What can be said about Battleship? It’s big, loud and dumb. It’s like a Michael Bay movie made by someone (Peter Berg) who can actually direct. It features a bunch of non-actors reminding the viewer why acting is actually hard word. It goes to hilarious lengths to integrate elements of the Battleship board game into the action (yellow pegs! grid coordinates!) It again proves that Taylor Kitsch is basically Thomas Jane 2.0: handsome as hell, pops on a TV screen, but lacks the charisma to carry a movie. The “plot” is littered with the sort of intelligence insulting shenanigans that send nerds into apoplexy, but are necessary to keep the action going and the principal characters alive.* It’s predictably jingoistic and militarist. Whatevs, bra.

The only thing interesting about Battleship is the fact that it’s proving to be a commercial failure, at least in the United States. Battleship is exactly the type of loud, stupid shit, complete with fast food tie-ins and omnipresent commercials, based on a recognizable piece of cultural detritus, that makes a zillion dollars. Seriously, how is Battleship less worthy of your 12 bucks than Transformers? They’re both products of the creative visionaries at Hasbro, after all. The obvious, and perhaps most important, explanation is the awesomeness of The Avengers: if you want to go to the movies to watch some real action ass-kicking, do you want to watch Rihanna and the dude from Friday Night Lights or mothefucking Iron Man, Thor and the gang? I suspect, however, that there’s another factor at work.

There was an online snarkgasm when it was announced that there was going to be a movie based on the board game Battleship, but the decision made economic sense. Summer movies cost way too much to risk on unknown properties. You need to know that the audience has some previous relationship with the material before you throw two hundred million bucks at it. If people liked the tv show/original film/board game/comic book/cartoon/toy/blog, then there’s a good chance they’ll want to see the movie. The danger is that a movie executive’s relationship with a piece of intellectual property is not necessarily the same at overcaffeinated 14 year old boys who comprise the target audience. Some studio suit might think about Battleship and remember afternoon fun with his buddies in the shag carpeted rumpus room. Orange Fanta and Cheese Nips. But those were the days before the internet, cable television and home video game systems. Nowadays, even Electronic Talking Battleship might as well be a hoop and stick. If kids today have any feelings about Battleship, it’s probably of games played under duress. Excruciating “family game nights” when you’d much rather be playing Halo. No number of Rihannas or Brooklyn Deckers or double amputee war heroes can overcome that sort of visceral aversion. 

*Especially annoying is the utterly arbitrary nature of the alien invader’s rules of engagement. It’s established early on that the aliens are on a recon mission and are not supposed to kill unarmed civilians, but they seem to choose when to attack people based on whether or not those people need to survive for the sake to the story. It’s made more confusing by a scene where Kitsch mind-melds with an alien and sees a future of conquest and destruction. If that’s the case, why are these aliens so capriciously sensitive to collateral damage? 

There are essentially two ways to go about making a superhero movie. You can make a “superhero” movie, (Christopher Nolan’s Batman films or Bryan Singer’s Superman) which takes the tropes, symbols and larger-than-life characters of the comic book universe seriously, analyzing the semiotics and psychology of superheroes and the culture that produces them. Or, you can say screw that egghead stuff and make a SUPERHERO movie, (John Favreau’s Iron Man or Richard Donner’s Superman) focusing on the technicolor spectacle that is the essential justification for the genre and leave the parsing of subtext to film critics and American Studies majors.

People interested in crowning a “greatest ever” superhero movie are really looking for a film that combines the two approaches to form the ultimate: a “SUPERHERO” movie. Whether such a beast is even possible is up for debate. Many people have claimed that The Dark Knight embodies the synthesis, but it really doesn’t. Are the action scenes (except for that kickass truck crash) on anyone’s list of the twenty most memorable things about that film? As great as it is, TDK is a pure “superhero” movie. Other films, like Ang Lee’s Hulk, attempt the synthesis and fail miserably.

The triumph of Joss Whedon’s Avengers is that it never wavers in it’s commitment to delivering the titanic action pageantry and iconic superhero personalities that drew us all to these characters when we were not-yet-jaded youngsters. And that’s why The Avengers is the best SUPERHERO movie of all time.

If The Avengers were just a string of high-octane action scenes, it would already claim the throne, but what makes this movie truly extraordinary is the attention paid to the characters. Considering that Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Hulk have all carried entire films by themselves, the main danger of a film featuring them all is that they might just blend together into one Uberhero. But Joss Whedon masterfully avoids this pitfall by focusing on the very different ways that each of these characters views their role as a superhero. For Bruce Banner, it’s a curse. For Steve Rogers, it’s a duty. For Thor Odinson, it’s a birthright. And for Tony Stark it’s a chance to have fun and show people just how awesome he is. These divergent visions of superheroism not only help the characters stand out from one another, they also create the interpersonal friction that sparks the kind of glorious intramural smackdowns that will thrill anyone who made their action figures fight each other as a kid. 

