The Komplete Val Kilmography (2003-2012): Wonderland

by Matt Smith

I have always been a fan of Val Kilmer, but excepting the odd movie here and there, I lost track of him for a while. The Komplete Val Kilmography (2003-2012) is a twice weekly column that will run through the summer. I will be viewing and writing about each film Val Kilmer appeared in (as long as I can track down a copy of it) in the past decade.

Director James Cox’s excellent Wonderland tells the story of an infamous and unsolved murder that took place in 1981 in Los Angeles. Porn legend John Holmes was directly involved in some way, but police could never pin the crime itself on him. Crime boss Eddie Nash was later tried and plead guilty to having planned the murders as an act of vengeance for being robbed by the Wonderland gang. Holmes was acquitted during trial and before his death reportedly admitted to his sister that he was forced to watch the murders take place, but did not take part in them. This is not an article about the murders. This is about the movie.

“I Can’t Be Fixed”: A review of Dead Man Down

by Matt Smith

Dead Man Down, a decent but not quite good B-thriller, reunites Swedish director Neils Arden Oplev with Noomi Rapace, the star of their international breakthrough hit The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Unfortunately, the magic of that film, which was fueled by the gripping narrative as much as the dark and gritty visuals and Rapace’s stunning performance in the role of Lisbeth Salander, is missing this time around. The story is extremely sparse and borderline nonsensical, and the bullet ballet it devolves into is ultimately not that exciting, let down by the lack of narrative logic and realistic character motivation. And that’s a shame, because I really love some things about Dead Man Down.

“We Don’t Need to Be Friends. We’re family.” A review of Stoker

by Matt Smith

*Spoilers*

India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) has just turned 18 and her father has died in a terrible car crash, his body burned in the wreckage. When her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) appears at his funeral and moves in with her and her mother, Evelyn, she becomes increasingly infatuated with him. Who is this family member she never knew existed? What secret does he hold? And what, exactly, does he want from India and her mother? These are some of the questions to be answered in Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker, a determinedly perverse work that dissects some version of the American family.
A straight-A student, quiet and unassuming, India is withdrawn and distant. Her father, we learn, used to take her hunting, and she excelled at it. He stuffed every bird she ever killed. Her mother was uncomfortable with the activity, but there are hints that her father recognized something in her that he felt the need to control. Something worrying. Late in the film, once some of the film’s mysteries are divulged, she remembers her father used to say, “Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop yourself from doing something worse.” What did he see in her?

The Best of ’12

by Matt Smith

I saw a lot of films in 2012, though my activity as one of the main contributors to this site wouldn’t necessarily give you that impression. I have spent quite a bit of time working on my thesis (due in a matter of weeks at this point) and have neglected many updates I still have partially written and hopefully will get back to in the near future for posting. But I did want to take a moment and get my year end list up. Not because I especially value the concept of a Top Ten or anything, but because I like to take stock of what I’ve loved and loathed in the year that just finished on a personal level. You will not love all of my choices, and some of them are even what one might say as divisive at best. Certainly most have very little consensus of opinion behind them. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these are the films that affected me the most, and which have stuck with me months after having seen them.

There are a couple of high profile films missing from my list which I have yet to see. These include Argo, Lincoln, Amour, and Life of Pi. Some because I just haven’t had the time, and others because I have very little to no interest in them. I’m looking at you, Life of Pi. I also have some runners-up that I think are well worth your time, so check them out if you haven’t already. In no particular order: Skyfall, Wreck It Ralph, The Paperboy, The Dark Knight Rises, Magic Mike, Brave, Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers, The Hunger Games, and Les Miserables.

And one last thing before getting on with it. This year saw a lot of great home video releases. I want to recommend a few of them to you. First, check out Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, put out by Criterion and well worth the money to get the Blu-ray. It looks fantastic, the film is amazing, and it’s my number one video release of the year. Then, in no particular order, add these to your collection: Black Sunday (Kino Classics), Jaws (Universal), and When Horror Came to Shinchoku (box set, Eclipse/Criterion). I will also point out that, though flawed, the Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection is worth your money if you can 1) find it on sale, and 2) really really like the idea of having Hitch on Blu. Even with the discs’ flaws, the titles still look and sound better than they ever have on home video and are a must for any serious fan.

