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A Good Day To Die Hard is so terrible, if it hadn’t been for the gunshots and explosions we would’ve fallen asleep. And we speak as a fan of the Die Hard movies. Okay, the first three.

When Bruce Willis and his “son” go to the abandoned nuclear plant in Chernobyl, we just tuned out and re-viewed Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in our head. It also happens in an abandoned nuclear facility in Russia. Yeah we’re a nerd. We cannot claim to have understood Stalker but we can replay scenes in our head. We forget this Die Hard even as we’re watching it.

Bruce Willis’s career isn’t over—recently he’s done good work in interesting projects like Rian Johnson’s Looper and Stephen Frears’s Lay the Favourite. He can go on without Die Hard. The Die Hard series needs to have its obituary read to it by Alan Rickman.

(Damnit WordPress, the videos in the scheduled post disappeared again!!!)

In 1988 Bruce Willis had hair, the Japanese and not the Chinese ruled business, the villains were German. In 2013 Willis is bald and all Russians are evil.

If Alan Rickman is not available, Benedict Cumberbatch could do it.

There are two reasons to watch Flight: the terrifying plane crash in the first half-hour, and the amazing performance by Denzel Washington throughout. Washington plays an alcoholic, the kind who deals with a hangover by having cocaine for breakfast. He’s managed to lie and charm his way through life, and it looks as if he’s going to do it again. On the day of the crash, he flies the plan while drunk and stoned. That’s not why the plane crashes; in fact his being drunk and stoned may have given him the derring-do to perform the stunt that saves nearly everyone on board. But his substance abuse turns up on the routine toxicology report, and the man is finally called to account for his life. Washington is infuriating and brilliant.

is self-awareness.

Consider the new movie Gangster Squad and its obvious model (so obvious it could be a remake), The Untouchables by Brian De Palma.

The Untouchables is corny. It knows it is corny. It trundles out all the ancient tricks of audience manipulation—ratcheting up the suspense with slow-motion (Gun battle on the steps of the train station, baby in carriage rolling down the stairs…), wallowing in sentimentality (We hear the aria from Pagliacci as the grizzled old cop drags his bullet-riddled body across the floor; cut to the villain watching the opera with tears streaming down his cheeks!), whipping up the audience’s blood lust (“Push him off the building! Do it!!”), directing our emotions with a fantastic score by Ennio Morricone. The characters are stereotypes: the straight arrow (Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness), the aged veteran/mentor (Sean Connery), the nerd (Charlie Martin Smith as the accountant who figures out how to get Capone) and the ethnic minority (Andy Garcia).

The villain, real-life mobster Al Capone, is gleefully overacted by Robert De Niro. De Palma even calls attention to how archaic these tricks are by ripping off the Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin. Hell if you’re going to borrow from a movie, borrow from the best. It doesn’t hurt that the screenplay is by David Mamet, the man who makes banality and profanity sound like music. In sum, The Untouchables embraces its corniness and runs with it, in the process achieving something sort of sublime.

Gangster Squad is baduy. It is corny, but it thinks it is cool. It trundles out all the ancient tricks of audience manipulation, but director Ruben Fleischer seems to believe he just invented this stuff; in the process he makes a movie that is both hackneyed and pretentious. Wow, oxymoron. The characters are stereotypes: the straight arrow (Josh Brolin), the aged veteran/mentor (Robert Patrick), the nerd (Giovanni Ribisi), and the ethnic minorities (Michael Pena and Antony Mackie). “Character” is overstating it—they have none. You know on sight which ones are going to die, and in what sequence. To sex it up for the contemporary audience Gangster Squad tacks on the hot dame (Emma Stone) and the cool dude (Ryan Gosling, we love you), both of whom could be written out of the story. Come to think of it, they can all be written out of the story, because this movie doesn’t have to exist.

The villain, real-life mobster Mickey Cohen, is overacted by Sean Penn, who takes out all the fun and replaces it with capital-s Seriousness. In the big action sequence Mickey Cohen emerges from the elevator toting a machine gun and starts shooting in slow-motion. Yiiiiiiiiii. The screenplay is full of pseudo-profundities about “his will to power” and how “Violence was his means…and his end.” Oy vey, someone’s been taking a Philo 1 class. Some characters are flat, others just don’t make sense. We love Emma Stone, but her mob moll is too wholesome to suggest a woman desperate or scheming enough to shack up with a psychotic murderer. Why does that other guy suddenly turn on his boss? What is Nick Nolte doing here? How did they get a first-rate cast to sign up for this fourth-rate bag of cliches?

