Gulliver's Travels

Directed by Rob Letterman.
2010. Rated PG, 85 minutes.
Cast:
Jack Black
Jason Segel
Emily Blunt
Amanda Peet
Billy Connolly
Chris O’Dowd
T.J. Miller
Stewart Scudamore
David Sterne

Occasionally, even actors who’s personas proceed them like to stretch their wings. They like to step away from what they’re known for, if for no other reason, to prove they can do something different. This is not that movie. The latest version of the classic tale Gulliver’s Travels is pure Jack Black through and through. Either he cracks you up, or he doesn’t. There isn’t much else to tip the scales in the movie’s favor. That’s because the story constructed around his hijinks and shenanigans is merely bland when it is at its very best. Most of the time it just takes all that’s good from its source material and pummels it into submission.

Our new Gulliver (Black) is a mail-room clerk at a New York City newspaper. Despite his near constant big talk he seems destined to remain at the same station in life until dying alone. In a desperate attempt to prove he’s more than hot air he decides to ask out writer Darcy (Peet) whom he’s had a crush on for five years. He botches this so bad he accidentally winds up with a promotion and gets assigned to write an article on the Bermuda Triangle. Yup, that’s what I said. Once in the legendary Triangle he’s sucked in by a heinous looking storm, knocked unconscious and deposited on the shores of a place called Liliput. When he wakes up he finds out he’s literally a giant, taller than their tallest buildings and he is being held captive. The Liliputians are also constantly battling their neighbors, the Blefuscians. That’s about all this movie has in common with the original story. From there, we get the normal Jack Black routine: anatomy and bodily fluid jokes, pratfalls, other sight gags and more empty big talk. Some of it is funny, most is not. Imagine another Black vehicle, Kung Fu Panda without the charm, animation or kung fu.

Since all of this plays out pretty much as expected, there is no reason for people who aren’t Jack Black fans to bother. It is precisely what he’s come to be known for. If you’re a fan of the original story, or even of earlier screen versions of Gulliver’s Travels I suggest you avoid this movie at all cost or you will be severely disappointed. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something fairly innocuous, have at it.

MY SCORE: 3/10

Black Swan

Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
2010. Rated R, 108 minutes.
Cast:
Natalie Portman
Mila Kunis
Vincent Cassel
Barbara Hershey
Winona Ryder
Benjamin Millepied
Ksenia Solo
Kristina Anapau

The dance company is going to open its new season with a fresh version of Swan Lake. Out of what looks to be a couple dozen young ladies who dance there, only a handful are even deemed worthy enough to audition for the lead role of “Swan Queen.” Nina (Portman) is one of the lucky few. For those unfamiliar, “Swan Queen” is a dual role. One has to ply both the pure and good “White Swan” and the evil “Black Swan.” Dancing the “White Swan” is no problem for Nina. Her innocence shines through her technical proficiency as a dancer. Dancing the “Black Swan” is another issue, entirely. She seems to lack the passion and the will to let herself go needed to be a convincing villain. She’s just too nice. Her director Thomas Leroy sees potential in Nina and awards her the role. From then on, he starts trying to get her to tap into her wild side and bring out the beast he wants to see onstage. Combine this with the over-protective mother she lives with (Hershey), the company’s new dancer Lily (Kunis) who keeps shoving herself into Nina’s life and the ungodly amount of pressure Nina puts on herself and she appears to be coming apart at the seams. Ironically, all of this insanity may just be helping her transform into precisely what she needs to be to pull off her new role. She’s not sure whether this transformation is literal, or not. Frankly, neither are we.

Our deciphering of this information, or more accurately, not being able to decipher it is key to the movie’s success. We’re given enough to see things more than one way. Yet, in the back of our minds one of those ways doesn’t make any sense. To this end, we’re told repeatedly how the plot to Swan Lake plays out. Could Nina actually be experiencing that plot in her own life? Could we really be watching Swan Lake and not even know it?

Keeping us off guard requires a strong lead. Natalie Portman is this and more. It’s truly a phenomenal performance. Her descent into madness, or her ascent into artistry if you prefer, is superbly captured. In a thankless role, Barbara Hershey is just as good. She hits the right notes at the right time. Even Mila Kunis proves to be more than just a pretty face, turning in excellent work. Ever the jaded puppeteer, Darren Aronofsky pulls it all together. He again proves adept at making real life situations as horrific as possible.

Does art imitate life? Or, is it the other way around? That’s the question hovering just above the surface of Black Swan. Below it, the question is: what happens to us when we push ourselves beyond our breaking point? There are no easy answers to either and along the way you might come up with more questions. Because of this, our journey is always fascinating despite it also being occasionally confusing. The true beauty of this film is that even though we get a definitive ending in the physical sense, we still have to deal with those questions.

