Review: Battle: Los Angeles

Battle: Los Angeles
Dir. Jonathan Liebesman
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 116mins

Battle: Los Angeles is a thoroughly depressing and numbing event. You’d be forgiven for crying after witnessing it purely out of sadness for the art of cinema.

Aliens are colonising the Earth and Los Angeles is the American military’s last stand. Two hours of bombastic combat later and I think we all know who is going to come out on top, but to quote the poster for Alien vs Predator ‘Whoever wins, we lose’. We being the moviegoer, who has to sit through this endless parade of sequences designed like video game levels, nauseating handheld camerawork, soldiers screaming identical dialogue at one another and deafening sound design. If the visual effects are nice, scene after scene of grenade and gunfire between gung-ho American marines and robot invaders soon puts any visual pizazz to rest.

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Truly. To call this movie "depressing" is allowing it to get off lightly. At one point on my walk from the train station to my home I had to stop and was all but on the verge of tears. TEARS! I wouldn't let this film defeat me though and I promptly finished my walk home and wrote this review. Personally, I'm quite proud of that Alien vs Predator reference.

Truly a despicable movie. I hate every single thing about it. I even hate the marketing, which not only aims to position it as the first in a long line of terrible Black Hawk Down-meets-District 9 style lobotomies, but also alludes to a back story that is never, for one single moment, mentioned.


And then there's the main poster - or, at least, the one being used in Australia - that brought about unfair comparisons to Deep Impact. I know I am a bigger fan of Mimi Leder's asteroid-on-path-to-Earth film than most, but even leaving that film to the side for a moment, even Michael Bay's Armageddon had quiet moments, you know? Battle: Los Angeles has one quiet scene and during it, quite tellingly, I dozed off for about 30 seconds or so.


Hmmm. Writing about Battle: Los Angeles is making me sad again. Let's move on... F

Review: Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Year: 2010

Aus Rating: M

Running Time: 90mins

Grief is given a hefty workout in Rabbit Hole, a searing drama that charts the parallel paths a married couple take after the death of their only child. It’s an unfair tragedy when a parent outlives their child, exemplified by the film being set nine months after four-year-old Danny’s death; you only get nine months to be excited about the imminent birth of a child, and yet the grieving never ends. Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) know they’ll never experience another day of their lives that isn’t impacted by memories of Danny’s death, but they do what they can in such a pressing situation.

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And given how much I've spoken about this movie over the past year, you probably should read it just so we can draw a line under it. I found it interesting that on one side of me at the screening earlier this week, one of my esteemed colleagues was crying and an emotional wreck once the credits rolled, and on the other side of me, yet another colleague, say laughing and doodling in her notebook. Maybe you should go and find out for yourself?

Rabbit Hole Trailer

As anybody who follows this blog will know that I have been awaiting Rabbit Hole with very high anticipation. I think it's quite obvious what I think of Nicole Kidman (just the way she goes "hmmm" after her angel speech at the start of the trailer fills me with love for that woman), but my appreciation for the likes of John Cameron Mitchell, Dianne Wiest, Aaron Eckhart, Sandra Oh and so on is so strong that their presence on any film will instantly make me sit up and pay attention. Now comes the trailer for Rabbit Hole and it looks good! I have to wait until February to see it as that's when it is receiving a local release, but you Americans out there get it in December. I've included some of my favourite shots, taken from the HQ Apple version, beneath.









And please bear in mind that I will reject any comment that even mentions Nicole's botox. Really. That discussion is over.

Tim Burton Wouldn't Know a Proper Rabbit Hole if He Fell in One

If you asked me right here on the spot what my most anticipated upcoming movie was I'd say it's a even split between Scream 4 (because of Scream, duh!), The Tree of Life (because of Malick, duh!) and Rabbit Hole (because of Nicole Kidman, duh). The film has premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to some really glowing praise (although, also some not-so-glowing as will always be the case) and Kidman has received her fair share of it. Time will tell whether people are willing to "forgive" Nicole for not making the right kind of arthouse movies or the right kind of mainstream movies, but these two clips below that have recently been released online show she is, yet again, working on a completely higher level than most actors.

Below them is a clip of Kidman, Aaron Eckhart and John Cameron Mitchell at the TIFF premiere discussing the film. I wanted to include this clip because it's all about Eckhart and Mitchell talking about how amazing Nicole is and, being the sucker for Kidman praise that I am, I loved it. Alas, "Embedding disabled by request" is one of the true evils of the online age.




Rabbit Hole will most likely be out in 2011 since it's surely too late in the "Oscar season" to be picked up by a distributor and released, especially in a year that sees the Best Actress category already so stacked.