Friday, July 30, 2010
Clash Of The Titans Review
Set in the timeless grandeur of Greek mythology, Clash of the Titans immerses players into the epic battle for dominance between the human race and the powerful gods Hades and Zeus. Through vast landscapes of swamps, mountains and the underworld, two modes of play let players embody Perseus' adventure from the film, or take on original new bosses in fresh, dynamic adaptations of one of the greatest mythological stories ever told.
Hydro Thunder Hurricane Review
Hydro Thunder Hurricane is an all new, adrenaline pumping sequel to the legendary Arcade hit Hydro Thunder! This XBLA title is bigger, better and more beautiful than ever. Dynamic water physics drives intense momentto-moment gameplay on ever-changing, water-based tracks. With gorgeously rendered visuals and over-the-top themed environments, Hydro Thunder Hurricane delivers adrenaline fueled water-based racing.
Inception Review
“True inspiration is impossible to fake,” explains a character in Christopher Nolan’s existentialist heist film Inception. If that’s the case, then Inception is one of the most honest films ever made. Nolan has crafted a movie that’s beyond brilliant and layered both narratively and thematically. It requires the audience to take in a collection of rules, exceptions, locations, jobs, and abilities in order to understand the text, let alone the fascinating subtext. Nolan’s magnum opus is the first major blockbuster in over a decade that’s demanded intense viewer concentration, raised thoughtful and complex ideas, and wrapped everything all in a breathlessly exciting action film. Inception may be complicated, but simply put it’s one of the best movies of the year.
“I’m asking you to take a leap of faith.”
Inception requires so much exposition that a lesser director would have forced theaters to distribute pamphlets to audience members in order to explain the complicated world he’s developed. During my first draft of this view, I realized I had spent three paragraphs simply trying to explain the plot. I will simply avoid this exposition and present the movie’s basic premise. Inception centers on a team of individuals led by an “extractor” named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who, through the use of a special device, construct the dreams of a target and use those dreams to implant an idea so that the target will make a decision beneficial to the individual who hired the team. To say that scratches the surface would be an insult to both scratches and surfaces. But since it takes Nolan about fifty minutes to set everything up, I hope you’ll forgive my brevity.
Why is it so difficult to explain the plot in depth? First, I don’t want to spoil you. Secondly, the film layers dreams on top of dreams to the point where a unique keepsake called a “totem” is required in order to inform a character as to whether or not he or she is still dreaming. Then you have people in particular roles like “The Architect”, “The Forger”, and “The Chemist” in order to pull off the job. Furthermore, dreams have rules: dying in a dream forces the dreamer to wake up, delving too deeply into a mind can cause an eternal slumber called “Limbo”, using memories to construct dreams is dangerous because it can blur the line between dreams and reality. In addition, intruding in the dreams of another will cause the dreamer’s “projections” (human representations created by the dreamer) to attack the intruders like white blood cells going after an infection. And these explanations only represent a fraction of the terminology, rules, exceptions, or details that are necessary for creating the world of Inception.
But it’s not a confusing movie if you provide it with your full attention. There are a lot of summer movies that ask you turn off your brain and enjoy the persistent-vegetative-state ride. Inception is not one of those movies. There’s a lot to take in, but the imaginative and thoughtful delivery of exposition keeps the viewer riveted despite the amount of information required in order to understand the premise, setting, and plot.
It tends to be the case that lots of rules create lots of loopholes. Filmmakers can use these to cheat and let audiences fill in the leaps of logics. But Inception always plays fair. It will twist your mind but it’s not a film built on twists. It’s a film built on possibilities and the boldness of pursuing those possibilities. On my first viewing, the film experienced a technical malfunction where a misplaced reel skipped the movie forward by twenty minutes and then played the scene upside down and in reverse. Inception had already sent the audience through such a strange narrative labyrinth that almost everyone in the theater wasn’t sure if something had gone wrong or if Nolan had just made another bold decision.