I Saw the Devil

Directed by Jee-woon Kim.
2010. Not Rated, 141 minutes.
Cast:
Byung-hun Lee
Min-sik Choi
Gook-hwan Jeon
Ho-jin Jeon
San-ha Oh
Yoon-seo Kim

Joo-yeon (Oh) is stranded on the side of the road on a snowy night with a flat tire. She is on the phone with her husband Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) who is also a secret agent of some sort. In fact, he’s at work at this precise moment. A stranger approaches Joo-Yeon’s door, offering to help. Wisely, and with the agreement of her hubby, she only cracks the window enough to tell him she is going to wait on the tow truck she’s already called. Obviously, they’ve seen a horror movie or two. Pretty soon, duty calls and hubby has to hang up the phone and get back to work. Just in case you can’t figure out where all this is going the creepy dude bashes in Joo-yeon’s window, knocks her out in a most untidy manner and drags her, quite literally at some points, back to his place. That’s when he really has his fun. Suffice it to say when the police find her, it’s not all at once. Trust me, this is only the beginning of a very bumpy ride.

Not one to sit idly by, Kim decides he’s going after the bad guy himself. Don’t you worry. This movie won’t bore you with detective work. He quickly learns the police have four main susupects who have been accused of similar crimes in the past. He immediately takes bereavement leave and starts tracking them down where they live and does some not so nice things to them.

Eventually, Kim not only gets to the right guy, but there is no doubt about it. That guy is Kyung-chul played by Min-sik Choi. Fans of Park Chan-wook’s “Trilogy of Vengeance” will remember him from the two best movies in that series, Lady Vengeance and most notably as our hero in Oldboy. Here, he is on the other side of the coin and barely recognizable (that’s him in the pic). He’s a completely amoral merciless homicidal maniac. Much like Javier Bardem’s performance in No Country for Old Men, he goes about his business in an awfully calm manner making him far more menacing than he would’ve been had he been a screaming, raging lunatic. It’s a remarkable performance.

The two men meet rather early in the movie. Because they do, a question presents itself and weaves itself into the fabric of the movie: To truly get revenge on a monster, do you have to become one yourself. It seems Kim does. Whenever our two combatants square off there are considerable fireworks. Kim is not content with merely killing Kyung-chul. He wants to make him suffer as much as possible which involves tracking him down beating him half to death and maiming him in some way then letting him go so he can do it all over again.

Between their meetings there is great tension and, thanks to our villain’s excursions plenty more very nasty happenings. This movie is not for the squeamish. It may be one of the more brutally violent films you’ll ever see. Still, despite the seemingly gallons of blood spilled and dozens of blows to various heads with heavy blunt objects (pipe, fire extinguisher, etc), this is no simple gore-fest. It blends the genres horror, thriller and action to create an unflinching and slyly complex revenge flick. It’s one downfall, aside from the violence if that’s too much for you, is that the end is a bit predictable. However, even then the manner in which it’s handled is brilliantly grotesque. Then we have to decide whether this ordeal was really worth it for the one left standing. As the credits roll bringing our thrilling and disturbing journey to a close we still have one more important question to ponder: Who really won?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules

Directed by David Bowers.
2011. Rated PG, 99 minutes.
Cast:
Zachary Gordon
Devon Bostick
Rachael Harris
Robert Capron
Steve Zahn
Connor Fielding
Owen Fielding
Peyton List
Karan Brar
Laine MacNeil

Greg (Gordon) is back for a second middle-school adventure. Most of the angst he experienced in sixth grade is gone. His biggest social hurdle nowadays is trying to figure out how to approach the school’s very pretty new girl. His real problems are at home where big brother Rodrick (Bostick) tortures him on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Mom (Harris) is completely bent on making her boys get along so that her real life is as perfect as she portrays it in her newspaper column. Sibling rivalry hijinks and shenanigans ensue.

Often, sequels attempt to do everything bigger than their predecessors. The larger scale tends to translate into a loss of focus on the things we liked about the previous movie. A curious thing happens in Rodrick Rules. It actually has a smaller scope than the original. A number of characters are either eliminated or relegated to lesser roles. Greg’s interaction with the sizable school community is replaced with what goes on at home between at home between the brothers and/or mom. Even Dad (Zahn) is just kinda there for long stretches. Despite all this it still feels less focused than the first film. It’s certainly less ambitious, feeling more like a long episode of a Disney Channel sitcom than a movie. This means the target audience will probably still like it. Us parents, not so much this time around.

RR does have its moments. There are pockets of goodness scattered here and there as reminders of what once was. Not surprisingly, most of these moments happen in school. The movie shines when depicting the often Darwinist society of pre-teens. It falls flat when away from this setting because Greg’s family is made up of the same caricatures we’ve seen rehashed for decades. Their worst offense is they’re not funny, making this a bit of a chore to sit through for adults. Kids will likely enjoy it while it’s on, but forget about it five minutes after its over.

MY SCORE: 4.5/10

Sucker Punch

Directed by Zack Snyder.

