Gangs of New York

I'll be honest, I usually find historical epics to be pretty boring. Even the good ones could use some trimming. Leave it to Martin Scorsese though to create one that's gripping from the first second of its nearly three hour running time to the last. It tells the story of New York City before it became the mecca of human civilization it is today, when the streets still ran red with the blood of the many warring factions that vied for influence and their many victims. The film isn't a true story, but besides some embellishments it may as well have been. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio in his first of four collaborations with Scorsese as the son of an Irish immigrant and leader of the Dead Rabbits, and Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher, the man who killed him. It starts with a war between two gangs for control of Five Points, a district in the city where the poor make do. The extremely bloody battle sets the tone for the rest of the film, establishing its main characters and their later motivations, as the plot quickly jumps forward to when DiCaprio's character has grown up.

The two best things about the movie are easily Scorsese's direction combined with the amazing work done to recreate 1800s New York and capture it on film, and Day-Lewis' performance. You could pretty much cut the protagonist out of the film and it could just be a great story about a leader of both crime and community in a city as it slowly develops into something resembling modern society. That's not really to slight DiCaprio, that's just how good Day-Lewis is. There's just something cool about the place the film creates, filled with hard men with curly mustaches, top hats, and razors and knives tucked into their clothing. And he epitomizes it with his glass eye and inscrutable nature. You never know if he's going to cut your throat or give you a pat on the shoulder. DiCaprio has his romantic foil, played by Cameron Diaz, can't quite measure up to his work, though they're perfectly fine otherwise.

The supporting cast is fantastic too, featuring recognizable faces in a variety of roles, supporting various sides as they see fit. Liam Neeson brings plenty of gravitas to the couple scenes in the beginning where he plays DiCaprio's father, which lends weight to later scenes where Bill shows clear ongoing respect for his former foe. The small time crew DiCaprio runs with features Al Capone from Boardwalk Empire and D'Angelo from The Wire, and Brendan Gleeson and John C. Reilly give interesting performances as former allies of Neeson who may no longer agree with his ideas. The film isn't without problems, of course. The entire third act is pretty messy, as though the screenwriters lost momentum and had to basically force things to make sure they managed to check off all the plot details they needed to to reach their conclusion. And that conclusion, while thematically appropriate, does result in a rather unfortunate anticlimax of an ending. With Scorsese at the helm though, all of those individual scenes manage to be good if not great, and he makes the problematic ending work because it's very clear what they're going for. He just knows how to make great movies, and this is certainly one of them.

Characters of the Decade: Part 4

One more to go after this one. Man, this really is TV heavy, isn't it?

Haruhi Suzumiya
Aya Hirano - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya


"Feelings of love are just a temporary lapse in judgment. Like a mental illness."

I might actually like mild-mannered narrator Kyon more, but the show's about Haruhi, and unlike the vast majority of characters, the universe really does revolve around her. She has a unique, eccentric personality that can make almost anything fun to watch, and is the sort of leader whose followers always wonder why they do what she says but do anyway. And there are enough glimpses at her normal, affectionate side in between world threatening crises that she's inadvertently responsible for that she comes through as a person and not just a cipher for the writers' wacky ideas. I guess I like that kind of character a lot, don't I?

Dexter Morgan
Michael C. Hall - Dexter


"Harry and Dorris Morgan did a wonderful job raising me. But they're both dead now. I didn't kill them. Honest."

In a lot of ways, Dexter is a flawed show. It's frequently predictable and there's way too much time spent on supporting characters and subplots we never actually care about. It's easy to keep watching though, because Hall's work is so good. I admit to being a little tired of his dry narrating style at this point but he can still carry the series through any low points. Until very recently he's been one of the best actors I can think of who only works in television, but he's really damn good at it, finally getting recognized by the Golden globes recently (although that award's tainted because Bryan Cranston wasn't even nominated), and is why I gave Six Feet Under a shot, which turned out to be a good decision. He somehow finds a way to sell the sympathetic serial killer angle, and still be menacing when required. All you could ask for from a lead.

Dr. Steve Brule
John C. Reilly - Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!


"For your health!"