In short, Gangster Squad is baduy.

Why are we frothing over Ricky Lo’s interview with Anne Hathaway? When I watched the video my first reaction was embarrassment. But who exactly was I embarrassed for: Lo, Hathaway, or myself?

As celebrity interviews go, this is not the most dumbass we’ve ever seen. On the scale of inanity, it’s average. Granted, we are connoisseurs at the cringe-making interview. (We remember the one where a local TV host talks to a Brazilian model and discovers that she is of German descent. “Heil Hitler!” he exclaims. And he does the Nazi salute. On television. I’m not sure, but there may have been a laugh track to go with it. Note: Never do that in Germany.)

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

We like some musicals—Singin’ In The Rain, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Passion—but we’re not really into the genre. We are the only people we know who have never seen The Sound of Music in its entirety (We see the hills, we fall asleep). A few minutes into The Phantom of the Opera movie we had a giggling fit and removed ourselves from the theatre lest we be attacked by its devout fans. We’ve never seen Miss Saigon or had the slightest inclination to do so.

In short, we’re not the right person to review Les Miserables the movie. We’ll watch it eventually, when the crowds thin. If you’ve seen it, do us a favor and post your review. Bonus question: You lost 25 pounds for the role. How did you gain them back?

Actual conversation with Noel
– Umiiyak daw ang mga nanonood.
– Kung ganoon, opening credits pa lang, iiyak na ako.
– Sa umpisa pa lang daw, humahagulgol na.
– Pwes, habang bumibili ako ng tiket, meron nang papatak na isang luha sa mata ko.
– Competitive!

* * * * *

Your reviews are fantastic. Thank you! From hereon we shall outsource all reviews of stage-to-film musical adaptations to you.

A new adaptation of Anna Karenina written by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley. We had to see it. We wanted to like it.

Much of the movie happens in a theatre. Proscenium, curtains, rigging, the works. Characters step off the stage, walk into the auditorium, talk backstage among the ropes. There’s a lot of choreography, as if we were watching a musical without the dancing.

Say Anna’s brother Stiva (Matthew MacFadyen) is leaving the office. He walks across the room without stopping or slowing down. In those few seconds someone takes off his coat, someone else puts another coat on him, he twirls, puts on his hat, someone opens the door and he walks out. It’s a lot of movement, and he’s only going to lunch.

The staging evokes the forms, rituals and artifice of high society in Imperial Russia. Hmmm, ingenious. They’re phonies, we get it. The ball where the dashing Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) ditches Kitty (Alicia Vikander) for Anna features some very odd dancing—a waltz crossed with ballet. Everything is stylized. And even if the location is obviously a stage set, the production design and costumes are sumptuous. (It’s jarring when the characters occasionally wind up on a real location. What, they forgot to bring their theatre?) Plus that train keeps turning up like a built-in spoiler.

Here’s the problem. The theatricality has a detaching effect on the viewer. We’re told that what we see isn’t real. So when Anna falls in love with Vronsky and eventually leaves her exalted husband (Jude Law) and beloved child to be with him, how are we supposed to feel? Ingenuity has trumped passion.

After a while the staging comes off as cute, and if there’s anything Anna Karenina is not, it’s cute. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) is too young to play Vronsky, and when their relationship starts cracking we’re not convinced of his pain. Keira Knightley seems to be playing the same character she played in Atonement and A Dangerous Method, although she doesn’t do her impression of the Alien from Alien.

On the plus side, Jude Law is an effective Karenin—virtuous, morally superior, smug yet sympathetic. This adaptation pays proper attention to the Kitty-Levin story, and Dohmnall Gleeson is compelling as the idealist Levin. (Confession: When we read Anna Karenina we skimmed through the parts about agriculture.) Their story isn’t the most passionate and exciting romance, but that’s the point: real love isn’t about flying sparks and grand gestures. It’s not that you can’t live without each other; but that you can live with each other.

We know some of you are reading the novel to prepare for the movie. Watch it anyway—it’s beautiful to look at, and it may point you to other ways of thinking about Anna Karenina.