Movie Reviews

Catch Me If You Can(5)

Anybody who’s torn between whether the death penalty is worse than life imprisonment should see Catch Me If You Can. Sitting through this thing should resolve that dilemma conclusively. Death is merciful compared with monotony.

Has Steven Spielberg lost it? He apparently directed this; at least that’s what the credits say. It’s hard to believe that the guy who directed fast-moving films like Jaws and the Indiana Jones series and Duel also directed this ponderous paceless piece. Catch Me If You Can might have been a good 80-minute movie. However this story, loosely based on ‘60s era teenage poseur Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), runs an interminable 2 hours and 20 minutes. One thinks one is in for life. It’s not just slow, it’s sloooooooooooow.

And, talk about wasted talent! If Tom Hanks is truly one of the great actors of our time, a dubious premise at best, then this is a deplorable dissipation of that talent. Hanks’ role in this film, as an FBI agent (Carl Hanratty) chasing Abagnale, is one dimensional, and could have been adequately handled by a fairly competent character actor (although, in truth, one doesn’t come swimmingly to mind). In fact, while I’m on it, if Hanks’ role really is star quality, Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy or Russell Crowe would have added something to it. Hanks disappears in this turgid script by Jeff Nathanson.

Unless you’re looking for a cure for insomnia, avoid this if you can.

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January 3, 2003

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Chicago(10)

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Narc (5/10)

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About Schmidt (8/10)

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Talk To Her (8)

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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1)

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The Recruit (8)

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Daredevil (1)

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Till Human Voices Wake Us (9)

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How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (6)

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Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (9)

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Dark Blue (1)

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The Hours (1)

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The Hunted (8/10)

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Bringing Down the House (4)

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Tears of the Sun (5)

This is a Hollywood War Movie in the style of Michael Mann, which means it’s too long and contains a plethora of reaction shots. Too bad, too, because Director Antonio Fuqua’s heart seems to be in the right place.

The setup for the film is that Lt. A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) takes his Navy Seal squad into Nigeria to rescue Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci) and two nuns from marauding rebels who were raping and pillaging. After landing the doc wants to stay if Waters won’t take all the people in her charge. Waters tricks her into the ‘copter and they fly away. Waters then changes his mind and they return to the people who were in her care. A few fly away in the ‘copters, leaving Waters with the doctor and the rest of the people.

How long would it take you to film that? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Certainly not longer than that, right? It takes Fuqua over 40 minutes to get this across. We get shot after shot of people contemplating their navels, rainforests, waterfalls, more contemplation, lizards that look like Gila monsters, rain, more contemplation. It’s almost unending.

The rest of the movie is Waters and his squad trying to get everyone to safety, fighting off the marauding hordes, and there appear to be thousands. Waters’ Superior Officer, Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt), refuses support and orders Waters to abandon the people he’s trying to save and return to the ship. Waters ignores him. All the while Waters’ squad never runs out of ammo, despite firing thousands of rounds at the pursuers and not being resupplied by Rhodes, but, then, this is a Hollywood War. And only in a Hollywood War could a 7-man squad elude thousands of pursuers who know exactly where they are.

This film does contain one of the worst actresses I’ve ever seen (well, let’s not talk about Julianna Moore [oh, come on, all she ever plays apparently is a ‘50s housewife…and badly] and Sandra Bullock). She’s one of the natives and it seems as if she’s always crying, although she’s unable to shed real tears. One can’t tell from the expression on her face whether she’s laughing or crying, but the assumption is that she’s crying because people are being maimed and killed. Who would laugh? Her performance (?) is almost worth the price of admission.

I only gave this a 5 because, even though I liked the idea Fuqua’s trying to get across (that bad things happen when good men don’t act), Tears of the Sun is too long and factually ludicrous.

March 8, 2003

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Basic (2/10)

The ad for Basic quotes a reviewer (Earl Bittman, Wireless Magazine, Houston) as saying, “Samuel L. Jackson turns in a phenomenally ruthless and devilishly delightful performance.” When you consider that Jackson has, at best, 15 lines in the entire movie, and that’s the best thing a reviewer can say about the entire film, you should get the idea. Jackson is in the opening sequence and he’s in the end with a few scenes in the middle. He’s forgettable, at best, and, to give Bittman credit, a forgettable performance exceeds the quality of this movie.

Basic is apparently about a squad of trainees dropped into a jungle in the middle of a hurricane. Bad things happen and when they are picked up, several are dead, killed by their comrades. John Travolta, a civilian, is called in to investigate. The story is then told in a Rashomon-like fashion with two of the survivors telling their story in flashback, both of which are predictably inconsistent. The problem is that the film doesn’t establish the identities of the characters before the investigation begins so the audience has no idea who they’re talking about when they refer to Styles or Dunbar or Pike or Kendall or Meuller. As a result the telling of the story is total confusion.

I have little doubt that if you make the misguided decision to go to this you will not have any idea what’s going on because the script is so convoluted it’s beyond comprehension. The ending is the worst, non-sequitor ending of a movie since The Spanish Prisoner. It renders what came before nonsensical. You exit the theater saying to yourself, “I sat through this for THAT?”

In fact, I’ll end this review with another quote from the ad, this one from Mairianna Bachynsky, ATV/CTV Entertainment, “… a twist you won’t believe.” That’s for sure.

April 1, 2003

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Bend it Like Beckham (9)

An Indian teenager, Jess (Parminder Nagra), growing up in London, wants to play soccer against the wishes of her traditional parents. She befriends another player, Keira (Jules Paxton), whose mother also opposes her daughter playing. Jess develops a crush on her coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), jeopardizes the traditional marriage of her sister, and her life becomes very complicated. The two mothers (Shaheen Khan and Juliet Stevenson) are the two funniest moms to appear on the screen in years. Anything more I say could jeopardize your enjoyment of this movie. Suffice it to say this is a delightful, uplifting treat, whether you like soccer or not (and I don’t).

March 25, 2003

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Nowhere in Africa (9)

The true story of a young, non-religious Jewish couple and their 5-year old daughter who flee Nazi Germany in 1938 to try to survive in the wilds of Kenya. This is a tender, intuitive, captivating 138-minute journey of change and maturation with exceptional acting by all. The gorgeous cinematography captures the essence of life in Africa. This film contains an original, brilliant depiction of African natives as normal people who just choose to live their lives differently than those who choose to live in cities, instead of showing them as ignorant, subhuman savages, which is the way they are generally depicted on the screen. This is a wonderful film. I was emotionally exhausted when it ended. In German with subtitles.

March 26, 2003

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Head of State (1)

I went to this expecting to see what would happen if a black comedian was elected President and expecting to like it. That shows how gullible I am. First, it’s not about what would happen if a black man gets elected. It’s about a black man’s campaign to be elected. And I didn’t like it.

Chris Rock is a Washington DC Alderman who’s drafted to be the party’s candidate for President when the real candidate dies in an airplane accident. Rock’s picked because the party leader wants to run in the next election so he wants someone who doesn’t stand a chance. This is, I imagine, supposed to be satire. But if dying is easy and comedy is hard, satire is much more difficult. It requires intelligence, a sense of irony, and caustic wit. Head of State might have qualified if it weren’t so dumb, lacking in irony, and cluelessly witless. To call it “stupid” doesn’t do it justice.

Worse, it’s egalitarianly racist. There’s not an admirable white person in the entire film. But what’s really remarkable is that there’s only one admirable black person in the film, and it’s not Rock, but the girl he’s pursuing (sorry, I can’t figure out what her name is or was in the film and can’t get it from production notes, either, but it’s not Robin Givens). If this exact film had been produced and directed by a white man, Rock would be leading Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton and all the other rabble-rousers to boycott it because of its racial stereotypes.

Rock pictures a world that couldn’t possibly exist because everybody is so doltish and venal they’d have a hard time figuring out how to eat to stay alive. Compounding the ills of this film, Rock can’t help but telegraph his political beliefs, which are numbingly superficial, juvenile, and ill-informed (but, then, he’s “Hollywood,” so what else is new?).

Rock produced, wrote, directed and stars in this thing. That’s four strikes, one more than needed for an ignominious “out!”

April 9, 2003

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Anger Management (8)

A half-hour into this I was an angry camper. All the funniest moments up ‘til then had been shown in the trailer, so they had little impact. The people responsible for the trailer should never have lunch in this town again because they had no faith in their film. There’s no excuse for showing the punch lines in a trailer to try to get people to come to your film.

There, I got that off my chest. I feel so much better. Next, I think sometime in the near future I’ll write a review that consists of just two words that will say it all. Those two words are “Jack Nicholson.” I’m not one who thinks actors are worth nearly anything like what they get. $20 million for Sandra Bullock? Give me a break! But if anybody is worth it, Jack is. This guy just seems to get better with each movie. I can’t remember walking out of a Nicholson movie without thinking that he just can’t get any better than that. Anger Management is no different. Nicholson is magnificent. If the film’s P.R. people had the confidence in Jack that he has earned, they wouldn’t have made a trailer so destructive to the enjoyment of the film. But Nicholson isn’t alone here. His co-star, Adam Sandler, is right up there with him. Together they make this film a big winner.

Anger Management is a comedy fantasy. By fantasy, I don’t mean people flying and all that. I mean that the things that happen just couldn’t happen in real life. But, really, neither could any of the screwball comedies. Can you imagine a woman living with a leopard as in Bringing Up Baby? The talent is in making it seem like it would play in real life, and that’s what Director Peter Segal and writer David Dorfman have accomplished.

I left my incredulity at the door and entered this fantasy world with no pre-conceived notions of how things really are. Dave Buznik (Adam Sandler) is a seemingly mild mannered Caspar Milquetoast with a gorgeous, sexy girl friend, Linda (Marisa Tomei), and a job that appears to be some sort of executive assistant for an abusive boss. He boards a plane to visit his boss when he’s manipulated into a confrontation with a flight attendant. The judge in the resulting trial orders him into “Anger Management” and a class given by therapist Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), who decides to move in with him. From there Buznik’s life is turned upside down by Buddy. His romance is threatened, as is his job. Adding to the pleasure is a myriad of cameos. Every so often a familiar face appears to join in the fun.

This film is delightful, funny nonsense that had me laughing out loud.

April 12, 2003

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Phone Booth (8)

This idea was first proposed to Alfred Hitchcock thirty years ago and apparently he was interested. Good thing he didn’t make it because the last good movie he made was before Psycho in 1960. After Psycho everything was second rate.

This film had a lot of big actors who expressed interest, signed up, then bailed. Then Colin Farrell signed up and made it but they had to keep it in the can until Farrell became better known. After he established himself in The Recruit and Daredevil, it was ready to be released. Then Iraq happened and it had to be shelved again. Now it’s finally out.

Stu Shepherd (Farrell) is an egotistical, smarmy PR guy a la Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success, who uses a phone booth to hit on a girl so his wife won’t see the calls on his cell phone bill. After hanging up after making his daily call to his girl friend, the phone rings and he answers. The Caller (Kiefer Sutherland) tells Stu he’s got a gun trained on him and if he hangs up, he’s dead. The rest of the movie is Shepherd trying to survive in what appears to be an impossible situation.

The Caller shoots a passer by to establish his bona fides. The cops come, headed by Forest Whitaker, and they think Stu has a gun and that he shot the passerby. Stu is in a pickle, trapped in the phone booth in front of the cops and a huge, gathering crowd on a major New York City street.

The entire film takes place in the phone booth. Not an easy task, it is extremely well directed by Joel Schumacher, from a good script by Larry Cohen. Farrell is spectacular. Sutherland’s voice is scary and threatening in its calmness. This is a believable, entertaining, tense, well-made, well acted 80-minute movie that does not telegraph its ending.

