The Disaster Movie to End All Disaster Movies!

Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.

As much as I love Pe, Kiki looks astonishing in this! Someone please give me this movie NOW!

Unknown *

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones

Aidan Quinn, Frank Langella, Bruno Ganz

Unknown has all the makings for a campy, exciting, popcorn thriller; there's amnesia, femme fatales, exotically frigid locations, female cab drivers and Bruno Ganz as a kooky Stasi agent.

However, it fails to deliver cheesy, or any other kind, of thrills because it takes itself too seriously.

Liam Neeson plays Dr. Martin Harris, a renowned scientist who goes to Berlin with his wife (Jones) to attend a biotechnology summit. After a mishap at the airport and an accident that sends him to the hospital he wakes up to realize nobody knows who he is and worse than that, somebody else seems to have stolen his life.

His wife is still in Berlin with her own version of Dr. Harris (Quinn) and neither of them have any recollection of who this man who claims to be the "real Dr. Harris" can be.

Devastated he teams up with the cab driver (Kruger) who remembers him and sets out to discover the mystery behind these strange events.

Shot with almost too much precision by Collet-Serra, the film becomes a self important attempt at delivering a serious thriller. Yet it seems that the director is completely unaware that the screenplay includes secret plots to assassinate royals and Nazi inspired conspiracy theories.

Not that you can't combine both and make them into something superb (right?) but the director's take and the story never seem to be on the same page.

Neeson sulks beautifully of course and his rugged, worried face makes once again for an unlikely perfect action hero. You can't help but feel that he would be more at home in a Hitchcockian throwback, instead of this chaos.

His scenes with Jones have a specially seductive, almost tragic tone. As he remembers life with his wife, you see traces of Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, with Jones being the ultimate ice queen.

However the director cheapens this mood by making the flashbacks be recollections of shower sex and muffled moaning against a glass door...

Because Neeson is so reliably good, even his worst scenes have a certain serenity to them. The whole cast however seems to be playing out different movies. Kruger looks completely uninterested, Langella is reliably creepy and Ganz gives the movie just the right tone of cheesiness needed for audiences to relax.

The action sequences are over indulgent, sloppy and filled with plot holes. Sure, this may be a surreal plot, but even fantasy should be grounded on a version of the truth.

Unknown's main problem is that it never figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

The Missing Man.

I saw Titanic when I was 11 years old. Like most people in the planet I became truly obsessed with it. Curiously it happened around the same time when I'd become truly interested in films and wanted my life to revolve around them.

Part of my self-education consisted of me going to the video club and renting up to eight tapes to stay in with during the weekend.

One of my first missions was to watch every movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. One weekend I went home with Heavenly Creatures and Total Eclipse.

Watching Kate and Leo take on homosexual affairs after having watched them play the ultimate heterosexual couple was all sorts of shocking. Of course back then, I was aware of my own sexual orientation and like any prepubescent was both terrified and excited about the possibilities it offered me.

I remember watching Heavenly Creatures locked up in a room where to this day my parents probably thought was my porn space. It wasn't.

I remember thinking quite clearly that I assumed that any signs of homosexuality in the media I consumed would immediately point the people around me towards the feelings I had inside.

I vividly remember what then became my favorite shot in Heavenly Creatures,

It was the violent transformation of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) into Orson Welles from The Third Man. I too understood why Juliet (Kate Winslet) saw this. I too was conflicted inside, I too felt like I needed to replace my own desires and fantasies with socially adequate figures.

The violent way in which Welles attacks her makes clear how Juliet is trying to fight something within her she doesn't understand.

I saw this movie for the first time almost fifteen years ago and this image remained burned in my subconscious ever since.
I never tried to commit a murder or developed violent tendencies, instead I chose to watch this moment as a life affirming instant, where Juliet's love for the movies expresses itself in such potent way that she fears its powers yet finds comfort in their magic, even if, in this case, it wants to kill her.

In the very same way the movies have remained with me and sheltered me from all fears, doubts and even sadness, they are the one thing in life I consider to be truly heavenly.

PS:

This,

reminded me of this...

This post is part of Nat's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series.

Hall Pass **

Director: Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly

Cast: Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis

Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate, Joy Behar

J.B. Smoove, Stephen Merchant, Richard Jenkins

Everyone in Hall Pass looks terrible. Leading men Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis sport crow's feet and physiques that lack fitness to say the least. Jenna Fischer shows strange sunburns and Richard Jenkins has the worst tan of all time.

