Kill Your Darlings (2013)

About twenty minutes into Kill Your Darlings I knew I was in trouble.  I was already having a hard time getting into it and still had well over an hour to go.  It didn't help that this featured some of the founding members of the Beat Generation, which I've never really cared much about.  Well, if you're not a fan of the Beat Generation, why in the hell did you see this, you ask?  I honestly didn't know that's was Kill Your Darlings was about.  I mainly saw this because it stars Dane DeHaan, one of my favorite young actors, and Daniel Radcliffe, whose career choices I'm following very closely post-Potter.

Believe it or not, I try to go into most movies knowing as little as possible about them.  I avoid trailers as much as I can, and stay off the web to avoid spoilers.  Many times I'm not even aware of who wrote or directed the film until the credits roll.  If it's based on a book, I won't touch it until after I see the movie.  I do this mainly to avoid going in with certain expectations, especially when I know it's from a writer or a director I may or may not like.  I know sometimes that's unavoidable with the bigger releases, or when the commercials or posters say, "Brought to you by the director of this and that."  Generally speaking, I try to go in as 'clean' as I can, and many times I usually don't know much more than the lead actors.

Kill Your Darlings follows the story involving the murder of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), and the early days of the Beat Generation.  As the movie begins with the murder and the accused, Lucien Carr (DeHaan) already in jail, there's little suspense at all to the remainder of the story.  We mainly watch Carr, Allen Ginsberg (Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) drink, do drugs, listen to music, and cause mischief.  I don't find it all that interesting to watch people do drugs, especially when I have no experience with their drug of choice.  I have no problem with alcohol and marijuana, but I have no knowledge at all of benzedrine.  Watching people listen to music is also pretty uninteresting to me, too.  Would like to see a Youtube video of me sitting in a bar watching a band you've never heard of that doesn't focus on the band or music?  Pretty fascinating, right?  Kill Your Darlings features much of the same general hedonism that I disliked about On The Road, only with less misogyny.  I guess if you think about it, this is sort of a prequel to On The Road.  The credits even specifically mention how Kerouac went on to write On The Road after this.  Okay...

After the opening sequence, we go back to just before Allen Ginsberg's heads off to Columbia University.  I was excited when I saw David Cross playing Ginsberg's father.  I thought maybe he'd lend some humor to the movie, but unfortunately this did not happen.  Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Ginsburg's mother, who is dealing with mental illness, but I found this subplot to be largely pointless as they didn't have any impact on the main story.  Maybe if Ginsberg had suffered from mental illness himself, it might have made more sense to include this, but it came across as unnecessary backstory.  After arriving at Columbia, Ginsberg meets Carr who introduces him to various members of the Beat Generation.  He begins to experiment with drugs and his own sexuality.

Another issue I had with the film was that I'm never made to feel why these people were important literary influences.  I didn't finish Kill Your Darlings wanting to know more about these guys.  The film features lots of scenes of Ginsberg writing and reading poetry, but the moments that worked best were the character moments, especially Carr's interactions with various members of the group.  They are inspired to create a "New Vision", and while there are several moments where you see them throwing out ideas, tearing up books, and working it out, what was the end result?  It wasn't clear to me.

As John Krokidas' feature directing debut goes, it's a decent effort.  I thought the pace dragged a little too much, and there were certain elements and characters that didn't add much to the story or were wasted entirely.  Part of the drag stems from how I mentioned that we begin with the ultimate climax of the film.  Lots of times this can work, but here it just made me antsy knowing I was going to sit through 100 minutes to get to a climax I already knew was coming.  Since this is a little-known story, spoiling how it turns out in the first five minutes was a mistake.  There's very little about the aftermath of this event, and it's all the lead up to it.

It's very well acted though.  Dane DeHaan was extremely charismatic as Lucien Carr, and it's one of those performances where he makes it easy to understand why people were drawn to him.  He plays off everyone well and it was interesting to see how manipulative he could be.  DeHaan's chemistry with Radcliffe is one of the strongest points of the film.  As for Radcliffe, if he wanted to distance himself from Harry Potter or make people start to forget about that part of his career, then he certainly accomplished that with a daring and earnest performance.  I think he even went "full gay."  It's bodes well for his future that he's willing to take risks like this, and it reminds me of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's earlier performance in Mysterious Skin.  Outside of wasting Cross, Leigh, and especially Elizabeth Olsen (an extreme waste), I found most of the performances to be good.

