Cinephemera

Bloodrayne
Rating: Unworthy

After two good vampire movies last week, it was inevitable that I would see a bad one. This also has the distinction of being my first Uwe Boll movie. As a connoisseur of bad movies, this has been a long time coming. Not that I’ve been consciously avoiding his movies, just never gotten around to one.

I never knew that anyone could make such bad fight choreography but now I know that it is entirely possible to completely bore your audience during an action sequence. How on earth did they convince Michael Madsen to be in this? Then again, he was recently seen in the not-quite-as-bad-but-still-pretty-bad movie, House. Has he too gone the way of Sam Jackson and will appear in any movie you stick under his nose? In any case, his appearance is the least confounding aspect of this film. About halfway through the movie there is a sex scene that literally occurs without story or character context. It just happens without any kind of pretext and the only reason this scene is there is so that the two characters can somehow feel “connected” and make the audience sad when one of them dies. Before this sex scene, they’d maybe said two or three sentences to each other. Why bother with character development when they can just have sex? That gets people involved in the characters right?

NO!

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Rating: Worthy

David Fincher is another one of my directors and Benjamin Button is a departure from his usual work which is rather kinetic and stylish. One could almost see his previous feature Zodiac as being a stepping stone toward this film. This is not to downplay Zodiac because I love it dearly but both of these movies are rather slow and have long running times. Normally this would entail the movie would be boring but somehow he manages to keep it interesting. Despite the fact that Benjamin Button is 20 minutes shy of 3 hours in length, I never felt the length.

The cinematography is absolutely stunning and special effects are fantastic. Brad Pitt gives one of his most subdued performances to the point where I never really thought about him as being Brad Pitt. The makeup they put on him is incredible. Each stage of his life looks completely believable and it’s amazing how young they were able to make him look toward the end. It was almost like having pretty boy Brad back before I respected him as an actual actor.

The Wrestler
Rating: Worthy

A David Fincher movie and a Darren Aronofsky movie in the same week? It doesn’t get much better than that. Aronofsky’s previous film, The Fountain is one of my favorite movies ever and The Wrestler is another great film to add to his resume. This is not a happy film but like any great movie, it’s sparked some great debate among friends. All of the performances in this feel so authentic that you’d swear Mickey Rourke was an actual wrestler surrounded by other actual people. On all technical levels, it is just as stunning as Rourke’s performance.

Beyond that, any movie that can make me respect professional wrestling is doing its job.

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