SXSW: Unleashed

...The move, came on and just kicked ass from the beginning. Jet's fight scenes are just brutal, and they really get you pumped up. The suffer a tad bit from overediting, but they really work well. The movie's about Jet Li who was trained by Bob Hoskins to be an attack dog, who attacks as soon as his leash is taken off. Soon Li is separated from Hoskins and taken in by Morgan Freeman, who, in an obvious attempt to outshine his Million Dollar Baby performance, plays a man blind in both eyes! In a Luc Besson script, the characters come together and form a makeshift family. Gets a little bit out there at times, but, for a Jet-Li action movie, it works. It seemed like Luc wrote his script and gave a copy to a friend to read to get some idea of how to improve it because Luc wasn't perfectly happy with it. His friend then insisted that he make the movie, but Luc refused, then his friend finally puts his foot down and says, "Fine, I'll make the movie!"

It's not a bad thing, but it's a Luc Besson script that doesn't feel like a Luc Besson script. It's not Taxi, it's not Fifth Element, it's different. It's an action movie with parts of those movies in the (too-long) middle. This movie is an absolute scream, a riot. It's not the movie that makes you think, that makes you a better person, it's the one that makes you smile and feel all pumped up. Not perfect by any means, but well worth seeing.
4:41:01 AM    comment []  trackback []

SXSW: Drop Dead Sexy

Drop Dead Sexy stars Crispin Glover and Jason Lee - just from those two names, how can you go wrong? Shot in or around Austin, always a good thing. I think the production, overall, was set up by finding actors, finding a loyal film community, booking everything, and in the three remaining days before they shoot, write a script. The process of writing the script couldn't have been that great, mostly asking the question - well, what's the edgiest thing we can do? The story is about enterprising Jason Lee losing his job, and taking his best friend/gravedigger Crispin on him to get a job with the town gangster to sell cigarettes in Mexico for more than in the US (given taxation, I think cigarettes are more expensive here, but, I really don't know prices in both places). The shipment ends up exploding while Lee and Glover are outside of their truck, leaving them stranded - only to get a ride home right away. Then it's revealed that the gangster was trying to kill Lee for no reason at all. The movie sprawls (and I really mean sprawls, it stretches to get it's links to the next action) to where Lee and Glover exhume a body to steal a necklace the woman was supposed to have worn when buried. Lee examines the body and finds the necklace to not be around her neck (big surprise). Lee then hurdles all logic and begins examining around her coffin, just in case they decided to burry her laying on it, or some force had placed it somewhere else inside of it. Lee then takes believability and tosses it out the window by taking the body out of the coffin to look for it, and wouldn't you know it, the night watchman comes by. In the time where they can see the watchman coming, yet he cannot see them or hear Lee and Glover yelling at each other, Lee decides to do what anybody would do - to NOT put it back, but to hold onto it and hide. This all happens about 20 minutes in. The words to describe it accurately are "God damn ridiculous". Lee was absolutely phoning it in, Glover was decent by putting no effort into it. The movie was trying to be edgy and cool, but it just wasn't. Nothing was set up decently. Nothing looked or felt right. Everything was just trying to hard to be craaaaaaazy and not trying to make things... well.. decent. Left after 45 minutes. Austin is a pretty good venue for movies like that, it's a very kind audience. NY or LA would've laughed them off the screen. Austin really appreciates you for trying. I just wish they would've tried giving the script at least one revision.
4:39:48 AM    comment []  trackback []

SXSW: Enron: The Smartest Men in the Room

...Shot in HD it's absolutely beautiful. The interviews look spectacular, just getting rich colored skin tones. They add in some great helicopter shots of the Houston skyline and an oil refinery at dusk, just pretty pretty shots. Everything they shot originally for this documentary had a great look for it, that becomes a problem when the documentary is structured to be a collection of images and sounds from other places. Lots of news footage, C-span footage, stock footage, etc. In comparison all of that stuff looks bland and boring. It doesn't mesh well. Fortunately the story is just amazingly engrossing. I really didn't know much about Enron since I really was unaffected, I had a general vague idea about everything and knew some stuff about specific issues, but not much. This doc really explained things well. Just laid them out for you in an amazingly digestible format for such a complex subject. I really did not think you could make a grossly entertaining movie about accounting, but they really did. False profits, lack of a balance sheet, all that is shown and explained, without being pandering. If you can't balance your chequebook, you will understand what they're saying; if you are an accountant, you won't feel like you're being babied. A real nice balance. It runs a little bit long (2 hours) but it's really worth it.
4:38:48 AM    comment []  trackback []