2013 - The Highlights (lionsroar)

Films watched for the first time and reviewed in 2013

Best Films of the year

In no particular order:

ARGO

Okay, this was technically a 2012 release, but I didn’t see it until January. The same is true with Silver Linings Playbook. But we’re talking about the year we see a movie and reviewed it on the blog.

The winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, Argo tells a historical event and while it takes some license with the facts, it does make a true story seem suspenseful. Going in, if you’ve ever heard of the Iran Hostage Crisis, you’d at least heard of the U.S. Embassy workers who escaped with the help of the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. While not 100 percent historically accurate (neither was Lincoln, another historical drama from 2012), it worked as a movie and that’s what’s important. I was on the edge of my seat even knowing the group makes it out successfully.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

The obvious star of this movie is David O. Russell, who both wrote the screenplay and directed the movie. This is a quirky Romantic Comedy about two of the most broken people you’d never want to meet: Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a bipolar man obsessed with his ex-wife, and Tiffany Maxwell (Jennifer Lawrence), a policeman’s widow who drowned her sorrows with promiscuity.

Together the two help rebuild each other while preparing for a dance contest Tiffany has her heart set on participating in. While the goal they set is sort of the point equivalent to a participation ribbon, it is the fact that they make it there at all that is important. Jennifer Lawrence would deservedly win the Academy Award for Best Actress, but the cast, which also included Robert DeNiro, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker, makes for a very strong ensemble.

GUN CRAZY

A man crazy about guns meets a lady sharpshooter who is a little crazy. Okay, this film from 1950 isn’t new, but I saw it for the first time this year and I fell in love. Now some of that has to do with Peggy Cummins, the Welsh-born actress who plays Laurie. She is great in the part and I’ve never seen a woman look sexier with a gun belt on. I don’t blame Bart (John Dall) for falling for her and doing whatever he can to keep her.

The story is a little slow to get going, but when it does the film is really worth watching. The film is famous for one sequence, a ten minute bank robbery shot in its entirety from the backseat of a car, but there is so much to love in this film. Given his love for Laurie, what Bart has to do at the end of the film makes it very powerful. Of all the movies I saw in 2013, this is one of the few I’d want to see again and again and would most highly recommend.

Biggest Film Disappointments of 2013

In no particular order:

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD

The Die Hard franchise is one without a mastermind. There is no George Lucas or book series behind these films to guide it. The films sort of lurch along, some good, Die Hard, some not, Die Hard 2, some sort of in between, Die Hard with a Vengeance. The fourth film, Live Free or Die Hard finally seemed to get the franchise on the right track and picked up a couple of characters, a more mature Lucy Gennero (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Matt Farrell (Justin Long), a slacker/computer programmer and possible romantic interest for Lucy. If they made a sequel to Live Free, I’d been happy.

But, no, all that gets swept away in the fifth installment. This is a film designed to appeal to as many international markets as possible with Australian, Russian and German actors/actresses cast in prominent roles, including John’s son, Jack (Jai Courtney). Lucy is reduced to a cameo and the movie suffers. There is a yet another heist and a lot of action, but there is none of the humor that made the Die Hard films fun to watch. Even the catchphrase is mishandled. It makes you wonder if the franchise has run out of steam.

MAN OF STEEL

I will admit that I’m not a huge Superman fan. I saw the original movie with Christopher Reeve when it came out in 1978 and I went into that with high hopes and came away disappointed as well. But my biggest disappointment is the stupidity of the back story they give the Man of Steel. While they sort of improved on the Jor-El side of the story, they did a disservice to the Kent side. Why was Clark made to feel ashamed of saving other children’s lives? Why did his father Jonathan (Kevin Costner) sacrifice himself rather than let his son save him? They both seemed like stupid choices to me.

And this was not a reboot of the Superman story, rather a remake of the Superman film from 1978. General Zod is not an original character. He did not come along until 1961 in a franchise that has been around since 1938. In Hollywood’s attempt to retell and reboot, but bigger and flashier than the original, Superman’s battle with Zod not only levels Metropolis (like a gabillion dollars’ worth of damage and most likely hundreds or thousands of deaths), but that doesn’t make the movie any better.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Okay, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but I have pretty much the same complaint with the second of the Star Trek movies that I had with Man of Steel. While I liked the film, it is basically a remake of Wrath of Khan (1982) rather than an all-new Star Trek adventure. Oh, there are a few twists and turns, but basically it’s an unneeded redo of one of the better original Star Trek movies. We don’t need to see movie stories again and again; especially since it’s going to be several years until we see a new Stark Trek movie. Remakes seldom tell the story better than the original and J.J. Abrams has a chance to take the crew of the Enterprise boldly go where the original series had never gone before, not retrace its footsteps. I’m hoping we don’t see some new remake of The Search for Spock (1984) whenever this series picks up again.

A Good Day to Die Hard

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yuliya Snigir, Mary Elizabeth Winstead  Directed by John Moore. Screenplay by Skip Woods. Based on certain characters by Roderick Thorp in the novel Nothing Lasts Forever. Produced by Alex Young. Run Time: 97 minutes. U.S.  Color.  Action. Thriller.

