Extract (2009)

Directed by:  Mike Judge
Starring:  Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig

Something I’ve noticed about a lot of plots these days is that a lot of conflict stems from people not talking to each other.   Then the story kind of evolves organically as the consequences unfold.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing as this allows performers to play off each other in ways that might not be otherwise available.  Though predictable, it can still be joyful and satisfying to watch.  So when you use this construct to drive your comedy, it seems only appropriate to get your players into some scenes together to establish that yes they have an important relationship.

Extract shies away from this formula, opting instead for the multi-threaded plot approach anchored by the prospect of a successful buyout of Joel Reynolds’ extract business.  Hijinks ensue when a freak accident severs an employee’s testicle, leading to a potential lawsuit that would cripple the company’s bottom line if successful.  Meanwhile, Reynolds seeks help from hippy bartender Ben Affleck to resolve the sexlessness of his marriage via means of a total boob of a gigolo.  And Mila Kunis has an objective of getting a piece of that succulent lawsuit pie after seeing the teste accident in the papers.  And still no one seems to be talking to each other.  Well, not meaningfully at least.

All of these things serve to make a mostly average film that lacks focus in spite of some really good line reads (Jason Bateman screaming the word ‘motherfucker’ fills me with joy).  I get a sense that all of the operatives here are working completely independently of each other and they all just happen to be heading to the same place: the end of the movie.  This leads to some disjointed pacing and no real chance for any two people’s relationships to move to the next level.  All the important character development happens off screen, which a strange thing to say about a 90-minute film with some pretty clever jokes inside.  With a little more polish, Extract could’ve been more than just an afterthought.

Memorable Quotes

“I think when you lose your balls it kind of mellows you out.”
–J.K. Simmons

“You must be incredibly rich.”
“Eh, I got a 7 Series BMW and some clothes………”

“I hate landscaping, but I like getting laid.”

“Hot girls need jobs, too.”
“But do they really?”

B-

Æon Flux (2005)

Directed by: Karyn Kusama
Starring:  Charlize Theron; Marton Csokas

Æon Flux is a scifi dystopian action film starring Charlize Theron and a bunch of That Guys that is loosely based on the 90s MTV show of the same name.  It is set some 400 years in the future where mankind has been reduced to a husk of its former glory due to some badass virus hitting the reset button on human evolution.  Life is pretty swell for most of the inhabitants of this pastoral metropolis, some minor exceptions notwithstanding. People tend to disappear, suddenly die, or suffer from severely mysterious nightmares on the regular.  And all the local leadership cares about is consolidating its total power even though life is pretty good for everyone when you think about it.  Still, people are suffering or something.  Guess we should do something about that.  Hey, here’s Charlize Theron in a slinky slip.  You’re welcome.

This movie is nothing special, being the typical smorgasbord of mid-aughts kung fu neck chopping, gun-blazing extravaganza that it is.  I am intrigued by its use of color–Æon Flux has a wonderful palette and the cinematographers take full advantage of Charlize’s kung-fu-emo look in terms of scene composition and set design.  It is clearly *her* movie because of this; the attention to detail is immaculate and polished, like a modeling reel.

I also like the warm, accessible look of everything.  Usually when I think of post-apocalyptic post-human Earth I think of drab grays and gross clothes.  And yet beauty is all over Æon Flux.  The [very very minor] problem I find with all Charlize all the time is that her presence holds the other actors (and a script that doesn’t take any chances) to some pretty lofty standards.  She’s so hot it’s distracting; it’s also a hypothetical reason why the film isn’t very faithful to its subject matter.  This is not me saying that Æon Flux is a terrible movie.  It shows us how capable Ms. Theron can be as an Action Girl and I appreciate that.

B-

 

Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (2007)

Written by: Brandon Sanderson
Published by: Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1688-2
Genre:  Fantasy

Warning: This is a review of the second book in a trilogy.  Therefore, it must be said that it may contain spoilers for the first book in that trilogy.  I apologize if this is inconvenient.