The film deserves, demands, and rewards repeat viewings, but from your first viewing you can grasp the events on screen and how they interact with each other as long as you force yourself to be an active viewer. But with set pieces so intricate, so jaw-dropping, and so breathtaking, you’ll find that there’s no exertion needed to stay focused. You’ll already be swept up in the whirlwind.
“And I will lead them on a merry chase.”
Inception features one of the best fight scenes of all-time. Take a moment to consider that: in the entire history of cinema, of every fight scene that has ever taken place, the one in this movie is among the best. Watching a fight without gravity is incredible. It’s not like in The Matrix where a character can defy gravity if they choose. The fight scene in Inception has no gravity to defy and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the team’s point man, has to figure out how to achieve his objective while fending off projections. I can only hope that someday in the distant future, when people with free time are on a space station in zero-gravity, they will re-enact this scene. In the meantime, Nolan’s spectacular visual effects will have to suffice.
With the exception of one set piece (which I’ll get to in a moment), the action scenes in Inception are spectacular. Visually lush and imaginative, Nolan transforms car chases into countdowns, fistfights into puzzles, and shootouts into…well, shootouts. There’s a mission on a snowy mountainside that doesn’t work as well as the other set pieces because there’s a poor sense of location, a lack of visual diversity, and sloppy editing. But that doesn’t really halt or hurt the film because Nolan brilliantly placed the car chase, the fistfight, and the shootout on top of each other. You would think this would cause action fatigue, but by cutting between three set pieces and having what happens in one set piece affect the others, the action climax of Inception isn’t exhausting—it’s exhilarating.
“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”
You can be the best action director around but you can only get so far if you lack characters worth caring about. With Inception, every character not only has a particular skill and task, but has a personality that mirrors their job description.
We learn about the characters of Inception not from long monologues about their past or even (with the exception of Cobb) delving into their dreams and memories. We learn about them by how they interact with each other. The small moments between Arthur and Eames, “The Forger” (Tom Hardy) indicate years of working on j tolerating each other on jobs but with no animosity between the two. Neophyte “Architect” Ariadne (Ellen Page) is a total jerk towards Cobb, but she’s the only one who’s willing to cut through his bullshit. Cobb’s relationship with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is the heart of Inception. The interactions among the supporting characters are standard for a well-made action movie, but the relationship between Cobb and Mal is yet another reason why Inception stands apart.
DiCaprio will take some flack for playing a similar character to his one in Shutter Island from earlier this year. Both Cobb and Teddy Daniels have become separated from their families, suffer from unbearable guilt, and have a tough time handling the nature of reality. Here’s another similarity: DiCaprio is great in both movies. I wouldn’t worry about him getting typecast as tragic-figure-with-tenuous-grasp-on-reality-as-a-result-of-intense-guilt-and-regret.
Two of the film’s stars will (hopefully) find their careers at the next level after this movie opens. Their names are “Joseph Gordon-Levitt” and “Tom Hardy”. Gordon-Levitt has excelled at playing lost boys, tortures souls, and recently a charming male lead in (500) Days of Summer. You can now add “bad-ass blockbuster action star” to that list. Gordon-Levitt’s versatility is why I will be excited for any movie that lists him as one of its stars.
Hardy’s critically acclaimed performance in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson brought him to Hollywood’s attention. His performance in Inception will bring him the attention of countries. He brings a light-hearted touch to the film and while the script forces other characters to remain serious, Eames takes a more laid back approach to the mind-heist game. But he’s not comic relief and he’s not around to comment on absurd circumstances. Like everyone in the cast, he’s there to help the team achieve their goal (although the script functions in such a way that you could see each character as a representation of a specific idea).
The only actor who’s a little shaky is Ken Watanabe who plays Saito, the team’s employer. His performance is great. He pulls off the impressive feat of being threatening without being menacing. The only problem is that Watanabe’s Japanese accent is so thick that it’s sometimes difficult to make out what he’s saying. In a movie where the dialogue is as delicately crafted as the rest of the film, it’s unfortunate to lose a few lines due to something as simple as pronunciation. And it’s only noticeable because everything in Inception is so finely crafted.
