Triage

A highly overlooked talent for actors is their ability to pick good projects for themselves. Russell Crowe, to my mind, is the best in this regard right now. Look at his body of work – how many really bad movies has he been in and how often has he been bad in them? Denzel Washington also makes mostly smart choices. When they drop the inevitable turd, it’s disappointing but no one bats 1.000 and you can be fairly certain they’ll redeem themselves next time. Some actors will take almost anything offered them – Nicole Kidman, I’m looking at you – which makes it impossible to handicap the likelihood of getting a quality experience out of your rental. Then there’s Colin Farrell.

I imagine that Mr.Farrell would be an awesome dude to sit down and have lunch with. He’s a smart and charming lad, obviously very talented. I also think he has great intentions. Dude enjoys a good time, I’m sure he looks to bring that to every set he’s on and I believe he works hard. I just wish he had a better track record with his film projects. Watch him in Phone Booth and the Recruit and you can see untapped potential just waiting to come out. If you watched him in Daredevil and Alexander, well, I’m sorry. That was embarrassing for a lot of people. Now, there’s Triage. Sweet mother of God what a performance!

It’s like he went shopping at the Academy Award giftshop for this role. Pop quiz – how does a young actor get on the fast track to winning an Oscar? Lose 44 pounds at risk to your long term health, make sure your character has some kind of disability, make yourself ugly, and if you have an accent, use a different accent. Mission accomplished.

The movie itself is about Mark Walsh, a freelance photojournalist covering the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq in the early 80’s. While camping with the rebel forces, he is witness to gruesome conditions - a doctor forced into committing triage via mercy killings, failed assaults, isolation, despair and food that would gag a maggot. While there he suffers a serious injury which the film is in no hurry to explain and comes home to London struggling with the burden of what he’s seen and what he knows. He is not the same man he was before and his wife/girlfriend calls in her grandfather (played by Christopher Lee) to offer him psychological purification.

Not gonna lie, I felt somewhat manipulated by the structure of this film. The score and cinematography seems familiar and borrowed from other Oscar type movies, almost like it was assembled more for film academy juries than to service the story. Be that as it may, I still liked Triage. Colin Farrell is phenominal – the story was less interesting to me than his performance. Christopher Lee in a supporting role is fantastic. I read that he had to learn more lines of dialogue for this role than in any other movie he’s ever done. Dude is 86 years old and has been in almost every movie ever made. That is impressive to me.

I give Triage 7 out of 10

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Great Swedish meatballs this movie is long! I swear I started watching it in 1994 and just now finished. If you’re going to watch this film make sure you’ve got nothing else planned because dude, you will be there for a while.

Before I go any further, let me say this is a 2 hour 34 minute Swedish murder mystery based on an internationally best-selling book. Those of you who haven’t run screaming and crying from the room may now continue. There’s no need to discuss the cast, because they’re all from Sweden and I don’t know who any of them are. The guy who plays the lead role does look like a cross between Gregg Kinnear and Stellan Skarsgaard, but I looked it up and he is in fact, neither. If you’re really into the Scandinavian movie scene, you may be familiar with the cast and if so, bravo. Frankly, I don’t give a shit who they are, they were all fantastic. Even though I couldn’t understand what they were speaking, they spoke it with conviction.

Story? Oh yes, there’s lots of it. The leading man is Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who’s been convicted of libel for printing a scathing takedown of a mighty Swedish business tycoon only to see all of his sources and source material disappear. He’s been set up and he knows it, but it’s a fight he’s already lost. Apparently the justice system there is a lot like ours, because he is free as a bird for 6 months before he has to actually go to jail.

Lisbeth Salander IS the girl with the dragon tattoo. She seems pretty gothy and distant and before long, she’s getting graphically face and ass raped by what I assume is her court appointed case worker. How lovely. Not to worry, before you know it, she ties up buddy and gives him a taste of his own medicine. Figuratively of course, because I’m pretty sure a man’s anus has no taste buds and a giant white dildo is no way to give someone medicine. In addition to being used as an unwilling fuckdoll, Lisbeth is also a hacker who appears to be obsessively tracking Mikael’s activity for an unknown security company.

Her research for this security company becomes of interest to Henrik Vanger, a really old super rich industrialist who wants Mikael to solve the 40 year old mystery of his niece’s disappearance/death. Now we have ourselves a good old fashioned murder mystery on our hands - one that draws Mikael and Lisbeth into a world of sex, lies, Nazis, more rape, and more murder. Plot twists and bunny trails galore allow for a very slow reveal, and then a very long ending.

How long an ending? Well, once you find out the whodunit part, there’s about 40 more minutes of movie. At all times I was aware of how drug out and elaborate the story was. This is a drama, there is no action (except for the rapes and one scene of consensual sex) so the pace can be excruciating. Sweden looks beautiful and I would love to visit some day. This is probably a very good book, and as a movie it feels like a good long Sunday afternoon read. I could forgive the pacing because of the strength of the story, but the ending needed to wrap itself up a LOT quicker than it did. Worth the watch.