By focusing on delivering core comic book thrills, by vividly representing a group of indelible superhero characters that have been painstakingly reintroduced to moviegoers over the past decade, by taking the time to shape relationships and conflicts sharply and efficiently, and by delivering a monumental finale of smashing and crashing that could have been pulled directly for a fanboy’s cream dream, Joss Whedon and company have made the finest SUPERHERO film to date. Until the sequel, at least.

I wish I could have written about this movie earlier, but I was in the process of moving across the country. By now, most everything that could be said about it has been, and the nerd community has already moved on to engorging themselves over the next Joss Whedon offering, The Avengers (I myself am counting down the days). The Cabin in the Woods is hilarious, observant, inventive and just endlessly entertaining. People who don’t like it seem to be viscerally repelled by genre deconstruction and its inherent smugness, and while I understand that view, I just can’t get over how much fun Cabin is. More than that, Cabin pulls off something truly impressive, something that renders any facile condemnation of the film’s empty ‘cleverness’ or alternatively it’s supposed didacticism churlish and wrongheaded.

It’s been called Dissertation in the Woods for good reason, but what makes Whedon and Goddard’s analysis of horror films so compelling is that, aside from being a blast to watch, it leaves a lot of room for the viewer to choose their own interpretation of the filmmaker’s essential insights. (Spoilers Ahead: although I can’t imagine the warning is necessary since literally everyone who will ever read this saw the movie with me) Early in the film, Whedon and Goddard posit that horror films exist, not for the audience to be ‘scared’ but for them to vicariously and ritually enjoy the slaughter of nubiles. But as it proceeds, Cabin offers the audience two distinct, well-supported and diametrically opposed interpretive frameworks to choose from. That’s why Whedon and Goddard sacrifice a number of potential “big twist” moments and gags in the interest of keeping the viewers in the loop and giving them the mental breathing room to form their own reactions. There’s the Michael Haneke-light interpretation, in which the horror genre turns characters into caricatures and then bloodily slaughters them for the thrill of closet sadists. Then, there’s the view that watching people get chopped into kibble by monsters is a cathartic hoot and the killjoys who try to undermine that should shut their self-righteous pieholes. The film offers two separate sets of protagonists, the kids at the cabin and the ‘directors’ of the ritual downstairs, and which group you as a viewer ‘root’ for illustrates which view of horror you embrace.  The divergence is made manifest during the scene where Richard Jenkins races against time to blow up the tunnel and prevent the RV full of survivors from escaping the mountain. What you, as a viewer, wants to happen in that moment says a lot about which view you hold. This is followed by a moment that Mike D’Angelo, in his clueless review, called “inept,” but which actually serves as the moral and aesthetic lynchpin of the movie. While Chris Hemsworth revs up his motorcycle to attempt the jump over the ravine, the audience knows that he’s going to smash into an invisible force field. That’s the “inept” part, according to D’Angelo: how hilarious would it have been if the viewer was just as surprised by the characters when Hemsworth squashed himself? But the whole point of “ritual sacrifice” plot is to put the viewer in the place of the omniscient, sadistic gods that Jenkins and co. are trying to appease. And the slow build-up to Hemsworth’s Evel Knieval routine offers the viewer the starkest possible choice: is this dude’s would-be heroism buffoonish or tragic? The answer to that question will give you your position later on when Marty literally “deconstructs” the horror movie world. 

Of course, part of me wished that this was directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Way more time spent with Cesar Flickerman’s Master of Ceremonies and the behind-the-scenes workings of the Hunger Games program itself. Plenty of deadpan shots of teenagers exploding like bloody pinatas. Cynical to the bone and a touch sadistic.

The problem is that that movie has already been made. The Running Man, the Verhoeven movie that Paul Verhoeven never made. And a bloodier, nastier version that spends more time with all of the “contestants” has also already been made: Battle Royale. From The Most Dangerous Game to Series 7: The Contenders to The Condemned, the concept of people hunting people, either on or off camera, has been done to death (ha!). The only way a new iteration of this premise can be justified is by exploring a previously ignored facet of it. Suzanne Collins’ YA novel The Hunger Games finds its value-added with a strong, indelible main character: Katniss Everdeen, eagle-eyed and resourceful tribute from the hollers of District 12. She’s a welcome antidote to drippy tween heroines like Bella Swan, who would be dead meat in the arena even after getting turned into a vampire. And she’s given a more compelling romantic quandary than: OMG, two dudez like me!? She has to pretend to love a young man who already loves her in order to please the overfed jackals watching her fight for her life on television.

