Arnold's tally

Christmas got you down? Your todo-list won't get shorter? Rest your eyes for half an hour:
 
 

via seanbaby

Peter Jackson: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey

The good stuff first:
- It is better than I anticipated. Well, I spent the last couple of weeks lowering my expectations, but still.
- There is a bit of Jar Jar Binks around, but it is spread thinly across many figures, so it never got on my nerves. Although some scenes got pretty close.
- Gandalf levelled up and can call in air strikes now.

Some gripes to get out of the way:
- Smaug shows a bit of leg, and that's it. That was a bit disappointing.
- As an old GURPS-afficionado, I hated how the old grand dame Physics and her lapdog Falling Damage was treated

All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but the humor found the right mark with me. Strangely, the scenes I dreaded most (the dwarfes' home invasion of Bilbo and everything with Gollum) came across really well.

Bilbo comes across as a dignified bourgeois in over his head, but still with a bit of spine. While he ends up as a troll's hanky, he never loses his poise, and he is much more watchable than Frodo, who I wanted to smack right in the quivvering lips for two long, long movies. Also, apart from three or four exceptions, I wasn't able to keep the dwarfs apart. If there only was a chart or something.

It is very different viewing compared to the old LOTR-films. Those hat some kind of grimy patina which became a hallmark of them. Strangely, the Hobbit looks like a high-end TV production, like Game of Thrones, only with less tits and more midgets, or a documentary. Yesterday, I learned that Jackson used 48 images per second than the usual 24: This somehow explains the strange cleanliness of the sets and the docudrama flair. Seems that this technical gamble didn't pay off. Also, 3D - next time, I wouldn't bother.

The movie shifts between kitchen sink-drama and grand, hectic CGI-vistas, and strangely, I enjoyed those small scenes more than the big, noisy ones.

3.5 (bordering on 4) of 5 of goblinoid living SMS messages

Sam Mendes: Skyfall

Spoilers, so many spoilers.

This is the movie you have been waiting for. Go see it, even if you are not into Bond - this is a great action movie on its own merits, while it ticks away at a lot of Bond-boxes.

Wonder slackjawed at the amazing pictures, the amazing, amazing pictures. Javier Bardem plays the Joker filtered via Bobby Peru: This alone brought tears of joy to my eyes. Learn important stuff about small island ecologies. See Moneypenny shoot Bond off a train. Marvel at our crocodile pit. Dame Judi Dench becomes the best Bond girl of them all. See the Joker pull off one jokeresque plan after another, including the mandatory "I wanted to be caught" scheme and the all-new subway train to the face. The Aston Martin comes out of the garage, only to be blown to bits by the chopper from Apocalypse Now. Voldemort now is the chief of the double-0 section. I wasn't kidding about those spoilers, it's the kind of state of mind this movie inducts in reprobates like me. Sorry. But the movie is still great after a second viewing, so nothing of value was lost.

Hacking in movies still has to take place in a haze of technobabble, but now everyone uses a PC, so it's no longer represented by flashing the word "HACKING" on the screen, but by convulsing nets and numbers, while someone blathers on about "self-obfuscating code". The IT security thug to my left couldn't hide his merriment at all the beautiful nonsense on display. But it's still nice to look at.

Monday, I'm buying two VAIO notebooks.

Five of five rats in a barrel

Timur Bekmambetov: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

This film has an interesting premise, and that's basically it. What if vampires - creatures defined by their ability to jump really far - were real and the Great Emancipator fought them? This sounds like something that this crew could turn into something glorious, but the idea is not enough to carry the movie for its running time, although, mercifully, it's only 105 minutes long.
There is a lot of very obvious CGI, including a horse stampede so fake it hurts and the longest bridge of the world on fire. Maybe the film would have been more interesting if it had really tried to keep Lincoln's vampire hunting business in the shadows, maybe even concentrating on the necessities to keep the war secret. Instead, there is this huge bridge, which must be the engineering marvel of the world, only now it's on fire, and the fields of Gettysburg are left littered with solid silver cannonballs. The premise of the movie (there is a shadow war against vampires, and Lincoln was part of that) is left hanging in the air (a shadow war has to stay in the shadows, or it's just your standard, run-off-the-mill war). All that remains is a guy with a manifestly false Honest Abe chin strip twirling an axe before our tech level's variant of a painted backdrop.

