Crimson Peak (a movie review post)

I want to like this movie more than I actually do. I like del Toro. Mostly. Although he may be shifting to a focus that too much relies on visuals over story for me. Or, maybe, he's always been that way but just happened to have better stories for the movies I liked. At any rate, Crimson Peak is visually amazing. But, then, Pacific Rim was visually amazing; dumber than a box of rocks but visually amazing, nonetheless.

Of course, the thing that stands out most is the ghosts. Or, maybe, the house. The house is pretty amazing. But the ghosts are freaky and cool. And, well, there are issues with the house that take away from its "cool" factor.

So, yeah, ghosts... Because it's a Gothic thing, and you have to have something supernatural in Gothic things, right? Evidently. Except for Wuthering Heights. That one gets by on tragedy alone.

I really wanted to do this without spoilers, but I'm finding myself unable to, because I'm going to just go ahead and say this, so... SPOILER ALERT!

The problem with the ghosts is that they are just a sleight-of-hand, which, in-and-of-itself is fine, I like sleight of hand, but the movie pretends to be a ghost story, and it's not that. It's a story with some ghosts in it. There's a huge difference between those two things. These ghosts are no more than props. To say this is a ghost story would be like trying to say that something is a chair story just because there happened to be some chairs in it.

But they do look cool. The ghosts, not the chairs.

Then there's the house, which also looks cool, but there are so many problems with the house that it drags the movie down into stupidity much like the house is sinking into the clay on top of the peak. Because, you know, the clay is so soft that it can't support the weight of the house but
1. we're expected to believe that someone built a house on clay that soft to begin with.
2. we're expected to believe that a mountain made of oozing clay would even exist.
I could go on with issues around the house (like the huge hole in the roof that exists only so that leaves can aesthetically flutter down around the characters (while they are inside) throughout the movie), but let's just stop there and say that the house broke my suspension of disbelief.

Beyond that stuff, the story is pretty formulaic... in a Flowers in the Attic sort of way. The ghost stuff is just there so that you won't see what's actually going on. You expect a supernatural story. Like I said: sleight of hand.

The acting is decent. That's about all that can be said about, though Tom Hiddleston is quite charming, which is good, because that's exactly what he's supposed to be. Jim Beaver is also good as Edith's father, but, really, it's the same sort of role he always plays, so you can't say he was any better than usual. Jessica Chastain was also pretty much as she always is, cold and somewhat aloof. I'm not sure at this point if she's capable of anything other than that. And Wasikowska... well... she's not bad. But she's also not good. She just kind of is. I find her mostly bland.

So, yeah, I want to like this movie. The use of the ghosts is almost very clever, and, again, cool. But the places where logic and sense are sacrificed to what looks cool are just too plentiful. I can't turn my brain off that much. It's not a movie I'll ever willingly watch again because, now that I've seen it, any other viewing will cause me to be irate at all the dumb.

The Wolverine and a Bowl of Pop Culture

Does everyone have a bowl? Yes, you have to bring your own; I just don't have enough. And a spoon, too. No chopsticks, because we don't want to leave them standing upright in our pop culture, right? It's bad luck. Evidently. Anyway, get your bowls and your spoons, and pour yourself a heaping bowl of pop culture. But no milk; Wolvie doesn't like it.

I wanted very badly to not want to go see The Wolverine in the theater. Why pay for another movie I was just going to be disappointed in, right? I mean, this year has been particularly good for disappointing movies. And that doesn't even take into account the other Wolverine movie, one of the worst super hero movies made so far (and all because of the ending). [It's amazing how a botched ending can ruin an otherwise decent movie.] But Wolverine has been in my top three favorite heroes since... oh, well, a long time, and Hugh Jackman just nails that role, so I couldn't convince myself to wait. I'm actually glad that I didn't; some times, it's good to go into something with, basically, no expectations.

