Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Review: "Total Recall"


If you thought Total Recall (1990) needed updated effects and an abundance of overly long action scenes, then you will absolutely love Total Recall (2012), my friend. LOVE it.

Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a factory worker who travels through the planet's core everyday to a dead end job at the other end of a post-apocalyptic world. Even though he returns home each night to his beautiful wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), the feeling that he was meant for more gnaws at him constantly. He decides to visit Rekall, a company that specializes in memory implants, for a better-than-life dream vacation, but the experience goes awry, and Quaid becomes a wanted man -- unable to trust anyone, even his own memories. On the run from both the police and his wife, he is aided by Melina (Jessica Biel), a resistance fighter who may be the key to discovering who he really is.

Len Wiseman, who directed the first two Underworld movies and Live Free or Die Hard, takes the helm for this remake of Paul Verhovan's 1990 film, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wiseman is  a nuts-and-bolts action director with a dark and gritty visual sense and a fairly straightforward shooting style that is free from heavy reliance on shakey camerawork. That's a plus, but while the action scenes are confident, they are often overly long. During one particular scene that involved a fight sequence where the characters are jumping between a series of elevators moving in every direction, my mind wandered, and I couldn't stop thinking, "where could all these elevators possibly be going?"

The story, inspired by Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," has tons of potential to be mind-bending and keep the audience guessing, but instead, the film settles for being just a propulsive action flick. There's nothing wrong with good action-for-action's-sake filmmaking (see The Raid: Redemption), but you don't need Dick's story to do that. Go write your own futuristic secret agent movie and leave the intellectual science fiction to filmmakers who are interested in telling those stories. The fact that Wiseman references Blade Runner (another, better Philip K. Dick adaptation) throughout the film, only makes me wonder how he could be such a big fan of that film and never learn anything from watching it.

In the end, Total Recall (2012) is not as guilty of being a bad movie as it is of being a missed opportunity, a waste of good material. I wouldn't begrudge anyone for enjoying the film for its slick visuals and nonstop action, or for Kate Beckinsale's now-textbook female terminator performance, but I can't wholly recommend it because it takes a smart premise with interesting ideas and ignores them, while the actors chase each other around and around and around.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C-


Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Review: "Moonrise Kingdom"


In Moonrise Kingdom, two 12-year olds, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), run away together during the summer of 1965. Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton), Suzie's parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), and the town's police captain (Bruce Willis) are frantically searching for the two puppy-lovers as a huge storm approaches their small island community.

This is a meticulously crafted picture from Wes Anderson, the director of Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, and Fantastic Mr. Fox -- all films that share a thematic connection to this new picture. In a way, it seems that Moonrise Kingdom is the culmination of more than a decade of filmmaking by Anderson, both as an exercise in style and as an exploration of the dysfunctional relationships between children and their parents.

The adult cast is uniformly good with Norton being the standout. He understands the cadence of Anderson's style, and it would not surprise me to see them collaborate again in the future. Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are as reliable as ever, and Bruce Willis may surprise you with his empathetic performance. Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, and Harvey Keitel also have small roles and are very enjoyable for their short time on screen.

Visually impressive, Anderson approaches every frame of film like a blank canvas, filling it in like a painter would. His camera movement and compositions are precise, and the costumes, set design, and music are all carefully chosen. One gets a sense that he agonizes over every detail, from the way a character hangs a cigarette out of his mouth to the choice of font and color for every title credit.

If there is a failing to Moonrise Kingdom, and Anderson's films in general, it is that his authorial stamp has been increasingly squeezing the spontaneity out of the performances, to the point where everyone is playing the straight-man in a film where the audience is dying to see someone acknowledge the ridiculousness. Even the kids are emotionless -- more like mini-adults than children. It's kind of cute when it's Macaulay Culkin in Uncle Buck, grilling John Candy with question after question, but when the entire cast behaves that way for the whole movie . . . it can be slightly off-putting.

I still loved the movie, but it won't change your mind about Wes Anderson as a filmmaker. His work has such a specific taste and style that the stories may change, but the feeling you get sitting through each one remains a consistent experience. If you love Anderson's films for that handmade, meticulously crafted quality, I highly recommend Moonrise Kingdom, a film that is perhaps the director's magnum opus, even if it's not his best movie (Rushmore still wears the crown).

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = B+