The Fire Rising

So I'm just chatting with one of my irl friends whilst browsing BZPower, and we're flipping through the different library clubs (ECC, SSCC, CCC, Ambage, CFE), and in the middle of looking through different posts, he stops me.
 
Then he says that a lot of the posts are like the speech Darth Sidious made to the Senate in Star Wars Episode III, and the church in Dishonored (I haven't played this, so I dunno if this part is correct).
 
I asked him why and he says this:
 
 

It sounds like they are proclaiming themselves as being this 'amazing' group that will help everyone, while in reality it never lives up to that and often contains a certain level of corruption....

 
That's a pretty funny description to give to the clubs on a website for a children's toy, don't you think?

 
Dr. King Schultz, a bounty hunter, buys a slave known as Django and gives him his freedom. The two strike a connection and become partners for the winter, providing Django with an opportunity to become a lethally accurate and fast shot with a gun.
 
I saw Django Unchained last night. It’s been my most anticipated film of the year since I saw the trailer in July, upsetting The Hobbit. It was a spectacular trailer to do that, because I’ve been following The Hobbit since early 2011. Usually I’ll look at a trailer, and if it does the job right and catches my attention, I will go see the movie. But I never let myself form an opinion on the film beforehand. I didn’t do that for The Dark Knight Rises, or Skyfall, or Looper. However, this was a trailer that was so good that I could almost smell the movie itself being just as fantastic. So when I walked into that cinema, I was expecting something amazing.
 
Director Quentin Tarantino has served up yet another masterpiece – not surprising, considering that my least favourite Tarantino film, Jackie Brown, is still far better than many films I’ve seen.
 
The setting, the south western United States before the American Civil War, is one I always enjoy if done right. The “western” genre has also been one of my favourite genres to watch. It feels like this film was made by Tarantino just to say “Merry Christmas” to me, because it stuffs so many things that I enjoy about film together and does it right.
 
Django is portrayed brilliantly by Jamie Foxx, both for the brief few minutes we see him as a slave and throughout the entire movie afterward as a free man. It was very fun to watch him turn from being an unsure free man ready to serve Christopher Waltz’s character into a confident, bounty hunting partner of Waltz’s character. In his relentless pursuit of these white men, Django throws himself so wholeheartedly into it that Schultz calls him the fastest gun in the south. It was interesting to watch as Django slowly developed as the main character throughout the film, and while he does some pretty nasty stuff in the finale, he retains his humanity.
 
Waltz as Dr. King Schultz is a joy to behold, and was the highlight of the film whenever onscreen. Waltz has a way of acting that I really enjoy (his character Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds stole that show, too) and I hope to see him in another film soon. Schultz shows up with some very fancy language in the beginning, combined with his own accent and unique way of speaking that allowed me to immediately latch onto the character. Although he is confident and knowledgeable early in the film, we are shown that Schultz is still very human – his German legend about Broomhilda, his anti-slavery view, and numerous shots of him being unable to watch actions taken against slaves in Candieland. Schultz is the character of the film, and Waltz did everything right with the role.
 
Leonardo DiCaprio as the antagonist Calvin Candie was also superb, as a brutal, conniving plantation owner. It was very interesting to watch as Candie allowed Django to talk smack about anything and everything (all thanks to a possible 12, 000 dollar deal) before the ruse was detected, and the allowances he was willing to make for Django and Schultz as well. I also enjoyed the scene between Candie and the head slave Stephen (played by Samuel L. Jackson), who had realized the ruse of Django and Schultz and reveals it to him then and there… leading to everything falling apart for our two protagonists.
 
As Tarantino films tend to do, the film does jump a little bit between different periods of time between Django’s past and Django’s present, but not as much as Resevoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. However, I think it works to the benefit of Django Unchained because, to put it bluntly, the only thing that matters about the past is the whipping of Django’s wife. Once we’re past that, we don’t need to know anything else – all that matters is the here-and-now Django story. So that’s what we get. Django Unchained is still filled with Tarantino staples – blood is everywhere, we get some disturbing scenes (such as a slave being eaten alive by dogs), and people being absolutely ridden with bullets. Tarantino himself cameos as a slave drive that’s shot while carrying dynamite… I’ll let you imagine the rest of that.
 
