moviesofmike.

*300

2007-03-17T03:03:00.000-04:00

Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by Frank Miller (graphic novel), Lynn Varley (graphic novel), Zack Snyder (screenplay), Kurt Johnstad (screenplay), Michael B. Gordon (screenplay)

Two notes:

1) In an episode of Futurama, the head of Pamela Anderson once noted that the fictitious Baywatch: The Movie was the first movie to be shot completely in slow-motion. A damned fine honor, that one, and history may prove that 300 comes in at a pretty close second, at around 85% slow-motion.

2) Where can I attend the Dr. Orpheus school of making every statement into a Proclamation For The Ages?

I kid, because I love. People complain that 300 is short on plot, but I disagree. It’s not that there’s not enough plot, it’s that it’s a simple, straightforward, exceedingly efficiently-handled plot. The Persian army is out to conquer the world, but when they reach Sparta, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, ripped) and 299 of his most loyal soldiers say no. And so, at one geographically strategic point, we have wave after wave of battle after battle – Persians invade, Spartans defend. Persians invade, Spartans defend.

Not a ton in terms of character development, which is obviously Frank Miller’s point. The Spartans are soldiers. That’s it. That’s their character. From birth they are conditioned and trained to be soldiers. To act as soldiers. To fight as soldiers. In this sense, the wave after wave of battle after battle IS character drama, IS character development (to argue otherwise would be the same as saying that Sophie’s Choice had no character development, because at no point do we see Meryl Streep pick up a rocket launcher and blow up Nazi tanks).

And along the way, we have bombs, elephants, rhinoceri, too many jaw-dropping moments and images to name here (I gasped audibly the first time I saw Xerxes' (Rodrigo Santoro, absolutely unrecognizable from his as-yet walkon role on TV's LOST) “walking temple”). And a subplot involving the Queen (Lena Headey) trying to convince the Spartan high council to send more troops (mileage varies).

With his surprisingly watchable Dawn of the Dead remake and now 300, Zack Snyder is definitely proving himself as a broody-action-thriller filmmaker. One has cautious hopes for his Watchmen adaptation, though one would imagine that story would call for a more naturalistic, less stylized (and much less CGI) treatment, and anyway how anyone is going to cram that whole story into just two hours is beyond me.

*Black Snake Moan

2007-03-04T23:10:00.000-05:00

Directed by Craig Brewer
Written by Craig Brewer

One day, the wife of grizzled blues man Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) decides to leave him for someone with "more life" (Lazarus’s younger brother – ouch!). Isolating himself with pain, hurt, and drink, Lazarus one day happens upon the half-dead form of town trollop Rae (Christina Ricci). He decides to take her in, to try to save her, and in doing so save himself as well.

Not nearly as trashy as its ad campaign would have you believe, Black Snake Moan is actually kind of sweet – as sweet as a movie involving a nymphomanic chained to a radiator can be, anyway. It’s actually a lot like A Walk to Remember, if Shane West was a girl and Mandy Moore was a grizzled old blues man, with anger issues rather than cancer, and instead of Christian shame there was a chain, a radiator, and...well, more Christian shame. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same movie.

You know the drill – first they hate each other, then they kind of like each other, then they have setbacks and breakthroughs and more setbacks and more breakthroughs, family members are confronted, roots of problems are discovered, the two go from liking each other to depending on each other, lessons are learned, and in the end everyone is happy (or, at least, a better person).

So why the recommendation? The story is entertaining, the acting engaging (though the sight of Christina Ricci’s emaciated form is disturbing to say the least, especially in light of recent developments), there’s an excellent soundtrack, and the ending was satisfying. I was a happier person for having seen the movie. Much like how I felt after watching Brewer's earlier (and much better received) Hustle & Flow (which you KNOW would have been festooned with a similarly lurid marketing campaign had studio execs thought that film would have any kind of audience to begin with).

Like I said, sweet. If you can get past the idea of a nymphomaniac chained up to a radiator.

*Notes on a Scandal

2007-02-17T01:55:00.000-05:00

Directed by Richard Eyre
Written by Zoe Heller (novel), Patrick Marber (screenplay)

Jaded and bored schoolteacher Barbara (Judi Dench) takes an immediate interest in new art teacher Sheba (Cate Blanchett), and basically declares that she is Sheba’s best friend. When Barbara catches Sheba in a potentially scandalous position with 15 year-old student Stephen (Andrew Simpson), Barbara has exactly the leverage she needs to fully embed herself into Sheba’s personal life, to fully convince Sheba, herself, and the rest of the world that Barbara IS Sheba’s best friend (and more!). But then, one ill-timed death-of-house-cat later (though one knows that with Barbara, if it wasn’t one thing it would just be another), Barbara turns on her “best friend” in a last-ditch effort to ensure that there will be only the two of them, forever.

Notes on a Scandal is trash. Well-produced, well-shot, well-acted trash, but make no mistake, this movie is pure trash. Highly entertaining trash, but trash nonetheless.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

To their immense credit, all the aforementioned actors (and one phenomenal Bill Nighy) are in top form and bring their A-game to table, but still, one must wonder what it was about this script that would attract such a highbrow cast to begin with. Nothing really changes, characterwise, nothing really happens, nobody (least of all the audience) really learns anything. There are plenty of places that a more serious movie could have gone – a meditation on loneliness, perhaps, or an exploration of longing and regret -- and there are certainly moments when the film looks as though it could be headed in these directions, moments that you wish could be sustained, that you wish would last, that you wish was more than mere lip service.

Seriously, had this movie been set in Cleveland and starred, say Meredith Baxter and Alyssa Milano as the leads, then...well, Lifetime probably still wouldn’t touch it with a pole unless somebody somewhere swore that it was based on a true story.

Definitely worth a rental if you are a fan of Dench, Blanchett, or Nighy. Or just have 90 minutes to waste on something gloriously trashy.

*Favorite (and others) movies of 2006

2007-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is a list of my ten favorite movies of 2006 (not the "best" movies, mind you, as I never understood how one can judge that sort of thing, other than simply going by what one's favorites were. Right?):

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Directed by Larry Charles
Written by Sascha Baron Cohen (screenplay and story), Peter Baynham (screenplay and story), Anthony Hines (screenplay and story), Todd Phillips (story), Dan Mazer (screenplay)

What people don’t seem to get about Borat is that there are (at least) two separate levels of “victimhood” to the jokes played by Sascha Baron Cohen: those who indict themselves with their own words and actions, and those who are victims of simple practical jokes. To say that, for example, the etiquette teachers or the driving instructor didn’t “deserve” the treatment that they get is ludicrous because they didn’t get the same “treatment” as, say, the racist rodeo rider or the sexist USC frat boys. There are (at least) two separate levels of laughter here: the simple Allen Funt-ish laughter at watching people in bizarre situations (the subway passengers, the elevator passengers), and the “darker” laughter at watching people peeling away their own societal politeness and political correctness and saying what they really think. Only once you realize that you are laughing at two different things (Michael Moore could learn a lot from Sascha Baron Cohen) will you be able to judge who “deserves” laughter and who...just get it anyway. While unconvinced of Borat’s current status as political hot button, and unsure of how future societal iterations (not “generations”, as I am currently experiencing what has traditionally been known as a “generation gap” with people five years older and younger than me) will view or judge this movie, alls I know is that I laughed longer and harder at Borat than I have at any other movie this year.

Brick

Directed by Rian Johnson
Written by Rian Johnson

The hard-boiled world of 1940s pulp noir fiction transposed onto the hard-boiled world of teens, high school, and the sun-drenched suburbs of Southern California – wha? But, first-time writer/director Rian Johnson manages to transcend the conceit, bringing us a moody, brooding, and intense tale of longing and loss. Top notch.

Children of Men

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Written by P.D. James (novel), Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Argata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby

Intense, brutal, real, frightening both in plot and implication, and heart-stoppingly gorgeous, even as (or maybe because) it is all these things, all at once. Children of Men is the best movie of 2006.

Little Miss Sunshine

Directed by Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Written by Michael Arndt

About once a year or so (more in a good year), someone makes a movie that just hits all the right notes with me. Small movies about awkward people. Usually they look pretty straightforward and simple on paper, but start digging around a little bit and you find the story, characters, and themes discussed to be far more complex (and complicated – not the same thing) than any simple capsule description or review of the movie could express. Movies that very much speak to me on the subjects of growing up, friendship, family. And, whether it be by coincidence or design, these movies almost always incredibly funny, and very, very real. Movies of the recent past that I have felt this way about include Bottle Rockets, Next Stop Wonderland, The Opposite of Sex, Rushmore, Ghost World, and my favorite movie of 2005, Junebug. Little Miss Sunshine was long my favorite movie of 2006, until I saw Children of Men.

The Prestige

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Written by Christopher Priest (novel), Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

A wondrous examination of obsession, jealousy, and revenge, with several decidedly sci-fi twists. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are awesome, and Scarlett Johanssen’s latest turn as femme fatale (after her abominable performance in the abominable The Black Dahlia) is actually pretty credible. As a whole much better than that other, more overwrought and CGI-heavy early-century magician movie that came out this year.

Renaissance

Directed by Christian Volckman

Written by Alexandre de La Patelliere, Mathie Delaporte, Jean-Bernard Pouy (translation), Patrick Raynal (translation)

An exercise in style over substance, to be sure, but oh, what style it has – motion-capture (NOT rotoscoped) animation, cel-shaded, and save for a dash or two of color here and there for emphasis, completely black and white. Not even grey, just pure, stark black and white. Though the plot (a twisty but unfortunately more-or-less familiar sci-fi affair involving corporate conspiracies and a fountain-of-youth miracle drug) doesn’t bring much to the table, the visuals alone were more than enough to keep me thrilled for the entire duration, and intrigued even days later.

The Science of Sleep

Directed by Michel Gondry
Written by Michel Gondry

In less capable hands, this bittersweet story about the awkward romance between Stephane, a young man who can’t differentiate between dreams and waking life, and Stephanie, the pretty young thing who lives next door, would have ended with the obvious celebration of the Stephane character, who moves about the world with a freshness and innocent beauty to which we should all aspire. But hold on, isn’t this guy a schizophrenic? And a somewhat paranoid one at that? Kudos to Michel Gondry for ending the film with a firm shake of our shoulders, telling us to get real, there’s no way you could have a relationship with someone like this in real life. Truthfully, had Gondry gone for the obvious ending, this movie, with its cuteness, humor, imagination, and yes, its sweetness, would have earned it a special place in my heart; it is that ultimate realness, however, which elevates it to one of my favorite movies of the year.

Stranger Than Fiction

Directed by Marc Foster
Written by Zach Helm

Taking major issue with everyone saying that this is Will Ferrell’s first “serious” role. First of all, it’s not very serious. Secondly, we saw him a year ago in Winter Passing, wherein he actually DID have a serious role. That he also played and sang straight the entirety of The Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why” is beside the point. Coincidentally, Winter Passing starred Zooey Deschanel, who is sort of a poor man’s Maggie Gyllenhaal (no offense to Zooey, I adore Zooey, but...right?). Stranger Than Fiction is like any number of stories where the main character has a near-death experience, or learns that he is going to die, and because of this decides to become a better person, or at least try, and in the end they do become a better person, not so much because they achieve their goal, but because they tried, and Yoda be damned, the act of trying is when the real magic happens. Tale as old as time, but well-told, with wonderful performances by all except Queen Latifah, who is sadly given an underwritten, throwaway role presumably with the abstract assumption that she would “bring something to it”, but she doesn’t.

Thank You for Smoking

Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Christopher Buckley (novel), Jason Reitman (screenplay)

A hard-edged comedy, one of the funniest and most biting of the year, that dares to put a human face on the tobacco industry. A smirking, funny, poignant, conniving, flawed, real, and utterly human face.

V for Vendetta

Directed by James McTeigue

Written by Alan Moore (novel) and David Lloyd (novel), Wachowski Brothers (screenplay)

I actually liked the movie better than the book, which just made me feel kinda dizzy and nauseous and claustrophobic and restless. Of course, that was probably the point. Or, it could have been because I read it on a plane. A lot has been made of Alan Moore’s detatchment and disgust with this project, but from what I’ve read Moore’s primary complaint is that his original story was a reaction to a Thatcher-era police state, and that there is no way that the story in its present form could be “updated” to be about post-911 society. Actually, the anxieties and truths about totalitarianism and government manipulation are universal, and even so, the genius of the story is that even politics aside, it works as straight adventure-thriller (the expression “ripping good” comes immediately to mind).

Other movies I liked a lot this year: Casino Royale (a textbook study in how to do a “reboot” right, worthy of examination for future generations), The Descent (a genuinely scary horror movie – how often can you say that?), District B13 (Parkour hits the mainstream, leaps through the tiny crack above the door, drops two stories, does a roll, and just keeps on running), Eight Below (a movie about dogs), Hard Candy (ouch! Just that: ouch), Night Watch (what the Underworld movies really should have been), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (a few issues, but in all a well-crafted, even superbly-made film), Running Scared (a linear Pulp Fiction as family drama, minus the jokes), Superman Returns (a bit cold; still glorious), Tristram Shandy (an unfilmable film of an unwriteable book, genius in execution), and Volver (Pedro Almodovar’s return to small, silly, and cute (but not cuteSY) movies, and a very welcome one at that).

Movies that disappointed me (not movies that I disliked, for that list would be far too long, but simply movies that for whatever reason I walked into with a fair amount of expectations, and left the theater wondering how I could somehow get my money and time back):

Art School Confidential (dir. Terry Zwigoff, wr. Daniel Clowes)

First, understand that I LOVED the previous collaborations of Zwigoff and Clowes. Second, understand why: it wasn’t for the bitterness and cynicism toward the world that they so clearly and cleverly express, but for the obvious affection that they feel for the (very) few people they believe deserve it. Art School Confidential, unfortunately, was pure vitriol with (save one tiny cameo by Anjelica Huston) zero heart. Yes, people by and large are selfish, petty, phony, and mean. Now tell us something we don’t know.

The Fountain (dir. Darren Aronofsky, wr. Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel)

I disliked both Pi and Requiem for a Dream with a passion unexpressable by words, so it is hard to imagine how and why I could have any expectations for this one. Advanced word was good, though, and we all know how I would watch anything with Hugh Jackman in it, even if he was just reading the phone book (I did watch that once, in fact -- it was called Kate & Leopold. Ooh, burn!). Though the trailer spoke to a certain level of overwrought pomposity that I felt specific (and appropriate) to Aronofsky’s past work, I genuinely did walk into this theater hoping, even somehow expecting, to enjoy this movie. I did not. Okay, it did look very pretty, and I did enjoy it more than I enjoyed both Pi and Requiem put together (which, admittedly, still isn’t very much), but to populate this story of pure, undying, eternal love (or is it?) with such empty ciphers to be filled in with our own memories of pure, undying eternal love (or is it) was either a collosal miscalculation (how many among us have ever felt such love? I was certainly having a bad day, in any case) or, perchance, lazy writing.

A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, wr. Philip K. Dick (novel), Richard Linklater (screenplay))

School of Rock aside, I’ve not been a very big fan of Linklater’s non-improvised, non-following-people-walking-around output. Still, a purported faithful film adaptation of Philip K. Dick (quite possibly the first in history) is a work to be admired (I’ve read much Philip K. Dick in high school and beyond – can’t claim to have understood more than half of it, but I have read a lot). Expectations were high, and though I did like the ending, I felt the movie took far too long to get where it was going, and the combination of high cop-drama and low stoner-comedy frequently made me feel like I was watching two, three, sometimes four completely separate movies concurrently – was that the point? Speaking of point, I’ve seen this movie two-and-a-third times, and cannot for the life of me understand why they chose the animation (rotoscoping, if you want to get technical) route, other than somebody somewhere probably thought it would look “edgy”, or something. Isn’t that the worst? If you’re going to be make a big deal about making a “non-traditional” animated feature, go look at how a serious filmmaker like Satoshi Kon actually DOES something with the form, rather than just using it because it’s cool or, like, whatever.

X-Men: The Last Stand (dir. Brett Ratner, wr. Zack Penn, Simon Kinberg)

So people credit the new, post-Burton wave of superhero movies to Spiderman, which I always felt was a bit too silly to be taken seriously (let alone be truly enjoyable). No, this new wave goes back a year or two further, to the first X-Men movie. The first two were great, serious studies into the world and characters of the comic. But with director and mastermind Bryan Singer off to try and repeat the same with Superman (he couldn’t, but whatever), leave it to walking horror show Brett Ratner to do with X-Men what Joel Schumacher did with Batman, that is, listen to people like my idiot co-worker who’s always saying, “Movies based on comics should be wacky and crazy and fun!” The two previous X-Men movies, while not completely bereft of good humor (and certainly, in their ways, flawed), carried with them a level of genuine human emotion and gravitas that just rang true to me. Ratner takes every moment of said human emotion and gravitas from the two earlier movies, and replaces them with campy, Adam-West-era Batman humor, wacky plastered haircuts, cleavage-baring cut-out bodysuits, pretty much everything but fart jokes and those “WHAM! BOOM!” text-explosion effects. Truly, the only thing anyone who’s opinion I trust liked about this movie was the idea of the “mutant cure” and the internal turmoil it causes among the will-they-or-won’t-theys of the X-crowd – an idea that Ratner lifted wholesale from Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s run of Astonishing X-Men, without any credit whatsoever.

*Children of Men

2007-01-06T19:38:00.000-05:00

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron

Written by P.D. James (novel), Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Argata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby

That many cooks in the screenwriting kitchen never produce any movies worth mentioning, do they? Kudos to Alfonso Cuaron for keeping this movie to his taut, singular vision. I kept flashing back to his beautiful and elegiac Y Tu Mama Tambien, which also had an epic vision of the world and society, separate from the narrative of the travellers, played out through moving car windows on the passed roadside. Children of Men had that feel in addition to its admittedly epic main storyline.

For reasons unknown and vague (possibly due to an influenza plague that wiped out a huge chunk of the human population, resulting in general global chaos), women have stopped giving birth, have in fact lost the ability to become pregnant. It’s been over 18 years since a recorded live birth, and that “child” has just been murdered. Theo (Clive Owen) lives his life as quietly as can be managed in these harsh times: work, home, helplessly watching the news, trying to ignore the literally truckloads of illegal immigrants all around him being systematically rounded up and shipped off to refugee camps, and spending time with his few remaining friends, in Theo’s case, the neo-hippy Jasper (Michael Caine, who is brilliant) and his near-catatonic wife.

Make no mistake – this is a fascist state. But it is also apparently the only still-functioning government and society on the planet. So does that mean....? Cuaron is brave enough to present us with a world of hard questions, and is audacious enough to answer very few, if any, of them, other than the power of the human will to simply carry on.

As Theo gets involved in a plot concerning his long-estranged wife Julian (Julianne Moore, who we don’t see nearly enough of nowadays, much less in non-50s-housewifey roles), the last pregnant human Kee (newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey, who is brilliant), and the enigmatic “Human Project”, he is also dragged into the world of terrorists, military dictatorships, refugees, refugee camps, dangerous double-crosses, and all things, of course, not being as they appear. This is the movie V for Vendetta should have been, wanted to be, and maybe almost was.

The term “documentary style” has become a cliché when talking about modern cinema and television, but Cuaron truly and masterfully uses it here with his long takes with a handheld camera that takes the viewer directly into the heart of brutal, violent warfare. At one point a few drops of blood spatter onto the lens, and remainder of that single, long take is shot with the blood still spattered on the lens. You watch this and think about how a Michael Bay or a Ridley Scott would have captured the scene, with quick edits, slow-motion explosions, a soaring Hans Zimmer score telegraphing every single emotion that We Should Be Feeling Right At This Moment.

Naming the boat “Tomorrow” is a bit on-the-nose, but forgiveable, considering.

Intense, brutal, real, frightening both in plot and implication, and heart-stoppingly gorgeous, even as (or maybe because) it is all these things, all at once. Children of Men is the best movie of 2006.

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-01-05T23:05:00.000-05:00

Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro

Not that i had any to begin with, or even cared if I did or did not, but I am sure I have lost every shred of movie reviewing street cred I could ever have with the following statement: I did not like Pan's Labyrinth. I wanted to like it, and there were things that I did like about it, but if you were sit me down and force me to choose between whether I did or did not like it, I would have to come down firmly on the side of did not like it.

Pan's Labyrinth tells the dual stories of the Spanish resistance against the fascist regime of 1940s Spain, and a fairy story of young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) called by the mythic Faun/Pan (del Toro alumnus Doug Jones, who had to learn to speak Spanish for the role) to complete three tasks by the next full moon in order to restore her status as princess of the underworld. Surely, you would think that in a movie of this nature the two stories would come together in a satisfying, possibly magic realist way at the end, wouldn't you? Even thematically? Otherwise it would just feel like we're watching two completely separate movies, right?

