Author Archives: J Caleb Mozzocco

Built almost entirely from ideas and jokes taken from other, similar recent comedies, even homaging and parodying the same source material as those films, the very best way to review Balls of Fury would probably be as some sort of elaborate math equation, with a long string of other titles connected by plus signs, minus originality, equals Balls of Fury.

As lazy and familiar as it all is, if there’s one genre that can get a way with lazy and familiar, it’s this sort of dumb comedy. Writer/director Ben Garant and writer/co-star Thomas Lennon, both of Reno 911! and The State fame (which explains all the cameos from those shows’ stars), are at least smart enough to pack the cast with gifted players and, more importantly, likeable presences.

We open during the 1988 Olympics, where pre-teen U.S. athlete Randy Daytona was embarrassingly defeated at ping pong by East German rival played by Lennon (leading to a neat Rocky IV-style U.S. vs. Communists scene). His ping pong career already over, he’s forced into semi-obscurity (like Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in Blades of Glory, or Ferrell in Talladega Nights).

Nineteen years later, he’s tubby and disheveled, and now played by Tony award-winning stage actor Dan Fogler. He’s working in a stage show at Reno, Nevada (Garant and Lennon must love the hell out of that place), when he’s approached by FBI agent George Lopez, who wants to use Randy to infiltrate a Triad archfiend Feng’s legendary ping pong tournament, which will gather the world’s greatest in one location for matches to the death (Like in Enter the Dragon, and the 4,000 movies inspired by it).

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This film is so perfect a comedy that the fact of its existence alone is something of a joke. It’s an office comedy written and directed by Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker responsible for some of the most soul-crushingly depressing films ever made (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) and partially responsible for the Dogme 95 aesthetic movement.

Von Trier himself is keenly aware of the oddity of a director like himself making a movie like this, one that isn’t far removed from the British version of The Office in terms of its sense of awkward humor, production value and documentary-like verisimilitude.

The trailer tells von Trier’s filmography like a joke, building up to the revelation of this film’s genre as a punchline, and the film opens and is occasionally interrupted by narration from von Trier himself, talking about the audience’s expectations in a comedy.
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Small wonder that Hollywood was interested in adapting Stardust into a film. In its native, prose medium, it represented a confluence of “hot” niches to try and exploit.

While not a graphic novel per se, Stardust was first published as a series of illustrated prose books in the size and shape of graphic novels, by graphic novel publisher Vertigo/DC Comics. Its writer, Neil Gaiman, is at this point equally famous as a prose writer (Coraline, Anansi Boys, American Gods) as a comics writer (The Sandman), and he’s long contributed to film fantasy (Having co-wrote 2005’s MirrorMask and wrote the English script for 1997’s Princess Mononoke).

Later published as a book-book, Stardust has a Harry Potter-esque pedigree of being an English fantasy novel about an English youth journeying to a magic world. Thus, it’s been thoroughly vetted by two rather picky built-in audiences, and it manages to hit on two current successful trends.
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Because Jackie Chan’s agent demanded it! Nine years after the original’s surprise success as a late summer release, and six years after the vastly improved sequel, Chan re-teams with fluent English sidekick Chris Tucker and director Brett Ratner for Rush Hour 3, one of the more uncalled for sequels of all time.

The pointlessness of the endeavor is perhaps most notable in the awkward attempts to evoke nostalgia for the previous films, with the pair reciting lines and breaking into dance sequences that result in a sense of vague familiarity rather than a burst of recognition (No crickets could be heard during the scenes at the preview screening I attended; I could only assume that it was because the crickets, like the otherwise generous audience, weren’t sure what they were looking at during these scenes and thus weren’t sure how to respond).
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If I were trying very hard to get a blurb from my review quoted in future advertisements for the film, I might say that Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine does for science-fiction what their 28 Days Later did for the zombie movie. Or that it’s probably the best science-fiction movie in, I don’t know, forever. In both cases I’d be exaggerating, of course (I haven’t actually seen every single science-fiction movie ever made), but honestly, not by all that much.

As they Boyle and Garland did with 28 Days Later, the team takes a well-worn, dead end, nigh self-cannibalizing genre and elevate it to the level of elegant, poetic art film, seemingly reinventing it in the process. The bar for good sci-fi is exceedingly low, of course, since films that assign themselves to this genre generally don’t have much in the way of science in them, instead focusing on aliens, robots, spaceships and, occasionally, Vin Diesel. And those with plots similar to Sunshine‘s, movies where a group of scientists and explorers must embark on a plan so crazy it just might work to save the world like Armageddon or The Core, are generally soul-destroyingly bad.
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For two guys who pulled off what has to be one of the biggest pranks in Prague history, Czech film students Vit Klusak and Filim Remunda don’t seem like particularly funny or fun-loving people in their documentary Czech Dream, which chronicles their elaborate punking of their own people a few years back.