George R. R. Martin ruined fantasy for me, I think.  These days, when I’m reading a book that’s so eager to win me over to whatever world of intrigue it has promised on the cover sleeve, I yearn for a gritty realism where character actions matter and political infighting presents real and prevailing danger at all times–that whatever threat that threatens the realm puts something I care about at stake.  A Song of Ice and Fire, for whatever faults it has regarding its overemphasis on descriptions of food and set pieces, at the very least feels appropriately vast.  As that series continues to grow, its vastness increases (Dorne a notable exception of course that might actually turn out promising), and it all feels very important and absorbing.  And the things that happen to the various well-developed characters feel natural and less forced, regardless of how absurd the premise feels after thinking about it for two minutes.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that it is becoming more difficult for me to buy this Hero With a Thousand Faces template.  I’m not necessarily one to embrace sophistication–I’ve tried reading In Search of Lost Time a couple times and couldn’t do it–but I’m saying that the tried and true themes of the Hero’s Journey just don’t resonate with me as much as they used to.  I question whether or not I’m qualified to write a response to this sort of thing.  I’m not much of a professional. But it’s how I feel at any rate.  So off we go.

The Well of Ascension is the second book in the Mistborn trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson.  It picks up roughly one year after the end of The Final Empire.  Elend Venture is now the monarch presiding over the Central Dominance, which consists primarily of its capital city of Luthadel.  The survivors of the Kelsier’s crew, all responsible in one way or another for overthrowing the godking known simply as the Lord Ruler, have all taken jobs that involve the court.  Elend’s focus is one that is less austere, willing the power he’s usurped to be transferred to the people and particularly the peasant population known as the skaa.  Naturally, the upperclassmen don’t like this at all and are constantly scheming to oust him from the court.  Complicating things further still is the looming threat of Elend’s father who has amassed his own army to march on the city, and still two more armies that threaten his hard-won victory as well.

The theme of this novel is one where an empire torn to pieces after its Lord Ruler’s displacement is reunited under the guise of a new peace.  It serves as a decent analysis of what happens to power when powerful people are deposed or cast aside.  It is a novel that is very eager to please: it truly wants you to feel that Luthadel is an important city and that the world would fall apart without Elend or Vin (of whom we’ll get to shortly) involved in every little political nuance, and is trying so hard to entertain.  Politics is interesting I guess, you know, when they’re done right.  My big problem rests with Luthadel being the big focus of this second, darker entry in the Hero’s Journey.  We don’t venture outside of its walls very often and ultimately don’t really have an understanding of how important this city is in spite of its convenient central location in the heart of the former Final Empire.  Why does Elend’s kingship matter?  Why is maintaining Luthadel’s position as the dominant force that drives this new empire important?  The world of Mistborn is hinted at being extremely large, suggested by the very well done lore that is the product of 1000 years of oppression by an immortal godking.  Why are we still stuck here playing this stupid game and not out adventuring so we may better understand why exactly the world needs Luthadel at all?  I’m sure it’s possible to infer a thing or two about why, but I couldn’t be bothered to.   The book asks us instead to care about the primary characters that were set up in Kelsier’s crew during the first novel and limits their abilities to do much of anything with the world at large thanks to political theater and enemies at the gates.  Yawn.

So if the politics is a total flatline (it is) then what of the characters that drive the narrative of this story?  Well…

…they’re okay, I guess.  All the characters you’ve grown to love from the first book are back.  Even Kelsier gets a starring role as ‘that guy we like to talk about because he was always smiling even when he was raging inside.’  There’s Vin, there’s Elend, there’s OreSeur, there’s… um… Ham… there’s… guy?  And guy?  And guy?  And some other guy?  There are new characters as well!  Like Zane, the angsty teenage Mistborn man that serves as an effective foil to Vin, the angsty teenage Mistborn woman.  And whats-his-face.  He’s there, too.  And everyone smiles more often than they realistically should.  You know what, whatever.  Let’s talk about Elend and Vin.