The physical scope of this movie is astounding. Worlds fall on top of each other, a freight train can burst onto a city street, hotels can lose all gravity, and everything that we know is impossible appears completely natural. It’s not enough to say that the cinematography is gorgeous, or that the sound design is sensational, or that this is one of composer Hans Zimmer’s all-time best scores. There aren’t “supporting” elements in Inception. Just as the film layers its narrative structure and thematic subtext, so it does with its technical elements. You will notice the cinematography and the art direction and the sounds and the score. It’s like hearing beautiful solos mixed together in a glorious anthem.
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
As you’ve probably guessed, when I said at the beginning of this review that Inception was the first movie in over a decade to mix breathtaking action with thoughtful subtext, I was referring to 1999’s The Matrix. The comparisons are inevitable. Both movies deal with the nature of reality combined with pulse-pounding set pieces that will be included in any action-scene highlight reel. But The Matrix is a freshman level course compared to the doctorate held by Inception, and it has nothing to do with how far special effects have come in ten years. It’s about taking multiple genres, settings, ideas, emotions, and questions and weaving them into a rich tapestry that will have folks talking long after the credits roll. But then you throw in those advanced special effects and you have a summer blockbuster that will blow your mind.
You’ve never seen anything like Inception, and you’ll want to see it again and again.
Rating: A
“I’m asking you to take a leap of faith.”
Inception requires so much exposition that a lesser director would have forced theaters to distribute pamphlets to audience members in order to explain the complicated world he’s developed. During my first draft of this view, I realized I had spent three paragraphs simply trying to explain the plot. I will simply avoid this exposition and present the movie’s basic premise. Inception centers on a team of individuals led by an “extractor” named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who, through the use of a special device, construct the dreams of a target and use those dreams to implant an idea so that the target will make a decision beneficial to the individual who hired the team. To say that scratches the surface would be an insult to both scratches and surfaces. But since it takes Nolan about fifty minutes to set everything up, I hope you’ll forgive my brevity.
Why is it so difficult to explain the plot in depth? First, I don’t want to spoil you. Secondly, the film layers dreams on top of dreams to the point where a unique keepsake called a “totem” is required in order to inform a character as to whether or not he or she is still dreaming. Then you have people in particular roles like “The Architect”, “The Forger”, and “The Chemist” in order to pull off the job. Furthermore, dreams have rules: dying in a dream forces the dreamer to wake up, delving too deeply into a mind can cause an eternal slumber called “Limbo”, using memories to construct dreams is dangerous because it can blur the line between dreams and reality. In addition, intruding in the dreams of another will cause the dreamer’s “projections” (human representations created by the dreamer) to attack the intruders like white blood cells going after an infection. And these explanations only represent a fraction of the terminology, rules, exceptions, or details that are necessary for creating the world of Inception.
But it’s not a confusing movie if you provide it with your full attention. There are a lot of summer movies that ask you turn off your brain and enjoy the persistent-vegetative-state ride. Inception is not one of those movies. There’s a lot to take in, but the imaginative and thoughtful delivery of exposition keeps the viewer riveted despite the amount of information required in order to understand the premise, setting, and plot.
It tends to be the case that lots of rules create lots of loopholes. Filmmakers can use these to cheat and let audiences fill in the leaps of logics. But Inception always plays fair. It will twist your mind but it’s not a film built on twists. It’s a film built on possibilities and the boldness of pursuing those possibilities. On my first viewing, the film experienced a technical malfunction where a misplaced reel skipped the movie forward by twenty minutes and then played the scene upside down and in reverse. Inception had already sent the audience through such a strange narrative labyrinth that almost everyone in the theater wasn’t sure if something had gone wrong or if Nolan had just made another bold decision.
The film deserves, demands, and rewards repeat viewings, but from your first viewing you can grasp the events on screen and how they interact with each other as long as you force yourself to be an active viewer. But with set pieces so intricate, so jaw-dropping, and so breathtaking, you’ll find that there’s no exertion needed to stay focused. You’ll already be swept up in the whirlwind.
