Pacific Rim (2013)

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Link: Pacific Rim

Summary: When monsters begin coming out of the ocean, mankind responds by building giant robots to fight them.

Thoughts: While I love director del Toro’s previous films Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, I think this is his best film yet.  The premise is epic in nature, yet the story stayed focused on the main characters.  The dialog could easily be mistaken for bland if you’re not paying attention, but it’s actually very clever.  (Well, I suppose it also depends on what sort of sense of humor you have.)  The special effects were awesome.  The story is not really innovative or daring, but rather very classical, and it works fantastically.  A great film to see in 3D (even if some of the fake 3D live-action shots were a bit wonky) with a bag of movie theater popcorn.  I love the sound of GLaDOS saying “Gipsy Danger”.  It is music to my ears.  The film also features a great soundtrack.  Great film.  So far, my favorite of the year.

Solomon Kane (2009)

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Link: Solomon Kane

Summary: Based on the character created by pulp writer Robert E. Howard.  After learning his soul is destined for hell, a mercenary vows to never again resort to violence.  But when a girl is kidnapped, he’s forced to reconsider his vow, and fights not just for her freedom, but for the destiny of his own soul.

Thoughts: This was like the film Lockout for me.  I can see why it got poor reviews, and yet I loved it.  The story is a bit thin and clichéd in some regards, the dialog is uninspired, and yet I love it.  I love the premise, I love the religious decisions the characters make, the themes of faith and redemption.  I love the look and feel of the film, the dark and moody atmosphere of the world, the costumes, the supernatural monsters, even when the special effects revealed a low budget.  The acting was quite good.  Very good film.

Upside Down (2012)

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Link: Upside Down

Summary: There are two worlds.  The one you’re on, and the one in the sky, which is upside-down to you.  You’re not supposed to have much to do with that other world.  After all, gravity will always pull you to your own world anyway; the gravity of the other world will not affect you.  This fantastical (though scientifically ridiculous) setting creates many obstacles for a man who falls in love for a woman from the other world.

Thoughts: I can forgive the scientific absurdity of this film for the sake of its classic forbidden-love tale, but unfortunately the story seemed to focus more on the problems created by its wild premise than on the human relationship problems, leaving the film rather dry story-wise, relying on fantastical dazzling visuals to keep things interesting.  The pee gag was funny, though nasty (if you try to pee in the upside-down world, it will fall to the ceiling), but shouldn’t he have known that was going to happen?

Monsters University (2013)

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Link: Monsters University

Summary: When a one-eyed monster is kicked out of a college’s scaring program, he joins a scaring competition to prove his abilities and get back in.

Thoughts: It’s nice to see that Pixar still has its unique “voice” amid the saturated animated film market.  It is already beginning to fade, I think, but this addition still had that unmistakable Pixar stamp on it.  I was not a big fan of the original Monsters, Inc., and was not impressed with the trailer for this college-based prequel, so my expectations were not too high.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoy it very much, from the lighthearted comedy to the deeper themes about loving and being passionate about something versus having the “talent” for it.  (It seemed to have its Ratatouille moments.)  Very good film.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

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Link: The Manchurian Candidate

Summary: A man is psychologically reprogrammed to do the bidding of evil foreign communists.  His mission: to assassinate an important political figure.  Can he be stopped in time?

Thoughts: Poor Frank Sinatra.  Good singer, lousy actor.  But even if he hadn’t been part of the film, the premise was rather absurd.  People can get psychologically reprogrammed through some mysterious special hypnosis?  What?  Granted, normal men can go crazy if pressured under the right conditions (as in the Stanford Prison Experiment), but to become controllable robots that will unquestionably do the bidding of someone else?  It ends up being rather silly.  Which would’ve worked if the film had treated itself like a comedy.  The film featured some interesting directing decisions, interesting photography and cinematography, but not enough to make up for the over-the-top storyline that seemed to try to take itself too seriously.

Premium Rush (2012)

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Link: Premium Rush

Summary: A delivery boy on a bicycle in a big city gets mixed up in a deadly mission when a crooked cop chases him after he’s asked to deliver a mysterious envelope for someone.

Thoughts: This film is a great example of how flashbacks can be completely misused to make a fairly straightforward story more confusing than it needs to be.  The overall premise was ridiculous in and of itself, with bicycles riding through dangerous traffic while being chased by cars and motorcycles.  The CGI cars looked terrible, but made for a good laugh when they ran over CGI people.  The ending was completely anticlimactic.  Overall, a ridiculous film.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 teaser trailer

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A teaser for the upcoming 2014 How to Train Your Dragon sequel has arrived, featuring epic dragon flying.  It will be interesting to see Dean DuBlois direct a feature on his own.  His usual co-director, Chris Sanders, went off to direct The Croods, proving that, um, he could not direct on his own.  (Well, I guess he still had a co-director on that film, didn’t he?  It just wasn’t DeBlois.)  Because The Croods was pretty bad.  Ahem.  That last shot in the teaser, I thought, what’s the point?  Oh.  He’s older.  Um.  Wow, that sure is amazing.  At least his hair looks a lot less dorky.  Shoulda been like that in the first film.

