PhoenixSon7 Reviews

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)

Forgettable. But at least your 10-year-old will love it.

[4/10 · 26 July 2010]

Disney's latest film from director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) is very straight-up an exactly-what-you'd-expect film. It's flashy, not too thoughtful, and has a couple of humorous moments, even if none of these are very laugh-out-loud funny. The plot, love story, and progression of character is very cliché. In short, it's a summer PG movie from Disney. What else would you expect? I have never been a big fan of Nicolas Cage, but for what it's worth, at least he apparently has a good enough humor about himself that he can still take these kinds of roles. While he is better here than he is in Ghost Rider, he still plays the role with a certain degree of silly kids entertainer. Even Balthazar's love story is milked here, and while there aren't near as many groan-inducing lines as, say, The Last Airbender *shutter*, the plot and writing are still pretty weak.

Adding to this weakness is Jay Baruchel as Dave, the titular apprentice. Nothing against Baruchel persay, but he seems to resign himself to playing this sort of character. To be honest, Baruchel's strong suit is his voice, the droll lisp-ish drawl which lent itself beautifully to Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. It's hard to accept Baruchel as a physics nerd, an object of affection for a beautiful girl, or a sorcerer, all of which he plays here. This could be a good or a bad thing, but Sorcerer's Apprentice simply doesn't milk Dave's character as much as it could have and instead feels like the script can't really decide what to do with him.

Visually, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is impressive. A favorite effect of mine is the car-morphing, in which an older vehicle transforms into a sleek roadster in a wash of liquid. Alfred Molia's character gets some pretty cool transformations as well. It's nice to see Monica Belluci back on an American screen, even if she barely gets to say a word.

As far as the plot, I commend the film for trying to balance magic and science and give scientific explanations. Sure, it doesn't always work, but at least they try. Sadly, as previously mentioned, the script missteps quite a bit without explanation. Of the "evil wizards", they are dispatched much too quickly and easily for how much they were built up.

I don't know if anyone really had high expectations for this film, and it pretty much sits in that rut. It's a fun family film but nothing more. It's forgettable and has plenty of holes, but at least your 10-year-old might love it.

Inception (2010)

Masterpiece of the Year

[10/10 · 16 July 2010]

It is the rare film that can completely immerse you in its experience to the point where it is hard to speak afterward. Inception is one of those films - beyond breathtaking, an incredible mind-bending tale full of action and suspense which takes us in to the world of dreams and back.

Inception is not only the most intelligent film of the year, it makes the rest look like a finger painting. Christopher Nolan has again manufactured a masterpiece of cinema, the story beyond intricate and full of psychological twists and turns through the mind of dreams which turns the action on its head - sometimes quite literally. The acting is exceptional, with Joseph Gordeon-Levitt standing out and proving again that he has more than enough acting chops to tackle bigger and better roles. What is really incredible is how Nolan manages to carry such an epic film with such a huge scale and yet maintain strong, well-rounded characters. Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb is at the center of the story and the focus is never taken off of him. Through Leo's performance and through sitting in Cobb's dreams, Inception manages a new way of getting us to feel what the film's characters feel.

Hans Zimmer's score perfectly compliments Nolan's actions on screen to create an experience films rarely give us anymore. Both epic and serene, Zimmer adds to the dream-like quality of the film and makes the action set pieces that much larger.

The set pieces of Inception are amazing. Not only is it refreshing to see so many special effects without the use of CGI, but the implementation of these special effects are the best I've seen. I only wish I hadn't seen any trailers for this film, as going in to this movie with a blank pallet would have given the movie even more exceptional moments, instead of hoping or waiting for "that moment" or smiling when a humorous line from the trailer showed up in the film. I could talk about the one central fight scene of the film for hours, which is nothing short of a benchmark of set design, camera-work and cinematography. I could watch this scene on loop for hours just to be knocked out over and over again by the sheer scale of it.

I cannot describe Inception as anything short of a masterpiece. Especially in the dredge of summer cinema, Inception reminds us why we go to films in the first place, giving us an intelligent film which doesn't fly over our heads (not that I'd recommend stepping out of the theater for ever a minute during the movie).

The Last Airbender (2010)

Not Much To Speak Of

[1/10 · 30 June 2010]

Whenever an adaptation is mode, it is hard to view said film in any other context than in comparison to the source material. While it is important to take things in context, it is also important to view a film as what it is - that being the film medium. In the case of the critically acclaimed television series Avatar: The Last Airbender it would be impossible to adequately recreate or adapt every single thing in the entire first season in to a movie. M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is an adaptation of the first season or "Book 1" of the television series. I have watched Book 1 of the Nickelodeon series and quite enjoyed it, but for the sake of the medium of film I try to take an objective stance on my review of the film on terms of how it stands by itself, as opposed to how well it adapted the source material.

First, however, in terms of the adaptation, let me say that with such brilliant source material as Avatar: The Last Airbender it'd be easy to take the script and scenes word-for-word from the source material and simply plug in actors to say the lines. Unfortunately, Shymalan's The Last Airbender fails at even the simplest of tasks such as this.

Before the coming of sound to film, the theater was silent and the pictures told the audience the story. When sound came along, some criticized the addition to film as a bastardization of the art form. The "talkies" became quite popular with the masses however, and as history will show us, filmmakers adapted to new techniques and new ways of integrating pictures with sound, and the silent film has almost completely gone the way of the dinosaur except for some notable art-house exceptions.

Movies like The Last Airbender almost make me wish that silent film still existed. From the delivery of the first line to the last word spoken, every single line that is delivered is done so with such a forced agony that the film is almost unwatchable. The acting is stale, what characterization there should be is absent, and the whole film becomes more unbearable with every scene. It's almost as if the characters think they are in a radio drama, as the plot is rehashed for us, the audience almost every third minute as the characters catch us up to speed in a quick narration. The script is bloated and filled with all sorts of unnecessary dialogue which is delivered either so lazily that it's hard to care or with such overblown emotion that the lines become laughable. This excess dialogue serves as a catalyst to suck all depth out of who should be well-rounded characters that even a quick-3D conversion process cannot rescue them.

There are a few bright moments with the actors, probably the two most notable being Dev Patel as Prince Zuko and Shaun Toub as Uncle Iroh. These two actually have some good moments among all the poorly written lines and end up being the best part about the film script-wise.

Watching The Last Airbender makes me wonder if anyone besides the special effects supervisors and the fight choreographers even cared about what they were doing. Shots seem well-composed enough (though not even close to usual Shyamalan standards), the special effects are simply incredible, and the choreography is excellent. However, everything else about the film is just terrible. Even the way the choreography is presented is so over-dramatic that it takes all emotion out of what is happening. Every action scene is put in to slow motion. This highlights the spectacular of the choreography, but makes me wonder what could have been done had at least a few of the fight scenes been left in real-time.

Another quick note related to the adaptation, most of the film is dedicated to the last episode of the first season. Over an hour of the movie, in fact. Because of this, the first hour of the film feels rushed, trying to speed us to the "big battle scene". I realize that a series adaptation is tough, but to skimp out on important character details makes it near impossible to identify or even care about a single character.

The Last Airbender is not only a terrible adaptation, it's a pretty terrible movie on its own right, and may even go down in history as Shyamalan's worst. A shame for the once-great writer/director.