The soundtrack is upbeat and delivers exactly as any Tarantino soundtrack should – by pulling in very out of place songs and making them fit. There’s one scene where we get a rap song that would usually only fit in with a bad modern comedy movie. The song shouldn’t fit into this “southern” scene at all, but this is Tarantino, and he makes it fit. However, the soundtrack also manages to fit in several western sounding songs, and let’s be honest here; society needs more songs like that.
 
If I have one complaint about the film aside from some small nitpicks (there’s a scene towards the end where Django shoots someone from an angle and they go flying in a straight line backwards), it’s the lack of screen time that the winter bounty hunting segment is given. We see Django and Schultz go up to the mountains, see a bit of Django training, and see his first bounty – and then the film skips ahead to spring, when Django and Scultz infiltrate Candieland. The film is almost three hours long as it is, and Tarantino mentioned they actually considered splitting the film into two volumes like Kill Bill, so perhaps cuts were made to that segment in order to keep the runtime down. That said, an extended version on Blu-Ray would be very welcome.
 
Suffice it to say that Django Unchain didn’t just meet my lofty expectations for it – the movie exceeded them. Where it fits in terms of the rest of Tarantino’s films I’ll have to decide later, but this is easily one of my favourite films of 2012 thus far. If you haven’t seen Django Unchained yet, correct that mistake immediately.
 
96%
 
I hope to see both The Hobbit and Les Miserables by New Years; if I manage it, both will be reviewed.

 
I saw Life of Pi this morning as the focus of a brief school outing - one of my favourite outings ever, up there with seeing The Hunger Games earlier this year. The film is about a boy called Piscine "Pi" Patel. Whilst on a Japanese ship sailing to Canada with his family and a host of zoo animals to sell in Canada the ship sinks during a massive storm, stranding Pi on a lifeboat for 227 days with only a Bengal tiger known as "Richard Parker" for company.
 
Now, I must first comment that I was duped with the trip and we did not see Life of Pi in 3D, which is a true shame. The draw of the film for me was the visual aspect of it; it is a beautiful film, with extravagant landscapes and a spectacular, always changing ocean. The subtle opening sequence, with its abundance of the many different species at the zoo, is among my favourite title sequences ever. The animals have a life-like quality to them, and I couldn't bear to even think about tearing my eyes away from the screen. When the ship sinks there is an odd, majestic sort of quality to it - as Pi stared in horror onscreen, I stared in wonder from in the audience.
 
I truly regret being unable to see the film in 3D, because it's obvious even in the 2D version that this film is meant for the additional dimension. These are visual effects at their finest, and scenes like the one early on when Richard Parker leaps out from the tarp and into the screen are breathtaking even in simple 2D. The sinking of the ship was truly a sight to behold, and the storms threw hooks into my arms and pulled me in with them. There wasn't a single scene in this film that failed to be breathtaking, which was made all the more fantastic by the knowledge that most of it was digitally animated. The closest thing I could describe this film to is Avatar from 2009: the story is somewhat lacking and the acting might leave you wanting, but it has a lush, beautifully animated and breathing world for you to lose yourself in. That's are far as I will compare the two, however, because everything else is too different.
 
The tiger, Richard Parker, was brilliantly done, to the point where there were times in the film that I was forced to remind myself he wasn't actually a real tiger. As I stated before, the animals were also a joy. They were all extremely life-like, and I hope that more films come that can successfully animate a film like this one.
 
However, visuals can only carry a movie so far, and I found the restof the film to be lacking. While the soundtrack certainly fit each scene it was used in, I cannot recall any of them. It fails to stand out like the soundtracks of films such as Inception or Pirates of the Caribbean, instead sounding rather generic. The acting also left something to be desired - while the boy on the boat is superb, everyone else feels as if they have been thrown in there for the sole purpose of having more than one human being in the film. The writer feels emotionally distant rather than curious, and the father is made out as a brutish businessman - but he lacks the bite to be like that. My next complaint is how several scenes in the film played out - several dramatic scenes were so goofy I actually laughed out loud, and over half of the theatre was laughing too. This movie isn't meant to be laughed at, but we laughed nonetheless.
 
