Posted by: Bradley Redder
Hmm... I remain unconvinced. All I got from your post was that you have a crush on Josh Brolin and you seem to think it's okay to eat things out of the toilet... Or were you just listing things that you think you have in common with my dog? Charles Barkley (or as my neighbors call him, "The Round Mound of Rehound"), sometimes eats stuff out of the toilet, but he doesn't actually like Josh Brolin that much... It was just coincidence that he was licking the screen that one time when you walked in on me watching that American Gangster DVD featurette.
Why do you keep insisting in your posts that you didn't like this movie when you keep sending me these texts waxing on about how great it was? I want to focus on this part of last-night's segment of your serialized dissertation, when you were discussing the impeccability of the time-travel aspects of the film, "...where most ofther [sic] time travel movies are so completely reckless in their depcition [sic] of the lasting effects of actions carried out in THe past... as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. men in black 3 makes sure it gets everything right, down to the letter".
I thought that phrase about killing time and injuring eternity was so strange for you to use, and then I realized I'd heard it before, in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Do you really think it was necessary to invoke Thoreau to make a point about this silly little movie? And the time-travel plot is so dry in it anyway. I don't know what you liked so much about it. I will admit that Michael Stuhlbarg's character, Griffin, is one of the more interesting ones in the film, but his schtick got old pretty quickly, especially once I realized that it wasn't really going anywhere. For those who haven't seen the film, or who fell asleep, Griffin holds the arcnet that J and K are looking for, and is a being who is aware of every timeline in existence, though he is perpetually unsure which timeline is actually playing out "presently." It's an interesting idea, I'll admit, to see someone aware of every detail of every potential outcome to a situation, but for me it also trivialized everything I was watching and might have even unwrapped itself in the end.
Griffin floats through every scene with an almost apathetic nonchalance, pointing out what might happen, depending on which timeline they're in at the "moment." But the rest of the characters, as well as Barry Sonnenfeld in his direction, make everything that's happening seem so imperative, like it matters, even after we're told that a timeline does exist in which K dies, another in which the world blows up, etc. This begs the question, why does it matter what I'm watching? In the universe of the film nothing essentially matters... If J saves K and they get the arcnet up, I guess that's cool, but it still leaves open the idea that in a parallel universe, K died, and the Bocclorettians (or whatever they're called) invade Earth and take over, so the suspense of the film is basically which timeline Sonnenfeld is going to show me. It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, only I don't actually get to choose the adventure. Instead I watch the least interesting version of the potential story contained within the pages. I can't believe you loved the time-travel so much. It just seemed like it created a silly rule that didn't really hold up under any scrutiny, and everyone just went with it. To also quote your friend, Henry, and his book, Walden, that you like so much, "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." What do you have to say for yourself? And please don't pretend like you didn't say any of this.
Showing posts with label Barry Sonnenfeld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barry Sonnenfeld. Show all posts
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Entry 1: RE: "MIB3" - A Mid-Summer Movie's Dream
Posted by: Bradley Redder
Well! What a change of tune! I was not expecting you to blast this movie so hard; when you walked out of it a few days ago and sent me a barrage of texts detailing how much you enjoyed it, I was sure you'd rate it at least three stars. I know that I've never said "It's brilliant science fiction with a hint of Shakespearean father-son tension that resolves in one of the sweetest moments on screen in years" about a movie and then turned around and gave it a star and a half. What changed since then? Did you sneak a peak at my review when it was still in draft yesterday and get worried that your comments were a bit over-the-top, get panicked and temper your praise for my sake? Please don't... You really don't have to do that; all opinions are welcome here. Maybe you saw something in it that I didn't. I'd certainly like you to delve more into your extensive comparison between this and the 19th century Transcendentalist movement... I just didn't see it.
In all seriousness, I honestly didn't see much to praise about Boris the Animal, which seems to be what you liked most. To me he felt a little too serious. He wasn't goofy enough for this ridiculous plot, and I didn't see any tongue-in-cheek in the performance, either. That's not a knock on Jemaine Clement (who I've really liked in everything I've seen him in); I actually didn't even know that was him until after the film, because he seems to just be covered in costume and CGI, preventing anything real from coming through. I'll agree on Josh Brolin, though. He did do a great Tommy Lee Jones impression, but I'm not sure how far that compliment goes in the context of the film, considering that that's kind of all it was.
Brolin seems to be the reason this film is being received fairly well, and I don't really understand it. Even if he was good, the rest of the film is so blank... I literally did gasp when I saw how much money was spent on it, and I do feel that there is a lot of talent involved that all seem to have forgotten to go with their collective gut on what is charming, clever, and funny, because MIBIII is seriously lacking in each of those in every way. It doesn't even take advantage of its time-travel premise all that well. It might have been interesting to see comparatively low-tech 60s high-tech MIB devices, but instead, Sonnenfeld seems to have followed the logic that a sequel has to be bigger rather than that of an earlier time means smaller, but then again, when someone throws an ungodly amount of money at you to make this movie, what choice do you have? What were those silly gyro-cycle thingies we both found to be the source of the most awkward and embarrassing Men in Black 3 promo photos on the Internet?
Full disclosure: I dozed off for about seven or eight minutes in the middle of this thing, and I didn't feel like waiting around a half hour to catch the minutes I missed at another screening at the theater. It was about forty minutes in and I wasn't enjoying the film very much, and then I decided that I was just going to let go of any expectations I might have brought in with me and just try to enjoy the film for what it is... No more than four minutes later I was sleeping, so I missed everything from the Coney Island fight to young K interrogating J. I came to as J was being loaded into the big neuralizer tube.
