no discernable purpose to all her fighting. The main character Ip Man flees whatever Chinese town he’s from as the crisis of a Japanese invasion occurs, but we don’t even care. Eventually Zhang’s character and Ip Man magically meet up in Hong Kong, but by this point, thanks to the miasmic mess that has spewed fourth since the beginning of the film, the only think we do care about as viewers is the amount of time left until the credits roll.

Because it’s so good, after watching Canadien/French Film Incendies for the second time, I thought that it must be based on a novel of play. I needed to find out. I now know that it is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad. Mouawad is a Canadien writer, and to my delight, Incendies is part of a series of four plays. This means I have three more Incendies-like plays still to read. I won’t go through a run-down of the plot, talk in abstractions about arch, characters symbiosis or lack-there-of…. there are tons of proper film reviews out there already dealing with these topics. I thought I’d just talk about two things, the two things that I thought make this an outstanding film: Photography, and the remarkable unfolding of a dramatic story; better film critics than me, which is to say any real film critic, have said that this film pulls off tragedy better than the Greeks. The photography… was just as good the second time as it was the first time I saw it. The film opens in a village that could be mistaken for Greece of Israel. At thought maybe this was set and shot in Palestine, but I think most of the film as actually shot in Jordan. Theses shots are actually set to portray a fictional Lebanon, both past and modern day. The history intertwined with the movie seems to be loosely fictional; I can’t find any information on any of the places that appear in film. My Lebanese civil war history is a little rusty. Anyone else? There are two shots in particular that stand out. Both are shot at a distance to reveal the vastness of the landscape, unmistakably Mediterranean. Rocky, and the trees, not that I’m a tree expert, but they must be olive or fig trees, they are almost overused as prototypical symbols of the Med, but they work great. The first shot I like is actually two shots, meaning one type of shot that is used twice, almost identically. It’s of a bus traveling on a skinny, mountainside road. At first, the camera is in close then pans way out to show the whole panoramic view, massive landscape, and tiny bus, a common technique in World films that are shot in exotic landscapes. The other shot is similar. It is later in the film. One of the characters is driving to a modern day Deressa Refugee camp and there is a shot taken from the sky of the winding roads leading up the side of a mountain. This shot is amazing, and whatever effects of filters the photographer added to make it fit the film’s tone so well, I can’t think of a better word to use to describe them, and the shot as ‘cinematic.’ I know that’s a terrible term to use when describing Cinema, I really do, but a shot like this is so expressive and well-placed in the film, there is nothing going in the film here excepts visuals, the shot on it’s own stands out as an artistic, filmmaking achievement. The storyline…unfolds with the precision of a textbook tragedy. It sets up the conflict right off the top--- find missing brother and father. As the drama unfolds the story becomes more and more complex, adding twists and turns to the plot that we never even thought possible. In the end we are left with remains that challenge Oedipus the King in magnitude of ruination, yet still manage to exit the scene with a sparkle of hope. Forgiveness lets the audience breath a little easier as the film closes, a catharsis, but even then the story, the film, will haunt your subconscious for a good while after.

