That's telekinesis, Kyle.

Can a cheap gimmick ruin a great story?

I bet when Josh Trank and Max Landis brought their pitch for Chronicle to a studio exec, they got about four words into before the exec held up his hands and said, “Wait, did you say ‘found-footage superhero movie?’ STOP RIGHT THERE! Here, take my entire wallet! Hell, you can come over and bang my mistress. Here’s my keys, there’s cocaine on the night stand.”

For trend-savvy businessmen who think in skin-deep marketing labels looking to recreate whatever was popular eight months ago, “found-footage superhero movie” is a word-powered Viagra boner, perfect for stabbing the nubile 18-year-olds they like to cast in everything. With Chronicle, it’s also a case of the hook, the most flashy thing about it, being the only obnoxious part of something otherwise pretty great. Found-footage is to Chronicle what that clear, one-button mouse was to Mac computers 10 years ago. Gimmick aside, it’s a high school movie that isn’t about the misunderstood loser courageously throwing off the shackles of his inexplicably cruel jock overlords. It’s a superhero movie in which the people who develop superpowers don’t have the morals of a 50s Boy Scout leader. I’d been hoping someone would make those for years, and now one movie does both? …What’s that you say? I have to watch it through the conceit of a high schooler’s camcorder? Boy, I could kick that Blair Witch right in the cunt.

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SHOOT HIM DOWN, MIKE! THAT'S THE GERMAN WHO MOLESTED YOU! /Wire joke

Corny movies are a civil right!

If you want to see a movie that tells the inspiring true story of the Tuskeegee Airmen, go rent The Tuskeegee Airmen. If you want to see a remake of that with Anakin Skywalker dialog, CGI explosions, and a nameless bad guy with a scar on his face who says things like “Die, you foolish African!” go see Red Tails.

There isn’t that much to say about Red Tails, really. It’s the identical plot of Tuskeegee Airmen but worse on every level. But it isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, either. The protagonist isn’t a horse, for example. It’s nice to look at, the war scenes are decent enough, and every ten minutes or so, Terrence Howard shows up to read an uplifting speech directly into the camera in the voice of Maya Angelou.

The two main characters are Lightning (David Oyelowo) and Easy (Nate Parker), the Malcolm and Martin, the Maverick and Ice Man, the Magneto and Professor X of the airborne civil rights movement. Easy drinks too much (though we never see it actually affect him) and Lightning is a hothead, the most talented pilot in the squadron, but goes off half-cocked every time someone calls him chicken. Wait, no, I’m thinking of Marty Mcfly. By “chicken” I meant the N-word. Lightning gets the love interest in the film, an Italian girl he meets when, no joke, she blows him a kiss as he’s flying over her house. He can spot beauty from thousands of feet up, so he goes to her house and takes her on a whirlwind courtship that takes place exclusively on “Italian countryside” b-roll from Olive Garden commercials. He asks for her hand in marriage while men in mustaches play the accordion and grey-haired grandmama’s in half-shawls wring their hands and everyone’s cool with it because Italians are notoriously open-minded about interracial dating.

But enough about-a the story. MAMMA MIA, SHE’S GOT-A SOME A-SPICY DIALOG!

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All Steak No Sizzle

Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 output reminds me a lot of post-Pinkerton Weezer. I don’t want to speculate as to what hurt Soderbergh’s feelings the way Pinkerton’s poor sales and appearance on Rolling Stone’s worst albums of 1996 list (I’ll never forgive you for that, Rolling Stone) hurt Rivers Cuomo’s, but Haywire and Contagion feel like Soderbergh playing with genre movies, the same way everything after Pinkerton felt like experiments with different pop styles, rather than an earnest attempt to make personal music. Taking on less personal work a great way to pump out product quickly and not be too emotionally invested if it fails (because they’re essentially cover songs anyway), but you can sense the detachment. And a detached artist is… kind of boring.