Bekmambetov did the fascinating Night Watch and Day Watch - look for those instead.

One and a half gloating vampires

Joss Whedon: The Avengers

Four superheroes for the price of one (plus the charge for 3D glasses, can we please stop this nonsense?), so what could go wrong? Indeed, this is a very amusing movie, even if you aren't a raving comic fan. It has a lot of Joss Whedon dialogue, so if you are a fan of Buffy and Firefly, you should have a good time on that count alone, although I found the characters unbelievably precious at some points. But it is genuinely funny, and they stopped the thing that made Ironman 2 nearly unbearable, where two characters are chattering away at the same time, so you needed to be a schizophrenic to get both parts of the dialogue.

The backstories and involvement of the heroes (Aryan Viking, Snide Toasterman, Green Butt-Naked Giant and Clean-Cut Protestant Guy, supported by the lesser heroes Sultry Temptress and Lotso Arrows, if you have been living under a stone) are deftly handled, meaning that I wasn't waiting for the big action pay-off, but really enjoying the slow bits of the movie. At 140 minutes this is a rather longish movie, but it does not feel that way.

And the action pay-off is grand, absolutely fantastic, I really think I won't see anything like it for the rest of the year. This includes the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. No shaky cam here, but a clear sense of who is doing what where and why. I don't know if you should stay through the credits, because I didn't. If there is a "surprise", it will be on YouTube anyway.

4 of 5 chair fights

Timo Vuorensola: Iron Sky

If you are on the web more than an hour a week, you probably have heard about this film: Nazis have hidden on the dark side of the moon in a massive, swastika-shaped moon base, and now they are returning to conquer the Earth in space zeppelins and UFOs. This is played as a comedy, and the film is very amusing, although uneven in its execution. Sarah Palin is a fitness-obsessed US president, an iPad controls the Nazi invasion fleet and Führer Kortzfleisch drives a VW bug on the moon: There are tons of brilliant ideas, but sometimes the comedic timing is off, or the idea overstays its welcome or is sabotaged by atrocious acting. There are a few changes in tone which mar the overall impression. A few scenes made me wince. But at other times, there is great comedic pay-off, and like me, most of the other moviegoers seemed to have a very good time.

I find it notable that this film exists at all. Please imagine pitching a comedy about Nazis from the moon to a big-studio executive: That sucking sound you just heard in your mind were his balls retracting into his body, to about the height of his liver and you'd be out of his office before you could say Reichsflugscheibe. Instead, a lot of funding came from the net. Now I am able to watch such an utterly crazy idea realized as a full feature movie with quite reasonable special effects on the big screen, and this gives me hope that we will one day have an R-rated film about Lovecraft's mythos worthy of the name. You know, real Shoggoths ripping up real mad cultists, stuff that is to weird for the normal film industry, but would look infinitely better with a big budget. Normally, I would give this film a 3.5 of 5, but it gets a small bonus for showing that crowdfunding can lead to results that leave the standard, safe blockbuster fodder in the dust.

4 of 5 laughably long German composite words

Vroom!

I visit 5secondfilms daily

Intimidation 101

This made my day. Players with intimidating characters should always have some of those quotes ready.

Justin Lin: Fast Five

Just dumb fun: This is the only reason for watching a movie like this. Dumb stunts, dumb big men saying dumb (but funny) things, a dumb plot with many dumb holes and some dumb gunplay to go with it. If you lower your expectations down to the level of grass roots and hastily buried hookers, a movie like Fast Five can be very entertaining.

The movie delivers, but nothing more. Some of its dialogs are so bad you will claw at your ears, some stuff strains the suspension of disbelief right past the snapping point into the realm were physics are replaced by angels dancing on needlepoints and some things make only sense in a moral universe very different from ours (your husband/ the father of your child has gone missing - you must presume that his stupid friends got him killed on their "last heist". As you enter your home deep in Rio's favelas, you see a large heap of cash on your bed - the share of your dead husband...and you are supposed to be happy about that. But maybe that's how they roll in Brazil.) Also, the movie tries to be about family or somesuch, when it should concentrate on the torque and recoil. But some of the banter is snappy and funny, the Rock and Vin Diesel chew up the scenery as completely over-the-top characters and cars are driven at high speeds and crashed into each other with abandon. And that's why I watched it, anyway.