Reilly is supposedly a very good serious actor, although all I've ever seen from him is his brilliant comedy work. His best role is most pathetic, as the befuddled and under-qualified local news correspondent Dr. Steve Brule. He's good for a few appearances per season, and they're routinely pure gold. In addition to his terrible advice and wacky outtakes, there are a lot of things about the character that make him endearing in a sad way like his chronic loneliness and crush on married news anchor Jan Skylar. He's getting his own show soon, and I can't see how it won't be fantastic.

Juno MacGuff
Ellen Page - Juno


"Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?"

Juno's a really divisive movie. Some appreciate its uniquely goofy dialogue and moments of indie cuteness, while others can't stand it. I'm with the former, and a big part of why the movie works for me is Juno herself. She has a unique vocabulary for a teenager, but I'm not selective on what I allow films to be fanciful about, and she really sells the whole teenage girl with problems thing that I usually can't stomach for very long. In a movie I saw for Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, Ellen Page is the one who impressed me most.

Leon Black
J.B. Smoove - Curb Your Enthusiasm


"Barack Obama! I'm the President of hitting that ass!"

Probably the least scripted character on this list. In a show where everybody just says what comes to mind during the scene, Leon takes it to the extreme. He can make any topic funnier than should be possible, from the proper way to respond to an insult to the appropriate amount of discretion required when discussing a friend's wife whose ass you're hitting. I enjoyed seeing Smoove pop up in an episode of Castle and hope to see him get more opportunities, but to me he'll always be Leon.

Emerson Cod
Chi McBride - Pushing Daisies


"Bitch, I was in proximity!"

After watching the rather bad previews for Human Target, I almost decided to give it a shot. That's how much I like the whole cast of Pushing Daisies, and I liked Emerson most of all. While the show lived off its saccharine sweetness, Cod was the bitter one who kept it from floating off into space. He's a perfect foil for pretty much everyone else, and his combination of intuition, wit, and resourcefulness made each case into a classic film noir. The show made strides to humanize him during its short run with love interests and a missing daughter, but it probably didn't need to. He's the kind of guy who'd be a pleasure to watch visit the DMV.

GLaDOS
Ellen McLain - Portal


"That thing you burned up isn't important to me. It's the fluid catalytic cracking unit. It made shoes for orphans. Nice job breaking it, hero."

Portal was already a unique and brilliant mind-bending puzzle game, but GLaDOS made it something that every gamer should try. Just one of the funniest and best executed character arcs in the medium. Encouraging at first, the artificial intelligence guiding you through a test facility you never quite understand slowly becomes more sinister over time, and downright hostile after a certain point. But she never loses her sense of humor, logging one of the best percentages of successful one liners in history (I just made that up, but it sounds right). Plus the song at the end is just icing on the cake. I just made myself groan.

Anton Chigurh
Javier Bardem - No Country for Old Men


"Would you hold still please, sir?"

It's rare to see such an intimidating force of nature in a film. Compared to the other people in the story, Chigurh is almost a caricature, a flesh and blood Terminator that will stop at nothing to accomplish his task. He also sort of rips off Two-Face's gimmick, although he pulls it off better. It's sort of his lack of humanity that makes him work though, taking the movie from being a solid, off-beat thriller and making it into a pretty impressive, unique work that stands alone. I'm not sure if it's exactly a brilliant performance, but it's certainly exactly what it needed to be.

Nathan Drake
Nolan North - Uncharted series


"I didn't think that far ahead!"

As video game protagonists were getting too grim and gritty, Nate came along and reminded people that heroes are allowed to be likable. Sure, his carefree attitude doesn't quite work with his near-genocidal kill count after only two games, but work with me here. It's shifted the tone of a lot of modern action games, and there's been so much demand for North's voice work that the Internet backlash is already well underway. It's clear from some of his roles that he has a good deal of range, but his classic sarcastic good guy voice is what people want, and I'll forever associate it with the first and still most interesting character I heard it from, Mr. Drake.

Daniel Plainview
Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood


"One night I'm gonna come to you, inside of your house, wherever you're sleeping, and I'm gonna cut your throat."