Kill Your Darlings is a stylish and well-acted story, but unfortunately meanders and suffers from lack of focus.  I didn't hate the film, it simply didn't work for me.  If you're someone who's a fan of the Beat Generation, or are interested in Daniel Radcliffe's career post-Potter, then you may get some value from watching it.  It's a rental at best.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Metallica: Through the Never (2013)

I suppose it's cheaper than a concert ticket...

This'll be a fairly quick review as there's not much to Metallica: Through the Never, and if you're not already a fan I can't imagine why you'd want to pay the IMAX premium ticket price.  Through the Never is a concert, inter-cut with what's essentially a glorified music video.  If you're hoping for some backstage footage or insight into the band, then you'll need to look elsewhere, but if you just want to rock out with Metallica for 90 minutes, then Through the Never delivers.

Yes, I am a Metallica fan, particularly when I was younger and in my early days of playing drums.  I used to play "...And Justice for All" from beginning to end, and was a big fan of Lars Ulrich.  As far as the music goes, I feel like the drumming and the tempo the only things I feel qualified to critique, but I'll get to that later.

I want to get the music video elements out of the way, since I found them to be complete nonsense.  Trip (Dane DeHaan) is a roadie for the band.  Shortly after the concert starts, he's sent out on an errand to retrieve an item from a truck that has run out of gas.  I don't know if everyone in this city was already at the concert or they just shut down entirely, but you'll notice there isn't a single car on the road.  That is, until Trip almost runs a red light and is struck by another car.  What a coincidence!  Forced to continue on foot, Trip finds himself in the middle of a riot between people that couldn't afford a Metallica ticket and the police.  Then he's chased by not-Bane on a horse.  He's able to find the truck though, and it's only cargo is a small bag.  What's in the baaaaaaag!?  Why a moving truck was needed for a small bag, who knows?  He's cornered by not-Bane's posse at one point and figures the best way out of this mess is to douse himself in gasoline and flail about uncontrollably.  This didn't work at all as the mob beats him senseless.  Fortunately, he wakes up on the top of a parking structure, still with the bag, and relatively unhurt.  I pretty much gave up at that point.  I know music videos don't always make sense, but I found these scenes to be devoid of any entertainment value and more and more distracting as they went on.  I'm not sure what the band and director Nimród Antal were going for here, but I'll chalk it up to an experiment that didn't work.  I was more surprised that Dane DeHaan is the featured character as he's an up and coming actor that's been in some well-reviewed movies.  He has no dialog though and doesn't really do much otherwise.

As far as actual concert goes, I really enjoyed it.  The stage design was great and there were some really elaborate and interesting effects used.  For instance, the intro to "One" was very theatrical and that would have been something to witness in person.  However, there were some distracting elements here, too.  At one point James Hetfield's mic cuts out and he angrily knocks it to the ground and motions for a tech to fix it.  Was this a real event in the concert or staged to make it feel like a 'real' concert?  Eventually the music video events bleed into the actual concert, and it felt awkward.

They play a wide variety from their catalog which I also enjoyed, like the aforementioned "One".  You'll hear many of their other popular songs like "Battery", "Master of Puppets", "Fuel", and "Enter Sandman".  However, if there's one thing that bugged me, it was that some of the songs were played at slightly faster tempos.  "Fuel" is already a fast paced song, but playing it even faster made it sound messy.  There was one song that was intro'd with the album version, but then cut to them playing live, which really made you notice how much faster they were playing it.  You'd think they would have worked on that to make sure it wasn't so jarring.  The irony is that when playing "Battery", it sounded great, as did many of the slower paced songs that didn't have many tempo changes, like with "Nothing Else Matters".

I hate to say it, but it sounded like Lars Ulrich's playing has regressed a little over the years.  His tempo was all over the place, even within the same song.  Again, with "One", I was happy to hear it begin normally, but then the speed keep creeping up as the song went along.  I'm sure the band would feel that using a click track or metronome would take away from the realness of the performance though.  Even his technique was a little off, and many fills sounded rushed or sloppy.  I don't mean to sound like I'm hating on Lars, but I tended to be more technical when I played, so things like this always bugged me.  I also don't recall hearing this as much when attending previous Metallica concerts.  At least I can still enjoy the goofy faces he makes.

