When [It] Strikes Me

I’m going to keep this rather simple and short, as a negative review need not layer on too much emphasis on the awfulness that is Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad.  We’ll start with the fact that I’m not entirely certain that this was directed by just one person, because at times the movie seems to jump from genre to genre, if not from style to style.  It is a film that falls short on so many very levels, not the least of which is an utter failure of the production team and the director to present a coherent vision.

Which is not to say that there isn’t one redeeming characteristic of Gangster Squad, because there is: it is, in general, a pretty fun watch. What, say you?  Yep, if you’re in the right mindset and can overcome the shortcomings of the whole, you’ll generally enjoy the movie.  You’re not going to ever be on the edge of your seat (as you would with Argo, my runaway favorite movie of 2012) and you won’t ever connect with any of the characters (as with In the Bedroom, the 2001 drama which perfected that element), but if you go in to it with the expectation of the violence and historical accuracy of 300 and the seriousness of Leslie Nielson’s Police Squad / The Naked Gun series series, you stand a pretty good chance of enjoying it.

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So I broke my normal rule and went and saw a highly anticipated movie on its opening weekend (or at least I think it opened this past weekend). After a full day of playing basketball and sweltering at a Yankees game, I headed out trying to get hydrated and air conditioned at a jam packed theater for Captain America.

I had pretty high hopes for Captain America. It is one of the follow-ons to one of the better superhero adaptations, in Iron Man. Indeed, in some ways this serves as a prequel to Iron Man, with Tony Stark’s father playing a prominent role and edging further toward the awaited Avengers series of films.

Captain America also featured some pretty solid casting. If you thought of one actor who could best serve as an action star and embodiment of what Hollywood would imagine as the truly American look, you’d probably end up with Chris Evans. Toss in Tommy Lee Jones as his grumpy commanding officer and Hugo Weaving (of Matrix Agent Smith fame) as your bad guy and you’ve got a start for some good scenes. Brits Dominic Cooper (as Howard Stark) and Haylee Atwell (as Agent Peggy Carter) rounded out the principal roster.

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So I ventured downtown a couple of weeks ago for a concert by an indie rock band I really hadn’t heard much about before. That’s partly because I just don’t do enough indie tunes or live concerts to get around. On a friend’s enthusiastic recommendation, I got tickets to see the Mountain Goats.

The Mountain Goats are fronted by John Darnielle, who in the past actually performed as a literally-solo act, acoustically and still under the plural Mountain Goats name. He did play solo for a few songs in the middle of the concert. He’s known as one of the truly great indie songwriters and I can say that, going in with no background of listening to the band, I was impressed with the concise, interesting story-telling accomplished by the songs.

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The Vicious Kind is a well conceived and well acted tale of revelation and story-telling. While the subject matter is a bit hard to watch at times – the characters and relationships between them are dysfunctional at best and disturbing more commonly – it’s presented in a calm, almost rustic manner that is, above all else, watchable.

Without going into too great detail as to the plot lines, it is a journey that starts with a boy, Peter (Alex Frost) and his girlfriend Emma (Brittany Snow) who come to Peter’s home for Thanksgiving vacation from college. As they are picked up by Peter’s older brother Caleb (Adam Scott), we get our first glimpse into the bizarre world in Norfolk from whence the family came. There the three delve into the confused web of a family torn apart, with the ultimate conflict being between Caleb and his father Donald (JK Simmons).

The film is very well acted and earned Scott and filmmaker and writer Lee Toland Krieger honors on the independent film circuit in 2009. I’m not quite sure what has to flow through the mind of someone to craft a story that is, for lack of a better word, vicious in its depiction of family strife and the means by which attempts to heal wounds can be made.

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I caught Hurt Locker late night at my buddy’s on the first night of my Los Angeles vacation last February. Given that it was competing with drunken viewing of Olympic curling off his DVR on the other nights I spent during my vacation there, it should come as no surprise that Hurt Locker just didn’t stand up. The film had garnered a whopping nine Academy Awards nominations, so I was genuinely excited to give it a look-see. Unfortunately, the film just doesn’t do enough to warrant the awards season hype. This remains true as a complete this review almost a year later after watching it on DVR and gritting my teeth as it cleaned up at the 2009/10 Oscars.

