The Game (1997)

Discovering the Object of the Game IS the Object of the Game.

Quite some time ago, my friend Fabio gave me a small novel’s worth of review requests.  Thus far I’ve completed few of them, if any.  But I recently decided to endeavor to complete more of my review requests as I had become too lax with them, and Fabio’s name just came up again.  It took me a few weeks to look through the list he presented me with, and I finally selected today’s movie.  I don’t know why he selected it, and I don’t know much about the movie that couldn’t be gathered looking at the front of the DVD, but let’s find out what I thought about The Game, written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, directed by David Fincher, and starring Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, Anna Katarina, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Charles Martinet, and Mark Boone Junior.

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is rich, and every bit the dick that can accompany that amount of money.  He’s celebrating his 48^th birthday, though I don’t know if you could call it celebration the way he does it.  Plus, his father was 48 when he committed suicide, so he’s got that goin’ for him.  His estranged brother, Conrad (Sean Penn), contacts him about getting together for lunch, and at lunch he gives him his birthday present: a voucher for a “game” at Consumer Recreation Services (CRS).  Nicholas begrudgingly agrees to call them after Conrad insists that it will change his life.  After a lengthy application process, Van Orton’s game begins.  He finds a wooden clown in his driveway with a key in its mouth, and then the TV tells him that his game is starting, but gives him no more information than that.  Part of the point of the game is to find out the point of the game, after all.

It took me a little while to warm up to this movie, but I did enjoy it when it all came together.  It winds up being pretty thrilling and mysterious, but it gets started pretty slow and uneventful.  Hell, Nicholas’ application process felt like we were watching it in real time, and they filmed HIM complaining about it.  At this point, I could just see them making the trailer for this movie.  THRILL as Michael Douglas fills out paperwork.  DELIGHT as the lead on his pencil breaks!  KILL YOURSELF as he looks at pictures!  But then the game got started and the movie became more of a mystery and a thriller than paperwork.  But I never thought the movie was quite that mysterious.  Once the concept of the game was introduced, I was already instantly suspicious of everyone.  The harder they tried to make me think someone was safe, the less I believed it.  The part with Nicholas’ brother Conrad did surprise me at the end of the movie, and then it surprised me again shortly after, but I didn’t actually like it.  The ending just felt weird and unsatisfying after the build up to it.  It felt like the writer had a great idea for the movie but forgot he had to end it.  But the rest of the movie still had enough thrills to make the movie worth the watch.  I know one thing for sure: I would punch my sister right in her stupid face if she tried to pull this shit on me.  At first it was harmless enough, being just a series of elaborate pranks like hiding a clown in the driveway, changing the lock on a briefcase, ruining a shirt, but when they got into the part  with getting shot at, getting drugged, thinking I killed people, then I’m a little pissed off with this stupid game.  I also don’t know how it would benefit me beyond making my life more interesting than watching movies and writing stuff all day for a couple of days, but he did seem like less of a dick by the end of the movie.

Also (just a random thought) don’t they act like it’s the fall that kills them and not the impact?  So if (HYPOTHETICALLY) someone were to jump off of a roof thinking they were committing suicide, wouldn’t their heart have stopped by the time they hit a safety net?  Hypothetically, of course.  And how would someone figure out exactly which random point on the roof he would jump off in order to set up a safety net?  And how do blanks break a champagne bottle?  Y’know what?  This isn’t the time or place for my random, non-sequitur thoughts.  Let’s move on.