I think my favorite single adjective I've heard used to describe Day-Lewis' work in this film was when Quentin Tarantino called it "volcanic". It just fits, doesn't it? There's really not much I can say about it that hasn't been said better by people who have a deeper understanding of acting. I just know that I've never been more impressed while watching somebody in a film. From his silent actions in the very beginning, to his dark charisma as his business gets going, to his increasing madness as the film continues and to the final scene which is both funny and startling, there's not a moment that could have been obviously improved. I won't forget it any time soon.

Walter White
Bryan Cranston - Breaking Bad


"We are going to make a good product that does what it is supposed to, as advertised. No emulsifiers, no baking powder, no bleach, no chili powder."

Despite the Golden Globes' continued negligence (Seriously, Avatar's the movie of the year? Why did I even look up the results?), even the slightly less maligned Emmys managed to see what everyone else has the last couple years with Cranston's great work on Breaking Bad the last two years. Watching a man learn that he was dying, turn desperately to crime to help his family, go back and forth hope and despair, and ultimately lose sight of what's important in his life has been a really eye opening experience. We always knew Cranston could be funny, but I've been a lot more impressed by this. I can only wonder what Walter will do next.

Bryan Mills
Liam Neeson - Taken


"That is what happens when you sit behind a desk. You forget things, like the weight in the hand of a gun that's loaded and one that's not."

What should have been a simple revenge-driven action movie ended up being pretty brilliant thanks to to lead's increasing willingness to abandon reason or sympathy in his quest to get his daughter back. More movies should just put guns in the hands of respected veteran actors and see what happens, because it totally worked out here with Neeson. In some ways it's a bog standard thriller, it's just that extra 10% of gravitas and brutality that makes it one of my favorite films ever of the type. Why exactly did they sit on this for a year before releasing it in America?

Concluded tomorrow.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

The Chronicles of Narnia is sort of the more child friendly, overbearingly Christian cousin of The Lord of the Rings, and after the success of the latter as a film franchise, there's little surprise that someone would follow suit with the former. The first movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was pretty decent to my memory. It's less of a war movie in places and more of a kid's fairy tale, but it had some interesting ideas.

I liked Prince Caspian more though, as it seems more focused on telling a complete story and is just more confident with everything. There's no Mr. Tumnus prancing around or Turkish Delight being eaten, just the story of a war for the future of the land. The action scenes are actually pretty darn good for a PG movie, from a clandestine assault on a castle by moonlight to a deadly show of single combat on the field of battle. They make a point of showing how hundreds of years have passed since the last time the kids appeared in Narnia, with most of the mystical creatures sequestered into the forest and the rest reverted into wild animals. A human empire has taken over the land, and the battle between them and the natives is a nice contrast with the first movie which had their loyalties divided between a magical lady and a magical Jesus cat.

Um... yeah. Movies. A lot of the humor is kind of obvious and cheesy, but there are a couple chuckles to be had. Eddie Izzard plays a talking mouse, and his lines all kind of suck but it's still cool because he's Eddie Izzard. The kids are uniformly less annoying than the first movie, which is good. If there's one thing sequels have over initial installments it's not having to waste time establishing familiarity with setting and characters and all that. The uh... the special effects are pretty good. The battles are nice but the ending was fairly Deus Ex Machina. I'm willing to watch more of these movies, especially since the next one has such a bad ass title. Go look it up. Seriously, bad ass.

Taken

I have to admit, my opinion of Besson's ability to make a script for and put together a kick ass movie was slipping a bit, but Taken showed me he still has some tricks up his sleeve. It's a bit light on plot and intelligence or subtlety to the dialogue, but it's the perfect vehicle for one of the most enjoyable straight-up revenge movies I've seen. You pretty much know everything you need to from the commercials that either focus on the pivotal scene where Liam Neeson's daughter get captured or show a montage of him beating the shit out of people. Put those together, and that's what the movie is. Morel's directorial debut was with District B13, another Besson script, and he really seems to know how to do action in the Bourne/new Bond style that I like so much, although the camera is thankfully a little less spastic when stuff's happening. The part is much more physically demanding than artistically challenging for Neeson, although he brings his usual great self to it and handles everything better than you'd expect from a 56 year old.

