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| Recent movie roundup by fabio 05/26/2012, 1:20pm PDT | ||||
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| The Social Network
David Fincher is a director who has a real talent for elevating source material. Aaron Sorkin is a writer who started out heavy handed and mediocre but has slowly improved over the past decade, though he still occasionally struggles with belabored pseudo witty dialog as he tries to be the next David Mamet. It's hard enough to pull off "one character always one step behind" dialog, it gets intolerable when two or three are doing it in the same scene. The Social Network is at its best when it focuses on the monster and the semi-broken people who gave birth to it. Broken people with warped ambitions are interesting. Even the sympathetic victim is interesting because he's too gullible for the audience to fully relate to, allowing him to fit right in with the spectacle of the most successful trainwreck of the decade. What's not interesting is Sorkin's too rad for realism masturbation dialog. Writing good dialog is straddling the line between too realistic (aimless and boring) and too phoney. Zuckerberg keeps flipping between borderline Asperger's and Talk Soup host whenever the script calls for a "witty" scene. Why does the president of Harvard talk like a Jeremy Piven character? Why does the entire cast? Luckily most of the actors rise above the material handed to them. Jesse Eisenberg does for this movie what Seymour Hoffman did for Charlie Wilson's War. I doubt the real Sean Parker is a sociopath talent agent, but it's so easy to picture him that way and Timberlake does such a good job that you're fine going along with it. Probably the least believable scene in the film is hardcore CS majors pounding shots. Sorry, NO. CS majors binge drink hard liquor like 12 year olds drink their first beer, in sips with lots of breaks for sour faces. Change it to a wine cooler or Smirnoff Ice binge and you have a much more believable and funnier scene (you're welcome, Mr. Sorkin). In the end the whole thing turns out to be a decent flick with passable to painful dialog saved by great direction and performances. Cabin in the Woods The key to parody isn't just pointing out cliches. You have to either take them to their logical extreme or lampoon the mania of the thought process behind them. It's not enough to simply point out that the slut is the first to die in a horror movie. Come up with a funny and insightful reason why. Attack American Puritanism. Do something. *15-30 minute mark spoiler* The basis of Cabin in the Woods is that evil gods will destroy the world unless a ritual scarifice is carried out in the form of horror movie cliches. A government agency sets up a stage lot disguised as a cabin in the woods so that kids can be lured in and unknowningly follow the script until they're killed and the sacrifice conditions are met. This might sound like the setup for a subversive movie, but mostly it's just an excuse for a lazy script. It amounts to the first two-thirds of the movie being indistinguishable from a by the numbers horror movie. The only difference is every time a cliche happens, it cuts to two technicians in a control room pointing out the cliche. Scream did this 15 years ago and this newest attempt isn't much better than Jaime Kennedy yelling the cliches at you. They even do the character who makes an inspirational speech about surviving only to be immediately killed which they manage to flub, a gag that even the otherwise worthless Deep Blue Sea pulled off. The movie becomes okay during the climax. Mostly because people are too busy dying to verbally point out cliches to the audience and all the gags are nice and brief. There are only about four gags in the whole thing that work, mostly due to how brief they are and a lack of characters naming them out loud. Every country is running the same sacrifice and monitors show their progress. This was a great chance to poke fun at foreign film cliches but they only manage to make one of them amusing (Japan) while flubbing the rest. Sweden's attempt is John Carpenter's The Thing? Spain's is a volcano blowing up? Ha ha? A golden opportunity to riff Euro art house and shittier production values goes wasted. Why not have Sweden's entry be a black and white Ingmar Bergman monolgue? Italy can offer up garish colors and terrible blood effects, Suspiria and Zombi style. 95% of American audiences might not get it, but it's better than something that makes no sense at all to anyone. In the end it's a movie that wants to appear subversive but doesn't have the desire or ability to carry it out and doesn't even have the freshness of Scream. Operation: Endgame (Netflix instant) How did this cast get snagged by first time writers and directors with such a lame script? I was shocked to find that the Cabin in the Woods writers weren't the same people. The control room technician scenes are almost copied verbatim. |
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Recent movie roundup by 05/26/2012, 1:20pm PDT  |