I went to see a new film by Danny Boyle called Trance. This is the guy that made Slumdog and directed the London Olympics opening ceremonies. I thought Slumdog was okay, and since I don’t care for much for ceremonial BS, I think his best work came earlier in his career, specifically, in this order- Trainspotting, 28 days later, 127 hours. He’s like almost a famous respected director, but I don’t think he really gets true credit for being an “artist” from the critics in a way that say, Von Trier does. But I think he makes great, big budget, quasi- mainstream films. Trance is not one of these, but in a good way. I am part of this type of film’s built in audience. Just by the fact that it is psychologically manipulative means I like it. The way that the film distorts time is excellent. The first half is straight forward, but the second half starts shifting all over the place. It’s almost completely non-linear. Because of the heavy emphasis on hypnosis we never know if what we are seeing is reality, dream, trance, past, present, future. It is a big, flashy, colorful film but it’s only out in limited release and it’s not very well advertised. After I saw it though I could perhaps see why it didn’t garner too much mainstream attention. I heard the late Roger Ebert say what makes a great film is when it does what it sets out to do, with excellence. It needs to be an example of greatness in the category of itself. What this to “do” is is very difficult to define. Is Trance a thriller? It has a heist, it has physiological manipulation, and it has an unorthodox love story, all elements that can make for great thriller, but as they occur on screen they seem too contrived, almost satirical. There are unrealistic, sometimes goofy flaws in the acting and in the characters, and it is not until after the film has laid all its cards on the table that all the little slips that have been happening are forgiven; they make sense in context, but this is a risky move. It requires the audience to recollect. It almost doesn’t work. Trance is like a mix of the Inception and Eternal Sunshine, but Trance does not succeed in achieving excellence in the same way these films do; however, it does do something else. I don’t think that Inception or Eternal Sunshine take the chances that Trance does, and so neither of these films make any of the same mistakes or flubs, but this also makes Trance really entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny at times. The problem is that only in retrospect does the film really make any sense. Trance requires a certain level of forgiveness from its audience, and a truly great thriller, I think, would never require such forgiveness. The coolest thing about seeing this film on opening night was that Boyle himself did a Q & A afterwards. He took technical questions: Do you prefer film or digital? He likes both, but sees digital as the future. Political questions: Do you think gun violence in film perpetuates real gun violence? He does, but relies on tragic paradox- the fact that we derive satisfaction from tragedy- to justify that we need these stories to be told, and sometimes, they happen to involve guns. Controversial questions: Does the UK (he’s British) do music better than the US? Yes, but since the UK does very so few things well (his words), he has no problem admitting this as one of those few. I wanted to ask him what he looked for in a script and if he had any advice for scriptwriters looking to get their scripts made, but he only took questions from the first few rows of the audience, and as usual, I was sitting way at the back.

Women make the best suicide bombers. They receive more media attention and generate greater mass hysteria. If they can kill innocent children, this creates the best publicity possible. The Attack, a film by Ziad Doueiri deals with such suicide bombing connected to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The story is told in such a powerful and inventive way that I left the theatre feeling as if my emotional center had been extracted, run over by a train, and then transplanted back inside. One way I seem to judge how good a film is is by how bad it makes me feel. After seeing The Attack I thought immediately of Paradise Now (2005). It has the same lead actor and both films involve Tel Aviv bombings, but while Paradise Now’s suspense is generated by mystery involved in the story’s unfolding climaxing in a mega-unsettller of an ending, The Attack gives away all its plot secrets in the first act. The major conflict of the film takes place early. Climax hit, mystery solved, we are out to examine why the events happened. The film opens with the protagonist’s highest moment, so from here down is the only way to go. Amin Jaafari, an ultra-successful Arab surgeon living in Tel Aviv receives a career achievement award. In his acceptance speech he praises a non-existent armistice of hostility between the Arab world and Israel. The irony of this speech is played out over and over again as he suffers blow after blow demonstrating the error of his judgment. There is a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and Jaafari’s wife disappears. She has forgotten her cell phone. All things lighting, photography and mood point to “oh no, she’s been killed.” Shockingly, not only has she been killed, she was actually responsible; She was the bomber. Married for 15 years, Jaafari tries to persuade others that he knew his wife well, that she could never do anything so terrible; we spend very little time wondering or investigating the trivialities of whether or not she did the deed. He gets a letter that was mailed before the bombing. It admits to the bombing and pleads, “Don’t hate me.” This secret disclosed, Jaafari goes to Palestine to track down the people who organized her suicide. What we find out in Palestine is a wrenching tale of Jaafari’s own search for answers. He tries to come to terms with his wife as a mass murderer while at the same time still being madly in love with her. The more he mourns, the bigger the atrocity of his wife’s deed becomes, and ever the more realistic. Jaafari’s fall from grace is a vivid representation that tragedy can strike at any time, to anyone. After seeing this film we are left with a striking awareness of our own vulnerability. Seeing an affluent, successful surgeon being betrayed by his wife, his family, his profession, and both of his home states leaves little hope for those of us that are less successful, non-surgeons. Jaafari’s was ignorant. He disregarded all the signs, saw only what he wanted to see, and this contributed to his ultimate demise, but he was not exceptionally oblivious, nor was he in any way malicious or evil. He was human. We leave theatres hopefully trying not to make the same mistakes.

