Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B

I know I’m probably going to get a lot of flack from friends and critics for this review. Why did I enjoy Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief despite it taking 5 minutes to say the entire title? Because it’s one word that seldom enters the vocabulary of those who analytically contemplate the merits of modern cinema. FUN. It’s entertainment, and it revels in its buttery popcorness. It’s a kids fantasy film that doesn’t start with “Harry” or “Chronicles” and yet manages to remain fast paced and enjoyable throughout. It may not end up being the better of the Greek God films released in the next few months, but it could very well be the start of another major franchise. Christopher Columbus did, after all, direct the first two films about a certain boy wizard, so if anybody can start a children’s fantasy saga off on a strong foundation, he’s certainly the man for the job.

I’d have to say that the biggest early success of the film was in the casting department. The film’s star, Logan Lerman, could very well be the next young actor to break into the big-time. His first film role was in The Butterfly Effect, but if you recognize the face, it’s from his great work as Christian Bale’s son in 3:10 to Yuma. He makes the hero likable but also avoids the pitfalls of the annoying/whiny variety that plague so many of his contemporaries. Kevin McKidd, one time television lead on the late, great Journeyman, plays Percy’s father Poseidon and is probably the most convincing of all the gods. Sean Bean isn’t quite as believable as Zeus (maybe because he’s played so many bad guys during his career) but he’s certainly not the worst choice. I’m of the opinion that the only living actor who could truly play the king of Olympus is Liam Neeson, and that is more than enough to ensure that I go and see Clash of the Titans. Pierce Brosnan also puts in some wonderful work here, and I’d love to see him do more non-tuxedo acting.

It’s a shame that the film will inevitably and extensively be compared to the Warnerbros. epic starring Sam Worthington. That film had a far larger budget, and has the benefit of a PG-13 rating to improve the battle sequences and general epic nature of its canvas. For a film directed at children, Percy Jackson does go out of its way to provide reasons to watch for the older crowd, but it still can’t have bloody fight scenes or realistic language (if a hydra was about to breathe fire at you, I don’t care who you are, you’d probably utter a large variety of obscenities). I guess, because of all that, it sortve cheapens the experience to a certain extent glazing everything with a candy sort of texture. Nobody ever seems to be in real danger, nothing ever has powerful consequences, and the scares don’t come across as anything you’d find terrifying if you’ve progressed past wetting your bed at night.

All those comments aside, the story is a great coming of age, reconnecting with a father figure, learning about yourself, magic and fantasy in the real world sort of yarn that, when done well, will never get old. It’s got all the elements you’ve come to expect, and a charm that makes you forgive certain logical missteps. It’s a good time at the movies, and gives you something to look at while chomping down popcorn. There are also plenty of great cameos spread throughout (I won’t spoil them, even though the opening credits do) that will make even a regular admission ticket worth your while. Do I think the film will be a giant success? Very likely. Will it be the movie that finally kicks Avatar out of the top spot at the box office. I’d put money on it. Am I looking forward to the inevitable sequel. Pleasantly, I am, though I also think Lerman might make a pretty good Peter Parker for the new Spiderman reboot that Sony’s been throwing around lately. I hope he and his agent can pull a Ryan Reynolds and get him 2 major franchises in simultaneous development because I think the kid has real talent. Don’t bother trying to remember the whole title, just tell the lady at the counter that you want to see Percy Jackson and that you also need a bucket of popcorn and a large soda. You don’t even need to thank me.

The Box Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: C

This is a crying shame. Richard Kelly, the USC graduate behind the cult classic Donnie Darko, really seemed poised to break into the mainstream. His follow up, Southland Tales, was met with scathing reviews and several prolonged re-edits that did little to help make the final project cohesive. Many found the script overly complicated, pushing past even Kelly’s own previous complexity and into a realm of sensory overload. With The Box, many expected him to tone back his heady plot intricacies and focus on what made Darko such a resounding success, a well-developed narrative. Taking his lead from a short story by Richard Matheson also seemed like a positive move. Basing something off a Twilight Zone veteran and the author of I Am Legend looks, on paper, as though it could successfully ground the writing and make for a marketable and accessible film going experience. In some ways it succeeds in this regard, but it more than makes up for such victories with colossal breaks in tone and character which we neither fully understand nor honestly believe.