Now, without further ado – the “Best of ’12″ (in ascending order):

The Best Films I Saw in 2012

By Eric Plaag

As we stand perched just moments from the start of this year’s Oscars broadcast, I’ve finally gotten around — without a minute to spare — to writing up my list of the past year’s best films. Coming up with a list of the ten best 2012 films I’ve seen in the last year is not as difficult as I anticipated. This isn’t because I didn’t see enough films, but rather because the availability of good films was rather skimpy compared to 2011. This may be difficult to see for some viewers, perhaps because many of those films that do rise to the level of inclusion in this list are unusually good, thus creating the impressing that it was a “good movie year.” Looking at the overall slate of what Hollywood and the independent studios churned out this year, I’d argue quite the opposite, actually.

Nevertheless, there is much to praise. What follows, in ascending order, is my list of and brief justification for the ten best 2012 films I saw. Readers will note two significant exclusions from the list: Zero Dark Thirty and Les Miserables. On a procedural point, both missed the cut because I have not yet seen them. In all honesty, though, I most likely would not have included either in my list. The swirling questions about director Kathryn Bigelow’s choice to portray torture in Zero Dark Thirty as essential to securing the information necessary to locate Osama Bin Laden — in direct contradiction to the facts — is a significant, disqualifying blunder in a film that purports to tell the “true” story of what occurred leading up to his killing. As for Les Miserables, while there are many film musicals that I have enjoyed over the years, I have a deep-seated animus against musicals being weighed in Oscar discussions, let alone being considered the best films of the year, in the same way (and for some related reasons) that other critics and Oscar voters won’t even consider horror films for their coveted accolades. This bias against film musicals may have something to do with Oliver! — one of the worst film musicals ever made, in my opinion — winning Best Picture over a host of far better deserving films. But I digress.

Several other excellent 2012 films (about which I will not say much here) just missed my cut and are definitely worth tracking down if you have not yet seen them. These honorable mentions include Bernie, Prometheus, Bully, Moonrise Kingdom, and Skyfall, which is probably the best James Bond film ever made.

And now…the list:

Badical Filmmaking: A Review of Resident Evil: Retribution

by Matt Smith

I have seen each of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films in theaters. I am a devotee of the game series as much as I am to the biennial craziness of the movies. I am under no illusion that either share any commonalities other than superficial ones: character names and likenesses, places, monsters. Each film takes its audience and its main character, Alice (Milla Jovovich), further down the rabbit hole of absurdity and borderline incomprehensibility. And that’s okay. This is what I love about them. Love may not be a strong enough word, but it’s what I have. These films are not “great” by any objective standard, but a list of how they might be described could go something like this: awfsome, shitty shitty bang bang, crapmazing, fabuless, and my personal favorite “badical,” which was coined by my friend Max. LOVE these movies. This one’s not really any different, and it will convert no one to the cause.

Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth in the franchise, picks up immediately after Resident Evil: Afterlife, with a gorgeous opening sequence shown in slow-motion and in reverse. It’s an orgy of uncanny images–spent bullet casings re-entering gun chambers, a helicopter putting itself together after a horrific explosion–and after the standard introductory passage in which Alice recounts the prior films’ convoluted plot, we see the sequence again in the proper order and the correct speed. From here the movie falls into fever-dream delirium as Alice wakes up in yet another top-secret facility run by the evil Big Pharma corporation Umbrella.

Lincoln: A Review

By Eric Plaag

I must confess that perhaps my least favorite genre of cinema is the biopic. Typically, we are forced to endure a half hour to forty-five minutes of the life-altering circumstances of a major figure’s youth, then be reminded for the rest of the film, ad nauseum, by a script that beats us into submission through melodramatic excess and less than artfully staged turns, that those early days are exactly why so-and-so turned out to be such-and-such. In short, such films almost always violate the golden rule (note that I do not say “commandment”) of storytelling: Show, do not tell.

Enter Lincoln, the much anticipated film focused on one of our most popular Presidents, and quite possibly our most important one. Early trailers gave me hope when I saw Daniel Day-Lewis’s awkward, hunched figure holding court with his cabinet and heard the high-pitched, country-boy twang he used to spin a tale that would twist their understanding of the historical moment through which they were galloping. Still, though, I braced for the worst excesses of the genre, especially with Steven Spielberg directing and Sally Field playing Mary Todd Lincoln.

