Top Tens of 2007

Over six months since my last post! Inconceivable.

So this actually turned out to be quite the year for movies, especially near the end of the year. I'll go in descending order, starting with my number 10...

10. Superbad
9. Juno
8. Ratatouille
7. The Bourne Ultimatum
6. Grindhouse
5. Zodiac
4. No Country for Old Men
3. Into the Wild
2. Michael Clayton
1. There Will Be Blood

Seriously, and I mean this without hyperbole, There Will Be Blood is the best film I've seen in easily the last 10 years. There's nothing else that comes close. I've all the nominees for Best Picture - and you'll notice that they're all on my top ten - but none of them measure up to the elegance, the power, and the majesty of There Will Be Blood. It's not just Daniel Day Lewis' performance, though it's one for the ages, and his best in a long and amazing body of work. It's everything, from the awesome score, to the pace of the editing, to the cinematography. I didn't think anything would top Into the Wild in that department, but fuck me if There Will Be Blood did.

This was also an awesome year for video games:

10. Super Paper Mario
9. Heavenly Sword
8. Tomb Raider: Anniversary
7. Metroid Prime: 3
6. Everyday Shooter
5. Zack and Wiki
4. Halo 3
3. Bioshock
2. Uncharted
1. Super Mario Galaxy

As you can see, I spent a lot of time with my Wii this year. (Sounds so dirty...) Mario Galaxy was the absolute shit, though - a game I'd play through again, which is something I haven't done since...Chrono Trigger (which is my fav game of all time). Uncharted also really surprised me, since most of the games I got for the PS3 really sucked a fat one this year.

BioShock

Back in the day, before the 360, PS3 and Wii were even released, there were rumblings of a game called BioShock. The more I learned about this game, the more I realized that one day I would have to own an XBOX360 in order to play it.

There are video games, and there are video game experiences. What I mean by this is that there isn't just the core concepts of gameplay and graphics, but something more - something so atmospherically perfect and engrossing that it transcends the idea of what a video game is and can be and takes it to another level completely. There have only been a few games that have had this effect on me: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the first God of War. I now add BioShock to that list.

The story, in case you aren't into video games (because if you are, you've surely heard about this game by now) starts off like the first episode of Lost did (which means I was hooked from the get-go): you're a guy named Jack, on a plane headed for...somewhere, when the plane crashes in the ocean. After wading around the water, you come to a tower in the ocean, with a pod that takes you under the sea to an underwater utopia (or dystopia, as you'll discover) that has a population that is mutated by genetic experiments. In addition to these mutations, there apparently is a civil war going on between the leader of the city, Andrew Ryan (whose name contains an anagram for Ayn Rand, which makes this already the most literary video game ever made) and rebel leader Atlas (another Rand reference).

The style is completely original for the video game world. Picture the gothic art deco style of the criminally overlooked 1990's film Dark City mixed with a bit of a brighter neon color palette (maybe Blade Runner) and you have the look of the game. Add in the fact that these are probably the BEST graphics ever committed to a console game, and you already have the gamer hooked.

Then there's the gameplay. I'm man enough to admit I'm not a huge fan of shooters, nor am I usually very good at them. This one, however, was so amazingly simple to just pick up and play - as easy as the GameCube Metroid, which I consider the best playing FPS ever - well, until now at least. The controls are smooth and intuitive, and I never had any doubts about what I was doing.

The game is also the perfect blend of difficult and easy - right in the middle! You're never confused about where to go, nor are there ever really any insanely difficult areas where you want to tear your face off in frustration. The enemies are SMART- probably the smartest ever in a game. They dodge and weave and jump into water when they're on fire and recharge their health using the same health stations you do.

And of course, there's the Big Daddy/Little Sister concept. The Little Sisters are orphaned girls who are mutated to collect ADAM - the genetic juices that give you super-powers in the game like telekinesis, pyrokinesis and on and on. They are protected by Big Daddies, which are giant tank-like juggernauts that the Little Sisters refer to as "MISTER BUBBLES!!!!" When you kill a Big Daddy, you have a choice - either kill the little girl and absorb the ADAM she's collected, or set her free. I chose to set all the Little Sisters free. I won't spoil anything, but I will say I am very happy with my choice, both morally and for storyline purposes.

