Eye Candy #568 - "Cowboys and Aliens"

Cowboys and Aliens:  This film is a mash-up of the country and sci-fi genres, which is always a bit of a tough sell.  Our story opens with an amnesiac (Daniel Craig) awakening in the desert, with no memory of who he is or how he got there, with a sophisticated metal manacle on his wrist.  He makes his way to a small cow-town, where he runs afoul of the law (who believe him to be a wanted criminal, Jake Lonergan) and the town’s overbearing benefactor, cattle baron Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and his equally overbearing son, Percy (Paul Dano).  But before they can move against him, aliens attack the town, kidnapping various members of the townsfolk. Lonergan has flashbacks that tie his own predicament into that of the townspeople, so he leads a posse to retrieve their kin, running afoul of outlaws, Indians, and aliens along the way.  The supporting cast here, including Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, and Olivia Wilde, is solid.  Even Adam Beach, who I usually can’t stand, has a good moment or two.  The film also has a sense of humor and doesn’t take itself too seriously (which is good, because the explanations for what the aliens are after is nothing to write home about).  The special effects are good, the plot is fairly simplistic without many original ideas, and the acting is good without being remarkable.  Not the best film of the summer, but still worth watching.  Good, without being great.  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”

Eye Candy #567 - "The Conspirator"

The Conspirator:  Directed by Robert Redford, this film details the military trial of Mary Surratt (played by Robin Wright) and other conspirators for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William Seward in 1865.  Surratt, who has the dubious distinction of being the first woman executed by the federal government, ran a boarding house that John Wilkes Booth and other sympathizers frequented.  She and her fellow conspirators, in violation of due process and in the name of political expediency, are forced into a military tribunal arranged by Secretary of Defense Edwin Stanton (played by Kevin Kline).  Her defense is led by Frederick Aiken, a Civil War veteran and idealistic attorney fairly railroaded into the job, played by James McAvoy, who has an uphill battle proving her innocence in a court where the burden of proof is extremely lenient and his client is uncooperative.  A better directorial effort than Redford’s “Lions for Lambs”, with a strong contemporary resonance to the current treatment and trials of suspected terrorists by the United States (the subjectivity of morality aside), it’s still not a very good film, with a profound emotional detachment to the proceedings, leaden pace, and lack of energy.  Surratt, as played by Wright, doesn’t make for a terribly sympathetic character – she lies in her own defense to protect her son John, a Confederate courier.  There is nary a likable person to be found, and we have no more profound insight into the life of Surratt, her motivations, and whether or not she was truly guilty of the crimes she was executed for (though it seems she was convicted as a proxy for her son).  It’s a pretty movie to look at, but it’s not a great movie to watch.  Woodchuck sez, “Nothing to write home about.”

Eye Candy #566 - "Conan the Barbarian" (2011)

Conan the Barbarian:  Ah, Hyboria, where men are men and women are topless, where mayhem and vengeance intertwine, and where James Earl Jones once turned into a real big fake snake.  Good times, good times.  This is the third film based on Robert E. Howard’s roguish barbarian Conan of Cimmeria, with actor Jason Momoa (from “Stargate Atlantis") taking the reins here after two outings by Ahnold back in the 1980’s (one of which – “Barbarian” – was great, and one of which -“Destroyer”- was complete crapola).  This go-round is less faithful to the original stories than the first movie (we get no praises to Crom, and the villain here, Khalar Zym, played by Stephen Lang, is a wholly new creation, as is the plot), and though there are some references to various Conan stories, including “Tower of the Elephant”, we still get the general gist of Conan – a ne’er-do-well who spends his time drinking, fighting, whoring, and stealing, a reluctant hero rather than a straightforward one.  That is to say, he gets the girl…but only because he wants to ravish her.  When he was a boy, Conan’s tribe in Cimmeria was wiped out by the aforementioned Zym, who is seeking necromantic powers to raise the dead and rule the world. Like you do.   As he grows older, Conan, while whoring, drinking, and stealing, is still seeking revenge.  In the process of this, he accidentally finds himself in the middle of Zym’s plot to sacrifice a young girl (played by Rachel Nichols), who Conan develops a hankering for.  Violent and bloody, you get arrows to various parts of the body, decapitated heads, heads with their brains bashed out, impalements, severed limbs, monsters ripping people in half, a finger shoved in a the hole left by a severed nose, metal claws to the face, axes to the chest, and at least one death by catapult.  Throw in one softcore sex scene, and this film earns its R rating the old fashioned way.  A surprising cast here – Morgan Freeman does the narration (though I think they could have found someone better suited; it makes you feel like you are watching “The Shawshank Redemption”).  Ron Perlman, as Conan’s father, and Lang lend gravitas to their various roles, and Momoa does a good job as Conan (he handles the action bits well, and luckily isn’t given any long speeches to deliver).  Creepy weird Rose McGowan plays, sans eyebrows, the creepy weird daughter of Zym, Marique.  Nichols mostly just stands around and screams…which isn’t unreasonable given the general chauvinism of Howard’s work.  Director Marcus Nispel has a handful of remakes under his belt, most of which deviate from the source material, so it should come as no surprise that he does here as well.  I can see how people with unrealistic expectations for this film would be disappointed -  Conan doesn’t ponder the meaning of life or other weighty themes.  Guess what?  He doesn’t in the stories either.  The special effects are fine, without being spectacular.  The acting is fair to good without being great.  It won’t win any awards, but it’s fine for killing a weekend afternoon.  Nispel could stand less cutting during his fight sequences, as he makes some of them awfully hard to follow.  But otherwise, it’s mindless fun that doesn’t take itself too seriously.  A lesser effort than the original “Barbarian” but better than “Destroyer” (though that’s not hard to do).  Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”

Eye Candy #565 - "Mars Needs Moms!"

