The Snowman (2017)

This has to be a record for the least amount of reasons I actually wanted to review a movie, and that's just down to the name of the main character: Michael Fassbender IS... Detective Harry Hole. That name is so insane that I had to see this shit to see if it was as goofy.

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

And it wasn't. Seriously. This is an insanely boring piece of shit with no point to it. If you wanted to stop reading now, you wouldn't be missing out on much – except for my razor-sharp trademarked wit, anyway. I guess the director has said the reason this was so botched up was because they didn't have time to shoot 10-15 percent of the script, and had to start unexpectedly early. And I get that. But at the same time, I'm just not that sure this would've been that much better anyway.

It starts off with a flashback of this kid trying to learn schoolwork and whenever he gets it wrong, his asshole stepfather (or whatever the character is supposed to be) smacks his mother in the face. Not sure that's part of the accepted curriculum. Then after finding out the stepfather is sleeping with someone else, the mother and the kid go on a drive when the mother gives up and tries to kill them both on thin ice! The kid escapes, but the mother dies – what a cheerful opening that also reveals so much about the movie we're about to see.

Then we're introduced to Detective Harry Hole, a complete lazy degenerate who somehow keeps his job even in spite of constantly drinking after work and falling asleep in snowy alleyways that should probably kill him. He's just a fucking loser, and Michael Fassbender's talents are wasted. Hell, he barely even has any fucking dialogue. There are scenes where he just walks up to people wordlessly staring at them, and we're just kind of supposed to dissect and analyze what that means even with zero real clues.

I guess she's his ex girlfriend and has a kid who isn't even his, but for some reason he's still involved. And there's a new guy in the mix who acts subtly snooty but isn't really a bad guy. Wow! Disconnected family drama! What a new, exciting thing!

Oh, okay, that was sarcasm. But you know what IS super fresh? A younger, motivated partner who joins the force and starts really trying to idealistically solve crimes that her jaded older partner thinks are impossible! Oh wait, shit, that's cliché hack garbage too. Fuck. Maybe this movie isn't so good.

The story is quite amazingly, infuriatingly directionless. It just seems to ramble on and not get to the point at all. I guess there's some scraps of a story when a woman goes missing and there's a mysterious snowman in the yard. But that should've been like, the first scene. Instead, it sort of just lazily drools through the film over the first half hour and there isn't much resolution or drive to solving it. There's a bunch of other fucking bullshit about Hole's ex-girlfriend's family, some camping trip, a hockey game, honestly, it's all just shit and we don't need to focus on it. The movie does enough time-wasting so I don't have to.

At least the young woman detective has pertinent theories about why the killer is doing stuff, saying the snow probably sets him off. That's fucking stupid because there's literally no evidence to support it – and the movie seems to agree with me, as it proves to be false anyway.

Oh, and got to love how it's set in Norway but every single character exclusively speaks perfect English in a British accent. You know, the usual lazy way to show a foreign country. Just have everyone be British! I mean why wouldn't I ever want to see a different culture or anything like that?

Eventually, after like 45 minutes of film – near half the runtime – we FINALLY get a real story starting to emerge, which is so asinine I'd throw the movie into a ravine if I hadn't rented it from Redbox. Some lady is reported missing, to which Harry Hole and his partner go and try to figure it out. But she's actually just fine, chopping off chicken heads in the dead of winter, like you do. Then they leave and before they even get very far in the car, they get ANOTHER call about the same lady, missing again! How inconsiderate to waste resources like that. Don't you know gas is expensive now?

I guess Harry Hole wanders around a bit, with Fassbender wearing a permanent expression of zombielike uncaring, and he finds a hole to look down in! Hey, Harry Hole is looking down a hole! Yeah, that's about all the humor I can mine from this dead, dried up well. But you do get to see a woman's severed head on top of a snowman! It's too bad that isn't as funny as it sounds. A better movie would've played it for campy laughs. But not The Snowman. This is mercifully free of any entertainment.