For the most part, the Mistborn series is more reliant on its action setpieces than for any deeper purpose it might try to postulate.  The character of Vin is clearly the action girl here, and also the heroine.  She is set up in the first novel as a street urchin that comes to the revelation that her magical abilities surpass many of the other Mistborn known at the time.  Streetwise, paranoid, and angsty, she stays up nearly all hours to protect the far weaker, not-Mistborn-at-all Elend because she loves him I guess.  She engages in these huge fights with tons of assassins that serve to display just how powerful she is, ostensibly to hold the audience in thrall as well because here is this creature that could do so much with her power and blah blah blah.   She feels obligated to protect everyone and that’s fine.  But there is also something Mary Sueish about her, where it seems that we are always relying on Vin and Vin only to keep Luthadel safe.  Most action scenes where anything is at stake whatsoever is ended after a time simply because Vin swoops in at the last moment to save the day.  She rarely makes any mistakes, and when she does she isn’t held accountable for them at all.  No, Vin is young and perfect.  Yawn.

Elend Venture is slightly different.  Political theatre aside, this guy actually gets something of an arc.  Whereas everyone else kind of keeps doing their thing, Elend has the biggest opportunity to grow and my argument is that Elend’s arc saves The Well of Ascension from crap-fantasy purgatory.  Here is a guy that is timid and weak, a philosopher who is fundamentally useless, and a king in name only.  But he gets more interesting as time goes by because he starts to learn what it is that makes kings great and he shirks his soft, philosophical side to become more of a hardened, altruistic king that doesn’t hide under his bed at the slightest bit of danger.  It’s fun to see him evolve into a person that doesn’t need a Mary Sue around constantly to protect him, and surely by the end of this book in particular he does become more of a man that can defend his own interests, a real king actually.  That is nice to see when everyone else is just kind of meh.  I’m more excited to see what becomes of him in the next book than I am of anything else, because suddenly this guy is important and certainly conflicted genuinely about who or what he is.

You may think by now that I don’t like the Mistborn series all that much.  The truth is that I don’t necessarily hate it.  I think it could be better.  There are really cool action set pieces and the magic is performed in an interesting way, although again the Allomancy system seems heavily inspired by video game RPG mechanics (be sure to watch your magic meter!).  It’s a crutch, though.  Action can never be resolved without involving some Allomantic trickery in this series and the softness of the writing and the disregard of feelings for these characters makes it a little more difficult to stay invested in anything that happens.  No, where Mistborn truly shines is within its mythologies, of why there are Steel Inquisitors, where the mysterious mists came from, what led the Lord Ruler to become a thing, and most interestingly this whole race of creatures that can assume the forms of other living things completely that are presumably born from the mists.  The characters we’re spending time with to uncover the nature of this strange fantasy world just aren’t up to par with the rest of the world itself and generally aren’t able to carry the series in my opinion, but at the very least it’s compelling enough to stick with it, since Sanderson dispenses the lore at regular intervals, indicating that the world is vast and storied and interesting.  It’s just too bad that we only get to see just a sliver of what makes the world of Mistborn so neat, and we get to stay locked up in a single city for the whole duration.

B-

Carrie (1974)

Written By: Stephen King
Published By: Doubleday/Signet

Carrie is a story of a 16 year-old smalltown girl whose telekinetic powers are awakened when she has her first period.  In the shower.  Of the ladies’ locker room.  After the other ladies assailed her with tampons while she bleeds all over the place.  Her condition is no doubt exacerbated by her religious wingnut-off-the-rails mom who believes that she is the embodiment of the unholiest of sins.  Essentially, Carrie spends every waking moment of her life perpetually tortured by stupid small-town hicks during the day and being stuffed in a closet by her mom to pray to God for the sin of merely existing by night.  Eventually, some horrible things happen and Carrie snaps, costing a good number of high school students and townsfolk their lives.  It is written in an epistolary fashion, which means that the narrative segments where the plot progresses are mixed in with some faux newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and investigative reports that ostensibly aim to explain what happens in the narrative and why.  Incidentally, Child Protective Services is never mentioned (although I can give that a pass since the agency was fairly new) in spite of all the blatant and obvious signs that Carrie is subjected to an enormous amount of abuse during and even before her high school career.  Things that make you go ‘hmmmm.’