In a brief intro, the pair dryly recite a sort of thesis statement, as if they were reading from cue cards. Later, at a press conference given after the big reveal, they seem surprisingly earnest about the points they were seeking to make in the process of making a lot of everyday people look like jackasses.

Which isn’t to say the stunt itself isn’t hilarious, or that the film built around it isn’t as fascinating as it is funny, just that its creators, despite their puckishness, are hardly playing clowns here.
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It almost seems a shame to review Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night at all, since even the most cursory mention of the basic plot spoils something that the film withholds till almost the halfway point, draining away potential mystery and suspense, to replace it with tension.

It’s a critic’s conundrum particular to this particular movie, on account of the fact that the whole movie essentially consists simply of that basic plot, and the steps leading up to it.

But what are you going to do? No one sees movies without any idea of what they’re going to see (The Wexner Center’s own Secret Cinema program aside), and it’s not like you’ve much chance of finding yourself in the Wex’s theater without any idea of what you’re there to see anyway.
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Satoshi Kon is one of a tiny handful of anime directors whose every new work is immediately accepted and embraced by Western audiences–enough so that we get to see them on the big screen, anyway. After 1998’s Perfect Blue wowed festival audiences, it and follow-ups Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfaters have all received wide-ish release.

Now comes Paprika, which previously showed at the Deep Focus film fest in Columbus, and now finally returns for a regular engagement. Like Kon’s first two movies, it’s an exploration of the perception of reality through various media and states of awareness, but Paprika has a sense of fun about it that is more in line with Tokyo Godfathers. It’s definitely his sunniest and most upbeat film to date, and blast from start to finish.

It’s also his best film. While his previous work seemed to be mostly anime-for-anime’s sake (That is, they could have just as easily been told in live action), Paprkia takes advantage of that which is unique to animation (the two-dimensional design not bound by realism, the way things move from frame to frame) and exploits it as both part of the story and part of the way that story is being told.
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Private Fears in Public Places, the international title for French film Coeurs, is based on a play, and it certainly feels like it.

Set in Paris during a very snowy winter, there’s precious little work done to immerse the audience in the setting, leading to a somewhat artificial, occasionally even claustrophobic feel. There’s a swooping intro to the city, a few overhead shots of characters walking through apartments, and falling snow laid over scene changes, but otherwise, you could just as easily be watching a play as a film.

There are six characters with significantly less than six degrees of separation between them. There’s Nicole (Laura Morante), who is looking for a three-room flat for her and her unemployed, drunken fiancée Dan (Lambert “The Merovingian” Wilson) to move into.
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In an effort to transform our money into their money, Dreamworks has united executive producer Steven Spielberg, the king of family-friendly sci-fi blockbusters; director Michael Bay, the king of spending a lot of money blowing stuff up in terrible summer epics; and Hasbro’s toy box full of Transformers.

While it’s the first time the warring robot races from the planet Cybertron have appeared in live action, it’s not the first time they’ve appeared on the big screen.

In 1986, at the height of the first iteration of the Transformers’ apparently cyclical popularity, the creators of the then two-year-old cartoon series released The Transformers: The Movie:

It was an animated epic that bridged the second and third season of the show, and blew the minds of nine-year-old boys everywhere (mine included).

It introduced strange and foreign concepts to the Transformers world we knew from the toys and ‘toons and comics, including gender, age, swearing and, most shockingly, death. After spending a half hour every weekday afternoon watching the Autobots and Decepticons shoot at and miss each other with laser guns, it was hard to even comprehend the wholesale slaughter that occurred in the film. Just about every single Transformer from the TV show was killed off, some of them quite violently and graphically, including the leader of the good guys, Optimus Prime.

Let’s watch as Megatron mercilessly slaughters our boyhood heroes:

The Bay-directed movie is a reboot, having nothing at all to do with the previous film or the various offshoots from Transformers revivals since, save recasting Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, and keeping some of the names of the Transformers and the surname of their human ally.

Is the Bay film an improvement over the original? In some ways, yeah, sure. In other ways? Well, not so much. Let’s see how well 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie stacks up against 2007’s live-action Transformers. As Prime himself would stay, “One shall stand, one shall fall.”
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