watching movies one cup at a time

This is supposed to be a comedy? The trailers made this film out to be a very funny, kind of slapstick comedy. But this film was not funny and was often quite dark. All the characters are pretty loathsome and while Brad Pitt acting goofy is entertaining for about a minute, it’s not enough to qualify this as a comedy. After an hour and a half I just didn’t get why we should care about any of these people or anything that was going on. It just felt like a waste of time.

Richard Kelly continues in his filmmaking attempt to be the next David Lynch of weird narrative movies, though this one is a lot less crazy than his last movie, Southland Tales. But while I found the movie to be interesting and done well, ultimately the story seemed a little light and grasping.

The premise of the story is that at a time of financial crisis for a married couple in the ’70s, a strange and disfigured man appears with a promise that if they push a button on a particular box, they will get one million dollars in cash. However, the catch is that someone they do not know will die if they push the button. This causes a lot of moral back-and-forth with the couple but ultimately they push the button. What happens next is kind of an odd mish-mash of government conspiracy mixed with aliens mixed with spiritual allegories.

Ultimately though the “great conspiracy” part of the movie was slow to develop and never really paid off in the end. While the rather simplistic and cliche’d message of “nothing comes for free” and “man’s greed will be his downfall” just seemed like an obvious and easy way out. By the end of the movie I didn’t really feel satisfied that this story really pushed any boundaries or tried hard enough to be clever in it’s agenda. It tries to build up the hype that there is a larger puzzle to be solved, but ultimately it just feels like lazy storytelling with a rather mundane set of circumstances.

Bottom line: Not bad but not as good as it could have been.

Jodie Foster doesn’t make bad movies. She just doesn’t. Sure, they aren’t all as brilliant as The Silence Of The Lambs or The Accused (her 2 Oscar-winning roles) but they are always interesting and quality experiences. It almost feels like just having her there makes the film take on a whole other dimension. Even her small role in Inside Man was brilliant and remarkable. She just really gives it her all.

The Brave One could have been a cliche vigilante movie. I’ve seen it before – person gets attacked, person recovers and starts taking revenge out on all the “scum of the city,” a cop befriends them and eventually figures out it’s them doing the vigilante killings, they have a big confrontation where the cop pleads “You don’t have to do this! This is not the answer!” which is followed by either the person getting shot or giving up and going to jail. Vigilante movies are nothing new. Thankfully though, The Brave One does not sink into cliche and is in fact very original and a really well done movie. Read the rest of this entry »