April 12, 2003

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Confidence (3)

Burdened by meager performances by Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia, this caper film sinks like a rock in its convoluted, smarter-than-the-audience style. The idea is that you never know what’s going on but that Jake Vig (Ed Burns) does, even though the film starts out with him on his knees with a gun pointed at the back of his head.

This seems to be the year for filmmakers who want to keep their audience befuddled and in the dark. From the trailer that leads you to believe that Hoffman and Garcia are the stars of the film when in reality each has only a small part, this is a dishonest film throughout. Ed Burns and his crew unsuspectingly steal money from crime boss Hoffman, who has one of them killed in retaliation. Burns then offers to make it up to him by running a grift for Hoffman’s benefit. Astonishingly told in flashback, Confidence is unsubtly trying to fool its audience. To its discredit it’s so pseudo-byzantine and hard to follow that it succeeds in spades. Telling a caper film in flashback just doesn’t work. How many times can you see someone shot with a plastic bag of red dye inside to look like blood and be surprised that he isn’t really, really dead? Eventually, you get the picture.

It’s astonishing that Hoffman and Garcia would opt in to this deficient film. Garcia is a hot leading man and Hoffman (who was a contemporary of mine at John Burroughs Junior High School, about my most enjoyable year in school, but, then, that’s another story) has a distinguished career to think of. What were they thinking?

Maybe they were thinking of The Sting. Alas, The Sting, this is not. For one thing, it lacks the talent of Director George Roy Hill. For another, it lacks the talents of Redford and Newman. For another, it lacks a coherent script. For another, it lacks humor. For yet another, it lacks intelligence. But I ramble.

April 25, 2003

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Malibu’s Most Wanted (1)

B-Rad Gluckman (Jaime Kennedy) is a rich, white rapper wannabe, son of California gubernatorial candidate Bill Gluckman (Ryan O’Neal). Bill’s campaign manager, Tom Gibbons (Blair Underwood) hires two well-spoken black actors (“trained at Juilliard and The Pasadena Playhouse”) to impersonate gang-bangers, kidnap B-Rad, take him to the hood, and scare him back into whiteness.

I always thought Ryan O’Neal was an underrated comedic actor. But with Malibu’s Most Wanted his career has surely hit rock bottom. This film is infuriating it’s so bad. There is one scene, for example, where B-Rad stands on top of a car as rival gang members fire at him with automatic rifles from about 20 feet away. Nobody gets hit!

B-Rad’s constant rapping throughout is enough to drive one out of the theater. Trivializing kidnapping and gang violence, both major societal problems, this is unfunny, mindless, infantile idiocy.

April 25, 2003

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The Good Thief (3)

I have come to respect Nick Nolte’s abilities as an actor. The Nick Nolte that appears in The Good Thief, however, is not the same Nick Nolte I admired. Here he mumbles his way about as if he were doing a pale imitation of Marlon Brando, circa 1951. I kept expecting him to rip his shirt and yell, “STELLA!”

The first hour of this remake of the 1955 French Noir Bob le Flambeur is so slow and dark it’s soporific. After about 20 minutes I bought a cup of coffee to induce wakefulness. When that didn’t work I resorted to a chocolate bar. The first hour is where the film should develop characters and explain who they are and why they’re there. Alas, Director Neil Jordan apparently didn’t feel that was important enough because, although characters are introduced, it’s hell trying to figure out who’s who and why. And the cinematography is what I call pretentious avant-garde. You’ve gotta see it to believe it.

Bob Montagnet (Nolte) is a drugged-up gambler who puts together a crew to rob a casino. There’s a young Russian girl, Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze) he saves from a pimp, a cop who’s chasing him for some reason, and a bunch of other guys who are either good guys or bad guys (who knows? Who cares?). Nothing’s ever explained. Why it takes an hour to set this up is mystifying. OK, they’re going to rob the casino. How long did it take to say that? A lot less than one hour, I can tell you. That’s why you better take some sort of stimulant if you want to survive the first hour…because NOTHING HAPPENS!

Oh, wait, one thing does happen. One of the most derivatively drivel scenes Hollywood puts in virtually every film about a drug addict. Bob’s a drug addict, right? So he has to clean up to rob the casino, right? So guess what he does. I’m sure you’re way ahead of me. He takes his Russian girl friend to his apartment, handcuffs himself to the bed, throws the key on the floor, and tells her not to give him the key when he asks for it! Gee, that’s originality for you. Naturally, a few scenes later he’s sweating and thrashing and asks for the key and she won’t give it to him. Cut to three and a half days later and he’s clean (and never again tempted, nor are drugs ever again mentioned). Hollywood can always cure an addict with a pair of handcuffs, a bed, a compatriot to deny him the key, and three and a half days. My only question is how did he go to the bathroom?

This ends with one of those absurd poker games Hollywood loves. You know, the ones where every hand has a full house beating a flush. And this isn’t really poker, it’s just five card showdown with no betting after the initial bet and no drawing, so the odds against getting even one good hand in an evening are huge. In a game like this, a Queen high hand will probably win most of the time. But we never see a hand worse than two of a kind!

All the while Nolte’s mumbling stuff you really have to strain to hear. My advice? Don’t strain. When you walk out of the theater, you’re going to be saying to your companion, “how did that happen?” But you really won’t care.

April 26, 2003

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A Mighty Wind (1)

I don’t understand this movie. I was a big fan of folk music, still am. Starting with The Kingston Trio in the ‘50s and throughout the ‘60s, I listened to, and liked them all. The music was captivating, the performers talented. Melodic, great lyrics, wonderful rhythms, what’s not to like?

That’s why this movie is so mystifying. It’s a “mockumentary,” a self-styled parody about a group of fictional ‘60s folk singers who are getting together for a retrospective concert. But the classic of this youthful genre, This is Spinal Tap, made fun of things that were there to be made fun of. This makes fun of things that never were. It tries to picture the writers and performers of folk music as naïve, untalented squares. Woody Guthrie a square? Bob Dylan a square? The Smothers Brothers squares? I don’t think so. Just think for a minute of the great folk artists of the ‘50s-‘70s; The Byrds, The Highwaymen, New Christy Minstrels, Bud and Travis, The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Peter Paul & Mary, The Mommas and the Poppas, Joni Mitchell, The Brothers Four; I could go on and on. And the great music! Turn! Turn! Turn!, Lemon Tree, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Greenfields, Both Sides Now, the list is almost never-ending.

Writer-Director Christopher Guest just doesn’t know what he’s talking about here. The music, which seems to have been originally written for the movie, contains lyrics that are, to give them the best of it, inane. To the contrary, writers of folk music have always had their message. Their lyrics have a point. Generally they contain sharp political commentary or tell a story. Why does Guest want to diminish such message songs as Blowin’ In The Wind and There’s Something Happening Here, or songs that tell a history like Creeque Alley, or patriotic songs like This Land is Your Land, and many, many others by trying to paint all folk music with the wide swath of the vacuous lyrics he foists upon us in this movie? Is he just nescient? Is he irresponsible and going for a cheap laugh? Or is he intentionally trying to belittle, even slander, folk music and its artists? Whatever his motives, this movie is the cheapest of shots, made without any discernable reason other than greed.

Who’s he basing these characters on? Nobody in the picture correlates to anyone in real life of whom I am aware. I didn’t recognize a parody of anybody I knew in the heyday of folk. One character, a guy whose brain had apparently been melted down by excessive drug usage and who could barely talk coherently, could have been based on Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. The only problem is that Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys did not write or sing folk music (well, they did have a hit with Sloop John B, but Wilson didn’t write it, and he recorded it as an homage to The Kingston Trio, who also had a version of it with a different arrangement). Director Guest tries to create a picture of all the great folk artists as naïve airheads. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I just don’t understand this movie or the reason it was made (well, greed, irresponsibility, and ignorance come to mind). It’s not that you can’t laugh or find something amusing about folk music. That, after all, was what The Smothers Brothers were about. This has some mildly amusing lines but they don’t make sense because the entire film is so off target. If Guest wanted to attack Folk Music, he could have made fun of the political points of view. But to try to paint the artists as dopes and the music as lame is just dead wrong. If you don’t know anything about folk music, or don’t like it, you’ll probably find this amusing. If you are a fan, as I am, The Mighty Wind is misleading, inaccurate, and reprehensible. I loathe the lack of integrity that went into making it and the dearth of respect and consideration for the many talented artists it libels.

May 3, 2003

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Only The Strong Survive

If you like soul music, this documentary about some remaining legends of soul is probably a 10, because it’s chock full of singing by Isaac Hayes, Mary Wilson, Wilson Pickett, Sam Moore and eight other legends of soul. When I hear soul music, however, it makes me think of the wailing sound you make when you smack your thumb with a hammer. So this was excruciating for me to sit through. What’s wrong with singing the songs with the notes that were written for them instead of adding all that warbling? But that’s soul and you either like it or you don’t. I don’t.

What I did enjoy about this movie was watching cinéma-vérité by D.A. Pennebaker, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of the genre. This is shot entirely in real time during 1999-2000 with hand held cameras. It captures a lot of concert footage and interviews all 12. Roger Friedman, the producer, and a foxnews.com columnist, took for himself the job of asking the questions and he was sycophantically amateurish. What an opportunity for someone with knowledge to probe these people in detail! What a waste! If you’re going to the trouble of recording this valuable historical record, why give such an important responsibility to such a dilettante? Friedman’s obsequious, insubstantial questions pretty much destroyed the only part of the film that will be of interest to people who aren’t fans of soul, like me. Surely they could have found an expert who would have known how to draw these people out more. Fortunately, his appearances are limited and the singers are generally on screen alone, giving responses to questions we can’t hear being asked.

I thought I was dying of a heart attack as I sat through the seemingly interminable last half hour, which is almost entirely concert footage. People who love soul must have been in seventh heaven. In summary, for me there was too much soul music and too little quality interview. Since I am no devotee of soul, I left this unrated.

April 22, 2003

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Holes (4)

Holes is the story of a boy, Stanley (Shia LaBeouf), who’s sent to a work camp after being accused of stealing a pair of sneakers (shades of Jean Valjean!). Everyone at the camp is put to work digging holes in a dry lakebed. There are flashbacks and a bad warden (Sigourney Weaver) with two bad underlings (Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson), and Stanley’s friend, Zero (Khleo Thomas). The story is why in the world are they digging all these holes, raising memories of John Lennon wondering how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall? But should it take 111 minutes to tell this story? Not in this lifetime, it shouldn’t. I could tell it in ten minutes and, using literary license, could even fill a normal 90-minute movie so it wasn’t too tedious. But 111 minutes? Not bloody likely.

But these people must be living in some nether world, certainly not in America. Stanley is a good boy with no record who’s hit on the head by a pair of sneakers and then arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Worse, he’s sent to what appears to be a chain gang type camp populated entirely by children at hard labor. I’d like the filmmakers to tell me where this happens in America. China and Cuba, maybe, not America. Talk about a sick, surrealistic fantasy world!

Stanley’s family, seemingly nice people (the father is The Fonz, Henry Winkler, who’s a nerd more interested in his inventions than in Stanley’s plight), doesn’t care a lick about him .until the end. This is a real never-never land. On one level I guess children will like it because it is about children. But what kind of filmmakers make a children’s movie that wants children to believe that a good, well-mannered, young boy can be railroaded into prison because he was inadvertently hit on the head by a pair of sneakers, and then that he’d be sentenced to hard labor in a hell-hole of a desert? This is no story I’d want an impressionable child to witness. This is more a horror story than a children’s story. But, then, Bambi’s pretty frightening, too, so Disney’s in familiar territory here.

