The Netflix Diaries: The Devil's Backbone

Ah well- you have all the intentions of posting regularly, but then things like life and the stomach flu get in the way. A flurry of posts for you this Monday, our regular readers (or Czechoslovakians googling Marketa Irglova. She's like Elvis over there, apparently.)

Anyway, I finally caught up with Guillermo Del Toro's film El Espinazo Del Diablo, The Devil's Backbone, on DVD, and I could see why he would describe it a the "spiritual predecessor" to last year's acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth.

Both are about orphaned children during the Spanish civil war, dealing with evil, greasy haired bad guys and supernatural forces. In Backbone, it's a child's ghost instead of an entire fantasy world, and the film as a whole is much less expansive than its "sequel"- the story is more or less self-contained in the orphanage that a young boy is sent to when his father dies, with the war lingering sadly at the fringes, instead of the much more intertwined plot of Labyrinth.

It's been described as a horror film (or at least it showed up on those Bravo "Scariest moment" countdowns that seem stupid but you end up watching the whole hour somehow), but it's not a jump out of your seat sort of experience. It's a ghost story with a purpose, and artistic merit- I guess I mean that it's a good story that happens to have a ghost in it, which is something that only seems to exist in other countries. In America, ghost stories are merely thinly plotted star vehicles where people slowly approach something creepy with creepy music playing before... BOO!

Another thing unique about both of Del Toro's historical fantasies is that he isn't afraid to show how unrelentingly cruel the world, and adults can be- there's no children's movie gloss to these stories just because the protagonists happen to be children. It makes me wish he'd have directed The Golden Compass.

Ah, well. At least we have The Hobbit to look forward to now. It should be interesting to see how he manages the more child friendly tone of that book with the dark currents of Jackson's trilogy.

The Netflix Diaries: Surf's Up

Last year, in predicting the Oscars for abc.com's official contest, I went with the favorite, Pixar's Cars, and got burned by the trendy, overly precious Happy Feet stealing the statue.

Let me tell you- Happy Feet is nothing special- it's just an environmentally minded novelty film with dancing penguins in it, and the multiple personalities of Robin Williams. We actually rented it from Blockbuster (children's fare is the one thing we usually miss in the theater, because we're... not children), and found it seriously overrated.

So when yet another Penguin themed CGI film came out this year, Surf's Up, I found it hard to muster up any motivation to see it- turns out I missed a pretty fun family film. And it's no surprise at all that it usurped The Simpson's Movie for the final, not a chance in hell, Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.

Surf's Up asks the viewer to pretty quickly accept the idea that penguins like to surf, and many of them live on a tropical looking beach and surf all the time, and once you do, it's a pretty straightforward sports movie. Shia LaBeouf voices a runt penguin that dreams of becoming a champion surfer, and eventually gains the help of Jeff Bridges' disgraced former surfing champion.

And for once, Surf's Up doesn't go too crazy with the "guess the unnecessary celebrity voice" game, despite James Woods in a minor role. Any major draws at least actually fit their part (Jon Heder voices a very stoner-sounding chicken), and it's rounded out by people with actual voice talent (like Brian Posehn and Diedrich Bader).

A well chosen soundtrack moves the film along, and the ultimate message of this sports film is to not get too competitive, which is a good one for some kids to learn.

But the real thing that sets Surf's Up apart is the faux-documentary style in which it was done- there are off-screen interviewer's, and boom mics visible. The pacing of verite scenes inter-cut with talking head interviews makes it like a long episode of The Office, except about surfing penguins. It's a clever gag that they never take too far, and make it fun for those of us older than ten.

It's got precious little hope for an Oscar come February 24th, but it worth seeing all the same.

The Netflix Diaries: Live Free or Die Hard

Since January is pretty much a wasteland in the movie theaters (except for J. J. Abrams' ripoff of The Host), I usually dedicate it to catching up on the things I missed the previous year on DVD, at least while I impatiently wait for There Will Be Blood and Persepolis to come to the midwest.

The first up was Len Wiseman's entry into the storied Die Hard trilogy. It's certainly a slick action film, and much less bogged down by exposition than his Underworld movies (although it's still all silvery-looking for some reason), but it cerainly has little to do with the first three installments in John McClane's life. This time, he has daughter issues instead of wife issues, but Live Free jumps haedlong into bullets and explosions after about five minutes.

The villain this time is Timothy Olyphant's uber-cyber-hacker terrorist, who brings nearly the entire country down by messing with the infrastructure. For some reason, this means he must kill freelance hacker Justin Long, who Willis ends up shepherding around.

Gone is any sort of gritty, human action hero sort of John McClane- instead he's a bald, shiny, indestructible force of nature that bounces between flying cars, semi-rigs, and fighter jets like a human pinball in the biggest Rube Goldberg machine of a film ever. Justin Long is mostly there to incredulously comment on the impossible things that Willis does, from "You just killed a helicopter with a car!" to "Shouldn't you go to a hospital or something?"