Two and a half of five tattooed G-men

Edit: a psychological perspective on the series as a whole, probably seeing stuff that isn't even there.

Brutal and Deadly

In Western society, marketing a movie is second only to making the movie itself. Millions are poured into carefully constructed leaks, mini-features, trailers, online campaigns. The marketing budget of a tent-pole summer blockbuster is large enough to create a whole series of indie films or to fight a minor war. In Ghana, you get an old flour sack, paints and a brush. And in Ghana, you bring the awesome.

At the moment, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich exhibits seventy hand-painted movie posters from Ghana. They are crude and often very brutal and completely over the top: Like a guy carrying a knife between his teeth, and there is also a bloody head stuck to the tip of the knife. A jar full of eyeballs. Often, hacked-off body parts seem to be added just willy-nilly or because the painter still had some red and pink paint to get rid off. But the posters also point to a completely different way of consuming and perceiving cinema. If you want to reexamine your reaction towards Hollywood's marketing campaigns (are they really so different to painting the words "very brutal! very deadly! don't miss this!" on an old flour sack?) and your way of watching movies, this can be a place to start. Go on a Sunday, when it's dirt cheap, and also visit the other exhibitions.

Zack Snyder: Sucker Punch

In the first dream sequence, the heroine has to fight three samurai. The samurai are very big, like, say, trees. One of them also has a chain gun, which is also as big as a tree. It is not a chain gun, but rather a CHAIN GUN! The demonic tree-sized samurai fills the air with about three tons of ammo, demolishing a huge Buddhist temple in the process. This is the mother and father of all chain gun scenes. The chain gun scene in The Matrix is a duck fart compared to this. Then the heroine shoots his face full of holes. I watched all this with child-like glee.

There might be a serious movie under all this, and some meaning beyond "all men are sweaty, greasy, lecherous swine - including Don Draper". I am sure that Zak Snyder thinks so. I'm afraid, that it might turn out a Disney-approved meaning like "Believe in yourself!". But at the moment I am still giddy with the dream sequences. It is terrible to find out the exact level of one's own immaturity, but clockwork zombie Nazis, the heroes strafing a fantastic battleground with an WWII era bomber, a dragon going after said bomber...sometimes, you just have to let the awesome in, know what I mean?

5 of 5 VTOL-capable, auto cannon-armed powered battlesuits which have a grim, pink bunny face painted on the front/ face armor plating.

I'd pay for a desktop model of this suit.

Why do movies suck so bad (at the moment)?

Obviously not all movies of the last year suck: Just the last two months, we were graced by movies like Black Swan and True Grit. But the mass of movies seem to be terrible, terrible comedies, films about young vampires and sequels of sequels. Why is that? Mark Harris has the (longish) answer at GQ, of all places. It's the perfect storm of demographics and marketing, and although the usual suspects crop up, the (no-longer-)cinema-going public is also to blame.

Robert Rodriguez: Predators

This is a gritty little adventure in the jungle. It basically copies all iconic elements of Predator from 1987 and updates a few of them - for example, the in-tune-with-nature indian is replaced by the in-tune-with-the-tao yakuza. It is highly amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), quite coherent and works entirely without jump scares. The characters are basically ciphers, but for a game master it is nice to see the typical cardboard cutouts in action and to take some notes for the next session. Adrian Brody works ok as an action hero, Laurence Fishburne is hilarious and I would liked to have seen more of Danny Trejo - but Mexicans seem to die just before the black guy gets it, and that's very early in the movie.

I predict this film will be standard Christmas fare for the late night slot on December 24th on the private TV channels from 2013 onwards. Some gun porn.