As it turned out, The Wolverine was much better than I expected it to be, and I actually enjoyed most of it. It has its issues, but, at least, they weren't really bad story-telling issues. The story, amazingly enough, was pretty solid and managed to not go off the cliff that the origin movie did. Of course, the story is only "pretty solid" if you look at it within the context of the X-Men movies. This movie has nothing to do with the comics other than that they pull some familiar characters from the Wolverine mythos to use in the movie. If you were hoping for anything resembling an adaptation of the Frank Miller/Chris Claremont Wolverine mini-series from the early '80s, you're not going to find that here. Okay, you'll get something vaguely resembling it. Very vaguely. He does fight some Hand ninjas. Except their not called that. So we're back to that "vaguely" again.

The thing to know about The Wolverine is that it's not about what it's about it. Within the context of the X-Men movies, the story is here to bridge the gap between X-Men: The Last Stand and the forthcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past and deal with the ramifications of how Last Stand ended. Basically, it's to get Logan to let go of the death of Jean and his part in it. With that goal in mind, The Wolverine actually accomplished its purpose and in a way that made sense. The micro-plot of just this one movie wasn't too bad either, even if it did have more than its share of "what the heck?" moments.

Spoiler alert:
The biggest issue with the movie is the sleight-of-hand they play with Logan's healing power. The dying old guy wants Logan's ability, and the best the writers could come up with is that the old dude is going to "steal" it. Not duplicate it, steal it. Which sounds like they're going to do some kind of thing like when Rogue absorbs other mutants' powers, but, no, the old guy is just going to drill into Logan's bone marrow and transfer the power to himself, which doesn't make any sense, but I'll give it a pass on the handwavium principle. Except that they also "suppress" his healing power using a little "Matrix" bug that gets on Wolvie's heart, and they don't explain that, either, especially after making it seem as if this is some other mutant thing before we find out it's a device. Really, you can only get a pass on one of these things in the movie. The deal with the tiny robot is that they want Wolverine to rip his own heart out to get rid of the thing, so I can see that they're going for the "cool factor" with that, but, then, they don't show it, so they lose out on that, anyway. And it leaves all kinds of questions: does the little robot bug suppress all mutant abilities or just Logan's? Or just Logan's healing factor? It's hard to tell, because he really doesn't use any of his heightened senses in the movie at all, so we don't know if he still has those or not. Of course, there's also the argument that Logan's healing power should have just expelled the little robot bug to begin with, but the movie Wolverine isn't quite as powerful as the comic book Wolverine.

And neither is adamantium, evidently, because we again have a "bullet piercing adamantium" situation in that the old guy cuts off Wolverine's claws to get at his bone marrow. It's slightly more believable than the bullet being fired into Logan's head but not by much.

At any rate, those things are just issues with story points not the story itself, and we have to deal with those all the time. Like people surviving explosions by jumping into water or standing behind a wall or whatever. So, whereas there are some... stupid? silly? okay, stupid... things within the story, the plot of The Wolverine holds up both on the level of there being a villain intent upon stealing Logan's healing powers and as a vehicle for Logan to get over have killed Jean.

Having said all of that, The Wolverine is not a movie you have to see in the theater. It's not like Pacific Rim or Man of Steel (although I think it's a better movie than both of those) that really need to be seen on the big screen to get the full effect of the scope of the action. You can just as easily wait for the DVD for this one, and, honestly, I doubt there's anything necessary in this movie for the overall X-Men story line. If you like Wolverine, it's probably worth seeing it, but you're not going to feel like you missed anything if you give this one a pass on the way to Days of Future Past.

Pacific Rim (part 2)

As I said last time, Pacific Rim was an amazing movie to watch. Seriously impressive visual display. And it leads off with it, too, as we start out right at the first Kaiju attack. The problem is that it's a prologue, and a prologue with voice over, at that. I really don't enjoy that kind of thing in movies. To compound the problem, it was the prologue to the prologue. Yes, the movie had to have two prologues. Just about the time I was allowing myself to get into the movie and be unannoyed by the prologue, we find out that what should have been the beginning of the movie was just another prologue. So, now, we're something like 20 minutes into the film, and the actual movie hasn't even started.