Seventh Son trailer

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The trailer for the Seventh Son recently came out.  The film, based on a book series, is set for release December 2013.  I love the look and feel of the film, though the dialog seems bland as usual for these sorts of fantasy adventures.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for it.  Still not sure whether or not I’ll see it in theaters.

Saving Mr. Banks trailer

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The trailer for the upcoming film Saving Mr. Banks (December 2013) recently came out.  The film chronicles the making of the classic film Mary Poppins, centering around the legendary clashing of personalities between the author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), and the media titan creative overlord Walt Disney (Tom Hanks).  It’s interesting to see a portrayal of Walt Disney as a character.  Given that he lent his name to his company that went on to become the world’s largest media conglomerate, his image is still tightly controlled by a business with deep pockets, so I’m interested to see what sort of character he’ll be.  Of course, in biopics, real personalities are always simplified and exaggerated; they’re turned into characters for the purposes of a story, after all.  It looks like they’ll of course be very gracious to the famous personalities involved.  Overall, it definitely looks like something I’ll be interested in seeing, even if what I’ve heard about the true stories weren’t quite so poetic.  Here it is:

Masquerade (2012)

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Link: Masquerade

Summary: After a king is poisoned, a double is secretly put in his place to keep chaos from erupting.  But the double has his own ideas about how to run the kingdom.

Thoughts: Because it’s a period drama, I at first thought the film might be similar to Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, but it was much more lighthearted and focused on the character’s noble intentions, making it more like the 1993 American film Dave, involving a double standing in for an American president.  A funny film, but the story’s villains were a little too obviously villainous for the main character’s noble words and decisions to really seem all that astounding; it’s not as if he were making some controversial political or religious statement or something, like Gandhi or Saint Thomas More.  Instead, he made very safe moral judgments that all modern audiences should agree with (unless something is being lost in translation).  So I wasn’t overly impressed with the main character’s moral decisions; they were just too easy.  While some of the potty humor (as in, humor literally involving a potty) was a bit much for me, some of the humor was quite good, and provided a good balance for the film’s more serious moments.  The film also featured a beautiful music score.

Side Effects (2013)

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Link: Side Effects

Summary: After taking new anti-depressants, a woman murders her husband, leaving her therapist to wonder if the murder was just a side effect of her new drugs as it seems to be, or if he’s missing something more sinister at play.

Thoughts: The story began a bit slowly, but got really interesting when therapist began unraveling clues that didn’t add up and seemed to imply that something more sinister was going on.  Unfortunately the solution to the mystery was rather simple and stupid, a bit of a let down after an interesting build up, leaving it a rather standard film.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

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Link: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Summary: Hansel and Gretel are grown and make a living hunting witches.  And their latest case is a big one, as the witches are capturing children to use them in a new formula that promises to make them immortal.

Thoughts: A fun popcorn movie.  The story was pretty weak and predictable, the humor was yawn-inducing, but this is a film that’s all about the action.  The violence was a bit over-the-top, with blood spurting and splashing and gushing all over, but it was all very cartoony, not horror-film-grisly.  I enjoyed the look and feel of the film, a sort of old German fairy tale look with a modern American attitude.

The Magic Flute (2006)

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Link: The Magic Flute

Summary: Mozart’s famous opera as a film.

Thoughts: This famous opera of Mozart features some of Mozart’s best music, melodic and fantastical, even though it accompanies Shikaneder’s lame boring story (if the guy was alive today, there’s no way he’d make it as a fantasy writer, and if it weren’t for Mozart’s music in this opera, he’d be mostly forgotten).  It was interesting to hear the lyrics in English, which made the story easier to follow.

Unfortunately, the fantastical story seems to make even less sense in whatever strange World War I setting the director was going for, and the end result is just bizzarre.  The film is complete with wacky visuals, including a marching orchestra playing the overture on a battlefield, a closeup of a singer’s mouth to make it look as if the tanks in the background are being created by her voice, floating giant woman lips in green fields to which Papageno sings, and sandbags of the trench walls singing an English version of the second act’s “Der, Welcher Wandelt Diese Strasse”.  But, as strange as it all may sound, this is better than most visual stage interpretations of this wild opera, especially any version that features Papageno in a feather costume, because that’s just disturbing (for which I blame hack-librettist Emanuel Shikaneder, who obviously wrote Papageno’s role so that he had an excuse to dress up in feathers).

Overall, this was a very weird film.  But really Mozart’s genius score makes everything OK.