Category: reviews

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Contantine; I participated in that offer.

You know that feeling you get after suddenly waking up in a movie theater after having dozed off? You’re thinking “What�s going on?” and “What just happened there?”. Yeah, that’s how I felt the entire time as I watched Constantine. Except that I was wide awake the whole time. And that mostly summarizes the screening for Constantine which I went to last night.

Other than the trailer for it preceding In Good Company, I hadn’t heard much about it — the trailer featured a heroic Keanu Reeves in a black & white suit sporting a gun, with plenty of demons and ominous dialog about heaven and hell. How bad could it be? And, the movie started off on the right foot — the WB logo faded in and slowly crumbled into the breeze as an off-screen wind blew in. Unfortunately — and I mean this unsarcastically — the movie went downhill from there.

[Very minor oh-that’s-cool spoiler in this paragraph.] Sure, it had its high points. I mean, one of the early scenes featured a demon-possessed worker who strolls into a road, unaware of the oncoming traffic. He ends up walking right into the path of a car which is unable to stop in time — and the worker remains standing like an immovable force while the car buckles around him.

So, the movie had its cool moments, but I had no idea what was going on. The plot goes something like this: Keanu Reeves plays John Constantine, a man who helps “keep the balance” between the demons of hell and life on earth. And, there’s this woman who jumps to her death. And, there’s another woman that’s a detective. Oh, and Satan and God have a pact that demons must remain in hell but that each of them can sometimes influence the minds of humans. Let me put it this way: Constantine’s plot could form the basis for a new Chewbacca Defense.

It’s not uncommon for directors to have reoccurring signature elements which they incorporate across several works. For instance, James Cameron likes to show feet trampling things and his movies often involve nuclear war. Well, a little IMDB checking reveals that Francis Lawrence directed Constantine. And, as this was his first foray into movie directing, I couldn’t make direct comparisons across a stretch of movies. But, I did notice several themes which kept coming up. To be fair, though, they were more like fetishes at the level with which Lawrence was marinating the audience in these elements:

• Smoking — Yeah, John Constantine smokes and, to Lawrence’s credit, this didn't automatically make him a bad guy. But his cigarettes and Zippo-style lighter just about made enough appearances to warrant an entry in the closing credits.

• Water & Fluids — For some reason, whether it’s blood pooling or water hurling into the air, this guy loves fluids. I mean, had he toned it down, it could have been a theme worthy of a snide remark in the director’s commentary, but it just left me thinking, “What, more fluids?”

• Bugs — Sure, bugs are gross, but that doesn’t mean they should be the go-to device for ready-made creepiness. Having said that, even though the movie is creepy at times, it wasn’t scary to me. But, it had its gross moments. And every gross moment was bug-based. Just a warning — if bugs wig you out, you might want to skip this one.

This movie may sounds pretty bad so far, but there’s yet another draining feature: the kid sidekick. Sidekicks rarely work well in movies (though I’ll acknowledge that there are a few exceptions). And, kid sidekicks are almost always a bad idea. Granted, the kid isn’t some youngster, but he isn’t old enough to drink, either. And, as you might expect, he does little more than act as a sounding board for John Constantine’s one-liners and provide some comic relief every now and then.

Maybe the script just needed another rewrite. Or maybe some would-be “oh, I get it now” scene got left on the cutting-room floor. Either way, I’d skip this one. It’s not boring — I’ll give it that — but I just couldn’t follow what was going on. Then again, it might be salvagable as a rental if supplemented with gratuitous use of the fast-forward button.

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about In Good Company; I participated in that offer.

I saw In Good Company last night. I’d been seeing commercials for it on TV for weeks and a few ads appeared in my TiVo as well; and, it looked pretty good from those ads. To be honest, you probably already have an opinion about this movie, one way or another. And, if you liked what you saw in the trailers, you’ll like this movie.

One fault of the trailers is that they portray this as a fish-out-of-water story, which is only partially true. In short, 26 year-old Carter Duryea (played by Topher Grace) suddenly becomes the boss of Dan Foreman (played by Dennis Quaid) as he takes on the role of head of advertising at a sports magazine. However, that scenario is only a major plot device for about the first half hour.

