Jared Rasic

Wes Anderson doesn’t care if anyone likes his films. I think if the world stopped paying to see them, he would continue to make them, with his own money and show them to friends when they came over for dinner. He’s an auteur and one of the handful alive today like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke and a few others. As with those filmmakers, it’s usually easy to tell within the first minute when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Yet for some reason, critics single out Anderson for his distinctive style.

Imagine this: You get directions to a house in the suburbs where you’re instructed to pull into the garage, close the door and await further instructions. A man comes out of the house, takes you inside and orders you to shower and to “be thorough” with the soap. After cleaning yourself and putting on a very New Age white robe, you’re blindfolded, zip-cuffed and driven to an undisclosed location in the San Fernando Valley. Then, after doing a complicated secret handshake, you’re taken to another room with a dozen other people in robes. Then she appears, the woman you’re there to see. Maggie. A beautiful, blonde mystery. Maggie then tells you a story about how she traveled back in time from 2056 to save her friends from a series of calamitous events that will change the world. Maggie has followers, maybe including you now, and she wants to take you to a safe place.

It’s been 10 years since Men in Black 2 came out, which is long enough for me to have completely forgotten every single detail of it (other than remembering Biz Markie played an alien in it). I don’t think anyone was really asking for another Men in Black movie, but as one of the world’s most bankable stars, Will Smith can get a project rolling despite the logical reasons against it. So, he got it made and now here it is, a sequel to a sequel with a 39 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes that occupies zero consciousness on the cultural radar. In other words, my expectations were pretty low and the film met those expectations exactly.

To enjoy Battleship you first really have to think about what you’re sitting down to watch. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour summer blockbuster based on a board game that you can play while waiting for your Oolong tea at Townshend’s. There’s no back story there, no mythology that the game teases out—it’s just blindly firing missiles at your opponent and winning through either luck or educated guessing. Which is fine. Pirates of the Caribbean was based on a damn Disneyland ride and still managed to be pretty great, but you can’t have expectations set at that level. Think of Battleship more like it’s Transformers 2 in the Pacific Ocean. But with Rihanna shooting at things.

One thing I will never understand is why a director casts a very capable martial artist, then has him shoot at people for 90 minutes. If an actor looks great kicking someone in the throat, then let him throat kick. Don’t put them in long stagnant gunfights. That, in a nutshell, is my biggest issue with Safe, the new Jason Statham vehicle.
There’s some intense and exhilarating hand-to-hand combat for the first half, followed by poorly staged shootouts in the second, which makes the entire finale anti-climactic and boring. Add the ludicrous plot and Safe plays like it should have been a direct-to-DVD release instead of a heavily marketed theatrical outing.

It might not be fair, but I don’t judge martial arts movies by the same standard as I do other genres. I don’t need character development, brilliant acting or nuance when it comes to a new kung-fu movie. I only need exhilarating action, an under-reliance on wire work and some savage ass-kickery. The Raid: Redemption not only delivers on those three fronts, but executes them perfectly (especially the ass-kickery part). I would even go so far as to say that there hasn’t been such a relentlessly action packed movie since Hard Boiled came out in 1992 and introduced Chow Yun-fat to America.

I suppose I should get this out of the way up front: I don’t think I am in this film’s target demographic. And for large stretches of the film’s running time, I’m not sure the writer and director were entirely sure who the movie's audience is.
At first, I thought the film was a drama about the United Kingdom reaching out to Yemen in the hopes of creating some positive PR. Then the script delved into questions of faith and religious certainty. Then it slipped the shackles of being a “message movie” in favor of a fairly straightforward romantic comedy.

Most everyone I know fondly remembers the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. It had it all: Greek mythology, the Stygian Witches, Calibos, Medusa, the Kraken, giant scorpions and, of course, Bubo the mechanical owl. I watched this original version again, for the first time in 20 years, before watching Wrath of the Titans. I wanted to remind myself of the main story points and remember how much better it was than the remake. That was not the best idea.
While it is still much better than the remake, the original really didn't stand up too well. Aside from Ray Harryhausen's effects work (his last before retiring), it's somewhat dull and lifeless. Harry Hamlin, with his bronzed, hairless legs, just isn't a hero that I care about. It's all too campy to take seriously as an epic adventure. That's to say that Clash of the Titans is not a sacred cow for me, so my feelings for Wrath aren't related to nostalgia for the original.