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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Independence Day (1996)

Welcome to Earth!

The third part in this contest brings me to my guilty pleasure genre: disaster movies!  Disaster movies, if done well, are a combination of various different genres.  They’re mostly action based, they always attempt drama (they don’t always get there), and they’re generally science fiction.  Usually corny and dumb, but mostly lots of fun.  Today’s movie exemplifies the genre, at least in my mind.  If the movie doesn’t exemplify the genre, the director certainly does.  Almost every movie I can think of that this guy has done has been a disaster movie.  And I’ve actually liked the majority of them, dumb and cheesy though they may be.  And so, as the biggest and the most fun in the genre, and the movie that best exemplifies the genre for me, I had no choice but to give my favorite disaster movie to Independence Day, written by Dean Devlin, written and directed by Roland Emmerich, and starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, Harry Connick Jr., Margaret Colin, Judd Hirsch, Harvey Fierstein, Robert Loggia, Mary McDonnell, Mae Whitman, James Rebhorn, Adam Baldwin, Brent Spiner, James Duval, and Frank Welker.

On July 2^nd, a signal appears in outer space, between the Earth and the moon.  Spirits are lifted temporarily when the giant curiosity slows down and stops before hitting Earth, but then it gets more curious when it “splits” into smaller pieces and enters the Earth’s atmosphere, first appearing as strange clouds that seem like they’re on fire, but changing to reveal that they are massive alien spaceships that then settle over the Earth’s major cities.  David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) discovers a transmission in the satellite signal that he first thinks is just going to go away, but soon realizes that it’s a countdown to an attack.  He collects his father, Julius (Judd Hirsch), and rushes to Washington to warn his ex-wife, Constance (Margaret Colin), who is the Communications Director at the White House.  With the president, Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), they barely manage to escape.  Also going on, a drunken crop duster named Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) escapes with his broken family, Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) takes part in an aerial assault on the aliens that he alone survives, and we go to Area 51 where scientists like Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner) have been studying these aliens in secret since some of them crashed here in 1947.

Roland Emmerich has got to be one of the best directors in the big dumb action category.  The story is pretty basic alien invasion fare that’s been going down pretty much since movies were invented, but it does it so well and makes it so fun that I can’t help but love the thing.  How can you not get behind the heroes of the movie when these fuckin’ aliens come down here and get all rowdy for no reason, laying siege to the biggest cities in the world?  It’s the easy way to get the audience invested in the movie, and it works on me.  Of course, I don’t know how much the other countries of the world will be invested near the end.  I mean, they all get involved in taking down the aliens, but it was all America’s idea.  FUCK YEAH!  It’s certainly not the brightest of movies, but I doubt it was trying to be.  From what I’ve read, they spent 4 weeks working on the script and 13 months on the production.  They knew what they were doing.  But I’m not like most film critics.  A movie doesn’t have to have a message or intelligence or something important about it; it just needs to be entertaining.  That’s what entertainment is supposed to do.  And how could you say Independence Day wasn’t entertaining?!  It’s impossible!  It’s at least impossible to finish that sentence before I slap you in the mouth.  As corny as it is, how can you not get amped by the “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” speech?  Watching it again almost inspired me to drive to the airport, steal a jet, and fly it up the butthole of an alien spacecraft.  And the ending is entirely satisfying.  Obviously, there are stupid things that happen in this movie, but none so stupid that they ruin the experience.  I would say it was probably in bad taste for the president to joke that he was in bed with a young brunette to his wife.  Not because adultery is bad (he is the president, what do you expect?), but because the young brunette was his nine year old daughter.  I don’t get behind the idea that the super advanced aliens wearing the biomechanical armor can be knocked unconscious for several hours by one punch from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  Probably not as much as I wouldn’t get behind the idea of letting the drunken guy who can’t even formulate the sentence, “I’m a pilot.  I can fly,” without stumbling into the driver’s seat of a jet fighter.  Also, early on in the movie, it’s a little on the nose to have one of the scientists playing the R.E.M. song “End of the World”.