The only thing worthwhile in this movie for me was Jon Voight’s performance, which was off the board. This is a Voight never seen before.

OK, some people won’t take this as seriously as I did, and will enjoy it. Children might enjoy it. As far as I’m concerned, in addition to being far too long, it’s reprehensible to make a movie like this, give it a ridiculous Hollywood happy ending, and then target it to children.

May 1, 2003

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The Dancer Upstairs (8)

In John Malkovich’s directorial debut, police captain Rejas (Javier Bardem) is after a secretive revolutionary, known as Ezequiel (Malkovich), who is causing random acts of violence and murder throughout an unnamed Latin American country. Rejas is a seemingly phlegmatic head of a police squad assigned the task of finding Ezequiel. Despite a wife and a daughter, he gets the hots for his daughter’s mysterious ballet teacher, Yolanda (Laura Morante), which leads to complications for Rejas. Rejas and his boss, who gives him a free rein to look for Ezequiel, are under pressure from the Presidente’s aide to find Ezequiel and turn him in quietly so he can be quickly eliminated. When Rejas doesn’t produce quick results, conflict arises between him and his boss, and the Presidente’s people.

One of the ladies accompanying me to the film leaned over when Bardem, who reminded me of Raul Julia, first appeared on the screen and whispered, “That’s a cute guy.” Another said, "Javier Bardem is much more than just 'a cute guy' or mere visual candy ... he oozes sensuality, controlled intensity, intelligence and purpose --- a mighty powerful combo!" So I guess women will like this a lot because he’s onscreen almost the entire film.

Although the film starts deliberately and proceeds at a leisurely speed, the tension slowly builds throughout its two hour eight minute running time. It held my interest because I was never quite sure where it was heading. I rate it an 8, but it would have been a 9 but for an unnecessary final few minutes of Directorial Conceit that left me walking out of the theater less enthralled than I would have been had the movie ended a few minutes earlier.

May 10, 2003

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Down With Love (3)

In 1962 Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) writes a bestselling work of non-fiction. Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) stiffs her when she tries to get him to write a pre publication article on it for the magazine owned by Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce). When she becomes a celebrity due to the success of the book, Block masquerades as a naïve foreigner (who knows what that accent is that he sports?) and sets out to woo, win, expose, and destroy her.

This movie proves the truth of the hackneyed adage, “they don’t make them like they used to.” While Down With Love is clearly a clumsy homage to Pillow Talk, the Rock Hudson-Doris Day classic from 1959, it pales in comparison. Pillow Talk contained scintillating double entendres. The double entendres in Down With Love are coarse and vulgar. Pillow Talk contained clever split screen shots of Day and Hudson talking on the telephone. The split screen shots of Zellweger and McGregor in Down With Love simulate them engaging in every type of sex act known to man and woman. They are, in a word, repulsive.

Another adage validated by this film is “Clothes don’t make the woman.” I’m a big Renée Zellweger fan. But here, even though she dresses like Doris Day and reads lines that might have been written for Doris, Renée is no Doris. And Ewan McGregor is no Rock Hudson. McGregor is so miscast in the role of a roué that he destroys what little chance this had to be an entertaining movie, which, to be truthful, given the vacuous script, credited to Dennis Drake and Eve Ahlert, and inept directing by Peyton Reed, wasn’t much. There’s more chemistry between McGregor and David Hyde Pierce than there is between McGregor and Zellweger. In fact, McGregor reminded me of the 150-pound weakling who was always having sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas ads of the ‘50s.

There are only two good things I can say about this film. First is that the recreation of the late ‘50s fashion is well done, and the second is the presence, however fleeting, of Tony Randall, who was in the real movie. I just wonder if he read the script before he agreed to contribute to this debacle.

To be fair, I saw it in an audience dominated by seniors, and they laughed. Lucky them; I saw nothing that caused me to even crack a smile. The running time for this is 110 minutes; too long, but it seemed much, much longer. Unfortunately the best part of the movie is a dance performed by McGregor and Zellweger over the closing credits. If you want to see this film, if it starts at, let’s say 7:00 p.m., I suggest that you arrive at 8:45 p.m.. That way you can see the dance number and not miss anything.

May 17, 2003

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Man on the Train (8)

Milan (Johnny Hallyday) gets off a train in a small town in France and meets Monsieur Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), a retired poetry professor, who offers to put him up in his gothic mansion he inherited from his mother, and where he has lived as a bachelor since his mother died. Milan is actually in town to rob the local bank. The two men bond in a strange way, exchanging stories of their lives and each grows to envy the other. This is a poignant, sometimes humorous story without sex, violence, or profanity.

Johnny Hallyday’s craggy face is a reason in and of itself to see this film. Character actor Jack Elam had one of the great cinematic faces, but Hallyday rivals him.

One negative of this film, and one that plagues many foreign films, is post production blues. I’ve never understood, in this age of amazing special effects, why films with subtitles can’t have white subtitles when there’s a dark background and black subtitles when there’s a light background. Yet when the left side of the screen is light, for example and the right side is dark, you can’t see the subtitles on the left side because the white subtitle blends with the light background, or vice-versa. When filmmakers can make people fly, and John Wayne advertise products that didn’t exist when he did, are you telling me that they can’t make subtitles that blend properly with the background so you can read them?

Worse is the translation. I saw Man on the Train with a woman who teaches high school French and was born and raised in France (is that enough qualification?). She told me the translation was pitiful. As an example, there’s a line that’s translated as “he has no tits,” which didn’t make much sense when I read it. She told me the actual dialogue was “he has no balls.” Now if the translator doesn’t know the difference between “tits” and “balls” someone’s being pennywise and pound-foolish. It’s a shame that a wonderful film like this, one that depends on an intelligent script, is so bedeviled by poor post production work involving the subtitles.

This film has a point. The film critic for the Los Angeles Times missed it completely, but then her reviews generally indicate that she either doesn’t actually watch the movies she reviews or she can’t comprehend what she’s seeing. Regardless, this is a slow movie. But if you like good writing and good acting and good directing and a good script and are patient and willing to think, this can be rewarding. In French with subtitles.

May 12, 2003

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The Italian Job (7)

Caper films got a poke in the eye with the deplorable Confidence and The Good Thief earlier this year. The Italian Job brings the genre back into respectability. Unfortunately, this is another film that’s shot in the foot by the people who created the trailer for it, which shows the audience the most shocking moment of the film. Why can’t those promoting films have more confidence in the film they’re promoting and more respect for their audience and refrain from showing the biggest moments in a trailer? I’m not going to reveal this moment to protect those who want to see it without having seen the trailer.

Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) is after Steve (Edward Norton) because Steve double-crossed Charlie and his gang. The way Charlie devises to get Steve is sheer fantasy that could only happen in the movies. But, hey, this IS a movie! So it’s OK. The fun is in watching Charlie reassemble his gang and get Stella Bridger (Charlize Theron), the daughter of Charlie’s mentor, John Bridger (Donald Sutherland), to join them, find Steve, and bring him to his just reward. Wahlberg is as understated as Norton is hateful. I liked both performances.

Coming in at a workable 100 minutes, this is a film with no gratuitous violence, no profanity and no sex, unless you’re like me for whom just looking at Charlize Theron constitutes a sexual experience, and you get a lot of time to look at her.

The cinematography of Venice, Italy, and Los Angeles is beautiful. The car chase scenes, though exciting, are preposterous, as is the ingenious plan finally devised by Charlie. But this is escapist fare that doesn’t pretend to be Shakespeare. For what it purports to be, I found it entertaining. It passed the watch test with flying colors, because I didn't look once.

June 1, 2003

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Respiro (4)

This is not a movie for everyone. It’s a story of two people trapped in a marriage in a small Sicilian fishing village on Lampedusa, a small island closer to Tunisia than it is to Sicily. Grazie (Valeria Golino) is a beautiful mother of two boys and a Sophia Lorenesque teenage daughter, Marinella (Veronica D’Agostino), married to fisherman Pietro (Vincenzo Amato), who is struggling to hold his family together. Why? Because Grazie displays periodic mental instability, like going swimming topless with her sons in public, blowing her top when Pietro disciplines their son, and generally acting goofy on occasions. Because her actions impact everyone in the small village, they want her to go to Milan for treatment. She reacts violently. Older son Pasquale (Francesco Casisa) tries to help her but his childish solution just makes things worse.

Through its beautiful cinematography, Respiro captures the claustrophobic life in a small Sicilian fishing village with nothing to do. Marinella deals with her awakening sexuality by coming on to a local policeman. Younger brother Fillipo (Fillipo Pucillo) causes trouble wherever he goes, especially tormenting Marinella and her boy friend.

Even though this is a lusty, brawling group of people, this movie takes its time getting to wherever it’s going. Some might find it terminally slow. The two women, Golino and D’Agostino, are gorgeous and Amato has rugged good looks that should attract women.

One of the unique things about this movie is that it not only examines the relationship between Grazie and Pietro, it also develops the relationships between the children and each of their parents. Unfortunately, the inscrutable ending makes one wonder if it was worthwhile sitting through. In Italian with subtitles.

May 18, 2003

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Bruce Almighty (7)

Copyright © 2003 by Tony Medley

I’ve never been a big fan of Jim Carrey, who seemed to me to be constantly overacting as an over-the-top, neo Jerry Lewis nincompoop, so I entered this with trepidation. Bruce Nolan (Carrey) is a TV reporter assigned to frivolous stories who feels he’s maltreated. When he’s passed over for the anchor job he so fervently desires, he blames and maligns God. God hears him and gives Bruce His power for three weeks. This changes his life and messes up his relationship with his long-suffering girl friend, Grace Connelly (Jennifer Anniston).

Bruce Almighty sounded silly and looked silly in the trailer, but turns out to be much better than anticipated. Despite a few lapses into his old slap-shtick character, Carrey gives a good performance. The person who really impressed me, however, was Anniston. A full-fledged star as a result of her being a part of the ensemble cast of a number 1-ranked sitcom, instead of resting on her laurels and demanding above-the-title star status, she contributes another professional outing in what’s little more than a supporting role, indicating she’s a serious actress and not just one of those jerks on Friends. This woman is legit. Morgan Freeman is a worthy successor to George Burns as God. Coming in at a workable 94 minutes, this held my interest as I only looked at my watch once.

June 13, 2003

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The Whale Rider (7)

Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), whose mother and twin brother died at birth, would be the heir apparent to become chief of the tribe if she were male. Her father wants no part of it and moves away, leaving Pai to be brought up by her grandparents. Her uncle has accepted the fact that he’s not going to be chief, but comes to Pai’s aid when her tribal chieftain grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), gruffly tradition-bound, refuses to consider his 11-year-old granddaughter, despite her obvious predilection to become chief. She is driven but he’s blind to her. She persists; he rejects…time and again. This is a mythological story that tugs at the heartstrings. Despite the constant rejections, Pai continues to honor and love her grandfather. Castle-Hughes, in her first role, is simply spectacular. Some may find The Whale Rider slow. I was captivated and had intermittent tears in my eyes throughout this touching tale, although I would have ended it differently.

June 8, 2003

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Hollywood Homicide (2)

This is one of Writer-Director-Producer Ron Shelton’s best efforts. The opening credits of all the signs in Los Angeles that say Hollywood, and the first two minutes hold your interest. Then the movie tanks, despite a valiant effort by Harrison Ford. Shelton never fails to disappoint. He gets A List talent and makes Z List movies.

The story is incomprehensible. Joe Gavilan (Ford) and K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett) are detectives, partners in the LAPD trying to solve a murder of a rap group. There’s a subplot about an Internal Affairs guy trying to set Gavilan up. Gavilan’s also a real estate agent and Calden a wannabe actor, two B plots that are supposed to provide joke lines. Instead they’re just ludicrous.

