Sunday Sierrablogging

Valley of the South Fork San Joaquin from the slabs southeast of Florence Lake, John Muir Wilderness.

Dueling Movie Reviews: RED versus Salt

Over recent weeks, I've seen two movies with striking similarities, so I'm reviewing them both at once. This also helps to catch up on my enormous movie review backlog.

Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. Rather than allow herself to be taken into custody, she goes rogue, exhibiting superhero-level abilities in the process. An excellent supporting cast includes Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

RED (technically, it's "Red," but the title is revealed to be an acronym), stars Bruce Willis as a retired CIA agent marked for assassination. Fighting back, he assembles a rogue team, exhibiting almost superhero-level abilities in the process. The astounding supporting cast includes Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, and Karl Urban.

So, you can see why I'd place these two movies side-by-side.
More...I really enjoyed Salt, don't get me wrong, but on a long list of things that RED did right, Salt did all of them wrong, and the primary thing is, RED had fun.

Salt is a really slick action movie, and Jolie as Salt does action really well, but it is ponderously serious. It's absolutely grave the way the CIA setting is established, including Salt's relationship with her boss (Schreiber). The whole thing, really, is treated as an action-adventure drama, made more dramatic by the presence of Serious Actors who are Not Allowed to Smile. And all this would be great, I love that kind of movie, except that in truth, this is not a serious movie at all, it's simply a movie that takes itself seriously.

RED, by contrast, knows it's a comic book, knows there's a silly component to it, and kicks back and relaxes. It does this in a way that enhances the plot points. If you're going to take the whole assassination thing seriously, then you have to take the deaths seriously, but if you make sure to portray every murder and attempted murder in a manner that emulates a cartoon, then you're allowing the audience to enjoy the mayhem. (And remember, I absolutely enjoyed the mayhem in both films.)

More importantly, the seriousness of the script confine's Salt's actors, whereas the looser RED script allows the talent to play. RED is basically Space Cowboys with killers instead of astronauts. The old farts are having fun. There's not a lot of wit; the script sort of backs away and lets the hams ham it up. Fun!

I really enjoyed Angelina Jolie's super-spy shtick. Arthur was annoyed by it; she's too super-human and the back story explaining it really isn't a justification. In fact, the whole back story is full of holes, which is important since it's clearly designed to establish a series. The ending ("Here Comes the Sequel!") was egregious in that regard. In thinking it over, I decided that James Bond started out relatively low-key, great but not super in his earliest films, and only gained strength and abilities as audience expectations increased; he expanded with the series. But Salt starts at the peak that Bond achieved after ten pictures—where can she go from here?

So, RED definitely wins this duel. A couple of months after seeing Salt, I remember almost nothing about it. I expect that, given a couple of months, the same will be true for RED. In that regard, it's a really a matter of taste; do you want a dark stupid movie or a light stupid movie? As stupid movies go, they're both pretty good.

Cross versus post

Wednesday Wildflowerblogging

Indian Pink (Silene californica) on Ring Mountain, Marin County.

Sunday Sierrablogging

Cathedral Peak from Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park.

Wednesday Wildflowerblogging

Sierra Pretty Face (Triteleia montana) at Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park.

Friday Random 10

Burial - Untrue
Fall - Ghost in My House
Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa
Dead Moon - Poor Born
Laurie Anderson - Excellent Birds
Huntsmen - Fever
Les Breastfeeders - Laisse Autant Le Vent Tout Emporter
Solomon Burke - In the City
Velvet Underground - Black Angel's Death Song
13th Floor Elevators - Rose and the Thorn

Wednesday Wildflowerblogging

Death Camas (Zigadenus paniculatus) at Donner Camp Picnic Area, Tahoe National Forest.

Monday Movie Review: The Town

The Town (2010) 8/10
For Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), Jim Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), and their friends, bank robbery is the family business. They live in the Charlestown section of Boston, a center for bank and armored car robbery. Now Doug wants out. He's falling for Claire (Rebecca Hall) and the FBI is looking into his last robbery. But getting out isn't going to be easy. Directed by Ben Affleck.