The musical highlight was during the credits, when the band played "Orion", one of their instrumental songs.  It was just the band on stage jamming the song without an audience.  The band sounded great here, and their playing was tight and clean.  I'm sure when playing in front of an audience they feed off the energy of the crowd, but I liked seeing the band play as if they were back in the garage.

You're not rewarded for staying until the end of the credits though, as we never find out what's in the bag.  What's in the baaaaaaag!?

Fans of Metallica will enjoy Through the Never for the music, but the movie elements end up being distracting nonsense and totally unnecessary.  The 3D and IMAX were also nothing special, but I guess it's cheaper than a concert ticket.  If you have a good surround sound system, then I'd recommend saving it for rental and enjoying it that way.  It's worth a listen.

3 (out of 5) Death Stars

The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

It's like Drive 2.0...

It's easy to draw parallels between The Place Beyond the Pines and Drive.  It doesn't help at all that Ryan Gosling plays another stunt driver that doesn't speak much.  It's also similar in that the trailer sets up a much different film that what you really get.  I know many people that were disappointed with Drive thinking it was going to be an action-oriented film, and from the trailer for TPBtP, you might think the same thing.  That's not to say that it's bad, in fact it's good film, just not what you might expect.

This might be a little spoilery, but I'll try not to reveal too much....

Pines is an overarching story, spanning over 15 years, and following the families of Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) and Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper).  We begin with Luke, a stunt motorbike rider for a state fair.  He ex Romina (Eva Mendes) visits him and Luke learns he is the father of her newborn son.  Luke decides to stick around to provide for him, but eventually needs a way to make more money.  His current employer reveals he used to rob banks, so the two of them decide to start robbing several banks in the area.  He eventually crosses paths with Cross, a local Schenectady cop, during one of the robberies.  This is pretty much the story you see in the trailer, but this is really just the first act.

The second act follows Cross after stopping Glanton.  This is has made him a hero amongst his fellow officers, but he gets mixed up with some crooked cops, led by Ray Liotta.  Cross wants to expose the corruption, and uses the opportunity to gain a higher position.

We then get to the third act of the film.  The story comes full circle, but it's also the weakest part of the larger story.  Again, I can't really get into it without spoiling things, the events that play out are just way too clean and coincidental.  You can see how it's going to play out from a mile away, and ends the film on a bad note.  It doesn't help that the two characters that are the focus of the third act, played by Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan, are the weakest and least interesting of the film.  It's not an issue with the performances, as much as it is with the story itself.  I will say, however, that Cohen speaks with a ridiculous Long Island accent, when neither of his parents do, and it just makes his character that much more unbelievable.  Also, another thing I thought was weak about the third act was they didn't do a particularly good job of aging the characters, outside of adding a few patches of grey hair here and there.

It's a shame it ends on such a bad note, because I felt the movie had been going along pretty well until that third act.  It's close to two and a half hours though, and any of these acts could have been movies all on their own.  As much as I liked the second act, it felt like they rushed through the conclusion of it, and it was already a little cliched.  I've often criticised a film for having too many writers, and this one has three: director Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder.  Each act feels like they were written by different people, and then tied loosely together.  The story is a little too ambitious for a single film.  I can't help but think this would have been great as a show or miniseries on HBO, similar to The Wire.

Pines is another one of those movies where characters don't always say much, and you see a lot of meaningful staring into the distance.  This usually means the music needs to stand out, and I thought this had a really haunting score.  I had to look up who did the music only to find out it was done by Mike Patton.  Mike Patton?  Of Mr. Bungle and Faith No More?  I never would have guessed he was involved.

I also enjoyed the aged, gritty look of the film.  I don't think they ever make a point to tell you when this movie occurs, but you get the feeling it's in the recent past.  The themes of the film though could be told in any setting though.

Pines has very good performances across the board, but I didn't think anyone was really stretching out of their comfort zones.  Again, Gosling basically plays a tatted up version of the same character he played in Drive, Ray Liotta plays another crooked cop, and Dane Dehan plays another awkward, angsty teen.  Eva Mendes only pops up here and there, and Rose Byrne is pretty much forgotten about by the third act.  That's also an issue in that there's so much story, not all of the characters are well developed.

The Place Beyond the Pines is an ambitious, well-acted story, but ultimately lets the viewer down with a disappointing third act. It's length makes it something that may be a little too much for casual viewers, even I started to squirm in my seat towards the end, but it's worth a watch...on DVD.