I guess this is supposed to be a buddy film with Gavilan and Calden always bickering but beneath the surface we are supposed to know they’re going to bond. Problem is that there’s zero chemistry between Ford and Hartnett. Laurel and Hardy they ain’t.

And the love scenes between Ford and whoever those women in the film are, are embarrassing. While I’m at it, who are those women in the movie and why are they there? One of them’s a madam. Another’s a clairvoyant. What’s their connection with Gavilan? Shelton apparently wants to keep this a secret. As to Calden, why he’s even in the movie is anybody’s guess, although there is another subplot about his father’s murder, which doesn’t seem to bother him much until the final denouement.

The last half of the movie is the obligatory ploy for the vacuous screenwriter and director with nothing to say, the car chase. Shelton validates his lack of original thought by showing the longest, most absurd car chase ever filmed. It goes all over Hollywood. When it’s over Gavilan and Calden are still chasing the bad guys. And about those bad guys. They became bad guys without any plot line whatever. We, the viewers, know they’re bad guys because we see them doing bad things. But there’s nothing ever explained in the film why the LAPD would know they are the bad guys. First they look like good guys. Then with no evidence other than a tip from an undercover cop and with nothing else that could even qualify as a clue, they’re bad guys being chased all over.

Oh, another thing…one minute Gavilan’s being investigated and charged as being a bad cop. The next minute every cop in the LAPD is on his side chasing the bad guys. Huh?

I can’t sign off without commenting on the most inane interrogation this side of Fearless Fosdick. Gavilan and Calden are put in separate, but side-by-side, interrogation rooms. Gavilan’s cell phone keeps ringing. Every time it rings it’s sitting on the table between Gavilan and his interrogator. The interrogator is frustrated because it keeps ringing and when he tries to grab it Gavilan always beats him to it. The interrogator never thinks to just take it away from him. This happens at least four times. Calden, on the other hand, takes off his shoes and assumes a yoga position on the table in his room. Neither interrogator knows what to do. Even a movie doesn’t have the right to be this stupid.

June 20, 2003

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Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (1)

This version of Charlie’s Angels comes closer to being among the worst movies I’ve ever seen than I had ever expected, even though I had seen the dismal trailer.

This thing is pure garbage. It is replete with mindless violence without consequence. There is no plot. The acting is non-existent. I’ve never bought into the Cameron Diaz myth (that she could act). This thing validates it. She’s a smile without substance. The jury was out, as far as I was concerned, on Drew Barrymore. If she can act, she hides it here. I have no idea who Lucy Liu is (yes, I saw Chicago, and I missed her) but if this is an example, I needn’t worry about putting her in my mind’s Rolodex. But, to be fair, these three actresses are victimized by the writing and directing.

Writing and Directing? Well, nothing need be said about the script because it must have been the result of sitting 5,000 kindergarteners at computers. Like the proverbial monkey who could end up writing Hamlet, one of them wrote this. There is no plot. Never will you hear more junior high-schoolish double entendres (they aren’t good enough to rise to the level of sophomoric). For example, Drew Barrymore’s real name is something like Helen Zass (I don’t remember the first name, but the last was Zass). What followed was a bunch of “jokes” about rear ends. Thus, you will understand if I don’t worry about commenting further on the script. This is nothing but 105 minutes of mind-numbing violence.

Directing? This was directed?

Hollywood has a lot to answer for in terms of showing violence without consequence. There are motorcycle crashes where people get wiped out and walk away. People are shot and walk away. People fall hundreds of feet with no injuries. People are hit with devastating karate kicks and chops and pop up, unscathed. They walk through fire, unburned. This is nothing more than a video game with breasts (none of which we see, although Liu wears a gown cut down to her naval in the closing scene; alas, we still don’t see anything). The opening sequence is copied from the spectacular, special effects-driven, James Bond openings (James had a good start with Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, then started the descent into special effects-driven drivel). The opening of Charlie’s Angel’s is utterly absurd.

Maybe I’m watching this on a different level. Maybe this is a satire. Maybe the movie has a point, that violence is…what? This movie has no point.

Let’s go further. This movie is racist. Bernie Mac is as foolish as Stepnfechit, his teeth so white you need sunglasses to look at him. His character is a bumbling caricature. Critics complain about Amos ‘n Andy (criticism without merit, I claim), where the characters were middle class business people. Why not this?

Believe it or not, John Cleese has a role in this. Cleese is one of the great comedic talents of the age. What’s he doing here? His appearance in this rubbish desecrates his genius.

I’ve gone on too long about this piece of dreck. You’re warned. See this at your peril.

June 27, 2003

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Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde (1)

The verdict is in on Reese Witherspoon. The jury has been out for quite awhile. Two years ago Legally Blonde was one of the best movies of the year. What made it so unique was that it was on the cusp of being ridiculous, but cleverly never crossed the line. The result was a runaway, surprise hit. I thought it was terrific.

It was such a spontaneously huge hit that it was a complete surprise, so, to strike while the iron was hot, Witherspoon rushed out Sweet Home Alabama, which was awful.

Now she returns to where she made her success and reprises her role as Elle Woods, a quintessential “dumb Blonde” who, in the original, was dumb like a fox. What’s the verdict? Legally Blonde 2 is worse than Sweet Home Alabama and Witherspoon is in danger of being nothing more than a one-hit wonder, a mere blip on the radar screen. Instead of being dumb like a fox, here she’s just dumb. The plot is that Woods is trying to save her dog’s mother from a medical research lab, which takes her to Washington and involves her with Congresswoman Rudd (Sally Field) and Doorman Sid Post (Bob Newhart). Shakespeare didn’t have this in mind when he penned Much Ado About Nothing, but that title aptly describes this trifle. The story’s inane; the script’s inane; the acting’s deplorable.

Just as an example of how ludicrous this is, Woods addresses a joint session of Congress. How many times does the President of the United States address a joint session of Congress, you might ask? Good question. There’s a one-time-a-year regularly scheduled address called the State of the Union Address. Other than that, he doesn’t do it unless he’s asking Congress to declare war or something relatively serious like that. I’m not aware of anyone else who can address a joint session of Congress. In Legally Blonde 2, however, we are supposed to sit in the audience and blithely accept the notion that this person who isn’t even a Member of Congress (much less President of the United States) is addressing a joint session of Congress to get them to pass a bill to save her dog’s mother. Yeah, I’m going to rush out and pay good money to see that!

Why is this so bad when Legally Blonde was so good? Well, maybe it’s because Legally Blonde was directed by Robert Luketic and written by Kirsten Smith and Legally Blonde II is directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfield and written by three people whom I will charitably refrain from mentioning. Herman-Wurmfield can’t blame the cast because he’s got two-time Oscar winner Field and Emmy winner Newhart along with heartthrob Luke Wilson in supporting roles. Alas, they’re working with a script by three different people, none of whom could come up with even one scene that wasn’t vacuous. Witherspoon’s dumb-like-a-fox blond shtick has worn out its welcome. It was cute the first time. Now it’s tiresome.

Maybe, also, it’s because Witherspoon is the Executive Producer of Legally Blonde 2, whereas Legally Blonde was produced by professionals. But there might be a logical explanation for this, too. A professional wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.

July 5, 2003

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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1)

I first saw Sean Connery in a forgettable thing called Darby O’Gill and the Little People, circa 1959. He didn’t show much promise (it was a musical). A few years later he was cast as James Bond in Doctor No, which was, for him, akin to dying and going to heaven. Almost immediately after Doctor No became a hit he started complaining that he didn’t want to be typecast and wanted out of the Bond thing.

Well, he got out, finally, and did make some good movies (The Man Who Would Be King comes to mind). But he’s come full circle with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which defines trash. I’m getting tired of watching films full of scenes devoid of rationality, but I don’t write ‘em, I just see ‘em. There must be one standard, generic script in Hollywood that everyone uses. There are all these bad guys, see, and they have automatic weapons, see, and the good guys are all unarmed and surrounded by the bad guys and the bad guys open up with their automatic weapons and start spraying the good guys with nine million rounds a second. Everything is shot; the walls, the chairs, the tables, the books, the glasses, everything…everything, that is, but the good guys, who never get hit with anything. Nine million rounds a second are sprayed all around and not one single, solitary bullet hits a good guy. How many times hence, in nations yet unborn and accents yet unknown are we going to have to watch this?

To make it even more ridiculous, you must compare it to the scene of Connery shooting targets from a ship. The ship’s rocking (well, it should be rocking, being at sea and all, but it’s actually not rocking; with all the money they spent on special effects, they couldn’t come up with one that simulates what it’s like to be on a ship in the middle of the ocean), the target’s floating hundreds of yards away in the ocean. Connery has a bolt-action long rifle. He waits while the ship sails farther in one direction as the target, a small balloon type thing, floats off in the other direction. He waits. It floats. He waits some more. It floats some more. Finally he slowly squeezes the trigger and demolishes the target. The way I see it is we are supposed to believe that the bad guys can have automatic weapons and can spray the good guys who are only ten feet away from them with nine million rounds a second and can’t hit anybody, but Connery can hit a floating balloon four inches in diameter, about a mile away from him from a floating ship with a single shot. This is the level of the intelligence of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Connery’s the Executive Producer of this, so who was he to complain about the quality of the James Bond series when he’s responsible for something like this? Where does he get off trading on his name to entice people, mostly loyal fans trusting him, to come to see this garbage? This must be the quintessential film that spent all its money on silly special effects. They certainly didn’t spend anything on the script, or the director, or the other actors.

There’s no tension because even though this is overburdened with violence, we know that none of the good guys is going to get so much as a scratch. Talk about a film without a story! There is no logic or reason to this whatever. It’s just one violent special effect after another. A Plot? We don’t need no stinking Plot!

I’ve now seen three Hollywood movies in a row, Charley’s Angels II, Legally Blonde II, and now this. They are all equally repugnant.

July 12, 2003

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Grand Slam

Contract Bridge was born as a result of a game on October 31, 1925 on board a ship called the Finland. While waiting to pass through the Panama Canal the next day, Harold S. Vanderbilt, the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the author of a revision of Yachting right-of-way rules, which are still known as the Vanderbilt Rules, and two friends needed a 4th to play a bridge-like game called Plafond. They allowed a lady who was a fellow passenger to join their game. She, however, attempted to suggest one exotic change after another based on a game she said she had learned in China. This aggravated Vanderbilt so much that the next day, during the Canal crossing, he worked out the scoring table for Contract Bridge, which remains remarkably the same today, three quarters of a century later. On that night, November 1, 1925, the first game of Contract Bridge was played, scored under Vanderbilt's new rules.

Vanderbilt recalled later:

We enjoyed playing my new game on board the Finland so much that, on my return to New York, I gave typed copies of my scoring table to several of my Auction Bridge playing friends. I made no other effort to popularize or publicize Contract Bridge. Thanks apparently to its excellence, it popularized itself and spread like wildfire.

As a result of the popularity of Vanderbilt’s new game, Warner Brothers in 1933, made Grand Slam, and gave it a terrific cast. Paul Lucas was the leading man, opposite a rising star, Loretta Young. Also in the cast were Frank McHugh and Glenda Farrell, well-established character actors. I must confess that I had a terrible crush on Judy Lewis, Loretta Young’s daughter (by Clark Gable, although nobody knew that for years), when she was a freshman high school classmate of my sister and I was a fifth grader. She was 14 and I was nine and she was just about the first real “woman” I had ever gotten that close to (I didn’t get that close, actually, but it was close enough for a nine year old). Despite this, I never thought her mother was that beautiful. Until I saw this movie, that is. As a young, developing star, in Grand Slam Young was drop dead gorgeous.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty silly movie. There is nothing in the movie about playing the game, but there are some pretty good lines, which indicate that nothing much has changed in the last seventy years. Here are two examples. One man tells his wife, “The system doesn’t exist that would give me any pleasure from playing bridge with you.” Does that sound familiar? Another one I liked was, “Being a bridge expert is a step down from being a fake Cherokee Indian.”