The performances in the movie were all great.  Michael Douglas did a really good job.  He started out all Wall Street and ends up all Falling Down.  I had nearly no problems with his performance.  One problem was that he didn’t punch his brother (and maybe even Deborah Kara Unger) right in their faces.  The other is that he’s supposed to be this high-powered investment banker, but he signs the CRS contract without even reading it?  Deborah Kara Unger did a good job too.  She was pretty difficult to figure out.  I was always suspicious of her, but she seemed to walk the line between trust and not, and I was never sure which way to go.  I was positive how I felt about her around the time she was acting like Douglas got her fired when she spilled a drink all over his expensive suit.  He didn’t get you fired; you deserved to get fired all on your own!  Not only did you spill on him, but you called him an asshole in earshot of the customer and your boss, and he wasn’t even acting that angry.  Most people would flip out much more over much less.  But perhaps that’s just the perspective of someone that’s worked retail for far too long.  Also, I understand her not wanting to get out of the elevator first if she wasn’t wearing underwear, but she doesn’t want to grab his hand to get out because there’s grease on it?  Fine then, bitch!  You stay there with your clean hands.  You can sit and admire how clean they are while waiting for someone to find you, and you can eat your fingers like Werner Herzog in Jack Reacher when you get hungry.  Also, Mark Boone Junior (the Shady Private Investigator) looks a lot like Ariel Castro.  …Just sayin’…

The Game was an interesting movie that ended a little weak, but had enough thrills throughout to keep itself interesting.  The story was decent up until the ending, even if it didn’t make that much sense, and the movie kept me interested even if I never felt it was that mysterious.  And the performances were all pretty great.  I’d say this movie was worth renting at least.  The Game gets “Think of it as a great vacation, except you don’t go to it.  It comes to you” out of “There goes a thousand dollars.”

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Alien3 (1992)

This is Rumor Control.  Here Are the Facts.

As I come towards the end of my reviews of the Alien series proper, I’ve been trying to remember if my dim recollection of the Alien series matches what I’ve been seeing in the scores on Rotten Tomatoes.  So far they’ve been spot on as they’ve rated Alien as awesome and Aliens as even better.  But when they come into Alien3 and Alien Resurrection, the scores drop below the 50% margin.  I don’t really remember hating the last two movies, though they do pale in comparison to the first two.  So let’s see how my recollection matches up to reality in my review of Alien3, written by David Glier, Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson, directed by David Fincher, and starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Paul McGann, Danny Webb, Lance Henriksen, Pete Postlethwaite, Niall Buggy, Tom Woodruff Jr., Peter Guinness, and Holt McCallany.

On the Colonial Marine spaceship called the Sulaco, a movie writer unzips his fly and pisses right on everything we loved about Aliens, simultaneously killing Newt, Bishop, and Hicks before the opening credits have even stopped rolling.  The remaining survivor, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), crash lands on the prison planet of Fiorina ‘ Fury’ 161, where she’s rescued by the prison’s doctor, Clemens (Charles Dance).  The prisoners – particularly their religious leader Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) and the warden Harold Andrews (Brian Glover) – don’t like Ripley’s presence because it disrupts the calm of the all-male prison community, so the warden contacts the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, that quickly sends a vessel out to retrieve her.  Their calm is further disrupted when the Xenomorph eggs that were hidden aboard the Sulaco hatch, laying it’s egg in an ox and breeding a bull alien that starts wreaking havoc on the prisoners.

The way the title is usually written for this movie, they seem to be implying that this movie is Alien to the power of three, but is it?  Nope!  But is it that bad?  No, not really.  It has its problems, but it’s good enough for what it is.  It’s really got two main things working against it.  First, Alien and Aliens were amazing, making this one that much worse by comparison.  Second, not only was it worse than Aliens, but it destroyed some of what we liked about Aliens in the opening credits.  I’m pretty sure we all got to like Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, but then you killed them all off right away because you wanted to make a new movie and not pay them.  Or they didn’t want to come back.  Or whatever.  Maybe it was just as simple as their whole idea being the all-male prison colony and it not really being super appropriate to have a 10-year-old girl running around.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t really appreciated.  The only thing that could make it worse is if they killed Ripley … oh …  Another thing that could be considered a problem with this movie is the fact that the final third of the movie is just a bunch of people running around corridors, filmed in nauseating handheld cameras.  Other than that, it’s an okay movie.  I did like that the Xenomorph finally started living up to its name by taking on a different form because it had a different host, and the Bull Alien mostly looked pretty cool, but the CG available to them was pretty consistently awful.  The lighting never matched up and the creature stuck out like a sore thumb.  One thing I’ll give the movie credit for is that it has one of the most iconic scenes of the Alien series in it.  I think one of the first images that comes to mind when I think about the Alien series is the image of a bald-headed Ripley with the Xenomorph right next to her head, extending his second mouth, and that happens in this movie.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the performances in this movie.  In some parts, Sigourney Weaver took Ripley to further levels of badassness in this movie, but I thought a couple of moments were just bitchy.  Take, for instance, when she decides she’s just going to walk around with the prisoners.  Sure, that shows that she’s badass because she’s not afraid of them, but the other half of that is her being a bitch.  The prisoners didn’t want her around because of the temptation.  They knew they were bad men and didn’t want to disrupt their harmony, but she’s going around flaunting herself to fuck with them.  Everyone else did their parts very well and are not to blame for the failings of this movie.