Most reviews I've read for this film refer to it as "magic realism" - I totally disagree. Magic realism is when forces and figures of magic actually exist in the "world" (diegesis?) of the story, which must always bear a strong resemblance to the world in which the audience exists (hence realism). In Pan's Labyrinth, there is little or no indication that the "magic" exists anywhere outside of Ofelia's imagination. So what we have here is NOT magic realism, it's one story of the "real world" and another story that exists only in somebody's head.

And what's the deal with that story going on inside Ofelia's head? Unless figures like the giant toad and the creepy guy with nostrils instead of eyes (also played by Doug Jones) are archetypal figures from Spanish folklore unknown to me, their placement in the story is completely random. With the story existing in this girl's head, you would think that these figures would have some sort of symbolic or thematic connection to figures or situations in her real life, wouldn't you? Think of Dorothy's fantasy in The Wizard of Oz (another story which is not magic realism). With no connection to life, these figures, these tasks she must perform, are just completely random.

That's how this part of the movie felt to me - just random. Which I suppose it could be argued was the point. Just a story a kid would tell. A rambling, incoherent, make-it-up-as-you-go-along story.

But, the movie had some nice visuals, and much as in del Toro's earlier The Devil's Backbone I found the "real" story far more interesting. Good performances by all; I just wish they had a more coherent story to tell.

Adrienne Shelly, 1966-2006

2006-11-07T12:13:00.000-05:00

Adrienne Shelly, I always felt, was one of those iconic New York actors, on the same level as the Parker Poseys, the Griffin Dunnes, the Maggie Gyllenhaals and the Cynthia Nixons of the city. That she was also a talented director (though I didn't care for her first film, Sudden Manhattan, I very much enjoyed her follow-up I'll Take You There, and her new movie Waitress starring Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion will be at Sundance this year) was just gravy. Best known for her starring roles in two of Hal Hartley's best films (The Unbelievable Truth and one of my favorite movies of all time, Trust), Adrienne was well-loved for being able to project a pitch-perfect blend of innocence and world-weary cynicism with a perfectly deadpan comic grace.

I had the privilege of meeting Adrienne two times. The first was at the 2000 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, where her movie I'll Take You There premiered. The Wild Colonials, who had done a song on the soundtrack, were giving a small, intimate, acoustic set. I was seated at a table in the second row, Adrienne was directly in front of me in the first. About halfway through the show, this photographer dude with this ENORMOUS bag walks into the room and decides to set up camp RIGHT in front of us. Adrienne looked taken aback for a second, looked around her in the cutest did-that-just-happen? kind of way, then did the only thing she could do: she laughed. It was such a small moment, but so funny, so real and surreal at the same time.

The second time I met Adrienne was at a surprise Q&A session that broke out after a screening of another of her movies, Revolution #9, down at either the Quad or Cinema Village, can't remember which. Nothing particularly dramatic about that time.

Last Wednesday, Adrienne Shelly was spending the night at the apartment that she used as her office and sometime guest quarters, down in the Village. Sometime during the night she got into an argument with Diego Pillco, a construction worker in the building, regarding the noise he was making. Pillco punched Adrienne, killing her, then dragged her body back up to her apartment and hung her from her shower curtain rod to make it appear that she had committed suicide.

Adrienne Shelly turned 40 in June. She leaves behind a husband and a 3 year-old daughter.

Sorry to start the day on such a downer. I'm just upset that none of the news headlines even mention her name, only refer to her as "actress". I recognized her picture and had to check online to make sure it was her. NY1 to my knowledge wasn't even reporting the story until the whole murder angle broke, and even still in the whole of their report only refer to her as "actress", and never once mention her name.

Her name was Adrienne Shelly, and she was awesome.

*Superman Returns

2006-07-02T10:32:00.000-04:00

Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Michael Dougherty (screenplay and story), Dan Harris (screenplay and story), Bryan Singer (story), Jerry Siegel & Joel Shuster (book and characters)

There's a scene about midway through Superman Returns when Superman (Brandon Routh) asks Lois (Kate Bosworth) to come with him, that he has something to show her. They fly high above Metropolis, and he gives her a short but big speech about how, despite Lois' human-empowering, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial to the contrary, people still need saving, and are still asking to be saved. They fly back to the Daily Planet building, where she goes inside and he flies off into space. A moving scene, I suppose, but all I kept thinking was: wasn't there something that he wanted to show her?

And that pretty much points to my fundamental problem with Bryan Singer's latest forway into superhero franchisedom, which is this: the movie isn't about anything.

Much is made in the beginning of the film that Superman is back. Not just that he's here, but that he's back, i.e., that the act of return itself, and therefore his absence, actually had some significance. All signs point to this being where the movie is headed: why did he leave? Why did he come back? How has the world changed in his absence? How has he changed? Will he fit in any better or worse than he did before? Will the world still have a place for him? Will the world welcome him back? Has the world simply moved on without him?

All of these questions, and any other question of relevance or significance, are completely ignored.

Instead, we have some inane plot involving Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor (who also returns, conveniently, at the exact same time as Superman) trying to raise an island off of the East Coast, flooding and killing millions. Can Superman stop him in time? (Duh.)

The casting didn't bother me as much as I thought it would, mostly because Superman Returns isn't nearly as direct a sequel to Richard Donner's Superman and Richard Donner/Richard Lester's Superman II as you've been led by the press and geek sites to believe. Yes, it is a sequel, but it operates just fine (better, in fact) as a standalone, or a reboot if you want to get technical. So, while implausible, it is at least theoretically conceivable that everyone was 18 years old when Superman left, and that's why they're now, what, 23?, now that he's come back. Implausible, but conceivable.

A lot has been made of the long search for a new actor to play Superman, and as actors go, Brandon Routh isn't a bad choice, though he's no Christover Reeve. See, Reeve's greatness was always that he was able to pull off both Clark Kent and Superman with equal aplomb, whereas other screen Clark/Supermans looked either like boxers stuffed into suits and glasses (George Reeves) or, like Tobey Maguire in the Spiderman movies, little boy heads freakishly stuck onto man-bodies (Dean Cain, and now Brandon Routh). Still, anything's better than, say, Nicolas Cage (age-appropriateness aside).

Effects were well-done, for the most part. Note to self: when making an effects-heavy Hollywood blockbuster-type (and especially when using that "rubberman" software that is apparently the pinnacle of visual effects technology today - at least, that's what everyone's using), use effects sparingly, behind lots of shadows and smoke, and in actual speed (sped up, in fact, if possible). Under no circumstances should effects like this be shown in slow motion, with camera lingering significantly over it all. Hollywood, listen: I know you spent a hundred million dollars on it and you want to get every penny's worth, but trust me, "rubberman" does NOT look as good as you think it does (i.e., at all).

So why recommend Superman Returns? Like I said, most of the effects were good, and performances were solid. Plus, I remember actually recommending Revenge of the Sith last year (dear god, can I retcon that review?), and Superman Returns was certainly better than that.

Global benefit for Equality Now, weekend of 6/22-25

2006-06-08T11:14:00.000-04:00

Listen up, this is important:

The weekend of June 22-25 is playing host to benefit screenings of Joss Whedon's movie Serenity around the world. Screenings will be preceded or followed by dinners, auctions, and other fundraising activities, with all proceeds above and beyond the price of theater/print/restaurant rental going to Equality Now, an international organization which works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world through the mobilization of public pressure. Issues of concern to Equality Now include rape, domestic violence, reproductive rights, trafficking, female genital mutilation, political participation, and gender discrimination.

Go to http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/ to find information on screenings in your neck of the woods.

To learn more about Equality Now, go to: http://www.equalitynow.org/

***

The NYC screening will take place on June 23 (Friday) at Cinema Village (22 E.12th St.) at 11:45 PM. Tickets are only $11 and will be available for purchase soon (I hear) at the Cinema Village website: http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/

Dinner and auction will be at Rose & Ting Noodles & Grille (85 4th Ave. (@10th St.)) at 8:30 PM. Tickets are only $10, and include food, tax and tip (drinks and dessert are extra), and are available NOW at: http://outerrimoutfitters.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=13

Seating is limited!

You can attend either or both events. (Or neither, I suppose.... ;_; )

For more information (not much yet beyond what I just told you, but keep checking the site for updates), go to: http://www.browncoatsofnyc.org/portal.php?page=3

Please pass along to anyone you know who might be interested in this sort of thing.

If you're there on the 23rd, ask anyone in charge in point you to Mike C., and tell them you heard about the event here at moviesofmike.

X-Men: The Last Stand

2006-05-26T22:48:00.000-04:00

Directed by Brett Ratner
Written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn

Bad? Really bad. How bad? Really bad.

Where to start? The cheesed-out dialogue? The plot that was about four movies crammed into one? The bad special effects? Where? Where to start?

Rumors have been flying around for a year that Fox was really rushing along this project, and it shows. So, as much as I hate Ratner, maybe this movie would have been just as bad had Singer remained on the project? (Or, since Singer had already proven himself a serious, and seriously good, filmmaker in the past, the studio would have been more lenient with scheduling and rewrites and such. Who knows?)

As much as I like comics, I must confess that the first (and still only) X-Men book I've ever read was only last Christmas. Everything I know of the X-Men comes from the previous two movies, which I really like, as well as just those little anecdotal things that one picks up here and there (e.g., I know who Gambit is and could probably pick him out of a lineup, though I'm not quite sure what his powers are -- I know he's like some master thief or whatever, but I don't think that qualifies as a mutation). What I like about the previous two movies were that they were serious movies. Yes, they had funny moments, even stupid moments, but the movies themselves were always serious at their core. They never got silly, which is exactly why I always liked the X-Men movies so much more than, say, the Spiderman movies, both of which just feel silly to me.

And that's the problem with X3. X3 is a very silly film.

Not to mention disrepectful. Characters that were built up in the other two movies, even major characters, even arguably THE main character of the previous two films (won't say which here) are just...killed. Without anything resembling an honest emotion. One of them isn't even killed on camera, and no one ever really mentions him again. These characters are not so much killed as they are discarded. Ignored and, worst of all, disrespected.

Contrast with a movie like, say, Serenity, where major characters die, but their deaths actually matter, and more importantly are heartfelt. Killing off major characters is always a gamble, and not something ever to be done just to be edgy, or twisty, or because you're lazy, or because you just don't care.

So, other than that, what is there? Almost shockingly (and most certainly laughably) bad CGI, and extremely bad dialogue -- new character Angel (Ben Foster), for example, has exactly two lines in the entire film, both of them delivered in the worst comical Simpsons-parody-of-a-bad-soap-opera style imagineable, except this ain't a parody, and this ain't the Simpsons.

Alright, here's the plot: Jean Grey (Famke Jansenn) has come back from the dead, though it's never made quite clear why, or how, or even when (not to mention where she got that outfit). Only it's not really Jean Grey, but her heretofore never-mentioned alter-ego Phoenix, who has all the power of Jean Grey with none of the conscience, humanity, etc. Magneto (Ian McKellen)sees her as the perfect trump in his battle against the normals, who have created a "cure" for mutation and have weaponized it. So, the stage is set for the "final" battle between mutants who want to wipe out humans and mutants (led by Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), yadda yadda) who want to help defend the very humans who hate them. Along the way we have an obligatory and/or pointless romantic subplot or two, a bunch of characters die (have I mentioned?), at least one major character is "cured" (again, aren't we supposed to care? Goddamn you, why don't I care?) and there is some ridiculous business concerning the Golden Gate Bridge. Poor Ian McKellan. Poor Hugh Jackman. Poor everyone.

Stay tuned after tge credits for one more surprise twist! Could there really be another sequel in the works? Not bloody likely, although I hear Arnold Schwarzenegger is gonna be looking for work fairly soon.

Silent Hill

2006-04-21T22:50:00.000-04:00

Directed by Christophe Gans
Written by Roger Avary (screenplay), Nicolas Boukhrief (story), Christophe Gans (story)

First of all, how 'bout a big hand for Akira Yamaoka? How cool was it hearing "You're Not Here" and "Letter - From the Lost Days" on the big screen? And kudos to the studio (or Gans or whoever) for allowing as much of Yamaoka's original music as they did. Hawttt doesn't begin to describe it.

I'm by no means an expert on the Silent Hill games -- I've only played the first and the fourth ones, and only for about an hour each at that, and only about enough to know for sure that a) I like the mood/look/tone of the thing, and b) they are waaaay better than the Resident Evil games, as in you get to run around everywhere instead of doing that weird spinning chicken-walk thing, and do I really have to see some cheesy cut-scene EVERY time I go up and down stairs or open a door? I know I'm opening the door! It's a game, it's what I just commanded you to do! Asses.

So anyway, yeah, just saying. Not an expert on the games, so the movie wasn't, like, beholden, if you know what I mean.

The story (of the movie) involves a young girl named Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who suffers from some sort of mental illness that neither her adoptive parents nor her doctors can figure out. She sleepwalks, experiences lost time (during which she frequently draws creepy stuff), and during her "spells" often speaks of a place called "Silent Hill". A little Internet research turns up the fact that there actually is a place called Silent Hill, a small ghost-town not on any maps (the town was abandoned after the mine underneath caught fire - a fire still burning to this day) very near the orphanage on whose doorstep Sharon was first discovered nine years ago. So, mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) decides to spirit Sharon away to Silent Hill, very much against the wishes of her husband Christopher (Sean Bean), to try and maybe figure out what the deal is with their daughter. They arrive in town, Sharon disappears, and then all sorts of creepy and gross stuff happens.

It's actually pretty interesting (and a pretty close approximation of my personal vision of hell) until they start explaining things. The final explanation, something about witches or a witch-hunt or something, didn't make a bit of sense to me.

While they were in the mood to explain things, I would have appreciated a word or two about the semiotics (semiology? systology?) behind some of these demons (or whatever). Okay, the burned children and the nurses were a no-brainer (hey, did anyone else start singing "We are young / No one can tell us we're wrong" in their heads during the scene with the nurses? Or was that just my tumor again?), but why, for example, did that guy with the pyramid for a head have, like, a pyramid for a head?

There's a story going around that the original script did not have a single male character in it, and that the Sean Bean character and the detective (Kim Coates) were added by special request of the studio at the last moment. If true, it shows - the two characters lift right out of the movie, and any exposition provided in their scenes could very easily have been provided elsewhere.

I was really looking forward to this one, too. The trailers and posters and stuff certainly made this one look a bit smarter than your run-of-the-mill horror flick, or game adaptation for that matter. Unfortunately, aside from some pretty creepy imagery, Silent Hill winds up being just more of the same. Damn.

February Home Video Roundup

2006-03-03T18:41:00.000-05:00

Wedding Crashers (dir. David Dobkin, wr. Steve Faber, Bob Fisher) - This one and The 40-Year-Old Virgin heralded for some a renaissance in comedy in 2005. Witty and clever while also crass and brash and NOT about the gross-out (though not above it either), yet still firmly character-based, with surprising warmth and heart. And very, very funny. I think the per-minute laugh ratio was actually a bit higher with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but if you like the sort of comedy described above, Wedding Crashers is definitely not one to pass over. Plus, I'm starting to find out what the rest America apparently discovered like two years ago: Rachel McAdams is really, really cool (keep reading).

Cry_Wolf (dir. Jeff Wadlow, wr. Jeff Wadlow, Beau Bauman) - I don't even remember why I rented this. Maybe someone I know worked on it or something. Note to self: STOP RENTING THESE GODDAMNED BOARDING SCHOOL TEEN-HORROR MOVIES.

Among the bonus features on the DVD are two short films made by the makers of this film, upon the strengths of which they were apparently able to raise the money to buy this thing. I enjoyed each of these shorts more than I did the whole of the main feature.

Red Eye (dir. Wes Craven, wr. Carl Ellsworth (screenplay and story), Dan Foos (story)) - Arriving from Netflix on the same day as Cry_Wolf is Red Eye. Prepared for another silly horror crap-fest, I was pleasantly surprised (really surprised, and really pleasantly) at how good this movie was. With this and Into the Blue, it's been a pretty good year for solid, well-crafted, tight and genuinely suspenseful b-thrillers. And again, Rachel McAdams is awesome. Cillian Murphy, who I started to like after Batman Begins (I hated 28 Days Later), is awesome. Brian Cox is awesome, but you already knew that.

Here's how much I liked the movie - about three chapters in, as well as about three or four chapters from the end, the disc started skipping, bad. I don't know what the deal was, as the disc itself didn't look terribly scratched, and my player is only three months old. But, no matter how many times I tried wiping the disc (carefully) and putting it back in, same deal. Usually, at this point, I will either send for a replacement or, if I'm sick of it, will just send the movie back. But this time, I did neither. I just skipped over the offending parts and resumed watching. Because I had to know how the thing ended. I HAD to.

The Aristocrats (dir. Paul Provenza) - Is there anything less funny than having someone explain to you why exactly a joke is supposed to be funny? Because that's what The Aristocrats is, basically -- an endless lineup of comedians telling the camera, and each other, why the titular joke is supposed to be funny. George Carlin, in particular, feels the need to explain it at least three times.

And what about that joke? Everyone goes on and on about how brilliant it can be with its endless variations and details and such, and yet every telling of the joke is almost identical: father fucks daughter, daughter fucks son, son fucks grandmother, etc. etc., everyone takes a huge crap and they eat it. And as for its supposed shock value...maybe I'm just on the internets way too much, or watch too many videos or whatever, but...in what sense exactly is any of this shocking?

Proof (dir. John Madden, wr. David Auburn (play and screenplay), Rebecca Miller (screenplay)) - Funny, this is sort of exactly how I've always imagined Gwyneth Paltrow's real life to be - lots of quietly gazing out of dusty windows onto empty, tree-lined suburban streets under overcast skies, heart full of longing and sadness. Jake Gyllenhaal is cool, if miscast (if Gwyneth has always been the young girl with the old soul, Jake is like the guy in his 30s who can get away with playing a high school senior for at least the next 15 years). Anthony Hopkins gives a predictable performance, that is to say good, but nothing new. Same, Hope Davis, who I actually usually even like. The movie is based on an award-winning Broadway play that I never saw. My friend Will says that his friend said that they actually cut out the best line of the play for the movie. I'm curious what this line was, but I guess I don't really care enough to pursue. Anyone?

Pulse (Kairo) (dir. Kiyoshi Kurasawa, wr. Kiyoshi Kurasawa) - Wow. And not necessarily a this-is-a-great-movie "wow", but more a I-was-not-prepared-for-this-at-all "wow". Though it's being billed and sold as a horror movie, I would not classify it as such. Instead, I would compare it to a movie like the excellent Memento Mori, which uses some horror movie elements, but is actually a pretty heavy drama with social commentary to boot, and where most of the "terror" is actually more like a nagging, existential angst.

And like Memento Mori, Pulse is a good film (though Mori was better), but you have to know what you're getting into. It made me very, very depressed. Definitely not for everyone (especially if you're expecting straight horror).I'm still trying to decide whether or not I like the thing, but I do know that I live in fear of the American remake (due for release next month I believe). I really have no idea what they're going to do with this.

The World (Shijie) (dir. Zhang Ke Jia, wr. Zhang Ke Jia) - While we're on the topic of depressing Asian films, I finally got a chance to see The World, which had an excellent trailer and played here in town for exactly two weeks before it disapparated.

An allegorical examination of a culture that grew up...not too fast, or too slow, just...differently, I guess, than we've seen. A world where every advance in technology and media, and every fashion trend, is readily available and accessible, yet the idea of foreign travel is still a curiosity. And truly, why go out to see the world when you have the whole world in your own backyard?

Director Zhang Ke Jia presents the story with a surprisingly clear, keen observational eye, offering no judgement or critique of this country, culture, or lifestyle until literally the final shot of the film (assuming I'm reading it correctly).

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (dir. Steve Box, Nick Park, wr. Nick Park, Bob Baker, Steve Box, Mark Burton) - After all this depressing social commentary, I just wanted to see something funny, you know? Something funny and fun and cool and light and kick-ass that would make me smile and laugh out loud. Wallace & Gromit satisfied on all counts. Funny, cute, witty, winning in every conceivable sense. Did they save Grommie from the fire, anyone know?