Quick aside: do girls actually bully one another using tampons?  That’s pretty fucked up.

This novel set the standard for a lot of horror fiction and solidified Stephen King’s place in the literary lexicon, for better or worse.  It plays mainly in extremes when it comes to developing characters and approaches the topics of bullying, religion, and paranormal activity with dubious rancor.  The religious references in particular are especially painful in scenes featuring Carrie’s mom, where heavy Christian and Biblical symbolism abounds; the mom gets very heavy handed quoting scripture at Carrie for her perceived slights.  I suppose if you’re overtly religious this kind of thing could be super effective, but Margaret White is so far off the deep end that I find it hard to fathom her degree of fanaticism could even be possible.  Other characters are unquestionably flawed, yet are cut so thin that they might as well be transparent–the worst of these would have to be Billy Nolan, who’s just kind of shoe’d in because there needs to be an asshole to instigate things I guess and whats-her-face couldn’t think but for a man.  In the end, hardly anyone is likable, even Carrie herself.  Which sucks, because Carrie is the one who really needs to succeed the most.

King fans probably won’t have issues with the book’s construction.  But as a seemingly normal guy trying to approach this material in an objective way, his writing style certainly takes some getting used to.  It’s quite fascinating, actually, to see how Stephen King’s upbringing and experiences have informed his writing ability.  Characters are defined by a sort of pastoral bigotry that leads to passages so profound in their idiocy that one might wonder how they were given the greenlight at all.  Odd details are also given away in character soliloquies that make bizarre references to pop-songs of the time or some guy’s business up the street, or a clumsy simile involving a car.  Manliness permeates every page–a tractor-trailer kind of manliness despite the fact that this is a novel about a 16 year-old smalltown girl forced to confront this testosterone-fueled bravado.  It suggests the intended audience for this book consists of those farming types that live in the Bible Belt of contemporary America; but don’t make the mistake that these people are treated with any sort of reverence or respect.  From top to bottom, they definitely aren’t.  Maybe that’s why this schlock has the appeal that it does since it appeals more to the smalltown folk than the ‘educated elite’, or maybe it was just a sign of the times at the time.

Carrie is a book that is easy to pick up burn through in a weekend.   I don’t think you’ll emerge a brighter person for reading it, but if you want some cheap thrills and good old fashioned revenge sttory, this book will see you through the day rather briskly and not all that seriously.

B-

Choice Passages:

“It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the background (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldn’t tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling, “Plug it up!” with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.
‘PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!”
‘You’re bleeding!’ Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. ‘You’re bleeding, you big dumb pudding!'”

“Estelle Horan has lived in the neat San Diego suburb of Parrish for twelve years, and outwardly she is typical Ms. California:
She wears bright print shifts and smoked amber sunglasses; her hair is black-streaked blonde; she drives a neat maroon Volkswagen Formula Vee with a smile decal on the gas cap and a green-flag ecology sticker on the back window. Her husband is an executive at the Parrish branch of the Bank of America; her son and daughter are certified members of the Southern California Sun ‘n Fun Crowd, burnished-brown beach creatures. There is a hibachi in the small, beautifully kept back yard, and the door chimes play a tinkly phrase from the refrain of ‘Hey, Jude.'”

“When they had finished making love, as she slowly put her clothes in order in the back seat of Tommy Ross’s 1963 Ford, Sue Snell found her thoughts turning back to Carrie White.”