There's really not too much to say about Taken without just gushing about how cool Liam is. He's not just a good fighter, he has all sorts of skills that he uses creatively to look for his daughter. He gathers the clues he needs a bit conveniently and quickly, but it works to drive the very tight pacing forward as he tears a path of destruction to find what he came for. And when the action does get going, it's really quite good. To be honest, I wasn't completely feeling the movie for the first hour. There were some cool moments, but the biggest scene was a car chase through dirt that I didn't much care for, and it wasn't totally clicking. But as the film goes on and Neeson's daughter gets closer to being lost forever, he gets visibly more determined and starts going further to take care of things, and his desperation shows as the brutality of his actions builds. It's effective both from a story perspective and the fact that it makes the movie backloaded, with standout moments occuring more and more frequently as it approaches the end. There aren't any big surprises to watch out for or complicated repercussions, it's just an unrelenting, very direct film that puts everything on the table and says, "Here's what we did, enjoy it if you want to." And I did enjoy it quite a lot.

Fallout 3

I haven't played any of the other Fallout games, but from what I can tell, Bethesda's first stab at the series takes the skill system and trademark sense of humor and transplants them effectively into Oblivion's engine. Coming out two and a half years later Fallout 3 isn't the big step forward I was hoping for, but it's still a great game when you play it. It still has some of Oblivion's glitches and awkward moments, but it does do a fair amount of things better. Characters look better, and there's way more variety in the voice actors. The speech and bartering system relies on numbers and chance instead of a conceptually moronic mini-game. There are little additions like an indicator if a container is empty so less time is spent searching for items. And they finally got the auto-leveling enemies thing right, in a best-of-both-worlds sort of scenario. The way it seems to work, wandering around outside will always produce enemies at a similar skill level to you, so it doesn't seem too easy. But once you've been to a specific location like an underground tunnel, the enemies will always stay at the level they were when you first went there, so going back for whatever reason lets you take care of them easily without having to worry about constantly getting beaten. It's a pretty good system, maybe the best that can be done with this sort of extremely non-linear game.

On that end, Fallout is in ways better and worse than the Elder Scrolls games. Doing only the side quests that naturally came my way while playing, I beat the main story in about 22 hours. I don't think that's much less than Oblivion, and Fallout's story is certainly more interesting. They really did a lot with the humor, making it a bit more enjoyable to just be in the world, and it has a number of quests that are more creative than anything else I've seen them do. Tranquility Lane springs instantly to mind. And there's a bit more freedom in proceeding through it, with multiple ways to complete certain objectives and a lot of options in the dialogue that make it replayable. But the whole world around the main quest is a bit more barren, and that's the part of Oblivion I liked the most. I know there's a number of significant things I haven't done yet, but it seemed like fun diversions just weren't as easy to stumble across. Only the Wasteland Survival Guide came close to having the depth of one of the Elder Scrolls' factions, and it's not even just the quests - wandering around a deserted wasteland and ramshackle towns built on destroyed pieces of the old civilization is a bit more depressing and purposefully empty than an intact fantasy empire. Fallout 3 is designed to be more focused and narrow than Oblivion, and I liked that game for its breadth.

