movies

That said, putting aside the not-really-my-views political undertones, the dull characters, the feeble attempts at humor, the incoherent action, the didn’t-need-to-be-this-epic-in-length approach to storytelling, and a climax that involves McGregor essentially finding and flipping a giant off-switch, this is my favorite Michael Bay movie. If that’s the film equivalent of having a favorite dental procedure, so be it.

The result is not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. It is more than that. It is heroic. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve. And also with lust, hunger, humor and all of the other notes that this man once played so easily.

I also recently watched In the Mood for Love (as mentioned here), which was also thoroughly wonderful, largely because of its two terrific leads, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and the subtle, dreamlike spell their story casts. Scott Tobias this time:

…director Wong Kar-Wai has developed an intoxicating style that reaches beyond the shopworn conventions of traditional storytelling and into a more abstract realm of human emotion. His unique virtuosity has often been compared to the improvisational riffs of a jazz artist, with straight scenes dropped in favor of rhymes, repetition, and dizzying impressions….In detailing the intimate friendship and love between two unhappily married lonelyhearts, Wong collects vivid moments out of time as they might play out in a person’s memory many years later.

I’d highly recommend both movies.

Diary of the Dead, though…well, maybe not so much. I think Romero does some very interesting things here, and manages some real scares that his other zombie movies maybe don’t always provide — the humans are almost always scarier than the zombies in the other films — but I sometimes felt like I was being preached to. I liked it a lot more than Nathan Rabin, for instance, but I’m not sure he’s wrong in thinking

…there’s a big difference between making a kick-ass zombie movie with a trenchant sociopolitical subtext, and making a dreary, didactic film about the ethics and politics of journalism and non-fiction filmmaking that just happens to have some zombies in it. With his latest undead opus…Romero set out to make the first kind of film, but ended up making the second.

It always sucks when a film promises to be one kind of shitty movie, then proves to be a vastly different pile of shit.

He goes on to add:

There is a place in hell reserved for people who try to spin crappy horror movies as vehicles for fading action stars. It’s located, conveniently enough, right next to the spot in hell reserved for Seagal himself.

But the odd thing about Mr. Cage in this movie is that even when he is responding to the threat of complete human extinction, you still can’t help feeling that he’s overreacting.

I miss the Nicolas Cage of movies like Matchstick Men and Adaptation.

I was also struck by Scott’s assertion that Cage’s character

is, like most movie dads these days, a widower, stricken with grief and trying to raise a cute, precocious young son…