The most notable nomination always is for Best Picture and Best Director. Hurt Locker took home both awards with Katheryn Bigelow becoming the first female Best Director award winner. It also took home the award for Best Original Screenplay (from embedded journalist Mark Boal, who spent part of 2004 with an Iraq-based bomb disposal unit), Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing. While the three technical awards are more than well-deserved, even when up against the formidable technical accomplishments of Avatar, the three creative awards were probably less spot-on.

This is not to say that Hurt Locker isn’t very good or that it isn’t a film (this most certainly isn’t a “movie” like Avatar). I just take the position shared by veterans and military-aware reviewers that the film lacks authenticity and presents itself as “gritty” and realistic, even though the story is grossly ridiculous at times.

Read more of why I didn’t fully enjoy being stuck in the Hurt Locker. Read more…

It’s Pilot season in America. There certainly seems to be more shows that at least have the potential to be intriguing. There’s the can’t miss in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the LOST clone in NBC’s The Event, the waiting-to-see-if-it-can-deliver in AMC’s The Walking Dead and a host of other intriguing new shows. I may not drop thoughts on all of them, but I will try to give my initial thoughts on some of those that catch my eye. On Tuesday, I reviewed NBC’s The Event. Today is NBC’s Indian sitcom, Outsourced.

• Monday: The Event (NBC)
• Wednesday: Undercovers (NBC)
• Thursday: My Generation (ABC)
• Thursday: Outsourced (NBC)

This will be nice, short and sweet. Despite knowing there would be a high likelihood that I would find the show Outsourced offensive, I bit the bullet and watched NBC’s latest addition to its Thursday sitcom, fest. The basic premise is a remake of the Josh Hamilton movie of the same name. The difference is that, for all the manners in which the film Outsourced was, at times, charming and lighthearted, the television series is stale and almost purely offensive.

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This past Saturday some friends and I dropped on down to Mercury Lounge on East Houston in Manhattan for an early show by Fitz & the Tantrums.  The band, fronted by Michael Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs has been burning up my iPod of late and was featured in a player post linked here.

Needless to say, I knew I was going to love the music, but I was bringing along two newbies as well.  The sound is relatively unique and hasn’t gone mainstream yet.  It is somewhat of a revisit to 50s soul music, but with a decidedly modern hipster vibe.  While I normally want to punch most things hipster, that’s not the case for Fitz & the Tantrums.

The show was sold out, but the venue was not so crowded as to make the concert uncomfortable or getting drinks impossible.  In fact, the only complaint could be some issues with the bass levels and our choosing to stand too close a bank of speakers.  It took a good day for my right ear to clear up fully.

All in all, the show was outstanding and the crowd was lively.  The band played near studio quality tunes, true to the CD and the only real hiccup is when Scaggs fell off the stage into the crowd.  After getting up with little more than her pride hurt, she claimed her tussle with gravity was a failed stage dive with nobody catching.  As a note, I’m not sure being found unworthy in a trust fall is any less embarrassing than catching an edge of the stage.

All in all, I could not recommend the show more highly.  This is an opportunity to catch a rising artist before they hit it big.

Some additional thoughts and videos from the performance after the jump. Read more…

On a recommendation from my boss, I checked out Mike Judge’s Extract.  I actually was quite jazzed to watch it, as I am a big fan of Jason Bateman and his work on Arrested Development, as well as Judge’s prior workplace comedy.  Office Space was one of the funniest movies of the 1990s and perfectly encapsulated the tedium of cubicle life.  Its cast was very well chosen, featuring an oft-overlooked, likable guy (Ron Livingston) and a beautiful female lead trying to break out of TV (Jennifer Aniston).