I hate to quote myself, but in my review of Live Free or Die Hard I wrote about the fact that this franchise doesn’t seem to have a central creative force (person or production company) overseeing the story arc. And while I pointed out that each film pretty much starts anew, that is not always a good thing.

I felt that the franchise reached a new height with Live Free or Die Hard. The subject matter was current, the acting was good and I was optimistic that the new film would perhaps not fly as high, but still soar. A Good Day to Die Hard unfortunately crashes and burns like say a helicopter hitting a building.

At 97 minutes, this is by far the shortest of the movies in the franchise, but it is surprisingly the dullest as well. This is a Die Hard meets Bond meets Bourne and it just never quite comes together. There are five action sequences, one that seems to take up a third of the film, but none of them come close to the ingenuity of say taking down a helicopter with a car.

In the last film, John had to save this daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) from the villain. Lucy only makes a cameo appearance in this film, which is too bad. Winstead once again doesn’t have anything to do. I thought it would have been a nice touch if she and Matt Farrell (Justin Long) had actually gotten together, but I guess that didn’t happen.

Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) only makes a cameo appearance. 

But it is the other child, the son we saw briefly in the original Die Hard, Jack (Jai Courtney), who is at the center of the film. And in this one John doesn’t save Jack so much as he works with him. (I’ll try to go into that without giving away too much later.) The father-son pairing doesn’t quite work as a buddy film, which has been a winning formula for the franchise.

If you’re unfamiliar with Jai Courtney, you’re not alone. Courtney is an Australian actor whose work I have never seen before. I didn’t watch Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the Starz series he was on in 2010, or Jack Reacher (2012). Neither was I familiar with the other main actors, besides Willis and Winstead. Sebastian Koch, who plays Komarov, is a German actor and Yuliya Snigir, who plays Komarov’s daughter Irina, is a Russian actress. Die Hard got very International very quickly.

Yuliya Snigir (Irina); Jai Courtney (Jack) and Sebastian Koch (Komarov)  make A Good Day to Die Hard an International Affair.

And while I understand the needs of International marketing, what this film is missing is some of what made the Die Hard franchise so popular. The most obvious thing missing is the humor. Die Hard films have always been full of witty dialogue to break up the action sequences. While there are some attempts at that, they fall short. Humor is replaced with some sappy dialogue between estranged father and son. John has never been a good father and while he seems to have made amends with Lucy, he and Jack are still distant.

Even the hero’s catchphrase seems to misfire. Some people have written that they didn’t even hear it. If you bury the catchphrase then you don’t seem to understand what you’re doing. There is a time and place for it and when it is spoken is not the right time.

While you often hear talk of chemistry between romantic leads, there didn’t seem to be any between John and Jack. Even when John is trying to be a father he comes off as a bit of a bully, even asking Jack, who has a piece of rebar stuck in him, if he wants to cry. These are the type of father-son talks that lead to years of therapy.

But John does apparently care enough about Jack to fly to Russia, when he thinks his son is in trouble, lifetime in the gulag type of trouble. We, as the audience, are kept in the dark the same way John is. We only learn later that Jack is working with the CIA. When the mission gets scrapped and plan B goes awry, John steps in to help him thwart the bad guys.

John (Bruce Willis) and Jack (Jai Courtney) are teamed together, but this is no buddy film.

Contrasted to that is the relationship between Komarov and Irina. At first, she’s with him as he wants to escape Russia after having served time in prison, then against him when she sides with his enemies and then with him as they pull the old switcheroo on his enemies. John and Jack seem to have a stable relationship (indifference) by comparison.

As always, this Die Hard film is about a heist. But there is no money this time. Rather it is weapons grade uranium stored at Chernobyl, yes the Soviet made wasteland. Is it just me, or does it seem that Chernobyl is a bit overused as a setting in films. I mean the Transformers were just there in Dark of the Moon (2011) and Chernobyl Diaries came out last year. Pretty soon it won’t be meet me at the top of the Empire State Building, as in numerous romantic comedies, but rather meet me at midnight by cooling tower 5 (maybe that’s wrong, I think Chernobyl’s meltdown was caused by the lack of cooling towers, but you get the idea).

There is plenty of action, but it's not all that ingenious. (It is a nice touch when John shoots the bird at the helicopter. Not shown here.)

After having watched the first four Die Hard films, I went in wanting to like this one too. I always hope that the movie will remind me of the best of the previous outings and strive to outdo them. But A Good Day to Die Hard is a Die Hard film almost in name only.

There are already rumors circulating of a sixth film. At the rate these come out, it’ll probably be 2020 and go something like this: Jack and Lucy are visiting John in the old folk’s home, but Komarov’s brother (to be cast later) is “convalescing” in the room next door and is planning on stealing all the medicine in the infirmary with the help of a cracker jack group of retired ex-KGB agents. God I hope it’s better than that and better than this one too.

For me, A Good Day to Die Hard belongs at the bottom of the films in the franchise, maybe above Die Hard 2, but it’s close. If there is a sixth, then it can only (fingers-crossed) go up from here.