Let us think, for a moment, about whether the premise of the film is enough to hold you through a feature length runtime. Family receives a box. Box has big red button. If you push the big red button within 24 hours, someone you don’t know will die, and you will receive a payment of one million dollars. So already you’ve set up two blocks of time which you have to work really hard to make suspenseful. The beginning of the film, without the box involved at all, which the audience will know is all character development and otherwise meaningless exposition, and the period before the button is pressed, as you know it has to be, in which various characters find out things about their life that would cause them to be more likely to push the damn button.

Surprisingly, it is in this first act that the movie is easily at its strongest. The characters are likable, even when Cameron Diaz is attempting her horribly fake accent, and considering that the couple are based off of Richard Kelly’s own parents, the dialogue is understandably layered and interesting. His father really did work as part of the Viking program crafting lenses, his mother really did have a tragic accident occur involving an X-ray of her foot, and Kelly really did grow up in a similar house in the year 1976 when the film was based. Knowing all that really only gives you a sense of why the beginning of the film is so strong and engrossing, and once the device is introduced, why the believability factor could begin to spiral out of control.

After the button is pressed, the gears start moving at a frantic pace, and with Frank Langella popping up periodically in one of his more wonderful performances, you will find yourself, whether you like it or not, strapped in for the ride. Who is behind the box? Why is the NSA involved? What does this have to do with NASA? What really happened when they pushed the button? How can our characters maneuver their way out of the maze they’ve let themselves fall into? Who will live? Who will die? What does it all mean?

As was intended, I’d assume, the answer to that last question is left fairly ambiguous. Sure you’ll start realizing things you missed once the credits roll with only a few minutes of concerted thought, and yes there will be many places that the movie may still confuse you after several days. The one thing the film does not do, however, is end itself in a satisfying manner. I will not say whether or not the ending in necessarily “happy”, nor if there would be a better way one could end it without sacrificing the overall message. It’s not that the ending is too confusing, too drawn out, or particularly forced either. In fact, the emotional resonance of the final scenes is on par with those in the opening of the film, leaving us to contemplate the purpose of much of the middle. Enough unfulfilled ideas abound in the story that you’re left with a feeling of immense disappointment and loss, the kind of sickly taste of betrayal following a carefully planned and executed manipulation of the senses. There are so many moments, looking back on the film, where there could have been a sense of accomplishment, a sense of figuring out what was going on in time to actually act upon that knowledge. Instead we realize each mistake as the event is in progress and are left much like the characters, as rats in the maze. The editing and the music don’t give us much more to grab onto either as each is heavily stylized in their own way, and the music, in particular, tends to wrench you out of the experience at the most inopportune times.

I feel really bad having to talk about the way in which the film rings hollow to me. It’s like in an effort to be mainstream Kelly thought he could broadcast the premise of his movie while holding the important cards deliberately close to the chest. We never know more than the characters do, but that doesn’t really matter, as they only figure things out after such facts would have proven useful, and the whole exercise makes one wish that their actions aren’t all in vain. In Kelly’s world, you can’t escape your choices, even if they come at the very beginning of a film, and this fact, more than anything else, is what keeps the end product from rising above its faults. I had such high hopes…

2012 Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B+

Thank god. After the emotional rollercoaster that never made its way back to the station with The Box (I’ll get to that review in a bit), I was dreadfully worried that Roland Emmerich’s theme park ride of a film would disappoint in similar fashion. It’s not that I particularly hated The Day After Tomorrow (the less that is said about 10,000 B.C. the better), but the spark that brought the audience to its feet in Independence Day has managed to elude the maestro of disaster in the intervening years. Just having “Roland Emmerich” and “disaster” in the same sentence has gotten cliché, and I’m happy to say that with his grandest and most destructive film yet, he has reached the pinnacle of the scope and scale that you can fit into a 2-hour motion picture.

It doesn’t get any bigger than this, and I’d like to believe that the misfires since Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saved the planet in terrifically entertaining fashion have been experiments on the part of Emmerich, looking at the genre from different perspectives, as preparation for this movie. Whatever you think 2012 is going to be when you enter the theater, this is a movie that manages to deliver the goods on virtually every level, even if the quality level of those goods isn’t enough to make it a “great” piece of filmmaking. It is perfectly happy with the type of film it sets out to be, and the fact that it knows its boundaries so well means that it wrings every last bit of action and emotion from each scene, flowing effortlessly from massive special effects to interpersonal drama. I was shocked at how personal the movie was at times, with a story painted on such a broad canvas that has more than enough heart to see the audience through the darkness.