Mars Needs Moms!:  Based on the book of the same name by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berke Berthed (best known for his comic strips “Bloom County” and “Outland“ and characters like Opus the penguin and Bill the Cat), this is the latest in a continuing line of Robert Zemeckis-produced motion capture CGI animated films (like “Beowulf”, “A Christmas Carol”) and is about as soulless as they come, though not entirely unwatchable (though why, with the advancements in  technology, do the motion-capture humans look less and less human as these films are released?).  Obnoxious child Milo (acted by Seth Green, but voiced by another actor) is a do-nothing, selfish brat.  He and his mother (played by Joan Cusack) have a fight and before they can reconcile, she is kidnapped by Martians who wish to steal the essence of her parenting to implant in themselves, killing her in the process. So he stows away on their spaceship and finds himself in a disjointed society run by women Martians (who don’t know how to nurture) and men Martians (who do, but are the underclass on their own planet).  He also finds an allies in fellow human Gribble (Dan Fogler, who fairs best here) and a rebellious Martian, Ki.   This is the latest directorial effort from Simon Wells, previously responsible for “Prince of Egypt” and the live-action “Time Machine” from a few years back.  My main complaint - the look of the film is about as far removed from Breathed’s fairly idiosyncratic art style as you can get.  Also, the book is fairly simplistic (it is a children’s book, after all) and generally much more good-natured (and decidedly less sinister).   Plus, the book is all of 40 pages long, so there is a LOT here that was added to expand this to a full-length screenplay.  The final result here is disappointing overall.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”

Eye Candy #564 - "Ironclad"

Ironclad:  A bit of a revisionist take on the Siege of Rochester in England in 1215, as King John (Paul Giamatti) attempted to kill some of the barons responsible for the Magna Carta, including William of Albany (Brian Cox) who, with a Knight Templar (played by James Purefoy), recruits a band of warriors to hold Rochester castle against King John and his army of foreign mercenaries.  The rebel forces in Rochester number less than fifty and are besieged by the King’s forces and siege engines for two months, with the result a foregone conclusion to history (minus the bits they obviously re-write, such as the fates of some of those involved including Albany and the ending of the siege itself).   Think of it like “The Magnificent Seven”, but with brigands instead of Charlie Bronson and Jimmy Coburn.  The supporting cast is better than the film deserves, including Derek Jacobi, Charles Dance, MacKenzie Crook, and Jason Flemyng, with another random American (other than Giamatti), Kate Mara, thrown in as the love interest.  Violent, unnecessarily gory (LOTS of severed limbs, a person taking a cannonball to the face, blood fountaining out of bodies, bodies launched by catapault against castle walls), but with decent production values (they did build their own replica of the keep to destroy so they‘ve got that going for them) .  But it’s overlong (just over 2 hours) and Giamatti is a bit of scenery chewer as John.  This is director Jonathan English’s third feature length film, and while it is better than other recent medieval efforts I‘ve seen (like, say, “Season of the Witch“), it’s still not all that.  But poor James Purefoy, he just can’t seem to get a theatrical release.   Woodchuck sez, “Meh.”

Eye Candy #563 - "Videodrome"

Videodrome:  David Cronenberg has his fetish with sex and orifices front and center in most of his films.  Sure, there are some exceptions, but this film is not one of them.  James Woods (looking very young) is Max Renn, the president of a low-rent UHF TV station in Toronto that is known for broadcasting softcore pornography.  While looking to spice up the programming with something more visceral, he is shown a copy of “Videodrome”, an amateur snuff/torture porn show that he becomes obsessed with.  Soon he starts to have fairly disturbing hallucinations that overlap with what he saw on “Videodrome“.  After a friend of his disappears trying to get on the show, he tries to get to the bottom of it, to determine who created it, and he finds himself being used by the people behind Videodrome, who seek to destabilize the entire country, using society’s infatuation with violence and sex against it.  They manipulate his mind and body, turning him into something more than human, though it’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t.  And this being Cronenberg, we get lots of bloody internal organs, dystopic future visions, throbbing televisions and VHS cassettes, and people turned into human VCRs through large, phallic openings in their stomachs.  In other words…typical Cronenberg.  Still it’s visually interesting (and some of the things that Cronenberg wanted to do but couldn’t due to budget and mechanical limitations were wild).  Woods does a good job here, with less of the manic intensity he seems to be channeling later in life.   I will readily admit that this may be too “visceral” for some tastes, so you have been warned.  Woodchuck sez, “Worth a look.”