Alien 3 might have been a good movie if they just hadn’t named it “Alien”.  It brings down the quality ratio of the series pretty harshly because it just can’t live up to its predecessors.  The story would be more enjoyable if they didn’t choose to kill off pretty much all of our favorite characters, the design of the new Xenomorph was pretty great but lacked the CGI to display it, and the performances were good, but couldn’t really redeem it.  I still would say it’s worth a watch just because it’s a continuation of Ripley’s story, but I doubt it will find too much favor with Alien fans.  Alien3 gets “Don’t be afraid.  I’m part of the family” out of “But we tolerate anybody.  Even the intolerable.”

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Rape, Torture, Fire, Animals, Religion.  Am I Missing Anything?

I had done everything I could to avoid watching today’s movie.  It’s the first part in what will inevitably be a trilogy of movies based on a Swedish trilogy of movies that was itself based on a trilogy of Swedish novels.  The reason I never saw the original movies is because I generally hate reading movies.  You make me pay attention with quality movie, not because I have to pay attention to read what’s going on.  I never read the books because they were books, and I don’t do that.  And when they released the American version of the film, I still never wanted to watch it.  Firstly, everyone is going to say that the American version is not as good as the Swedish version.  And others may even say that the Swedish version was not as good as the books.  On top of that, all I knew about this movie was that someone gets raped in it a couple of times.  That is literally everything I knew about it, so much so that I actually referred to this as “That Rape movie”, because that was shorter than the actual title, and why would I want to watch a movie about rape when it’s not “socially acceptable” for me to touch myself while watching … except in Japan.  My roommate even asked me if I wanted to watch this with him, but I turned it down.  Finally, I saw it in a RedBox and decided to just do it already.  Someone would request it eventually anyways.  So let’s dive into my review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (aka “The Rape movie”), based on a novel by Stieg Larsson, written for the screen by Steven Zaillian, directed by David Fincher, and starring Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson, Steven Berkoff, Yorick van Wageningen, Geraldine James, Donald Sumpter, Robin Wright, and Goran Visnijc.

Journalist and co-owner of a Swedish magazine called “Millennium”, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), has gotten himself on the wrong side of a libel case brought against him by a corrupt businessman named Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.  Even though his credibility has been damaged, he has been requested for an investigation by an entrepreneur named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), but only after an extensive background check by computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).  Vanger asks Mikael to investigate the disappearance of his grandniece, Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago.  Even though he suspects that she’s dead, he wants to know what happened.  As Mikael is dealing with that situation, Lisbeth has a bit of a situation of her own.  She is under state appointed legal guardianship because of some troubles in her past and her new lawyer, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), is being a total dick … and putting his in her mouth.  He makes her work for her money right up until she films him raping her and regains control of her life by blackmailing him.  Mikael investigates Harriet’s disappearance by himself at first, but eventually requires the services of another investigator, and so his path crosses with Lisbeth’s.