The performances did exactly what they were supposed to in this movie.  You probably couldn’t say that any of them impressed, but they all performed adequately.  It’s kind of hard to say who the main character in this movie is though because they have about 4 main characters in separate stories that come together at the end.  You have Will Smith’s story, Bill Pullman’s story, Jeff Goldblum’s story, and Randy Quaid’s story.  Will Smith was just becoming a superstar around this point, but he show’s what makes him a superstar in this movie.  Both charming and funny in his role, he makes for a very likeable character.  I had problems with other people in his story though.  First, Vivica A. Fox.  She’s pretty and dances in a bikini at one point, but I had already gotten fairly mad at her for her reaction to Smith getting called to the base when the aliens showed up.  Bitch, you want to marry a guy that’s in the military!  What do you think’s going to happen when a threat to America shows up?  Also, Harry Connick Jr. was usually really annoying, definitely not funny, and possibly gay.  Something about the way he kept calling Will Smith “Big Daddy” – in a post BioShock world – seems gay to me.  Pullman was strange to me in this movie.  He didn’t do a bad job, but he’s got this smug raspiness to every line delivery, making ever sentence end with a smug sounding “uh”.  His wife also made me mad because she was so naïve that, when Vivica A. Fox said that she was “a dancer”, this bitch automatically goes to ballet.  Yeah, ‘cause that’s a common occupation in America.  Also, his daughter was Mae Whitman, who was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  That’s all I have to say about her.  Goldblum acted just like Goldblum, but he was good at it.  His dad was a little weird.  I don’t know if this is how Judd Hirsch always acts in movies, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Jackie Mason was unavailable.  Quaid plays a good drunk, but I hated pretty much everyone in his family.  His younger son was a pussy and his daughter was a whore.  Well, she never had sex with anyone in the movie, but she did fall in love with and try to have sex with about three different guys through the course of the movie, and usually within 5 minutes of meeting them.  I also assume that James Duval (who played Miguel Casse, the oldest son) never really got famous because the world already has one Keanu Reeves and doesn’t require another.

Independence Day still stands up as the shining example of how to get past the limitations of your story with fantastic special effects, spectacle, and all around fun factor.  Even after all these years, it still stands up as the most fun disaster movie that I was able to think of.  It’s what Roland Emmerich does best.  I probably don’t need to recommend this movie as I have a hard time believing that anyone has managed to not see it by the point in their life where they could be reading this.  If you haven’t, do it.  Independence Day gets “You Don’t Actually Think They Spend $20,000 on a Hammer, $30,000 on a Toilet Seat, Do You?” out of “Yes yes.  Without the ‘oops’.”

Congratulations goes to my sister, Katie, for not only guessing my favorite disaster movie, but also guessing my runner up disaster movie, Armageddon.  That just proves that she’s Country Strong.

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Real Steel (2011)

The People’s Champion?

Some of you that are old enough may remember a time when one of the best “video games” you could play was two plastic robots on either end of a tiny ring, controlled by two buttons on each side that would cause the corresponding robot to punch with either his left or his right arm until one of the two robot’s heads popped off.  This game was called Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.  In order to pave the way for them to somehow turn Battleship into a movie, they decided to turn Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em into a movie to test how people would react.  And then to add a little baby mamma drama into it, just to get the ladies watching.  They kept the beginning initials the same, but rename the movie Real Steel, written by John Gatins, Shawn Levy, and Richard Mathis, directed by Shawn Levy, and starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Hope Davis, James Rebhorn, Evangeline Lilly, Karl Yune, Olga Fonda, Anthony Mackie, and Kevin Durand.

In the not too distant futures, the world has decided that the sport of boxing is far too brutal for humans to go through, so they are replaced with giant robot boxers.  But also (and thank God for it) PETA seems to have disappeared because, on occasion, those giant robot boxers are allowed to fight bulls.  That’s where we start off, with former boxer Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), down on his luck and forced to take his robot, Ambush, to fit bulls.  Charlie gets distracted by a cute blonde and his robot get scrapped, making Charlie skip out on the money he owes the promoter, Ricky (Kevin Durand).  Charlie finds out that his ex-girlfriend died and he must attend a custody hearing for his 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo).  Deciding that he is neither the paternal type, nor the type that wants to be likeable to almost any audience, Charlie not only does not want custody of his kid, but sells custody to Max’s wealthy uncle Marvin (James Rebhorn), behind the back of Max’s wealthy-by-marriage aunt Debra (Hope Davis), for $100,000.  Because Marvin and Debra were about to go on vacation, Charlie agrees to take Max for three months, until they return.  Charlie takes Max to the boxing gym of Charlie’s childhood friend Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) and promptly drops around $30,000 dollars on a once famous (and championship material) robot named Noisy Boy … which he quickly enrolls in an underground main event fight and gets it destroyed.  Charlie and Max go to a scrapyard to find pieces to make a new robot when Max stumbles across an old, 2nd generation sparring robot named Atom.  Flying in the face of all logic, Max single-handedly digs Atom out of mud and claims the robot as his own.  They take it to another underground fight and find out this little robot’s got some chutzpah.