Big props go to the casting people behind this behemoth, as they found literally the only people I can think of who could give us believable emotion when faced with overwhelming amounts of green screen and SFX laden material. I will believe John Cusack is staring at a volcano exploding as he runs for a plane in mid take-off, I will believe Amanda Peet as his estranged wife who is juggling responsibility for her family and a desire to reconcile what is happening to the world around her, I will believe Chiwetel Ejiofor as almost anything, especially a scientist who becomes a key part of the cabinet, and I will believe that America would elect Danny Glover as president of the United States over just about every actor who has played a president in the last 20 years. I save the best for last, as special recognition has to go to Oliver Platt’s terrific performance as senator turned advisor turned leader who imbues the other side of each debate with enough gravitas and charisma that you know he believes every line he’s delivering. Between Cusack and Platt, the audience is swept up on this journey and feels each horrific event through the cast, including a handful of wonderful cameos I won’t spoil here. I wasn’t expecting anything close to strong writing or strong character work from this one, and it elevated the whole movie well above my expectation level.

The effects are… well… you need to see this on as big a screen as humanly possible. I’m not sure if they’re offering any IMAX prints, but if they aren’t, they are wasting a phenomenal opportunity. The special effects work here is akin to a national geographic special about the end of the world, and to say that many of the sequences will have you holding onto the arms of you chair is a gigantic understatement. Part of me doesn’t ever want to see another disaster movie again, as this would be the perfect cap on a legacy that goes back to the original The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. This level of production and special effects research is the culmination of everything movies have been working towards since the first computer generated effect, and though I trust in James Cameron to bring things to a whole new level with Avatar, this is like the end of a generational era in blockbuster filmmaking. They don’t make movies like this anymore and they probably won’t try to again. If this is going to be the nail in the disaster genre’s coffin, I can’t think of a better swan song. Perfect it certainly is not, camp is always waiting in the wings, and it doesn’t try to be more than a B-movie because that would lose the charm that keeps us engaged. Bravo Mr. Emmerich, you may well have crafted your masterpiece.

A Christmas Carol Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: A-

Well that sure wasn’t the movie I was expecting to see when I walked into the theater. Granted, I didn’t have very high hopes of Robert Zemeckis’s retelling of the single most adapted story ever written, and I’m still not a hundred percent behind his belief in motion capture as the future of the medium, but for the first time he’s actually provided me with solid evidence of what the technology has under the hood and it is truly breathtaking. Not Avatar breathtaking to be fair, but far beyond anything you saw in The Polar Express or Beowulf.

Lets begin with the good. The 3D transfer is subtle enough to avoid pandering to the classic tropes of children’s fare where things pop out of the picture obnoxiously or characters push themselves through the screen and into the audience. The depth exists, but isn’t forced on the viewer, and has more of a living painting aesthetic than something out of a creepy wax museum diorama. The flying sequences, and there are several, are among the best uses of 3D I’ve witnessed, really harnessing the sensation of hurtling through the air to an almost unsettling degree. My bet is that it will be just as beautiful in 2D, just without the added rush.

Jim Carrey’s Scrooge is undeniably a perfect fit from both a casting and conceptual level. You can see every facet of the performance emanating through the character, and for an actor like Carrey who thrives on his lack of subtlety, the honesty and simplicity of the acting here is the foundation of the believability of the entire world. Everything hinges on us indentifying with old Ebenezer, and thanks to the artists working overtime behind the scenes, we are able to do so like never before.

The script itself is also a wonderful adaptation of the source material, drawing heavily on the kind of dialogue that feels as though it was imprinted in our cultural upbringing since birth. There is a definite comfort level at work here, and even when the film strays from the beaten path on occasion, we never get the sense that the tangents aren’t serving the story, unlike many sequences in Zemeckis’s previous Christmas themed exploit. He serves as both writer and director here, and the loving care behind every shot is a wonder to behold. Sure we have one unnecessary chase sequence involving a transformation of physical size, but it can be forgiven in an otherwise wonderful retelling.

The bad here is never truly awful, but is just enough to slide this one out of contention for the greatest production the story has ever known. The aforementioned chase sequence not withstanding, there are plenty of moments where the motion-capture just doesn’t work very well. It’s surely more hits than misses this time around, and it can be so incredibly lifelike, but at its worst it still looks like some variation on the Play-doh your younger relatives may be busying themselves with during the film’s darker moments. It doesn’t skimp on the creep factor either, and is faithful to a lot of the scarier elements of the original story. In some cases, it may be too dark for extremely young kids, but at the same time, parents really need to grow a pair in regards to sheltering their sons and daughters. Of all the things your kids could be watching, at least A Christmas Carol is a terrific story, and the frightening scenes work to make the conclusion all the brighter. It’s a timeless tale, and this is one version which will surely be around for years to come.

