24 May - "He'd let you die."

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

dir. J.J. Abrams  (Super 8, 2011)

CAST
Chris Pine (Carriers, 2009)
Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, 2009)
Zoe Saldana (Burning Palms, 2010)
Karl Urban (Priest, 2011)
Benedict Cumberbatch (War Horse, 2011)
Anton Yelchin (The Beaver, 2011)
Bruce Greenwood (Double Jeopardy, 1999)
Simon Pegg (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010)
John Cho (Total Recall, 2012)
Joseph Gatt (Thor, 2011)
Tony Guma (Mission: Impossible III, 2006)

I saw Star Trek 2 on a rainy day in Rome, New York, with my friends from the the 2013 Tuscarora Migration Project as we took a hiatus from kayaking due to inclement weather conditions on Oneida Lake. It was probably the perfect movie to see under such conditions.

Since Star Trek already established our characters back in 2009, now we have the luxury of jumping straight into plot and conflict. Just to be safe, however, the movie opens at a breakneck pace with Kirk and Spock racing like devils through a white-red-yellow alien landscape, being chased by mud-daubed alien primitives. It was a great homage to something that might have happened in so many original series episodes. It also served the purpose of re-establishing our characters, Spock is logical to a fault, Kirk flies by the seat of his pants, and everyone else is just tagging along for the ride.

Unfortunately, we also had to sit through the "development" of Spock and Uhura's romantic relationship, which used Spock's self-sacrifice in the first scene to spin off a whole sub-plot of Uhura and Spock passive-aggressive infighting. This was tedious and otherwise irrelevant to the plot.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan, a genetically-modified superhuman based on the DNA of Ghengis Khan, historical badass. They don't mention that in the movie but they say so in the TV series when the Khan character is first introduced. Our heroes also have to deal with the war-mongering head of Starfleet Command, and in all other ways to save the day.

Problems:

I'm hoping that when Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy's reprisal of future-Spock) referred to Spock defeating Khan only at "a great price," he was alluding to the next sequel, because all in all, it was not very difficult to defeat Khan.

Uh-oh, Dr. McCoy used Khan's blood to cure Kirk's severe radiation poisoning. This means the laws of death no longer apply and it's going to create a slew of plot holes in the future.

26 Nov - Life of Pi

Life of Pi (2012)

dir. Ang Lee - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

CAST
Suraj Sharma
Irrfan Khan Slumdog Millionaire (2000)
Gérard Depardieu The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

I went to see Life of Pi in 3D at the for-real movie theater with a fella. We watch a lot of movies together but at $10 a pop (even with a student discount) going to the cinema still seems like a big deal. We saw another movie together...it was Taken 2. Which I think would have been better named, Taken, Too. But no one asks what I think. He didn't even read the book, Life of Pi, I mean, by Yann Martel. I know I read it when it first came out because I still have the hardback copy at home somewhere. Sometimes I'm really disappointed when I choose a book based on the bright colors (plus a tiger) on it's cover, but in this case I was right to choose as I did. I think I read it twice.

The movie preserved the key elements of the book, but I think lost a little in the streamlining of the plot. While I'm never thrilled about a movie that's more than 2 hours long, I wish some of the parts where Pi's just sitting around were preserved. These are the scenes where we get to feel the thrill of his smallest accomplishments, learning to fish, using the solar still, when he catches a turtle. Without these trials, Pi's survival is punctuated only by fortuitous interventions, the school of flying fish, the carnivorous island, etc.

1 Aug - "The supermodels, Willy? That's all they are. Bottled promise."

Beautiful Girls (1996)

dir. Ted Demme (The Ref, 1994)

CAST
Matt Dillon (There's Something About Mary, 1998)
Noah Emmerich (The Truman Show, 1998)
Annabeth Gish (Mystic Pizza, 1988)
Lauren Holly (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, 1993)
Timothy Hutton (Serious Moonlight, 2009)
Rosie O'Donnell (A League of Their Own, 1992)
Max Perlich (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986)
Martha Plimpton (The Goonies, 1985)
Natalie Portman (The Professional, 1994)
Michael Rapaport (True Romance, 1993)
Mira Sorvino (Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, 1997)
Uma Thurman (Les Miserables, 1998)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (JFK, 1991)
Sam Robards (American Beauty, 1999)
David Arquette (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992)
Adam LeFevre (Jungle 2 Jungle, 1997)
John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, 1996)

Beautiful Girls is one of those movies about High School friends being unable to cope with the reality of adulthood. You can put it on the shelf next to The Big Chill and St. Elmo's Fire. Uniting the friends is an inability to manage their romantic relationships. There are two rational, self-aware characters in this movie, one is Vera, the bartender's cousin from Chicago, played by Uma Thurman. The other is the sassy friend, played by Rosie O'Donnell. The men seem to excuse their own inability to commit to their respective womenfolk by the fact they haven't yet found "the perfect woman" the sassy friend scolds them for chasing a fantasy, and says that they would get bored of their imaginary supermodels even if they ever managed to find them. That's true enough, their girls may dress like New Englanders in the '90s, but they're all played by very attractive actresses. Uma Thurman's characters I guess is supposed to represent the perfect woman made real. but she's unattainable because she has a boyfriend back in Chicago that is mentioned all of twice. She's cool, does he own thing, and her friendly gestures are always misinterpreted as permission for a romantic advancement. She turns all the guys down.

So what's the point? It would seem that based on this movie, men are children and women are adults that must put up with their ridiculous behavior. That's a silly idea.