The movie sluggishly slogs on, with some other random story about JK Simmons playing some creepy doctor who takes pictures of women without tops on to blackmail them, or some shit like that. I dunno. I was falling asleep during most of this plotline and was only woken up when something fell off the refrigerator in my apartment and loudly made noise as it hit the floor. That's really how I finished the rest of this movie, because that happened.

A lot of other very dull things happen, and then it's revealed that the bad guy is actually Harry Hole's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend! DUN DUN DUN! What a nonsensical twist! It turns out HE was the kid in the beginning of the movie with the jackass stepfather or whoever that was. And he says he's been killing women because he's judged them for getting abortions, not knowing who their kids' fathers were, and other things. I'm sure a better movie could've made this compelling, developed his character or added social commentary, but The Snowman was just like “fuck that!” and didn't do it at all. And seriously, 'guy who was totally inconspicuous and nice the whole movie is actually the killer'? That was the BEST you could do? Even people in comas for the last 30 years would find that trite and overdone.

So instead we just get a dumb final battle scene where Harry Hole chases the killer out into the wide-open icy field. When he loses track of him somehow – there doesn't seem to be many places to hide out there – Harry just stands in place and screams for the killer to come face him. Real badass! Except the guy instead just shoots him from far away. Man, people just have no honor anymore.

Then the killer comes close, making some bullshit speech no doubt, and falls through a hole in the ice, dying instantly in the freezing cold. So really, Harry Hole didn't do all that much of anything to stop the guy. If this had been happening in the summertime, he would've just been murdered point blank. What a hero!

There wasn't really anything worth watching in this. Two hours of complete bullshit, nonsense time-wasting. In the interest of ending this review and not wasting YOUR time anymore, avoid the movie. There. Done!

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Cinema Freaks Live: Alien: Covenant (2017)

SPOILERS are afoot on this strange alien world where nothing makes sense...

Co-performed and suffered through with Tony.

REVIEW: Shame (2011)

 

Director: Steve McQueen

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986233/

Shame is a provocative drama about a man’s discovery about who he really is sexually. It is a quiet and subtle film that doesn’t use a boat-load of dialogue or outward exposition to tell you the story, and if you’re not paying attention, a lot of the movie’s finer points might be lost on you. Definitely not a movie for those with short attention spans or those looking for a cheap thrill, Shame is like the fine wine of movies – something rich, textured and intricately complex.

Michael Fassbender plays the lead and I can only imagine how tough this role was, as the camera is on him alone a lot of the time and he doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, so the easy way of emoting and conveying to the audience the sense of character is out the window. This is a slow moving film that unfolds its story through sometimes silent, wordless images and the expressions on Fassbender’s face. His character is a stoic and tight-fisted corporate office man who gets his jones by constantly watching porn and getting good looking, often high-class women to come back and have sex with him. It’s almost as if he’s compensating for something.

Until his sister, played by Carey Mulligan, shows up. His sister Sissy is a fun-loving, impulsive and brash young woman whose only job seems to be singing at clubs and sleeping with men, and she cannot seem to get her life together. Mulligan plays the role really well – very spunky and yet haunted character who tries her best to be happy as any average person does. But sometimes trying is not enough, now, is it? The characterization in this is just first rate, and is really the reason the whole thing works so beautifully.

There is also a palpable sense of atmosphere resonating through this movie, of smoky New York city streets flooded with fog, of dark shadowy apartment hallways as if they are hiding some secret that has to be wrenched out, as if it wanted to stay in the shadows in the first place, of empty, white bedrooms in the early mornings with wide, airy panoramic views of the city below, as if the person in that bedroom (well, Fassbender, obviously) is far away from everyone else – separated, alienated by his sex addiction and consequently the secrets buried by that sex addiction.

The film unfolds like an uncoiling serpent, showing you scenes that are sometimes very short and sometimes very long, and always have a great sense of pacing to them – they connect together like a beautiful puzzle. The first ten minutes have almost no words and contain only images of Fassbender engaging in sexual acts or clearly thinking about it as he goes about his day-by-day activities. Once the dialogue is actually introduced, it’s a stark but welcome contrast, and is very well written for that.