January Home Video Roundup

2006-02-03T18:40:00.000-05:00

January sucked. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

D.E.B.S. (dir. Angela Robinson, wr. Angela Robinson) - One of my brothers wanted to rent this when I was back in L.A. over New Year's. I knew nothing about it other than I had heard from a couple people that it was really, really bad. We started watching, and it was actually kind of alright, fun in a completely brainless, wacky, popcorn-movie kind of way. Unfortunately, I fell asleep about 20 minutes in (loooooong day) and had to miss the rest. But, what I saw seemed cute and fun enough that I wanted to see the rest, so the video was netflixed as soon as I got back.

The rest of the movie was par for the course. Fun, kinda stupid-funny, but I've certainly seen worse. Come for the funky Charlie's Angels-style action bafoonery/teen lesbian coming-of-age romance mashup; stay to hear Devon Aoki doing the most comically bad French accent in recorded history (and doing so intentionally, one hopes).

Into the Blue (dir. John Stockwell, wr. Matt Johnson) - You've seen the trailer. Jessica Alba in a bikini. That's all we needed to know, right? Jessica Alba in a bikini. This is the Jessica-Alba-in-a-bikini movie. Hey, remember that movie with Jessica Alba in a bikini? Let's go rent that thing with Jessica Alba in a bikini. Oh yeah, that thing with Jessica Alba in a biniki.

Okay, I have to admit that I was never a fan. Never seen Dark Angel, never even wanted to. And she made some movie where she was a dancer or something? Gag. She had a reasonably good cameo in the first season of Entourage that made me like her a little. I found her surprisingly awesome in Sin City, but stopped liking her again after I saw Fantastic Four, which wasn't a bad movie, but I really can't buy Jessica Alba as anything other than some 14 year-old woman-child stripper, let alone as some nuclear physicist or whatever the hell she was supposed to be in that one. Ugh.

I don't really know what that tangent was about. Into the Blue actually turned out to be a really cool movie: a nice, tight, genuinely suspenseful 70s-style B-thriller that held my attention from beginning to end. Remember Cellular, a year or two back? It was like that.

Paul Walker - I haven't seen any of the Fast/Furious movies, but in the ones I have seen him in, he always seems to play, like, the straight-laced dude with a kooky brother (or brother-type) who drags him into some crazy scheme and seedy underworld. But, I still like him and keep watching his movies anyway. Still not quite sure why. His performances are all very Keanu-like. We'll wait and see if Paul has a Matrix in him, somewhere (possibly the forthcoming Running Scared, of which I am hearing interesting things).

And yes, Jessica Alba in a bikini. If you're into that sort of thing.

December Home Video Roundup

2006-01-10T18:44:00.000-05:00

December began with promise, but.... Ask me about it sometime. Anyways, happy new year and stuff.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (dir. Doug Liman, wr. Simon Kinberg) - Avoided this like the plague in the theaters. Was so frakking sick of...lords of Cobol forgive me...Brangelina, that I said, Fie! None of this! Screw that noise!

After a few months had gone by, I finally calmed down a bit and decided what they hey, let's give it a spin. And guess what? It wasn't that bad. Kinda fun, in fact. Brad and Angelina have definite chemistry, and there are plenty of fun chases and shootouts and such. We're in definite popcorn territory here, but...all together now...you've seen worse.

Amusing post-script: Angelina sent me a nice basket with a note asking (not begging, mind you, as Angelina begs to no one) for forgiveness. How could I not? Even if the oranges were Valencia. Just saying.

Fantastic Four (dir. Tim Story, wr. Mark Frost, Michael France, Stan Lee (comic), Jack Kirby (comic)) - Another avoid-at-all-costs movie that I finally decided to give a chance. Now, I've never read an FF book in my life -- all I knew of it was anecdotal stuff and half-remembered details from the 60s and 80s cartoon series (there was a stretchy guy, right? And some rock dude? And they wear blue, right?) Everyone everywhere was saying how bad this movie was. The ONE person who told me that it was alright was, ironically, a co-worker who is like the biggest Fantastic Four comic fan on earth. Confusing.

Completely unrelated story: I had gotten a free Fantastic Four t-shirt at the Episode III premiere a while back, and one day I was wearing it in the elevator when some guy gets on, sees the shirt and asks me if the movie's any good. I have to confess that I hadn't seen it yet. And then for the next 35 floors I had to hear him talk about, "That Jessica Alba, man, she is so hot. And she's hot because she's so small, you know? Like, tiny. That's when they're hot. When they get a little older, they fill out a little more, get a little bigger, and then they stop being hot, you know? Like that Jaime Pressley. Or that other girl, Jessica Biehl? They were so hot when they were younger, but now they're kinda built, so I don't like them anymore. But that Jessica Alba, she's tiny. Man, she is so hot."

You should all be thanking your personal god that you don't live in that building (unless you do, in which case, hey, it's a nice building, at least).

Anyway, saw the movie (and got the t-shirt ha ha), and it wasn't bad. Lots of good New York shots. Effects weren't terrible. I don't know that they really captured the essence of what the FF are all about in the books, character- and story-wise, but as a standalone, Friday night thing, it's actually a pretty fun movie. Watching (tiny) Jessica Alba trying to be, like, some nuclear astronaut or whatever's a trip, though. (Hey, remember Denise Richards in Tomorrow Never Dies?)

Happy Endings (dir. Don Roos, wr. Don Roos) - Christ, I am so over these the-loosely-interconnected-lives-of-four-hundred-people-living-in-such-and-such-city-(usually-Los-Angeles) movies. I loooved Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex way back in the day, but nothing he's done since then (and, as I later discovered, nothing he's done before). Here he makes all the same obvious observations about life and family and relationships and trust and betrayal and the irreversibility of things typical of your run-of-the-mill the-loosely-interconnected-lives-of-four-hundred-people-living-in-such-and-such-city-(usually-Los-Angeles) movie, hereafter known as the ROTMTLILOFHPLISASC(ULA) movie. There's a way to make these movies work. Don't just throw in random details that sound important but are ignored for the rest of the movie. Make the movie about the characters, not about the events (or, more to the point, how clever you are in linking all these events). Happy Endings is no Nashville, or Shortcuts or Magnolia, or even You and Me and Everyone We Know.

I almost saw this movie for free at a preview screening many months ago, ticket received through an organization with which I occasionally volunteer. But, they over-"sold" the screening and I couldn't get in. By way of apology, I received a Happy Endings notebook featuring the poster for the film, with a pat-the-bunny-esque fuzzy patch where the towel is, as well as one free pass to any movie showing at a Clearview Cinema (blackout dates apply). The pass is still in my wallet. Anyone want a notebook?

Roll Bounce (dir. Malcolm D. Lee, wr. Norman Vance, Jr.) - Loved it loved it loved it. If you've seen the trailer, you know exactly what you're getting (unless, like me, you actually said out loud, Ohmigod, it's the gay black Lords of Dogtown). A very sweet, fun, funny, coming-of-age story set in the suburbs in 70s, when disco-funk was king, roller rinks were the shit, and...okay, it's a tiny bit before my time, as the only roller skating I was doing in the '70s was in the driveway and the garage, where my brothers, cousins, and a few of the loserish-er neighborhood kids had set up our own makeshift roller rink, complete with baby ghetto blaster playing a cassette of the Xandu soundtrack, and...well, that was about it (we were very easily entertained, apparently). It didn't take much to entertain us in those days. The kids in Roll Bounce, even the loser kids, are much cooler than we ever were. That makes me sad. Rent it.

The Polar Express (dir. Robert Zemekis, wr. Chris Van Allsburg (book), Robert Zemekis, William Broyles, Jr.) - I only rented this because I kept getting $3-off coupons with my Peanut Butter Crunch, and for some reason it made me wonder if, should I someday wind up seeing this movie on a plane or something and end up liking it, I would one day regret not taking this valuable limited-time offer of owning this video for, you know, $3 off. Turns out, of course, that I need not have worried.

Because of the title, and because there was a picture of a big steam engine on the poster, I thought it might have something to do with the glorious Galaxy Express 999 (okay, so that last Maetel movie thing sucked, but the first 999 movie and its sequel, Adieu, Galaxy Express 999 were pure genius), but...actually, I'm still not sure. Maybe the connection is the key to understanding this film.

The Polar Express, far as I can tell, is about this weird race of gangly, spastic zombie-children who live in a weird, sort of plasticine version of our world. Apparently, in this world, one need only utter the magic words "I don't believe in Santa Claus" to summon, almost Beetle Juice-like, a kind of ghost-train with a conductor who sort of emotionally blackmails these children into allowing themselves to be kidnapped to the North Pole, where they get to see Santa Claus for themselves and learn the error of their ways before being sent back to their homes, young minds properly rehabilitated.

Here's where the 999 connection comes in (I think). In 999, the train took people from Earth to the mechanized world so that they could give their souls over to the machines and become robots themselves. Zombies, as it were. So while The Polar Express begins as a sort of an anti-999 in that it is picking up people who are already zombies and taking them on a long trip, you would think that this trip would lead to a place where they, if the analogy holds, would be turned back into human beings, dig? But The Polar Express instead leads them to a place where the zombies become, if anything, even more zombified than before. It's an odd relationship, and one that, I confess, I have not yet completely been able to wrap my mind around. Like, what is The Polar Express about, really?

If I've somehow made this movie sound more interesting than it is, I apologize -- trust me, it's not. What we have here is a "kid's movie" in the truest sense of the term. Ever had to sit through one of those horrible little school plays written by 8-year-olds? Characters appear out of nowhere, say one or two things, then disappear, forever. Completely non-sensical sideplots are introduced, go nowhere, and similarly disappear. There is a half-assed attempt at some lame, obvious moralizing (in this case, it's that poor people are human beings, too -- who knew?). Someone sings a song, for absolutely no reason.

And have you ever had one of those moments where, no matter how much you hate an actor, you see them doing something that just makes you feel so much worse for them than you ever have for any other human being? Hearing Tom Hanks singing the "hot chocolate song" is one of those moments.

There's an audience for a movie like this, somewhere (I believe it did reasonably well, box-office-wise), though I haven't been able to figure out who it could be. Obviously made by kids for kids, yet I would think the kids themselves would be too frightened by all the zombies. So...zombie movie fans? Or possibly all those closet masochists who just can't resist...and I promised myself I wouldn't say this, but what the hey...a trainwreck.

Alls I know is, last time a hobo on a train yelled at me to "grab his muck stick", it certainly didn't end as happily as this.

November Home Video Roundup

2005-12-03T18:38:00.000-05:00

Dot the I (dir. Matthew Parkhill, wr. Matthew Parkhill) - Spoiler warning (if you've already seen this movie, don't think you'll ever see this movie, or simply don't care about being spoiled, copy the following tiny text into your favorite text editing program and increase font to read): If there's anything more tired than "reality" TV, it's comedians, TV shows, and movies that attempt to discuss the "phenomenon" (fad, more like) of "reality" TV.

I swear, it's like when someone makes a Springer joke. They think they're being all funny and smart and insightful and crap, when really all they're saying is that they've just found out about Springer. (Is Springer still on? Do the kids these days even know who Springer is?)

Despite the presence of Gael Garcia Bernal, I think not worth the rental.

Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (dir. Andy Fickman, wr. Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney) - Brilliant in concept and execution. Basically, it's a snarky music-and-dance version of the classic '30s exploitation flick Reefer Madness that actually manages to incorporate all the characters, major plot points, many minor details, and even quite a bit of dialogue from the original movie. If that description sounds even remotely humorous to you, go rent this thing right now.

It stars Kristen Bell, Christian Campbell, Steven Weber, Ana Gesteyer, Alan Cumming, Neve Campbell, and several dozen others, and they all sing and dance and sing and dance some more. If that description sounds even remotely humorous to you, go rent this thing right now.

They even throw in as a bonus on the DVD the entirety of the original film which, ironically enough, rumor has it, is only even remotely watchable when you're really, really high.

Land of the Dead (dir. George A. Romero, wr. George A. Romero) - When I first heard the news that new Romero zombie movie was coming out, I thought, Awesome! Anyone who knows me can tell you that his Dead movies are among my favorite movies of all time, zombie or otherwise. But then I had to stop and think, okay, is he going to do it right, or is he going to follow this weird and completely nonsensical fad of, you know, the running zombie?

When I first heard the (very) general plot of the story -- the zombies get smarter and form societies and learn to cooperate and use tools and stuff, while humanity fiddles their last decadent days away in some "last human stronghold", oh and Dennis Hopper's gonna be in it -- I thought, gag. So, I skipped it in the theaters, and months later rented it out of obligation only.

I started the movie, and yeah, not bad. The zombies don't run, for one thing. And the whole thing about them starting to develop a rudimentary intelligence, I can see, is simply an extrapolation of the end of Day of the Dead, wherein zombie Bud definitely starts displaying not only a sort of "intelligence", but a rudimentary moral code and definite management potential as well. As for the "last human stronghold" idea -- how is that radically different from the underground lab of Day of the Dead, or even in concept from the mall of Dawn or the house of Night? It's just a matter of scale, and in any large group you'll have your haves and your have nots. Just imagine all the scientists of Day either giving up, getting killed, or left behind when it was time to move on to the next fortress (that certainly was the direction things were headed in Day). So anyway, my point is, it all made sense, once I gave it a chance, and actually sat down and tried to reason it out.

Let that be a lesson to all of you.

Solid zombie stuff, with a surprisingly good performance from John Leguizamo, whom I usually cannot stand. A good addition to the Romero zombie canon, though I really don't know where (or if) he's gonna go with it from here.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (dir. Tim Burton, wr. Roald Dahl (book), John August) - A lot has been made of this new Tim Burton remake of the Willy Wonka movie (more on this in a moment). Supposedly much closer in content and tone to the original novel by Roald Dahl (who apparently hated Mel Stuart/Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka), even though the trailers really did make it look like one of those near short-for-shot remakes, even in terms of costumes and makeup and dialogue.

I love both Dahl's novel and the Stuart/Wilder movie. Grew up with both of them. Yes, they were quite different from each other, but I still liked them, and they were just different enough that I could separate them in my head. Like Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds vs. Jonathan Frakes' Thunderbirds, or the old Battlestar Galactica vs. the new Battlestar Galactica (which, if you're not watching yet, hop to). Some of the character names are the same, and the basic premise is the same, and even some of the ship designs are the same, but they are still different and enjoyable enough that I can like both, without necessarily having to compare which version does what better than the other. Not quite apples v. oranges, more like Gala v. Braeburn. Both are apples, both are good, and both are enjoyable on their own merits but not quite justifiably open to the which-is-better-than-which discussion, even though they're both apples. (The answer, by the way, is Gala).

Which sort of brings me back to the first line of this review. Just because Burton took out the geese and put in the squirrels, just because Burton put in a scene with Willy in the jungle, just because Charlie now has a father doesn't mean (to me) that Burton has made a movie closer in content and tone to the original novel. Make no mistake, Burton's film (to me) is a remake of the Stuart/Wilder Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

And a quite inferior one at that. Burton's added content does nothing for the film. So what that the Oompa-Loompas now play drums and electric guitars and keyboards and stuff, and can sing in four different styles of music? Pointless. And the thing about Willy Wonka's dad, frankly, is the sort of hackneyed family-values moralizing that one would expect from Steven Spielberg, not from a filmmaker as (once) original as Burton. With this film and Big Fish (a film I actually enjoy a great deal, by the way), is Burton becoming the new Spielberg? And I mean that in the worst possible sense.

Mad Hot Ballroom (dir. Marilyn Agrelo, wr. Amy Sewell) - I saw this movie laying in bed with my coat still on, bundled under two blankets, shivering and waiting for a fever to break, as T. sat seven feet away on the couch, laughing at me. Considering, I was in a fairly good mood because we'd just had Thanksgiving dinner at Les Halles (although it wasn't as good as I remembered last year's to be) and I had the next day off work (a fairly recent development in my office). Mad Hot Ballroom talks about a public school program apparently currently going on in New York City wherein children take a once-a-week ballroom dancing class, and then compete. Not as intense as Spellbound (however pointless knowing how to spell can be, it at least, however marginally, can help you with your SATs and get you into a good college, and the families taking part certainly take it seriously; dance, expecially as portrayed here, is seen as something that people have just fallen into, and honestly couldn't give a damn) and the film seems to focus more on the instructors than the kids themselves (ugh, remember Rock School?), but it's still a cute movie, worth a rental. Even if you're shivering away a fever under a coat and two blankets and one of your best friends is just sitting there laughing at you.

October Home Video Roundup

2005-11-03T20:05:00.000-05:00

Did you miss me? Forgive the silence of the last couple months - I've been so busy getting involved in other people's projects that I've been fully neglecting my own. I'm like the Adrian Tomine of crap.

In the coming weeks, I will be sneakily back-posting a few reviews for things I've seen in the last few months that for whatever reason never got posted. A few may even be up by the time you read this! It's up to you to find them, loyal readers, as my legal counsel has informed me that on this particular topic I must remain regrettably mum, lest they revoke my blogging license. That's a joke. You don't need a license to have a blog any more than you need a license to have a kid. And have you seen some of the stupid, ugly blogs out there?

Anyways, again, apologies. I'll try to get back on the ball, review-wise, and have something posted about a movie by the end of the weekend in which I saw said movie. In the meantime, to tide you over, as well as to give a nod to a few recent movies that I couldn't be bothered to see on the big screen, I give you the first in what I hope to be an occasional-but-regular segment of moviesofmike., the home video roundup.

The Aggressives (dir. Jeong Jae-Eun, wr. Jeong Jae-Eun) - Having thoroughly enjoyed Jeong Jae-Eun's feature debut Take Care of My Cat (near the top of my list of favorite movies of the 2000s so far), I eagerly anticipated a chance to get my hands on her follow-up feature, The Aggressives. Unfortunately, I must say I'm a bit disappointed. At first glance, the frenetic camerawork and mad pacing of the film makes it completely unrecognizable from the steady heartbeat that defined her previous film. About halfway through, though, you start to get what she's trying to do (at least I think I get it) - the spastic camera-work and Mountain-Dew-commercial editing (EXTREEEME!) is just as much a reflection of the lives, inner and outer, of what we can only assume is Korea's not-non-existent aggressive in-line skate subculture as the dreamy, hazy, somnambulistic approach of Take Care of My Cat reflected the lives of the young-women-on-the-verge of that film.

Does it work? Is it just an unfortunate case of an artist's subsequent work always being seen through the rosy gauze of their first? I don't think so, as I've seen a handful of short films that Jeong has made, both before and after Cat, and I feel like the dreamy style on Cat is pretty indicative of what she knows, and understands, best. So, kudos to her for trying something new; unfortunately, I just didn't buy it. I didn't get these characters (I tried), so I couldn't really care what happened to them (I tried). And I especially did not like the big "Hollywood" ending (I didn't try). Now available at a Hong-Kong-bootlegged Chinatown DVD shop near you.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (dir. Miranda July, wr. Miranda July) - cute flick, with more than a few moments that genuinely moved me (I liked the scene with the goldfish) but waaay too precious to ever make it into my personal collection. Although, that "pooping back and forth" emoticon is, like, my favorite thing right now.

Melinda and Melinda (dir. Woody Allen, wr. Woody Allen) - Woody Allen, to me, is one of those people whose movies you really want to like, even after you finish watching them, even after they sorta suck. Strangely, the one he did with Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci a few years back, Anything Else, was to me probably the most interesting movie he's made since, say, Deconstructing Harry, and probably my favorite of his since, say, Everyone Says I Love You (a movie that is simultaneously vastly entertaining and completely uninteresting). A lot of hopes are being pinned on the forthcoming Match Point, which people say is incredible, but we'll just have to wait and see. Anyways, Melinda and Melinda tells a parallel narrative of two versions of a story about a messed-up woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) who disrupts the lives of a small group of angsty Upper East Siders, as told over dinner by a bunch of pretentious Upper East Siders. One story is ostensibly a comedy (you can tell that it's a comedy not so much because it's funny but because Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell are in it), the other ostensibly a tragedy (you can tell...[snip]...Chloe Sevigny is in it). The two stories are being told in an attempt to find which is better or, at least, has more value: comedy or tragedy. Conclusion: people need both.

If that's what passes for great human insight in your own household, you have probably already seen (and been told that you absolutely adore) Crash (dir. Paul Haggis, wr. Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco). For all the swearing, explosions, histrionics and gunplay, the idea Haggis seems to be reaching for is that people everywhere are lonely and angry and scared, causing us to lash out at other people, and racism is usually the first place people go because it is the easiest, fastest, and most obvious way to dislike or to hurt someone. And the revelation is...what? (other than, gasp!, some Asian people speak English! The horror!) And the solution is...what?

