A list of upcoming movies I want to see this summer:
Jodi and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend. I’d seen it a couple weeks ago, but wanted to see it again before reviewing it.
The Bourne Ultimatum is, in a word, excellent. The central characters and themes are carried over from the first two movies, but the story never feels like re-tread (stone?) of the preceding films.
I’ve fallen in love with the intimate, near-documentary style mastered by Paul Greengrass (this film and The Bourne Supremacy) and The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman. As viewers we feel like we’re right there with the the characters, lending an intimacy and tension to scenes that might have seemed slow or unimportant had we been watching from a comfortable distance.
While I loved the quiet, intimate moments, The Bourne Ultimatum is at it’s core an action movie, a spy thriller, and the action here is simultaneously both larger, more intense than in the previous films and easier to follow. The hand-to-hand fighting (and there’s a good bit of it) is tight, intricate work, taking place in hallway and small rooms.
The close quarters keeps the camera (and the viewer) right up with the combatants and the sense of intimacy once again heightens the tension. As well, Greengrass emphasizes that assassins can’t be choosers: fights involve books, candlesticks, misc toiletries, razor blades, and towels - whatever is at hand is turned into a weapon and the stakes seem the higher for it.
Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I love me a good car chase, and Ultimatum delivers. The Fugitive may have pioneered the wireless destructo-cam (where small cameras transmitting footage wirelessly are placed in scenery that is going to be destroyed, so as to capture everything up to and including the destruction of the camera), but this movie uses them with wild, reckless abandon. No vantage point is safe from a head-on, or tail-on, or side-impact collision, and the result is shots that had me climbing out of my seat.
Bourne uses his vehicle (a commandeered police/security cruiser) not only as transportation, but as a weapon - stopping suddenly to force a rear-end collision with a following vehicle or reversing direction at high speed into another (sacrificing the entire trunk to put an SUV chasing him out of commission).
In the end, my greatest pleasure in the Bourne series is that I feel like I was taken seriously as a viewer. There are no “winks” at the audience, no 4th wall shenanigans, no tongue-in-cheek references or smart-ass parting shots after each kill. These movies aim to entertain, but they also expect me to keep my brain engaged. And that’s are rare thing in action these days.
4.5 out of 5, um, whatevers.
Three great things happen today! iPhone, Ratatouille, and my birthday! Yay!
Jodi and I and the kiddo went to a sneak peak showing of Ratatouille Saturday night, and I cannot encourage everyone enough to go see it. It was FANTASTIC - easily the best movie I’ve seen in ages. The writing is excellent, the story is both conceptually simple yet complex in its depth. Jason Kottke captures a lot of my reaction to the film in his review of Ratatouille (my apologies for the large-scale quoting, but I want to preserve these bits):
With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details.
…I’m not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell.
Pixar’s search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they’re watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.
Jodi and I laughed all the way through the movie - not the sniggering laughs you get from off-color jokes in Shrek and the like - but uncontrollable belly laughs, the kind that Donald Duck and Goofy used to be able to draw from our little hearts as kids. Even Adelina, whose hearing and language are not on par with her peers, was rolling. Ratatouille is a visual feast (pun intended) that never relies too much on it’s looks and is satisfactory down to the last scene.
PS. I should stop on that note but I have to give huge props to Brad Bird and his voice character casting. I knew going who a couple of the voice actors were, but was never caught up in hearing them instead of the characters. There are even a couple of voices that I had to look up later and was shocked to find that I knew the actors - their voices were unrecognizable in the roles, and yet were perfect for them.
5 out of 5, um, whatevers. Go see this movie, take your kids, grandkids, cousins, neices, nephews, or random strangers. You will come out a better person!
Woooo! New TRANSFORMERS Trailer!
There’s a hysterical Q&A with Sylvester Stallone on on AICN . Here’s a great one:
Q: How do you think the template for cinematic heroes has evolved from that of the action stars of the eighties? Where do you see it evolving in the future?
A: I believe the culprit in the transformation of action films can be traced to BATMAN starring Michael Keaton. By that I mean, when an individual can step into a latex suit bulging with muscles and Velcro himself into an action star body we knew the times they were a-changing. It’s tough enough to go to the gym and stay in good shape, but when you have the option to step into a Herculean Halloween costume; working out doesn’t look like much fun. Damn you, Batman.
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
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