FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HOST'' (2013)

 

For the record, I enjoyed the “Twilight” film franchise and even read the first novel.  Author Stephanie Meyer’s vampires versus werewolves epics amused, excited, and delighted with surprises galore.  The third installment "Eclipse” ranks as my favorite, but I loved all those lightweight horror chillers.  Unfortunately, Meyer’s doesn’t deliver narrative material either as suspenseful or as compelling with “The Host.”  The bestselling author produced this shallow, one-dimensional thriller with the usually competent writer & director Andrew Niccol.  Niccol is no stranger to sci-fi since he has helmed “Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” and “In Time.”  Basically, “The Host” (* OUT OF ****) derives its narrative from movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and "The Puppet Masters."  You know when somebody has gone alien because their eyes glitter like the creepy adolescents in “Children of the Damned.” Meantime, as a road-trip melodrama, "The Host” broods more often than it boils.  Sadly, Niccol generates marginal conflict in this lukewarm thriller.  Not only are these aliens well-mannered, but they also dress in immaculate white outfits. They patrol the planet in silver Lotus sports cars, hover overhead in shiny Bell Jet Ranger helicopters, and straddle shimmering motorcycles.   The drawback is these aliens dominate each human with one of their own Souls. Typically, the Soul overrides its captive human, but our heroine proves far from typical. Actress Saoirse Ronan makes a fool of herself as a woebegone human who constantly bickers with the alien occupying her body.  Despite her best efforts, Ronan appears pretty silly during these hysterical moments trying to imitate the antics that Jim Carrey performed in “Me, Myself, and Irene.”  

"The Host" is the kind of minimalist, low-budget science fiction film where everything happens on Earth. The story unfolds after a parasitic alien race known as ‘the Souls’ have taken over the planet. Occasionally, we’re given glimpses of these aliens. They resemble luminous jelly fish.  The Souls slit an opening in the nape of your neck and then slip in one of these ethereal-looking critters. Compared to the usual malevolent aliens terrorizing other cinematic galaxies, the Souls are benevolent.  Indeed, these intelligent extraterrestrials don’t lie, and they have changed things considerably.  Mankind no longer wages wars.  Diseases afflict nobody.  Ironically, the aliens may be the best thing that has happened to Earth.  Instead of atomizing mankind as the aliens in the green-themed Keanu Reeves’ sci-fi saga “Day the Earth Stood Still,” the Souls subject humanity to a form of house arrest. They occupy our bodies and erase our memories.  The problem with this nondescript science fiction saga is that the Souls aren’t antagonistic enough to qualify as villainous.

Heroic Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan of “The Lovely Bones”) struggles to hide her little brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury of “Repo Men”) from the Souls.  Melanie conceals her sibling under a desk.  Scrambling off in different direction, she leads the aliens away from Jamie.  Melanie doesn’t flee far. She crashes headlong through a window and fall to what should have been her demise.  Miraculously, despite breaking every bone and rupturing every organ in her body, Melanie survives the plunge. The Souls heal her with their minimalist technology that resembles silver packages of expensive cologne.  They introduce one of their own parasites into Melanie’s body to learn where the last pockets of resistance exist. The mind control that the Souls have perfected, however, suffers a setback with Melanie.  She refuses to kowtow to the alien in her body known to us as ‘the Wanderer.’  

Inexplicably, after the Wanderer has exposed most of Melanie’s memories, alien decides to obey Melanie when the latter insists they must escape captivity.  Apparently, the Wanderer harbors mixed feelings about her own race so she helps Melanie acquire a car without endangering the vehicle’s owner.  The alien possessed owner willingly relinquishes his automobile; he assures Melanie and the Wanderer that it will transport them for many miles.  Our heroine appropriates the vehicle and later crashes it rather spectacularly on a remote stretch of highway crossing the desert because the Wanderer has second thoughts.  Afterward, they trudge through the desert on a journey of hardship until Melanie finds the last known humans.  Of course, when Melanie finds her family, everybody regards her with justifiable suspicion since her eyes gleam with an alien presence.  The leader of her band, her Uncle Jed (William Hurt of "Dark City"), doesn't feel threatened by Melanie’s dual personality.