This vivid characterization is what makes The Hunger Games a credible entry in the “reality-tv-as-return-to-the-Colosseum” genre, and it’s the element that director Gary Ross wisely decides to focus on in his film adaptation. It starts with Jennifer Lawrence’s steely lead performance and a free-hand, close-up heavy directorial style that insists upon empathy. One big benefit of this approach is that it short-circuits the dilemma at the heart of most movies of this kind: how can you decry the cruelty of voyeuristic mayhem while portraying voyeuristic mayhem? There’s very little mayhem, and that which there is gets filtered through the subjective view of Katniss, rendering it stark and horrible instead of entertaining. It also drives home the essential gap between the debauched denizens of the decadent Capitol and the vulnerable, exploited citizens of the outlying Districts. This could not be more relevant. We already live in a country where people from economically devastated places not much removed from District 12 have few opportunities to get out, and among them are joining the army and getting on a reality TV show. All to serve the interests and entertainment of a bunch of people in our gentrified urban centers who don’t actually do anything. This is Verhoeven territory, but without the Dutchman’s ironic distance, which gives it the weight of real injustice, not just a cruel punchline.

The Hunger Games is not a perfect movie by any means. It’s a slavish adaptation of Collins’ book, but the absence of Katniss’ first person narration makes some of the emotional beats feel shallow. For those who haven’t read the book, much of Katniss’ internal turmoil remains opaque, while those who have read the book won’t find much surprising or innovative here. Still, it’s a significant feat for a mass market film aimed at tweens and teens to so directly demand audience sympathy for the often invisible dwellers of the American underclass.    

This blog is dedicated to evaluating the promise and reality of 2012’s potentially-historic slate of genre movie extravaganzas, but I’m starting things off by reviewing a Welsh/Indonesian production that will be seen by a handful of Americans. Why? Because The Raid* is exactly the sort of elegant machine of ass-kickery that Hollywood should be studying if they want to remind people why movies are still worth seeing.

Writer/Director Gareth Evans’ story is a model of simplicity. A squad of Jakarta’s finest break into an apartment complex in order to arrest a local gang lord. It doesn’t go well. The End. In between, The Raid offers a clinic on what does (and does not) make for a satisfying action film.

American movie producers, if you want your movie to be as awesome as The Raid…

Keep the set-up simple and efficient. The Raid is a straight-forward movie, but it’s not just a parade of ultra-violence, as some reviewers have suggested. The protagonist, rookie police officer Rama, has a back story and a strong motivation beyond simply surviving the bloodbath. But the information is delivered in economical terms, never getting in the way of the film’s forward momentum.

Mix it up: If The Raid has one persistent criticism, it’s that the action tends to blur together after a while. It’s true that there’s probably one too many scenes of Rama kicking his way through a bunch of henchmen in a hallway, but The Raid actually does a great job of varying the mayhem, including all the shootouts, stabbings and creatively-staged explosions you’d ever want to see.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of shooting a bunch of high-octane ass-kicking, frame and edit it in such a way that the audience can actually see what’s happening! Self-explanatory.

Most of the movies they I cover on the blog this year are going to be seen by many more people than The Raid, but I doubt that any of them will pack as much kinetic energy and effortless effectiveness as this one. That’s sort of a bummer, but at the same time, at least I got to see it.

*I know that the official American title is The Raid:Redemption, but that’s just some dumb marketing garbage and I refuse to acknowledge it. In many ways, the name-change is symbolic of the way that The Raid outdoes so many American action films. It’s a sleek, nasty piece of work that goes about it’s business without mercy. Too many American action films take something simple and elemental and compelling and muddy it up with shallow “character arc” malarkey, getting in the way of the visceral thrills that are the only reason anyone is watching in the first place. THE RAID is a single, all-encompassing verb that sums up the entire movie while also reflecting the film’s style. The Raid: Redemption is a soggy pile of meaninglessness. How can a raid be redeemed? Is it a sequel? Bah? Just like all the two and a half hour migraine-factories put out by the likes of Tony Scott and Michael Bay, where there’s nothing that’s ever well enough to be left alone.   