Very few games have as much going for them as BioShock. I have yet to play Metroid Prime 3 (coming in the mail this week), Heavenly Sword, Mario Galaxy, Assassin's Creed or Smash Bros Brawl, but I can say this - BioShock is probably already going to by my pick for best video game of the year. And I can safely say that it is now firmly entrenched in my all time top ten.

Gameplay: 10/10
Graphics: 1o/10
Variables: 10/10

Strongly Strongly Strongly Recommended.

Carved: The Slit Mouthed Woman

So you'd think that with a title like that, the movie would be pretty great.

And it had me fooled for about...oh, 15 or so minutes.

The thing about a lot of Asian horror films is that they rely on and use really horrid sound effects that totally take you out of the film. When someone is being dissected, it sounds like its coming from a separate sound channel - in effect, it sounds like it's coming from "outside" of the film, rather than having a diegetic sound.

The other crippling problem with this film is that it is one of those "message" horror films. Now, in the case of something like Auditon, which actually did an impressive job of diving into the very real gender biases that exist in Japan and Japan's entertainment industry, I'm all for a deeper message. With Carved, though, we have a focus on something equally important, but which is handled so much more poorly than the action of Audition that it becomes kind of laughable.

The central focus here is on mothers and how well they raise their children. Abuse and neglect are also addressed, to varying degrees of seriousness. This sort of thing was done much better in films like Nobody Knows and the like. Here, it just feels like an excuse to show a woman with a fucked up mouth.

There are twists, of course, but they're uniformly lame and uninspired. This is lazy filmmaking at it best, folks.

Entertainment value: 4/10
Artistic value: 3/10

Avoid.

The Road

If there's one kind of story I always have time for, it's post-apocalyptic stories. From Mad Max to Chrono Trigger to Akira, I've always loved that notion of humanity struggling to carry on in the face of complete obliteration, with clans of wanderers popping up and violence everywhere.

I waited awhile to read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, mostly because I do the bulk of my reading in the summer. For months, my buddy Dave insisted that I read The Road, especially in light of my love for post-apocalyptic stories. "I have to warn you, though," he said. "This is an extremely dark, depressing and despairing story. There is no hope, no happiness."

Sounds like fun.

I tore through this book in a little more than a day. It was one of those proverbial can't put it down novels. Dave was right: there is no hope in this novel. Well, maybe a little. But even then, it's fleeting and unstable.

McCarthy, whom I have not read before, writes in a very unique style here. There are no quotation marks for dialogue (actually, there's almost no dialogue), so when the story segues fom a character speaking back into the narration, there's a very jarring and unsettling effect. I suppose this is intentional, in order to reflect the often chaotic world that the protagonist and his son inhabit.

McCarthy does not bother telling us what has destroyed the world. He does not give us a name for the wandering father and son that this story focuses on. There is no real quest; theoretically, the father is trying to reach the southern coast of the US, but not for any real reason. Food is scarce; so is water. Every chapter is full of nothing more than the characters trying to survive in very horrible conditions. What other characters do wander in and out of the story are freakishly horrific; a family of cannibals, another traveling group that does something particularly grotesque that I won't relay here; another wandering old man who the son takes ill advised pity on.

The lack of names for the protagonists is discernibly done to bring us right into the place and mind of the father and son; what would we do and feel in their place? We never really get into the head of the son, but we can fully view the world through the father's eyes, and it's a terrible, horrible place. What makes this story even more palpable is the fact that this whole scenario - a torched world with no hope - never really feels that far off to the reader. At least, it didn't to me. The writing is simplistic and sparse, a style that perfectly suits the tone and pace of the novel. It's not a difficult read from a literary standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint - holy fuck is it hard to process what you read at some points.

Literary value - 9/10
Impression value - 10/10

Recommended.

Sunshine

There's not much good sci-fi to be found these days. The last truly great sci-fi film that acutally had any sort of substance in it was The Matrix, which was hampered by two wonky sequels and the fact that it had Keanu Reeves as its lead. Enter Danny Boyle.

Boyle is one of the more versatile directors out there. In a way, he reminds me a of a more pop-culture centric Stanley Kubrick, but without the 5 year delays in between his films. For instance, he's done black comedy (Trainspotting), horror (28 Days Later), romance (A Life Less Ordinary), a misguided attempt at social commentary (The Beach), and now a pure sci-fi movie (Sunshine). To compare, Kubrick also did a black comedy (Dr. Strangelove), horror (The Shining), romance (Lolita) and he also had a misguided attempt at social commentary (Barry Lyndon). And for sci-fi, there's 2001. Boyle has yet to really repeat a genre, and you can argue that Kubrick never did either. Boyle has not done a Clockwork Orange or a Full Metal Jacket (yet), and a few of those other connections are tenuous at best, but the place where both directors best overlap is their sci-fi works.

