Jonathan Poritsky

In 2008, I had trou­ble get­ting my A in G when it came to pub­lish­ing to this blog. I toiled over a few movie reviews for so long that I never ended up pub­lish­ing them. I’m hav­ing the same issue now, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire reviews still mar­i­nat­ing in my “Drafts” folder. Anyhow, I was try­ing to clean up the hard drive when I stum­bled upon some of my unfin­ished mas­ter­pieces. There are too many reviews to write for movies that are fresh in my mind now, so I sup­pose it would be futile try­ing to com­plete these lit­tle nuggets. However, it would be just as dumb to keep them to myself. So here you go, my unfin­ished and unedited thoughts on 6 films from 2008.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Fanboys, haters, new­bies, and snobs, hear me out…I liked this movie. The emo­tional stakes are very high this hol­i­day week­end over whether or not you liked this movie, with the dis­cus­sions gen­er­ally devolv­ing into fac­toid piss­ing con­tests over the sanc­tity of the fran­chise, the rel­e­vance of Lucaspielberg (or Splucas), or the over­all state of cin­ema itself. I’ll try to answer as many of your ques­tions as pos­si­ble over the next few min­utes, but let me start by let­ting you know one thing, I liked this movie.

The Indiana Jones fran­chise is once of the most lucra­tive in the his­tory of fic­tion, which is wholly fas­ci­nat­ing since the orig­i­nal incar­na­tion of the fedora’d adven­turer first appeared on the sil­ver screen, a rare feat in an indus­try bloated with repur­posed pro­tag­o­nists. Though bits and pieces of him have been culled from var­i­ous moments of pop, his cel­lu­loid scowl we came to love as the 1980s began bore a new kind of hero for a coun­try look­ing des­per­ately for one in a time of crisis.  He was steamy, he was smart, and he could crack a phal­lus like no other, so we imme­di­ately latched on with love.

First he con­quered the Nazis with decid­edly Hebrew magic, then he defeated, uhhh, weird Indian voodoo guys with some awe­some magic rocks, and then we watched with awe as he once again showed the Third Reich the door by throw­ing Christianity in their faces. It was a wild ride and Harrisson Ford slipped into every jour­ney with ease. However, the mak­ers fig­ured he could be dusted off for one more journey.

Our clas­sic bad­dies, the Nazis, have been replaced by Russian Commies hell bent on beat­ing the U.S. in the cold war. Classic. It’s impor­tant to note that George Lucas, love him, hate him, or do either one too much, is extremely astute in choos­ing his metaphors. He is say­ing a lot about American mil­i­tary pol­icy over the last few decades…

Review: The Happening

Over the years, we have all con­di­tioned our­selves for the expe­ri­ence of sit­ting through a film by M. Night Shyamalan. Watch out for empty bits of the frame, because some­thing scary this way comes; be sure not to chat­ter your teeth when James Newton Howard’s score ramps up; and for the love of Pete don’t let any­thing hap­pen to the chil­dren. While all of those ele­ments fall into place as usual in his lat­est offer­ing, The Happening, we are also given a delight­ful taste of a vir­tu­ous film­maker learn­ing from his own mis­takes. The film shows a lot of growth for Mr. Shyamalan as a direc­tor and really is a step in the right direc­tion for his career. If only his writ­ing could come as far as his helm­ing capabilities.

An homage to zombie/horror films of the 1960s, at least I hope it is, this film isn’t afraid of spread­ing on the cheese. Some event is caus­ing peo­ple all over the Northeast to lose con­trol of their senses and begin com­mit­ting sui­cide en masse. The way in which this idea first unfurls is actu­ally quite beau­ti­ful in its sim­plic­ity. Mr. Shyamalan has a rep­u­ta­tion for being a mil­i­tant preser­va­tion­ist, often to his detri­ment. He is prob­a­bly the only film­maker his age who still edits on a KEM reel to reel.