“The Host” spends most of its time with Melanie and the Wanderer fighting for supremacy over their body.  Melanie reacts with considerable rage and jealousy when the Wanderer kisses her old flame, Jared (Max Irons of “Dorian Gray”), and then Melanie forces the Wanderer to slap him.  Jared feels relieved because he realizes Melanie has survived the alien possession.  Later, Ian (Jake Abel of “I Am Number Four”) falls in love with the same alien that he had abhorred earlier and refuses to see her tortured.  Presumably, “The Host” was designed to appeal to junior high school girls because our heroine concentrates primarily on kissing.  At this point, “The Host” degenerates into a formulaic, chick flick tearjerker.  The one-thousand year old alien inhabiting Melanie’s body doesn’t understand the emotions that occur between humans under passionate circumstances.  Essentially, what we have here in a romantic triangle:  two studs with one babe who suffers from a dual-identity crisis.  Meantime, Terra the Seeker (Diane Kruger of “National Treasure”) and her personnel search relentlessly for the Wanderer/Melanie.  Eventually, they are able to locate our heroes because the grain that Uncle Jed cultivates inside a mountain relies on a sophisticated array of mirrors to gather sunlight.  Nevertheless, Uncle Jeb intervenes and saves the day for our lovers. This is the kind of melodrama where the heroes rehabilitate the villains rather than exterminate with extreme prejudice.  A final scene during the end credits when our heroes are joyriding through enemy country reveals that the Wanderer isn’t the only alien who isn’t happy with its own kind.

Although it looks visually stunning amid awe-inspiring scenery, “The Host” still amounts to half-baked hokum.  The heroine is an idiot; the villains lack menace, and the melodrama flatlines throughout the film’s interminable 125 minute length.

FILM REVIEW OF ''OLYMPUS IS FALLEN" (2012)

You know an actor  has a stake in a movie when he is listed as one of the producers.  Indeed, Gerard Butler served as one of four producers on the slam-bang, high-octane, but derivative President-in-jeopardy thriller “Olympus Has Fallen” (**** OUT OF ****), featuring Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Aaron Eckhart, and Rick Yune.  “Training Day” director Antoine Fuqua and freshman scenarists Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt must have put their heads together and scrutinized the “Die Hard” movies, “Air Force One,” and “In the Line of Fire.”  They’ve reconstituted the conventions of those classics as efficiently as the corpses pile up in this edge-of-the- seat nail-biter where nary a second of its two-hour running time is squandered.  Furthermore, they’ve followed the lead of not only “Team America: World Police” but also the recent “Red Dawn” remake and cast the North Koreans as the villains.  The impressively orchestrated aerial attack on Washington, D.C., alone is worth the price of admission.  When he isn’t generating suspense and tension, Fuqua shows no qualms about depicting battlefield torture either by the villains or the hero.  Subsequently, squeamish moviegoers might find the subject matter challenging in this violent melodrama.  Our sympathetic but indestructible hero displays about as much compassion for the treacherous villains as they show for the scores of innocent bystanders that they kill with barrages of bullets and high explosives in this rambunctious R-rated actioneer.  This is the kind of movie where the audience talks back to the screen.  At least, several people were talking back to the screen where I saw it.  They were either advising the hero or warning the villains. Interestingly, Fuqua and cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (son of Oscar winner Conrad L. Hall) lensed most of the White House scenes on location in Louisiana rather than in the nation’s capital.  Mind you, we’ll have to bide our time until late June when “Independence Day” helmer Roland Emmerich’s similarly themed saga “White House Down,” co-starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, appears to know which of these white-knuckled, geopolitical, hostage epics will take top honors.  

“Olympus Has Fallen” opens at Camp David.  President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart of “The Dark Knight”), First Lady Margaret (Ashley Judd of “Heat”), and their young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen of “Marmaduke”) are cruising along slippery, snow-swept roads at night with a Secret Service escort when chaos occurs.  The President’s limo goes into a spin and crashes through the railing of a bridge over an icy river.  Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler of “300”) and his personnel struggle futilely to stabilize the limo as it teeters precipitously off the bridge.  Simultaneously, President Asher fumbles to help his wife who has been injured during the accident.  Banning slashes the President’s seatbelt and extracts him from the vehicle.  Unfortunately, the sudden weight shift plunges the car with an unconscious Margaret inside into the river.  The memory of the accident and Banning’s valiant efforts to save his life at the expense of his wife prompts President Asher to have Banning transferred to a desk job at the Treasury.  Banning cannot stand his new sedentary position despite assurances from his superiors that he did the right thing on the river bridge.

