The Upside of Anger

Directed by Mike Binder
Written by Mike Binder

I wanted to avoid reviewing my video rentals on this site, just because there's just so damn many of them, but The Upside of Anger is recent enough that I think I'm justified in writing about it.

In The Upside of Anger, Joan Allen, too-often relegated to playing the mom, the wife, or the boss, finally gets a meaty leading role in a movie that's not bad.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much all there is to say about the movie.

The plot, as plots go, is strictly Lifetime. After Terry Wolfmeyer (Allen) wakes up one morning to discover that her husband has abandoned the family, she and her four interchangeable daughters, played by a bevy of once-were-hot-teen-girl-stars-whose-ships-never-quite-came-in's (Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Erika Christensen, and...well, the jury's still out on Evan Rachel Wood, though any one of them could just as easily have been played by, say, Jena Malone, or Leelee Sobieski, or...fuck, I don't know, Lacey Chabert) are left to fend for themselves in the big bad world (albeit from one of those sprawling Grosse Point-ish estates that you only see on television). But before you can say Little-Women-reimagined-for-the-new-millennium (which...okay, I admit, sounds like a horrible idea), the story decides to concentrate on the clumsy courtship between Joan Allen and the stoned, drunk, washed-up ex-ballplayer next door (Kevin Costner, who to his credit, plays his role with all the paunchy schlumpiness it deserves).

Along the way, we get the laundry-list of so-called "women's movie" cliches: daughters hate mother, mother gets a new boyfriend, daughters hate mothers new boyfriend, daughter has inappropriate relationship with much older man, daughter wants to go to an "art college" of which mother disapproves, daughter falls in love with the gay boy at school, awkward meet-the-new-in-laws scene, surprise pregnancy, life-threatening disease, death in the family, magic-hour shot of the whole family pulling together (see above) - it's all here, folks.

And, of course, mother becomes a bitter, resentful alcoholic. Allen's performance is quite good, really - watch especially Terry's interactions with daughter Andy's (Erika Christensen) much-older boyfriend "Shep" (the hilarious Mike Binder, who also wrote and directed), a man who spells out to Terry's face all her own fears about why her husband left her. The main problem with the performance, and this is a problem more with Binder's script than with Allen's performance itself, is that we're supposed to be marvelling at how Terry's anger at being left turns her into a bitter, resentful alcoholic, only since we never see her as anything but a bitter, resentful alcoholic (we're only told how kind and nice and bright and chipper and etc. she used to be), we have no transformation, only performance.

Does that make sense?

[Wanted to make some crack about Mike Binder going from The Mind of the Married Man to The Mind of the Abandoned Woman here, but that shit's for amateurs.]

The Upside of Anger is not a bad movie - it's cute, unpretentious, charming (in its way), and surprisingly (to me) poignant in the end, but it's still not anything you're going to remember having seen the next day. Is it a chick thing? The most memorable scene in the film for me is when the Alicia Witt character's husband (Tom Harper) is invited over for a backyard barbecue with the family - the women exchange one or two family inanities, and then break out into spontaneous laughter that just goes on and on and on. I remember this scene only because the bewildered (and slightly fearful) look on the husband's face is exactly the look that was on mine.

*Batman Begins

Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by David Goyer (story and screenplay), Christopher Nolan (screenplay), Bob Kane (characters)

Sometime late last year someone on one of the Firefly boards posted a link to what was supposedly the David Goyer/Christopher Nolan script for the new Batman movie. I, of course, printed it out, took it home, gave it a read, and had a good laugh at myself - what a dope I was, wasting an hour of my life reading this fake, hackneyed, slapped-together pastiche of Internet rumors, comic references, and descriptions of that same lame-assed Batmobile footage I had seen a week or two previous on AICN - written, no-doubt, by some bored fanboy who didn't even attempt to make it sound like anything that could possibly, plausibly have been written by a professional screenwriter. In the words of Hedonism-bot, "How wonderfully decadent! Jambi, the chocolate icing!"

And then something weird happened.

The trailer was released.

And somehow, some scenes from this fake script I read had actually somehow made their way in.

Entire lines of dialogue, even.

In the words of Bender, I thought, We're boned.

I waited five weeks to see this movie, and caught it last Friday only because the only movie out that I really felt like seeing (Zhangke Jia's The World) wouldn't let me get home in time for Galactica (which, if you're not watching, then you, like, should be, or something), so it was off to brave the mean streets of Battery Park City (that's a joke, by the way) to the gorgeous (that, too) Regal Stadium 16 to catch what I was sure was, despite the praise of quite a few people who I really thought ought to know better, a fair disaster of a movie.