Bridge was a hot activity in the ‘30s. If this movie is to be believed, people got dressed up in White Tie and Tails to play Rubber Bridge at parties. Of course, this is a Hollywood world where everyone had a butler in the depth of the Depression. The script must have been written well before 1933 because McHugh tells a cabbie to take him to a “speakeasy,” even though Prohibition ended shortly after Roosevelt took office in March of 1933. According to this film, major newspapers reported the goings on in the bridge world. There is even a radio play-by-play of a match. I imagine there’s a lot of literary license here. If you’re going to watch the film to see some bridge playing, you’re due for a disappointment. You see people playing, but you don’t see any of the play.

Fortunately, however, the running time is just a little over an hour, so the weak plot doesn’t cause you to lose interest. How disinterested can you get in an hour? I think this is worth seeing just as an historical artifact, to see the way Hollywood portrayed the world of 1933, to see the beautiful Lorreta Young, and to recognize how popular bridge must have been to present the game without any explanation. The makers of the film just assumed that the audience would understand how bridge was played and scored, as if someone made a film today about baseball or basketball without having to explain. The fun of watching this movie for a bridge player is to watch how the players interact with each other, and to realize that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

June 30, 2003

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Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (4)

If you think the title is long, wait until you see the movie. At two hours, 23 minutes running time, a good guy captured by pirates should pray for a plank to walk that’s this long. Gone with the Wind, which covered the Civil War and its aftermath, was only 55 minutes longer. Although you might find it hard to believe as you’re sitting through it, it does end eventually, and the proof is that I am actually sitting here writing this review.

Johnny Depp plays a constantly inebriated pirate captain (Jack Sparrow) in this tongue-in-cheek sendup of pirate movies. Did we really need a sendup of pirate movies? When’s the last time you saw one? Who was in it? Burt Lancaster? Gene Kelly? Errol Flynn? What, Hollywood has nothing better to do than spoof a genre that’s been dead for fifty years?

And, please, if you’re going to do a spoof, make it intelligent. People it with good actors. Give it a good script. Give it a story, for heaven’s sake. Alas, Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer did none of these. Oh, there are a couple of guys, Geoffrey Rush, who plays the dastardly Captain Barbossa, and another guy, who do pale imitations of Robert Newton as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, circa 1950, the quintessential cinematic pirate. But, like this movie, they fall way, way short of Newton’s genius.

In the unlikely event that you still want to see this, I won’t ruin it for you by telling the story (that’s a joke, son). There’s Hitchcock’s mainstay, the McGuffin that the pirates need, and it’s all pretty silly, but that’s OK because this is a farce (and I don’t use that as a term of opprobrium; it’s meant to be a farce). But I will warn you that, except for Depp and Rush, the acting’s mediocre at best. Keira Knightly, who did a workmanlike job in Bend it Like Beckham is mightily miscast here as the gorgeous damsel in distress, Elizabeth Swann. She’s not gorgeous enough (she’s not gorgeous, period). And the lines she’s given would put any actress to the test. Depp’s besotted Captain Sparrow starts out humorous, but finally becomes tiresome. I’m also offended by vacuous filmmakers who think it’s funny to show the harmless drunk. Alcoholism is no joke, folks, and movies like this (and the worst of the loveable drunk genre, Arthur) trivialize a serious problem. Hollywood, however, loves drugs; you’re not gonna breathe much if you hold your breath until Hollywood takes a stand against drug use. Even though we don’t see him taking a drink until near the longed-for end, Sparrow’s constantly drunk, even when he’s locked away in jail.

This has a lot of mindless violence. But that’s what you would expect in a pirate movie, unless it’s The Pirates of Penzance. Here people keep fighting dead people who can’t be killed. They knew they were dead going in. What’s the point? And the fights take up about the last seven hours (OK, it just seemed like seven hours) of the movie. One fight after another between a man and a skeleton. Then there’s a fight between two skeletons. There apparently aren’t any Basil Rathbones left in Hollywood because all the sword fighting is shot with Chicago-like quick cuts so you can’t see if any of these hunks can actually handle a sword.

This is apparently a big hit if you judge by numbers. The only way I can explain this is to postulate that watching this after sitting through Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Legally Blonde 2, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is akin to the relief you feel when someone stops hitting you over the head with a hammer and starts pinching you. It’s good only in comparison with what came before.

July 14, 2003

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Dirty Pretty Things (7)

Two illegal immigrants, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Senay (Audrey Tautou) working in a London hotel, try to survive after becoming involved in a nefarious scheme in this involving 97-minute thriller from England. The less you know the more you’ll enjoy it, so I will say no more, except that the ending needed more of a setup in the plot to be plausible.

July 20, 2003

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Swimming Pool (10)

I saw Titanic and All About Eve on successive nights on cable. I saw Titanic first. Then, later that night, I awoke around 4 a.m. and turned on the TV and caught one line of an old black and white movie that I instantly recognized as All About Eve, although I hadn’t seen it. I heard that one line and I was caught. Wide-awake now, I had turned on in the first ten minutes and was transfixed.

As soon as it was over, I was struck by the dichotomy between the two. Titanic cost over $100 million to make and won the Academy Award as best picture (one of 11 it received, none of which was for writing). All About Eve cost around $600,000 to make, was shot almost entirely on a sound stage in Hollywood, and won the Academy Award as best picture (as well as five others, including best screenplay). The two couldn’t be more different. Titanic had no script worth talking about. The story was sophomoric, the acting mediocre. All it had was a huge ship built at exorbitant cost, and spectacular special effects. For this it received the Oscar as the best picture of the year.

All About Eve, on the other hand, had no special effects, a moderately large budget for the times (1950), but it had a brilliant script and direction by Herman L. Mankiewicz, and spectacular acting. That’s what you needed in 1950 to win an Academy Award. You needed a good story. You needed a brilliant script. You needed the script intelligently translated to the screen by a competent director and a good cast. By 1997, all you needed was special effects.

My thesis here is that Titanic ruined Hollywood. Nobody cares about the script or the story or the acting anymore. It’s all special effects. Look at the movies Hollywood has released this year, Charley’s Angels, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Matrix, Terminator etc., etc. All driven by special effects. I admit to having not seen the last two, but doubt that anyone will challenge that they are special effects-driven. Can you name one Hollywood movie you’ve seen this year that had a good script? How about one with a good story? How about one with good acting?

I remember how I felt after I saw All About Eve and Sweet Smell of Success the first time. I felt that I had seen something remarkable. I felt that everyone involved with each was a consummate professional. I felt that each came close to perfection. The writing of each blew me away.

That’s how I feel today after seeing Swimming Pool, a film not made by Hollywood, thank you. Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) is a dispirited, disagreeable successful writer of mysteries. She is turned off by people who recognize her and fawn all over her, telling her how much they like her books and all. I’ll stop here because the movie almost fell apart for me right there, at the outset. I don’t know any writer, and I know a few (remember, I’m a writer!) who doesn’t like to be recognized and, yes, fawned over. Don’t believe me? I’m in the process of reading William Goldman’s (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, etc.) second volume of his autobiography, More Adventures in the Screen Trade. One constant theme is the under-appreciation of writers. Writers generally welcome the plaudits of the crowd, because, for one thing, they are so rare. If you see me and want to fawn over something I’ve written, feel free.

But, despite this flaw, I recognized it as a plot device so hung in there. If you’re not a writer, it won’t bother you. Sarah has the hots for her publisher, Charles Dance (John Bosford), so she unloads on him and he suggests she visit his country house in France as a locale from which to write her next mystery. She accepts, on the proviso that he visit her there, which he agrees to do.

She arrives and starts writing. Shortly thereafter, Dance’s sexy, mysterious daughter, Julie (Ludivine Sangier) arrives unexpectedly. Sarah rejects Julie’s attempts at being friendly. Julie cavorts half naked throughout most of the movie and brings in odd men for one-night stands, all of which upset Sarah’s equanimity. Sarah can’t make contact with Charles to tell him in person of her complaints. From that point, things go from strange to stranger. Julie’s weird. Sarah changes.

This is a magnificent script by Emmanuele Bernheim and Francois Ozon, who also directed. Ozon wrote and directed 8 Women last year, which was one of the better movies I saw in 2002. He’s topped himself here. This is a recondite story that’s extremely well acted by everyone, but especially Rampling and Sangier. The story is enthralling and keeps you involved up to the ending, as you try to figure out what’s going on. So far, this is the best movie I’ve seen this year.

July 22, 2003

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Seabiscuit (8)

If there’s one dictum in movie making that is proven time and again in its absence it’s Woody Allen’s that movies should not exceed 90 minutes. Seabiscuit is just the latest of a long list of well-intentioned films that just take themselves so seriously that they can’t leave a lot of the stuff they shoot on the cutting room floor.

This really isn’t just the story of a horse. It’s the story of three men, the horse’s owner, car dealer Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), its trainer, Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), and jockey, Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire). As suggested in Alice in Wonderland, the film starts at the very beginning and continues on until the end. It actually starts with Howard working on Henry Ford’s assembly line! I mean, that’s about as far back as you can go. We’re introduced to Red Pollard as a child. Only Smith is introduced as a contemporary, and he’s probably the most interesting character. He’s the guy who, through some profound intuition, recognized that Seabiscuit had something special even after he had raced without much success for several years, bought him for Howard for $7,500, and trained him into the champion he became. But the movie treats Smith almost as an afterthought, behind Howard and Pollard. Even though his character gets short shrift, at this point Cooper should be a contender for Best Supporting Actor.

But even though it’s the life story of three men, as well as the horse, there’s really no logical reason why this story should take more than 90 minutes to tell. The movie seems almost as long as Seabiscuit’s entire career, finally clocking in at 2 hours nine minutes, way, way over the track record.

The cinematography by John Schwartzman is exceptional, indeed a reason by itself to see the film. The acting’s pretty good, although Howard’s second wife, Marcela (Elizabeth Banks), beautiful as she is, isn’t up to the quality of the rest of the cast. But the worst part of the entire movie is “Tick Tock” McGlaughlin (William H. Macy), a fictional sportscaster so over the top he seriously damages the movie. It’s a shame that Writer-Director Gary Ross (who also appears as the Pimlico Track Announcer) had so little faith in just telling the story that he had to add such a ridiculous character. McGlaughlin is so irritating that he detracts from, and diminishes, Seabiscuit’s amazing story. To be factual, former UCLA basketball player, and Olympic Gold Medal Winner (1936), Sam Balter had the first ever (and only one at the time, at least of which I am aware) coast-to-coast radio commentary show which commenced on the Mutual Network in 1938, the year of the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race and the year Seabiscuit was Horse of the Year, and he was the exact opposite of “Tick Tock,” a low-key guy who hardly ever raised his voice. “Tick-Tock” is just a figment of Ross’s imagination, and is a huge mistake. Rather than being funny, which I guess was what Ross was aiming for, Tick Tock is simply ludicrous.