During a visit from the South Korean ambassador to the White House, terrorists strike from the air with a cargo plane equipped with mini-Vulcan machine guns that blow U.S. fighter jets out of the air.  The cargo plane strafes the White House and anybody in the surrounding area, killing tourists and law enforcement personnel.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Asian gunmen with automatic weapons storm the White House, killing anybody who gets in their way, while the Secret Service herds Asher and his guests to a bomb-proof bunker beneath the White House.  No sooner has the Secret Service gotten the President to safety than traitors in the South Korean delegation start blasting away.  The terrorists take Asher, his Vice President, and other essential members of his cabinet as hostages and demand that the U.S. withdraw the Seventh Fleet as well as pull our troops from the DMZ between North and South Korea.  Nobody knows who the identity of the terrorists, but two minutes later when the American military arrive, they find themselves in a stand-off.  The leader of the villains, Kang (Rick Yung of “Die Another Day”), has some other tricks up his sleeve.  Worse, a treasonous Secret Service agent, Forbes (Dylan McDermott of “In the Line of Fire”), has helped orchestrate the takeover.

During this surprise attack, Banning manages to survive, but he is the only survivor.  He learns from the acting President,  Speaker Trumbull (Morgan Freeman of “Driving Miss Daisy”), that the terrorists haven’t taken Connor as a hostage.  Banning sets out to find Connor while avoiding detection from the terrorists who are busy fortifying the White House from intruders.  Banning is clearly modeled on Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard” hero John McClane, and he dispenses ruthlessly with the terrorists while he searches for Connor.  Meantime, Kang wants the codes to our nuclear arsenal and he doesn’t mind shedding a lot of blood to get want he wants.  When he isn’t trying to outfox the terrorists, Banning has to prove to Speaker Trumbull that he is America’s last line of defense.  Pentagon General Edward Clegg (Robert Forster of “Jackie Brown”) argues with our hero every step of the way and demands that he stand down so that the Navy Seals can chopper in and take out the terrorists.  What Clegg doesn’t know is that the wicked Kang has planned for virtually every contingency. 

“Olympus Has Fallen” qualifies as Gerard Butler’s best action-thriller since “Law Abiding Citizen” (2009), and Fuqua’s film takes full advantage of a talented, top-notch cast, particularly Morgan Freeman.  In a smaller role as an egotistical Pentagon general, Robert Forster stands out, while Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, and Ashley Judd make the most of their peripheral roles.  You can bet that America’s worst enemies will enjoy the set-up in “Olympus Has Fallen” more than they will the payoff. 

FILM REVIEW OF ''VERA CRUZ" (1953)

Gary Cooper plays Confederate Colonel Benjamin Trane who lost everything when the North defeated the South.  Burt Lancaster is cast as an unscrupulous soldier-of-fortune named Joe Erin who would kill you for the gold in your teeth.  These polar opposites encounter each other in rugged Mexico when Ben’s horse pulls up lame.  Coop inspects two horses and runs into Joe holding a Winchester rifle.  Joe offers to sell the Colonel one of the horses for $100 in gold.  Reluctantly, Ben shells out the coins.  No sooner has he paid Joe than a troop of French cavalry appear on the horizon.  Joe leaps aboard his horse and skedaddles.  Coop lights out after Joe on horseback.  He is surprised when the leader of the cavalry slings lead his way.  The Colonel rears up his horse and returns fire.  He is such an excellent shot that  his bullet knocks the revolver out of the leader’s fist.  Joe explains moments later that the leader wanted to plug him because he is riding his horse.  Talk about a way to start a friendship!  