Past that, it gets into personal and personnel relationships. In particular, Dan’s daughter Alex (played by Scarlett Johansson) becomes romantically interested in Carter. On top of that, Carter has to adjust to his new position within the company.

Really, I knew what I was getting into when I walked in to the theater — one run through the trailer clearly defines the scope of the film. All the same, this isn’t another paint-by-numbers romantic-dramedy. You may think you know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

At one point, I was even hoping for the ever-elusive Accountants Ending. (For those unaware, the “accountants ending” is the prototypical unexpected ending for a fictional work: Two men face off at the end, about to kill one another. Then, one interjects “Do you think we should just become accountants?” to which the other replies “Well, right-o. Let’s do that.”)

I enjoyed the characters and the film as a whole; and I also found the set design notably charming. In the scenes taking place within Dan’s house, the furniture, lamps and bookshelves all seemed authentic to a man of his position in life. The sets within the office-oriented scenes were also good, though I did notice an annoying tendency to use underlighting — such as from podiums and even conference tables — that I couldn’t imagine any actual office having.

Some critics describe a movie's worth in terms of whether it’s worth seeing in the theater, as a rental, or not at all. And, as I was walking out of the theater, I was trying to ask myself that question. I was generally leaning towards “maybe a rental”, but I think I’ll qualify that. If you liked the trailer and you like Topher Grace as an actor, you can’t go wrong with seeing this in the theater — it may not be high literature, but you’ll have a good time.

I do have a few minor gripes about the movie, primary of which is that the director and/or score composer didn’t always trust his audience to “know how to feel”. For the most part, the script could have stood on its own; but, there were times where I’d notice a sappy acoustic guitar piping in as if to say “See? You’re feeling all mushy inside, right?”.

In addition to that, Johansson’s lips looked swollen throughout the flick. I've seen her in other works, notably Lost in Translation, but her lips just seemed to big for her own face here. Really, in her first scene, I thought that the make-up artist had just done a shoddy job — that he/she had not “colored within the lines” when applying Johansson’s lipstick.

Another nit was Carter’s Porsche 911 Carrera. One of the first scenes clearly establishes him buying an automatic — as he drives out of the dealership, the camera cuts to a view of his hand putting the car into “D” or such. However, a running joke throughout the movie is that he can barely drive this car. Now, setting aside the cliche that is the Can’t Drive A Manual joke, the joke isn’t even relevant with an automatic transmission. Driving such a car is just a matter of pressing one’s foot down on the skinny pedal towards the right ;).

I saw the ads for Bulletproof Monk back in April and it looked pretty good at the time — Chow Yun-Fat, dual pistols, what’s not to like? Its PG-13 rating should have been my first warning, but Mike and I decided to add it to our Netflix queue.

I was aware that it got 39/100 at Metacritic, but there have been times in the past when Metacritic has been off. But, it wasn’t off this time — we watched it over the weekend, and Bulletproof Monk just wasn’t what I was hoping it’d be.

In short, every good scene is encompassed by the trailer. And, I don’t just mean “every scene” loosely — yeah, some movies put most of their good scenes into the trailer, but this one really had all the good scenes in the trailer. And, the non-trailer scenes were just not up to that level.

One gripe I have with the flick is that the trailer prominently shows Chow atop a car with guns in both hands (a good sign, or so you’d think). However, the trailer cuts out the following part of the scene: Chow uses the guns only to shoot the weapons out of the hands of the bad guys. And, that’s the only scene where the main characters even hold guns — according to the making-of featurette, the producers did that on purpose for the “sake of the children” in the audience.

And, in general, the PG-13 rating just gets in the way. In one scene in particular, a Nazi general executes several monks in a firing squad (this happens in the first ten minutes, so this doesn’t spoil anything). However, the view is framed so that you only see the shots being fired followed by the sounds of the monks taking the hit — lame.

It looks like the trailer got the best of me this time. Is this worth buying? Nope. Is it worth renting? Well, only if you really like Seann William Scott — and even then, only maybe.