4 of 5 creepy convicts

Christopher Nolan: Inception

Just a few thoughts:
- Expectations were very high, and as the movie is good, but not comparable to your garden-variety epiphany, I came back a bit disappointed. I guess nobody will film a mix up of Matrix and Mullholland Drive anytime soon. And that's too bad.
- Nolan doesn't like women. He thinks they are clingy, emotional, stuck-up toddlers that mainly exist to get in the way. See Batman Begins for another blatant example. That the woman in question is just a figment of a character's subconsciousness doesn't make her less irritating.
- There were two films in one. One was a kick-ass SF movie of the good kind, the kind that asks a "what if" questions and follows the answers to the end. The other was a psychodrama about a husband's guilt trip. Those two movies shared the space, uneasily, and sometimes tripped over each others' feet.
- Zero gravity never looked so good. I think, this was the first zero g fight that really looked like the real thing.
- In your dreams, car doors are bulletproof.
- The plot is convoluted, but not willfully opaque or complete gibberish. If you try, you will keep up. But don't think too much about the mechanics of entering other people's dreams. The more you ponder it, the less it works out.
- I like Leonardo DiCaprio better with every movie he makes.
- The same goes for Cillian Murphy.
- This is possibly the one good blockbuster movie this year. If you want to see a movie, this is a good choice. But it is not a must-have cultural artifact, necessary for inclusion in this particular civilization.

3.5 of 5 spinning tops.

Intacto (2001)

After two blockbusters, I want to talk about a quite unknown movie for a change. The movie is Intacto from Spain, and about a decade old. It is, while disguising itself as a thriller, basically a vampire movie, and it showcases how to scare an audience with the concept of the supernatural parasite. Classic vampires have changed from monsters to pure objects of desire, and there is not much the audience does not know about them. They drink blood, sunlight turns them into a five-minute household chore, they have great reflexes and are ripped as fuck. They are also conflicted about having those reflexes and a six-pack that will last them a few centuries. No wonder the girls like them. Some variables may differ, but that is your normal vampire, as experienced by the movie-going public. He might be good for a few jump scares, but then a cat in a refrigerator is. He has stopped from being uncanny or scary by himself.
The vampires of Intacto are different: They seem to be normal people in all respects, but they drain the luck of their victims, just by touching them, if they want to or not. There is one scene in the movie which especially creeps me out: One of the vampires is led to a group of victims and touches them in turn. They are rundown and obviously unhappy and seem to have gone through the procedure before: Quite the contrast to the come-hither eyed blood dolls common in vampire movies. Apart from the vampire grabbing them for a few seconds, nothing else happens. The victims get a few bills and are sent away. But it is far more terrifying than a conventional vampire sucking at the neck of a nubile girl: It is implied that these people will never catch a break again, or have a good turn, or be at the right place at the right time.
This is not only terrifying because, by now, every student of (popular) culture has come across the various readings of the vampire as symbol of sexuality, of reverse colonization, of social isolation, and so forth. We also understand blood very well. When Stoker wrote Dracula in 1895, the theory of blood groups was not yet invented. Blood was not "just" blood - it was your life force. Today, it's just the red juice that runs out of you when you cross traffic with your eyes closed.
But the vampires in Intacto drain your luck. No-one really understands luck, you just "know" it exists, that your life might have turned out very differently if you hadn't been lucky at some points. And that luck is beyond your control, ineffable, and yet in some ways critical to your happiness. And these creatures take it away! The disheveled victims in Intacto are worse off than any of Dracula's prey. Apart from that, the vampires in this movie are just like normal humans - but very, very lucky. The movie features some scenes where they test their preternatural luck, and these are more uncanny than every vampire flick, where a bloodsucker is "fast" or "strong" - because by now we know that a vampire is supposed to be that way. Intacto shows us real vampires: predators that take away the one thing that you do not understand but which you cannot afford to lose.

So you want to see a dragon

Go see Alice in Wonderland. The only review that does it justice is here. I didn't like Avatar too much, it's a flat, predictable movie, a lot of sound and fury. And slowly the consensus comes around to my view. Alice in Wonderland is like Avatar in many respects: Good will triumph over Evil, the girl will man up in the end and the Big Bad will get just deserts. But it makes absolutely no bones about being a fairytale, while Avatar tried to be a gnarly war-is-hell-we-should-treat-our-Mother-right movie and left me playing trope-bingo for two hours. Alice herself is a much more lovable protagonist than the soldier-turned-blue: A bit of politeness can go a long way. Wonderland is at least as awesome to behold as Pandora, and while Cameron's creature design had to keep some standards of biological feasibility, Burton could just run wild. And thus you get a Cheshire cat that is...well, you best see for yourself. The 3D is a bit obtrusive in some places, but people really seem to learn how to employ the medium.