I was totally disappointed.  This movie was not about rape at all!  Why is that the only thing I had heard about this movie?  It’s actually a mystery and suspense movie with two quasi-rapes and a lot of rape talk.  I guess I’ll have to start referring to this movie by it’s actual title now.  All that aside, this was a pretty good movie.  Is the Swedish one better?  I don’t know, but that’s the rumor.  But I’m not talking about that, am I?  The story of this movie was pretty good, but I felt like it got off to a slow start.  Technically speaking, you could have easily dropped out all of the Lisbeth stuff before she meets Mikael.  He’s really the main character of this movie, and all of her stuff before that point didn’t really serve the story at all, which means this movie could’ve been completely rape free and been just as potent.  Looking around on Wikipedia, it turns out that Larsson included that stuff because he witnessed a gang rape when he was 15 and it’s haunted him ever since.  I’m sure women would be into it because Lisbeth has a pretty hardcore retaliation for her rape and that’s very empowering for women.  Not having a vagina myself, I just realized that it was unnecessary to the story.  If Lisbeth just walked in and got hired by Mikael, nothing would have changed.  The mystery that they solve together was pretty great, and I really had no clue what the outcome would be until the very moment they revealed it in the movie.  I also had a bit of trouble following some of the reveals in the end because I lost track of the names of all the characters.  I probably could’ve been paying better attention, but there were also so many suspects that, when they were coming up with the potential killer’s name, I was trying to figure out which one of the people they were talking about.  But it’s still a very good mystery, and I appreciated it for that.  After the mystery is taken care of and the story is wrapped up, I felt like the story kept going to no great effect, but it wasn’t that much time wasted.  The look of the movie bothered me a bit, but mainly just because everything was just a shade above black and white for almost the first half of the movie, and that didn’t make it very visually interesting to me.  Except for the opening titles.  They were pretty cool and definitely visually interesting.  There was also a car chase and crash that was pretty spectacular in the movie.  I’m not that big of a fan of Trent Reznor.  Never was a Nine Inch Nails fan and most of his “music” in this movie just sounded like there was constantly a plane flying overhead, but it did set the mood, so I guess it did what it was aiming at.

I can’t think of any real criticisms about the performances in this movie, but I do have a couple of fake criticisms.  This was one of the first times I had seen Daniel Craig play someone that wasn’t James Bond, and it was a much more grounded and real performance.  I felt bad for him for the bulk of the movie because almost anyone that interacted with him opened with a verbal kick to the nuts by bringing up his legal troubles.  I did laugh when Lisbeth was stitching up a cut on his head because the cut seemed so minor.  As a guy, there’s not a whole lot I can say about Rooney Mara’s character that’s non-sexual.  Finding her attractive in this movie was difficult for me.  I usually like the goth look, but her hair and almost invisible eyebrows were a little off-putting to me.  Her body was not, though, and she was not shy about letting that thing breathe.  I did think the sex between her and Daniel Craig just came out of nowhere and could’ve used a little explanation, but I’m not complaining because I enjoy her boobs.  Most of the time she just played it emotionally dead, but performed her part of the rape disturbingly realistically, and that made her retaliation that much more satisfying.

I liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo much more than I thought I would, but it was not without it’s problems.  The story doesn’t pick up for me me until Lisbeth and Mikael start working together because I felt like Lisbeth’s part of the movie before that was unnecessary.  It wasn’t that visually interesting to me, but the story kept me paying attention for the second half of the movie, and I never saw the end coming.  I can recommend this movie for a watch but, from what I’ve heard, that’s just because I haven’t seen the Swedish ones.  I still liked this movie though.  And so, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gets “You do something for me, I do something for you” out of “May I kill him?”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Fight Club (1999)

I Want You To Hit Me As Hard As You Can

Yeah, I couldn’t actually let you go an entire day without giving you a review proper.  I also don’t care what any of you think, the previous Fight Club review was hilarious to me.  Fight Club was recommended to me at one point, but I no longer have any memory of who actually supplied the recommendation.  It doesn’t really matter though.  Fight Club is an immensely popular movie, but I don’t recall being that enthralled with the movie as most people were.  But it’s also been a very long time since I last saw the movie, so I don’t have a whole lot of memory of it.  Now that I’ve watched it again, my memory is a lot clearer.  So let’s see what I thought of Fight Club, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, written by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher, and starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, Jared Leto, Zach Grenier, and Eion Bailey.

