DVD review: Knight and day

A normal woman gets entangled in the crazy life of a super spy.

This movie was nailed down by critics and performed very poorly at the box office; it was the worst opening for Tom Cruise in the last twenty years. After watching it on DVD I must say that I think that this reputation is unreserved.

Maybe the main problem was that the premise is too meta. The whole point of the movie is how the wacky antics of the stereotypical action movie protagonist would look from the point of view of the poor damsel in distress. It’s very hard to convey this trough the usual channels, going into the movie I had no idea, but the critics chorus of “It doesn’t make any sense! It’s too illogical” is disconcerting; they watch a movie like this one and point at plot holes? It’s like complaining that James Bond is the only spy who goes around telling is real name to everybody. It misses the point, completely.

It certainly is not perfect, not at all. The script went through nine official rewrites and changed completely tone at least three times and it’s easy to spot dreg and bits that clearly hails from previous iterations but overall it works, maybe because action movie plot are often messy and confused and so it doesn’t look out of place in its own genre.

There are a couple of nice stunts and action sequences, again nothing mind blowing just nicely done.

Tom Cruise practically plays his movie persona and he is still clearly believable doing it. Cameron Diaz got the hardest part, the script requires her to whine a lot about everything, but she manages to deliver the tricky mix of suburban life and action girl in potential.

Overall it’s a really enjoyable experience, good for a relaxing evening.

DVD review: Killers

A woman meets and falls in love with a man without knowing that he is a spy.

If you got the distinct impression of having watched this movie at least a couple of times without knowing it rest assured, it’s true. The “Oh my god! My husband is an undercover spy!” it’s something that Hollywood seems to really love, we got so many iterations of this basic premise, sometimes she is the spy, maybe they are both spies but they don’t know it.

Anyway as usual like seems to be very complicated for these undercover James Bond, eventually their jobs interfere with their real life, the con is discovered and they need to face their spouse with “I got a really high paid job with many, many perks. Do you want to visit the white house next week?”.

Jokes aside this sub genre spawned at least two excellent movies, “True Lies” and “Mr and Mrs Smith”, so evidently it’s possible to do this stuff right.

Killers clearly aim to do a rom com version of the aforementioned cliché. Sadly this requires funny jokes, which this movie clearly lacks. The romantic part is decent but there is no spark between the two protagonists. Ashton Kutcher, it’s there physically but it’s not really there, there is a strange kind of actorial void. Notionally he is supposed to be the impossibly cool guy but, c’mon, we are talking about Ashton Kutcher, he simply lacks the necessary charisma. Katherine Heigl is also oddly detached, she still has good comic timing but she still plays the trademarked Katherine Heigl character which we had to endure during her last four movies and still isn’t able to bring it to a semblance of life. We know that she can be good, we saw it in “Knocked up” but considering this is her only movie that she doesn’t like I fear that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

There is some action but it’s so tame that I can’t help but wonder why they bothered; we saw better stuff in any random episode of Chuck.

Not even for Rom Com fans, this movie will appeal only to Katherine Heigl completists.

DVD review: Hierro

A mother returns to the island where her son disappeared.

Spain is becoming synonymous with good quality horror and “Hierro” doesn’t disappoint the trend.

This is not a scary movie per se, this is more an “atmosphere” movie, a psychological thriller. There are not a lot of scare or gory moments but in their place we get an interesting story, with an actual plot and a mystery that we actually want to solve.

Where the mood is king the various characters are very thin. The grieving mother is an horror staple while the various hostile people of the island are more part of the general background than true people. Indeed it would have greatly beneficiated from some subplot and a change of pace every now and then, as it is it’s a study of grieving and pain 90 minutes long.

Recommended for fans of the genre.

DVD review: District 13 Ultimatum

The mad French parkour masters are back!

Strangely in the five years following 2004 District 13 nobody followed his lead and so to get another dose of parkour acrobatic we had to wait for the sequel.

The answer to the obvious question “Does it live up to the first movie legacy?” sadly is a resounding no. It’s not a bad effort but it was misconceived from the beginning.

The plot is stupid but this is not the real problem, we don’t expect the plot for a parkour movie to be any intelligent. The real problem is that the plot is not really very fun, it’s like a strange mutant version of “The warriors” were the various gangs, all good guys, are presented as real bad asses but somehow they never do a lot. An inordinate amount of time is spent on the French president, played by a serious French actor, Philippe Torreton, who, according to the extras, always wanted to be in an action movie, just to drag it down with inane gravitas I would like to add.