3.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Jack and Diane (2012) - Movie Review

I never thought I'd see a movie about young romance with dialog worse than the Twilight films.  Congratulations to Jack & Diane for this accomplishment.

The movie starts with an unusual opening sequence of seeing blood in a bathroom, and then a monster's reflection in the mirror.  We immediately flash back to "Earlier" (that's what the movie tells us), where we see that Diane (Juno Temple) has lost her phone and goes into a store and asks to borrow theirs.  She sees Jack (Riley Keough) behind the counter.  Without any dialog or hint of anything, the next scene we see them hanging out.  Then, they are at a club where Diane is drunk off her ass despite only seeing her have a sip of beer (and neither is of drinking age).  I think Juno Temple is a talented actress, but I'm convinced she's never been drunk before, as I couldn't tell from her performance if she was trying to play drunk or her character was meant to be extremely stupid.

The film falls into a pattern of the couple sitting and staring at each other without saying much, or walking nowhere in particular.  Thirty minutes into the film, I knew almost nothing about the characters or why they should be together.  If anything it felt like Jack kind of forced herself on Diane, and she just kind of went with it.  I wonder how that would have played if Jack was a man. Jack came off as an extremely unlikable person.  She's rude and disrespectful to people for no reason.  Is this supposed to be her edge?  The only thing I knew about Diane was that she suffers from nosebleeds, and is moving to Paris in a week for school.  Yes, this is romance that takes place over just a week.

I couldn't even tell when this movie took place.  At first I thought maybe this was set in the  80's or 90's due to the use of tape decks and walkmen, and it was hilarious to see someone try to use a broken tape in a tape deck.  Are the people involved with this film so young they don't know how tapes worked?  But then I remember that the whole beginning of the film is about how Diane loses her phone and you see several other people using modern cellphones.  Was that tape deck stuff some quirky, hipster bullshit, or was this movie just not consistent at all?

The worst part of J&D is the weird, stilted (sometimes barely audible) dialog.  It's so bad and laborious I thought maybe they had gone to the Kristen Stewart school on how to speak more good.



This is an actual line of dialog from the film:

"Um...(five second pause)...it's just like...this...cheesy song over and over, and like...uh...but...(another five second pause)...I...(six second pause)...uh...(14 second pause!)...this is my brother's...um...and I've been like...saving it...um...I'm just gonna be...lame and say it."

This continues on, and ends with Jack asking, "Am I freaking you out?"  Yeah, your inability to string a coherent sentence together is freaking me out.  To be honest, I started tuning out at this point, but I already got the general idea of what this movie was about: two girls that were supposedly in love that can barely speak.  Throughout the film, I kept saying "line" from Rifftrax when there'd be a long pause in the dialog.



Oh, and the whole terrible looking werewolf-monster thing from the beginning?  Throughout the film we see these weird stop motion sequences of what appeared to be hair growing through internal organs or something.  They are really distracting and never really addressed by the characters in the film.  At one point Diane has a dream about turning into this monster and eating Jack, but then only casually mentions it to Jack, who just blows it off and asks to go back to sleep.  If the movie is trying to tell us that love is turning them into monsters, cause...you know...like...metaphor..and stuff, then they are going a really bad job of it.  Remember, this takes place over a week.  I don't even get why these two are a couple, let alone see anything that shows me that they are dealing with some kind of super intense love.

What kind of movie is this supposed to be?  It has horror elements that aren't scary and the romance isn't believable.

I've seen the actors do better work in other films, so do I blame them for not being able to deliver a natural sounding line of dialog, or is it that Bradley Rust Grey's script and direction solely to blame?  Normally when I watch a film, if there's at least some redeeming quality about it, then I'm motivated to go back and watch other films from the same writer or director.  This movie makes me never want to watch anything by this guy again.

Jack & Diane is honestly one of the five worst films I've seen this year.  It's a nonsense love story about two girls you don't care about, and features the worst dialog I've seen in a very long time.  I'm actually not dreading seeing the new Twilight film next week now.  It can't be any worse than this. This movie actually made me angry at how boring it is and how it wasted my time.

0 (out of 5) Death Stars

Lawless (2012) - Movie Review

I guess with the popularity of Boardwalk Empire we shouldn't be surprised if we see a trend of prohibition-era films.

