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Movie
Reviews
2002
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| Murder by
Numbers (2/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
I violated one
of my prime rules tonight and saw a movie with Sandra Bullock.
I’ve never understood how this woman became a movie star.
Anyway, I went to see Murder by Numbers.
This movie is
worth seeing just to watch how truly bad an actress can be.
Bullock, as executive producer, did one smart thing.
She made sure she found a supporting actor who wouldn’t out
perform her. She accomplished
this task with aplomb by getting Ben Chaplin to sleepwalk his way through
the part as her partner.
She was
fortunate, also, in getting Tony Gayton to direct his own poorly written
screenplay.
He apparently went to a Hitchcock class once, or saw Vertigo and
Foreign Correspondent in a double feature, and tried to make them both at
the same time, all the while telling an updated version of Loeb &
Leopold.
Alas, all is not
lost.
The teenagers, two men and one woman, are superb.
The Loeb and Leopold roles are played by Ryan Gosling and Michael
Pitt and their teenage lover is played by Agnes Bruckner who is drop dead
gorgeous, but who looks far too old for a high school girl.
She’s so beautiful it’s almost worth the price of admission
just to watch her. Almost.
Unfortunately,
Bullock is on screen so much that there’s not much to enjoy.
Given yet another politically correct heroine who initiates all the
sex and just about everything else, her girly ineptitude in the final
confrontation is as ludicrous as the rest of the movie.
The sex between
Bullock and Chaplin is uninvolving; the relationships between Bullock and
everyone else, her partner, her boss, and the suspects are convoluted,
inconsistent and inexplicable.
If you want to
see terminally horrible acting by Bullock and Chaplin, and a poorly
written script poorly directed, this movie is for you.
However, I do believe that Gosling, Pitt, and Bruckner are so good
that they are worth suffering through Bullock, Chaplin and Gayton’s
writing and directing.
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| The
Bourne Identity (3/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
I was looking
forward to this movie because I read Robert Ludlum’s book several
decades ago.
While it wasn’t Ludlum’s best (that would be The Eiger
Sanction, written under the pseudonym Trevanian, which became a wonderful
Clint Eastwood Movie and contained a tour
de force by Jack Cassidy in a role that allegedly contributed to his
untimely death), The Bourne Identity was an enjoyable read.
Unfortunately,
this review is not about Eastwood or Cassidy or Ludlum, it’s about Matt
Damon and Director Doug Liman. Damon’s a good-looking guy whose best
roll was his cameo as Private Ryan. Maybe
he’s best when he’s off screen and people are looking for him.
Here, however, he’s on screen while people are looking for
him.
For some unknown
reason, Liman apparently wanted to show a totally emotionless protagonist.
So he made a good pick in Damon whose display of emotions, in
Dorothy Parker’s words, runs the gamut from A to B.
One thing you could say about Ludlum’s novels, both good and bad,
is that his protagonists were emotional.
Lots of italicized thoughts run throughout his novels emphasizing
the fact that his hero has feelings. Damon,
on the other hand, seems totally unphased by the fact that his life has
apparently only started when he awakens on a fishing boat in the
Mediterranean Sea
and that the entire world seems out to kill him.
This picture has
been in the can seemingly forever. Universal
kept postponing its release date. Too
bad they didn’t use that time to fix things, like reshoot it entirely
with a different director and a different star.
One of the many
problems, other than Damon’s lack of emotion, is the fact that there’s
no suspense. This guy is so in
control that you never doubt he’s ever going to come to harm.
He knows everything that’s going to happen before it happens. For
example, he deduces that there’s a hit man outside just because a dog is
missing. Then he finds
the guy, who’s hiding in a huge weed-filled field surrounding a
farmhouse in the country, with no clues.
Before a shot is fired, he knows exactly where to go to look for
him.
You want more?
The fight scenes are poorly staged and unrealistic, one Hollywood
Punch after another. Damon
kills his last guy in a derivative scene copied from Guilty as Sin (a
pretty good Don Johnson-Rebecca deMornay thriller that virtually nobody
saw). It was ludicrous in
Guilty as Sin and it’s still ludicrous.
More?
Take the car chase. Please.
