127 Hours (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Danny Boyle. Starring James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara.
James Franco is Aron Lee Ralston, the American man who survived a five-day ordeal trapped by a boulder in a crevasse thanks to relentless determination and the magic of product placement.
I think there should be a rule that nobody gets to be called a hero for saving their own life. If that makes you a hero, then I'm a hero for eating a hearty breakfast this morning. I've also been known to heroically look both ways before crossing the street.
The way it really works in our society, of course, is that you only get to be a hero if you save your own life after doing something incredibly stupid: for example, hiking out into the wilderness alone without telling anyone where you're going. Bonus points for hugging grizzly bears or climbing on loose boulders while you're out there.
What I appreciate about 127 Hours is that beneath all the marketing bunk about heroism and the triumph of the human whatsit, it's really just the story of a man putting himself into a nasty situation and surviving in an ugly and undignified way. It doesn't have the nauseating romantic quality of Into the Wild.
Any movie that spends 65 out of its 90 minutes in a two-foot wide space with a total of three possible camera angles needs a creative-minded director, and it got one in Danny Boyle. He comes up with noisy, colorful, and visceral ways to stage everything from tying knots to hacking through a nerve fiber.
But as you might imagine, no matter how many unique ways one finds to depict the act of drinking urine, there isn't an hour-plus of story to be told about a man stuck under a rock for five days. Recognizing this, the film relies more and more heavily on flashbacks and dream sequences as the days roll by. These scenes manage to avoid being cheesy, and with considerable efforts Boyle relates them distantly to the events at hand, but they're still clearly filler.
Franco is obviously the lynchpin of the production. He makes the viewer feel every one of Ralston's highs and lows, which gets downright cruel later on.
Though 127 Hours has its dull moments, the urge to escape by hacking off my own arm was only momentary.Rated R for disarming performances.
4 out of 5
Faster (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. George Tillman Jr. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Jackson-CohenVery watchable but unexceptional action/revenge flick.
Freshly released from a 10-year prison bid, a getaway driver (Dwayne "Not 'The Rock' Anymore" Johnson) hunts down the people who sold him out and murdered his brother. He is hunted in turn by a worn-out cop (Billy Bob Thornton) and an eccentric assassin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). None of them have names.
Johnson plays his usual character, the world's biggest badass; you know this because the other characters keep telling you so, just in case the way he keeps killing scary gentlemen even burlier than himself isn't enough of a tip-off.
Like the guy from Blade Runner, each of the driver's victims shows more humanity than the last, making him question the morality of his mission. It's a hackneyed movie-character sort of humanity, and his doubts never really amount to much story-wise, but I give the film credit for making an effort.
Similarly, Jackson-Cohen's character, a pretty boy super-genius hitman who seeks a new challenge after having "beaten" yoga, would be absolutely ridiculous outside of an action movie, but here he adds entertaining color.
Faster takes its time, but isn't boring. Despite the over-the-top characters, the action sequences are somewhat more realistic than most entries in the genre.
One weakness of the story is its strange loose ends, such as Jennifer Carpenter's character: an old girlfriend of the protagonist who has a teary reunion with him in the first half and is never mentioned again. Certain developments at the end of the film provide a distraction from these missing pieces, but they're hard to ignore once the credits roll.
Rated R for one more gunshot wound to the head than is probably healthy.3.5 out of 5
