Real Steel
Real Steel (2011)
★★★ / ★★★★
Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) was addicted to robot gambling which was inopportune, in the least, because he was neck-deep in debt. After his robot was demolished by a raging bull, he was informed that his former girlfriend had passed away and his son, Max (Dakota Goyo), needed an official guardian. Charlie was to appear in court to pick up the boy, but Max’ aunt, Debra (Hope Davis), who married a rich man, wanted to adopt him. For a hundred thousand dollars, the gambler made a deal, unbeknownst to Max and Debra, with the husband: Max was to spend time with his father over the summer but he was to be returned in Debra’s care after their trip to Italy. Written by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Jeremy Leven, “Real Steel” managed to be quite involving as it explored the connection between father and son through robot fighting. The picture was smart in first establishing Charlie as our protagonist on the path to self-destruction. He was a good guy, but he often relied on instincts instead of measured calculation to make a quick buck. On the outside, he seemed to do it for the money. He was a former boxer who saw himself as a failure in that field. I looked at him and considered that perhaps he gambled for the rush. Maybe watching his robot fight was like being in the ring himself. As his machines were eradicated, so were his personal connections. Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), his somewhat girlfriend and the daughter of the man who taught him to box, really needed the money that Charlie burrowed to pay for the gym she managed. This made him so desperate, he didn’t even think twice to sell his son. Charlie and Max were quite opposite but the same in important ways. Meeting for the first time, the son suspected that he’d been sold and asked his father if he, in fact, was. Charlie told the boy the truth but Max, plucky and sarcastic, digested the information with dignity and dealt with it on his own. When presented by bad news, neither shriveled; both saw it as a chance to start anew and to prove everybody wrong. That was the reason why I wanted Charlie and Max to succeed as robot gamblers and as father and son. Notice that I haven’t even discussed the robots. That’s because they were secondary to the human drama that propelled the movie forward, yet necessary as a catharsis for these characters. Max stumbled upon a robot named Atom in a junkyard. It was a sparring robot, designed to take a lot of hits but not actually hit back as effectively. With the help of Charlie’s robots, Ambush and Noisy Boy, that had been destroyed, Max was able to extract necessary pieces from them to make Atom stronger in both offense and defense. Eventually, they won enough fights to gain popularity and be invited to World Robot Boxing Tournament in which they had to face Zeus, the undefeated robot champion. Based on “Steel,” a short story by Richard Matheson, “Real Steel,” directed by Shawn Levy, was ultimately a story of redemption. Our decision to emotionally invest in the characters, if one so chooses, was worthwhile because it wasn’t just about metals clanging against each other like in Michael Bay’s egregious “Transformers” movies. There was something real at stake. That is, a father finding his son and recognizing that he was good enough even though he wasn’t perfect.
Synecdoche, New York
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
★★ / ★★★★
This is the kind of movie that is frustrating to watch because its ambition got in the way of true emotional resonance. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a theater director who one day decides to make an epic life-size play about his whole life. He makes that decision because he wants to know how his life turns out the way it is, to understand why his relationship with the people he loves most simply did not work. There are four women in his life that have impacted him greatly: Samantha Morton, a box-office worker, Hope Davis, a shrink, Michelle Williams, a stage actress, and Catherine Keener, Caden’s wife. The first thirty minutes of this picture is very engaging: I felt how alienated Caden was because he doesn’t feel appreciated by his family and the people he works with. That frustration (and maybe even a bit of rage) begins to manifest physically and he starts to think more negatively about himself to the point where he ends up believing that he’s dying. The point where I started to get confused was when the movie decided to jump forward in time multiple times. I began to lose track of who Caden can still connect with, his motivations, and where he’s ultimately going to end up. On top of that initial confusion, Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director, kept adding elements of existentialism and sequences that might have or might not have happened. The movie got way into itself to the point where I couldn’t relate at all. I’ve read a plethora of critics’ reviews that this is a great film because of its ambition. To me, ambition can only get a movie so far. With ambition, a film must also be able to take its audiences to whether it decides to go no matter how ludicrous the destination. With this film, I felt left out of the loop and constantly wondered what was going on. Even though it’s not as accessible and relatable as I would’ve liked (especially for a movie that’s about life and death), I’m still giving this movie a mediocre rating because I did like some of the elements and issues it tried to tackle.
