Box Wars, where people dress up in elaborate cardboard
costumes and stage massive battles, is definitely a great subject for a
documentary. The biggest problem with Justin McConnell’s (“The Collapsed”) new
film, “Skull World,” is that it rarely gets beyond the “this is super cool”
level of examination and analysis. Which is too bad, and feels like a missed
opportunity.
Though
there have certainly been female fronted buddy cop movies before, the genre is
dominated by boys being boys. Leave it to Paul Feig to follow up his raunchy
bachelorette-party comedy “Bridesmaids,” by adding a new tweak to this
well-worn genre. And that’s really all “The Heat” is, a slight adjustment to
the formula, but one that pays off big time. If you want to laugh really,
really hard, and you’ve already seen “This is the End,” go see “The Heat.” It
doesn’t break any new ground, but it is super goddamn funny.
Big, loud, heroic, and fun, Roland Emmerich’s take on “Die
Hard in the White House” (the first this year was the more serious “Olympus HasFallen”), “White House Down,” is also bloated, ridiculously violent, and kind
of dumb. And all of this is wrapped up in one bombastic package. The film wears
its politics on its sleeve, but it’s a jumbled mess of simple, watered down
jabs at the right, big business, and the American war machine. I’m as
left-leaning as they come, but the way the film goes about trying to have a
message is so asinine and rudimentary that you have to wonder why even bother.
Neil Jordan’s moody new film “Byzantium” is a sprawling,
novelistic take on a familiar genre. Not his first horror rodeo, the “Crying
Game” director offers up a revisionist approach to a vampire story. His film
contains many of the hallmarks you expect—eternal life, themes of undying love,
an epic scope that spans historical epochs. While this strategy has enough
twists and tweaks so that it fit doesn’t feel like a story you’ve witnessed a
thousand times before, the meandering nature is also its biggest drawback.
Occasionally bloody and violent, “Byzantium” is primarily a somber tale of a
woeful, savage life.
Every year, in addition to more than 400 features, the
Seattle International Film Festival also presents an extensive series of short.
While fests like this may be your only chance to see many of the full-length
films, the odds are even worse that you’re going to stumble across most of
these smaller offerings. There aren’t a lot of mainstream distribution avenues
for short films, they don’t get released into theaters, so if you miss them
now, you’re probably shit out of luck. Digging into the darker side of things,
the films in the “Nightmare Mystery Theatre” program offer you quick glimpses
into the twisted, violent, and horrific.
After all the
well-documented production problems surrounding the adaptation of Max Brooks’
best-selling zombie novel, including extensive rewrites and weeks worth of
reshoots, here’s something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to say: World WarZ is a damn good movie. Far from a perfect feature, but Brad Pitt,
Marc Forster, and company, didn’t do too bad. It’s nothing like the book—Brooks
was right to call it an adaptation in name only—but if you can get past that
fact, the film is surprisingly effective hybrid of action and horror.
Watching Pandora’s Promise, the new
documentary from veteran documentarian Robert Stone, is a strange endeavor. As
far back as you can remember, the argument over nuclear power has seemingly
been stuffy men in crisp white lab coats spouting technical mumbo jumbo, while
loose living environmental activists espouse the evils inherent in the
technology, and state the potential for disaster. Nuclear power is the bogeyman
in countless movies, shows, and books, and is portrayed at this monolithic
monster.