“And I will lead them on a merry chase.”
Inception features one of the best fight scenes of all-time. Take a moment to consider that: in the entire history of cinema, of every fight scene that has ever taken place, the one in this movie is among the best. Watching a fight without gravity is incredible. It’s not like in The Matrix where a character can defy gravity if they choose. The fight scene in Inception has no gravity to defy and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the team’s point man, has to figure out how to achieve his objective while fending off projections. I can only hope that someday in the distant future, when people with free time are on a space station in zero-gravity, they will re-enact this scene. In the meantime, Nolan’s spectacular visual effects will have to suffice.
With the exception of one set piece (which I’ll get to in a moment), the action scenes in Inception are spectacular. Visually lush and imaginative, Nolan transforms car chases into countdowns, fistfights into puzzles, and shootouts into…well, shootouts. There’s a mission on a snowy mountainside that doesn’t work as well as the other set pieces because there’s a poor sense of location, a lack of visual diversity, and sloppy editing. But that doesn’t really halt or hurt the film because Nolan brilliantly placed the car chase, the fistfight, and the shootout on top of each other. You would think this would cause action fatigue, but by cutting between three set pieces and having what happens in one set piece affect the others, the action climax of Inception isn’t exhausting—it’s exhilarating.
“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”
You can be the best action director around but you can only get so far if you lack characters worth caring about. With Inception, every character not only has a particular skill and task, but has a personality that mirrors their job description.
We learn about the characters of Inception not from long monologues about their past or even (with the exception of Cobb) delving into their dreams and memories. We learn about them by how they interact with each other. The small moments between Arthur and Eames, “The Forger” (Tom Hardy) indicate years of working on j tolerating each other on jobs but with no animosity between the two. Neophyte “Architect” Ariadne (Ellen Page) is a total jerk towards Cobb, but she’s the only one who’s willing to cut through his bullshit. Cobb’s relationship with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is the heart of Inception. The interactions among the supporting characters are standard for a well-made action movie, but the relationship between Cobb and Mal is yet another reason why Inception stands apart.
DiCaprio will take some flack for playing a similar character to his one in Shutter Island from earlier this year. Both Cobb and Teddy Daniels have become separated from their families, suffer from unbearable guilt, and have a tough time handling the nature of reality. Here’s another similarity: DiCaprio is great in both movies. I wouldn’t worry about him getting typecast as tragic-figure-with-tenuous-grasp-on-reality-as-a-result-of-intense-guilt-and-regret.
Two of the film’s stars will (hopefully) find their careers at the next level after this movie opens. Their names are “Joseph Gordon-Levitt” and “Tom Hardy”. Gordon-Levitt has excelled at playing lost boys, tortures souls, and recently a charming male lead in (500) Days of Summer. You can now add “bad-ass blockbuster action star” to that list. Gordon-Levitt’s versatility is why I will be excited for any movie that lists him as one of its stars.
Hardy’s critically acclaimed performance in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson brought him to Hollywood’s attention. His performance in Inception will bring him the attention of countries. He brings a light-hearted touch to the film and while the script forces other characters to remain serious, Eames takes a more laid back approach to the mind-heist game. But he’s not comic relief and he’s not around to comment on absurd circumstances. Like everyone in the cast, he’s there to help the team achieve their goal (although the script functions in such a way that you could see each character as a representation of a specific idea).
The only actor who’s a little shaky is Ken Watanabe who plays Saito, the team’s employer. His performance is great. He pulls off the impressive feat of being threatening without being menacing. The only problem is that Watanabe’s Japanese accent is so thick that it’s sometimes difficult to make out what he’s saying. In a movie where the dialogue is as delicately crafted as the rest of the film, it’s unfortunate to lose a few lines due to something as simple as pronunciation. And it’s only noticeable because everything in Inception is so finely crafted.