Did I miss anything important, maybe some of those Shakespeare scenes? Can you fill me in on what I slept through? Actually, never mind... Don't tell me. I think that in my dream state the film's most repeated line may have penetrated some inner-region of my brain, so I'll just refrain from asking questions I don't want to know the answers to.
Well! What a change of tune! I was not expecting you to blast this movie so hard; when you walked out of it a few days ago and sent me a barrage of texts detailing how much you enjoyed it, I was sure you'd rate it at least three stars. I know that I've never said "It's brilliant science fiction with a hint of Shakespearean father-son tension that resolves in one of the sweetest moments on screen in years" about a movie and then turned around and gave it a star and a half. What changed since then? Did you sneak a peak at my review when it was still in draft yesterday and get worried that your comments were a bit over-the-top, get panicked and temper your praise for my sake? Please don't... You really don't have to do that; all opinions are welcome here. Maybe you saw something in it that I didn't. I'd certainly like you to delve more into your extensive comparison between this and the 19th century Transcendentalist movement... I just didn't see it.
In all seriousness, I honestly didn't see much to praise about Boris the Animal, which seems to be what you liked most. To me he felt a little too serious. He wasn't goofy enough for this ridiculous plot, and I didn't see any tongue-in-cheek in the performance, either. That's not a knock on Jemaine Clement (who I've really liked in everything I've seen him in); I actually didn't even know that was him until after the film, because he seems to just be covered in costume and CGI, preventing anything real from coming through. I'll agree on Josh Brolin, though. He did do a great Tommy Lee Jones impression, but I'm not sure how far that compliment goes in the context of the film, considering that that's kind of all it was.
Brolin seems to be the reason this film is being received fairly well, and I don't really understand it. Even if he was good, the rest of the film is so blank... I literally did gasp when I saw how much money was spent on it, and I do feel that there is a lot of talent involved that all seem to have forgotten to go with their collective gut on what is charming, clever, and funny, because MIBIII is seriously lacking in each of those in every way. It doesn't even take advantage of its time-travel premise all that well. It might have been interesting to see comparatively low-tech 60s high-tech MIB devices, but instead, Sonnenfeld seems to have followed the logic that a sequel has to be bigger rather than that of an earlier time means smaller, but then again, when someone throws an ungodly amount of money at you to make this movie, what choice do you have? What were those silly gyro-cycle thingies we both found to be the source of the most awkward and embarrassing Men in Black 3 promo photos on the Internet?
Full disclosure: I dozed off for about seven or eight minutes in the middle of this thing, and I didn't feel like waiting around a half hour to catch the minutes I missed at another screening at the theater. It was about forty minutes in and I wasn't enjoying the film very much, and then I decided that I was just going to let go of any expectations I might have brought in with me and just try to enjoy the film for what it is... No more than four minutes later I was sleeping, so I missed everything from the Coney Island fight to young K interrogating J. I came to as J was being loaded into the big neuralizer tube.
Did I miss anything important, maybe some of those Shakespeare scenes? Can you fill me in on what I slept through? Actually, never mind... Don't tell me. I think that in my dream state the film's most repeated line may have penetrated some inner-region of my brain, so I'll just refrain from asking questions I don't want to know the answers to.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Brad's Take: Men in Black 3 - *1/2
It's late. Much later than my normal review-writing time, and I'm tired, almost as tired of being awake as I am of thinking about Men in Black. Why is it so late? Because I've been sitting here staring at my computer, turning over in my mind the idea of posting the lyrics to Will Smith's theme song to the original Men in Black instead of writing an actual review. On the one hand, I think it would perfectly reflect my feelings on a film which doesn't really demonstrate any more effort beyond cutting and pasting something from somewhere else and calling it a night. But I'm not sure the statement would be effective without a thorough explanation even longer than this one, and it might put me in the position in which I'd come off as the asshole, rather than the team that led to me handing over fourteen hard-earned dollars to see this slop. It doesn't even have the integrity to be really awful, so that I could at least throw out some adjectives with a little emotion behind them. Nope. Instead it's just the hollow corpse of a once-clever and imaginative film.
I'm not too sure what Men in Black 3, or as I like to type it, MIBIII, is about, which is an eensie bit depressing considering how much time I have to imagine writer Etan Cohen spent developing the story for this overstuffed, undercooked turkey. He takes the modern approach to film comedy of creating such an overwhelmingly convoluted plot scenario that it just pounds the audience into submission trying to follow it that they don't even realize that almost none of it is funny. MIBIII seems to fancy itself more of a sci-fi film than a comedy, which would be fine if it raised any interesting quandaries worth pondering longer than it takes to say the name of the film's villain alien race, something like "Vocclorettabillunozenbrout." Wait... No, the simplicity of its ideas force me to the conclusion that it couldn't have been that long, but I remember it being equally nonsensical.
This leaves the film in that criminal territory of ridiculously over-budgeted comedy at (GASP!) $215 million. Money can't buy happiness, or humor apparently. MIBIII reeks of talented people who have simply lost their instinct for what is fun, or funny, and as a result, the film flounders haplessly, desperately grabbing onto anything that might lead to a laugh, and it's twisty time-travel plot means that what they get hold of is (Surprise!) historical anachronisms and a re-imagining of some historical figures and events. And aside from a scene where Bill Hader portrays Andy Warhol as an undercover agent who thinks his work is pretentious garbage, it all feels (Surprise!) as stale as you'd expect a sequel to Men in Black 2 to be, or as I like to type it, as MIBII II B. (In the interest of paralleling MIBIII's hackiness, I'll say that) I wish a man in black would have neuralized me after I walked out of the theater!
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