That issue with the storytelling ends up being the movie's greatest flaw. Basically, they started what was an epic tale spanning years and skipped to the last battle. There's no emotional connection to any of the characters, no foundation for the arbitrary scientific-sounding crap they fling at you in the same way that chimpanzees fling poo (and, yes, I have a story about that... for another day), and no logic to the things that happen. IF they had started at the beginning of the story or, at least, closer to it, they could have built something more believable. It's kind of too bad, because, like I said, visually amazing.

I'm not even going to get into the specific story issues. They are just too numerous to list. In fact, I'm sure I've forgotten most of them. Let's just say this movie is more hole than cheese (Swiss cheese, you know).  I'll sum it up this way: After the movie was over and my friends and I were comparing notes, so to speak, they were all about how great they thought it was. But I wasn't saying much. Not much more than it was amazing to look at, at any rate. And they're used to this from me, to me being the one most likely to not like a movie, but I was really trying not to say anything, but I guess I had this look on my face, because they were all like, "What? What was it that you didn't like? Because it was amazing." So I said I would share the one thing I thought was the most stupid (the arbitrary choice to have two pilots because the "neural load" was too much for one pilot (like I said, there's a lot of scientific-sounding crap flung at the audience to achieve what they wanted in the story, but that "neural load" crap is just that: crap)), and one of the guys started to respond with "but the right hemisphere and the left...," and I just kind of looked at him, and he stopped, and, then, all three of them started spewing various stupidities from the movie. And that lasted for something like half an hour, and I never brought up another thing. So, see, all three of these guys that walked out of the theater loving the movie couldn't hold the stupid back once the gate was open, much like the Kaiju gate in the movie.

I wish I could say something positive about the acting, but there's nothing there to talk about. No one was horrible, but no one was great, either. Or, even, all that good. It was a 'fest of mediocre. Okay, Charlie Day was good, but he was as good as it got. I mean, Idris Elba was so flat, they had to give him a nose bleed to pass for emotion.

The whole movie was like getting a giant present wrapped in the most awesome wrapping ever: glittery paper, bows, a great card, but, when you open it, you find an open package of chewing gum or something. To put it another way: big hat, no cattle.

But I'd still say to go see it at the theater, because it's just that kind of movie.

So... The movie ended, and we were heading out, trying to follow this other guy that had been with us, but he was on call there at LucasFilm, so he was heading back to his desk, so we started out going that way, too, so we ended up going off through the building into areas I had never been...

And there was just so much cool stuff! Around one corner was a display case with a tyrannosaurus Rex model in it from Jurassic Park and, down the hall, a case with a model of the foot structure of the T. Rex. And, of course, more movie posters. And, in a little lounge area, a suit of silver robot armor from some commercial ILM did at some point, and, on the other side of that, a set of Tatooine Stormtrooper (sandtrooper) armor! I so wanted to touch it; I mean, it was right there, but I restrained myself. There were display cases of models all down the halls; I don't even remember them all. And, in a room that I could see into (but the door was locked), a full-sized model of some Sith Lord. It was dark in there, so I'm not sure who it was, but the red lightsaber was very visible. It might have been Darth Maul, but it could have been one of the characters from Clone Wars, too.

The walk through the hallways of the LucasFilm building was more than worth any number of bad movies. Next time, I have to make sure I have my camera with me.

Pacific Rim (part 1) and "The Bitter Fruit"

As I've mentioned before, I have a friend that works for LucasFilm. Actually, I have two friends that work there, but one of them is being let go because of the Disney acquisition. His department was gutted, so it wasn't like he was singled out.

Anyway, every so often, these guys and I get together to see a movie and catch up, so we made tentative plans back in May to do that. At the time, I listed out all of the summer movies I was interested in. Pacific Rim was on that list, but I also stated that it was probably the movie I was least interested in seeing. I expected it to be eye candy, and, although I enjoy the occasional eye candy, I will almost always choose story over it. Or, at least, something I think will have story. However, my buddies, all three of them, chose Pacific Rim, so I sighed and came to terms with the fact that giant brawling things have more appeal for the age group of my buddies (a bit more than a decade younger than me) than they do for me.