Review: The Incredible Hulk

I’d like to thank Louis Letterier and the entire team behind “The Incredible Hulk” for help­ing me to under­stand the virtues hid­den within Ang Lee’s 2003 “The Hulk”. This is not to say that I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily enjoy this summer’s slam­fest, but the ear­lier film, which was mocked by crit­ics and avoided by auds, holds true as both a bet­ter film and even a bet­ter comic book film. First off, let’s get to the meat of the lat­est install­ment from Avi Arad’s jug­ger­naut shin­gle, Marvel Studios

Bruce Banner’s alter ego has always been a con­fus­ing super­hero in that his abil­i­ties seem too far out of his own con­trol: get him angry and he crushes you. After a quick-cut ori­gin intro that doesn’t resem­ble any­thing that hap­pened in the last film, we find our hero hid­ing out in Brazil, learn­ing to con­trol his rage. This is nice as it seems we might start to see him hone his heroic abil­i­ties a bit more later on, but we’ll have to wait for the next film to see more of that.

Review: Quantum of Solace

Quantam of Solace started out quite good, but it sorta devolved into just the same old shlock by the end. I think Malthus’s death is when the film jumped the shark. I don’t, how­ever, believe the fran­chise did. Ultimately that hap­pened with the end of the cold war, a con­cept which is toyed with in the pre­vi­ous fran­chise install­ment, Casino Royale by Martin Campbell. In this lat­est out­ing by cos­tume dram­edy helmer Marc Forster, absent is the grief for a bygone era when men in Bond’s line of work were actu­ally nec­es­sary, and in its place is a sweep­ing attempt to human­ize a trained killer.

This idea that trained killers pos­sess some­what of a heart beneath their rock-hard bodes and blood­thirsty train­ing is all to com­mon a con­cept in cin­ema these days.

Right down to the cast, Quantum of Solace remind’s me too damn much of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, by which, while I rather enjoyed that tale of human­ity lying beneath the cold hard sur­face of trained oper­a­tives, I mean in the most pejo­ra­tive sense. When I go to see a film with Albert R. Broccoli’s name in the cred­its, I have a cer­tain set of expec­ta­tions that ought be met by the time I fin­ish my $9.00 popcorn.

Review: W.

That Oliver Stone’s “W.” is nei­ther a train wreck nor a bloated Hollywood lib­eral mud-fest does not nec­es­sar­ily make it a worth­while endeavor. Jumping back and forth through the life of the 43rd President, the film offers us very lit­tle in terms of a per­sonal nar­ra­tive, instead deliv­er­ing a mediocre per­spec­tive on his pres­i­dency that one could have acquired for free sim­ply by liv­ing in America over the past decade. Still, Mr. Stone has risen to the daunt­ing task of biograph­ing a sit­ting President whose legacy is still to-be-determined with a steady hand and a shaky cam­era to cre­ate a vivid pic­ture of the man as we have known him thus far. –Poritsky 11/3/08 1:19 PM

The film opens in the oval office in 2002, as the President and his pals dis­cuss the seman­tic des­ig­na­tion of the nation’s ene­mies. What slowly comes across as this film creeps for­ward is that the Mr. Bush is a vicious politi­cian, a genius with sell­ing ideas be they right or wrong.

Review: Changeling

Somewhere in the mid­dle of Clint Eastwood’s lat­est offer­ing, “Changeling”, the story veers off and becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more inter­est­ing than what you ini­tially sat down to watch. However, unlike some of the tena­cious director’s more recent work, the film refuses to cap­i­tal­ize on that new­found inter­est and instead opts to cycle through the same dreck you had to walk through to get to that point in the first place. This is a real shame because the tale that unfurls is one with so much poten­tial (cor­rup­tion, resilience, rev­o­lu­tion, etc.) that it is hard to believe it could fall short on any of its con­sid­er­able promise.

First and fore­most I would like to say that I am wholly unim­pressed with Angelina Jolie’s per­for­mance as our hero­ine, Christine Collins. In fair­ness to the actress, she really wasn’t given much to work with in the one-note script writ­ten by J. Michael Straczynski. Half her lines are either “That’s not my son” or “I want my son back”. Still, she ramps up imme­di­ately and never turns it down.