Well, curse my unfevered imagination for not being able to translate a couple corny lines of dialogue on the page into the film now before me. I guess this is why I will never direct. This is why I will never write. This is why I will never be one of those readers, you know, those people who read ten scripts a day and decide which ones should pass go, and which ones should just pass.

I loved Batman Begins.

It's been widely said that Batman Begins is a retelling of the Batman origin story - I beg to differ. The death of his parents, the origin of the bats, nothing you haven't already seen in Burton's Batman, or even Schumacher's Batman, or pretty much every Batman. The business with the ninjas is new, but I am not at all enough familiar with the comics to say how new.

No, it's not an origin story. Instead, it's like Batman: The First 100 Days. Not quite how/why he became the Batman, but the first awkward outings, the first cuts, bruises, trials, errors. He's figuring out what to do, and how to do it, and we're right there with him.

The most interesting thing about this Batman, and possibly something that we've not really seen before, is the ways in which, more than gadgetry, more than darkness, more than fighting skills (though there is plenty of all three), Batman uses psychology and intimidation to get his "power". Especially interesting, considering the ways in which intimidation and fear figure into the plot itself (you may or may not have known that an early working title for the film actually was Batman: Intimidation).

The acting goes a long way in selling the story to us, and I cannot think of enough words to say how great this cast is (and Nolan, who reels them all in to properly tell this story as seriously as, say, Ang Lee should have done, or Sam Raimi seems to think he is). Christian Bale - phenomenal. Michael Caine - phenomenal. Liam Neeson - phenomenal. Morgan Freeman, for whom I usually don't much care - phenomenal. Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson - all phenomenal.

Katie Holmes, though. Yeesh.

Not all is well in the city of Gotham.

It's not that she's doing a bad job, really, she's just (horribly) miscast. Lest you think I'm just jumping on the let's-all-hate-Katie-Holmes-now bandwagon, I actually think she's pretty cool, loved her in Pieces of April and Go, but I can hardly buy her behind the wheel of a car, let alone as some high-powered D.A. who's all, you know, down with the people, or whatever.

Also did not care for Linus Roache's Thomas Wayne - I think he was going for strong, noble, brave, and true, but he comes off as some sort of weird robot.

Ken Watanabe, also, probably did the best he could with what he was given, but doesn't really bring anything to the table (other than yet another prestigious name to the cast), and honestly, lifts right out. He supposedly never blinks once. I'll have to watch it again just to make sure since, you know, I care.

What else bothers me? The Batmobile is ridiculous, though I guess no more or less so than any of the previous versions, really. The thing with the train having to reach Wayne Tower, or whatever, made little sense to me, even after the third (seriously!) time one of the characters in the movie had to explain it to me.

What bothered me most after I read the script continues to bother me after watching the finished film: the annoying (and hackey) repetition of the Big Heroic Tropes: "Why do we fall down?", "It's my actions that define me," blah blah blah - who wrote this shit, Akiva Goldsman?

Okay, forgetting for a moment that Nolan co-wrote said script, it very much speaks to his vision and skills as a director that he has not made a film ABOUT said Big Heroic Tropes, nor has he made a simple response to the last few Batman movies, nor has he made some obvious, snarky movie about itself; Nolan has a story to tell, and it's a good one.

Goyer's upcoming projects include film versions of The Flash and Ghost Rider, starring Nicolas Cage. 'Nuff said!

War of the Worlds

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by David Koepp (screenplay), Josh Friedman (screenplay), H.G. Wells (novel)

Where to begin?

I don't know what to say about this movie that you haven't already heard, except that Spielberg is a filmmaker who very much cannot make up his mind. The bad animation, bad stock footage, and bad voiceover (from Morgan Freeman, no less) at the outset of the film sets up a sort of late-60s b-movie schlockiness that the movie, with it's a-list "talent" and state-of-the-art visual effects, fails to deliver. Instead we're getting classy, top-of-the-line major summer actioner...right?

Other than the opening and closing animations and some dumb-looking helicopters and fighter jets, the effects are good...and that's pretty much the only positive thing I can say about this piece of crap. That and that there was something transcendantly glorious about watching Tom Cruise getting sucked into a giant alien sphincter, but enough about me.

A pastiche of pretty much every popular Spielberg movie of the last 15-or-so years, you can pretty much run down the list and point to the Jurassic Park scene, the Minority Report scene, the Saving Private Ryan scene. Also present is the problem that has very much plagued every one of Spielberg's "serious" movies (Schindler's List aside) - he can't decide if he's making a movie about Everyman, or about Thisonesingularandveryspecialman. He'll go halfway in one direction before suddenly turning around and going halfway in the other, never committing to either, and ending with an incredibly confused mess.