So we made plans for the opening weekend of PacRim. They would all converge to where I live for a Saturday showing, which is good with me, because, as the only married one of the group, it's a lot harder for me to get down to San Francisco than for them to get to where I live. BUT, the day before the release, my buddy at Lucas let me know that they were doing a showing down there since ILM had done the effects. We had a change of plans.

Here's the thing:
Special screenings of movies used to happen at Skywalker Ranch, which is somewhat north of San Francisco and easier to get to (and you don't have to deal with parking, which is always an issue in the city); however, the Ranch was not part of the sale to Disney, so screenings don't happen there anymore, because that's where Lucas lives. Well, it was always where Lucas lived, but... well, it's complicated, because Skywalker Sound is still at the Ranch, but... Anyway, the screening was going to be held in the screening room at the Presidio, where LucasFilm is housed. Let me just say that the screening room there is one of the finest theaters in the world, as you might imagine. And the screening was in 3D, which we hadn't known about ahead of time. When we go to movies, we don't do 3D; it's just inordinately expensive. So the 3D was like a special bonus.

But let's back up a moment:
The building with the theater in it at the Ranch is pretty cool. There are a lot of vintage movie posters and the theater is underground and it's the place where I saw George Lucas that one time. But, aside from the movie posters, that building isn't full of cool stuff. At least, not that I ever saw, and my buddy and I did get lost in it one time trying to leave a screening of something through one of the back exits. There were some shopping carts and a Darth Maul bicycle, but that was about it for "interesting items." Aside from the fact that building has a movie theater in it, it's pretty much like any office-type building.

Now, I've been to the offices at the Presidio before (for an event for the release of The Clone Wars movie and the following television series), but I'd never been inside any of the buildings except to see the special Clone Wars exhibit they had set up for that release, which, of course, is long gone. The only other thing I'd ever seen was the Yoda statue (so cool) in the courtyard. Yes, I need to get a picture of it. This screening of PacRim was my first time to really inside. And, initially, it seemed like it was the same kind of thing as at the Ranch. Just a lot of vintage movie posters. That's what I saw before the movie.

Oh, yeah, the movie! Visually, the movie was AMAZING! And, I'm sure, seeing it in one of the finest theaters (and 3D theaters) in the world didn't hurt it any. I mean, this movie is seriously impressive to look at, especially in 3D. There's a lot of holographic imaging involved in piloting the Jaegers (the giant robots), and it looks super cool in 3D since you're seeing it the way the characters are supposedly seeing it. It's certainly a movie that I'm glad I saw in the theater, because a television set just would not do justice to the Jaegers and the Kaijus (giant monsters) fighting amongst skyscrapers and, frequently, knocking them over.

So, in short, if you want to see a film with lots of action and fight scenes, especially involving giant combatants, this movie is for you. Seriously, I think it's safe to say that there will not be a better looking film this year.

But... you'll have to wait for part two for the rest.

In other news!
Today is the FREE! release of "Part Twenty-six: The Bitter Fruit"! Remember, if you want to read the whole Shadow Spinner right now and get the exclusive short story "Like An Axe Through Bone" by Bryan Pedas,

you can do that by clicking on the link.
However, if you're  invested in the serialization, here is a list of today's (Monday, July 22) FREE! parts:
"Part Twenty-six: The Bitter Fruit" (This one is also FREE! Tuesday, July 23)
"Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge"
"Part Twenty-four: The Serpent"
"Part Twenty-three: The Harlot"
"Part Nineteen: Lost in the Garden"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Ten: The Broken Window"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
"Part Five: The Police Car"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
So there you go: 19 of 26 parts available for FREE! Go! Tell your friends! Tell them to tell their friends!