Maybe I'm just immature.
 
While I wish that more films would take the care and focus on the visual side like Life of Pi, I wonder if it's really necessary. Yes, this film is a beauty to behold, but so was Avatar. Must these breathtaking visuals always come at the cost of characters, plot, and even music? I don't want that. Characters alone are extremely important to me, and I believe in having my attention captured by every character onscreen. Filmmakers need to learn balance when it comes to visual masterpieces such as Life of Pi. All this time it has been touted as such - a "visual masterpiece", and never was the story or anything else given the spotlight for more than a few brief seconds. This needs to change, and until it does, I'm content to remain with films, even those with animated settings, that fail to reach this bar visually.
 
Because of that, despite my visual love for the film, I'm scoring it 80%.
 
**As a note, I wrote half this review the day of, on the 18th, but had to leave and only just came back to it - that is the reason for some contradictory statements regarding time in the review**
 
Stay tuned for a Django Unchained review later today, and then a special film related entry today or tomorrow.

I'll be reviewing The Expendables later today or tomorrow, and a review of The Expendables 2 will be coming later in the week.

A Review of The Dark Knight Rises

Where should I begin? How do you begin a review of possibly the best super hero film, and possibly one of the greatest films of all time?

I shall open with my few complaints about the film, as so very minimal they are. The first being The Bat, Batman’s new vehicle debuting in this film. While it is neat, and it’s cool that Batman can fly around, it just can’t hope to match the brilliance of the Tumbler, nor the versatility of the Batpod. However, the way it is worked into the film is very clever, and it ends up giving Batman a slim advantage where without it, there would be no movie at all. My second complaint is with the many connections to Batman Begins; while this helps the film to set itself up as the conclusion of the trilogy, aside from Harvey Dent being mentioned a few times there are no such connections made to The Dark Knight, leaving it out on its own. The third is a scene that takes place between Batman and Bane in the middle of the film, an encounter which looks like it should render Bruce Wayne either dead or useless, but doesn’t. It felt a little unrealistic, and thought the film worked with it very well, it could have been done far better.

However, as I said, those complaints are minimal. This movie is brilliant, fantastic, amazing, and I will definitely be going to see it again. The film takes place eight years after The Dark Knight, and this is easily seen; Bruce Wayne has become secluded from society as his company slowly loses money, and organized crime within Gotham has ground to a halt. However, chaos is rippling just beneath the surface, and when Bane reveals himself it comes crashing out of the floodgates.

The portrayal of Selina Kyle/Catwoman (although she is never referred to as Catwoman, another bonus) by Anne Hathaway was terrific, and it was nice to see that she never truly allied herself with either Batman nor Bane, working with one only to turn to the other and then back again. I also enjoyed Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance, and was extremely happy to see his character play a large role within the film. The cameo appearance by the Scarecrow was also welcome, and I wish that we could’ve seen the Joker in some way as well.

There were several twists and turns within the plot that I didn’t expect, which was actually very surprising in a very good way. In fact, even the parts that were predictable were played out so well that I can’t complain about them. This film’s story outdoes the overly depressing one of The Dark Knight and its role as the climax to the trilogy is leagues better than the opening to the trilogy of Batman Begins. As hard as it is to believe, Christopher Nolan has outdone both of the previous films with this one, marking an extremely satisfying end to this tale.

I loved the soundtrack as well. Every single scene that was given music was strengthened in every way, the notes matching perfectly with what was going on and giving precisely the right tone. And when we were given scenes with no music (one key scene between Batman and Bane comes to mind), it fit as well, lending us more focus to the action that was occurring in those moments.

While I did have some complaints with the film, as I said before they were minimal and barely impact the score I have given this film. This film, like The Avengers before it, gets the superhero film right and perfects it. This is without question the biggest film of the summer, and you have to watch it. No moviegoer life will be complete if that moviegoer has not seen The Dark Knight Rises. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to the theatre and watch this again.

Final Score: 98/100

Yes, it's that good.

-ibrow