Q101 The Alternative
Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
As you may recall, or even Rekall, the troubled hero of the original “Total Recall,” played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, goes to a brain-bending establishment called Rekall Inc. to buy a virtual vacation, one that’s all in the mind. Now it’s Colin Farrell who goes to the same company, where he’s told, in the same spirit of dangerously genial salesmanship: “We’ll provide you with a complete set of memories all your own.”
For those of us who saw the original, the problem with watching this totally dehumanized remake, which was directed by Len Wiseman, is that we, too, have a set of memories all our own: specific memories of the 1990 movie—which was clever and playful, as well as exciting and hugely impactful—and general memories of a time when going to see an action adventure could be giddy fun.
The basic plot has been retained. (So has the hooker who flashes her three breasts, in case you were wondering.) After something goes horribly wrong during the memory-implant session, the hero, Douglas Quaid, finds himself caught up in an epic battle he doesn’t understand at first, and struggles to figure out who he really is. Unlike the original, which was set in the future both on Earth and on a Mars that’s either real or a dream, the new one takes place entirely on an Earth that’s staggering under the load of overpopulation and really bad weather—”Blade Runner” meets Malthus.
To give the new version its due, the visuals are great, especially if you’re partial to oppressiveness: a Londonesque megalopolis thrust skyward in a jumble of shifting platforms and seemingly infinite tiers; a spectacular—though also interminable—hover-car chase; multilevel leaps, preposterous crash landings, soulless interior spaces that make Hong Kong’s malls seem warm and cozy by comparison. (The production was designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, and photographed by Paul Cameron.)
But alas, this movie wasn’t made for us. The state of the movie business has been transformed by globalization. Foreign sales are now where the main action is. International moviegoers respond more reliably to action, and the bedazzlements of production design, than to character or dialogue, let alone to humor, which translates chancily, if at all, into other languages. In that context, the new “Total Recall” is not only instructive, but possessed of a perverse purity. Almost everything but the action has been distilled out.
Total Recall opens this weekend, the first in August.
For the full review READ HERE.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577564980144670986.html?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
Don’t come to watch The Dark Knight Rises and expect your spirits to be buoyed and your sadness lifted. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal offers this review of the much awaited third film in a trilogy, ”The Dark Knight Rises”.
“The Dark Knight Rises” is notable for many things—thrilling chases, supercool vehicles, majestic vistas, an epic scale that hasn’t been achieved since “The Lord of the Rings,” a redemptive climax that brings an end, more or less, to a complex saga. The most stunning thing about the film, though—and this is said not by way of praise, but with anxious wonderment—is how depressing and truly doomy most of it is. Batman, played by a marvelous actor with a singular gift for depicting pain, suffers mortally. Drums beat incessantly—before, during and after a series of numbing, Neanderthal brawls between Batman and Bane. History takes a double beating from a script that reprocesses the storming of the Bastille into an attack by terrorist thugs.
Bruce can be forgiven the bleakness of his initial mood. His caped alter ego was unjustly blamed for the death of Gotham City’s district attorney, Harvey Dent, who was anything but the model citizen he’s become in public memory. Now the billionaire socialite has turned antisocial, a Howard Hughes-like hermit (minus the screwiness) licking his psychic wounds and living with the all-too-real injuries of former battles. But two threats conspire to end his solitude.
One of them is brought home—into his own home—by Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. It’s intriguingly difficult to discern her motives, or loyalties, for most of the movie.
But the most proximate source of the threatening storm is Bane—an implacable, bemuscled villain who wears a mask over his disfigured face, and who speaks in muffled tones that make Darth Vader sound like an elocution teacher. (He’s not the only one with intelligibility problems; the movie’s use of bass frequencies to convey threat and evil does for dialogue what amped-up rock does for lyrics.) As played by the excellent Tom Hardy, who has porked up for the role and is essentially unrecognizable, Bane is not merely evil enough but ambitious enough to bring Batman back into action, since he plans nothing less than the city’s enslavement, if not its total destruction.
Dark comic books have always been around, but with a difference; as pictures and words on paper, they’ve allowed readers to choose their own degree of involvement. “The Dark Knight Rises” allows no choice.
READ MORE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303754904577530792153262270.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_editorsPicks_1
There are currently no events to display.