I'm sorry, it's probably not nearly as bad a movie as I'm making it sound (a number of cheesy slow-motion shots aside, it is actually photographed quite nicely), it's just that.... Okay, I see a lot of movies that I think are pretty stupid, but usually by the time I get home, finish eating, or stick the thing in the mail back to Netflix, I've happily pretty much forgotten all about them. But, every once in a while, for whatever reason, one of these movies that I think are pretty unnoteworthy somehow captures the imagination of moviegoers at large, and then for the next year and a half I have to listen to people in the lunchroom gushing about how "beautiful", how "moving", how "deep", how "important" such-and-such movie is. And it is at that moment when that movie earns a special place in my dark and hateful heart as one of those movies that I HATE, and that I will always HATE, forever and ever and ever again. It happened with Dark City. It happened with Requiem for a Dream. It happened with Hero. It happened with Million Dollar Baby. To a slightly lesser extent, it happened with all three Lord of the Rings movies (which are like ballet or opera to me - yes, I know that it was a very difficult thing to pull off, and that everyone displays great talent at what they do, and while I can appreciate their good works on a purely technical level, none of it makes me FEEL anything, one way or the other). And unfortunately (for someone, I guess), it happened with Crash. Back against the wall, pal.

On the polar opposite end of the DVD suck-spectrum is Kontroll (dir. Nimrod Antal, wr. Jim Adler, Nimrod Antal). Oh, how I wish I caught this little gem of a film on the big screen. A surreal-yet-grittily-realistic look into the lives of clinically insane Polish subway inspectors (one gets the impression that you'd have to be insane to even apply), it's the rare film that can be simultaneously hilarious, depressingly horrific, heart-poundingly suspenseful, intelligent, and ultimately uplifting. Destined to be among my top 10 favorite movies of 2005, as unfortunately there isn't very much on the horizon to which I am looking forward (moviewise). Live in fear of the inevitable U.S. remake, starring, say, I don't know, Ewan MacGregor.

September Home Video Roundup

2005-10-01T23:32:00.000-04:00

Happy Autumn, everyone. On to the new(-ish) videos for last month:

Layer Cake (dir. Matthew Vaughn, wr. J.J. Connolly) - a lot of people were telling me how great this movie was, and how excited they were that Daniel Craig was gonna be the new Bond. I don't quite know what I was expecting from a British gangster/heist movie directed by a co-producer of Guy Ritchie's films, but what I got was...a British gangster/heist movie directed by a co-producer of Guy Ritchie's films. People loved it, I guess. Not my thing, but it may be yours. That's all I'll say about the film. I only really rented it to see what the new Bond may be like, and I have to say it's an interesting prospect, though wholly canceled out by the fact that fucking Haggis is writing it. Oh well, I only watch those movies for the music, anyway.

Mind the Gap (dir. Eric Schaeffer, wr. Eric Schaeffer) - I got this mainly because I knew Jill Sobule was in it, and it's always a hoot to see her in things. I didn't even realize that this was an Eric Schaeffer flick until I started watching it. Schaeffer I think is very underrated and misunderstood as a filmmaker (listen to me talking like an expert here): a lot of his detractors label him either a mysogynist or some immature man-child still wallowing in schoolyard jokes about bodily functions and premature ejaculation. But the thing is, personally, if I must watch a film from one of these Woody-Allenish "vanity" filmmakers (i.e., stories about the filmmakers themselves, starring the filmmakers themselves playing versions of themselves) I'd rather see an honest, warts-and-all portrayal of the filmmaker rather than, say, that thing that Ed Burns does in his movies. I think it speaks to Schaeffer's skills as a filmmaker that he can wite and portray characters who are deeply flawed (if not out-and-out assholes), and still make us care about them, or at the very least make us wonder what happens next (never more so than in the glorious Wirey Spindell) -- all the more so that said asshole is, you know, himself.

In any case, though I've grown weary of these movies about the-loosely-interconnected-lives-of-eight-hundred-people-living-in-such-and-such-city, I still liked this movie, and think it's worth a rental, if only because Jill Sobule is so gosh-darned adorable in it.

My Neighbors the Yamadas (dir. Isao Takahata, wr. Isao Takahata, Hisaiichi Ishii (comic)) - an excellent, new-ish offering from the famous Studio Ghibli. The animation is all digital, however drawn in the style of those old-school watercolory kids' anime shows (like that Chibi show. Remember that Chibi show? Nobody I know knows what this show is really called, we all just refer to it as "that Chibi show". ) Very cute, very funny, and surprisingly poignant comedy about a sort of mediocre, middle-class family and all the everyday things that makes life such a hassle. Also worth noting that he English dub, starring Randy Quaid, Molly Shannon, and Tress MacNeill is also quite good. Definitely worth renting if, like me, you enjoy this sort of thing.

Strings (dir. Anders Rønnow Klarlund, wr. Anders Rønnow Klarlund, Naja Marie Aidt) - I really, really wish I liked this movie more than I did, and am almost ashamed to admit that I did not, since this is, on paper, exactly the sort of film that I love. It is certainly a visual feast, and almost utterly brilliant in concept and execution, but...somewhere around the 2/3 of the way in it just kind of loses a lot of steam. Still very much worth the rental, I think.

Naked Fame (dir. Christopher Long) - The story of Colton Ford, one-time gay porn star, as he attempts to leave the business and start his new career as a pop singer. He (and his partner Blake Harper, who also left the business at the same time and now goes by his real name Glenn) face all manner of problems in this quest in the form of assholish and indifferent music industry execs, horrible bookings (what Ford believes to be a major industry showcase at "Britney Spears' new club" turns out to be basically a lounge act in the foyer of her empty family-restaurant NYLA), and a past life in porn that refuses to let him go.

A little career advice for Ford: if you're a former gay porn star, and want people to forget that you're a former gay porn star, and want to be taken seriously as a legitimate singer, STOP USING YOUR GAY PORN NAME, and STOP SINGING SONGS ABOUT GAY PORN.

So, the viewer is left in quite a dilemna: while Ford and especially the long-suffering Harper come off as pretty likeable guys, it's hard to root for Ford's success when his songs, and his singing, are so unbelievably heinous. What to do? Other than the huge headache caused by this conundrum, Naked Fame is notable mostly for its portrayal of Kyle something-or-other, a former-porn-star-turned-Svengali-business-manager, the kind of self-important prick who has to spell his full name to the operator when he calls 911 to report someone on the sidewalk having a drug-induced seizure.

Flightplan

2005-09-24T12:20:00.000-04:00

Directed by Robert Schwentke
Written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray

After T. told me that he didn't feel like seeing Proof for the second week in a row, I decided all on my own to go see Flightplan instead. Just cos, you know, Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster, you know?

Here, Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an aircraft engine engineer whose husband has just died. Unable to quite deal, she's decided to take her daughter (and her husband's body) and move from Berlin back into her parents' house on Long Island.

They're all flying on the (ginormous) plane whose engines she's designed, so she seems to get a weird, low-level VIP treatment - she has a badge from the company and is allowed to board the plane several minutes before all the other passengers start to file in en masse, yet she has to sit in coach, and none of the attendants or pilots appear to know who she is.

This all becomes very important later. Well, maybe not the badge.

Kyle and daughter (and everyone else) soon fall asleep. A bit later, Kyle wakes up and daughter is gone. She looks around for her. She asks everyone else if they've seen her. No one has seen her. In fact, no one can remember EVER having seen her. In fact, there is no record that the daughter ever boarded the plane. In fact, a call to the morgue back in Berlin says that her daughter died in the same accident (OR WAS IT??) that killed her husband.

As Kyle becomes increasingly unhinged (and passengers get increasingly inconvenienced, therefore antagonistic), we're all asking, has she lost her mind? Does the daughter exist? Has she been kidnapped? Is this all part of some insidious conspiracy? Who can we trust? Where's God, etc.?

I will not here tell you the answers to or reasons for all the misunderstanding in this The-Lady-Vanishes-meets-Panic-Room-...in-space! (now with added post-911 fearmongering - watch for the obligatory let's-blame-the-arabs scene, and then watch how it is "resolved" in the end) pastiche, but only say that, for all the set-up, said answers and reasons turn out to be disappointly, almost depressingly, mundane. Maybe that's the point. I don't know. At least The Forgotten had space aliens in it.

Foster gives a predictable performance, that is to say, it's very good, just nothing new. She's fragile and moody, then shows her undershirt and magically becomes Lara Croft. Ho-hum. But after the failure (on several levels) of a film like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and the (relative) success of, oh, say, Panic Room, can you blame her?

Peter Sarsgaard (as the initally nice-ish but increasingly creepy air marshall), though, I'm liking more and more with everything I see him in.

Sean Bean, who I've seen a million times though I can't for the life of me remember what, is also pretty good as the grizzling captain who has to weigh the safety of his 435 passengers against the implications of what has (possibly) happened to this one (possibly) deranged woman.

So, Flightplan doesn't completely suck, it just...kinda sucks. The pieces don't really fit. It's like those MPC Alpha Fighters that they sell at Robotech.com. They don't quite transform all the way, and the cannon doesn't really sit very nice on the hands, and bits keep breaking off of it, but they sure do look nice, and hell, you just spent eighty bucks on the thing. (Well, you did. I surely did not.)

P.S. I am officially never flying again. (Super-spoilery text: copy/paste into your favorite text-editing or word-processing program and increase font to read:) Now you can't even trust the air marshall. The air marshall!

Trailer watch:

Jarhead - why am I the only one who thinks this movie looks like utter crap? Well, Jamie Foxx aside, it looks like Mendes has got a pretty capable cast to work with, so I guess we'll just see. On cable.

North Country - ah, Oscar-bait. Next.

Memoirs of a Geisha - it's not so much the fact that everyone's speaking English that bugs me, it's that they all have accents.

Casanova - that same old faux-foreign-so-it's-"arty"-but-it's-in-English-so-it's-safe swill squirted out of Harvey Weinstein and Lasse Halstrom's collective diarrhetic sphincter this time every year.

Glory Road - an inspiring tale of one man'szzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

August Home Video Roundup

2005-09-03T22:35:00.000-04:00

Not a great month for new(ish) video rentals, unfortunately, though I have been catching up on plenty of TV show box sets (Mary Tyler Moore, Angel, Buffy. I think I'm giving up on Clamp's X, though, even though I'm more than halfway through -- it's totally a show where after the first three or four episodes you know exactly where it's going, and exactly how it's going to end, and then have to sit through a maddening 7 more discs before you get there). Also finally saw The Specials (sort of a wittier, lower-budget Mystery Men) starring Rob Lowe and Thomas Haden Church, which I found enjoyable (warning to Melissa Joan Hart fans: she's only it for all of forty seconds. Warning to Melissa Joan Hart haters: Melissa Joan Hart's in it).

On to the new(ish) movies!

Off the Map (dir. Campbell Scott, wr. Joan Ackermann) - Actor Campbell Scott's directorial debut, unfortunately, is notable only for the fact that it is actor Campbell Scott's directorial debut. His story about a tax-dodging Wilderness Family (Joan Allen, Sam Elliot, Valentina de Angelis) (remember The Wilderness Family? That shit used to be on tv ALL the time! Now it's NEVER on. I haven't seen that movie on TV since maybe 1989. Also, Pipi), the IRS guy (Jim True-Frost) who is sent to track them down, gets stung by a bee, decides to live with the family and inexplicably become an artist was all over the map (sorry) thematically. I get the sense that Scott wanted to make a subtle, ensemble, alt-family drama, but never really got a handle on what this movie was actually about. I know I certainly did not.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (dir. Darren Grant, wr. Tyler Perry) - I saw this movie for the exact same reason I suspect a lot of people wound up seeing this movie: I wanted to see if it really was as bad as I'd heard. My conclusion is: yes, it is. But it's also a little more interesting than most people are giving it credit for.

Yes, the humor (courtesy one multiple-role-playing, cross-dressing Tyler Perry, whose character Madea is the subject of many a highly-popular stage production, all written by Perry himself) is unbelievably corny, vaudevillian at best, and it's made all the more awkward because it is completely tacked onto an extraordinarily self-important and melodramatic story -- Kimberly Elise plays Helen, the titular "mad black woman" (and it's "mad" as in angry, though she does have her moments, and completely contrary to popular wisdom, not to mention common sense, that the titular character is in fact Madea, and it's "mad" as in "insane", which Madea gleefully is, and I love grammar, don't you?) is left by her husband (Steve Harris) for a white woman - will she ever learn to love again? (It's Shemar Moore so, you know, duh) -- which is derivative of any number of Terry MacMillan novels or every Lifetime movie, ever (and don't even get me started on that final scene of the movie, derivativeness-wise). It's like simultaneously watching two completely separate movies, with the "serious" plot infitely funnier than the "comedy".

Much of the criticism/discussion of the film that I read dealt with how unfunny the film was (yes), how derivative it was (yes), and whether or not such-and-such characters are or are not incredibly offensive racist stereotypes (possibly, though no more so than Eddie Murphy in any of his Klump roles, or the very existence of Chris Tucker), but I don't think anything I've read deal with what this movie is actually about: forgiveness. And when the final act of forgiveness comes, it actually comes against the wishes and expectations of the Madea character, and I'd imagine against those of much of the audience as well. In this sense, I find it very interesting the way that Perry portrays Madea as a sort of vox populi, even as Perry the writer subverts even his own expectations. It's a complex dynamic in a film that celebrates actions which are radical in their very Christian-conservativeness.

I don't recommend the movie, because on top of it being very corny and unoriginal, it is also just plain not very good. I'm just saying, don't believe everything you read.

Broken Flowers

2005-08-22T21:23:00.000-04:00

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Written by Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch has always been a bit hit-or-miss for me. While he excels in making quirky character pieces that are really about nothing much more than themselves and their own characters(Mystery Train, Stranger Than Paradise, Night on Earth), his attempts to crowbar his wacky-fun characters into cohesive plots have left me, at best, utterly indifferent (Dead Man) and, at worst, horrified (Ghost Dog). And although Broken Flowers undoubtedly has a cohesive plot, the idea of an aging Don Juan bouncing around the country having quirky encounters with quirky loves lost smacked much more of the former than the latter. Plus, the advance word was excellent. Plus, cahmaaahhhn, Bill Murray.

The plot is certainly cute enough: Murray plays aging Don Juan Don Johnston (subtle), who is being left by his girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy), whom we know is just the latest in an endless string of them. He receives an unsigned letter, typewritten on pink stationery, from someone identifying themself as an old girlfriend, warning Don that he has a 19 year-old son who is possibly out looking for him. His neighbor, detective novel freak Winston (Jeffrey Wright) sees the letter and tells Don to make a list of possible "suspects". Don does so, reluctantly. Winston takes the information to Google, Mapquest, and Orbitz and plots out Don's whole itinerary, complete with plane tickets and car rental.

Don had five girlfriends 19 years ago: the slightly trashy Laura (Sharon Stone), the uptight reformed-hippy Dora (played by - who else? - Frances Conroy), the enigmatic pet-whisperer Carmen (Jessica Lange), the very trashy Penny (Tilda Swinton), and someone named Michelle Pepe, who we never meet because she's dead. Don visits each of them in turn, always bringing a gift of pink flowers to gauge their reactions, and always searching for clues as to who may have written the letter, although it is confusing to me why the person who had sent the letter to Don in the first place would now try to hide the fact.

As for these "clues", Don is instructed by Winston to look for a typewriter and "anything pink". At this point, Jarmusch gets cute and turns the film into a game of Spot the Pink Things (don't you love that game?) - there is pink everywhere: pants, bathrobes, pictures, wallpaper, curtains, try and find them all!

It is signficant that each of the encounters gets progressively worse, i.e. the longer that Don stays mired in the past. Each of the four women, in fact, seem to represent different ways that we look back on relationships (and break-ups). Laura accepts that the relationship was just a fling - pleasing, but meaningless. Dora: longing, and sadness. Carmen: embarrassment. Penny: abject bitterness. Where do you fall on the love/fear spectrum?

Maybe if we knew a bit more about how and why the relationships actually ended, or actually came to be. There may be a clue in why his present girlfriend, Sherry, is leaving him now: he doesn't know what he wants, won't make a commitment. If we are to assume that he has never changed, then perhaps the sadness (and disconnect) of his character is in his observations of how all these other people have changed, maybe even grown up, while he himself has not? Don't look to Murray for clues - he just looks bored. Tired and bored. Essentially the same character he played in Lost in Translation (which, incidentally, was probably my second favorite film of 2003 after American Splendor), without the arc.

Each of these four actresses give excellent performances, and we want nothing more than to see more of them. Unfortunately, the four (in particular Lange and Swinton) only have about ten minutes between them, tops.

The ending was unsatisfying. Not that I want everything to be explained away or tied up in a neat package - kudos to Jarmusch for giving us something ambiguous, something to actually talk about, discuss. That said, however, even the most ambiguous, sudden, and open-ended of endings still feel like endings, thematically or characterwise. We leave films not knowing what's going to happen, but satisfied that we have learned enough about the characters that we can picture them living on, and maybe even have some fun in thinking where they may be next week, in five years, in fifty. Bad endings are born of bad, or just plain careless, characterization, just sit there and do nothing. In Broken Flowers, Don doesn't really learn anything, nor does the audience learn anything about him.

The very last images of the film are supposed to have Don, and us, realizing that Don will never again look at the world in the same way again, that for the rest of his life he will look at the faces of every young man he encounters, and wonder. Seems to me that there was another scene quite a bit earlier on, at a car rental lot, where we pick up pretty much the exact same thing.

Broken Flowers is a film that desperately wants to be liked, and I really did want to like it, really did want to see the same film that all the critics had seen. But, in the words of Jayne Cobb, if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.

Trailer watch:

Prime - ha, no.
Walk the Line - maybe, I doubt it.
The Constant Gardener - maybe, I doubt it.
Rent - I hated the show, and I hate Chris Columbus. So how is it possible that this movie actually looks pretty good?

*Junebug

2005-08-09T20:46:00.000-04:00

Directed by Phil Morrison
Written by Angus MacLachlan

I suspect that people who complain that there aren't any good movies out there because they can't find any at the local multiplex are the same people who complain that there aren't any good books out there because they can't find any at the Duane Reade (that's Sav-On for all you westies out there), or complain that there isn't any good music anymore because they can't find it on the radio. There's nothing wrong with the books that they sell at the drugstore, or the music that they play on the radio - they have their purpose, and I suppose they pretty much serve it, and their respective audiences are more or less satisfied, I guess, but if you need something a little more substantial than sappy beach reading or happy rolling music, you kind of have to look for it.

Friday night I go up to Lincoln Square to check out Broken Flowers, and of course it's sold out (have I ever once gone to Lincoln Square to see something in its opening weekend without buying tickets in advance online?). After calling my friend Tim to tell him that he needn't bother coming out (I found out later that this pissed him off), and spending a good five or ten minutes standing around like an idiot, wondering if I should just go home and watch videos, I sort of circuitously wandered down the street and found myself in front of Lincoln Plaza, toying the idea of watching 2046 even though I HATE WONG KAR WAI (don't even get me started), but the next two shows of that were already sold out as well. After once again wondering if I should just go home, I decided instead to buy a ticket for Junebug, a movie about which I knew nothing other than that it was supposed to be pretty good.

The tagline for the poster reads something like "Where the Red States meet the Blue States", which pisses me off because politics has nothing whatever to do with the movie (religion, definitely, but not politics). That and the weird pre-credits yodelling sequence really sets you up for a far different film than you wind up getting.

Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago art dealer, has to go down to North Carolina to seal an important deal with a reclusive "outsider" artist (Frank Hoyt Taylor), and sort of as an afterthought decides to take along her new husband George (Alessandro Nivola) so that she can meet her new in-laws, who live nearby. George is the absolute golden boy of his family, and they are not so much curious about who he has married as they are disappointed that he's left home. Of course, Madeleine's English accent and kiss-kiss big city airs immediately alienates everyone - everyone but Ashley (Amy Adams), the extremely pregnant wife of George's broody brother Johnny (Benjamin MacKenzie), who seems boundlessly fascinated by her.

At this point, you're thinking you know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be right? But this is no movie about crazy citygirl vs. the wacky countryfolk. Not by a longshot. What it is is a great film about family, about people, more specifically about all the quiet spaces in between people, if I may say so without getting shot.

Observe how much of the film takes place to shots of empty rooms and lawns, to conversations, arguments, and laughter overheard more than directly addressed. Listen to what (and how much) is being "said" after people stop speaking.