Why do directors continue to try to liven up movies with ever more
implausible car chases? Nobody’s
ever going to achieve the standard set by Peter Yates in Bullitt (although
William Friedkin came close in The French Connection).
The fact the chasee in The Bourne Identity is a Mini Cooper and is
mostly going the wrong way on one-way streets (a cheap trick to which
Yates didn’t have to resort in Bullitt) should be a telling tip it’s
as uninvolving and unsuspenseful as the rest of the movie.
The film makers
must have been as confused as they make their audience because they
explain virtually nothing. The
word sailing through your mind as you leave the theater is, huh?
And, speaking of mysteries, if you do happen to go see this, please
explain how Damon discovered what he discovers at the end.
Huh?
On the plus
side, I didn’t go to sleep
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Windtalkers (1/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
I felt I had to
see Windtalkers because I’ve always liked World War II movies, from the
best, From Here to Eternity and The Caine Mutiny, to John Wayne in Sands
of Iwo Jima and Flying Leathernecks, to Battleground and A Walk in the
Sun. I even liked Battle Cry
despite Tab Hunter and Aldo Ray.
So I went to see
Windtalkers. I didn’t expect a comedy.
Nicolas Cage plays the John Wayne role.
Boy, this guy was a marine corps all by himself.
He must have killed half of the Japs who died in the Pacific in
this one movie! What a guy!
The director,
John Woo, never could figure out what kind of gun Cage should be using.
So in one scene he’s using a carbine.
In the next scene he’s got a sub machine gun.
Then he’s using a .45 handgun.
And what a shot! Anyone
who’s ever shot a .45 knows that you can’t hit the broad side of a
barn with it unless you’re within five feet. The kick alone is enough to
break your arm. But Cage never misses!
It seems as if every time he fires his .45, three Japs die, none of
whom are within 50 feet of him. Man,
he pulls that trigger and Japs fly all over everywhere!
He and his
windtalker Navajo buddy, played by Adam Beach, walk into the Jap front
lines and the two of them kill half a division even though the only weapon
Cage has is his trusty .45. Tojo must have sent only the stupidest Japs to Saipan.
And the noise!
This is one of the loudest movies you’ll ever see; nothing but
guns shooting and bullets flying. But
whenever Cage wants to have a talk with his buddy, Beach, all the sounds
of the war cease. There it
is, World War II being fought all around them, and they’re having their
little heart to heart in the middle of the battle field and the only thing
you can hear is the wind whistling as they speak to each other.
Director Woo
never comes to grips with what function these “windtalkers,” Navajos
whose language was used as a code, performed and why they were so
important.
The only thing Woo used them for in this movie is to radio
coordinates of locations of Japs to big guns behind the lines to blast the
Japs to smithereens. Why did
they need some indecipherable code to transmit this information, which is
hardly top-secret? If the
Japs intercepted the transmission, what were they going to do?
Go to their Colonel and say, “Colonel, they’ve found our
coordinates! We’ve got to
move these three ton guns that it took us four months to erect somewhere
else in the next five minutes or we’ll be blown to smithereens!”
Give me a break. Apparently windtalkers were just the McGuffin
(which is what Hitchcock called the thing that was generally some
inanimate object that was going to make someone a fortune or change the
world as we know it, that provided the raison d’etre for the plot of the
movie, like the statue of the maltese falcon in the movie of the same
name). Windtalkers had to
perform some function more useful than what Woo concocted if they were
that important. Woo couldn’t
have cared less that their presence in the movie made sense.
Pushing the
implausible button, the Windtalker (Beach) got to a radio during a fierce
firefight and radioed to the Navy that the Navy was bombarding US Marines,
not Japs.
Luckily, a guy as handy with big guns as Cage is with the .45 must
have been running the Navy because without bracketing or information from
forward observers or anything else that would have been needed in a real
war, they immediately started blasting the location of the Japs.
Precisely! From maybe 30
miles away. Sight unseen! In
fact, whenever any marine shot at a Jap, he hit him.
Cage’s marines even destroyed a Jap tank by throwing two grenades
at it! No marine ever missed
a Jap if he pulled the trigger.
I don’t know
what Director Woo did for a living before he found directing movies to be
so easy, but it sure didn’t expose him to the way wars are fought.
