Revenge mildly
entertains; Keeper is teary-eyed disaster
By Joel Frady
Bay’s ‘Revenge’ isn’t entirely terrible
No matter how hard I try to stay entirely unbiased when I enter
a theater, I dreaded watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
The 2007 Transformers was a pleasant surprise, but considering
that director Michael Bay was responsible for Armageddon and Pearl
Harbor, two movies I still consider among the worst ever, I was
worried that he would eventually just make the Pearl Harbor of
giant robot movies.
Toyota’s new hybrid
Transformer runs at an impressive 2.4 miles per gallon
(city). Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is currently
playing at Regal Cinema 7 in Boone.
The good news is that Revenge isn’t half as bad as I had
feared. The bad news is that it’s not very good, either,
though I imagine that the target audience of 10- to 22-year-old
males will probably argue with me on that point.
Revenge again follows Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf, Eagle Eye),
a teenager who found himself in the middle of an intergalactic
battle between the nice Autobots and the evil Decepticons in the
first film. All he really wants is to go to college and live a
normal life, but he soon discovers a shred of the Allspark (some
robot artifact) that brings his kitchen appliances to life and
stores the history of the giant robots’ civilization in his
head, leading to mental breakdowns in both class and his dorm.
From here the plot gets more and more ridiculous, and to be honest
I spent half the latter part of the film trying to piece together
the absurd story. But it’s basically just a repeating cycle
comprised of: humans try to figure out what’s going on, giant
robots fight and humans run from explosions caused by giant robots
fighting. Towards the end, it’s just humans running around
while giant robots fight.
The special effects are phenomenal, as they should be, and the
acting is fine. The problem with Revenge is that there just isn’t
anything particularly new. The first film featured lots of giant
robot action and was fun, and the sequel is just a bigger, more
confusing version of the same thing (without the fun).
But there’s nothing new and exciting – it’s just
really loud and really long. Because it’s so long, it starts
to get extremely boring toward the end and I found myself spending
as much time pondering the film’s many mysteries (the robots
can teleport?) as I did trying to figure out what was happening.
Bay’s directorial style is incredibly distracting as well,
primarily due to his inability to leave the camera stationary.
The camera is always moving, circling characters for no apparent
reason except maybe to make me nauseous. It’s distracting
at best and, when combined with his inability to hold a shot for
longer than two seconds, leads to giant amounts of confusion.
Ridiculous plot and confusing filmmaking techniques aside, Revenge
just isn’t any fun. It’s as big and spectacular as a
summer movie should be, but it’s all business and no pleasure.
It has a few humorous moments that add some fun, but they’re
just as distracting as they are entertaining. Instead of adding
something to the equation, they serve as a reminder of how bland
the rest of the film is, and you know it’s a bad sign when
the most entertaining part of a $200 million summer blockbuster
involves the main character’s mother eating pot brownies.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, rated PG-13 for intense sequences
of sci-fi action violence, language, some crude and sexual material,
and brief drug material, is playing at Regal Cinema 7 in Boone.
Throw it back, it’s definitely not a ‘Keeper’
Writer/director Nick Cassavetes’ My Sister’s Keeper
is a complete mess, a film that’s so melodramatic and painstakingly
in-your-face with the most depressing material possible that it
is dulling to the emotions instead of liberating.
It contains about five different movies, some with fairly interesting
ideas, that it slams together in telling the story of a family’s
struggle to save a terminally-ill cancer-ridden teenager.
One of the movies inside Keeper, and the most interesting, involves
11-year-old Anna (the strikingly composed Abigail Breslin from
Little Miss Sunshine) as she attempts to win medical emancipation
from her parents, Kate and Brian (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric).
Anna visits famous lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin, who
provides the film’s only glimpses of hope) with horror tales
of undergoing eight separate surgeries that used her healthy parts
to keep her sister, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), who has leukemia,
alive. She has donated a lot of bone marrow, but now fate requires
a new kidney to keep Kate’s heart beating.
From this plot there was also the potential for an interesting
character study of the two parents who produce a test-tube baby
to serve as spare parts for a sick child, and for a moment I thought
Cassavetes and company might provide Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca
a thought-provoking sister film. But that was just false hope,
as this idea is prominently mentioned but never truly discussed.
Then comes the tear-jerking story of the poor 15-year-old girl
who feels that her disease is simply tearing her family apart
and feels nothing but pain, both physically and emotionally, all
the time. Her pain is momentarily erased thanks to a romance with
Taylor (Thomas Dekker), a fellow cancer patient she meets in the
hospital. I’ll bet you five bucks that you can tell me what
happens in this subplot without even watching a trailer.
Then there’s Jesse (Evan Ellingson), the neglected brother
who has gotten no attention due to his sick sister. He could easily
go off the handle without anyone noticing due to his distracted
parents, but this idea is only briefly introduced.
My Sister’s Keeper is not interested in examining any of
these issues in depth and is instead content with constantly pulling
the emotional strings of the audience. I was fairly warned that
this movie would be very sad, but of course it is! It’s just
100 minutes of watching a sweet girl slowly die a painful, horrible
death as her disease cripples the emotional and monetary states
of everyone else. The character Kate is shown entirely no respect,
either, and we watch as she vomits blood and progressively looks
more and more like a talking corpse.
The film is melodramatic on the level of The Life of David Gale
and John Q (also directed by Cassavetes), two films that were
so intent on expressing their political opinions (about the death
penalty and the flawed American health care system, respectively)
that they ignored their characters and beat audiences over the
head relentlessly with their messages. What confuses me about
Keeper is that it doesn’t seem to have any particular message
– it seems content to beat you over the head with constant
sad images and teary conversations.
The narrative style is also completely confusing. About seven
characters provide voice-over narration and the film jumps back-and-forth
in time at a rate that would confuse Quentin Tarantino. Most of
the performances are as melodramatic as the script, with Diaz
going especially over the top.
Terminal illness is a tricky subject matter, for sure, but it’s
not like success is impossible. George Miller’s 1992 masterpiece,
Lorenzo’s Oil, and Peter Horton’s 1995 drama, The Cure,
both tackled tragic stories of terminally ill children with compassion,
humor and tenderness. They cared more about the characters, and
staying true to those characters, than the disease.
Keeper seems to care more about the disease than the characters,
and it’s a giant step backward for Cassavaetes, who in 2006
directed the haunting Alpha Dog. That film was also about a doomed
child, but it focused on how good people can follow the wrong
trends and do monstrous things. It wasn’t constantly flaunting
the imminent demise of the doomed – it just happened naturally.
Keeper could have also been a character-driven film, but it’s
not. It made me realize I’ve been too harsh on Patch Adams
for years; while it’s equally melodramatic, at least it focused
on the humor in life and providing a respite for cancer-ridden
children. It found the cookie in the briar patch, so to say, and
all Keeper allows the viewer to see is the giant thorns.
Keeper is, hands down, one of the worst films I have ever seen.
I’d rather submit to an experimental root canal than ever
attempt to watch this film again.
My Sister’s Keeper, rated PG-13 for mature thematic content,
some disturbing images, sensuality, language and brief teen drinking,
is playing at Regal Cinema 7.
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