This review might be a little spoilerific, so be warned.

Lawless is about the Bondurant brothers, Howard (Jason Clarke), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Jack (Shia LeBeouf), who were moonshine bootleggers during the prohibition. The story is based on the book The Wettest County in The World by one of their descendants, Matt Bondurant. I've never heard of the Bondurant Brothers, so they could have been based off the Bing Bong Brothers for all I knew.

Right away, I can tell you that this movie suffered from not deciding on what type of movie it was going to be.  It never focuses on one character or element enough, and even the tone of the movie is all over the place. Sometimes it's brutally violent, then it's funny, and at other times you aren't sure if you should be laughing.

Forrest Bane...er, um, I mean Bondurant, while being a little unclear as to whether or not he's the eldest Bondurant, is clearly the boss of them.  At first you think this is going to be a bad ass movie about him.  He's kicking ass and telling the new lawman in town (played by a 'dastardly' Guy Pearce) to piss off, but then something happens to him.  This gives Shia the Beef an opportunity to prove to his brothers he has what it takes.  Then, you might think this turns into a revenge flick, but The Beef basically makes a bunch of moonshine runs with his pal, Cricket (Dane Dehaan), laughing all the way.  He's got a little more business sense than his brother, so he's making them more money, but not as much common sense, as he's just spending money all over the place.

While Forrest recovers, both he and Jack have their own romances, but neither added anything to the central plot.  It's shame because I really like both Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska, but they weren't give much to do, especially with Wasikowska, and it felt like both characters where thrown in there just to give the main characters something to do during their down time between moonshine runs.

Gary Oldman shows up for early in the film, and you get a glimpse of what appeared to be another bad ass character, but that's all you get, a glimpse.  He's gone before you even get a chance to blink.

Even though many characters are underused and underwritten, the strength of the film are the performances.  I've been critical of Shia the Beef, but I thought his performance worked very well in contrast to the tougher nature of his older brothers.  I did think it was odd that his main characteristic seemed to be that he got his ass kicked in nearly every scene though.  Tom Hardy was a badass, but for the second time this summer, he plays another character that speaks with a voice that's difficult to understand at times.  Also, it seemed they missed another opportunity with his character, as the fable of Forrest Bondurant was that he couldn't be killed, but it's treated a little more than a gag and kind of glossed over.

Guy Pearce's character, Charlie Rakes, is this silly, over-the-top villain.  It seemed like a caricature of a villian from an old cartoon.  The only thing he was missing was a twirly mustache and cigarette holder.  Pearce appeared to have a lot of fun with the character though, and I thought it was a good performance.  Pearce is one of those actors that I think can do pretty much anything, but hasn't quite gotten that one killer role that he'll always be remembered for.  I hope he gets that chance.

Directed by John Hillcoat, who's directed much darker movies like The Road and The Proposition. I hoped this was going to be similar in tone to those movies, but it simply wasn't.  I never felt any real tension or like the characters were in any real danger.  He teamed up again with writer/musician Nick Cave. The screenplay is extremely straightforward and seems like something you could have seen on TV.  Lawless doesn't take any risks or do anything you haven't already seen before.

What couldn't have been on TV though were the visuals.  There are some really bloody, violent moments and there's also lots of nudity (thank you, Jessica Chastain).  It's a well-made movie as far as how it looks.  The sets are great and the setting felt authentic, but again, there's something in the details that just felt odd to me.

Speaking of which, here's one of the attention to details the bugged me.  Early on, Jack gets worked over pretty hard by Rakes.  He punches him several times on the left side of his face pretty hard, but in the subsequent scenes, he's face is bruised on the right side.  There's also very little swelling.  It was funny to me, because while Jack was getting his ass kicked in the scene I would have bet you any amount of the money that Jack's face wasn't going to look all that that bad after the beating he just took.  When a movie blows a detail like that, it kind of takes me out of the movie.   

Lawless is still an entertaining film, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed in it.  With the cast and all the window dressing, it had the potential to be something special, but it wasn't greater than the sum of it's parts.  It's suffers too much from lack of focus and inconsistent tone that makes it hard to completely get into, and at times it wastes its extremely talented cast.  I'm right on the edge between a matinee and rental on this one.  If you're really interesting in seeing this, then I'd say to check it out on matinee, but if you're on the fence, save it for rental.

3 (out of 5) Death Stars