Ultimately this is a story of two siblings both going through a hard time. Fassbender is a sex addict on a downward spiral because he can’t find something that truly satisfies his needs. He gets angrier and angrier as the film goes on and takes it all out on Sissy. However, he ignores the fact that she is troubled as well, and ultimately a tragedy results from this miscalculation. Fassbender isn’t perfect – far from it in fact. He’s portrayed as a neurotic, selfish and impudent man whose insecurities and frustrations are channeled through the only outlet that can’t reject you or walk away – family.

There is a lot to be said about life here, like that ultimately, it’s up to you to do what makes you happy sexually and otherwise, no one else will do it for you most of the time. And sometimes, you get lost along the way, because the world has no cheat code manuals or hand-books to help you out of everyday situations, and you get stuck in a rut where you don’t just climb out of it easy. And the downward spiral commences. Shame is about a man at the last edges of his spiral. Beautifully written, beautifully acted and just a haunting and memorable film.

Review: X-Men: First Class (2011) TH

The X-Men in groovy training pants

Marvel Comics and its embodiments have been rearranging and manipulating the past and present to include how super-heroes would have done it differently since the golden days of Captain America punching the lights out of Hitler. Fast forward to the early '60s and we get revisionism of the Cold War by splicing fantasy and realism to include a look at where "mutants"--super-humans with odd mutations in their DNA giving them special abilities--fit in to society. Is the world ready to accept these flukes of nature even if it's to save the Kennedy/communist era world from nuclear war on the brink? Well, at the center of the story involves two men who look at the dilemma quite differently: an idealist junior professor from a handed down wealthy background and another man who survived from the ground up in the bleak Nazi concentration camps.

The beginning of X-Men: before distinct suits and names, before mutants collectively showed their ugly or beautiful side--however you want to look at it--for fear of ridicule, misunderstandings and unequal treatment. Think back to when glasses, fat kids and braces got the giggles and swirlies in the john, except the characters here instead transform certain flawed characteristics into epic super powers that would cause the normal person to stand still in their tracks and not quite possibly believe their eyes. Professor X: a telepath with persuasion; Riptide: wind control; Banshee: voice projection; Azazel: instant teleportation. These are just some of the select super heroes and villains before they knew everything about what it is to truly being one.

Where there are specially gifted spread out, they all have something in common and the story brings them closer together to either destroy or save humanity. Some mutants still find it in them to do good, others say the heck with the regulars who won't except them for who they are, and then, of course, there are the true villains who exploit their powers for gain. As a boy Erik (Michael Fassbender) was introduced to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) due to being sighted as talented in the dreary concentration camps of Poland in 1944. Erik's powers of controlling metal objects only came out with extreme rage, so Shaw being the nice Nazi he is callously disposes of someone to see this come out. This creates a tormented vendetta against the man who unlocked his hidden abilities but also took something that can't be given back. By now Shaw is a little harder to get ahold of with a strong group of mutants behind him. He uses them to press a political agenda to pit Russia and the United States against each other, while he reaps the reward of the fallout.

What made "X-Men: First Class" work was there was a layered story that was dramatic while not missing out on a constantly moving adventurous side. Since this squeezes numerous characters, frequent location and language changes, not to mention two battling nations in one reasonably lengthened movie, some things do fall a little too in place to benefiting the story all coming together in one big related catastrophe at the same time. Some complex inventions and training sessions came a little too conveniently, but when are they ever realistically shown? While the mutants are at the forefront, the regular humans miss out on depth and range. Their personalities go from completely wooden to just tentatively going along for the ride to nail it home that they're utterly closed-minded to push a definitive persecution tone without question.

This is an entertaining experience that's both for comic book fans and regular cinema goers as it takes it all a little more seriously than other massive budget popcorn pictures by measuring out fantasy and injecting realism--including violence and people that "actually" die in a comic book story--to make one's imagination crack wide open and put in the direct moment. That is till someone has to go back to the day-to-day grind where they might daydream of stopping that bully, taking out that robber and if there was a power to give themselves a raise at work, I'm sure they'd do that to.

Director: Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Kick-Ass)
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne
Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270798/