Excellent cast, including Alessandro Nivola, completely unrecognizable from his smarmy turns in pretty much anything else I can remember seeing him in - Jurassic Park 3, Time Code, Laurel Canyon. With his nice shirts, schoolboy haircut, and generally quiet demeanor, in fact, he reminded more of Christian Bale in Laurel Canyon than anything else. Benjamin MacKenzie, who according to the people sitting behind me is on some show on the WB or something, plays a young man so tightly coiled in his frustration and disappointment that he is beyond hating himself - half the time he doesn't even seem to recognize himself. Look at their faces when one of them throws a wrench at the other near the end of the film - the look on one of their faces is of complete horror, the look on the other conveying that the moment was long, long overdue.

If Amy Adams does not get an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting, it's only because the voters did not see the movie. At first she seems mere comic relief - that one person in every movie (and in everyone's life) who just a bit too chipper, too hummingbird, too puppydog, too loveable and loving - though by the end she reveals herself to be far smarter, and far sadder, than she would ever want anyone to believe.

Unthinkable that such rich depth of character is mined with such subtlety by two (basically) first-timers - Phil Morrison and Angus MacLachlan had previously collaborated on one short film, and Morrison had previously directed a few music videos and segments of Comedy Central's Upright Citizen's Brigade. To illustrate, there is one scene involving a video cassette that reveals more about the characters involved than most other writers and directors could reveal in an entire feature.

The more we learn about these characters, the more we realize that yes, this is a fish-out-of-water story, though by the end we're asking ourselves, which is the fish, and what exactly is the water?

What I liked best about Junebug is that we are never forced or manipulated into liking, or disliking, anybody. Morrisson and MacLachlan shows us these people as they are, develops them far fuller than one would expect in a 100-minute span, then wisely leaves it to us to make up our own minds about how we are supposed to feel about them, whether we like them or dislike them or are simply annoyed at or frustrated with them. Nobody gets off easy, and nobody gets out unscathed. Good choice, on their part - good, lovely, unassuming, unpretentious, unsentimental, melancholy, mysterious, bittersweet, wonderful choice. In my experience, most of the "issues" that we have with people, especially family, cannot even be put into words in 100 minutes, let alone examined, discussed, debated, and resolved. These characters will stay with you long after you leave the theater. Many of them may even be living in your home.

Musical score by Yo La Tengo, which went completely unnoticed by me, which means they did their job.

The Girl From Monday

2005-08-08T20:01:00.000-04:00

Directed by Hal Hartley
Written by Hal Hartley

Another video rental, this one the new film from Hal Hartley.

Hal Hartley.

Damn.

The writer and director of a handful of THE best movies of the '90s (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and I would even put Flirt in here, though I'm the only one I know who liked it) continues his steep (and embarrassing) dive into irrelevance with his latest piece of cinema ~~diarrhea~~, The Girl From Monday.

Hal Fucking Hartley.

Hartley used to make great, small epics about human beings and all the dumb shit we put ourselves and each other through, and how every day we have to fight and struggle our way out of the messes that we ourselves have created, and how it's in all that fighting and struggling that we reach enlightenment, or relevance, or meaning, or at the very least contentment.

And then he made a movie called Henry Fool and suddenly everything went to utter crap. Hartley stopped making movies about the world, about people, about you and me, and started instead trying to making movies about The World, about People, about You and Me. I think he started listening too hard to his detractors, who accused him of making films that were too small. Hartley needed to grow up. Hartley needed to start taking on the Big Issues. Hartley needed to be taken seriously. Hartley needed to get universal.

Ironically, by making such incisive "small" films about "small" people, he WAS being universal, and by making them so well, a lot of people DID take him seriously. Doubly ironically, by taking on such Big Issues is such a clumsy and pretentious manner (think of a college sophomore at his first non-Starbucks trying to impress his friend's girlfriend by talking very loudly about Capitalism, or The Media, or why The Motorcycle Diaries is THE best movie EVER made), now NOBODY takes him seriously, and the louder he tries to "grow up", the more sophomoric he comes off.

Case in point: The Girl From Monday takes place in a near-future totalitarian society, only the dictator is not some government or military figure, but is sort of a cooperative dictatorship run by you and me (that is, You and Me). The consumer is now king, and every aspect of the individual's personal life, from his or her sex appeal to their career cache, is publicy traded like stocks and bonds at open market. Interesting set-up, right? Possibly, had he given us any real characters to care about or anything interesting for them to do, say, or think.

Sure, there's a stab at a plot, involving a secret revolution against the system and the burgeoning illegal romance between ad exec and secret revolutionary Jack (Bill Sage, who sadly is not aging well) and a co-worker Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) - hey, wasn't this "illegal future romance" plot from some horrible Tim Robbins movie a year or two ago? And then there's a girl (Tatiana Abraco)who's dropped into the ocean from outer space, from the constellation called Monday (the girl from Monday, get it?), who is searching for a friend who arrived on Earth years before, who is now in some sort of trouble.

Get all these people in a room together, and what do they do? They proselytize. A lot. About The World, about People, about You and Me, and what's wrong with Everything. The trademark halting and poetic Hartley dialogue which is cute when talking about friendship and loyalty and brotherhood (and what were his earlier films if not stories of children in adult bodies trying to grow up), but just sounds like the aforementioned college-sophomore-at-the-coffeehouse when he's trying to say something Deep and Important about The World, about People, and You and Me.

Like I said, it's a mess. Emotionless and lacking a coherent plot or interesting characters or dialogue. It's a film about Big Ideas...which go nowhere and do nothing besides sit in a pile emitting the same abstract platitudes about Consumerism and Media Manipulation as Hartley's his last two films, No Such Thing and Henry Fool.

Plus now he's shooting exclusively on HD, which is usually bad enough, except he's using this weird, choppy, smeary, slow-speed HD, which is unwatchable. It's like Pixelvision, without the charm.

I'm not angry. Hartley is an artist, and an artist's responsibility is only to his or her own vision, and has nothing to do with whether or not I like or even accept it. It's just that I used to connect with Hartley's work on such deep emotional and spiritual levels that it's a little bit...sad? disappointing?...that he's gone to such the opposite end of the spectrum for me in such a short period of time. Maybe just surprising. Still. After eight years. Only Hartley knows if he's satisfied with his last few films. He seems to be. I'm going to miss him.

Hartley's next project listed on imdb is called Fay Grim, which is presumably a sequel to Henry Fool. I wonder if Parker Posey will be reprising her role? Someone else is going to have to tell me, as I don't really plan on seeing it myself.

P.S. Hey, while we're still on the home video tip (do the kids still say "tip"?), imagine my immense surprise when I learned that both JSA and Memories of Murder, two of the best Korean movies of the last decade, are now widely, readily, and non-Hong-Kong-bootleggedly available domestically on DVD! Go rent one or both of these movies. Now.

The Upside of Anger

2005-07-28T22:13:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-17T18:45:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-11T19:31:00.000-04:00

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

2005-07-01T18:40:00.000-04:00

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.

Rock School

2005-06-04T17:55:00.000-04:00

Directed by Don Argott

I am no doubt the only one on Earth who remembers the video for Yo La Tengo's song "Sugarcube" - ask me about it when you see me.

How do you mess up a documentary about nine year-old kids learning to sing Ozzy?

Sometime around 1999, Paul Green turned his after school guitar classes into a full fledged (after)school of rock, where some 200 kids aged 9 to 17 come daily to learn “the basics: power chords, head banging, and being a rock star”, as the poster’s tag line reads (I guess the guy brought in to make that sound even vaguely compelling or catchy was out sick that weekend). Turning his lessons into an actual school presumably allowed Green to hire a staff of teachers, which is fortunate since Green himself is rarely seen doing anything other than talking about himself, and screeching and shrilly swearing at his students. What little actual teaching he does appears to be how to mug, vamp, and scowl – basically, everything that’s wrong about music today, or ever has been.

Okay, at the risk of sounding overly touchy-feely, if you really want to mold “significant” musicians, as Green claims to want to do, teach them to find their own voice, to find the thing that makes them unique, to find the thing that gets them excited, and most importantly that it’s okay to just go with it, and to go with it with everything they have. And if that one thing happens to be, say, Quaker rap, why not?

In other words, you can be great without being a “star”.

Okay, abhorrent teaching philosophy aside, Rock School really could have been a great documentary.

So, how do you mess up a documentary about nine year-old kids learning to sing Ozzy?

For one thing, don’t make this story about the kids, but about their shrill and utterly obnoxious teacher. At several points Green even admits that that’s not even really him, but an act he does for the students, and for this documentary itself.

Assholes pretending to be bigger assholes because they think it makes them look better on the big screen. Hello, Michael Moore.

At far too many points to mention I wanted to physically shake director Don Argott and tell him, make this movie about the kids. Let them talk. Watch what happens to them from the day they enroll to their first show, and beyond. Watch how, and what, they develop. Do NOT make the movie about their asshole, cheeseball “teacher” who does nothing but scream and berate and mug for the camera for an hour and a half (noticing a pattern yet?).

Near the end of the film, Will O’Connor, the mopey, shaggy-haired, bespectacled boy of questionable musical talent who serves as sort of a commenting Greek chorus to these proceedings (in a far better movie, Will O’Connor would be the star – he is far and away the most intelligent, insightful, and well-spoken of the few people in this film who actually speak) makes the observation that there is a definite hierarchy at Rock School, with the handful of truly talented kids (and they are truly talented) getting all the attention and love, and the all the other students sort of getting looked over, falling through the cracks, disappearing. Apparently, the makers of Rock School have fallen into the same mind-set. Maybe they did set out to make a movie about the kids, about all of them. Maybe once they started they, like Green, decided to just focus on the “cool” kids.

Indeed, only about a dozen of the 200 students of Rock School are ever even shown doing anything besides filling a room, and of that dozen, only three of them (C.J. Tywoniak, a true guitar prodigy; Madi Diaz-Svalgard, the aforementioned ex-Quaker rapper, shamed by Green into becoming merely an incredible singer; and Will O’Connor) to my recollection speak. Plus two, if you count the two nine year-olds speaking by proxy for their weird stage-mom (and their weird stage-“teacher). Other than Will O’Connor, you get very little sense of who these kids are, why they’re here, and what they’re learning.

No, check that. We get some sense of what they’re learning. Nine year-olds, we can excuse for parroting their parents’ and “teacher’s” wishes to go on tour and get free stuff. It’s when an otherwise fully reasonable and incredibly talented teenager expresses that their main reason for being a musician is to sell a million records that I decide that I guess I really do hate people, all people, forever.

I really tried to like Rock School. Who wouldn’t? And there were a couple moments where I forgot I was in a movie theater, almost stood up and screamed (the good kind) at the end of a performance or an incredible solo. Will O'Connor says at the end of the film (before back-pedaling, a little) that Rock School is bigger than Paul Green, whether Paul Green wants to admit it or not. I wish Argott had listened. See Rock School to watch some amazing (and amazingly talented) kids do some amazing things; don’t see it to get any real sense of who these kids are, or why they’re here.

Bomb the System

2005-05-28T09:48:00.000-04:00

Directed by Adam Bhala Lough
Written by Adam Bhala Lough

In the stairwell of my building there is an old closet door, probably removed from an apartment one or two renovations ago, left by the stairs and thoroughly forgotten. As I pass this old door leaning against the wall week after week on my way to and from the laundry room on 3, I’m noticing that one of my fellow residents has taken to writing on it, the markings growing greater in number, and greater in graphic sexuality, as the weeks pass. The weird thing is that as increasingly bold and sexual the graffiti gets, it is always on, and only on, this old closet door, the walls around the rest of the stairwell retaining their dingy, dusty off-white, making me think that as incredibly disturbed (you should see some of this stuff) and misguided as this kid (and he’s got to be a kid – again, you should see some of this stuff) is, he remains strangely considerate and respectful of his fellow residents by limiting his perverse writing to only this loose, forgotten, and easily disposed of closet door. Weird.

I wonder what would this kid make of Adam Bhala Lough's Bomb the System? Hard enough to sort out my own feelings for this particular piece of cinema.

The few things I’d heard about this new movie intrigued me enough to justify the trek up to Cinema Village on Friday evening (ever since I switched from the monthly subway pass back to paying per ride, it’s been harder and harder for me to get my cheap ass anywhere above, say, Canal Street). With the buzz this film has been generating in certain circles, I went into the theater prepared to feel thoroughly unhip. This was not helped by the fact that I appeared to be the only one in attendance who was not either actively involved in or friends with someone who was actively involved in the production.

Story: Anthony/BLEST (Mark Webber) and his friends Justin/BUCK50 (Gano Grills) and Kevin/LUNE (Jade Yorker) spend their nights writing graffiti along the streets of Lower Manhattan, partying, and dodging the Vandal Squad of the NYPD, as personified by the ex-graff-writer-gone-straight Shorts (Bonz Malone) and the corrupt and increasingly violent Bobby Cox (Al Sapienza). Though Anthony lives a seemingly charmed life within the graffiti subculture (his works and exploits are well-known, if not legendary, in and among his fellow graff-writers, and he has free room and board in the apartment of his friend Hazer (Joey Dedio), a soap actor on Telemundo), he still feels that he’s living in the shadow of his brother, another famous graff-writer who actually died while on a “bombing” expedition twelve years ago. After the Vandal Squad violently harasses the young Kevin, Justin is ready to declare war on the city, on the police, and especially on Bobby Cox. Anthony, however, is distracted by two new things in his life: his acceptance into an art college in San Francisco (and the accompanying possibility of going straight, i.e. selling out) and his new girlfriend Alex (Jaclyn DeSantis), who comes with both her own style of graffiti and her own beliefs in how to use it to change society.

So, will Anthony sell out by leaving for art school, channel his energy and talent into making a difference, or continue down the same path as his brother? His ultimate choice, and his ultimate fate, don’t make a whole lot of sense, either to the story or even to the rest of this film (when you see it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about).

It’s hard to dislike a movie so pure in its intentions, and according to the people sitting in my theater, everything apparently rang true, that graff writers truly are the unsung, existential philosopher poet kings of New York that this film would have them be rather than, you know, vandals. Still, Lough's utterly cartoonish portrayal of the Vandal Squad was bothersome, and I didn’t see any cops standing up to say how accurate their portrayal was. Still, the cast of mostly unknowns (truly the only recognizable face here is Kumar from the Wes Anderson movies, though it was later pointed out to me that Mark Webber was the guy who played Scooby in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling, and Jade Yorker played the younger Jesus in Spike Lee’s He Got Game) did an excellent job with the little material they had. Unfortunately, the characters they play fairly one dimensional, and Lough doesn't really give them much to do, either - life (at least my life) is so much more about the bleary-eyed morning after than it is about the wild night before.

The character of the cop called Shortz is potentially interesting, possibly deserving of his own movie, as he waxes poetical about the importance of graffiti among the underprivileged, disaffected youth of the city, but never justifies why he would choose to turn around and persecute said writers with such gusto.

I’m not there, so I don’t know. If this movie is about you, you’ll likely enjoy seeing yourself and your friends vindicated on the big screen. If you’re like me, you’ll see little more than a disjointed and uneven story about kids who would rather be hated than anonymous. Which would make them sort of the equivalent of those people who talk at the movies, right? I mean, those people who go to the movies just to talk and to be annoying.

Which leads me to my new pet project: Run, Girl!, the definitive film examining the exciting and sometimes dangerous subculture of theater-talkers. I've already cut a trailer, which I will describe to you here:

Fade in:

A darkened, crowded movie theater. Everyone is trying their best to ignore the small group of kids in the front row, dancing, yakking on their cell phones TO EACH OTHER, throwing things, jumping between rows.

MISGUIDED WUSSY THEATERGOER: Excuse me, could you please be quiet?
OUR HEROINE: I CAN TALK HERE IF I WANT!

Cut to our heroine sitting in a generic “authority” office – could be for a guidance counselor, a store detective, etc.

CONCERNED AUTHORITY FIGURE: You have a gift, girl. The gift of observational comedy. You could be a stand-up comedienne, or a writer for television.

Cut to another darkened, crowded theater. This time the group is watching the movie, but screaming things at the screen, laughing and pointing inappropriately.

Cut to our heroine and a TEENAGED BOY on the street outside the theater.

BOY: Hey, I like your jokes. What’s your name?

Cut to our heroine’s Urban Outfitters-decked out bedroom. Our heroine and the teenaged boy make out passionately. He pulls off her shirt.

Cut to our heroine and her TIRED MOTHER at the breakfast table.

OUR HEROINE: Talking in the theater is the only thing that’s ever meant anything to me!

TIRED MOTHER slaps our heroine.

TIRED MOTHER: I had to sit by and watch what theater talking did to your brother, I’ll be DAMNED if I have to sit by and watch the same thing happen to you!

Cut to our heroine and the teenaged boy on the street outside the theater.

BOY: How can you even THINK of giving up now? This is the night we’ve been waiting for all our lives!

Cut to the inside of the darkened, crowded theater. Our heroine is pulled out of her seat and dragged up the aisle by the THEATER USHER.

OUR HEROINE: NOOOOOOOOO!!!

Run, Girl! Come on, it's brilliant. Someone give me a million bucks, and this movie will be coming to a theater near you shortly.

*Star Wars : Episode III : Revenge of the Sith

2005-05-19T20:13:00.000-04:00

Directed by George Lucas
Written by George Lucas

The Ziegfeld, Wednesday night, 12:01 AM, counting down with the rest of them, fighting for my free t-shirt (Fantastic 4), looking at all the guys and the few chicks in costume, makeup, with props. Props. And I’m thinking, who the fuck are these people?

Fanboys (and fangirls). Just like me. Notoriously both the harshest and most forgiving of critics. And I’m here to tell you that everything you have heard about this movie, good and bad, is true, it’s all true. Yes, it’s dark. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it is pure heartbreak.

All the weird cutesiness, which was always annoying and never appropriate, all the worse here when contrasted with subject matter so, so self-consciously dark.

It’s not a bad movie - quite the contrary. It’s definitely the best of the prequels, and maybe even better than I expected it to be. But it still annoyed me. And, being a fanboy, it annoyed me beyond all reason, beyond all proportion.

The acting isn’t great, but I’m told that the acting in Star Wars was never great, and that’s not why we’re here. I wholly disagree. The acting, when it’s good, always had a naturalistic grace to it, even with dialogue so obviously heinous. Mark, Carrie, Harrison, and Sir Alec all had it. James Earl Jones has it. Samuel L. Jackson has it (though he’s appeared in enough good-bad and bad-bad movies to have it down). Same, Christopher Lee. Ian McDiarmid most definitely has it. Ewan McGregor almost has it, if he could just stop from appearing in physical pain whenever he has to, say, sit down at a 50’s diner on Coruscant and ask for a Jawa Juice. Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, god bless their little acting souls, most definitely do not have it.

And, of course, there are the requisite Episodes IV-VI tie-ins. Okay, the idea of Obi-Wan having spent 17 years on Tatooine possibly communing with Qui-Gon Jinn is admittedly an intriguing thought. But, other than that, seriously, why does it matter that Chewbacca helped save Yoda from the post-Order 66 clones on Kashyyk? Does it add anything to the story that 3P0 was created by Anakin, and that R2 has apparently bore silent witness to all of these events, from Naboo all the way to Endor? Of course not. If anything, it detracts from the overall story. I, for one, loved so much more the idea that Boba Fett was just a gun for hire, not some kid who’s harbored a 20-year grudge against the people who killed his father (or whatever).

Face it, it’s all pandering. Despite George’s insistence that all of these movies were written and fully conceived in his head some 30 years ago, Attack of the Clones and now Return of the Sith very much go down the list of everything the fans cried out for, and against. Fans don’t like Jar Jar – check. Fans like Boba Fett – check. Fans probably like the Sony PSP – check. Fans need more material to justify the importance and relevance of Star Wars to today’s political situation – check. Fans want to see Chewbacca – check. Fans want a “darker” movie, a more violent movie, a PG-13 movie – check, check, and check.

And fans (including this one) love it when Yoda gets all medieval. The biggest cheer of the night comes when Yoda trashes the Imperial Guards.

As much as Sith tries to tie up every single loose end, it still didn’t answer any of the questions raised by Clones, namely who was Jedi Sifodyas, how could he requisition an entire army without anyone else knowing about it, and, most bewildering to me, why NO ONE EVER ASKS WHY. Okay, I could buy that the Jedis would send in the clones (har) as an emergency measure to fight their way out of the trap laid for them on Geonosis (though, at the time that Yoda had flown off to Kamino to check out this army, there was no way of knowing that said trap had been set). What I don’t understand is why no one ever questions the fact that out of nowhere there is this army of clones defending the Republic, an army apparently requisitioned by an impostor pretending to be a Jedi (so “Sifodyas” as known to Lama Su and Taun We is actually Dooku, right?) , let alone the fact that they are all clones of the man hired by Dooku to assassinate a senator, and who is in fact himself being ARMED by the Kaminoans as well (let us not forget that the Kaminoans are not only expert cloners, but apparently expert manufacturers of armor and weapons as well). I mean, seriously, what is up with that?