2011. Rated PG-13, 110 minutes.
Cast:
Emily Browning
Abbie Cornish
Jena Malone
Vanessa Hudgens
Jamie Chung
Carla Gugino
Oscar Isaac
Scott Glenn
Gerard Plunkett

After her mother dies, Baby Doll (Browning) is attacked by her stepdad. Obviously, it was a struggle for him to wait until his wife kicked because he goes on the prowl moments after the funeral. Apparently finding Baby Doll a bit more of a struggle than he wants just then, or perhaps saving her for later, he manages to lock her in her room and then starts in on her younger, much smaller sister. Since our heroine can’t let stepdad get his satisfaction she gets out of the room and gets a loaded gun and confronts this clown. Just to show she’s serious, Baby Doll fires off a warning shot. Oops. Little sis winds up all dead and stuff over in a corner. Daddy Dearest then has BD hauled off to an insane asylum run by some shady characters. He even slips the guy in charge a few extra bucks to make sure she gets lobotomized in five days. I hate when that happens.

All of this takes place before and right after the opening credits. Truthfully, only the end result is relevant. The elaborate set up is interesting, but unnecessary. She could’ve simply been perceived as crazy and arrived at exactly the same place. However, elaborately is the only way this movie does anything. Not surprising since it has the same director, it has a look reminiscent of 300 with nearly as much slo-mo, super slo-mo and bullet-time effects. The heavy metal soundtrack blares brazenly while things onscreen hiss, boom, shatter and pop. All the while, the camera follows a team of girls draped in fetishistic and/or militaristic garb and kicking all sorts of robot tail. If you let it, it can be big fun. That is, until you get to the end wonder what you just watched.

Speaking wondering what you just watched, where do the robots come from? Well, shortly and suddenly our insane asylum transforms into a brothel. I’ll let you figure out the how and why of that one on your own. Anyoo, BD is made to dance. In a total shock for this movie, there’s no pole involved. Still, when she dances everyone in her onscreen audience is so mesmerized they cease all bodily function except for watching her. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we never see BD dance. Along with her, we enter the dreamworld in the trance she falls into. Here, she receives orders from Wise Man (Glenn) about the next object she tries to obtain by fighting her and the team’s way through hordes of robots. By the way, if you couldn’t figure it out the team is made up of other girls in the looney bin. Each object gets the whole crew closer to escape from the real asylum. Get it? The actual connection is made a little better than that, but it’s still convoluted.

Overall, Sucker Punch is a fun looking mess. The visuals are a treat, but the pieces to the story don’t quite fit in a cohesive manner. First off, there are too many of them. A surplus of things that could’ve been discarded are kept. Conversely, we get the feeling plenty of things that should’ve been kept are thrown out. Second, none of the characters are written well enough for us to really care what happens to them. They’re just mannequins in the window striking poses appropriate for the gear they’re wearing. Worst of all, the movie is horribly inconsistent about what happens to people in the room when BD dances. Who is and isn’t effected changes based on what’s convenient for the plot at any given moment. Finally, I have a question. Why on God’s green earth did Zack Snyder allow Carla Gugino to keep going with her ridiculously bad Russian accent after the first day of shooting? For that alone, he should be sucker punched.

Love and Other Drugs

Directed by Edward Zwick.
2010. Rated R, 112 minutes.
Cast:
Jake Gyllenhaal
Anne Hathaway
Oliver Platt
Hank Azaria
Josh Gad
Gabriel Macht
Judy Greer
Jill Clayburgh
George Segal

After losing his job as a stereo equipment saleman, Jamie (Gyllenhaal) decides to give the pharmaceudical industry a try. He takes a job as a sales rep for Pfizer. Basically, he hangs around private practices hocking Zoloft to the doctors. We most often see him at Dr. Knight’s (Azaria) office. While there, he manages to talk the doc into letting him be present during a visit from a patient. That patient is 26 year old Maggie (Hathaway) who has already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Of course, Jamie is immediately head-over-heels in love with her, but she wants nothing to do with him. Ever the smooth talking ladies man, he navigates that little hurdle and talks her into a date. Right away, the two start a relationship they both agree is only about sex. Well, if things were that easy we wouldn’t have a movie, would we? Anyhoo, this is all set in the days leading up to the initial public release of Viagra. This becomes prominent in several ways I won’t reveal.

Things start off in an amusing manner. Jamie’s rich younger brother Josh (Gad) has been kicked out by his wife and taken up residence on big bro’s couch. Sales manager Bruce (Platt) is constantly prodding his young protégé to sell more. Prozac salesman Trey (Macht) has the upperhand and is constantly in their way. Dr. Knight is openly selling his loyalty to whichever rep can get him laid the most. Through all of this Jamie and Maggie actually do get laid, a lot…by each other. If you want to see Anne Hathaway in (almost) all her glory this is the movie for you.

It’s our favorite couple’s interactions between lovemaking sessions that try to attach us emotionally to the movie, but fail. The problem is pretty much as soon as he rolls off of her she starts with an unstoppable wave of self-pity, questioning his motives for sleeping with “the sick girl”, as she refers to herself and imploring him to stay away from her. He stubbornly refuses and back and forth they go. We’re supposed to be sympathetic towards their plight because of her disease. However, it’s much more tiresome than endearing. I have to remind you that the peripheral events all seem to work pretty well. They’re entertaining and light. When juxtaposed with them, the heavy relationship at the film’s core is jarring and transparently manipulative, ineffectively tugging on our heartstrings.

Big Fish