One part that annoyed me (beyond the sheer ridiculousness of some action set-pieces) was the Kevin Smith cameo as Justin Long's hacker friend that does other hacker things that aren't really explained. We get it. There is a computer subculture in this country that is extensive, and contains eccentric minds and colorful characters. Can we just tone it down some maybe? (Although at least Long and Smith are semi-nerdy looking white guys, though- Transformers was asking for even more crazy hackerness believability with Rachel Taylor and Anthony Anderson).

In a weird way, this film is sort of a mindless counterpoint to No Country For Old Men- both have aging law enforcement officials that are relics from an older time, doing business with grit and dignity, who are forced to confront an entirely new sort of villainy. But Tommy Lee Jones' Sherrif Bell plaintively despairs at the horrors of the new drug trade in the Coen's masterpiece, while John McClane just head-butts cyber-terror into complicity.

In the end, Live Free or Die Hard winds up right where you expect it to, and it's a pleasant enough time waster. But it won't crack my Top 30 films of the year.

Also, there wasn't anything that really had to do with living free, although plenty of people certainly died hard.

The Netflix Diaries: Banlieue 13

So for me, beyond Daniel Craig's all around badassery, the coolest part of Casino Royale was the elaborate chase at the beginning, with Craig pursuing a fast, jumping bad guy, played by Sébastien Foucan.

This reminded me of a French movie I'd heard about a couple years ago, released here as District B13- it's a film starring David Belle, the founder of "parkour." Parkour is basically the art of running around and climbing things- using an urban environment to move in the quickest, most efficient way possible in an emergency. Foucan is actually Belle's childhood friend, and founded the practice of "freerunning," which is pretty much the same as parkour but more flashy.

Anyway, I assumed that Banlieue 13 would be as fascinating to watch as the chase sequence in Casino, and parts of it were. But mostly it's just another over-stylized piece of fluff from producer/writer/French ADD sufferer Luc Besson.

Belle plays a tough guy vigilante who partners with a tough guy cop (Cyril Raffaelli) to rescue the film's titular crime ridden barrio from a gang lord who's stolen a nuke. Also he's trying to rescue his sister. That's pretty much it. Of course the nuke is on a timer, and the shady looking government dudes who conscript our heroes for the job have predictably shady intentions.

The film's biggest claim to fame is that the action sequences are all done with no nets, wires, or stunt doubles, and considering that fact they're pretty impressive. But the rapid-cut, MTV-on-crack visual style of Besson's team makes it easy to forget that anything we're seeing is real- we may as well be watching a video game.

Add in what's either a very clunky script or a very clunky translation, and it adds up to a pretty underwhelming experience. In the right hands, a unique form of physical stuntwork can really add something to an action movie (like the aforementioned Casino Royale), but in the middle of a shoddy film it's wasted.

There is an interesting subtext to the film: it was released in a Paris less than a year before the riots of the impoverished youth in real-life ghettos. But Banlieue 13's particular vision of urban Paris of the future is surprisingly white-washed, between the two leads, which leads me to think that the filmmakers didn't really have the majority of the Arab and black Paris ghettos in mind.

The Netflix Diaries: Croupier

So we've had two-at-a-time Netflix for a year and a half now, and I kept meaning to watch things that I've been meaning to watch and start this feature, but I've had no time. The life of a graduating senior is a hectic one. But the bright red Netflix packets just sit there and stare at you, a reminder that you're paying $15 a month for these DVDs to not be watched for two weeks.

So two days ago we finally watched Croupier, which I saw a few years ago but nearly slept through- my memory of it was hazy, and I only recalled a vague conviction that Clive Owen is pretty damn cool.

And he is. But this neo-noir story about Clive Owen's hard-luck writer who takes a job as a casino dealer (which are called "croupiers" in Europe because they're so pretentious over there) doesn't help one stay awake. Which isn't to say its boring, it's just sparse, dark, and a little slow moving. Director Mike Hodges re-teamed with Clive Owen five years later for the ironically titled I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which is so slow that my girlfriend and I couldn't finish it, but he is best known as the director of Get Carter.

Anyway, the main draws of Croupier are a tight script, well-rounded cast, and straightforward, BBC style production values, and its definitely a unique film about a subculture so noir-friendly I'm surprised there aren't more films about croupiers.

And while we're here: I have no problem with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Great choice, great film. But having seen Croupier well before Layer Cake, I was a strident Clive-Owen-for-James-Bond campaigner long before the choice was made- he spends enough squinting in a badass way while wearing a suit in this movie to convince anyone.

Ah, well. At least he got to badass it up in Sin City and Shoot 'Em Up. But I haven't seen him in a suit since.