The physical scope of this movie is astounding. Worlds fall on top of each other, a freight train can burst onto a city street, hotels can lose all gravity, and everything that we know is impossible appears completely natural. It’s not enough to say that the cinematography is gorgeous, or that the sound design is sensational, or that this is one of composer Hans Zimmer’s all-time best scores. There aren’t “supporting” elements in Inception. Just as the film layers its narrative structure and thematic subtext, so it does with its technical elements. You will notice the cinematography and the art direction and the sounds and the score. It’s like hearing beautiful solos mixed together in a glorious anthem.
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
As you’ve probably guessed, when I said at the beginning of this review that Inception was the first movie in over a decade to mix breathtaking action with thoughtful subtext, I was referring to 1999’s The Matrix. The comparisons are inevitable. Both movies deal with the nature of reality combined with pulse-pounding set pieces that will be included in any action-scene highlight reel. But The Matrix is a freshman level course compared to the doctorate held by Inception, and it has nothing to do with how far special effects have come in ten years. It’s about taking multiple genres, settings, ideas, emotions, and questions and weaving them into a rich tapestry that will have folks talking long after the credits roll. But then you throw in those advanced special effects and you have a summer blockbuster that will blow your mind.
You’ve never seen anything like Inception, and you’ll want to see it again and again.
Rating: A
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Salt Review
Bottom Line: A spy thriller more than worth its salt.
She never quite says: "The name is Salt. Evelyn Salt." But Angelina Jolie, for all intents and purposes, is James Bond in her new film "Salt," and it's really no surprise that Jolie, the only female action star in Hollywood, more than measures up to Daniel Craig.
Donning several guises while on the run in Columbia's spy thriller, she even -- with the help of considerable facial latex, mind you -- turns up as a guy in one scene. She makes a pretty ugly one, but it makes an amusing gag, a kind of acknowledgment that kick-ass action heroes now come in both genders. In Jolie's case, it's more convincing than ever because in those Lara Croft movies, she looked like an animated creature that popped out of a video game.
While preposterous at every turn, "Salt" is a better Bond movie than most recent Bond movies, as its makers keep the stunts real and severely limit CGI gimmickry. This is a slick, light summer entertainment that should throw considerable coin into Sony's coffers while re-establishing (if it needs re-establishing) Jolie's bona fides as an action star. The film certainly didn't need the assist, but recent news events have erased any objection from critics, tied to laws of plausibility, over the film's key concept that Russian sleeper spies still exist in the U.S. long after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Another talking point here is the similarity between this film, reportedly first developed for Tom Cruise, and the action-spy thriller he chose to do, the lamentable "Knight and Day." There are astonishing similarities: An American spy believed to be a rogue agent gets chased by the CIA, with the protagonist escaping by, among other tricks, leaping from one fast-moving vehicle to another on a major thoroughfare. These similarities only point up how smart "Salt" is in crafting its escapist fare.
Director Phillip Noyce and stunt guru Simon Crane, working from a clever though shallow screenplay by Kurt Wimmer, make sure the stunts in "Salt" look like a dangerous and demanding day at the office. In "Knight and Day," the movie's absurd physicality is played as effortless clowning replete with repartee that is supposed to remind you of 007 but in fact is embarrassingly flat and banal.
There's no joking around here. Jolie's Evelyn Salt is made of sterner stuff, the kind that can survive a North Korean prison without giving up the name of her employer, the CIA. Back in D.C. and married to a nice though naive German arachnologist (August Diehl) -- yes, he studies spiders and, yes, there is a payoff to that -- she is assigned to CIA desk duties when a supposed Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) walks in one day.
Nobody is particularly buying his act, especially Salt's superior, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), but she accedes to his plea to interrogate the man briefly before she heads home to an anniversary dinner. The Russian talks nonsense about sleeper cells and a plot to assassinate the Russian president on American soil. Then he happens to drop the name of the Russian sleeper spy: Evelyn Salt.
This apparently is enough to turn the Agency's counterintelligence officer, Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), into her instant foe. Nothing that happens after this deserves any serious scrutiny, but it's fun to watch Jolie's Salt seemingly transforms into the Russian sleeper agent she is reputed to be -- escaping from a virtual lockdown, dodging cars and bullets, making her way to New York and through subway tunnels to confront the Russian president, then take on, seemingly, every Russian and CIA op in her way.