I admit being completely caught off guard by this, but this movie actually won me over.  Going into this movie I figured that the robot fights would be awesome, but that they’d be flimsily held together by an ill-conceived plot and the addition of a kid reminiscent of Seven from Married … With Children.  …Okay, that’s kind of exactly what happened, but it was done in a way that worked.  The story is kind of one you’ve seen before … especially if you’ve seen Rocky.  There are two underdogs in this movie (as opposed to the lone one they had in Rocky) in Charlie and Atom.  Charlie doesn’t believe in himself anymore and his kid helps him believe in himself again.  The similarities to Rocky are at their boiling point in the very end of the movie where ::SPOILER ALERT:: Atom puts up a good fight but loses the decision, settling for the “People’s Champ” booby prize.  In this scene, Atom and Charlie take turns being Rocky, whereas Max takes the role of Adrian.  IMDb tells me that they’re in the process of making Real Steel 2, so one can feel safe in thinking that Atom will win in the next one, fight a robot with a mohawk in the movie after that (but Charlie will probably have to die at some point), fight a behemoth Russian robot next (and make a cheesy speech about how we all can change and love each other), and then further ruin the entire memory of the series in the fifth one.  Maybe, some years after that, they’ll make a coming out retirement one that tries really hard to fix what number five fucked up.  ::END SPOILERS::  I found the kid parts of the movie fairly tedious for the greater majority of the movie, but then it started getting to me towards the end of the movie, causing me to get a little bit choked up about it.  And before you go calling me a pussy, think to yourself why movies about daddy issues affect me so much and, if you know me, you’ll understand … and THEN you can call me a pussy.  On a much more manly note, the robot fights are pretty spectacular and incredibly gripping, especially when you take into account that they’re robots with no feeling or emotion.  I guess it’s because you kind of get attached to Atom, even though he only mimics movements of people around him.  Of course, that lead to something that I found sickening on every occasion, but it still popped up about 3 or 4 times: Max dancing with Atom.  Charlie comes up with this idea when he sees Max dancing with Atom outside of a hotel once and decides to incorporate it as a gimmick before the fight to get the audience on their side.  I grant that this would probably work for some people, but I just found it annoying.  Get to the robot smashing!  Speaking of  ::RESPOILER::    The ending bout worked for me too.  I originally predicted that they would need to defeat the adaptable, super powerful champion, Zeus, by doing something unpredictable.  I guessed that would be dancing to confuse Zeus.  Thankfully, that was not the course they took.  His remote controls damaged, Max comes up with the idea to have Atom mimic Charlie, so that Charlie would be doing the fighting via proxy.  Charlie doesn’t believe in himself, Max gets him to, and though they don’t win, they whoop that ass.  It’s another predictable strategy, just not the one I expected, but I thought it was very well done.  ::END RESPOILERS::

The cast mostly does a fantastic job for what I went into this movie expecting.  Hugh Jackman’s performance was great, but it was difficult to do with the writing being a little soft.  You hate him to some degree for about an hour and a half, getting to like his character for only the last half hour of the movie.  This guy basically sells his son, who he’s either never met or not seen in 90% of the kid’s life.  Then, Max turns out to be more business savvy than Charlie is because Charlie’s so desperate for money that he’ll throw a robot he’s never used into a main event fight, never thinking about why a legendary champion robot could be purchased for less money than he was fixing to win in that one fight.  Maybe there was something wrong with it, Charlie.  These kinds of decisions lead him to get in a bad financial situation, which in turn leads to more bad decisions, which in turn leads to him getting his ass kicked by the guy that played the Blob, probably mostly in retaliation for being in that shitty Wolverine movie.  But I got really confused by this beating they gave him because Charlie and Max were getting their asses beat fairly close to a truck that contained their giant, ass-kicking robot!  I’m sure there’s some law against using your giant robot to beat up a guy (and I’m sure Asimov wrote these stupid laws), but there’s also a law against beating up a man and his son with your two goons.  I’d call that a push.  I never really liked Dakota Goyo, but I’m not sure if that’s because he was bad or just because I hate kids.  I do know that I hate the kid in the movie that’s supposed to be smarter than a kid his age ever really is, but is also always trying to act tough when I know, for a fact, that I would beat the shit out of that kid.  Not so tough now, are you Dakota!  One thing that annoyed me about him was that he was instantly able to speak Japanese and disassemble a robot.  How was he able to do this?  He plays video games.  Well so do I, and I also watch TONS of Japanese Anime porn, and I only know how to say “No” and “Stop raping me” in Japanese.  Thankfully, I’ve had to use those two phrases a lot, but I still call bullshit on this movie for it.  Evangeline Lilly was also in this movie, and pretty attractive as well, but there’s not a whole lot more to be said about that.  She did, at one point, say that her plan was “trying not to let (her) gym die”, but that is not a plan.  That’s something you need a plan to do, so you’re apparently in the same boat as Charlie.  The performances of the robots in this movie can roughly be equated to that of Jet Li: they’re stiff and can’t really act, but they are good in the fight scenes.  I never really did understand how they justified the robots getting punch drunk, though.  They don’t actually have brains.  I could understand parts of them not functioning from being broken, but not them staggering around the ring because they’ve been hit in the head too many times.

I was quite shocked to find that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  Sure, it was pretty easy to make fun of because some of it is so ridiculous and pointless, but their story had won me over by the end of the movie, and the robot fights had me from the word “go”.  A lot of fun as an action movie, and pretty solid as a movie in general.  I say go rent this movie.  I’m probably going to outright purchase it, but I understand if you don’t trust me.  I’ve lied to you before.  OR HAVE I?!  Real Steel gets “I want you to fight for me!  That’s all I ever wanted!” out of “You know you’re bringing him home in pieces, right?”

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