And the Jabberwocky is the best dragon in ages.

The Wolfman is not a good movie

It's basically a collection of jump scares, sudden startles and violin stabs pasted together, and bolted on a woe-is-me monster plot. This film has jump scares nestled within jump scares, and apart from that, it is a pretty weak rerun of Dracula from 1992, with some added blood and guts strewn about, some fancy hallucinations and a werewolf that is about as scary as the bears on Munich's CSD. Hugo Weaving as inspector Abberline is amusing, but the namedropping just reminded me that I would rather be watching From Hell. Fair warning: People dragging their girlfriends into this movie will be punished with no less than three (!) romantic comedies.

Avatar: War of the Dunces

This post is full of spoilers, but you probably have already seen the movie, know that it cost about the same as a real brushfire war and that most people think that it is a good movie. Which it is. There is really a lot to see, the creatures and the forest are fantastic, the 3D works as advertised. It is a nice movie and a good time was had, but I am not going to talk about the goodness of the movie. I am going to talk about the suckiness of the warfare. Even General Custer would have done better. Just four things that came to me while watching the movie:

1. The Sky People are stupid
- So you are a spacefaring race, and you have a nice fat colony ship in orbit. There is a holy site on the ground which want to blow up badly (Ooooh, so badly).
Why not take the big fat orbital lifter, go into orbit and drop 50 tons of steel from 100 klicks up. Or dump one of the big yellow excavator/forest-murderer machines on the Na'vis' Holy of Holies, if you really want to make a point. Delivering explosives basically by hand on site is just asking for massive interference and blowed-up helicopters. At least drop the daisy cutter from a height were the natives can't breathe.
- The useless pretty-boy colonel. The stupid seeps from him like tasty, tasty molasses. He kicks open a door and opens his command center to the poisonous atmosphere of the planet, risking everyone inside, just to demonstrate his incompetence with the SMG. Instead, like, having two choppers on 24h standby, on a world that teems with aerial predators. Also, getting out of that exploding gunship was darn impressive, but the guy was basically jonesing for a knife fight all the damn movie, and that was probably the only way he was going to get one. A bowie knife on a mech? That shit would get you laughed out of even the more hand-to-hand inclined space marine chapters. Someone should have set up the colonel with a nice bar brawl or, you know, a roll in the hay. That would have nipped many problems in the bud. The guy might be able to bench-press half a ton, but the space beneath his steely hair is empty.

2. The Na'vi are useless
- Was nobody briefed about the Sky People's tremendous capability to concentrate fire on an approaching front? Or did Sully sleep in school? Was there a mistake in translation? "Just charge the firing line with your big blue horses. Just right at the three dozen goons who each have a machine gun or automatic cannon. The bad guys will turn and run. On earth, this tactic works. Every. Single. Time. History proves it, from about 1914 onwards." Of course they get their asses handed to them in a spray of blue mist. For me, it smacks of a political decision: Nobody liked the horse people that much, so they got set up in a big fat decoy/ martyr mission, and in the following massacre, they were weakened for generations, facilitating a push of the forest people into the plains. They probably do not whoop and hiss in the pure and proper way, like the good forest people do. I thought these guys were jungle fighters, bred from minute one to deal silent death in the bush. So were are the traps, the ambushes and the swift arrow into the coolant tubes?
- I know it's good for morale, but putting the leader on the big read bird, where even the useless pretty-boy colonel can identify him from three miles off is just stupid.
- So you have this chopper of the enemy and a sympathetic pilot. Why wait while all the clans make up their minds and come to the meeting place at about twenty miles a day. Stuff that sucker full of your most aggressive warriors right now and dump them in the Sky People's base. Tell them to target windows and air locks. Or hijack the orbital lifter, drive it to about 2000 meters high, turn it around and switch on the burners , transfer the infiltrators to butterfly dragons (or glorious martyrdom) and drop the ship on the station.

So, in conclusion, the two antagonistic parties flail around like toddlers in blindfolds, and sacrifice people and materiel for nothing while the mournful Horner-score blares in the background, until the planet itself gets sick of the commotion and throws the newcomers off. As I said, it is a nice movie, but if you want a film by Cameron where humans and aliens are fighting (relatively) smart, rent Aliens.