It's a tall order to compare Sunshine to 2001, and Sunshine admittedly never quite reaches those very lofty heights, but the effort is clearly there. The science is what you'd consider "hard" science - no aliens (not really, anyway) or tech that's really that inconceivable. The future isn't that far flung, either - only a few dozen years for 2001 when it was made; about 500 for Sunshine (which, when you look at most sci fi, is a pretty conservative number). The main difference between the two films, though, comes from the lack of a amazingly huge trip out moment for Sunshine - nothing quite like the Monolith's space odyssey that ends 2001.

However, there's plenty else going on here. The central plot is fairly simple: a crew is sent into space with an enormous bomb that, when ignited, will start the sun back up again. What is actually wrong with the sun is never quite spelled out. The best we get is Cillian Murphy's character, Capa, saying in his principal narration that the sun is "dying". Of course, things go horribly wrong, as they always do. Actually, the film veers almost off its rails when it descends into a semi-haunted ship routine after Murphy's ship, the Icarus II, finds the previous, failed mission's ship, the Icarus I, floating around Mercury. I won't spoil what happens, and everything still resolves nicely, but the plot addition is kind of unnecessary, even though aesthetically, what happens is pretty cool.

I mention aesthetics also because this is one fucking gorgeous movie. Everything looks great, from the minimalist special effects of the spaceship, to the hand-crafted sets, to the view we get of the heart of the sun. It's a shiny movie, which dovetails nicely with the goal and scope of the film. The music is also really awesome. The score was composed by the great Brit dance outfit Underworld, and the glory that is their soundtrack actually sealed the deal for me in terms of my overall appreciation for the film.

The cast is almost perfect, as well. Murphy's Capa is a great, tortured hero; Hiroyuki Sanada, one of my favorite Japanese actors, steals the whole fucking movie in the bits that he's in as the ship's doomed captain; Michelle Yeoh is not bad...for Michelle Yeoh...as the ship's botanist; and the best surprise of the film is Chris Evan's character Mace. Evans other big role this year was as the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four sequel. Here, with a competent director and stellar cast around him, he brings a refreshing edge to the cast, someone who is brooding, angry but also likeable. Benedict Wong's lame ass mathematician sets Asian cliches back a hundred years, unfortunately. He's the weak link of the cast.

All this being said, Sunshine is a great, great film that stuck with me for more than a week. I think back to the visuals, to Sanada's performance, to the great soundtrack, and realize that this is one of the best movies I've seen this year. It's probably going to flop at the Box Office, but I encourage you to check it out.

Entertainment value - 8/10
Artistic value - 9/10

Recommended.

The Yakuza

There's something to be said about the 70's era of American filmmaking. This was a bold era for bold filmmakers, with progressive films like Mean Streets, The Godfather, The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces, and on and on. Coppola, Altman, Scorsese, Speilberg, Lucas...the list goes on and on. This was a ripe, amazing period for film - perhaps even the last great era before Star Wars, Jaws and the like nearly killed American mainstream filmmaking.

During this Renaissance, The Yakuza was released. The exact year was 1974. The film is immediately notable for a few reasons: it's directed by Syndey Pollack (Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie), written by Paul Schrader (also wrote Raging Bull and Taxi Driver) and Robert Towne (also wrote Chinatown), and has as its two leads Robert Mitchum (one of cinema's great badasses) and Ken Takakura (who I previously wrote about in my review of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles). That's one hell of a pedigree.

If only the film wasn't so...lame.

Now, this film was pretty much a flop when it came out. It's found a cult following since then, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why. It's not quite cheesy enough to get to that Charles Bronson/Chuck Norris level of cheese, nor is it really sufficiently dark and noirish enough to get to the level of other revisionist noir films like the Blade Runner. It is a noir - probably thanks in large part to Robert Towne; but it still can't ever quite get a firm hold on the noir atmosphere.