Jason Bourne busting in the front door of the CIA, Uma Thurman chopping her way to justice, or Old Boy bashing in skulls with a hammer, no matter how many times it’s done, when it’s done well, the revenge story model still works. The Prey (La proie), a film by Eric Vallete, is a classic revenge story that totally rocks the model. Prisoner/Bad Guy Franc Adrien’s is out from vengeance. After Franc kicks the asses of three guys at once, and then escapes from prison, he finds out his wife has been murdered and his daughter kidnapped. He sets out to avenge his wife’s death and get his daughter back. Franc knows the killer, problem is, Franc has no idea where to find him. Almost nonsensically, an ex-cop character with a hunch about the Franc’s wife’s killer is thrown into the mix. How else would Franc be able to track down the killer since he has no leads? Even then, despite this character’s evident obvious triteness as a device, he comes to such a monumental end that his self-sacrifice justifies him. A fault in the script is that it tries to have two interesting main characters, the bad guy whom we cheer for Franc, and the cop that is chasing him, Claire, but only Franc’s story line is interesting, and even then, it is mostly just because Albert Dupontel who plays Franc is so awesome. Dupontel is so good that I found myself consciously noticing his awesomeness as it was unfolding and thinking, “these particular scenes might **** if this were any other actor.” All the best cop scenes were the ones where they were chasing Franc. Since the cops seem to exist only to act as obstacles to Franc’s goals, I just kept thinking it would have been better if they remained at arm’s length. The vanilla acting made the non-action cop scenes seem cheesy, but there were other positives. The gun battle where we first meet the beautiful cop lead Claire is crazy and super tight, but right after this the cop storyline settles into nothing but clichés. There is the obstinate hard-ass police chief who’s menacingly interferes with proper detective work, hot tempered cops slamming their fists down and cursing as the bad guy gets away, and of course the scenario of the only (super hot) woman cop being totally bad ass and in charge la Cold Case or Homeland. There is one scene in the second act when the cops catch up to him. He is cornered. You think there is no way out or him and then BAM, he escapes. I give some serious credit to the writers for coming up with some amazing escapes and incredibly suspenseful situations. Also, there are many awesome fights scenes, including the much blogged about ‘shaved head **** across a concrete wall,’ and these scenes alone make the film worth seeing. Despite the weak cop storyline, Dupontel as Franc is so great that his storyline supports the entire film. Franc is a vicious prison escapee yet we cheer whole-heartedly for him. Very good French thriller.

I have traversed the Gulf of Aden twice, the piece of ocean between Yemen and Somalia notorious for it’s pirates. I was somewhat familiar with the methods that pirates use when commandeering ships to demand ransoms, but to appreciate the events of Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking no sailing experience is necessary. Even though the film is a representation of how an actual Hijacking would take place: Quick, precise, and severe, the film spends little time on the mechanics of how the pirates actually board. This is not an action film. We learn that a high-speed boat has approached and boarded effortlessly, that’s it. More important to the film is what happens while the pirates are onboard. The first thing the pirates do, even before starting negotiations for money, is demand food. The ship’s cook, played brilliantly by Danish actor Pilou Asbaek, becomes the pirate’s gopher, and an ad-hoc negotiator between the pirates and the ship’s owners. Conditions onboard are miserable. Shocking even. The cook and 2 other crewmen are kept in a small closet for weeks, four other crewmembers below deck. They’re not allowed out to relive themselves in a toilet; they must use a corner of the room. My training on ships did not include images like these. There was no training about how to interact with maniacs with automatic weapons. The job of casting the actors that play the pirates is ingenious. All the actor’s performances are in the Somali language (I think). Their interactions with the ship’s crew are so authentic that I’m guessing none of these men were trained actors. Probably just local Somali men recruited by the casting director, but I can’t verify this. If they were actors, they’re the best I’ve ever seen. Contentious negotiations between the ship’s owners and the pirates leave questions. The hijacking ends without incident, almost, but the negotiations take months. Could the ship’s owner have done more? Given in to the pirate’s demands sooner? Gotten the crew home faster? Undoubtedly questions that need to be asked of the real hijackings that take place routinely in the Gulf, where we get little more than a single paragraph in the news about some, and no more.