Perhaps the Farrelly brothers thought that exposing actors as they "are" would give their film a shot at achieving some sort of emotional authenticity but not really...

What we end up with instead is an attempt of the crass filmmakers at creating the kind of comedies that Judd Apatow has excelled at during the last decade. Apatow's films display men-children forced to mature, usually by strong women, who shake up their hum drum lives with their knowledge, genitalia and love for them.

This is the only thing Hall Pass has in common with something like say The 40-Year Old Virgin, and it's that the film assumes that women were created to teach men lessons, even when this means they have to reduce their personalities to often overbearing examples of "she's being a bitch because she loves me".

In this case, Wilson and Sudeikis, play the horny husbands of Fischer and Applegate respectively. The two friends spend their days checking out women and fantasizing about how much they would get laid if they were single again (obviously Fischer and Applegate's characters always have headaches and come up with excuses to avoid intercourse with them).

When their hormonal behavior leads to social embarrassment, the women decide it's time to give them a "hall pass": they get an entire week off of marriage to satiate their sexual appetite.

The film then follows the guys as they spend their week attempting to have sex and usually failing. This obviously will lead them to realize that, like Dorothy, they have no other place like home, but before that they take part in Farrelly stunts that involve farting, African American penises, psychotic DJs and Jenkins playing an expert ladies' man.

At the center of the film there are some signs of something deeper than we'd expected and this is mostly seen through Applegate's character, who takes on a pseudo-affair of her own with a younger man.

Watching the talented comedienne you can't help but wish she was in a better movie, because she provides her character with melancholy traits that seem out of place in the rest of this frat-boy fest. Even if her character receives a ridiculous punishment for exploring her own sexual liberty (something that says more about the latent misogyny in the movie than its attempt at cherishing married love) she's perhaps the only time the movie ever comes close to achieving humanity.

The rest is a mildly funny excuse for defending immature male behavior filtered through humor that could've been ruder and less cringe worthy because of its forced warmth.

A Felicidade.

Head over to The Costa Rica News by clicking here and read my review for Rio.

Then come back here and let's samba!

Style Sunday.

This Marchesa isn't Blake Lively's best look (it broadens her upper body too much) but as an example of forward looking couture it's a truly remarkable piece of work and further proof that there's nothing Blake wouldn't wear.

The luscious Abbie Cornish shines in this romantically creamy Alberta Ferretti.

The cut is perfect old Hollywood and her simple hair and makeup recall classic starlets.

Speaking of fashion forward femmes, Diane Kruger is a vision in this simple Jason Wu cocktail dress. The ample skirt with the revealing white is sexy in a can-can meets 50s housewife way and the golden shoes are a perfect detail.

Battle: Los Angeles *

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez

Ramón Rodríguez, Michael Peña, Ne-Yo, Bridget Moynahan

Cory Hardrict, Noel Fisher, Jim Parrack

How can a movie where things explode very two seconds, be so freaking dull? That might be the biggest mystery in Battle: Los Angeles, and not why the leading characters never get hit by bullets, why the virgins die first and why are the aliens bothering with physical combat when they have such amazing weapons.

The film is essentially a handheld version of every war movie made during the last decade. Only difference is that the Middle Easterners have been replaced by aliens who have come to Earth to steal all the water (yes, a thinly disguised allegory for water replacing oil as the ultimate element of survival).

The characters include all the usual suspects, including Eckhart who plays an officer who just happens to announce his retirement the day aliens invade, Ramón Rodríguez as a newbie with a pregnant wife at home, Fisher as a geeky virgin and Michelle Rodríguez as a tough, butch chick with a heart of gold i.e. she plays Michelle Rodríguez.

The film was supposedly inspired on a WWII episode concerning mysterious lights that appeared above Los Angeles and watching this torturous film, you honestly have time to think that maybe filming that story would've been a much better idea.

The action scenes in the movie are deft but shockingly forgettable, the characters are under developed and other than Eckhart and Peña (who are always reliable) everyone else seems to not even bother with putting on a show.

Perhaps what results more vomit inducing about this movie is how biased it is about the idea of military forces being the families of the future.

We always wonder what keeps this people together as they travel the streets of the city trying to find civilians. Why aren't they more interested in their own lives? Since the performances are so poor, the only thing that bonds them is the actors' contract.

This forced love for the army the characters talk so much about comes off looking as a silly, even subversive method of drafting, not very different from what people in the 1940s would've thought.

At least this lack of soul, makes it easy to believe that no intelligent extraterrestrial force would bother with conquering a bunch of mechanical beings.