“The first time had hurt like hell. Her girl friends, Helen Shyres and Jeanne Gault, had both done It, and they both assured her that it only hurt for a minute-like getting a shot of penicillin-and then it was roses. But for Sue, the first time had been like being reamed out with a hoe handle. Tommy had confessed to her since, with a grin, that he had gotten the rubber on wrong, too.”

Chasing Amy (1999)

I generally have a difficult time rating a movie if I see the main character morph into a prick.  It’s not something I see that often so it certainly stands out and it’s kind of a trope I like.  Movies like this rely heavily on their leads having the ability to lead well both through writing and the actual performing.  A perfect job renders everything transparent, and so it begins where I wonder if the lead has always been a prick from the start.  Does he make a change at the end?  Does he learn his lesson?  Is he likable enough for me to give a crap?  These things are important to me because in the end my reviews are based on how I feel after the movie is over.

Chasing Amy is a movie that has put me into this line of thinking.  It’s about two asshole comicbook maker guys: one is a major homophobe while the other is a super conservative and inexperienced douchenozzle. One day at the club they encounter a slinky and charming lesbian.  The douche falls for her almost immediately and they end up in a rocky and short-lived relationship that culminates in his questioning of her shady and mysterious past that basically paints her as a whore.  It’s not a very funny movie in spite of taking place in Kevin Smith’s View Askew universe where Jay & Silent Bob hail from.

Instead, this movie makes a push as the oscar bait.  It’s full of thoughts and feelings and melodrama and homophobic slurs and two of the biggest asshole characters I’ve seen in a while.  The thing is, no one mentioned to Kevin Smith that Ben Affleck sucks at carrying a movie (as the leading man, not the director–I heard he’s quite good at that).  It has some good writing and dialogue that just gets pissed down the drain due to Affleck’s staggering starchiness.  Maybe that’s what Kevin wanted when making this movie: it has a respectable level of discomfort but I think Damon or even Lee would’ve made a much better lead.

Also: Ben’s hair looks face-punchingly stupid.

B-

Last Night (2010)

Last Night takes a peek into the life of a rich, attractive couple from New York. The girl, played by Keira Knightley, gets pissed off at her husband, played by Sam Worthington, because he appears to be attracted to a recently hired associate at his firm. They have a fight and nobody wins; he jets off to Philly on a business trip and she stays at home to finish her “novel.”  Why do indie movies like novels?

The movie then proceeds to split into two stories closely aligned with one another. He has to hang out with this girl who actually does want to touch his Avatar, while she reunites with a former lover from Paris who really wants her to jack his sparrow. The plot plays around with this concept to a point where we get to observe both parties resist some pretty heavy petting to preserve their matrimony.

You’ll basically watch this movie with one question on your mind: “Who’s gonna fuck up first?” For the most part, it really looks like it could go both ways. However, everything falls apart once the gun goes off; the film doesn’t want to give us a satisfactory conclusion, either. It’s a very disappointing payoff to what could have otherwise been a pretty good character story.

B-

Thunderball (1965)

Thunderball is a film where Bond.  James Bond.  Must foil the criminal organization SPECTRE from ransoming ‘merica with some stolen nuclear weapons.  Along the way he meets some really nice people and kills them while banging supermodels, sometimes in the same scene.

As far as Bond films go, this one is unremarkably average.  Its visual themes rely on snorkeling and underwater diving; it contains a lot of shots of the Caribbean’s immaculate ocean floor with some sharks thrown in to escalate tension.  If you’ve seen any National Geographic specials in the last 10 years, they’re nothing to write home about.  Maybe they were brilliant for the time, though.

What I would really like to comment on is the end battle sequence.  It’s basically this really weird underwater polo game with harpoon guns and violence approaching slapstick levels.  It could’ve been something great maybe, but it went on for way too long and I was bored out of my brain about halfway through.

B-