Our narrator and star was never given a name (although I never realized that about Edward Norton’s character until I started writing this review).  What we do know about him is that he’s an insomniac.  Based on a doctor’s recommendation, he starts going to support groups so that he can see what real suffering looks like.  Being able to release his emotions at these meetings finally allows him to get some sleep, but his bliss is interrupted by another imposter at the support groups named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter).  After stewing over her presence for long enough, he finally confronts her and reaches an agreement so that they’ll never have to go to the support groups simultaneously.  On a flight home after a business trip, he meets a soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).  When he returns home, he finds that his apartment was blown up in a freak accident.  He calls Tyler to find a place to stay and the two go out for drinks.  At the end of their bar visit, Tyler asks him to hit him as hard as he can.  He finds the fights that he and Tyler have help him see the world in a different way and, over time, they start a fight club.  This is also ruined by Marla, who starts banging Tyler.  Also, Tyler starts recruiting people from the fight club into a cult-esque organization bent on causing mayhem.

I admit that this is a good movie, but I still don’t find myself nearly as enthralled as many of the people I’ve talked to about it.  There’s nothing really wrong with the movie, it’s just not the revolution that most people would have me believe.  Perhaps it’s the story that enthralls some people.  It’s a very interesting look at the world with a message about finding value in something immaterial.  It’s very anarchic when it comes to Tyler Durden, but the narrator is just confused and whiny throughout the movie.  The big reveal at the end of the movie is cool and surprising, but it’s lost some of it’s steam after watching it knowing the big secret of the movie.  But it is a pretty cool story that probably never connects with me because I’ve never been in a fight, so I obviously can’t know that much about myself.  I’m also not super keen on anarchy, so I can’t really watch this movie thinking, “He’s right!  Let’s burn this mother down!”  I did like the humor in the movie as well.  People could find themselves interested in the look of the movie, and I’d tend to agree with them about that.  It opens up with a cool little animation (that I’m starting to find David Fincher is very fond of) that reminded me of the opening of the X-Men movie.  The rest of the movie does some really cool things with the direction and the look.  I liked when the narrator was telling the audience about Tyler by standing in front of the camera and speaking directly to us as Tyler was going about his business, but occasionally stopping to interact with Norton directly.  It was an interesting manipulation of the fourth wall.  Other interesting style choices came up in the movie, like the brief, one frame’s worth appearance of one of the characters during the scenes early in the movie, pointing out the cigarette burns on the film, and having the film warp and look like it was about to tear.  The music was also very good.  Most of it was a mix of metal and electronica, provided by the Dust Brothers.  It was also my introduction to the song “Where is My Mind?” by the Pixies, which I am now pretty fond of.

The thing I definitely connected with in the movie was in the performances.  Everyone in the movie knocked it right out of the park.  Edward Norton did a great job, losing a lot of weight and playing it really beaten down in the beginning, switching it up to a lot more confident and secure, and winded up being really manic and crazy near the end until the resolution.  I found Brad Pitt a much more interesting character, and that’s what he was meant to be.  He represented the man that most of us want to be: he’s strong, good looking, intelligent, funny, apparently very good at sex, but he kind of loses me when he wants to cause mayhem and anarchy.  I don’t want that part, but I might accept it if I can have all the rest of that stuff.  I also liked Helena Bonham Carter in the movie.  She was the one that allowed us to see what was actually going on when you watched it for the second time.  She was the one that showed the confusion in the situation.  She also got them boobs out.  Carter’s got a unique look that I can figure most people wouldn’t like, but I dig on it.  I’ve found her attractive more often than not, so I’m happy to see her in this movie.

Fight Club is a great movie that never really connected to me on the same level as it does with most people, but it’s a movie I respect and admire anyway.  It’s an interesting story that is kept from being a bummer by some real funniness, the look is fantastic, the music is great, and all of the performances are fantastic.  I’ll still recommend this movie to you as a watch because the chances are much higher that you’ll find this movie more significant and important than I did, and even if you’re more like me, it’s a good watch.  I still own this movie on DVD, after all.  Fight Club gets “Ah, flashback humor” out of “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.