Not that Fallout isn't very good at what it does. There was some concern about the combat system, but I think it works pretty well. The V.A.T.S. system to target specific weakpoints is useful, although I tended to go for the head pretty exclusively. The normal aiming isn't very good for a shooter, but it's functional enough that you don't feel helpless when you can't use V.A.T.S. and it can actually be satisfying to use it by itself. I didn't try too much melee combat, but it seemed to function a lot like Oblivion's without any blocking. The karma system seems a little deeper than the average good-or-evil gimmick more and more games seem to be having, and unlike most of the others, it actually gives a compelling reason to be neutral. The writing is better than some of their earlier work, and overall it's a bit more polished as a product. I've been comparing the game to Oblivion for the entire review, but in the end it's probably worth checking out if you're interested, even if you've never touched an Elder Scrolls game.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Episode I confirmed for long-time Star Wars fans what they feared after seeing the Special Editions of their beloved series: George Lucas doesn't know what a good movie is any more. I didn't really notice this when it came out, because I was 12, and I could relate to annoying little kids, and I liked sword fights, especially ones with glowing magic swords. And watching it again now, I don't see it so much as the beginning of the end for Lucas, but a funeral for his good sensibilities. In retrospect, it's the best of the trilogy, and not just because it contains the two best action scenes: the pod race and the fight with Darth Maul. Sure, it introduced many of the things that made the prequels shit on the old movies. Turning Jedi from people naturally attuned to the universe's mysticism into people with a larger infestation of parasites than others was a tragedy. Making everybody know everybody for the sake of cute winks to the audience (Haha, Darth Vader built C-3PO!) is stupid, and just hard to believe when your setting is a galaxy filled with turmoil and not a small town. But it did some things right, before the sequels continued the vicious cycle of more and more visual effects and absurd characterization until we ended up with The Clone Wars, also known as when Star Wars died.

Hell, Yoda's still a puppet in this one. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are two completely likable actors from the British Isles, Natalie Portman is somewhere between cute and gorgeous (Did you know she was born in Israel? Just found this out.), and the three form the nucleus of a decent adventure movie. Yeah, Jar Jar Binks sucks and is mildly racist. Yeah, Jake Lloyd is one of all too many kid actors who piss off grown ups in one or two movies and are never seen again. But the Battle Droids are just soldiers with digitized voices, not an army of fucking clowns. A lot of the sets actually existed in real life. "Duel of the Fates" is probably my favorite piece of Star Wars music. There's still a soul in the production somewhere, and as long as the main characters are good, you have a watchable film. I would not call it a good movie, because as I said earlier, George Lucas forgot what that is. But it's not that bad.

Batman Begins

I haven't been posting lately, mostly because I've been rewatching some old movies. No reason I can't talk about them, though.

Somewhere in between its release in 2005 and seeing The Dark Knight, I forgot that the first Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie was as good as it was. I still think Knight's better, but Begins is damn solid in its own right. What's impressive is how he manages to make films that capture the coolness of Batman and comic books in general without having particularly good action scenes. They're a big part of what makes the Spider-Man movies (at least the first two) great, which is the only super hero movie franchise I've enjoyed on the same level as the revived Batman, and usually what carries action movies in general, but they really aren't what makes Batman good. Sure, the fights are there, but they're pretty poorly filmed; lit too dimly, shot too close, and cut too fast. This is partly a stylistic choice to make Batman more secretive and menacing, but it doesn't make for particularly entertaining sequences. Both movies have had decent car chases, but it's really the characters that drive the show, and that's what makes them so much better than the other riffraff.

When Begins came out, origin stories were all the rage, and they still are to some extent, it's just that more properties are already established. A good origin story can be very compelling, the problem is they end up being similar and you can only see a guy accidentally gain powers and adapt to it over the course of an hour so many times before it gets boring. But that's what makes Begins interesting; not only is it a story we haven't heard before, it's one about a character's motives, not the magic MacGuffin that turns him into a freak. (Note: I intentionally misused the movie term "MacGuffin" here, because the next several films I'll be talking about are directed by a man who has no idea what it actually means. Guess who it is!) Showing Bruce Wayne's slow transition into Batman, one he makes because he comes to feel a true need to help people and not because he's strong enough to throw trucks now, is a truly interesting one, and then we get to the second half, which is a pretty darn good crime story besides the somewhat ludicrous doomsday device. The cast is obscenely good, with nearly every significant part played by a well-known talent, and despite the hate she got I think even Katie Holms was competent. Liam Neeson plays a good mentor, but he shows here that he can do other things as well. Besides the fights, the film's only failing in my eyes are the attempts at humor later on, which seem somehow more frequent as the drama builds and usually fall flat. Gordon's racing to get into place with the new Batmobile and stop the bad guys from destroying the whole city, do we really need a cutaway to a random bum telling him he likes his car? In any case, it's not perfect, but it's exactly the reboot Batman needed to fit into this era of a more serious super hero.