Another problem I have with this film is one that troubles all sports films. I’ve played most of the sports all my life. Whenever I see a sports movie, the sounds are so over emphasized that they become cartoons. In boxing movies the noise accompanying a slight left jab is akin to the explosion of a hand grenade. Nobody could survive one punch that sounds like this, much less 15 rounds of them. Basketball movies sound far more violent than games really are. In football movies (and the videos brought to us by NFL Films and the like) the sounds accompanying each play would require 22,000 men to complete a game because anyone hit as hard as the sounds indicate wouldn’t last more than one play. Don’t get me wrong, these guys hit hard, but not as hard as the sounds make you believe. The microphone expands the noise so that it transcends from what’s ordinarily background to where it becomes the most compelling part of the sport, and that’s just basic misrepresentation.

Even though the racing scenes, choreographed by jockey Chris McCarron, are compelling and very well done, I wondered if the sounds in Seabiscuit exaggerate the ferocity of the race. I know that there’s more that goes on in a horse race between the jockeys than we can see. So I asked Jorge Estrada, who was a world-class jockey at Santa Anita and the other major tracks. Estrada’s take on the movie is instructive, coming as it does from the inside. As far as the noises are concerned, he confirms my suspicion. “I won two races one day at Santa Anita before 85,000 people; the grandstand was packed, the infield was packed. I didn’t hear any noise at all during the races, even from the public address announcer calling the race. As far as the noise of the race itself, you don’t hear much of anything. You don’t hear the horses hooves hit the ground. You don’t hear the cavalry stampede, unless you’re in front and fading. Then you might hear the pack coming up on you. The horses’ hooves are throwing dirt up in your face that’s hitting you at around 50 miles an hour. Believe me, you don’t hear much of anything.”

Estrada said jockeys never take instruction from owners or trainers. He said Willie Shoemaker told him “good jockeys don’t need it and bad jockeys won’t follow it.” He said, “I won over 1,000 races. Somebody who’s never even ridden in one race is going to tell me how to ride a race? I would find that offensive.” So much for trainer Smith telling jockey George Woolf (played by real life jockey Gary Stevens, looking like he’d been acting all his life), the greatest jockey of his era, how to ride Seabiscuit in the legendary match race against War Admiral (in real life it was Pollard who gave Woolf the tip on how to ride the race). In addition, Estrada said that trainers not only would never talk to a jockey in the jock room, they are not allowed in the jock room. The only way you can get in is if you’re a jockey. “That’s our inner sanctum, the place where we can get away from those jerks.”

There’s a scene where Red on Seabiscuit passes Woolf on the backstretch in the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap. Woolf says to Red, “OK, Johnny, have a good ride,” as Seabiscuit passes Woolf's horse. “Never in a million years would one jockey in a race tell another jockey to go beat him, especially in one of the biggest races in the world,” says Estrada, “and especially not Woolf, who had a reputation for being arrogant, and in that race it’s even less likely since Woolf had been replaced as jockey of the horse Red was riding.”

Estrada confirmed that the fight between jockeys during the race that we see in the first part of the film was commonplace before film. Now they film you from so many angles that it’s not possible to take swings at other jockeys without being caught. But in the days of Seabiscuit there was no film and it happened a lot. Estrada also said that jockeys don’t talk to their horses like Red and Woolf talked to Seabiscuit. He said it’s so unprofessional that if they did they’d get unmerciful razzing from the other jockeys.

Technical complaints aside, this is, after all, a movie and is entitled to literary license. Most people will probably enjoy it. And the films that have been released so far this year make this an Oscar contender. But I thought it was too long and that the McGlaughlin character and Banks’ acting devitalized the final result. On the plus side, it’s a good story well told, most of the actors are good, and the cinematography should win awards.

July 29, 2003

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Lucia, Lucia (1)

This is a pseudo art film that thinks it’s oh, so clever, but, in reality, is oh, so pretentious, sort of what a prepubescent director might produce in an attempt to recreate Last Year at Marienbad for a kindergarten film class. Lucia’s husband disappears and is apparently kidnapped. Two men, one old and one young, appear at her door to help her. Her story is either true or lies. Her husband has either been kidnapped or he hasn’t. The story is boring, disjointed, boring, incoherent, boring, and nonsensical. Oh, did I mention that it’s boring? Lucia (Ceclia Roth) is beautiful (and topless in one scene), but, try as she may, she can’t cry tears. I wasted enough time sitting through this. I don’t want to waste any more writing about it. If, after reading my review, you find yourself tempted to see this, take a cold shower and fight it off. In Spanish, unfortunately with subtitles

August 2, 2003

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Freaky Friday (10)

There is a reason for everything. If you withstand and accept the bad and relax, good will come. That’s what happened to me today. I now understand why I’ve had to sit through all the truly awful movies I’ve seen this summer. The Almighty was preparing me for Freaky Friday.

Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her high school daughter, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), don’t get along and don’t appreciate the other’s situation. Anna doesn’t get along with her younger brother, Harry (Ryan Malgarini). Tess is engaged to marry Ryan (Mark Harmon) soon. Anna, who is a guitarist in a garage rock bank, has a crush on Jake (Chad Michael Murray) and has problems at school. It’s a mess.

While fighting with each other in a Chinese restaurant, the hostess gives them each a fortune cookie with the same fortune in it. Almost simultaneously everything shakes like an earthquake and when it’s all over Tess and Anna have swapped bodies and the fun begins. I laughed until, literally, tears came to my eyes. Curtis and Lohan are spectacular. Their expert acting makes this implausible movie work. Both should be Oscar nominees, but, despite Sir Donald Wolfit’s deathbed utterance, “Dying is easy…comedy is hard,” it’ll never happen because comedy is rarely rewarded. Regardless, make no mistake, you will rarely see better acting.

The amazing thing about this movie for me is that it holds up all the way through. Other films I’ve seen that had really funny parts, like The Producers with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder and Touch of Class with George Segal and Glenda Jackson, could make me roll in the aisles laughing for a period of time, but the humor didn’t hold up after about the first 30 minutes or so. Freaky Friday had me laughing throughout.

August 8, 2003

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And Now Ladies & Gentlemen (3)

Early on in this Claude Lelouch film, there are shots of a guy who is supposed to be playing the trumpet (backing up a woman who’s acting like she’s singing). I’ve been watching movies all my life. I’ve seen unathletic guys like William Bendix try to be Babe Ruth, Woody Harrelson try to look like a basketball player, Alan Alda try to look like a football player (to be fair, Alda was trying to look like George Plimpton looking like a football player, but Plimpton was athletic, at least). But I’ve never seen a more inept job of acting than this guy trying to look like he’s playing the trumpet. He’s even worse than Stu Sutcliffe when he was an original member of The Beatles without any musical talent, so he tried to hide on stage pretending to plunk the guitar he was holding but didn’t have a clue how to play. I played the trumpet a little when I was a teenager, so I know a little bit about it. There’s not much to it, but what there is is all in the lips. This guy barely presses the trumpet to his lips. Sometimes, when it shows him playing the trumpet in a band backing up the singer near the end of the movie, you can hear the trumpet, but you can see that the trumpet isn’t anywhere near his mouth! It’s ludicrous, but it epitomizes the sloppiness with which this movie was made.

Worse, you will never see another movie with more platitudes. They were so stomach-churningly simplistic I can’t even remember one to quote. But if you think that something like, “the end is just the beginning and the beginning is just the end and the middle is just something in between,” sounds inane (I made that up), what you hear in the movie makes what I just wrote sound incredibly profound. And you read one (a lot of this is subtitled) every couple of minutes.

So, Tony, how did you like the movie?

As the legendary Los Angeles sportscaster Jim Healy used to say about former Philadelphia Eagles owner, Leonard Tose, Writer-Director-Producer Lelouch (known mainly for his creation of 1966’s A Man and a Woman), has, uh, lost it (if, indeed, he ever had it). The first hour is interminable. Valentin Valentin (Jeremy Irons) is a jewel thief who has a problem with blackouts. Jane Lester (Patricia Kaas) is a saloon singer who has the same problem. But the problem with this film is that Valentin and Jane don’t meet until an hour into the film. Lelouch should have blacked out the first hour.

Lelouch has used a bunch of hackneyed tricks to try to assemble this into what might appear to be a thoughtful film, like time warps and the like. Alas, they don’t work. Nobody cares whether what we’re seeing is a flashback or a dream or reality. During the first hour I kept feeling like Elaine in the Seinfeld episode when she was watching The English Patient, and finally got so fed up she yelled out, “Get on with it and die so we can get out of here!”

Irons gives his standardized sensitive man performance. Kaas is so one-dimensional she sometimes appears catatonic. The credits say that it’s her voice we hear when she’s singing, but she lip syncs to her own voice so poorly that I thought maybe it was old Marni Nixon’s voice. One thing that might hold your interest is trying to spot ‘60s femme fatale Claudia Cardinale. She sure doesn’t look like she did in the ‘60s, but then who does? Actually, Claudia is one person who gives a good performance. Other than that, while the first hour of this seems interminable, it picks up in the second hour, but you’re still wishing that they’d “get on with it."

Detracting further from this film is Michel Legrand’s dirge-like music. I had admired some of Legrand’s music until I heard Kaas’s renditions. Unfortunately, Kaas warbles them endlessly. Instead of being evocative, they’re mostly forgettable with pompous lyrics that contribute to the banality of the script.

August 7, 2003

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American Splendor (4)

There is, in the literature of the job interview (which I must modestly admit I created with my second book, Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed, in 1978) something called the “halo effect.” The “halo effect” is the undue influence of an irrelevant trait on your overall judgment. This came into effect at the screening of American Splendor. There was a woman sitting behind me who laughed at every line in the movie. But it wasn’t the kind of guffaw you make when listening to Billy Crystal or Richard Pryor or Robin Williams or someone who is actually funny. It was the annoying kind of laugh of an ignoramus who is trying to let everyone around him/her think that the laugher was in on something inside. It was the kind of laugh that takes the place of a statement like, “oh, isn’t that just like him!” as if she had an intimate relationship with the person, causing her to “laugh.” Try sitting in a movie and have a character say, “pass the mustard, please” and have someone laugh. Then the character says, “What time is it?’ and the same person laughs. Annoying? It’s much worse than that.

Fortunately, I’m not only in the process of becoming an adult, but I know about the “halo effect,” so it shouldn’t cloud my judgment of this movie. When I’d hear her laugh every minute, I’d say to myself, “don’t let this influence your judgment of this movie.”

Alas, it didn’t. American Splendor is a grainy depiction of Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti), who penned a comic book based on his life in the ‘70s. It’s cleverly done in that actual interviews with the real Pekar are interspersed throughout the film, so it’s part biography, part documentary.

Maybe this would be more enjoyable if you’ve ever heard of American Splendor or Harvey Pekar. I hadn’t, so I found myself wondering why Pekar was important enough to be the subject of a feature film. Pekar is pictured as a disgruntled, unhappy guy with an intellectual bent who worked his entire life as a clerk at a Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Cleveland. Despite this, the reputation he built through American Splendor got him several appearances on the David Letterman Show, and some other radio appearances, so he was a sort of minor celebrity.

I can’t say that the film is terrible. It has its amusing moments. But at 100 minutes it’s far too long. Giamatti bears a remarkable resemblance to the real Pekar and he does a very good job in the role. Despite this, I found it pretty uninvolving. But the lady behind me laughed at every line. Maybe she should have written this review because she obviously saw something in the film that I didn’t.

July 10, 2003

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Open Range (7)

Kevin Costner has a reputation for long, boring movies. I didn’t see Waterworld, but I still become almost comatose remembering sitting through the trailer for The Postman. But you got to give it to the guy. He’s got Chutzpah. He makes another long, talky movie, and he casts himself to co-star with Robert Duvall (Boss). The story, which is sort of a neo-High Noon, pits “open range” cattle drivers, who would let their cattle graze anywhere, which was the Common Law of England and was adopted in most of the United States, against ranchers who owned their graze land and fenced it off. The year is 1882. The locale is unknown, identified as the “Old West,” but I’d guess Wyoming. Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon) is the rancher who runs the town and tries to drive Duvall and his herd away, killing one of Boss’s men, prompting Boss and Charley Waite (Costner) to seek revenge. Normally I would be philosophically aligned with the rancher, who bought his land and didn’t like “open range grazers” to use his land to graze their cattle. Doesn’t that make sense? Why should someone else be able to bring his cattle onto someone else’s land to graze? Alas, here he’s a villain.