Try not to lose count how many times Cruise & Co. go from the verrrrrry back of a large crowd to the verrrrrrry front of a large crowd (then again to the verrrrry back of the crowd when the aliens begin to give chase), giving them a clear, front-row view of every single stupid event. Note the clear path around stopped traffic, hordes of people, and at one point airplane debris (from the jet that crashes right into their house, no less) always provided to their car - and not a scratch on it, by the way, even after the plane crashes into the house.

Note how Cruise magically stumbles onto the one car on Earth that works. See how nobody ever attempts to stop, or even flag down, said car - that is, until it becomes convenient to the plot, and even then, see how subtly (he sarcastily said) that's handled. Note how he just happens to run into some woman that he knows at exactly the right moment where it is the height of drama that they are separated, seconds later. Oh, the suspense when Cruise runs to stop his son from joining the Army (because, see, he's so angry and confused at the attack that he is reactionarily, if that's a word, dying to pick up a gun and kick some alien ass - how's that for subtlety?) at the exact moment where a hundred yards away his suddenly-mute daughter (a noxious Dakota Fanning) is about to be kidnapped by - get this - a concerned passerby. In short, try not to lose count how many times Spielberg will create some utterly artificial situation out of the clear blue sky in which to place his hero just so we can gasp, or sigh, or whatever respiratory reaction is most desirable from our respective demographics.

Then Tim Robbins appears, and the thought literally running through my head is, Oh my god, this movie is never going to end.

What feels like an entire third of the movie takes place in the Robbins character's basement, and I'm guessing it's supposed to be all suspenseful or something, based on the grunty faces everyone is making, and of course the overbearing BUM-BUM-BUUUUUUUMMM score.

The family finally ends up at the doorstep of ex-in-laws (I think), in a hoity Boston neighborhood with nary a broken pane of glass anywhere. As the family emerges one by one, not a scratch or bruise or arm in a sling among them, I joked to my friend, "Now the son!" And guess what? THERE HE IS. I am NOT KIDDING. Seriously, what next? "Rover! I thought you died when I was 12! I guess they really did send you off to live in the country!"

I can't believe I missed Family Guy for this.

Undead

Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
Written by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig

So there I was with a Friday afternoon off, meeting my friend Scott for lunch at two (he’s moving to D.C. tonight), what to do to kill some time? If you’re anything like me, you’re thinking, zombie movie! I suppose I could have just walked around the corner to the Battery Park City Regal to see Land of the Dead, but the more I hear about that one, the more it scares me (and not the good kind, either). So, it was off to old City Cinemas Village East to check out this new (to these shores) zombie flick from Australia, Undead.

With my ticket came a flyer announcing that Michael and Peter Spierig would be there to do an intro and a Q&A for the 5:00 and 7:00 shows, plus they were having a drawing for an autographed gas mask. Damn.

Undead begins with a quick introduction to our principle players. They are, in no particular order: our brooding heroine (Felicity Mason), the hysterical pregnant girl (Lisa Cunningham), the goofus dumbass (Rob Jenkins), the asshole cop (Dirk Hunter), his naïve and skittish (and asthmatic, to boot) first-day-on-the-job partner (Emma Randall), and the grunting, monosyllabic, survivalist gun nut with John Woo moves, Jack Black looks, and an unending supply of spring-loaded weapons in his coveralls (the wonderfully named Mungo McKay).

Then meteorites fall from the sky and turn people into zombies. And that’s about it. You keep hoping that something more will happen, that the Spierigs are going to spring something on you, that these people are going to turn out to be, or turn into, something more than their three-word descriptions above, but…the heroine broods, the pregnant girl gets hysterical, the goofus does something dumb, the cop is an asshole, the skittish partner reaches for her inhaler, and Mungo gets to grunt cool lines like, “Nobody drives this shitbox but me.”

And then the aliens make their first appearance, and you know that you are just shit out of luck.

Undead is far from the worst movie I’ve seen this year (that would be The Jacket) - the scene where Mungo is punching the zombie fish in fact got a bigger laugh out of me than anything in, say, Fever Pitch. And on the zombie movie scale, I'd place it somewhere above Night of the Comet (which is quite a few rungs up from 28 Days Later, in my book). Still, Undead is a pretty limp affair, as either parody, comedy, or horror.

If you’re dying to see a funny zombie movie, it is time to rediscover Peter Jackson’s brilliant 1992 gore-fest Dead Alive (hey, remember back when Peter Jackson still made interesting movies?), or last year’s resplendent Shaun of the Dead. Still, damned if that gas mask wouldn’t look pretty fucking sweet on my bookcase.