Rant end.

It’s been said, and I suppose it’s true, I guess, that it’s to George’s credit that there are still some surprises left in this movie. Well, they’re not surprises, actually, though at this point anything that hasn’t already been 100% predicated would be considered a surprise, e.g., that zero-g water show thing is a surprise.

The big surprise is supposed to be, I guess, the fact that Anakin’s final and official turn to the Dark Side happens because he has a vision that Padme’s going to die in childbirth, and thinks the Dark powers will let him prevent this. And the fact that he’s the one who basically ends up killing her is supposed to be, I guess, some grand irony or something (snore).

Anakin’s real turn, everyone knows, happens way back in Clones, with the slaughter of the Sand People (“And not just the men…but the women! And the children, too! They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals! I HATE THEM!” Thank you, thank you very much, next show’s at 11, try the fish, I hear it’s good.).

But it all comes down to the fact that, in Anakin’s eyes, Palpatine is the only one who takes him seriously. I think the audience is supposed to realize that everyone is just too scared of his power to give him too much of it, but no one is ever given nearly enough screen time to convey this, least of all Ewan McGregor, who I think is supposed to feel this most of all. No, what we get is everyone just treating him like a kid, as a “less-than”. They make him a part of the Jedi Council, but will not confer upon him the title of Master, despite the fact that he is at least as powerful a Jedi as…that green chick, you know, the one with the horns (George misses a golden opportunity to flesh out some of these Jedis, actually making their deaths tragic rather than simply telling us that their deaths are tragic. But, a good story is not something I should be expecting from a Star Wars movie, I am told).

Anyone who’s seen Clone Wars knows that Anakin is allowed to cut off his braid without even having to go through the Trials – geez, kid, what more do you want??

So I guess Anakin’s turn to the Dark is more interesting here than his turn in Clones. I mean, it all comes down to his thinking that no one takes him seriously, which I think may be rooted in his thinking that he really isn’t helping out as much as he could be, or should be – a trait not terribly unsubtly (though for the very first time, and completely out of nowhere) showing up in the opening dogfight (which, incidentally, is spectacular). In Clones, Anakin comes off as a petulant kid raging that he should get the big lolly if he wants the big lolly, whereas in Sith he just wants to be respected as an equal. I guess.

The visuals in Sith are amazing. The fight scenes are appropriately grand. General Grievous is set up to be much more of a bad-ass than his short screen time allows, and the importance of the fact that his innards are partly organic was completely lost on me, and probably to George himself. The multi-layered lightsaber battle was excellent – some claim that it goes on for too long, I like to think that its length makes up for the 20-second lightsaber battle in Clones (Fans thought the light saber duel in Clones was too short – check).

So, in the end, does any of it pay off, really?

First of all, you’re not going to see or not see this movie based on what people are going to tell you about it. If you’re a fan, of course you’re going to see it. If you’re not a fan, you already know you’re going to hate it, so why would you even go? If you really have a free night and $10.75 (thank you very much, Regal Cinemas – hey, I didn’t hear that this was going to be a very special season of Joey, could you possibly turn up the volume on these commercials ANY LOUDER? Asses.) just laying around like that, I recommend you pick up a couple issues of Finder or Global Frequency. Unless you’re here because you’re dating a Star Wars fan, in which case, hey, good luck with that. I recommend that you check out my review of Fever Pitch (though not the movie itself).

Anyway, as I was saying, in the end, does any of it pay off, really? Let me put it to you this way: I doubt that even the great Sir Alec Guinness could have pulled off the word “younglings” with a straight face.

CG Temeura Morrison – creepy.
CG Peter Cushing – creepier.
Jimmy Smits in a flying ’57 Johnny Lightning – just plain weird. Cherry, but weird.

*The Interpreter

2005-05-07T09:02:00.000-04:00

Directed by Sydney Pollack
Written by Martin Stellman (story), Brian Ward (story), Charles Randolph (screenplay), Scott Frank (screenplay), Steven Zaillian (screenplay)

I’m just about the least political person I know. I find most of the political discourse happening around me to be varying degrees of memetic recitation (I was about to say “regurgitation”, but these are my friends after all). I know people who refused to see this movie on political grounds. I (initally) refused to see this movie because Sean Penn was in it.

All I know about simultaneous translation is from Audrey Hepburn in Charade. Okay, so it wasn’t the UN, but it still looked hard.

Nicole Kidman plays Sylvia Broome, a French-to-English simultaneous translator (just like Audrey Hepburn!) at the UN. One night, while in the soundbox after hours, she happens to hear what sounds to her very much like the plotting of the assassination of a very unpopular African dictator Zuwanie of the (fictitious) nation of Matobo. The facts that Sylvia herself is Matoboan, has some interesting connections with Zuwanie, and in fact has every reason to want him dead are not lost on the two feds (Sean Penn and Catherine Keener) assigned to protect her. Why wouldn't she just keep her mouth shut, let them kill the bastard? Because she doesn't believe in violence, doesn't believe in revenge - that's why (cue James Newton Howard) she works at the UN. Oh, plus, the conspirators maybe spotted her.

How best to approach The Interpreter? Best not to look for any deep political insight (the major one of which appears to be that The System Works). The film is best approached as part character study, part straightforward procedural, part thriller (and a tight, efficient, economical one it is at that), and...wholly a commercial for UN and the power of diplomacy, of words, to help, to heal, etc. Agree or disagree, it’s a handsome building.

And ah, Sydney Pollack. We know we are in the hands of an experienced director right away – the plot moves quickly, and in a few deft scenes we learn all that we need to know about these characters, before they are let go to inevitability (especially admirable given the number of people who had to substantially rewrite the script after Mr. Pollack decided to completely change the ending). The climactic confrontation between Sylvia and Zuwanie strained plausibility, but was forgiveable given its emotional truth. And the fact that we can speak of emotions in what is basically a police procedural dealing in global diplomacy scores this film a few points in the win column.

[In order to fully appreciate this feat, consider for a moment, say, Attack of the Clones, another police procedural dealing in global diplomacy, which was absolutely devoid of emotion despite its operatic settings and what I suppose we are meant to take as a grand melodramatic romance.]

The casting (more than the acting) is uniformly good . Nicole Kidman, who I usually like anyway, is excellent as the haunted UN interpreter with a past. Certain well-known critics have commented on her casting, loudly wondering how much more interesting and powerful a movie this would be had Dreamworks cast a black actress in the role. I choose to non-cynically believe that Kidman was cast simply because she was the best actress for the role, not for her potential box office draw, and had they cast an Angela Bassett (I hate what they’re doing to you on Alias, by the way) or, gag-of-all-gags, a Halle Barry in the role, these same critics would just as loudly wonder how much more interesting and powerful a movie this would be had they cast a white actress in the role.

Sean Penn, whose unique brand of pompous, humorless, squinched-face whinging somehow continues to win him endless accolades, is also used to great effect as the tired fed with a tragic past. Again, as interesting an idea it would have been to have, say, a John Cusak or a John C. Reilly in the role, this part really did call for a pompous, humorless, squinched-face whinge, and honestly, when I say the words "pompous, humorless, squinched-face whinge", what's the first name you think of? Meanwhile, Catherine Keener, who admittedly plays the world-weary wisenheimer in every movie she’s in, has what turns out to be a pretty good supporting role here.

“Haunted”, “tired”, and “world-weary” were words that kept coming to me as I watched and listened to the characters in this film. Indeed, the New York City portrayed in this film is the City as I know it (though not necessarily like it) best – foggy, drizzly, cold, and very, very grey. So pervasive is the grey that, with its deep colors and rich woods, the UN is (an intentional choice, I’m sure) almost warm and intimate by comparison. The beat, tired, and world-weary characters in this film have witnessed and survived enough to deserve to be as cynical as they are. The attempt of some of these characters to rise above their cynicism, their desire to believe that there is anything more to life than more heartache and death, this is what the movie is really about. The simple fact that Pollack does not loudly and continuously beat us over the head with this idea alone is proof that we are in excellent hands.

If you require more proof, the bus scene alone is worth the price of admission.

A word about the Vespa: Chief UN interpreter Brigitte Andreassier-Pearl, who served as a character model for Nicole Kidman, has famously scoffed that “no one comes to work on a Vespa in New York.” My friend Doug, who has crashed his beloved Vespa on the streets of this fair city more times than most people have even rode on one, got a good laugh out of that one.

*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2005-04-30T19:05:00.000-04:00

Directed by Garth Jennings
Written by Douglas Adams (book and screenplay), Karey Kirkpatrick (screenplay)

Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) never could get the hang of Thursdays. He's not awake for ten minutes before he's laying in the dirt of his garden in the path of an oncoming bulldozer; finding out that his best friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is not from Guilford after all, but actually from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelguese ("That would explain the accent"); getting teleported on board a rather skanky-looking interstellar spacecraft; learning that the Earth has been destroyed; and having a fish shoved in his ear. And all this before the movie starts in earnest.

This being one of the three movies that I was looking forward to seeing most this year (of the other two, one has already been released and reviewed on this site, the third is not coming out until September, and YES, that means that none of the three were Episode III!), expectations were, of course, running rampant, and I have to say that, for the most part, I was not disappointed.

I’m not going to run a laundry list of every single frakking difference between the novel and the film here (no, Prosser does not lies down, and yes, the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, so integral to the fabric of the texture, or texture of the fabric, of all in the novels gets only a passing and forgettable glance here. Towels also.) – if you want that sort of review, this guy can accommodate you. But, as a fan of the books, this review cannot help but be colored by a little comparison.

What I liked: The opening musical number (of course). The fact that they left in the dolphins and the whale, not to mention the bowl of petunias. Marvin. The Heart of Gold, though not looking the least bit how I pictured, was still quite cool. The improbability drive effects were appropriately (and hilariously) old school, both in execution and sensibility. Zaphod’s second head was handled imaginatively. The controversial-among-fans-of-the-novel romantic subplot, which I didn’t like at first, I thought paid off okay in the end. The Magrathea factory floor. Oh my god, the Magrathea factory floor.

The acting was almost uniformly good, the casting note-perfect. Martin Freeman, though skewing a little younger than the famously middle-aged Arthur Dent, is a no-brainer, as is Zooey Deschanel as Trillian (the girl who really, really got away), Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin (duh), and the inimitable Sam Rockwell as the inimitable Zaphod Beeblebrox. The casting of Mos Def as Ford Prefect was controversial, to say the least, but his performance so captures Ford's off-hand debonair that I will never be able to picture anyone else in the role. Bill Nighy doesn't waste a second of his screentime, and Simon Jones even comes out to play. Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide finds the perfect tongue-in-cheek (read British) tone to match those brilliant visualizations (or vice versa, I don't know).

Which sort of leads into the things that I didn't so much like: there really wasn't nearly enough of the Guide in the picture - it provides a tiny bit of exposition and a lot of humor, but you never really got the sense that its existence really meant a thing (okay, the Guide was always a bit of a MacGuffin in the novels anyway, but still, come on). The catch-22 is that as much as I wanted more of the Guide, the Guide's narrations, interludes, and interruptions, so organic to the novels, were unfortunately, unavoidably a bit disruptive here (to their credit, the Guide effects and animations were not only top-knotch, but utterly hilarious, completely keeping in the spirit of Douglas Adams’ original penchant for the complete non-sequitur (is there any kind of non-sequitur? Can there, by definition, even exist a partial non-sequitur?) reference).

Also affecting the pacing was an overlong exposition of the Arthur Dent/Trillian meeting.

The whole subplot with Humma Kavula (John Malkovich), born of the very definition of a throwaway gag in the novels, is mysteriously inflated to be an important subplot in the film before it is more or less abandoned entirely (the removal of Zaphod’s second head also receives no payoff whatever). Speaking of throwaway gags, the Magrathean POV-gun felt like something that the writers of Red Dwarf thought up on a Tuesday morning (and was thoroughly forgotten by lunchtime), and the payoff was way too pat (defeat the Vogons by making them feel like Marvin? Not like the Vogons were the picture of mental health to begin with...).

And about those Vogons – I suppose the film needed something by way of actual villains, but the idea of our heroes being pursued across the stars by a league of inefficient bureaucrats (and bad marksmen to boot) is an idea which works much better, I think, in theory than in practice. That said, however, the Vogon city is a site to behold.

I mourn for all geekdom if I am the only one who caught the cameo of TV Marvin.

People who don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of (mostly) useless Adamsiana will likely find the film cute, even diverting. Fans of the book, I think, will have an experience tantamount to mine: enjoyable, but not quite the sublime experience that, whle I was not exactly expecting, I somehow believe that I deserve.

*Save the Green Planet!

2005-04-20T18:49:00.000-04:00

Directed by JANG Jun-Hwan
Written by JANG Jun-Hwan

You may have heard some people talking about how Korean cinema is either gonna be or is the next big thing, but if you've seen most of the recently widely-released (stateside) offerings from the Land of Morning Calm, you may be left wondering what exactly the big deal is.

I mean, as shlocky as recent and semi-recent offerings such as Oldboy, Shiri, and Tell Me Something are, they are at least slowly chipping away at the perception that Korea is a land of saccharin (The Way Home), provincial (Memories of Murder, A Tale of Two Sisters) Buddhist monks (Spring Summer Fall Winter...and Spring, Hi, Dharma!) and/or sex maniacs (Bad Guy, The Isle, Samaritan Girl, hell, basically anything directed by KIM Ki-Duk) whose stories always seem to take place in, like, the 16th century (Chihwaseon, Chunhyang, Scandal). The perception which movies like the severely overrated Oldboy do not fight, however, is the one of Korean directors being nothing more than technically capable rip-off artists of more creative Japanese, Hong Kong, and even Hollywood filmmakers.

But then, there exists another level of Korean film, on which stand truly well-made, affecting, original, and (most importantly) distinctively Korean films, such as One Fine Spring Day, JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 301/302, Memento Mori, Take Care of My Cat, and the subject of this little review, Save the Green Planet! Films that see little to no distribution here in the states, in my opinion, exactly because they don't so easily fit into what has become the stereotypical view of Korean films.

You know how when you see real blood you think to yourself that it doesn't look real, because it doesn't look like movie blood?

[I am, of course, being completely unfair and hyperbolic in my argument. The fact is that, other than Oldboy, The Way Home, and two of the KIM Ki-Duk films, none of the movies I mentioned saw much, if any, play here in the States outside of the festival circuit. (It is also a fact that both Memories of Murder and A Tale of Two Sisters are among the best films I've seen in the last few years, Korean or otherwise.) But, enough about my issues. On with the review!]

According to Byung-Gu (SHIN Ha-Kyun, who's been in everything), aliens are invading Earth. According to Byung-Gu, the aliens are already here. Unfortunately, his "proof" consists of old B-movies and the kind of books you usually find yellowing in the windows of that weird store that nobody ever, ever goes into. Somehow convinced that this invasion is in fact being led by an alien disguised as corporation CEO Man-Sik (BAEK Yun-Sik), Byung-Gu and his girlfriend Sooni (HWANG Jeong-Min, well-known stage actress making I guess her film debut), a tightrope walker in the local circus, proceed to kidnap and torture the poor guy in the basement.

Then, somewhere along the line, as the torture proceeds, as the two men begin to play their subtle (and some not-so) mind games with each other, as we follow the detectives who are tracking Man-Sik, as we learn more and more about the disturbed Byung-Gu, director JANG Jun-Hwan casts his spell us, and our emotional allegiances, like the mind of poor Sooni, become utterly tangled before we begin to understand what's going on, what this is really all about. And then we become afraid, thoroughly afraid.

For reasons that will remain one of those great cinematic mysteries of the ages, the powers that be decided to market Save the Green Planet! as some sort of a wacky screwball comedy upon initial release. Audiences, charmed by the goofy posters and website and expecting a good Sunday afternoon guffaw got instead (assuming they didn't walk out halfway through) a completely unique and organic blend of tragedy, pitch-black humor, shocking violence, and utter mind-fuck. It's no wonder that the picture bombed. It was just too good for this Earth.

So good, in fact, that the last two minutes can't help but feel like a bit of a cheat. Not a bad ending, just unnecessary, just too easy for the journey (and it is a journey) on which we've just been taken. But then, just as you're ready to scoff, JANG pulls one final rabbit out of his hat, the credits begin to roll, a cracked television screen appears, and you start to cry all over again. In the economics of human emotion, I guess a questionable ending really isn't that big a deal, really.

Save the Green Planet! is playing at Film Forum (and possibly elsewhere - check local listings) through May 3. Find it, watch it, share it with someone you love.

The Cat Returns

2005-04-12T22:58:00.000-04:00

Directed by Hiroyuki Morita
Written by Reiko Yoshida, Aoi Hiiragi (comic)

Okay, The Cat Returns actually came out in Japan a few years ago, but was never released into theaters in the States, so far as I know. It was just released here on DVD in February, and I had never seen it before, so I am going to consider this a “new” movie and review it anyway, for the reasons stated above and also because you can’t stop me.

A few years back, when an old friend and fellow anime-freak whose name I can’t even remember offhand, but whose picture is in my photo album, and I will probably wake up at 4 AM tomorrow morning shouting his name, told me that Studio Ghibli was making a follow-up of sorts to Whisper of the Heart, dramatizing a short, sort-of-story-within-story from it, I was pretty damned curious what it would be like.

Whisper of the Heart, if you haven’t seen it, is a great movie in ways which cannot even really be put into words. It’s one of those movies that you describe to people, and they look at you like you’re crazy, like, “Okay, so that’s the first fifteen minutes, what about the other hour and forty?” Carla Speed McNeil, in the endnotes of her fine book Finder: Talisman, describes it thusly: “Whisper of the Heart [is] a beautifully plotted exercise in serendipity and ‘real’ magic. If you can get past the John Denver song that serves as a theme, it’s amazing.”

Maybe Disney should have put some money into bringing that movie to the states. Bundled it as part of the two-disc set, perhaps? After all, if you haven’t seen (or likely have never even heard of) Whisper of the Heart, you’re probably going to be confused by the title. To which cat does the title refer? And to where is he returning, exactly?

I love John Denver, by the way. I also love cats, always have. Weird thing is, cats seem to like me as well. Like they can sense if someone is a cat person or not. Weird. And I wanted to like this movie. I really, really wanted to like this movie. But I didn’t. And that makes me sad.

Here’s the story: one day, young (though, notably, not as young as your typical Ghibli heroine) Haru saves a cat from getting hit by a truck. Later that night, a royal cat procession arrives at Haru’s house to formally thank her – turns out the roadkill-bait was the prince of the Cat Kingdom. In gratitude, the cats bestow all sorts of little cat-gifts on Haru (catnip in her pockets, locker full of live mice, you get the picture) before revealing that they plan to kidnap her away to the Cat Kingdom so that she can marry the prince. The only way to stop them, for some reason, is an appeal to the Cat Bureau, the sole member of which is a living cat statue called The Baron (who, in inanimate form, was featured prominently in Whisper of the Heart – the cat returns, get it?). Before any plans can be made, however, Haru is kidnapped, and it’s up to the Baron, along with his helpers a very fat cat named Muta (also from Whisper of the Heart) and another living statue, a crow named Toto, to get her out. Add to this the complication that Haru is herself turning into a cat and must leave the kingdom by dawn, and there you have it, a heavily watered-down version of Spirited Away (which was, in turn, a heavily watered-down version of…well, water, I guess).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about The Cat Returns. The animation on the cats, before and after anthropomorphization, is quite detailed (my favorite are the secret service cats, though the camo-colored ones are a hoot) and realistic, obviously the work of cat lovers. There are little surprises all over, particularly in the Egyptian-inspired decorations and all the little fish-motifed accoutrements (watch for the calamari-thrower). The obligatory climactic dive/fall is spectacular, and its resolution clever at least.

Still, as a whole, it just wasn’t as textured and rich as I’ve come to expect from a Ghibli production. Add to this a run-time of a hair over an hour fifteen, and you’ve got all the earmarks of a rush, rush, rush production. The plot and characters, meanwhile, didn’t really do anything, or mean anything. For all its many, many faults, Spirited Away at least was emotionally true. Nothing resembling anything here. A few moral-ish pronouncements are made (“Believe in yourself”, “Speak your mind”), though basically they seem to be put in to belie the messages within the plot itself (“Don’t stick your neck out for anyone”, “Helping others just leads to trouble”).