Jennifer’s Body Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B+

If you’re already shocked by the grade, believe me, I am too. I will preface this by saying that if you were born before 1980… you will not get this movie. In all likelihood, you won’t find it all that funny, and you won’t understand how teenagers can look or sound so stupid. If you are a horror fan, you will get more out of Jennifer’s Body due to the way it cleverly twists age old horror clichés while managing to maintain a feeling of dread not unlike its classic roots in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. The enjoyment to be found in this film is how wholly 2009 it is, and should it gain a cult following over the next few years, I guarantee revisiting it will slam you right back into the same seat where you saw it for the first time.

Diablo Cody is an interesting example of a screenwriter who doesn’t make a distinction between what she says and what she writes. Whenever you attempt to create dialogue, it’s almost always a conversation you’re having in your head, not something that you know real people will say. Cody leapfrogs the barrier between written and spoken word to deliver lines that are full of her own crackling wit while playing at perfectly natural, almost improvised levels of honesty. This movie, along with Juno and Superbad, is the closest Hollywood has come to writing a screenplay that accurately reflects how modern teenagers communicate, and here is where it is likely to become dated in the future. Sure there are plenty of references that feel a little contrived, but the majority of them are so spot-on that they have a painfully sharp quality, a barbed sting against the vain consumerism of pop culture. Cody knows she’s good with dialogue, and even where the set ups for the words falter slightly, they lend more than enough energy to revitalize the scenes.

That brings us to the cast, an eclectic collection of different types of people, the kind of diversity not normally associated with a horror film, but which would be right at home in your local high school cafeteria. Megan Fox is that girl, the self obsessed hot chick that eats men… only now she does it literally. Amanda Seyfried does a wonderful job as the sandbox best friend who’s still our title character’s go-to-girl despite not growing up to be gorgeous and man-eating. Her character, named Needy, is the true heroine of our story and manages strong turns in both the dramatic and comedic moments. The film switches between the horror and the comedy at lightning pace, and they needed actors who could believably keep up. Seyfried is the definite highlight, as we think we know where she’s going to end up, without really believing how she gets there.

Megan Fox is the obvious draw of the film, and not unlike marketing Star Wars with Darth Vader’s helmet, the antagonist here manages to command much of the runtime. Possibly more frightening than the scares in the movie itself, Fox actually manages to have some acting chops, and though Jennifer has a lot of similarities to Transformers’ Mikaela from an eye candy perspective, she spends just as much time looking hideous or disgusting, a level of transformation which Fox sells surprisingly well.

The story is modulated at a brisk pace, supplemented by some great musical cues and a repeating motif surrounding the rock group who set the story in motion. They attempt to sacrifice a virgin in order to gain fame and fortune, and since Jennifer is not a virgin, the ritual goes horribly wrong, sending a demon into her lifeless body. The fact that Cody brings the band back into the story at so many points speaks to the twisted nature of fate, especially horror movie fate, as each reference or appearance gets a laugh as well as advances the story closer to its bloody conclusion.

Here’s where it all pays off. You can almost judge horror films completely on the strength of their final act, as it is here where the vast majority of them are unable to sustain the weight of what came before and collapse, breaking their own rules in the process. Jennifer’s Body never breaks its own rules, having built a world in which almost anything could conceivably occur. With such a surreal set up, the conclusion nails the emotional core of the movie, and does what so many serious films of the genre fail to do, believably resolve their original premise. For that reason, I feel honor bound to praise the effort as not only a great satire of horror conventions, but a well designed horror film in its own right.

Megan Fox will ensure that teenagers will buy a ticket, and they’ll end up with a lot more than they bargained for. This is a movie with a female protagonist and a female antagonist, written by a woman, and directed by a woman. The fact that both genders will find this movie so entertaining is a testament to good storytelling across the board, and I predict it will be a surprisingly big hit at the box office… though I have been wrong before. Is it the next… anything? Sort of, if only that it’s a story and a setting that this generation can actually embrace as their own. You won the Oscar with an indie drama, and you follow it up with an incredibly entertaining horror flick. Diablo Cody, I salute you.