Se7en

One of my friends has been trying to get me to see this for maybe a decade now. I'm not sure why it took so long. David Fincher's Fight Club is one of my favorite movies. Maybe being repeatedly told to see it was subconsciously pushing me away. Whatever it was, it's definitely a good film. It's part crime movie, part suspense. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are a couple detectives in a strange city where everything looks run-down and it always rains. Pitt just moved to town to replace Freeman, who's set to retire at the end of the week, but a string of related murders start showing up, pointing to a serial killer obsessed with his own sense of justice and the seven deadly sins. It's a slow burn as they examine the aftermath of his painstaking, disturbing work and try to find connections that will lead to him before he finishes the job. It's clear that he's toying with them, almost challenging them to catch him while he goes about his business. As a look at the possible endpoint of what a human mind might be capable of putting together, it's intriguing and chilling at the same time.

In between checking crime scenes, the movie takes some time to develop the detectives when they're off the job. Pitt comes home to his wife played by Gwyneth Paltrow and their three dogs, while Freeman goes to the library, rarely able to stop thinking about work. There are a couple scenes where Paltrow confides in Freeman, the only man besides her husband she knows to turn to in a new city that she hates. It's unclear at first what the point of this stuff is besides preventing the entire movie from being a creepy detective story, but as the depths of the killer's horrifying plan are unraveled the truth becomes clear. Kevin Spacey has a good role, one of the more interesting in his career (which was nice to see, because it's been a while since I've seen him do a whole lot). It all builds to a huge downer of an ending, one that the studio fought against but ultimately had to happen for the movie to totally work. I should be more diligent about seeing Fincher's films, because he's certainly one of the most interesting directors of the last couple decades.

Unforgiven

Let me just take a moment to acknowledge David Peoples, a screenwriter who without me realizing it until now has written screenplays for three movies I've liked and blogged about in the last year and a half; this, 12 Monkeys, and Blade Runner. That's a pretty diverse and impressive list. Good on you, Peoples.

Anyway, Unforgiven is probably the best western I've ever seen. It's not the normal easy moral tale where some kindhearted gunslinger saves the township from evil bandits. There's no good guys or bad guys in this movie, just people on opposite sides of things. Clint Eastwood directed and stars as a former tough son of a bitch who got domesticated by his now-dead wife, but has to return to killing for the money. Morgan Freeman is his old partner who agrees to come along. Gene Hackman won an Oscar for his performance as the sheriff of the town the story revolves around, and he's equal parts dedicated lawman and vicious bastard. Richard Harris shows up as a dishonest gunman known as English Bob, and he's mostly there to give Hackman something to do while Eastwood and his posse take their good damn time getting to the plot. The movie seemed a bit slow in places, but I find that to be a common malady of the western genre, and the movie is well-written and well-put together enough to keep it from ever getting too dull.

Basically, some whores put together some money for a bounty on a couple cowboys outside Hackman's law, and Eastwood makes the long journey to try and collect. Obviously they end up at odds, and despite it not being the reason for the journey, the resolution of their conflict is the story's climax. It's an interesting, dark movie, one that shows the supposed violence of the time without ever once glorifying it. It's heavy without being heavy handed, and both manages to convey a message and simply deliver a clever, violent western if that's all you're looking for. I found it to be well deserving of its many awards, and got me interested in some other work by Eastwood.

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.

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins was one of the better releases in the now quite popular comic book/super hero movement in modern action movies, although it wasn't perfect. The Dark Knight isn't either, of course, but it is probably the best comic book movie I've ever seen. I'd be lying if I said a big part of that wasn't Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, but the movie wasn't one-note either, as it excelled in most areas. A problem with Begins was the action scenes themselves. The movie completely captured the grittier, darker mood that the Batman franchise took in the 80's, but when people were getting violent it often got confusing because darkness and the trendy shaky camera conspired to muddle what was actually happening. The Dark Knight still isn't perfect, but it's generally easier to see what Batman's doing as he pounds faces in. There are some excellent vehicle sequences as well, which were amplified in intensity by the great and incredibly loud sound design, with my seat in the theater actually rumbling when huge trucks were barreling around. It's not restricted to loud moments - there are plenty of times, usually involving the Joker, where it's impressive how well they got across the characters sickly violent nature without ever breaking the PG-13 rating.

Most of that though is all Ledger - the guy really dove into the character and created one of the most unnerving performances I've ever seen. Every tick, every line shows you the depth of his psychosis. Although I thought it was more impressive, the job he did really shouldn't be compared to Jack Nicholson's in the 1989 film, because they're very different. Nicholson's Joker was perverse and hilarious, Ledger's is just perverse. There are times when he will make you laugh, but that isn't really the goal. I haven't seen any of his other work, but his passing is truly unfortunate. He had quite a talent that we won't have seen enough of. Not that he was the only good member of the cast. Bale's Batman voice is still a little weird, but he does a good job of handling both ends of the character. I haven't seen Eckhart do much serious stuff, but he is great portraying the downfall of Harvey Dent. Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine don't stretch their talents that far but are solid playing familiar characters. I don't like how they had to recast Maggie Gyllenhaal in Katie Holmes' old role, but she probably does a better job than Katie would have. Nolan really impressed me with Memento, and whether he does another Batman or moves on, he's one of the more talented directors working right now. There were some surprises with how he handled all the different characters, but I thought they did a great job keeping everything in check and entertaining.

Wanted

I haven't seen either of Bekmambetov's "Watch" action/fantasy/whatever films, but I guess they were somehow interesting enough to find success outside of Russia and get him a job in Hollywood. I can't really say I'm that impressed by his storytelling skills, but he sure knows how to make an over-the-top action scene. Wanted is (apparently very loosely) based on a comic published by Top Cow and written by Mark Millar, whose work I also haven't experienced but has done well enough for me to have heard of him. It (the movie) is about a loser whose life changes when he finds out he's inherited his father's abilities as an elite assassin and is brought into a secret guild that carries out hits around the globe. It's quite a while before he really gets into that though, as a lot of time is spent showing how much of a loser he is. A lot of the focus is at the office where he works, with some really unfunny scenes about how much he hates his fat boss and dirtbag friend. The narration by James McAvoy is really bad, especially in these early scenes, where you can see him and the writing straining very hard to be clever but failing at every turn. I was glad when he left that and got into killing people.

McAvoy and Angelina Jolie are featured in most of the action, and they have a pretty decent chemistry on camera. She's sexy as she always is, and he seems a little out of place starring in a movie like this but doesn't do a bad job overall. Morgan Freeman is the leader of the assassins, and does the typical wise old man thing he always does, and towards the end his character gets more interesting and funnier. Common makes another acting appearance, although the actual acting he does is minimal and I think he's just there because his face looks cool. There are many other mildly interesting characters, and the middle of the movie is a bunch of McAvoy getting his ass kicked and partaking in some entertaining missions before the big one, avenging his father's killer. It's around this point that they start throwing out plot twists like they're party favors, and it's not long before the final big violent sequence with lots of running, shooting, absurd curving of bullets, and exploding rats. The very end makes one final attempt at too-cool-for-school humor, and then there's the credits to a very mediocre movie. While it usually pretty dumb, the filming and visual effects in the action scenes make it easily watchable for fans of the genre. If you think you'd like it from the previews, you're probably right.