Extract has a similar formula, with Bateman and Mila Kunis headlining the cast.  Judge managed to surround Bateman and Kunis with a stellar supporting cast including SNL standout Kristen Wiig, headliner Ben Affleck and top notch character actors JK Simmons and Clifton Collins Jr.  With a great supply of human capital to work with, Judge tried to tap back into the winning formula he struck with Office Space.

Bateman plays Joel, the owner and operator of a flavor extract manufacturing and packaging company.  Although he’s hardly the cog in the wheel that Livingston’s Peter Gibbons was at Inetech, Joel suffers from a sort of middle age malaise.  He’s ready to sell and get out of the extract business, hoping to retire and be able to spend time filling his life with something to enjoy.  Unfortunately, his home life is stale and his friendships consist solely of a relationship with local bartender Dean (Affleck).  When Kunis’ Cindy, a serious bid on the business and various other pratfalls enter his world, Joel’s life gets turned upside down.

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From One Pawn To Another.

In television, a viewer might often feel a pawn, not being handed anything by a fellow pawn, but rather shifted from one board to the next. Never long to last in the fight, as the milieu of a series loses its shine and the successive attempts at new shows turn into just another run of short-lived games. Rarely does a pawn cross the board and become the queen, engrossed with and empowered by the board itself.

With a few shows I have felt myself as substantively more than a pawn in the game of television programming; in those handful of shows I have lastingly and fully been engrossed. I can really check them off with the fingers of one hand:

• “The West Wing” for its political acumen. A show that reminded us both of what we most wanted in our leaders and the forces which prevent that ideal from being manifested.
• “Battlestar Galactica” for its social commentary. In an era when America was redefining itself both at home and on the world stage, no television program so boldly captured our internalized national struggles.
• “LOST” for its Joycean depth. Bad Robot’s ambitious efforts to challenge viewers made expecting more of one’s viewers a reality and opened the door to the difficult-to-navigate world of what might aptly be termed televised literature.
• “The Wire” for its simple poetry. It is, after all, this epic, five-part poem about the decline of the American empire that gave us the inspired scene in which D’Angelo explains chess to Bodie and Wallace.

There have been other great shows. “Mad Men” gave us attention to detail and historical fiction as a commercial winner. “The Shield” offers a level of grittiness that is hard to turn from. But with most television, it’s as D’Angelo explained to Bodie, “The pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out of the game early.” In most television, it’s easy to just sit back and play dumb. Only in the best shows are the pawns challenged to be “some smart ass pawns.” It’s those shows that challenge the viewer that interest me most. In “Rubicon”, I hope we have one such show.

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So what happens when you turn over to a “legitimate author” the dystopian, post-apocalyptic genre with a mix of vampires and the “fast-zombies” of 28 Days Later?  Well, the long and the short of it (and this will be the last reference to “short”) is 784 pages of frackin’ awesome.

The author is Justin Cronin, whose prior works, “The Summer Guest” and “Mary and O’Neil”, were less mass-marketable titles.  They were, however, popular and well received, with each earning pretty solid reviews and critical acclaim.  In “The Passage”, he breaks out into the world of big, Hollywood-tie-in fiction.  And he does so by journeying into a realm that, to be honest, few “legitimate” modern authors have ventured into.

Yes, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker became legends with the monster book story, and each did so with sophistication. But the modern face of monster fiction is the drivel that Stephenie Meyer has made a fortune off of.  I’ve not read and have no intention to read Twilight books.  One only needs to understand that they are written for an ADD, tween audience with film in mind.  I imagine her books must be like Dan Brown vomited up a trilogy with no religious underpinnings and a lot more self-cutting.

I’m probably not being fair, as this isn’t really a genre I seek out in books.  I generally read more non-fiction than fiction and I tend to stick with the classics or some Michael Chrichton (who, to be honest, probably actually would qualify as something not far off this genre).  Nevertheless, I imagine most horror fiction is somewhat like a harlequin novel or the Star Wars spin-off books.  Not a lot of thought, but mindless enjoyment.

“The Passage” is so very much more than that.  Click on through for why. Read more…