Haywire is Soderbergh’s contribution to the Bourne/Hanna/Columbiana/Abduction sassy vengeance oeuvre, with the twist being that he cast former MMA star Gina Carano, one of the only pretty girls around who actually looks believable beating up grown men (the other? you guessed it, Maya Angelou). Adding believability is almost revolutionary in the hot-chick-beats-up-dudes genre, and Soderbergh, competent as always, does a solid job building a story that tracks, and never makes you go “what? That’s stupid.”

Only he forgot one key ingredient – fun. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding that Haywire‘s audience cares about which secret agent double crossed Agent Sexpunch (was it C-Tates? Banderas? Ew-Greg?), when really we just want to see her look sexy and punch stuff. There’s one truly transcendent fight scene in a hotel room that hits just the right note of intimate brutality, where Gina seems like she might f*ck you but will probably kill you, but the rest of the film just sort of chugs along clinically, hitting all the positions, but never quite giving you the full girlfriend experience.

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Politics Schmolitics, Being a Lady is Hard!

WOOF, what a dog of an assignment. I try to go into movies with an open mind, but let’s be honest, that was impossible here. The Iron Lady. I felt stupid just saying the title. Try it. Go to your local theater and tell the cashier, “I’m here to see The Iron Lady.” You’ll feel like an asshole, I promise. It sounds like a torture device, and it was.

Basically, I expected a cut-rate The King’s Speech, which was already the same boring biopic we’ve all seen umpteen times before. A COURAGEOUS OUTSIDER AND BLAH BLAH BLAH UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP WAR SPEECH THE END.

Imagine my surprise when I found that it wasn’t a biopic about Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister at all, but rather a biopic about Margaret Thatcher: Senile Old Lady, grieving over her husband (Jim Broadbent) who died eight years ago. You know that shitty flashback structure they use in every biopic where the decrepit old protagonist stares wistfully at a picture of himself on a horse before it flashes back and turns into a period piece? Well imagine if that pointless flashback justification wasn’t just five minutes at the beginning and end of the movie, but A RECURRING THEME THAT TAKES UP HALF THE RUNNING TIME. Hate boring, conventional political biopics? Well hey, here’s that, intercut with 40 minutes of an old lady hallucinating conversations with her dead husband about tea! MY GOD, IT’S ALL WORTH IT TO HEAR MERYL STREEP DO AN ACCENT!

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"Quit it with the AC Slater stuff. Don't you respect chairs?"

I haven’t read the Stieg Larsson books or seen the Swedish-language film adaptations, so you’ll get no comparisons here (GOD, I’M SO IGNORANT!), but as rendered by David Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is basically an above-average murder mystery with a sloppy ending, mostly unnoteworthy — but for one thing: Lisbeth Salander, who, as a character, is damn near groundbreaking, and no, dummy, it’s not because she dresses like suicide girl Barbie. With Salander, Fincher/Larsson do right by “strong female heroin” in a way that movies have been f*cking up for probably 100 years. Then they totally screw it up again, but we’ll get to that later.

Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a recently-disgraced journalist (loser of a high-profile libel suit by a wealthy industrialist) who gets hired by another wealthy industrialist, this one retired, played by Christopher Plummer, to investigate a decades-old murder. Plummer comes from a family of kooky ex-Nazis (Stieg Larsson was himself a journalist who investigated right-wing extremists), almost all of whom still live on a sleepy island in the north of Sweden (with shades of Wicker Man, Insomnia). Plummer wants Craig to find out how his niece disappeared into thin air one day at a family reunion back in the 60s. In exchange, Plummer promises to provide Craig some dirt on the industrialist who disgraced him. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual, antisocial ward of the state with a photographic memory, works with a firm of investigators. She comes into the picture first as the operative who does the background check on Craig for Plummer, but soon she and Craig find themselves working together on the murder. OOH, DOES ANYONE ELSE SMELL AN UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP? I’ll be your Danny Glover. Just let me get my merkin.

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