I need not have worried. Rather than cantering us through Lincoln’s youth, his many failures as a businessman, his tortured courtship and marriage with “Molly,” and his improbable rise to political prominence, all as a build-up to the “action” of the war and his assassination, Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (an odd choice, given that his only previous screenplay credit is for Munich) instead follow the sage example of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who originally penned the particular consideration of Lincoln and his significance upon which the film is based. We are immersed in media res: January 1865, the war slogging to its end but the South not ready to give, and a political scenario in which a re-elected Lincoln still cannot quite claim a mandate and thus cannot be certain that conservative Republicans will align with the Radicals and secure a sufficient number of votes from the dozens of lame-duck Democrats to confirm passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House.

Gotham’s Reckoning: A review of The Dark Knight Rises

by Matt Smith

note: This review contains heavy spoilers.

I have been reading Batman since I was about five or six years old. I spend roughly thirty dollars per month on Batman comics. I have a pull list at the best damned comic shop / music store on the planet: Scratch ‘N’ Spin Records in Columbia, SC. I loved the Burton Batman flicks, and I have a soft spot in my heart for the ‘60s TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward. Batman: The Animated Series is probably the single best iteration of Batman in any moving image medium. Until yesterday, I was slightly underwhelmed with Christopher Nolan’s take on the iconic universe. Batman Begins was enjoyable but didn’t take the character nor his nemeses (the Scarecrow in particular was given short-shrift) as seriously as they should have been, and the follow-up, 2008’s The Dark Knight, moved every element much farther down the road toward a realistic depiction of the Batman and his villains, but lacked a sense of pointed direction. What was the Joker leading all of us toward? Why did it matter to kill off Harvey Dent at the end of that film?

While disappointed with some of the questions left dangling at the end of both the first and second films, this weekend’s The Dark Knight Rises is a satisfying conclusion to both, though it almost completely ignores the events concerning the Joker that shook Gotham City and its residents so hard in the previous film. Instead, we return to the League of Shadows, the organization formerly headed by Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), and the terrorist attacks carried out by Bane (Tom Hardy), who now heads the League. Bane has come to destroy Gotham, hell-bent on completing the task that Ra’s failed to do in Batman Begins, and as an added bonus, to break the body and spirit of Gotham’s bat-suited savior.

Masculine Interest: A review of Magic Mike

by Matt Smith

Magic Mike opens with a shirtless Matthew McConaughey laying down the rules of touching to a screaming crowd of women there to see the lurid and (acknowledged) ludicrous stage show of the Xquisite All Male Revue. “The law says you cannot touch. But I think I see a lotta lawwwbreakers up in this house tonight,” he tells them. McConaughey’s trademark drawl and hand placement on the various parts of his body while on stage are no doubt the subject of a great number of fantasies, male and female, and combined with the appeal of the film’s star, Channing Tatum, will help ensure a high volume of audience members looking to safely explore a seedy dance club within the confines of the local cineplex. And while all manner of recently-waxed chests and ass-less banana hammocks do make multiple appearances on all the principle cast members, I have a feeling that some of the film’s more sordid moments might offset the enjoyment of thumping music and bared flesh.

“My Calibrations Are Flipping Pinpoint”: A review of Safety Not Guaranteed

by Matt Smith

A film like Safety Not Guaranteed is ready-made for acclaim at a festival like Sundance. It has likable, interesting, and just-quirky-enough characters played by a variety of up-and-coming, vaguely recognizable faces for the mainstream viewers, and who are also well-regarded by those of us who actually keep up with such things. It’s low-budget, high-concept, and shot through with both humor and pathos. In fact, as described above, it might seem that Safety Not Guaranteed is almost too pat, too familiar, maybe a bit redundant. And it is – almost.

It’s saved from the lower rings of indie comedy hell because the film’s particular high-concept sci-fi premise is intriguing, and because those vaguely familiar actors are enjoyable to watch. The film is brought to life by a delightful Aubrey Plaza, whose Darius is a stronger-willed variation on her deadpan performance as April Ludgate from Parks and Recreation. As an intern at a Seattle newspaper, she becomes entangled in an investigation into a mysterious ad placed by a man from a small town in Washington state that reads:

“WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.”