That might be in thanks to the setting. Here, the setting is Japan, where Mitchum's character Harry Kilmer ventures in order to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a friend. The kidnappers? The Yakuza, of course. In true noir fashion, Harry returns to a sordid past he thought he'd left behind. In non-noir fashion, it turns out the past he left behind was a decidedly normal lady named Eiko (Keiko Kishi), who he rescued from the streets during World War II. This placed Eiko's brother Ken (Takakura) in Harry's debt, but begrudgingly so, because even though Mitchum speaks very horrible Japanese and knows how to bow correctly and all that shit, he's still a gaijin pig, and must be hated.

At any rate, the plot moves forward at a nice clip, and there's lots of awkward sword fighting with katanas (apparently readily available everywhere in Japan in the 70's) and Mitchum somehow grabs large shotguns and a few handguns out of thin air (aren't there crazy gun laws in Japan?) and shoots lots of nameless Japanese thugs in the name of gaijin righteousness.

Pay no mind that this film is called The Yakuza. Though there are some pretty authentic (as far as Japanese Yakuza movies from the same era go) scenes and depictions of Yakuza culture, there's also just one cliche after another. The gambling den; the chopped off pinky; the grunting, sweating crime boss; the tattoos; the open palmed greetings; and so on and so forth. But these scenes are fleeting; the story focuses more on Mitchum's character, leaving Takakura to do not much but chew scenery and ultimately come to respect and love his gaijin comrade. You could say that this is a hallmark of noir - the macguffin that gets the plot going that actually has nothing to do with the plot, but still. I'm almost ready to compare this to the Last Samurai - gaijin proves his worth to traditional Japanese male, people get chopped up, score swells, semi-happy/deep ending ensues.

If there is anything actually worth seeing in this film, it's the credit roll that opens the movie, where a half naked Yakuza dances around in the dark as the lights occasionally reveal a horrifically painted-on tattoo that looks like it's going to come apart under the sweat of the guy moving around. The music is laughably shitty, too, like what you'd hear in a Korean-owned Japanese restaurant that is desperate to make everyone think that it's authentic.

Pollack, Towne, Schrader, Mitchum and Takakura are all way better than this. It's a shame.

Entertainment value - 5/10
Artistic value - 4/10

Not Recommended.

The Simpsons Movie

My buddy Ken summed up this movie nicely:

"I wasn't disappointed."

And this much is true. It's not a disappointement. However, this means that the film is not without its flaws. I think, as a long time fan of the show (watched diligently from seasons 1-10, before the massive drop-off in quality) that there were enough winks and nods to long-time fans (especially Springfield Gorge...that kind of sealed the deal for me with this movie) to keep me interested and invested throughout the whole thing, not to mention willing to slog through a truly uneven and almost disappointing middle.

Here's what I wanted from the Simpsons movie: an epic plot, a lot of interplay between the family and minor characters, a reduced focus on Marge (always the weakest link of all the Simpsons) and an increased focus on the relationship between Bart and Homer. The film delivers on a couple of these things. For instance, you can probably justify the first 30 and last 20 minutes of the film as epic, but the middle is as lame as the last few seasons. Marge gets way too much screen time, especially in said middle part. Her touching scenes with Homer are nicely written and all, but maybe not what I would've wanted, in retrospect. The interplay between Bart and Homer pays off nicely at the end, and the ending itself is satisfying and fun.

My biggest qualm is the lack of peripheral characters. I love Monty Burns, Skinner, Nelson and Comic Book Guy. But there's next to nothing for most of the minor characters. I know, that's what they're called minor characters. But ask yourself - aren't they what makes the Simpsons great? What would the show be without Moe, or Apu, or Burns? Probably a whole hell of a lot less than it is. So that's my big complaint - not enough minor characters.

Still, don't let my moping about my sticking points cause you to avoid the film. The first 30 minutes returns the Simpsons to former glory; there's few times in animated film history (save South Park) that I've laughed as much as I did in those opening scenes, culminating in one of the best lines Ralph has ever uttered. Likewise, the last 15-20 minutes has some great stuff in it as well. It's worth seeing in theaters.

I've read somewhere that the original plan, years ago, was to make the episode where Bart and Lisa take over their summer camp into the film. I would've preferred that, actually - most of the best writers were at the top of their games then. Along the same lines, Alfred Brooks gave one of the best guest performances in the show's history as Scorpio back in season 9 - a return of that character would've been great, especially seeing as how Brooks is in this movie too as virtually the same character, but not.

But seriously, I enjoyed it a bunch. I had fun. And I was not, in the long run, disappointed. I laughed, and I walked out satisfied. The nitpicking came later.

Entertainment value - 7/10
Artistic value - 7/10

Recommended