All those "seemingly" qualifiers are meant to indicate that no studio is going to cast Jolie as a villain or even an anti-hero. What do you think this is, the '70s? But there's just enough doubt for the ad copy to read: Who is Salt?
You can't say the movie keeps you guessing about this for long since most attentive viewers will figure out the true villain(s) well before the climax. But the chase is the whole point.
Here Noyce and his team excel. Propelled by James Newton Howard's nerve-teasing music and enhanced by Robert Elswit's clear-eyed, smartly positioned cameras, "Salt" moves ever forward -- pushing, pushing, pushing its heroine to greater feats every minute. It doesn't stop for martinis, either shaken or stirred, or any other detours. The movie is lean and muscular, looking for action even in situations where a little sleight of hand might have done the trick.
You do wish that maybe it did slow down to consider the human factor. Salt is married; let's dig into that. A marriage between an agent and a civilian is never explored. In making the husband a problem that needs solving, here -- not to give anything away -- the movie stumbles badly. At the end of the day, "who is Salt" is less a tagline than a criticism. Eventually, you know what Salt is. But who she is isn't satisfactorily resolved.
In story terms, that is. In Hollywood terms, there's never any doubt: Salt is Angelina Jolie.
She never quite says: "The name is Salt. Evelyn Salt." But Angelina Jolie, for all intents and purposes, is James Bond in her new film "Salt," and it's really no surprise that Jolie, the only female action star in Hollywood, more than measures up to Daniel Craig.
Donning several guises while on the run in Columbia's spy thriller, she even -- with the help of considerable facial latex, mind you -- turns up as a guy in one scene. She makes a pretty ugly one, but it makes an amusing gag, a kind of acknowledgment that kick-ass action heroes now come in both genders. In Jolie's case, it's more convincing than ever because in those Lara Croft movies, she looked like an animated creature that popped out of a video game.
While preposterous at every turn, "Salt" is a better Bond movie than most recent Bond movies, as its makers keep the stunts real and severely limit CGI gimmickry. This is a slick, light summer entertainment that should throw considerable coin into Sony's coffers while re-establishing (if it needs re-establishing) Jolie's bona fides as an action star. The film certainly didn't need the assist, but recent news events have erased any objection from critics, tied to laws of plausibility, over the film's key concept that Russian sleeper spies still exist in the U.S. long after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Another talking point here is the similarity between this film, reportedly first developed for Tom Cruise, and the action-spy thriller he chose to do, the lamentable "Knight and Day." There are astonishing similarities: An American spy believed to be a rogue agent gets chased by the CIA, with the protagonist escaping by, among other tricks, leaping from one fast-moving vehicle to another on a major thoroughfare. These similarities only point up how smart "Salt" is in crafting its escapist fare.
Director Phillip Noyce and stunt guru Simon Crane, working from a clever though shallow screenplay by Kurt Wimmer, make sure the stunts in "Salt" look like a dangerous and demanding day at the office. In "Knight and Day," the movie's absurd physicality is played as effortless clowning replete with repartee that is supposed to remind you of 007 but in fact is embarrassingly flat and banal.
There's no joking around here. Jolie's Evelyn Salt is made of sterner stuff, the kind that can survive a North Korean prison without giving up the name of her employer, the CIA. Back in D.C. and married to a nice though naive German arachnologist (August Diehl) -- yes, he studies spiders and, yes, there is a payoff to that -- she is assigned to CIA desk duties when a supposed Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) walks in one day.
Nobody is particularly buying his act, especially Salt's superior, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber), but she accedes to his plea to interrogate the man briefly before she heads home to an anniversary dinner. The Russian talks nonsense about sleeper cells and a plot to assassinate the Russian president on American soil. Then he happens to drop the name of the Russian sleeper spy: Evelyn Salt.