The two heroes from the first one, Cyril Raffaelli and parkour god David Belle, are back. They choreographed personally the stunts and all the action scenes bringing in their usual level of cheerful insanity but it just doesn’t manage to get to the next level. The inane plot robs it of every sense of urgency and an extremely clean cinematography made every action feel very detached.

It’s still a good action movie, with incredible stunts that are way above most of the CGI and cable enhanced stuff that Hollywood feed us every day, but it clearly fails prey to the sequel law of diminishing returns.

DVD review: Shelter

A psychiatrist who doesn’t believe in the existence of multiple personality disorder investigates an incredible case.

Julianne Moore is certainly a gifted actress, with a positively enormous acting range, and she almost manages to sell this movie.

The hook is original but it deviates too soon into supernatural territory making the rational, skeptic psychiatrist look really stupid. The “Maybe there is a scientific explanation” angle is legitimate, and probably it would have been much more interesting, but when obviously supernatural stuff start happening and we, the viewers, know it, watching a character that should be smart wander aimlessly trough the plot is aggrieving.

The resolution, in a bid to be original, is incredibly contrived and bizarre. Certainly watchable stuff but nonetheless baffling.

Moore does her angsty best but even that doesn’t manage to elevate the material, quite the opposite actually, because after a while she becomes grating and annoying. There’s only so much motherly wailing that we can tolerate on screen. Actually the mother trying to save her child is so incredibly common in horror movies lately…

John Rhys Meyer as the cursed patient does its best to be unsettling but really, there’s a point where the suspension of disbelief simply stop working and his character is really too much out there that in the end it accrues to little more than a collection of tics, menacing eyes and cringe inducing neck movements.

The direction is competent and strikes all the required points for a spooky film. The locations are nicely haunted, the scares are effective… maybe with a coherent plot this would have been a recommended viewing but as it stands it’s a professional vehicle for random ominous stuff, a well cooked roast with third quality meat.

Web review: Dragon Age Redemption

An elven assassin, Tallis, is on a mission to redeem herself against a rouge mage.

We all love Felicia Day, spelling out all the reasons we like her so much probably deserve a whole individual post, suffice to say that she is an incredibly creative person, and very cute too, who is cutting a whole new original path in the world of media and she is doing it again with this one.

Dragon age: Redemption is a six part web series set in the world of Dragon age, very famous videogame for those who don’t play.

Web series normally are limited to ten minutes per episode, the old you tube limit, so we are talking of roughly one hour of footage. Major studios normally don’t want to touch this format, apart from the occasional so called “viral videos”, so this is mainly the domain of independent productions.

This is certainly an interesting experiment and very original. Felicia Day’s character, Tallis, is also the protagonist of “Mark of the assassin” a downloadable expansion of the video game developed alongside the web series. You can’t get more cross media than this! And it certainly pushes the boundaries of what is possible with the format.

Many users, as is traditional in the terrible comments section of You Tube, bashed its production values, basically calling it a “sub par Xena Warrior Princess Episode” without realizing that this has all been developed with a fraction of any normal daytime show budget. Felicia Day put on our screen stuff that simply it wasn’t supposed to be possible, there is a reason most of these web things are guys talking to the cameras in their bedroom.

Sadly the storytelling is not up to her usual standard; while she certainly looks the part she clearly has trouble with delivering the most epic parts of the script. Both her writing and her acting are clearly more at ease with the funny interplays between the various characters.

It remain a genuinely enjoyable experience, a recommended viewing for fun of the genre considering that is there on the web only a click away.

Dvd review: Touching the void

A documentary about a true incredible mountaineering story.

“Touching the void” is a strange beast that defies classification. The academy had to actually rewrite the rules of what constitutes a documentary because of this movie.

It consists mostly of a reenactment of the ascent performed by actors interspaced with interviews and so many people didn’t consider this a true documentary. In my opinion the reenactment is fundamental to convey what actually happened on the mountain, without that we’ll be left with interviews and shots of ice.

The story is really incredible. One of those true life story that seems to farfetched to be true and somehow the documentary format instead of making it more sedate, as it normally happens, enhances to drama of the story the new heights. Listening to the calm voice of Simpson retelling his ordeal is so much stronger than the usual cinematic tricks with which movie directors normally try to sway the audience.

This is a straight story of human determination, masterfully delivered.