The Town makes an art of gritty, but it still looks good. Maybe I should say Affleck can't make up his mind, but instead I feel like he recognizes the fine line between realistic and annoying. There's certainly a trend towards documentary-style, hand-held, muted colors, and the like, to broadcast to the audience, "Hey, we're authentic!" Yeah, sure. What Affleck does is cut in little bits of grittier filming, blended with a more conventional look, and it works. It's important, because it's the kind of movie where people say "the city is a character," and so you do have to feel the locations. There's a strong sense here of alleys, bars, shops, crappy apartments, gentrification—the whole way in which a city lives, breaths, and grows.

More...

Speaking of the city as a character, The Town features one of the best car chases I've seen in years; a real throwback to movies like The French Connection and Bullitt. Those movies, both famous for their car chases, were also very much about the cities in which they were located. The French Connection had a car chase that could take place nowhere but New York, and The Town's is strictly Boston. It's a great chase because it's down to the ground, connected to its streets in a specific way. I know nothing about how it was filmed but it felt real, not CGI, not overly staged. It had a thrillingly haphazard quality to it.

It's a very modern movie, with exciting, slightly over the top action, that is essentially a film noir. The two movies that came into my head watching it were Criss Cross and The Killing. The strange notion of romancing your former hostage actually makes more sense if you look at it in a noir context: fate, wrong decisions, harms done in the past returning to the present.

The crime gang, led by Affleck and Renner, are of a piece with their neighborhood. They all seem almost to look alike, the way they blend in with their environment. Affleck is smart and weary, Renner a loose cannon and over-eager; these are cliches, of course. We've seen that before, as well as the way loyalty makes the smart one stupid. But it's well done; lived-in and fleshed-out. Blake Lively has a nice turn as Jim's sister and Doug's ex, as does Chris Cooper as Doug's incarcerated father. It's a movie full of very lived-in actors who really get down to the bones of their characters.

Which brings us to Jon Hamm, as FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley. He's in town to investigate our boys' most recent bank robbery. In it, the assistant bank manager was beaten brutally, and the bank manager (Rebecca Hall) was taken as a hostage and then let go.

Jon Hamm does not belong in this movie.

I feel bad saying it, because he's a terrific actor, and he does great with the part. Like the rest of the cast, he's really earthy and direct. He's also got real movie star presence, which is not something you know about an actor you've seen on TV until you actually watch him on the big screen. The problem is, Hamm has a lot of presence. He's startlingly handsome, and yet he's not the leading man, nor a romantic presence, nor is he meant to be dashing or exciting. It's as if he was cast in a role written for Charles Durning. And really, he acts the shit out of it, but it's distracting to see Durning's lines coming from that face.

(Criss-Cross-posted)

Friday Random 10

Ramones - She Talks to Rainbows
Nigerian Police Force Band 'The Force 7' - Asiko Mi Ni
John Doe - Burning House of Love
Minutemen - The Politics of Time
Blondie - Rapture
Sonics - The Hustler
Agent Orange - I Kill Spies (live)
Sleater-Kinney - A Quarter to Three
X - The Unheard Music
The Sweet Talks - Akampanye

Wednesday Wildflowerblogging

Cream Cups (Platystemon californicus) at Salt Point State Park, Sonoma County.

Sunday Sierrablogging

Rock Island Lake in northern Yosemite National Park.

Friday Random 10

Soul Vibrations - The Dump
Laika & Cosmonauts - Disconnected
Jon Langford - 1234ever
Dead Moon - Poor Born
Sonics - Psycho
Morcheeba - Blood Like Lemonade
Brian Setzer Orchestra - One More Night With You
RJD2 - Oh, Tragedy
Crossfires - Fiberglass Jungle
RJD2 - Chicken-Bone Circuit