This apparently is enough to turn the Agency's counterintelligence officer, Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), into her instant foe. Nothing that happens after this deserves any serious scrutiny, but it's fun to watch Jolie's Salt seemingly transforms into the Russian sleeper agent she is reputed to be -- escaping from a virtual lockdown, dodging cars and bullets, making her way to New York and through subway tunnels to confront the Russian president, then take on, seemingly, every Russian and CIA op in her way.
All those "seemingly" qualifiers are meant to indicate that no studio is going to cast Jolie as a villain or even an anti-hero. What do you think this is, the '70s? But there's just enough doubt for the ad copy to read: Who is Salt?
You can't say the movie keeps you guessing about this for long since most attentive viewers will figure out the true villain(s) well before the climax. But the chase is the whole point.
Here Noyce and his team excel. Propelled by James Newton Howard's nerve-teasing music and enhanced by Robert Elswit's clear-eyed, smartly positioned cameras, "Salt" moves ever forward -- pushing, pushing, pushing its heroine to greater feats every minute. It doesn't stop for martinis, either shaken or stirred, or any other detours. The movie is lean and muscular, looking for action even in situations where a little sleight of hand might have done the trick.
You do wish that maybe it did slow down to consider the human factor. Salt is married; let's dig into that. A marriage between an agent and a civilian is never explored. In making the husband a problem that needs solving, here -- not to give anything away -- the movie stumbles badly. At the end of the day, "who is Salt" is less a tagline than a criticism. Eventually, you know what Salt is. But who she is isn't satisfactorily resolved.
In story terms, that is. In Hollywood terms, there's never any doubt: Salt is Angelina Jolie.
Toy Story 3 Review
I’ll be honest. In the past the very mention of Toy Story made my blood freeze. It triggered a ghastly train of associations that went something like this: Toy Story, toy shop, retail outlet, shopping mall, Bluewater, suburban sprawl, ecological tipping point, global apocalypse. The series that, back in 1995, ushered Pixar’s reign as purveyors of some of the smartest, most loved and certainly most profitable films of recent years, seemed to me vastly inferior to the same studio’s Ratatouille or Up, little more than extended plugs for kiddie merchandise.
Toy Story 3, what seems certain to be the final installment in the series, is a different matter altogether. Directed by Lee Unkrich and written by Michael Arndt, it has all the usual ingredients — squeaky toys, happy anticry, high-octane “To infinity and beyond” set-pieces and escapades — but something new too: a heart, a huge beating heart. It’s a film that moves as much as it entertains, that will make adults cry as much as — perhaps even more than — younger children.
What gives it its emotional heft is the sense of expiry and mortality that hangs over it almost from the outset. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the motley crew are on the brink of being separated from their owner Andy (John Morris). He’s older now, about to leave for college, and even though he decides to take Woody with him for sentiment’s sake, the game seems to be up: barely managing to escape being carted off on a rubbish truck, they wind up in a day centre for toddlers.
At first the place seems like paradise regained, a happy-slappy utopia. New toys to pal around with! New children with whom they can have funny-fits and giggles! But those children, it turns out, are brats who whack, batter and abuse them as — well, children tend to do. As for the other toys being kindred souls who might protect their backs — that’s a joke. Bossed about by Lots-o’-Huggin (Ned Beatty), a superficially-kindly bear nurses untold bitterness and against the world after being lost — worse: replaced – by his beloved owner, they shackle Buzz and pals in cages each night.
They have to escape. But to where? Their owner no longer wants them. Their future is seemingly lonely and Sisyphean. And if that seems a lofty frame of reference, I can only say that it barely touches the epochal grandeur of a scene in which the toys, faced with what appears to be certain death as they sink inexorably towards an incinerator, whose roaring light is itself redolent of a Dantean inferno, hold each others’ hands in a gesture of collectivity and mutual love.
Waste, trash, leftovers. Toy Story 3, like WALL-E, Ratatouille and even Cars, attempts a juggling act: redefining digital technology in the service of stories that hanker back to an earlier, analogue era. It doesn’t always pull it off: too often the film’s colours recall those of a gaudy confectionery stand or are over-lit like a boring vision of heaven, and sometimes there’s not enough depth of field (the 3D version doesn’t fully remedy this).