If the films of 2011 had a single message to the people of Earth, it was “they don’t make ‘em like they used to!” With The Artist and Hugo dry humping the corpse of silent filmmaking and War Horse simulating the verities of mid-century marital movie pageants, you’d think the art of film had peaked some time before 1950.  The strong signal conveyed by the slow, wet fart of a program that was the Academy Awards what that we’d all be better off if we stopped going to new movies all together and just spent our time watching TCM and whittling. 

If you watched the blockbuster entertainments that took up so much theater space and screen time last year, you might be inclined to agree with the idea that the art of cinema had died long ago and all that was left was bury the bloated carcass and get on with our lives. Of the top ten highest grossing films of 2011, 9 were sequels, and only two (Fast Five and Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol) could reasonably be described as ‘good’ movies. Mostly, you’re talking about long-dead  horses being beaten (Twilight and Harry Potter) and hollow, creatively bankrupt special effects extravaganzas that are also long-dead horses being beaten (Transformers). Since most mass-appeal movies seem to be thundering inanities, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to haul yourself down to the local multiplex in order to pay exorbitant prices and deal with cell phone-wielding cretins just so you can watch Hollywood blithely jerk off in your face.

 But there is hope. It’s a new year, and a blank slate, and looking at the schedule of films coming out in 2012, there’s every reason to believe that the next ten months will see the release of some of the boldest, most visionary and imagination-capturing blockbuster genre movies in recent memory. The kind of movies that make you glad for the advent of “talkies” and color film.

You’ve got The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, either of which could be colossal misfire or a generation-defining classic. Ditto Prometheus.  Rian Johnson’s Looper could be the best time travel actioner since Back to the Future. Lincoln and Djano Unchained could be the best double-feature-while-you’re-stoned in recent memory. Cabin in the Woods could be the exclamation point on thirty years of horror tropes. You’ve got new movies by BOTH Andersons, Moonrise Kingdom and The Master. And new comedies from Sacha Baron Cohen (The Dictator) and Judd Apatow (This is Forty).

I’m not going to claim that mass appeal and genre movies are better than art house fare.  There are plenty of fanboy strokers out there who’ll make that case. But I do think that these movies, since they will be seen by so many people, and young people especially, are the ones that will or will not breed the next generation of cinema fans, and just as importantly, will shape the expectations of those very fans. 

This blog will  chart the progress of the 2012 Movie Apocalypse and evaluate how the actual films stack up against their media hype. By the end of the year, we’ll have a better idea of whether or not popular cinema has a future beyond providing a place for harried parents to dump their children for a couple of hours. I am cautiously optimistic.  

Some dirty hippie once said, “fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,” and it’s true. Take the brave assembly of ronin tasked with killing a bloodthirsty feudal lord in Takashi Miike’s truly fantastic samurai movie 13 Assassins. A just and wise administrator in the Shogun’s service asks an aging samurai to assassinate the Shogun’s younger half-brother, a callous sociopath who rapes and kills his subjects with abandon and who is moving ever closer to a position of influence in the Shogun’s court. The samurai, played by Koji Yakusho, assembles a group of at-lose samurai who, like him, have been rendered redundant by the prolonged domestic tranquility of the Shogunate. His merry band of trained killers are happy to have a cause worthy of dying for, but their very effort to ambush and annihilate the evil Lord Naritsugu’s massive retinue rekindles the old sanguinary joys of samurai warfare. As Naritsugu watches his the assassins cut a bloody swath through his retainers, he remarks to his aide that, when he gets back to the Shogun’s court, he will recommend that Japan return to the “age of war.” And the viewer, watching Miike’s brutal, gripping, sustained action juggernaut, would be inclined to agree. That’s the quandary that Miike deftly explicates: no matter how righteous an individual samurai might be, the samurai code, with it’s devotion to duty, monastic study of violence and scorn for life, is not compatible with peace or justice. The tragedy for the death-drunk samurai is that they only discover the fragile beauty of existence in the blood-splattered field of their own demise. At the end of the movie, the Shogunate is still peaceful, but the ecstasy of death we’ve just witness leaves the unshakable impression that this peace is evanescent.

Sure enough, shortly after the fall of the Shogunate, Japan saw the rise of a military regime imbued with the spirit of Lord Naritsugu that brought he age of war to all of Asia. In 1937, the Imperial Army conquered the Chinese capital of Nanking, and the subsequent bloodbath is the subject of Lu Chuan’s film City of Life and Death. The triumphant soldiers treat the people of Nanking as Naritsugu treated his subjects; disposable playthings, born to serve. And, as during the Shogunate, the only path of resistance allowed a solider who resists participating in mass rape and murder is self-annihilation. Chuan’s lush, sweeping black-and-white cinematography captures the epic scope of the horror, but focuses acutely on the individual people caught in the terrible gears of history. The film’s greatest achievement is the way that characters with little to no dialog make indelible impressions with a series of insightful, deeply empathic close-ups. It’s an approach that keeps the film from becoming a dreary catalog of atrocities. It also lends insight into the soul-destroying dilemmas of an independent conscience trapped in a military hierarchy suffused with the life-denying, loyalty-obsessed ethos of the samurai. 

Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun is the culmination of the 70’s exploitation craze ushered in by Grindhouse. This is fitting, since Hobo started out as a fake trailer that won a contest sponsored by Miramax during the run-up to Grindhouse’s release. It is also, by a wide margin, the first film to truly channel the look and feel of those bygone splatterfests. While Quentin Tarantino’s Death-Proof avoided simulation altogether in favor of genre deconstruction and Robert Rodgriguez’s Planet Terror and Machete content themselves with simulated scratched film and an emphasis on evisceration, Hobo replicates the experience of watching a cheap gross-out flick in a run down theater while wearing polyester bell bottoms. The film stock, the camera angles, the over-saturated color palette, the scary and unhinged protagonist, creative but low-tech bloodletting, alternately flat and histrionic performances, purple-to-the-edge-of-incoherent dialogue, and, my favorite touch, supporting actors who look sleazy and unkempt even though they’re supposed to be playing authority figures. Not a detail is overlooked in the pursuit of lurid authenticity.

Of course, this raises the question: why? Why go to so much trouble to recreate a genre of film that is marked by low budgets, inept direction, horrible acting and revolting misogyny. For my money, it’s about taking the singular, defiant tastelessness that characterized grindhouse movies and adding some actual talent and production value. Those movies were giddy delights, made only unpalatable by the fact that they were generally made for twenty bucks by off-duty porn directors. Hobo With a Shotgun brings real vision, a 21st century sense of boundary pushing, and an actually great lead performance by Rutger Hauer, making it one of the most satisfying movie-going experiences of my life. After a string of botches, fiascoes and near-miss classics, from Planet Terror to Drive Angry 3D to Faster, the rigorous vision and daring of Hobo With a Shotgun is a triumphant blast of twelve-gauge buckshot.

Both Drive Angry 3D and the underrated gonzo action film Shoot ‘em Up contain a scene in which the protagonist kills a bunch of bad guys while having sexual intercourse. In Shoot ‘em Up, Clive Owen rollicks his way across a hotel room, alternating dong thrusts with trigger pulls, all while heavy metal blares on the soundtrack. In Drive Angry 3D, the killing and humping is in slow motion, all scored with treacly classical music. The difference between the two scenes is the difference between telling a joke and explaining a joke. It’s also just one of the seemingly infinite ways that Drive Angry fails to capitalize on its potential as an exploitation throwback.

Probably the most egregious misstep is the complete mishandling of Nicholas Cage. These days, Cage only has two acting gears: bugfuck insane, and semi-conscious. Which Cage you get is largely dependent on the tone and content of the material he has to work with. Sadly, Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier’s script basically demands that Cage sleepwalk through the movie. He’s a dude who has escaped Hell in order to save the life of his granddaughter, but the Ad Wizards behind this flick decided that the way to handle such an inherently ridiculous premise was to take the character’s remorse over a life poorly lived seriously. This, to put it as mildly as possible, was a mistake. Cage’s character has spent nearly a decade in LITERAL HELL, as in Lake of Fire and pitchforks and constant, unquenchable thirst. Wouldn’t it have been more understandable, not to mention VASTLY more entertaining, to emphasize Cage’s lusty embrace of the human pleasures he’d been denied so long? The “joke” during the sex/shootout scene is that, while his partner is writhing around in ecstasy, Cage is fully clothed and motionless. Dude’s been roasting on the Devil’s spit for ten years (which must have felt like an endless span of time), wouldn’t he be fucking like a Viking lord? Cage should have been channeling Sailor Ripley, not Ben Gates. It will never cease to amaze me how many filmmakers are incapable of letting go of their Robert McKee character arc bullshit when dealing with stories and genres that demand excess and shamelessness, not inept stabs at depth. I know that you’re ‘supposed’ to make the audience “care about the characters,” but when you’re dealing with a 3D action flick about dudes escaping from Hell to fight Satanic cults, the metric for what constitutes ‘caring’ is unique. Yes, you want the audience to root for the protagonist, but the best way to do that is to make him violent, capable, and FUN, not to give him a half-baked excuse for a heartbroken backstory. C’mon guys, this stuff isn’t that hard.