Black Snake Moan, The Dead Zone, The Matador
Black Snake Moan
[ 3 stars out of 4 ]
As strange as this film is, it’s ultimately a story about redemption. There’s something beautiful about the uneveness of this movie: the first twenty minutes are focused, the middle doesn’t know where to go, and the last twenty minutes regained its focus and offered something a little extra–something touching and real. I think this is one of my favorite roles of Christina Ricci: she’s a sex addict at first glance but we see her evolve until the last frame. Samuel L. Jackson is complex, to say the least, and every time he refers to the Bible, I think of his speech on “Pulp Fiction.” Just when you think he’s going to take his character one way, he takes it in the opposite direction and it feels refreshing. Justin Timberlake surprised me again like he did in “Alpha Dog.” Just when I thought he’d be the weakest link in the film, he more than held his own again A-list actors like Ricci and Jackson. There were a few highlights in the picture: Ricci’s “agony” on the grass when Timberlake left to serve in the war, when Ricci realizes that Jackson has tied a chain around her, when Jackson sings the blues while Ricci seductively dances in a pub, and when Jackson and Ricci made music together. Those scenes are so memorable, it makes up for most of the film’s shortcomings. Still, this is a very different movie so I can’t recommend this to just about anyone. It requires close viewing because some of the changes that the characters go through are shown in a subtle (and sometimes frustrating) manner.
Dead Zone, The
[ 3 stars out of 4 ]
Most people put this under the horror genre but this is a supernatural thriller more than anything. This film, directed by David Cronenberg, is smart because instead of avoiding the question of how will people react if they know about the main character’s ability to tell the future, it tackles the subject head-on and drives the story forward. I completely bought that Christopher Walken has the power of premonition because of his soft-spoken nature but knowledgeable (yet shifty) eyes. I also bought the romance between Walken and Brooke Adams because they had chemistry. My main problem with the film is that it feels like it’s divided into episodes: how the ability came about was part one, the murderer of the town was part two, the boy that was being tutored was part three, and the political figure played by Martin Sheen was part four. The only organic parts of the story that seemed to flow was Walken’s interactions with Adams and Herbert Lom, the doctor that took care of Walken while he was in a coma for five years. My other minor problem is that path that Walken’s character had taken in the end was very different from the character we got to know throughout the picture. Still, there’s a lot to recommend here such as solid acting from all the actors and a smart concept by Stephen King. This is a pretty solid “what if” movie that poses a lot of philosophical questions worth thinking about.
Matador, The (2005)
[ 4 stars out of 4 ]
“I’m as serious an erection problem.” I loved this film the first time I saw it because this is a classic ordinary guy meets a not-so-ordinary guy… with a little something extra. The timing and pace of this picture is impeccable: the first forty-five minutes focus on how Greg Kinnear, a businessman, and Pierce Brosnan, an assassin, meet and the last forty-five minutes focus on how their lives have changed after their meeting. By the end of the movie, I realized that from the first scene to the last, it kept getting better and better–I wanted to for it to be longer because I was really interested in getting to know the characters a little more. Once you think a character is one way, that assumption is blurred by another scene so you have to make room for reevaluation. Greg Kinnear is perfect as a regular Joe who doesn’t see how good he has it despite being often down on his luck. One can tell from his eyes that he craves something exciting, something new. Hope Davis is really funny, as usual, as a once tormented high school kid who can’t quite let go of what happened to her son. Her sensitive moments were heartbreaking and her character was established with a relatively short period of screen time. Last but not least, Pierce Brosnan is very believable as an assassin who eventually loses his touch while at the same time realizing that he doesn’t have any friends because of occupation. I think his age does give him edge without sacrificing his signature charisma. I also love the fact that his sexuality is always vague so his character is that much more interesting. There are a lot of inside jokes (accidental or otherwise) that made me laugh and one of them was the job in The Philippines. Those scenes were so funny to me because none of the supposed Filipinos on screen even looked remotely Filipino. I really couldn’t stop laughing and I thought it was great. Written and directed by Richard Shepard, this is one of my favorite dark comedies because it reminded me a lot of another favorite film of mine called “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.”