The Wolverine keeps you on the edge of your seat for nearly every second of the film. After an atomic set of dream sequences where Logan witnesses the bombing of Nagasaki in World War Two, we find Logan living in the forest, in what is wrongly identified as “present-day Alaska” by New York Times critic A.O Scott. It is clearly the Yukon Canada, as identified by The Yukon Sportsman’s Paradise sign in an early scene. Having abandoned his life as a crime fighter, it doesn’t take long before the action starts, and Logan gets drawn back into his old kick-ass ways. Very early the film departs North America for Japan, and stays there for the rest of the time. The sets designs are spectacular, the photography obviously expensive and flawless. Shots of everything Japanese give the film an exotic flare, which then of course allows for every single character to be a martial arts expert. The fights scenes are visibly momentous, the special effects outstanding. There are some gut-wrenching flaws though that are hard to stomach amidst the film’s greatness: Logan and his side-kick Yukio are both highlighted riding motorcycles through the snow in the middle of Japanese winter; the sexy Viper villain has no discernable point as a character, neither do her costumes; the scene from the trailer where Logan is standing smoking his trademark cigar disappointingly does not appear in the film. Yet the overarching theme dealing with Logan’s angst causing immortality is interesting enough to easily redeem the film. Wolverine doesn’t save the world here, but he fights to protect the life of one woman, and ends up fighting just to save his own.

World War Z must have one of the shortest first acts in film history. The first act, usually the first half hour is generally where the conflict is introduced. This film opens with Gerry Lee, Brad Pitt, a former UN investigator having breakfast with his family. Five minutes later, BAM, zombies. No time is wasted getting straight to the conflict. Begin second act. The story is not complicated: zombies take over the world and Brad Pitt is obliged to save the day. The assault of zombie movies over the past few years has been such an onslaught that by default the genre itself now gives me an automatic feeling of “I don’t care.” World War Z is very much another zombie film, but a damn exciting one. Even the script’s name for becoming a zombie, turning Zeke, is subtlety refreshingly “It’s not what you say but how you say it.” With cinematic excellence, Director Marc Forster breaths new live into this tired cliché. It’s all in the delivery, and WWZ is all delivery. As Gerry Lee (Pitt) travels the world trying to solve the mystery behind the infection causing people to turn “Zeke,” the scenes that unfold during his expedition are so exciting that story arc is incidental in comparison. A memorable scene is when a military commander becomes infected. He’s got about ten seconds: “I’m a goddamn Zeke…I got this one boys.” He puts a bullet in this own head The exotic set designs of the adventurous locales are the highlights of the film. First an adrenaline pumped escape from an infested Philadelphian housing project, then to a US navy ship at sea, then over to a US military base in Korea where a massive fire fight breaks out. Next Lee arrives in Israel where the citizens have protected themselves against the Zekes in a totally ingenious, but vulnerable walled up construction. The set design here is just incredible and when the situation goes awry, and things start blowing up, the visual effects are some of the best around, bar none.