In addition to defending what appear to be the wrong people, Open Range has some basic flaws. For one, Costner’s character, Waite, is impossible. Nobody with his background, having done what he’s done in a Union Civil War outfit that sounds a lot like Quantrill’s Raiders (a Confederate band of killers in Kansas who marauded and killed in cold blood anyone they could find who might be a Union soldier or sympathizer; Jesse James and the Younger Brothers were members), could be the person portrayed in the movie. Nor could anyone with a character like Waite’s win the love of a woman of high character like Sue Barlow (Annette Benning)…and so fast…and with so little exposure!

Then there’s Costner himself. I’ve seen him in many movies and he’s always Kevin Costner. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Kevin Costner. He seems like a nice guy. But whether he’s Eliot Ness, or looking for a message in a bottle, or a cold-blooded killer, he’s always, well, Kevin Costner. As Dorothy Parker said of Katherine Hepburn, he runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Then there’s the “love interest” between Waite and Barlow. They have one conversation that lasts for about two minutes and fall madly in love; maybe because they’re the only two people in the town who look like movie stars. The sad part of this is that, apart from the love interest, the movie looks pretty authentic. The clothes, the town, the storm…all look like they could have been that way in 1882. You can almost smell Costner’s filth as he lopes around. However, there sure seemed to be a lot of people living in this small, one-street town.

Finally, there’s one scene involving Sue Barlow that’s so laughable it reminded me of a scene from The Great Race, where Tony Curtis walks through a pie throwing fight in an immaculate white suit. Pies are flying all over the place. They go over and around and under Curtis. But when the fight’s over, his white suit is as clean as when the fight started. The problem is that in The Great Race the scene is meant to be funny. In Open Range it’s meant to be deadly serious.

Too bad, because this is an involving film. Although it’s Costner-long, at 2 hours 15 minutes plus (published running times vary from this to ten minutes longer), for me it didn’t drag. There is a lot of talk, but I felt that the tension built throughout into the climax. Although we’re told that there are only 8 gunmen against Waite and Boss, it seems as if they’re shooting at everyone West of the Pecos except Wyatt Earp.

There were other things I liked about the film. For one thing they didn’t seem to be using partial loads to keep down the noise of gunfire. When someone fires in the climax, it sounds like a real gun. I really enjoyed Duvall. Playing against the glacial Costner, Duvall gives a powerful performance as a tough, rough-edged cattle herder.

Despite all my criticism (hey, that’s my job!), and notwithstanding its mushy ending, the last ten minutes of which are so out of sync with the rest of the movie they look like they were added later in response to women’s comments in previews, I enjoyed Open Range.

August 16, 2003

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My Boss’s Daughter (2)

In the 1930s there appeared in Hollywood a new genre called the Screwball Comedy, created by people like writers Charles McArthur, Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, Directors Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Leo McCarey, Howard Hawks, actors Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, William Powell, and others of their ilk. These people all were, or became, Hollywood legends, as did their movies, which were cleverly written, brilliantly directed and acted. They were subtle and funny. There were lots of them and audiences adored them. They are still brilliantly funny. And they had taste.

Fast forward to the present. Now instead of clever scripts we get the toilet humor of stuff like There’s Something About With Mary (1998) and, now, My Boss’s Daughter. Although there are some funny lines that had me laughing out loud, most of the humor is based on the groin. There are lots of urine shots. The film itself has absolutely no coherence. The concept is that Tom Stansfield (Ashton Kutcher) works for a dictator-like boss, Jack Taylor (Terrence Stamp) and has a crush on his daughter, Lisa (Tara Reid). Tom gets finagled into housesitting while Jack and Lisa go out. Jack gives him specific instructions that nobody is to set foot in the house. Naturally, as soon as Jack leaves, the house is inundated with weird people, who cause nothing but trouble. What follows is imbecilic. The ending is moronic.

The film starts out with ten very funny minutes. Then the scatological humor starts and the movie tanks, as far as I’m concerned. The film is obsessed with the male groin. Not only does urine fall like rain, when someone pulls a gun, his victim pulls his male member. Call me crazy; I don’t find this funny.

I don’t rate this at the bottom of the barrel because the film does have a few funny moments. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with the slightest inclination to good taste.

August 23, 2003

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Uptown Girls (1)

In Uptown Girls, MGM seeks to answer the age-old question, “How bad can a movie be?” Molly Gunn (Brittany Murphy) is the spoiled, vacuous daughter of a deceased rock star whose trust fund has been stolen by a Trustee. Ray (Dakota Fanning) is an unbelievably precocious 8-year-old daughter of Roma Schleine (Heather Locklear) who acts like she’s sixty years old. Molly’s hired as Ray’s nanny, and the idea is that each is supposed to influence the other, Molly bringing Ray back to being a little girl and Ray bringing maturity to Molly.

The gaggingly simplistic script is marred (it’s hard to believe anything could make this script worse) by Michael Ballhaus’s derivative cinematography. Ballhaus is hung up on circular camera shots. If there’s one, there’s a half dozen. Whenever there’s nothing else to do, Ballhaus spins his camera around in a 360-degree circle. He’s even got a Busby Berkeley-type overhead shot of Molly and Ray in spinning teacups at Coney Island!

Director Boaz Yakin throws in a scene of Ray talking to her dying father who’s in a coma. It’s a shameless attempt to try to con some tears out of the audience, but it’s so obviously manipulative, showing the heretofore-impassive Ray rubbing her comatose father’s hand as she tells him what she’s been doing, it loses all effect.

I would sit through almost anything just to get a look at Heather Locklear. As far as I’m concerned there hasn’t been a more beautiful actress since Gene Tierney. But her appearance as Ray’s selfish, inconsiderate mother in a few scenes is nothing more than a cameo, not enough to be worth having to survive 94 minutes of this banality.

The romance between Molly and Neal (Jesse Spencer, in his first film), a rock singer, might be deep enough to appeal to a 12 year old girl, but it’s so shallow it gives superficiality a bad name.

The only good thing I can say about Uptown Girls is that some of the music by Joel McNeely and sung by Jesse Spencer (Neal) is pretty good. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of it. Other than looking at Locklear, Spencer’s the only actor in the film worth mentioning, but, to be fair, the script is so weak, even Laurence Olivier would have trouble looking good.

At the end, a ballet recital is turned into a modern dance (by Ray, an eight year old ballerina) done to rock music. This movie is so bad it had me groaning out loud. Maybe my groans bothered the few teenage girls who must be the target audience, but I doubt if even they could have found anything to like here.

Nothing in this movie makes any sense. There’s not any reason given for Molly and Ray to connect in the end, but they do. There’s not any reason for Molly and Neal to connect in the end, but they do. There’s not any reason for Roma to become a caring mother to Ray in the end, but she does. There’s not any reason for this movie to be seen.

August 27, 2003

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S.W.A.T. (6)

There aren’t many modern actors I’d pay to see. Russell Crowe is at the top of the list. But Colin Farrell is right below him. Farrell made Phone Booth a captivating film. He even made the execrable Daredevil tolerable. So that’s why I went to see S.W.A.T.

This is a pretty standard police thriller, but it deviates from the modern norm in that it pictures the LAPD in a fairly favorable light. Jim Street (Farrell) is a S.W.A.T. team member who gets into the doghouse of his hateful, self-centered boss, Capt. Thomas Fuller (Larry Poindexter), who banishes him to routine work in the “cage.” Hondo Harrelson (Samuel L. Jackson), also unliked by Fuller, rescues him and puts him on his team. Alex Montel (Olivier Martinez) is a drug lord who’s captured, and offers a $100 million reward to anyone who can spring him. Hondo’s team is assigned to protect him.

This is an unexceptional, flawed, police shoot-em-up that kept me awake for the entire 109 minutes. Unfortunately, the uninspired script barely scratches the surface of Farrell’s talents. Anyone could have handled his part, even Ben Affleck. Farrell’s a budding star and needs more challenging roles than this.

One problem with this film is the music. I watched the original The Thin Man (1934) again recently and one thing struck me--no music! One of the classic mystery/comedies of all-time and there was no music. S.W.A.T. would have been better had it copied The Thin Man, because S.W.A.T.’s music (Elliot Goldenthal) is inconsistent with the emotions it should be emphasizing. It’s loud and, rather than adding to the tension they’re ineptly trying to develop, detracts from what’s going on on the screen. How would you like to watch Humphrey Bogart tell Ingrid Bergman, “We still have Paris,” to the background music of The Real Slim Shady?

Another problem is that there’s a token woman, Chris Sanchez (Michele Rodriguez), on the team. One thinks she’s being included for some reason, maybe to do something special or to provide a love or sex interest. She’s shapely and beautiful and the film has scenes that establish her ability to cause significant mayhem. But, no, she’s just there. And she’s still just there at the end, having done nothing remarkable. Really, just a token; nothing more.

The big climax is so contrived it lessens the drama of the film. I would have thought that after setting this thing up the filmmakers would have had a challenging ending that would have required a S.W.A.T. team to perform exceptional services. Alas, there’s nothing special about how they prevail. It could have just as easily been the guys and gals from Law and Order.

This is an enjoyable entertainment, but I can’t really call it any more than average.

August 25, 2003

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Step Into Liquid (7)

Step Into Liquid is a highly entertaining, but ultimately disappointing, documentary about surfing. Writer-Director Dana Brown, son of Bruce (who wrote, produced, and directed 1966’s The Endless Summer), introduces us to Robert August, the star of The Endless Summer, now living in Costa Rica and still an avid surfer. He introduces us to his dad, Bruce, also still a surfer. We meet lots of people, all of them in love with surfing. We even meet a young surfer who is paralyzed from a surfing accident, but still surfs with the help of his buddies. We meet surfer girls. We meet surfers of all ages from all over the world. All have the same story; a life devoted to surfing is the highest calling because it’s pure enjoyment.

Nobody in this movie worries about living a productive life. Apparently all they do is surf, because none is ever identified as having a profession. We see them surfing in Malibu, on Maui’s North Shore in Hawaii (where else?), in Vietnam, on the Cortes bank (100 miles off the coast of San Diego). They live their lives according to The Beach Boys’ mantra, “Surfin’ is the only way, the only way for me, so surf!” OK, maybe all these people are happy hedonists and maybe that’s fine. It just bothered me that their lives seem so vacuous, just waiting for the next big wave. Isn’t there more to life than that?

I have the same criticism of this film that I had about last year’s Blue Crush. The filmmakers missed another golden opportunity to explain the sport of surfing. People are introduced as world champions. One guy is identified as the best surfer in the world who has never won a world’s championship. What is the sport all about? How does one win a world championship? How is competition judged? It wouldn’t take long to explain what the sport is. But this film doesn’t do it. It also doesn’t explain what makes a good surfer. Is it standing up throughout the wave? Is it doing acrobatics while riding the wave? Is it “hanging 5 or 10?” Is it surfing in the curl? Why is someone the best surfer in the world? Nobody explains anything.

Despite all that, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. The cinematography (John-Paul Beeghly) is breathtakingly beautiful, spectacular shots of the ocean and huge waves, incredible camera angles, buttressed by mind-boggling sunsets. The people are all, ALL, attractive. The music (George Acogny and Joe Fischer) is captivating and melds perfectly with what we’re seeing on the screen. Simple-minded though it is, it’s wonderful entertainment.