I rate this 7 out of 10

Hot Tub Time Machine

For those out there who never got to experience the 80’s, well, that’s just sad. It was a magical time of mullets, skin tight acid wash jeans, hair spray, glam metal, and unbridled enthusiasm for every ridiculous trend one could possibly imagine. Seriously, a friend of mine once started a thing where he wore sweat pants every day with one pant leg hiked up to his knee. Just one. It never really caught on, but you know what? Fuck you, he was an innovator.

The greatest thing about a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, is that you already know what it’s about. The title is not a metaphor or anything. It is what it is and I LOVE that. It stars John Cusak (Adam), Craig Robinson (Nick) and Rob Corddry (Lou) as three former best friends reunited when Lou almost dies of carbon monoxide poisoning while rockin out to “Home Sweet Home” in his Pontiac Trans Am. Clark Duke is Jacob, Adam’s geeky nephew who tags along for the ride for shits and giggles, basically.

Look, if you really need a synopsis for a movie like this, you are not the intended audience and will hate it no matter how awesome it is. Just accept the fact you are wrong and toddle off now. The humour is immature, the plot is ridiculous, and the whole thing could have been filmed over a long weekend for beer money. Fact of the matter is, it works. The cast is fantastic – no one in Hollywood can make indignity hilarious like Craig Robinson. I want to see him in many many more movies and I don’t care if he winds up playing the same character in every single one of them because he is phenominal.

Know who else rules? Rob Corddry. Everything he does, every choice he makes, he delivers with an eagerness and enthusiasm that I find hilarious. I share his sense of humour, and he goes for every laugh like he is winning the lottery. He has a manic energy that he infuses with a healthy dose of evil and his character Lou is a masterpiece of awesome. He’s a live action Family Guy episode all on his own.

Supporting role shout outs go to Chevy Chase (finally funny again) and Crispin Glover; and I almost wet my pants when I saw the blue Chevy pick up truck from Red Dawn in there. This movie is best suited to guys who lived the 80’s and can remember them fondly, and for ladies who are patient and can tolerate locker room banter. There is a lot of foul language, a lot of crude sexual humour, a good amount of drug use, but most of all, hilarity.

I give Hot Tub Time Machine 7 mullets and a can of hairspray out of 10.

Green Zone

If you're anything like me, you saw the trailers for "Green Zone" and thought it was either a sequel or prequel to the Bourne trilogy. It looked like it, felt like it - it had the smell of Bourne all over it. (I'm not sure what the actual smell of Bourne is, but I imagine it to be a combination of sweat, sea water, and awesome) Then I watched it.

Matt Damon stars as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, whose job is to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003. Fruitless search after fruitless search (literally ... he doesn't even find an apple. How wrong is that?) getting shot at by ungrateful hostiles in scorching sand-choked heat on the orders of people who don't give a shit if you live or die would make anyone kinda pissy, and Miller is no different. He wants to know why the dudes in charge are so much stupider than him, where the weapons might actually be, and which bureaucratic douchebag needs a public flogging.

Greg Kinnear essentially plays Paul Bremer . I don't recall the character's name and I don't care - he's an asshole and you want to punch him in the throat every time he's on screen. His character's job is to serve as administrator of the chaos left behind in the wake of the initial military campaign. His motivations are impure, naive, and entirely about political positioning back in America. The function of this character is to represent the corrupt incompetence of the Bush administration and to give the audience someone to hate. Mission accomplished.

Brendan Gleeson is a cagey old CIA guy who knows everything about Kinnear's character is one giant flaming ball of bullshit and is out to redeem his own organization's tarnished image. I love Brendan Gleeson but he's wasted here. The role is all presence but no meat. He has some authority, but it's easily revoked. It seems like he's going to be a key figure, but really, the entire purpose of the character is to give Miller a chance to go places he would otherwise have no right to go.

Matt Damon is essentially playing Jason Bourne in military fatigues. The movie is directed by the same guy who directed the last 2 Bourne movies, and the style (hand held cameras, shakey running action shots, grainy as hell - this will look like shit on blu ray) is identical. Having said that, I LOVE the Bourne Trilogy. The frenetic pace, the steely determination and comfortable performance of Damon moves this along and I found myself completely invested in the story. Watch this movie. Enjoy this movie. Eat lots of popcorn and get fat while you do it. For those of you on the right of the political spectrum, be enraged by the flaming left wing slant and preachiness of the story. For those pussy left wing bleeding heart liberals, bask in the self righteous indignation and moral superiority of it all. For the unpolitical, watch lotsa stuff get blowed up and shot and stuff.

I give this a 7 out of 10