27 May - "Always count your bullets, senoritas"

Bandidas (2006)

dir. Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg

CAST
Penelope Cruz (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)
Salma Hayek (Desperado, 1995)
Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do! 1996)
Dwight Yoakam (Wedding Crashers, 2005)
Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down, 2001)
Gary Carlos Cervantes (Scarface, 1983)
Joseph D. Reitman (Lady in the Water, 2006)
Daya Fernandez (Minority Report, 2002)

Bandidas is a comedy about two oversexualized Mexican women, one who is from a wealthy family and knows about archery and horseback riding and etiquette (Hayak), and one who is from a poor family and is rough-and-tumble (Cruz). At first they hate each other because Hayak is snooty and Cruz is ill-mannered, but when a land-baron has both of their fathers murdered, they team up and become friends instead. Steve Zahn plays a nerdy detective and although the ladies engage in a rivalry for his attention, he ends up with a white woman from the good ol' U.S.A. instead. This was an amusing movie, but it was also racist and sexist and it's important to acknowledge that sometimes we find ourselves amused for all of the wrong reasons.

2 April - "You are the epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being."

Chasing Amy (1997)

dir. Kevin Smith -Mallrats (1995)

CAST
Ethan Suplee - Desert Blue (1998)
Ben Affleck - Dazed and Confused (1993)
Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Jason Lee - Dogma (1999)
Dwight Ewell - Party Girl (1995)
Joey Lauren Adams - Mallrats (1995)
Guinevere Turner - American Psycho (2000)
Carmen Llywelyn - Never Been Kissed (1999)
Matt Damon - Mystic Pizza (1988)
Welker White - Dead Poets Society (1989)
Ernest O'Donnell - Clerks. (1994)
Brian O'Halloran - Clerks II (2006)

I'm almost positive that this is my second-favorite Kevin Smith movie (Clerks - obviously). It's about comic book artist Holden (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with fellow comic book artist Alyssa and is undetered by the fact that she is homosexual. With perseverance, he succeeds in winning her heart, surprise! The catch comes when he learns more about the sexual misdeeds of her past, and is unable to accept her for her past. The irony is not lost on the supporting characters, who altogether scold Holden for rejecting the woman he loved because he couldn't condone the person she had been, even though she had completely changed herself to be with him.

The difficult question that always sticks with me after I watch this movie is whether Holden is supposed to be a villain or not. Of course you could say that in true Kevin Smith form there aren't any real villains (except in Dogma) but only these schlubby man-children trying to establish a coherent purpose as they bumble through their mundane lives punctuated only by comic book references and the recollections of women they've banged in the past (but rarely turn up in the course of the movie-story itself). But I repeat the question: is Holden an unlikely hero for winning Alyssa's heart and then tragically losing it, or is he a villain for discarding her hard-won affection?

1 April - "That wasn't one of my first instincts "

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

dir. F. Gary Gray

CAST
Jamie Foxx - Toys (1992)
Garard Butler - The Ugly Truth (2009)
Colm Meaney - The Commitments (1991)
Bruce McGill - Elizabethtown (2005)
Leslie Bibb - Iron Man 2 (2010)
Michael Irby - Flightplan (2005)
Gregory Itzin - Adaptation. (2002)
Regina Hall - Danika (2006)
Christian Stolte - Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Annie Corley - The Cider House Rules (1999)
Richard Portnow - Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Viola Davis - The Help (2011)
Michael Kelly - Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009)
Dan Bittner - Adventureland (2009)
Brooke Stacy Mills - Hairspray (1988)
Brian Anthony Wilson - The Happening (2008)

I didn't like this movie at all. I don't even have anything good to say about it. It's about a guy who's wife and daughter are murdered, but through legal whateverness one of the guys who did it gets a light sentence because he cooperated with the rest of the investigation. The Gerard Butler character is so pissed off that he goes totally batshit crazy and orchestrates a complicated scheme to get back at the justice system. What I particularly dislike about this movie is not even the ambiguous morality, its the lack of a clear division between anti-hero and antagonist. My friend Cora clearly was in the anti-hero camp. She said that the point of the movie was to figure out how Gerard Butler was achieving these heinous murder-plots. I thought that was horrible to watch because most of the people that Butler's character killed were only tangentially related to the incident which pissed him off so much in the first place. He wasn't fighting for anything, and that made him a bad protagonist to root for. On the other hand, he makes a fatal error in the end and blows up, making Jamie Foxx the "winner" of the story and Butler the "loser." But even in that perspective I don't think any clear statement about the evils of either the justice system or the evils of vigilantism was made. And the grrrwehatecorruptlawyers trope induced in my the repulsive horror of what those ideas mean to people who really believe in them. Batman is pretty cool, but in the real world I don't condone vigilantes.You can't just go around killing people. Do I even have to say that?

The absence of a conflict resolution (was there even a conflict to begin with?) made me feel like I had only seen half of a movie. This wasn't a story, it was just a bunch of stuff that happens. I've seen movies about dudes with misdirected anger before, but Gerard Butler lacked the compelling interior logic of a character like Hannibal Lector. I say, if you're going to make an anti-hero, go all the way. It works for Dexter. But if you're going to waffle in-between you aren't going to accomplish anything meaningful.

26 March - "Fancy me a heroine"

The African Queen (1951)

dir. John Huston (The Unforgiven, 1960)

CAST
Humphrey Bogart - The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Katharine Hepburn - Little Women (1933)
Peter Bull - Dr. Dolittle (1967)

The African Queen is set in Africa during WW1. When Germans take over a village where a missionary and his sister are staying, the missionary dies of fever and despair and his sister, Rose, is left on her own to find a way to survive and get home. She teams up with Bogart's lowbrow character Charlie Allnut, but this odd couple ends up having more in common than they thought when Rose develops some spunk and decides that the pair of them need to take their little steamboat (the title character!) to liberate Lake Victoria from a German warship blocking English ships from entering the interior.