Overall, a disappointing effort from the usually dependable Studio Ghibli, an unworthy follow-up to a great (or at least very, very special) movie. Pity the children (inner and otherwise) if this is what the “new generation at Studio Ghibli” (as to which it is frequently referred in the admittedly enlightening “making of” feature on the DVD) have in store for us now. I fairly live in fear of Howl’s Moving Castle, which arrives stateside this June. In the meantime, see if you can get any of your cooler friends to lend you Whisper of the Heart. Failing that, neither My Neighbor Totoro nor Kiki’s Delivery Service should be hard to find at your local video store in one form or another.

EDWARD! That was his name! See, you didn’t even have to wait until 4 AM.

Fever Pitch

2005-04-10T11:43:00.000-04:00

Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly
Written by Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, Nick Hornby (novel)

"Can you name a single thing that's been important to you for 23 years?"
"23 years ago, I was 7."

There’s a scene about halfway through Nick Hornby’s memoir Fever Pitch where Hornby buys a house right next to the Arsenal pitch, thinking this the ultimate tribute to his love for the home team, and naturally assuming that all of his neighbors would be as into Arsenal as he was. He quickly finds out, however, that all of his new neighbors are fairly indifferent to football, and are in fact quite annoyed by their proximity to the field.

In the little-seen (at least in this country - it pops up on IFC every once in a while) first film version of Fever Pitch, however, everyone in the neighborhood is in fact all over Arsenal, and when Arsenal wins the big championship at the end of the movie, all the neighbors bust out of their homes in full team regalia and face paint and have a wild, impromptu party right in the middle of the street. I was always bothered by this, as the neighbors’ complete indifference was a very important, revealing detail in the original story that was subverted for the film entirely - how could such a telling thematic detail be completely upheaved just for the sake of giving the film an easy, sappy, big ending? That Hornby also wrote the screenplay for the film is something that I still find a bit bewildering.

I mention this at the very beginning of my review just so that I won't have to talk about either the book or the first film version of Fever Pitch again - this new version of Fever Pitch bears pretty much no relation to either, other than basic plot outline (woman falls for a sports-obsessed-but-otherwise-nice guy) and yet another dissertation on the archetypal Hornby male (aHm).

Hornby has made a career out of talking about obsession, particularly male obsessions, particularly the many (many many many) ways in which men use their obsessions to fill voids in their lives until the very things which served as their entry into the world, the very things that let them feel a part of something greater than themselves, ironically become the very agents by which they shut others out, not move on, remain in their safety zones, totally excluding the possibility of any meaningful fulfillment in their lives, then falling into deep existential melancholia about the facts that a) their lives are meaningless; b) they feel unfulfilled; c) nobody “gets” them; d) their only moments of fleeting quasi-happiness come from indulging in their obsessions (football, pop music, religion, no-strings sex, “stuff”, what have you); and e) every day, for the rest of their days, will be just as boring and meaningless as today, or yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, or the day before that. Add to this an overly well-thought-out philosophical and vaguely poetic justification for said obsession, not only in their personal lives but in the “grand scheme” as well, and a deep fixation on personal history, in particular on trying to uncover the very day, the very moment, the very encounter where “everything went wrong”, and there you have it: your archetypal Hornby male.

If you consider yourself an aHm (regardless of your own gender – I know probably just as many women who fit the mold as men), watching Fever Pitch will probably just depress you because a) Jimmy Fallon is much cuter and funnier than you are, and b) Drew Barrymore is much cuter and smarter than anyone who will ever love you (and even if they were, they still wouldn’t really “get” you, and your life is meaningless, and you will still feel completely unfulfilled, and every day, for the rest of your days, will be just as boring and meaningless as today, or yesterday, or the day before – that is, until the next game, the next party, the next big DVD release day, the next new episode of Lost, what have you).

If you, however, find yourself falling for someone who is an aHm, you should, early on and often, ask the aHm two questions: a) Do you expect me to be as into (Star Trek, Lenny Kravitz, hockey, metasyntactic variables, what have you) as you are; and b) Would it be an actual problem if I was not as into (comic books, 70s r&b, Halo 2, complete sexual independence, what have you) as you are. There actually exists a subset of the aHm who really doesn’t mind if you don’t share in, or even understand, their obsession, just so long as you do not interfere with said obsession, and never, ever make the comment, “But it’s only a (dog, pair of shoes, first edition JM Barrie, OOP VHTF MOMC Obi-Wan Kenobi with vinyl cape, what have you)!”

One gets the sense that Jimmy Fallon's Ben (nice, normal guy six months out of the year, nice “normal” guy the remaining six months out of the year) would probably have told Drew's Lindsey (stressed-out workaholic who doesn’t even realize that she wants to meet a nice, normal guy until she meets him) that no, he wouldn’t really mind that she does not share his obsession (baseball, especially as played by the Boston Red Sox). Fallon doesn’t seem obsessed so much as overly enthusiastic. You would believe that John Cusak and Hugh Grant, who have played perfect aHms in the past, truly would have removed anyone from their lives who stood between them and their respective obsessions. Fallon, by virtue of his winsome cuteness, can’t quite take the pivotal you-made-me-miss-the-big-game scene to the insanely pathetic depths for which it calls, even after Lindsey utters those four words that she should, absolutely under no circumstances, but especially this one, ever, ever say: “It’s only a game.”

(By the way, if you know what “OOP VHTF MOMC” means, you just may be an aHm.)

The Farrelly Brothers seem to be following in the footsteps of the Weitz Brothers, trying to transition from youth-centric grossouts to semi-serious comedies adapting Nick Hornby. Unlike the Weitzes (and their very excellent About a Boy), however, the Farrellys are not so quick to let go of their past formulas, subjecting us to early scenes of vomit humor and work-out shenanigans, and at one point a dog gets his teeth brushed by what appears to be one of those overpriced Sonicare toothbrushes they sell on television – I don’t know what I find more disturbing, that Ben is using Lindsey’s toothbrush to brush her dog’s teeth, or that Lindsey has in fact purchased an expensive toothbrush from the television specifically for her dog, and has set it up in her bathroom with a label clearly indicating as such.

Fever Pitch is certainly not a bad film, it just doesn’t add to the discussion, or even really inspire one. It’s a cute, but largely forgettable, affair with a few moments of honesty which too-infrequently hit home. You’re definitely better served waiting for the video. But since you’re going to the store anyway, pick up High Fidelity and About a Boy as well, both of which you will probably enjoy more.

The ending of the movie had to be reshot in order to fit into the events of Boston’s momentous 2004 post-season. Presumably, the film would have originally ended on a bit of a downer. Strange how reality can sometimes out-Hollywood Hollywood, i’n’it?

*Millions

2005-04-03T21:44:00.000-04:00

Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce

I’m not a fan of Danny Boyle. I’m just not. I thought Shallow Grave was just plain shallow, I never spotted any of the supposed brilliance in Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later felt 28 days long. The only film of his that I’ve seen that I find entertaining is A Life Less Ordinary, the one that even his staunchest fans hate (or at the very least have completely forgotten about). Sacrilege, I know. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, meanwhile, is better known for his far edgier collaborations with Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, Code 46), to all of which I am almost without exception completely indifferent.

So, you can understand my trepidation going into Boyle and Boyce’s much-hyped foray into family filmdom, Millions. Saint-obsessed Damian (Alex Etel) and his brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) have recently lost their mother. Their father (James Nesbitt, whom you will recognize from all those Murphy’s Law movies on PBS) moves the family to a new house in a tract community in the suburbs. One day, while Damian is having a conversation with St. Clare (the patron saint of television), a huge duffel bag full of cash drops from the sky at Damian’s feet. Knowing that their father would only turn it over to the police, the boys are left on their own to decide what to do with the money. Damian searches the neighborhood for poor people to help (“The house prices keep them out,” Anthony points out), while the older Anthony has slightly more conventional plans for the cash (watch for his pre-pubescent secret service – hilarious). Unfortunately, England is changing over to the euro within days, and the boys must spend or exchange all the money before the changeover renders all the nation’s pounds sterling notes, including the boys’ new windfall, useless (the whole exchange-the-money-before-the-currency-handover-deadline plot device also worked to great effect in last year’s Goodbye, Lenin!).

But…where did this money come from? Where is it leading them? Could someone else be after it? Could it really have been a miracle that brought them the money? And what exactly constitutes a miracle, anyway?

The plot at this point plays somewhat like a non-violent Shallow Grave with kids (there’s even a reprise of the hiding-out-in-the-attic thing). One of many amazing things about this film, however, is the way in which most of the usual trappings of your typical coming-of-age movie (moving to a new town, brothers growing apart, dad's new girlfriend, etc.) unfold and play out in the context of not only the money, but on the discourse on miracles as well, all leading to the predictably happy, yet subtly (and wonderfully) ambiguous, conclusion.

There are also more bright, sunny days in a row in Millions than ever before recorded in English history.

In making a film about (potential) miracles, Boyle has created a minor miracle of his own. Millions possesses a childlike straightforwardness, but is never pedantic. The film is surreal, but not weird (very much resembling that which used to be referred to as magic realism); spiritual, but not sanctimonious; clever, but not snarky; realistic, but not cynical; cute, but not cutesy. And, for the most part, it is almost shockingly subtle for a filmmaker whose quietest previous moment was having Cillian Murphy roaming the empty streets of London screaming, “Hellllooooo!! HELLLLOOOOO!!” for THREE MINUTES STRAIGHT.

But is Millions really a family film? Is it even possible to have a family film today that has neither CGI nor a single fart joke? Not unlike Heidi or Pollyana or Old Yeller, Millions is a film that will undoubtedly be shown to thousands of children, but one which will go unappreciated by every single one of them (hell, even the edgy-for-the-70s Freaky Friday had to be amped up with emo girl bands, motorcycles, and potential MILF-sex in order for the remake to fly with today’s youth). Honestly, what is today’s youth (or today’s anyone, for that matter) to make of the young, angelic Damian? Likeable, sure. Admirable, absolutely. But relatable? The world should be so lucky.

*Sin City

2005-04-02T11:58:00.000-05:00

Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino (special guest director)
Written by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

The only thing I knew about Sin City going in was that the comic was written by Frank Miller and that an action figure from the series got Todd McFarlane on many a Christian-right shitlist back near the turn of the century (I'm sure Todd was heartbroken about that). You'd have thought that would have been enough to get me excited about this film, and I was at least interested. Until I saw the trailer.

A lot has been made of the visuals in the movie - in fact, I'm hearing a lot of the same people who hated the flat, plastic, alien, frosty look of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (and how quickly have we all forgotten Radioland Murders?) praise how amazing and innovative essentially the exact same look is here. I really don't get the disconnect. (And I really hate it when people use "disconnect" as a noun.)

Sin City is a long-running, and I suspect continuing, series of novels, every one of which director Robert Rodriguez claims to want to bring to screen. For this first go-round, however, we are only given three storylines. In the first (which is split into two segments, which bookend the film), a grizzled cop (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a creepy pedophile, then reunites with her eight years later to protect her again. In the second, creepy Marv (Mickey Rourke) scours the city to violently revenge the death of the woman he loves, a woman he hardly knows. In the third, an argument between two rivals (Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen) circuitously upheaves the shaky truce between the police and the working girls of Old Town. The three stories are not connected, are not quite even related other than by setting or by the odd character from one story making an appearance (if not actually taking part) in one of the others.

Seeing as how Rodriguez tries very hard for and succeeds in delivering what is essentially a direct translation of Miller's graphic novels to the big screen, both in dialogue and in visuals (the countless Web sites and magazine articles devoted to providing frame-by-screen comparisons of any given scene in the film can attest to this), Miller very much deserves the co-directing credit for which Rodriguez had to drop out of the DGA in order to let Miller receive. (That Quentin Tarantino receives an enigmatic "Special Guest Director" credit seems irrelevant, given that Rodriguez and Quentin are the same person anyway.)

So, that's what Rodriguez has done. He has succeeded in projecting a giant, moving comic book onto the big screen. As for whether or not Sin City is a successful, that is, satisfying film hinges on exactly two things: 1) whether the audience realizes that they are not watching a movie so much as they are a giant moving comic book on the big screen, and 2) whether the actors take their performances (and the requisite pulpy, neo-noir dialogue) unironically enough to project that they are in a giant moving comic book rather than, say, an incredibly goofy experiment, or an incredibly bad joke (Brittany Murphy, I'm looking directly at you).

Taking point number 2 first, I have to say that the performances, with few exceptions, are uniformly good. The stories are played out by a sprawling cast of various A- and once-were-A-listers, all (with the possible exceptions of Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis) quite surprising, and all (with the definite exception of Brittany Murphy - how in hell do you keep getting work?) surprisingly effective. Clive Owen, action star? Jessica Alba, fragile? Nick Stahl, creepy badass? Carla Gugino, topless lesbian? Mickey Rourke, still alive, and (most surprising of all) actually good? Josh Hartnett, period?

As for point number 1, I must confess that the enjoyment I got out of the film came from the stories, the performances, and the dialogue, but most definitely NOT from the "look" of the thing. That is to say, I think this film works in spite of the whole green-screen gimmick. As I sat in the theater for the length of the picture (two hours and change, by the way) I kept thinking how much more interesting it would have been had it been given a straightforward noir treatment (serious-mode Coen Brothers?), something that didn't have to scream COMIC BOOK !!! at every possible moment. But, I suspect that I am missing the point.

Like I said, in spite of all this, I found Sin City to be amazingly, almost absolutely absorbing. Just imagine what they could have accomplished had they gone and made an actual movie.

Take a drink every time someone gets it right in the groin.

Trailer watch:

Domino - smear all the action dirt on her you want, Keira Knightley ain't nothing but a skinny, 15 year-old British chick.

The Skeleton Key - which is based on a novel by the same guy who wrote the original Japanese novel Ring, and which has a script written by the same guy who wrote the scripts for the American versions of The Ring and The Ring Two as well as, coincidentally enough, the forthcoming John Carter of Mars, for which Robert Rodriguez had to drop directing duties after leaving the DGA; directing duties for John Carter were eventually handed to...what's the opposite of ironic?...Kerry Conran, director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In any case, The Skeleton Key looks like crap.

Mindhunters - apparently serial killers have become so cliché that now even the profilers are killing each other.

Apropos of nothing, I had jury duty this week.

The Ring Two

2005-03-28T22:09:00.000-05:00

Directed by Hideo Nakata
Written by Ehren Kruger, Hiroshi Takahashi (Ring, 1998), Koji Suzuki (novel)

Before I start, let's clear up some things: Hideo Nakata is the director of the original Japanese Ring and Ring 2, as well as the writer of the original Ring 2 (but not of the first Ring), and though he did not direct the American remake of Ring, he is the director of the American version of The Ring Two (and was apparently fourth choice after Gore Verbinski, Richard Kelly, and forthcoming All Families are Psychotic director Noam Murro all Pasadena'd on the project), which is NOT a remake of the original Ring 2 (he's also been tasked to direct the American remake of the Pang Brothers' The Eye, which I find odd, as well as an American remake of the creepy early '80s The Entity, which could go either way, depending).

Glad I could clear that up for you. Though to a lesser extent than I had with Takashi Shimizu's American remake of The Grudge or George Sluizer's American remake of The Vanishing, the biggest problem I had with The Ring Two was that it unspooled very much as what it in fact was: the outsider's version of what he thinks would cater to the stereotypical American audience. You know, like when your boss buys you a heinous Cosby sweater for the office Secret Santa, or when you're driving with this girl who wants to be your girlfriend but you have no interest in her, and she pops in a tape that she "thought you would like," and it always turns out to be, like, the Cranberries or Veruca Salt or some shit, and you think to yourself, Geez, is this what people think of me?

And that's The Ring Two, in a nutshell: a tape of the Cranberries that you traded with your sister for a bag of cornnuts. Face it, people who are not you just don't get you. Period. No matter how hard they think they've studied you, memorized your past work, the best they can hope to expect is a pat on the back for the effort. More often than not, what they will in fact get is a stunned, perhaps even disgusted, "Geez, is this what people think of me?"

The movie starts how you would expect a sequel to start, with the reintroduction of that whole watch-the-creepy-video-tape-and-Samara's-gonna-kill-you-unless-you-make-a-copy-and-show-it-to-someone-within-seven-days thing but, strangely, the conceit is abandoned right away, and pretty much everything that made the first movie so creepy and weird is suddenly replaced by...I guess a different sort of creepiness. Poor Rachel (Naomi Watts) and young Aidan (creepy David Dorfman) are plagued by, in no particular order, bad dreams, spirit possession, Sissy Spacek, the undramatic deaths of a couple pointless supporting characters, lots of water, and a herd of badly CG'ed deer (wouldn't horses have made more sense, storywise?).

It's almost enough to understand Rachel's climactic supreme sacrifice at the end: poor Samara wants a mother, Rachel decides, and since there are no other viable candidates in the room, Rachel will have to do. Until you realize that it wasn't a sacrifice, but a trick - or was it? Was her trickery completely premeditated, or did she just see an eleventh-hour opportunity and take it? If her action was a simple redemption of the fact that she pretty much doomed humanity at the end of the first movie, then the question is irrelevant - live or die, she had to end the cycle. She, like you or I would, simply chose to live. But then, what's the deal with the final, symbolic act of suicide? It doesn't make sense. The pieces do not add up. This movie is crap.

Okay, so there's no "...OR IS IT !?" ending, though as Rachel tells Aidan that it's finally over, that Samara won't be coming back, I half-expected her to go on to tell him that there will not be another sequel, the well (pun intended) was dry, Dreamworks will not commit to continuing this franchise.

Huh. If you liked the first one, don't waste your time. If you didn't like the first one, don't waste your time. You're better off watching the original (that's the Japanese) Ring. But not the original Ring 2 - now, THAT movie was crap.

Glad I could clear that up for you.

Somebody please hook me up with some Lily Chou-Chou MP3s!

*Steamboy

2005-03-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
Written by Sadayuki Murai, Katsuhiro Otomo

A scrappy young boy in industrial Victorian England is entrusted with an all-powerful artifact and, along with a young princess, is relentlessly pursued by mysterious MIB-types intent on possessing said artifact (which they view as the key to powering the ultimate weapon), eventually journeying far from his provincial home where he dramatically battles for control of a flying fortress and, by extension, the fate of the entire human race.

The story of which I speak is, of course, Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful 1986 fantasy adventure epic, Laputa (that's Castle in the Sky to all you Vanderbeekers out there). But, Steamboy is no slouch, either. It's gorgeous. It's just that the dork-boy in me couldn't get past the parallels. Both take place in an incredibly sumptuous Jules Verne-ish, H.G. Wells-ian world. The Scrappy Boy here is Ray Steam, who we see in an early scene beating a boy about the head with a brass pipe (now that's scrappy!). The Young Princess here is a girl named Scarlett O'Hara (no joke, and don't even get me started on the guy named Robert Stephenson), of the enigmatic O'Hara Foundation, which funds the invention by Ray's father and grandfather of the All-Powerful Artifact, the titular Steamboy, a surprisingly light iron ball that, through a combination of pure water and incredibly high pressure, provides limitless steam energy.

There are two marked ways in which Steamboy differs from Laputa: philosophy and tone. While Laputa's philosophy was limited to the decidedly Disneyesque be-nice-to-animals-and-the-environment, Steamboy is concerned with a discussion of technology itself - its purposes, the responsibility of its creators, its users. The answers, as in life, are ambiguous - it's in the questioning that humanity is found.

Fittingly, Steamboy retains an appropriately dark tone throughout. Almost the entire second act (which felt drawn out to me, and maybe this is why) takes place in the dark confines of the abovementioned fortress - all pipes and, of course, steam. The entire third act (again, a bit drawn out) is an extended action sequence where lots of people die. I mean, people died in Laputa, but never quite on-screen. Things exploded and people fell of cliffs, but you never really saw any bodies or blood. Not so here. Corpses, both innocent and guilty, bleed and fly all over the extended third act of Steamboy.

One smaller side-difference from Laputa is that, while Miyazaki's hero and heroine play Disneyesque ideals, Otomo makes the daring miscalculation (and make no mistake, it is a miscalculation, albeit a daring one) of having his female lead unrelenting in her snobbish brattiness to the very end (speaking of which, don't be fooled when the credits start rolling, as the story is very much continuing behind the silhouettes of ignorant theatergoers and, in my case, no less than three custodians who felt the need to sweep the row directly in front of me).

No written description of Steamboy could ever do it justice, as its main strengths are in its visuals and the steam-technology presented (the CG cuts, though extensive, are pretty low key until almost the very end, where the appearance of carousel horses and other carnival rides seemed designed specifically to annoy me. Well, good job). Steamboy's many cogs, wheels, zeppelins, and steam-powered suits of armor were certainly enough to make the otakus sitting in front of me cream their pants, repeatedly (is this why the custodians kept coming back?). And in the end, isn't that what a good cinematic experience is all about? And so, for this, Steamboy gets the coveted asterisk from moviesofmike. But I'm going to be watching Laputa again. Tonight.