September 3, 2003

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Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star (2)

The pitch for this probably sounded good. Take a former child star from a TV sitcom, Dickie Roberts (David Spade), and give him a selfish, Hollywood mom, Peggy (Doris Roberts), who abandons him. When his series is cancelled, he’s a complete mess and can’t become an adult, never having been a child. By the time we meet him, at age 35, he’s a loser. Then he’s rejected for a role in a new Rob Reiner film on the basis that he has to have been a child to act this part. So Dickie hires a family, headed by Grace Finney (Mary McCormack, the best thing in the movie), to allow him to join her husband and two children so they can treat him as their child. The idea must have been that we’ll watch them affect one another.

Unfortunately, what sounded good in a pitch has been translated by people who don’t speak the language. Take the writers, for instance. Scriptwriters Fred Wolf and Spade don’t exhibit a scintilla of understanding about how children talk and act. Nothing ever occurs that shows why Dickie should have a positive effect on the family or why the family should have a positive effect on Dickie. Just about everything Dickie suggests they do is dishonest or malevolent, and it turns out OK, not the morality I want to see in a movie, even if it is supposed to be a comedy. One of the climactic moments in the film is when 35-year-old Dickie takes on three 12-year-old bullies who are tormenting Dickie’s new “brother,” and vanquishes them. This gives you the same kind of rush you might get watching Goliath beat the stuffing out of David. The relationship between Grace and her husband is never developed, other than showing him to be an insensitive clod while Grace is perfection personified. Jon Lovitz plays Dickie’s agent, Sidney Wernick. I’ve never seen Jon Lovitz before where he wasn’t funny. The Wolf-Spade script conquered that barrier.

Or, take the casting. The two children, Sam (Scott Terra) and Sally (Jenna Boyd) resemble refugees from The Munsters. That wouldn’t be so bad if that were the concept; hook Dickie up with children even more screwed up than he! Good comedic idea. But it’s not what’s intended. These are supposed to be normal children. Sam’s hairdo looks like he must have been electrocuted before each scene. If the idea was for Dickie to become a child and try to live through a childhood by associating with children, Sam and Sally aren’t the ones. They’re children who talk and act like 25 year-olds. Even more laughable (not funny laughable, pathetic laughable) is the casting of the “bullies” who torment Sam. They’re fat and ugly and, in real life, they’d be the bully-ees, not the bully-ers.

The movie terminates with a silly Hollywood ending, followed by the closing credits with legions of real life former child stars singing a coarse song that, I guess, is meant to be funny. Instead it’s just scurrilous. However, this segment does seem to validate the premise of the movie, to wit, as a result of their lack of development in their formative years, former child stars often grow up to be losers.

September 5, 2003

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Once Upon A Time In Mexico (4)

During the last quarter of this year, Hollywood will present us with a plethora of horror films, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Cabin Fever, Cold Creek Manor, to name only a few. I’m not an aficionado of horror films. But they do have their strange morality. They show violence and gore as scary things, things to be avoided. They show death as something to fear. They show killers as bad, bad people. They inspire a gut-wrenching, emotional response to violence, gore, and death.

Once Upon A Time In Mexico, however, is a part of a genre that, to me, is Hollywood at its most immoral. These films show death and gore without any emotional involvement whatever. People die and are tortured without fear or loathing. Torture and death are just as commonplace as drinking a glass of water. Bad people are just other people, not to be feared. In fact, the only emotional involvement in any of the thousands of deaths that we see throughout the 98 minutes of this film, is El Mariachi’s (Antonio Banderas) grieving for the death of his wife, Carolina (Selma Hayek), which occurred shortly after the last film, Desperado, ended eight years ago!

If you look at the cast, you think you’re in for a treat; in addition to Banderas and Hayek, Cheech Marin, Mickey Rourke, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Pedro Armendariz, accomplished actors all. How could it miss? Let me count the ways.

First, Banderas, a talented man, has a role that defines one-dimensional. This part doesn’t require acting, only an impassive body. Second, Hayek is little more than a cameo, appearing only in flashbacks. Third, Dafoe and Rourke aren’t in it much more than Hayek. Fourth, the main point of this film is to show as much gore and as many violent deaths as possible. Do you want to see a man’s eyes gorged out? You’ll see it here. Do you want to see a film that averages what seems like ten deaths per minute? You’ll see it here.

But do you want to see a reasonable story? A good script? A love interest? Suspense? Something interesting? Forget it, you won’t see them here. This is just an exercise by writer-producer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer, jack of all trades, master of none, Robert Rodriguez in pop-film making, an over-the-top action film with a lot of bullets, lots of people shot on top of tall things, falling long ways, lots of people getting shot when you don’t expect it. But, let’s face it, how dumb can an audience be? After the first several, maybe it’ll start to expect that maybe somebody’s going to get shot within the next few seconds whether it looks like it or not.

Johnny Depp contributes another strong performance in a weak film, following up on his performance in Pirates of the Caribbean. Marin gives a good performance, as does Rourke, who is hard to recognize in his new, puffy, Marlon Brando-like body.

You’ll notice that I’m now in the seventh paragraph of this critique and I haven’t mentioned the plot. Well, there’s a reason. The raison d’etre of this is the humorization and trivialization of violence. You want a plot? Although it’s hard to determine, apparently a drug lord, Barillo (Dafoe), wants to kill The President (Pedro Armendariz). El Mariachi for some reason is trying to stop it, I guess, and to gain revenge against General Marquez (Gerardo Virgil), who killed Carolina in Desperado, and what Depp, who is apparently a rogue CIA agent, Sands, is doing is anybody’s guess, but he’s in a lot of scenes, thank God. To call it convoluted would be to give it too much credit. This thing is so obtuse it’s an insult to language to use words longer than one syllable to criticize it.

I think this is intended to be a comedy (with thousands of graphic, bloody deaths; yeah, that’s real funny). There are a few good lines. The cinematography is pretty good. The best part of the film is the post-production. The subtitles are in bright yellow so you can always read them. Hooray! Finally, in 2003, filmmakers have figured out how to put in readable subtitles! Up until now they could conquer space, make people fly, rebuild and sink the Titanic, have John Wayne advertise products that didn’t exist when he was alive, but couldn’t figure out how to put in subtitles that didn’t blend in with the backdrop. (Pardon this digression, but in a horrible new film called So Close, a film far too dreadful for me to critique, the filmmakers inserted a white strip on the bottom of some of the scenes and then inserted subtitles in white! Remember the movie The Invisible Man? So Close should be called The Invisible Subtitles. These people had to actually take post-production action to insert this white strip and then take post-production action to insert white subtitles. Can you spell stupid?). But there’s another issue with the subtitles, which seems to set an inexplicable double standard. The vulgarity MotherF---- is spoken in English several times. But when it’s spoken in Spanish, it’s not translated into a subtitle! What? It’s OK to speak it, but it’s not OK to write it? What am I not understanding here?

Films like Once Upon A Time In Mexico can tend to desensitize viewers to violence and can result in a more violent society. There are some people who might like this. I’m not among ‘em.

September 13, 2003

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Anything Else (2)

One thing Woody Allen said that was right on was that no movie should be longer than 90 minutes. Even though this one is advertised as coming in at 96 minutes, it seems like eternity. But, to be fair to Woody, after only 30 minutes, this was too long. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I’ve only seen three Allen films I liked, Annie Hall, Deconstructing Harry, and Bullets Over Broadway. Why he’s got the reputation he’s got is beyond me. Why all the actors apparently stand in line to act for him for little more than scale is beyond me. He’s got a longer string of unentertaining, marginally profitable films than any director extant.

The last Allen film I saw was The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. That was so bad I swore off any more. But for some reason I went to this, maybe because Allen wasn’t starring. I thought he had a small part. Unfortunately, his part isn’t small. It’s the second leading man. His acting has become as bad as his writing and directing. It showed in Scorpion, and it’s gotten worse here.

This could as easily have been entitled The Nebbish and The Shrew. Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs) is a struggling writer who lives with aspiring actress Amanda (Christina Ricci). In a flashback we see that he falls in love with her because they have similar tastes. But from that point on there’s never anything that indicates a loving relationship. He’s smitten, but we can never understand why because she’s such an unappealing character. She’s not particularly beautiful. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, she was the least attractive female in the movie. So what’s keeping Jerry tied in with her when she’s such a manipulative, uncooperative, unresponsive jerk, except to maintain a tenuous story line, which is, basically, why does Jerry stay with Amanda and will he continue to stay with her?

David Dobel (Allen) is kind of a mentor to Jerry. But Allen’s neurotic way of acting, where he never says his lines straight, always appearing to be groping for words, is so annoying, the truths Dobel is telling Jerry are pretty much lost. Worse, Allen’s script is so hackneyed that it’s super predictable. I could say lines before they were spoken. I could tell what was going to happen before it occurred.

This movie goes on and on and on. There’s never a moment of silence. When there isn’t dialogue, Jerry’s talking to us, like Allen used to before he grew too old. To make matters worse, Biggs isn’t up to the weak script. Cary Grant or Ryan O’Neal might have been able to handle this. Maybe Woody Allen could have handled it 30 years ago. Biggs clearly can’t. Weak script plus weak actor equals disaster.

Nobody would put up with what Amanda puts him through. The movie completely lacks credibility. I can’t imagine anyone who actually is a Woody Allen fan liking this movie. If you don’t like Allen, there’s not a chance you’ll like it. I felt like I had been sitting there three hours when it finally ended.

September 20, 2003

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Matchstick Men (8)

As Monty Python used to say, now for something completely different. Director Ridley Scott, whose recent history has brought us wonderful action films like Black Hawk Down and Gladiator, translates Eric Garcia’s book about a neurotic con man into a compelling film. Roy Waller (Nicholas Cage) is the obsessive-compulsive grifter. He’s told he has a daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman), by the pregnant wife he divorced 14 years ago, finds and meets her in front of Venice High School, and the relationship changes his life. A sometimes funny, sometimes touching caper film with plenty of surprises. Deserving of Oscar nominations to Scott, Cage, Lohman, and screenwriter Ted Griffin.

September 13, 2003

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Lost In Translation (6)

Approximately two decades ago I attended a small dinner party. One of the people in attendance said he was the brother of Francis Ford Coppola. I believed him because it was a party of celebrities (author Judith Krantz was there) and he had a beard like Francis. He told of the new film he was preparing, all about a blind man told from the blind man’s vantage point. In other words, the screen was all dark all the time.

Now we get Lost In Translation, written, produced, and directed by Francis’s only daughter, Sofia, the niece of the guy who said he was the brother of Francis. If watching a film with the screen black sounds kind of slow, it would prepare you for this one, which defines the word “slow.”

Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is an aging actor in Japan to do whiskey commercials. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansen) is a young wife, fresh out of Yale, in Japan with her photographer-husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi). Both feel they have been minimized by their respective spouses. Murray does a good job of looking bored, but the best job of acting in the movie is by Johansen, who captures the part of a young wife who feels she’s being neglected and finds herself attracted to an older man magnificently. Their mutual ennui is exacerbated by an unflattering picture of life in Japan for Americans. Interesting cinematography alternates between the noise and bright lights of the streets to scenes in the hotel bars shot in what appears to be available light.

If you’ve got patience, you might enjoy it, but this is S-L-O-W. For me, it flunked the watch test (I looked at mine more than ten times) as nothing continued to happen on the screen, but I did find it ultimately satisfying, even though it would have been much better if it had come in 30 minutes shorter than the final 105 minutes running time. Apparently interminable movies run in the Coppola blood.

September 19, 2003

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