In 2002, ten people were randomly assassinated in the Washington D.C. area by a duo called the Beltway Snipers. Blue Caprice, a film by Alexadre Moors investigates these events. The film opens with the lush blues and greens of tropical Antigua, but to the young protagonist Lee Malvo (Tequin Richmond) having just been abandoned by his mother, this island paradise has become a prison. Just in time Lee is saved by John, a caring neighbor played Isaiah Washington. The pair soon depart Antigua for the US, Lee as John’s adopted son. Fast-forward a few months to Tacoma, Washington. John’s pathological personality has begun to emerge. Father and son drift from couch to couch. John’s other kids have been taken away by their mother, a restraining order officially filed. Enter firearms, and John’s maniacal attempt to transform Lee into an automaton assassin begins. John locates his ex-wife and kids in Maryland. Out for blood, John and Lee head east in a blue 1990 Chevy Caprice, what will become the epicenter for their killing spree. When they reach the Eastern US John’s psychopathology is unleashed and Lee is forced to help avenge a fictitious, eternal grudge. Director Moors shows us that Lee is undoubtedly a bright kid. He memorizes his combat manual in detail and applies the instruction with expert precision. Had he been a year older Lee may have applied these mercenary skills in the Army. We sense Lee feels remorse and does not want to become a hardened, senseless killer. In a touching scene, Lee steals, of all things, veggie burgers. Post Boston Marathon bombings, this film resonates strongly of the psychologically excruciating manipulation of the underling by the elder. After the Tsarnev brothers we why not keep this dialogue open? Or should we wait until after another docum-drama shows us the horrors, or another atrocity occurs?

Before Christianity and Latin existed how did exorcists exorcise? A lingering question after watching The Conjuring, a film by James Wan. The age of Scary Movie-esque franchises has turned seeing dead people and being haunted by and evil spirits into mundanely comic events. Sexy vampires, farcical zombies, and ridiculous inside jokes about the world’s end begone! The Conjuring is a big horror film that is actually good and scary. Finally! Still, Director Wan uses all the old horror tricks to build up the suspense: creeping suggestive crescendos in the score, brief uncertain glimpses of unknown beings, and of course, lots of loud and unexpected jolts. The film opens as the Perron family arrives at their new home, a large fixer-upper in the Rhode Island countryside. As the family starts their life in the new house the haunting becomes apparent. Clocks stop, doors slam, people scream. Terror drives the family to huddle up in the living room where they spend their nights sleeping together. It makes the spirits calmer, they say. A little too conveniently, famous demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren just so happen to be speaking nearby. Mrs. Perron persuades the Warrens to come inspect the house. Lorrain Warren, a kind of clairvoyant, senses real trouble in the Perron house immediately. Using cameras, Holy magic, and Latin scriptures, the fight begins to save not only the house from destruction, but the people inside it as well.

The drab, dusty, industrial backdrop of what is purported as the unglamorous metropolis of Tian Jin, China, tacky haute facades are the setting for Drugs War’s series of raw, tension filled episodes. From a country riddled with censorship, Drugs Wars, a film by Johnnie To, is an unbridled glimpse of organized crime and crystal meth in China. Although perhaps a tad sensationalistic, the film delivers a bold statement: the Chinese the drug market is alive and well. Louis Koo plays a busted crystal meth baron who has a choice, either help police bust a massive organized crime syndicate, or be executed. He chooses to help police. In an elaborate tireless scheme, actor Honglei Sun dazzlingly plays a police officer portraying a criminal in the attempt to infiltrate this upper echelon syndicate. The best scene of the film is when Sun’s character is forced to rail two massive lines of crystal meth as part of this act. The effects of the meth play out into a powerful piece of cinema. Post- OD, literally having come back from the edge death, the chase for the criminals continues with out a flinch. At times this police tenacity is too exaggerated to be believable. The chase for the bad guys goes on endlessly for days. None of the cops ever eat or sleep. They seem to have inexhaustible resources at their disposal. They are able to commandeer an entire harbor just to put on a show of authenticity for the crooks. The cops risk their lives over and over, and for what? To rid the world of a few truckloads of drugs? The conventional divide between the good guy cops and bad guy criminals doesn’t blur, until it does. After an epic final gun battle, we have no idea who’s who. Drug Wars attains excellence as an action movie and serves as a rare example of a controversial work to emerge from a country that produces so much state-approved propaganda.