Before director Robert Aldrich revolutionized World War II movies with “The Dirty Dozen,” he was revolutionizing westerns with “Vera Cruz.”  This lean, mean, United Artists oater clocks in at a trim 93 minutes without squandering a single second along the way with co-star Cesar Romeo, Denise Darcel, and George Macready as Emperor Maximillian.  Burt Lancaster’s gang of mercenaries constitutes a rogue’s gallery of heavies, including Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Charles Bronson, Jack Lambert, while Henry Brandon playing an up-tight, arrogant European officer in green attire.  “Fistful of Dollars” director Sergio Leone idolized this horse opera along with John Sturges’ classic “The Magnificent Seven.”  These two excellent westerns with their south of the border setting served as prototypes for Spaghetti westerns.  Leone even got to work with Aldritch briefly before he got sacked.  Nevertheless, while this Harold Hecht production provides a milestone in the eventual rise of the Spaghetti western, it exerted an effect on all other westerns lensed in Mexico after its release.  Reportedly, Mexican abhorred this sagebrusher, and in one instance, an audience removed their seats from the floor at hurled them at the movie screen in contempt of the image that “Vera Cruz” created about Mexico.  After “Vera Cruz,” American westerns had to suffer the interference of Mexican censors on the set.  John Sturges had to contend with these censors when he produced “The Magnificent Seven.”  Despite all its notoriety, “Vera Cruz” ranks as one of the greatest studio westerns released during the 1950s, and Robert Aldritch’s finest western to boot!

“Vera Cruz” (**** OUT OF ****) opens with scenic long shots of Mexico.  A preface appears over this shots.  “As the American Civil War ended, another war was just beginning.  The Mexican people were struggled to rid themselves of their foreign emperor—Maximilian.  Into this fight rode a handful of Americans—ex-soldiers, adventurers, criminals—all bent on gain.  They drifted south in small groups.  And some came alone.”  At this point, we see Gary Cooper ride his horse into the shot.  He discovers his mount is lame and goes in search of a suitable replacement.  Eventually, the Colonel and Joe form an uneasy alliance.  Initially, they want to work for the Emperor under the supervision of Marquis Henri de Labordere (Cesar Romeo of “Batman”) with the lovely but treacherous Countess Marie Duvarre (Denise Darcel of “Tarzan and the Slave Girl”) running interference.  Joe goes after her but he doesn’t let her beauty undermine his greed.   

Meanwhile, the Colonel grows fond of a Juarista bombshell, Nina (Sara Montiel of “Casablanca, Nest of Spies”), who is as light fingered as she is sweet.  Our protagonists and their gunmen follow the Marquis to Mexico City and marvel at the Emperor's palace.  Of course, most of the hardware is wrong.  The Colonel and Joe wield 1973 Colt revolvers.  Anyway, Ben and Joe display their considerable expertise with skills with their Winchester repeating rifles.  Gimlet-eyed Joe blasts the spears off the top of the French lancers poles.  The Colonel shoots the flames out of the smudge pots used as supplemental lighting.  The imperialist Emperor Maximillian (George Macready of "Coroner Creek) and Labordere enlist them to act as an escort for Countess Marie Duvarre (Denise Darcel of "Tarzan and the Slave Girl") for her trip to Vera Cruz.   Maximilian promises to pay them the sum of $25-hundred.  Naturally, Maximillian and Labordere have no intention of paying them. 

During the journey on the first day, Ben and Joe both notice the deep wheel ruts that the carriage hauling the countess makes at a river crossing. Later, after they have put up for the evening, Ben and Joe discover a concealed compartment in the floor of the coach that yields a small fortune in gold. "Each of one of those six boxes contains a half-million dollars in gold," Countess Duvarre informs them after she finds them in the stable with the wagon. She explains that the gold will be used to hire mercenaries. It is important to notice that the anti-heroic Lancaster hero has changed out of his black shirt into a white shirt when they embark on escort duty. Symbolically, this means that Joe is showing a little goodness. Later, when he betrays Ben, and they shoot it out with predictable results, Joe is dressed in solid black from head to toe. Anyway, the three of them plot to steal the gold and share it. Meanwhile, the Juaristas are shadowing their every move. Eventually, a pretty Juarista, Nina (Sara Montiel of "Run of the Arrow"), makes friends with Ben. Ben decides that he must switch sides and convinces Joe to make the change.

Lancaster's own company, Hecht-Lancaster Productions, produced "Vera Cruz" on a $1.7 million budget. Despite uniformly negative reviews, "Vera Cruz" coined more than $11 million worldwide. The amorality of the characters, especially Lancaster's lascivious villain, along with the surfeit of violence, makes this abrasive western a prototype for Spaghetti westerns. It is amazing that some of the violence survived the Production Code Administration censors, particularly when Joe kills a helpless lancer with his own lance. Cooper and a charismatic Lancaster make a strong pair of heroes who cannot trust each other. Aldrich directed flawlessly, and this lively Technicolor horse opera bristles with both intrigue and excitement.