Still, by the end, these are minor caveats. The toys make the biggest transition of their lives. And we are reminded, beautifully and rather agonisingly, about how it’s both possible — and sometimes vital — to let go of those whom we most love.
Toy Story 3, what seems certain to be the final installment in the series, is a different matter altogether. Directed by Lee Unkrich and written by Michael Arndt, it has all the usual ingredients — squeaky toys, happy anticry, high-octane “To infinity and beyond” set-pieces and escapades — but something new too: a heart, a huge beating heart. It’s a film that moves as much as it entertains, that will make adults cry as much as — perhaps even more than — younger children.
What gives it its emotional heft is the sense of expiry and mortality that hangs over it almost from the outset. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the motley crew are on the brink of being separated from their owner Andy (John Morris). He’s older now, about to leave for college, and even though he decides to take Woody with him for sentiment’s sake, the game seems to be up: barely managing to escape being carted off on a rubbish truck, they wind up in a day centre for toddlers.
At first the place seems like paradise regained, a happy-slappy utopia. New toys to pal around with! New children with whom they can have funny-fits and giggles! But those children, it turns out, are brats who whack, batter and abuse them as — well, children tend to do. As for the other toys being kindred souls who might protect their backs — that’s a joke. Bossed about by Lots-o’-Huggin (Ned Beatty), a superficially-kindly bear nurses untold bitterness and against the world after being lost — worse: replaced – by his beloved owner, they shackle Buzz and pals in cages each night.
They have to escape. But to where? Their owner no longer wants them. Their future is seemingly lonely and Sisyphean. And if that seems a lofty frame of reference, I can only say that it barely touches the epochal grandeur of a scene in which the toys, faced with what appears to be certain death as they sink inexorably towards an incinerator, whose roaring light is itself redolent of a Dantean inferno, hold each others’ hands in a gesture of collectivity and mutual love.
Waste, trash, leftovers. Toy Story 3, like WALL-E, Ratatouille and even Cars, attempts a juggling act: redefining digital technology in the service of stories that hanker back to an earlier, analogue era. It doesn’t always pull it off: too often the film’s colours recall those of a gaudy confectionery stand or are over-lit like a boring vision of heaven, and sometimes there’s not enough depth of field (the 3D version doesn’t fully remedy this).
Still, by the end, these are minor caveats. The toys make the biggest transition of their lives. And we are reminded, beautifully and rather agonisingly, about how it’s both possible — and sometimes vital — to let go of those whom we most love.
Starcraft II: Wings Of Liberty Review
StarCraft II continues the epic saga of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. These three distinct and powerful races clash once again in the fast-paced real-time strategy sequel to the legendary original, StarCraft. Legions of veteran, upgraded, and brand-new unit types will do battle across the galaxy, as each faction struggles for survival.
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty's solo campaign will continue the epic saga where it left off in StarCraft: Brood War. The storyline chronicles the exploits of marshal-turned-rebel-leader Jim Raynor and features both familiar faces and new heroes. Players will be able to tailor the experience, choosing their own mission path and selecting technology and research upgrades to suit their playing style throughout the 29-mission campaign.
In addition to the solo campaign, dozens of multiplayer maps are available for competitive play through Battle.net. This improved version of the service has been built from the ground up to offer an unparalleled online play experience, with new features such as voice communication, character profiles and achievements, stat-tracking, ladders and leagues, cloud file storage, and more.
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty's solo campaign will continue the epic saga where it left off in StarCraft: Brood War. The storyline chronicles the exploits of marshal-turned-rebel-leader Jim Raynor and features both familiar faces and new heroes. Players will be able to tailor the experience, choosing their own mission path and selecting technology and research upgrades to suit their playing style throughout the 29-mission campaign.
In addition to the solo campaign, dozens of multiplayer maps are available for competitive play through Battle.net. This improved version of the service has been built from the ground up to offer an unparalleled online play experience, with new features such as voice communication, character profiles and achievements, stat-tracking, ladders and leagues, cloud file storage, and more.
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