"Bring down the bone saw!" Within the overall ranking of great film, there is a sub-section of great reserved for awesome Sci-Fi, the rarest of all great. This blog will begin with a review of such a film. Having just seen Elysium I am more probably more envious of director Niell Blomkamp than any other person in the world right now. Besides the fact that Blomkamp’s now two feature films are fantastic, his other film is District Nine, he’s only 33 and he operates as a visionary in the Sci-Fi genre, a genre where visionaries are in urgent demand. In 2154 Earth’s wealthiest have abandoned the filthy scourge that has become our home planet and taken up residence on Elysium, a Garden of Eden type space station equipped with ultra-advanced medical technology. It’s all just a quick shuttle ride away from Earth. Close enough to be realistic, but just outside the reach of masses. Matt Damon plays Max, a heavily tattooed former criminal trying to get this life back on the straight and narrow, but the Los Angeles of 2154 where he resides makes it difficult. After a run of bad luck he is dealt a deadly dose of radiation while working at his factory job. From here Max’s only chance of survival is to get to Elysium. Conveniently, Max just happens to be on a first name basis with Spider, a mastermind hacker crime boss that has the means to get Max there. After an unpleasant scene were Max is fused to with a robotic exoskeleton all he needs to do to attain his passage is hijack a corrupt official’s brain and download the data to his own. The dismal picture that Blomkamp paints of our future as a species is grim, although slightly glorified. His Los Angeles 2154 resembles the favelas of current day Rio de Janerio, hardly a fictional dystopia, and although Damon is a pleasure to watch amidst this dystopian fiction, his overall goal of trying to save his own life is not enough to garner sympathy. It is difficult to care about the worth of a single ex-con’s life amidst the pandemonium and violence that everyone around him also suffers. This disconnect never really resolves itself despite an attempt: Max ends up trying to save his childhood friend, and her daughter too. It doesn’t work, but it also doesn’t matter. This film is about wholes, big pictures, sums of all things greater than the individual. The technological marvels of Elysium are matched only by the decrepitude of the world that Blomkamp creates. A statement has been made loudly about humanity’s potential trajectory, lest we decide to alter it.

The total lack of films that come out of Saudi Arabia made Wadjda, a Saudi film by Haiffa Al-Mansour, instantly alluring. Haiffa Al-Mansour is already credited as being the first successful woman filmmaker in Saudi Arabia’s history. The precocious 10-year Wadjda is growing up in Riyadh where she wants nothing more than a shiny new bicycle, but not only is she a little short on riyals, in Saudi Arabia women do not to ride bicycles. Saudi moral code bans woman from driving, going out in public unveiled, living unaccompanied, leaving the country alone, and opposing their husband’s orders in any way. This is very much Al- Mansour’s film. She charms the viewer with the common everyday struggles of the Saudi woman, and rather than address the issues in a combative way, her approach is warm, even cute. This draws us in to her characters and provides us with some heartfelt laughs along the way. Small details make grand impressions: In an all girls school teenage students paint their toenails, a sin, and are publicly vilified for it. The mere possibly that workmen half a mile away might see school girls playing in their courtyard forces all the girls to rush inside, lest they be judged impure. Pubescent girls are considered impure and must use a tissue just flip the pages of Koran. Wadjad’s truly beautiful mother spends much of her time perfecting her appearance only then to have to then cover herself with a full hijab. She is never openly defiant; defiance is impossible, but even thought she is obeying age old traditions that we’d assume would have dulled any emotional protest, through the mother’s submission we get a brief glimpse of her distress, the natural human emotional distress that no amount of “aged tradition” or religious subjugation has the right to inflict on any human being. In a country where cinemas are banned, Riyadh is not exactly a city where women can just go around shooting films. Females mixing with male co-workers would bring dire consequences. Al-Mansour shot the film anyway, directing much of it from the back of a van, and the result is a film representing the triumph of the defiant feminine spirit, in all forms.