This movie is sheer fantasy. So-called
sophisticates take glee in putting down WWII movies that were made before
our enlightened times of hand-held cameras and limbs blown off in front of
your very eyes. But Sands of
Iwo Jima and Battleground weren’t nearly as unrealistic as Windtalkers.
If you’re
among the legions of people who have successfully avoided this movie,
count your blessings. It’s
an interminable two hours and fifteen minutes that would be better spent
investing in Worldcom without help from Martha Stewart.
Tony
Medley
PS.
For those of you who are politically correct, I use the term “Jap”
to describe the people who started and fought WWII, who attacked Pearl
Harbor with no warning, who conducted the Bataan Death March, who abused
hundreds of thousands of “comfort women”, who raped Nanking, who
killed 2/3 of the POWs in the Pacific (vs. only 4% who died in Europe). The
people who presently occupy Japan are Japanese.
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Pumpkin (0/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
Tony Medley
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Men in Black
II (1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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South
Pacific (10/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Road
to Perdition (6/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
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K19
- The Widowmaker (7/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Read My Lips (8/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Possession
(5/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Blue Crush (2/10)
Copyright © 2002
by Tony Medley
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Signs (1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Blood Work (6/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Lovely and Amazing
(6/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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City By the Sea (6/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Igby
Goes Down (7/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Last Kiss (7/10)
Copyright
©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Banger Sisters
(1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Sweet Home Alabama
(1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Man From
Elysian Fields (10/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Real Women Have Curves (7/10)
Copyright © 2002
by Tony Medley
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Roger Dodger (8/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Auto Focus
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Truth About Charlie (2/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Weight of Water
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Frida (8/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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I Spy (1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Way Home (9/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Santa Clause 2 (8/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Femme Fatale (5/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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December’s Quick
Reviews
Copyright ã
2002 by Tony Medley
The Man From Elysian Fields (10/10):
Married
destitute writer Andy Garcia is fixed up by escort service owner Mick
Jagger (in an Oscar-deserving performance) with gorgeous Olivia
Williams, who is married to famous writer James Coburn, and this film,
with striking parallels to Sunset Boulevard, weaves its
Faustian tale; best drama I’ve seen this year.
Frida
(8/10): The sanitized, curiously unemotional biopic of Artist Frida Kahlo, wife
of Mexican Communist muralist Diego Rivera; interesting and
beautifully photographed, but the truth would have made a better story.
The Santa Clause 2 (8/10): Santa (Tim Allen) has to find a wife so he leaves the
North Pole in the care of a clone who turns out to be a dictator,
jeopardizing Christmas; a delightful, funny, happy fantasy with clever
dialogue.
Punch Drunk Love (6/10): Adam Sandler as a mentally dysfunctional man who
falls in love; a surprisingly touching film, poignant rather than
funny.
Femme Fatale (5/10): Film Noir that is marred by a non-noir, blatantly soap
opera-derivative, Hollywood cop-out
ending and a dismal performance by leading lady Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.
The Truth About Charlie (2/10): Tepid remake of Charade without Cary
Grant, Audrie Hepburn, Walter Matthau, Stanley Donen and Henry
Mancini, so why see it?
Personal Velocity (1/10): A deplorable trilogy presenting a starkly negative,
unsympathetic, invidious view of women.
I Spy (1/10): Poorly written version of ‘60s Robert Culp-Bill Cosby hit, overloaded
with special effects, without the charm and humor of Culp and Cosby.
Auto Focus (1/10): Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) was a second-rate disk
jockey who luckily got a role in an imbecilic sitcom (Hogan’s
Heroes) that became a hit; this tiresome biopic shows him as a
sexual sociopath who came to a violent end; the only question is, who
cares?
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(NR): I
looked at my watch after 40 minutes and realized I couldn’t take
another 2 hours of this nonsense full of flying special effects and
bugs coming out of a young boy’s mouth; maybe children would like
this; I can’t imagine an adult being entertained.
The End
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Far From Heaven (0/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Personal Velocity (1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Die Another Day (7/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Quiet American (4/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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My Kingdom (8/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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The Pianist (10/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Analyze That (6/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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Max (1/10)
Copyright ©
2002 by Tony Medley
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