Please to note that this film is being shown in theaters in both English and Japanese. The undubbed, subtitled Japanese cut runs roughly 26 minutes longer than the English dub, which features the voices of Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart, and Alfred Molina. While I can't personally vouch for the English version, it is possible that the edits could help with some of the pacing issues I mentioned, and I generally find dubs performed by actual actors to be more nuanced than the generally histrionic and overenunciated performances of most American voice actors. No dub, however, can solve the biggest problem of having to add extra words just so the actors have some noises to make while the character's mouths keep moving (e.g. "What have you done with my father?" invariable becomes "What have you done with my father? Tell me now! I need to know right now! Tell me, tell me what have you done with him?") Just my thoughts. Didn't see the dub, can't vouch for it. Check with your theater before leaving the house.

P.S. I get bonus points for writing this whole thing without once mentioning the word "steampunk" (ugh).

The Jacket

2005-03-05T00:10:00.000-05:00

Directed by John Maybury
Written by Tom Bleecker (story), Marc Rocco (story), Massy Tadjedin

If you were wondering what Adrien Brody could possibly do as a followup to his sensitive portrayal of the retarded Noah Percy in The Village (and really, what normal moviegoer wouldn't be?), the answer would appear to be to star in a very, very retarded movie.

Brody plays Jack Starks, a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and probably brain damage after being shot in the head by a little kid during the first Gulf War. A few months later, he's back in the States, apparently living as some sort of drifter (this is never explained, though I guess it happens). He helps a little girl and her apparently-deranged mother start their truck. This scene is important because we meet the girl again (now Deeply Troubled) several years on in her life. We know she is Deeply Troubled because she drinks a lot, she smokes a lot, she appears to have bought all of her home furnishings from Urban Outfitters (you gotta watch out for those Urban Outfitters chicks, seriously), and she wears black nail polish. Hey, her mother wore black nail polish! Important character detail here!

Meanwhile, Jack gets falsely accused of a cop killing (Damn you, Brad Renfro!) and is sent to a mental institution where he undergoes a super-secret, radical therapy (presided over by a waxy Kris Kristofferson) involving...ahem...being pumped full of drugs, getting tied up in the titular jacket, and being locked in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Some combination of the above, along with the PTSD or the brain damage causes Jack to...ahem...travel into the future. This is never explained. I'm guessing it's the jacket, it must be some sort of a magic jacket. Otherwise, the movie would be called, say, The Drugs, or possibly The Drawer, or maybe even The Brain Damage.

So he goes into the future and...that's basically it. He's not there to clear his name, or to save anybody, or to help mankind, or anything. The fact that he learns of his own death is basically an afterthought, and the subplot involving his trying to solve his own (possible) murder sort of loses steam and is abandoned partway.

I guess in this way, it is attempting at some sort of realism, or as close to realism as you can get in a movie involving time travel. If you woke up one morning and discovered that you could travel through time, face it, you wouldn't do it to save humanity, you'd probably do it just to make out with the hot chick (here, Keira Knightley, who was always just a blonde Winona Ryder, but here is just plain Winona Ryder).

There's a lot more plot involving another inmate who tried to kill his wife and Jennifer Jason Leigh curing an autistic boy, none of which really goes anywhere, makes much sense, or is worth detailing, except...under what possible circumstance would a doctor let a patient (whom she knows that a court of law has judged to be criminally insane) out of hospital grounds, LET ALONE let wander about unsupervised, LET ALONE let him go into a stranger's house (again, unsupervised) that she knows has a kid in it, LET ALONE ask HIM if HE'S okay by HIMself, if SHE should just wait by the fekking truck?

Like I said, none of this really matters, as the focus of the movie is on the time travel, but as the focus of the movie, it here simply signifies nothing. If you saw the not-completely-dissimilar The Butterfly Effect, you saw how incredibly narcissistic and simple-minded that movie was in its judgments of which past actions effect which present person at whatever moment is most convenient to them, and have absolutely no effect on anyone (or anywhen??) else. Well, at least Ashton was trying to protect his girlfriend from becoming some cut-up four-dollar crack whore. The Jacket goes one level of narcissism further by not having any actual reason for the act other than the act itself. Yes, certain things come up, and a Signficant Letter is written (albeit on Asylum for the Criminally Insane letterhead - probably wanted to tear that off before delivering that letter there, sport), but again, mere afterthoughts. Like, not only is it narcissistic, it's like being narcissistic for narcissism's sake, which I suppose would be the very definition of narcissism (I hope no one is trying to read this review aloud).

The movie you should be watching, of course, is Twelve Monkeys, which had all manner of things this movie did not, not least of which is a sense of humor.

The 77th Annual Academy Awards

2005-03-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

I wasn't going to comment on this year's Oscars, was just hoping that they'd be quickly forgotten in favor of all the exciting new stuff coming out this year (what were they again? I can only think of two, and neither one of them is Episode 3). But, since you asked (if you asked), here's what I think:

Just about everything about this year's ceremony was wrong.

The treatment of the nominees of the quote unquote lesser categories was reprehensible, offensive even. Yeah, tonight isn't about achievement or recognition, it's all about star power. No one cares about costume designers, make-up artists, production designers, or the people who make those little movies that no one cares about, like docs or shorts. Just give us our Tom Hankses, our Julia Robertses, our Robin Williamses, our Tom Cruises.

Here's an idea for next year's ceremony: for the Best Actor nominees, let's let the Big Stars have their triumphant walk to the stage, but make all the "lesser" actors sit together so that, on the off-chance that they win, we can toss them their Award like a bag of peanuts and let them take all of four steps to a microphone stand where they can make their speech to the back of the heads of people that we've decided are more important than they are. Let's see, figuring that that would shave about four seconds for each of the major categories, that's another, what, twenty seconds of the viewer's life that they can take back? (Assuming that none of the Big Stars win, of course.)

Or better yet, let's parade them all on stage like cattle at a 4-H auction. That way, you don't get the triumphant walk to the stage if you win, but you do get a nice loser's walk back to your empty seat when you lose. Charming. I'd like to see them do that to Tom Hanks.

There's a lot more that goes into movies than actors and directors. Yes, I know that actors and directors are the big box-office (and Nielsen rating) draws, but the Oscars aren't supposed to be like that. The Oscars are supposed to be about recognition and achievement in all the aspects of movie-making. The producers of this program, who are in the business, should know better. How could they not know that these people deserve better? How could they not know that there are actually people out there aspiring to get into the movies, NOT as actors, NOT as directors, but AS make-up artists, set designers, costume designers, sound engineers, visual effects artists, animators, documentarians? How could they pass up a once-a-year chance to actually explain what exactly a production designer does, why a cinematographer deserves an award, how the quality of sound editing can absolutely make or break a picture?

How could they not understand that in a culture so obsessed with celebrity and weekend numbers, that for many of these people, this is the one night when they get not only industry-wide, but virtually world-wide recognition for all the things that the general public, though they go by the thousands to ooh and ahh at their work, don't even consciously realize whose work they are oohing and ahhing?

This year, not only did the producers decline to educate, they all but denied that these "other" aspects even exist. This, I find unforgiveable.

I couldn't even enjoy Charlie Kaufman's much-deserved win (Eternal Sunshine was the movie of the year, as far as I'm concerned) and non-speech. No, the only purely enjoyable moment I found in Sunday's proceedings was Jorge Drexler's acceptance speech for his win for best song ("Al Otro Lado del Rio", The Motorcycle Diaries). While struggling to hear a hint of melody or rhythm in Antonio Banderas' voice underneath Carlos Santana ceaselessly being CARLOS SANTANA (TM), my head just about burst. Drexler's speech was the perfect fuck-you - to Banderas, to Santana, to Beyonce, and to all the show's producers who chose a vision of glitz over substance. I turned to my friend and said, "How cool would it be if he just finished singing, said thank you, and walked off the stage?" And just then, turning back to the TV, I watched Drexler do exactly that. Perfect.

*Constantine

2005-02-19T00:15:00.000-05:00

Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by Kevin Brodbin, Frank Cappello, Jamie Delano (comic), Garth Ennis (comic)

Man it's cold out - 21 degrees, and windy. And I know I'm going to hell already anyway, so I don't feel too scared about the repercussions of what I'm about to say:

Hell doesn't really look all that bad.

But...why are there cars in hell? And palm trees? And the brief view of what we see going on underneath (I guess even hell has an underneath) to me looked a great deal like the classic dance party Zion scene in The Matrix Reloaded.

Okay, I take that back. Hell looks downright awful.

I've never read Hellblazer, though I'm a big fan of the Vertigo brand (geez, listen to me). Apparently the original John Constantine was British, and based physically on Sting. Not so, here, on either count.

John Constantine is not your everyday guy-who-looks-good-in-a-suit. Due to a psychic gift, some bad parenting, and a few questionable life choices, Constantine has now dedicated his life, like most of us, I suppose, to get on God's good graces and secure himself a place in Heaven. Then we find out he's dying, which I think is supposed to be the big driving motivation behind the actions to come, though I don't really see things going any differently either way.

We're taken to Constantine's shithole apartment, which is about four times the size of mine and one bottle of Windex and a free weekend away from being four times nicer. I'm serious! High ceilings, dramatic lighting, and only a pullman kitchen, but did you see the size of that bathroom? The last six Chinese restaurants I've eaten at put together could fit in that bathroom!

The plot, involving an attempt to bring about hell on Earth using the Spear of Destiny (which you will remember from the TNT original movie The Librarian: Quest for the Spear starring Noah Wylie was the spear that killed Jesus, and is rumored to bring it's bearer great power, and don't pretend like you didn't see the TNT original movie The Librarian: Quest for the Spear) didn't make a lot of sense to me the first time around, and I doubt that it would hold up under repeated viewings, though it was actually involving enough to make the kids in the theater stop yakking on their cellies for about an hour. If you want plot, go watch the TNT original movie The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. Constantine is a fun Friday night. Goes good with popcorn. Believe me, you've seen much worse.

The plot also involves several trips to hell. Going to hell involves lots of water. All those bottles of water in that huge apartment makes me think Constantine goes to hell a lot. You'd think he'd be used to it by now.

Casting is good, for the most part - Keanu somewhat redeems himself from the last few Matrix movies ("At least the weather's nice" - classic), and Rachel Weisz is not annoying. Pruitt Taylor Vince, Djimon Hounsou and Tilda Swinton are great, as always, as expected. It was fun watching Gavin Rossdale (or Mr. Gwen Stefani - oh come on, you saw that coming from a mile away) die, and Peter Stormare can now add "Gay Christopher Walken" to his resume. But Shia LaBoeuf - poor guy. Showed such promise in Holes and (to a much lesser extent) The Battle of Shaker Heights, but now seems doomed to play the annoying know-it-all sidekick for the rest of his life.

Constantine was originally to be directed by original video auteur Tarsem Singh, with Nick Cage starring. Tarsem left the production because he refused to work with Nick. I don't know why Nick left. Director Francis Lawrence is also from music video land, though I don't know that I've seen anything that he's done.

Fun movie - I wonder if the book's better.

Trailer watch:

A Scanner Darkly - looks better than I expected (though, School of Rock aside, I tend not to so much get into Linklater's non-walking-around movies). I haven't read this particular PKD, but based on what they reveal of the plot, it looks like there's actually a reason why this movie is animated - I had previously thought that this was just one of those let's-animate-it-for-the-sake-of-animating-it movies. Oh, and a note about the animation here as well as in Waking Life - breathtaking? Groundbreaking? Completely state-of-the-art and unlike anything you have ever seen? It's called rotoscoping, and not only have people been doing it at least since the early 1900s, it's actually much easier than what's referred to as "normal" animation. Yeesh.
Batman Begins - sigh.
The New World - geez, give it a rest already?
Stealth - oh my god, this is the worst movie ever made.
House of Wax - no, THIS is the worst movie ever made.

*Inside Deep Throat

2005-02-12T00:07:00.000-05:00

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

It's hard to talk about a movie like this. Whenever people start talking about movies like this, they wind up talking more about the actual events or engage in the debate itself, rather than talking about the film as a film. So, I'm going to try not to talk about politics, sexual or otherwise, or life in the age of "porno" vs. the age of "porn", or how much I miss top-loaders (I do! Top-loaders are the shit! Do the kids still say that? "The shit"?) - most importantly, I will do my best to separate discussion of the movie Deep Throat (which I've never seen - I'm sure I would have remembered if I had, I remember all the other awful '70s porn videos I saw when I was a kid) from that of the movie I just saw tonight, Inside Deep Throat. DT and IDT, for short.

So, first off, did I like IDT? Yeah, it was alright. I was a bit worried at first that the makers seemed overly coy about DT's subject matter, that they were dancing around it, always referring to it as "the act", or "that thing that she could do". It reminded me of an professor I had in undergrad, poor thing, who was trying to teach us the (non-)subtleties of Restoration-era English comedies, but seemed incapable of even alluding to anything at all untoward without blushing, giggling, covering her mouth, let alone actually being able to say aloud the word S-E-X.

And then, they show it. They show it. And it's masterful. Not only what Linda Lovelace does, but the way it is revealed in the film. Finally, I think, a movie!

Oh, and before I'm accused of being overly coy and all blushy and giggly myself, allow me to be completely clear what "it" is. "It" is Linda Lovelace taking a huge, erect penis all the way down her throat.

The history and aftermath of this one wonderful (possibly even important) moment in pop culture, and to a lesser extent, pornography itself, is traced through some cool archival footage and excellent interviews with everyone involved in its making, including its distributors, prosecutors and defenders, a handful of some of the best-selling authors and thinkers on the subject, Dr. Ruth Westheimer (I swear, didn't she die?), and of course the filmmakers themsleves, including director Gerard Damiano (he of the worst hairpiece in history), a crazy-eyed Harry Reems (who I can't remember if he actually did fake his own death, or was just rumored to have died), even Linda Lovelace herself (who, sadly, did pass away in April 2002). Stories from Lovelace's family and a childhood friend add weight and gravity, if not any concrete answers, to what pretty much amounts to a very, very sad life.

There are some things I could have done without. I could have done without the cutesy introductions of the protagonists of this little tale, and the Big Ending tries to give both this film and its subject far greater cultural weight than either have, on the terms of IDT, I think, earned. I mean, I could buy that the emergence and popularity of pornography in the early '70s was, in its way, the birth (or, at the very least, a birth) of today's independent film, and this one stupid little movie (DT) really did open up discussion and debate not only on censorship and morality, but on the idea of the clitoral orgasm and, by extension, the very concept of female sexuality itself, not to mention making a ton of money for...well, the mob, I guess, seeing as how everyone interviewed claims not to have seen dime one of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars DT has made, and though IDT's assertion that the porn industry is killing itself with oversaturation is true, the film goes on to posit that this oversaturation is removing all trace of art that ever existed in porn. This, not thirty minutes after talking about, and showing, Harry Reems giving the worst acting performance ever committed to film. Honestly, how much "art" was there ever involved?

Also, with all the interviews, why the distracting, heavy-handed narration (Dennis Hopper, no less)? One or two additional interviews would have taken care of it. It is, after all, the great interviews that make this movie. If you're are looking for a human face to put to the triumphs, tragedies, and reluctant legacy of this one, single, stupid movie from long long ago, don't ask the starlets at the AVN Awards, who have hardly even heard of DT, let alone seen it. No, you need look no further than the wife of former Miami theater owner Arthur Sommer. Classic.

*In Good Company

2005-01-29T20:48:00.000-05:00

Directed and written by Paul Weitz

In Good Company, as I understand it, was until literally days before its release to be titled Synergy. A more interesting title, to be sure, and probably more appropriate as well. Synergy (besides being also the name of the holographic svengali in the seriously-due-for-a-comeback Jem and the Holograms) is one of those quintessential meaningless HR buzz-words that, if you can stop being cynical for one damn minute, can actually be a pretty interesting, if not outright uplifting, concept that comes pretty damn close to actually making sense, damnit. Not unlike this movie.

Movies of this sort usually try to suss out the family at work vs. family at home thing by arguing that you can't be happy in one if you're happy in the other. In Good Company is bookended by trying to show that it is possible to be happy in both. To this end, the bad guy is played by Topher Grace, who plays one of those shallow, handsome, how-the-fuck-did-he-get-so-lucky ex-fratboy overachievers who are quickly sucking up every affordable apartment on the Upper East Side. I mean, Jesus Christ, am I the only one who wants to physically strike these people?

Of course, unlike in real life, things here are not so cut-and-dried. Topher Grace is actually pretty likeable here, and you feel bad at a few of his initial failures, and don't begrudge him some of his initial success. Plotwise, you can pretty much map it out based on the trailer. Old guy gets downgraded, new guy keeps old guy on because new guy knows he's in over his head, old guy is humiliated but plugs along, there's the obligatory sports scene, they teach each other a thing or two about life and business, and they wind up being friends. There's also a small romantic subplot involving the new guy and the old guy's daughter that seems a little tacked on, seems just an excuse to show pretty people being pretty together (though, to be fair, if that was indeed their intention, they succeed).

It's a little formulaic, but forgiveable. What saves the movie for sure are the nuanced performances from all principle and supporting. Both Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace are pretty good at portraying people who suddenly find things spinning rapidly out of their control, and Topher Grace can actually be pretty funny when he wants to be (apparently, his TV checks aren't big enough). Scarlett Johansson is radiant, of course, though unconvincing as an 18 year-old (especially given that we saw her convincingly playing 18 quite a while back in Ghost World, and convincingly playing 20-something two years ago in Lost in Translation, and because, as much as I hate to admit it, I've been so wholly brainwashed by all these tabloid stories about her and Colin Farrell and Javier Bardem and the like that I kept expecting her and Dennis Quaid to, like, start making out, or something). Malcolm McDowell, in an uncredited cameo, is appropriately, and hilariously, creepy. And, of course, there's David Paymer, who takes your basic Smykowsky role and, through intonation alone, somehow elevates it to something approaching its very own movie.

In short, a synergy of good performances, a smattering of outside-the-box thinking, maybe the reorganization of a few paradigms could have better maximized the revenue streams for this film. Might I suggest a team-building exercise, possibly in the form of a person-centered weekend encounter group?

Kudos to the Weitzes. I'd put this squarely in the "win" column, above American Pie, below About a Boy. And with any luck, we will continue the forgetting of Down to Earth.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Appleseed

2005-01-15T01:20:00.000-05:00

Directed by Shinji Aramaki
Written by Haruka Handa, Tsutomu Kamishiro, Masamune Shirow (comic)

Ah, the double-edged sword of the CG-heavy sci-fi movie. On the one hand, their makers are usually so concerned with showing off all the cool things they can do that they neglect to tell a compelling story in an interesting way (I'm looking right at you, Wachowskis), and on the other hand, all the cool things they have to show off, frankly, don't look very good (again, Wachowskis).

In these respects, kudos to the makers of Appleseed of making a movie which is interesting, sort of, and also looks good, sort of.

Putting aside what I think I remember of the original Appleseed movie (wasn't this just a cop show?), the plot (involving the uneasy relationship between mankind and a new race of "bioroids"(cloned, synthetic human beings not unlike the Replicants of Blade Runner, complete with truncated lifespan), and the dying romance between a troubled ex-soldier and an even-more-troubled soldier-turned-cyborg-cop (Briareos, pictured above)) wound up having a bit more depth than your average PS2 game cutscene, and aside from some crummy water, fire, smoke, and broken glass effects (I've finally decided that CG programmers are NEVER going to get those right, so I don't even pay attention anymore), I must to say that much of the non-character animation was the best I've ever seen.

Much of the non-character animation was, in fact, as good as the character animation was bad, which is to say the character animation was extraordinarily bad. Their movements, which according to the credits was based on motion-capture, ranged from okay-that-was-weird to what-the-hell-was-that. The faces, also based on human models according to the credits, were as alien, frightening, and expressionless as porcelain masks (also shiny). Watching these faces reciting some already pretty bad dialgoue was...not something I'd like to see in another movie, ever.

You'll find a lot to be annoyed about in Appleseed, but with its complex (if a bit overwrought) plot and great non-character animation, it's certainly not as bad as it could have been. In fact, if you're way into either anime or sci-fi, it's probably worth a viewing. If you really want to see some engaging, human, intelligent, and well-animated sci-fi, though, you should watch the Ghost in the Shell movies, or better yet, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade or the criminally underrated Patlabor: WXIII.