My Life in Movies

Sometimes I Feel Like an Idiot: Mike Judge's Idiocracy

2009-03-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Satire is difficult, and Mike Judge certainly doesn't pull punches. Unlike in King of the Hill, subtlety isn't his style in Idiocracy. Instead, he goes all out for every gag in the book. Every nuance is there to portray society as simply stupid.

What works in the film is the premise. That's even what carries it through until the end. You probably already know what it's about: society has gotten dumber and dumber (sic) until by the year 2500, the world (or at least America) is on the brink of collapse because they can't solve any of their problems, ones that they caused in the first place. In comes an average guy from the year 2000, and he's hailed as a genius. He must now solve all of humanity's problems, from the death of crops to the overflow of garbage.

It's a good premise.

What doesn't work, though, is the way the movie becomes a series of gags: sight, sound, etc. I guess a world of really stupid people would actually be full of gags, but it really just seems like a bunch of stupid people from the year 2000, not from the year 2500. Nothing has really changed in those 500 years except that people still can't solve their own problems.

So all in all, Idiocracy is a decent film with a great premise. The genius of it is also its problem: it is couched in a faraway land (like allegory or a lot of satire) that is really available right here at home. But the truth is generally easier to take when it seems faraway.

The other thing I like about this post is how people like to think they're above the critique. Just look at some reviews for the movie. Really, though, we're all kind of that stupid, either like Luke Wilson or like the stupid people there for laughs.

Robert (Sean) Penn Warren's All the King's Men

2009-03-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

Reading Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men is like riding an academic roller coaster through early twentieth century politics. The narrator, Jack Burden, is a student of history, and his journey through life illustrates the character of Willie Stark, the Boss, the Governor of whichever southern state it actually takes place in. Burden's narration is lush, vivid, and sometimes bogs down in its own detailed prose as it describes the landscapes and peoplescapes, even delving into philosophical ramblings about the meaning of a specifically placed finger or a supposed wink.

The book, frankly, borders on genius. It's a difficult read, sure, but it's a great story. It's the narration and description that makes it so good, though, not necessary the story itself. We come to know the characters only through that narration, but they are fully realized by the end.

The 2006 movie doesn't have those strengths. It tries to make a standard story out of the difficult prose and narrative. Not that it makes the novel strictly linear, but it leaves out all of the interesting philosophical meanderings. Jude Law (Jack Burden) tries to insert some of the stuff about the Friend of your Youth (one of the philosophical inserts) into the movie, but it falls flat because we don't get enough of it to fully appreciate it. All of the characters are that way, too: they're all one-sided, even bordering on stock characters.

We do see some brilliance in Sean Penn's Wille Stark, however, at least when he is giving speeches. When he comes out of his shell and attempts to connect with the world, his speeches are good. Watching this movie in 2009 is a strange experience, however, for we have seen the inauguration of Barack Obama, whose speeches sometimes mirrored those of Willie Stark, although his aren't nearly as mean-spirited. Stark represents the new kind of politician that cares for the people and wants to get rid of money-riddled politics. Instead, he wants to do good, even though he will still use corruption, for it is only through bad that good can ever come (at least according to Stark).

We have some good themes here, but most of them are minor. The primary theme is about the purpose of political life and whether politics can remain above the fray. The movie hints that politics is about service, but it cannot be above anything. Instead, it is as debased as any other human endeavor. Therefore, the very nature of political service is debased.

I'm not sure if the movie can be appreciated without having read the novel, for the plot gets a bit confusing, but the theme about politics and service is still evident. Watch it for that alone, but only if you generally vote Democrat. I guess a Republican can enjoy it, too, for it points out that even "idealists" are flawed and are really just as corrupt as any politicians.

Grade for All the King's Men: 6

I Pine for Camelot!

2008-05-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

Let's forget the historical arguments, for I'm really just looking for a good movie. Antoine Fuqua has delivered it before, and I really do think his Training Day is one of the best gritty cop movies out there. He got some good performances out of good actors in what was potentially a confusing plot.

Too bad Fuqua hasn't made anything else of that caliber. I would even suggest King Arthur is his worst. At least The Replacement Killers was fun, and Tears of the Sun (Special Edition) was overwrought but intriguing.

King Arthur has nothing going for it except some extended battle scenes that are quite well done. I admit that the overall idea is really cool. I like the reimagining of King Arthur that we see here, and I don't mind that Guinevere is a warrior maiden. But the acting here--from Clive Owen, of all people!--is simply atrocious. I have loved Clive Owen since Croupier, and most of his movies are decent, or at least he is decent in them. But King Arthur has some of the worst dialogue that even Owen couldn't save it.

There are lots of other problems here, too (such as the fact that I didn't mind when Lancelot died), but I will leave the review with the simple statement that this is a bad movie with some good action. Therefore, I guess it's a decent action film.

Grade: 4 of 10

To be superbad

2008-04-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Apatow's films are funny (see The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Rated Widescreen Edition) and Knocked Up (Widescreen Edition)) and this one is no different. It's directed by Greg Mottola who did The Daytrippers, another decent film. These movies take the standard sex comedy fare and add an ultimately conservative twist. For The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the movie says it's a good thing to wait until marriage to have sex. For Knocked Up, casual sex gets one into trouble and babies are better with two dependable parents.

Superbad has another conservative message. But don't go looking for a wholesome family affair, for this is not it. If I had to watch this movie with my parents, I fear that I would perhaps pass out. It's raunchy. Even though there may not be nudity per se, these guys talk like real guys, and they don't talk nicely about our, umm, private parts.

It's the story of Seth and Evan, based on the writers of the script, and one evening during their last weeks of high school before they split up to go to college. They have always been misfits, but finally, they may be able to become cool without changing. That's one of the good things. It isn't about these guys "fitting in" with the in-crowd. It's more about the in-crowd realizing that they're actually cool guys.

The movie is flawed, though. So much of the script is ad-libbed that some things don't make sense. Characters say things that contradict earlier ideas, and the editors just kept it becuase it happens to be funny. I guess I can forgive that.

The DVD has some hilarious extras, too, especially the one with Jonah Hill going through different versions of his lines. I don't know how they decided on only keeping one of them. I liked them all. I have trouble recommending Superbad because of its raunchiness, but if you're okay with that kind of thing, enjoy and get something more than mere comedy out of what is ultimately a conservative, enjoyable film.

Grade for Superbad: 7

Noir Excellence

2008-03-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

L.A. Confidential is Curtis Hanson's masterpiece. Overlook the flaws--especially the stereotypical characters--and see that it's all a part of the genre. The film noir does use stereotypes, and this movie takes that genre and makes it into a wonderful story of the gray between good and bad. There's the police thug who hates women beaters. There's the political good guy who won't compromise for anything. There's the gorgeous prostitute. There's the smarmy celebrity cop. There's even the loathsome smut-mag publisher. And none of them are quite what they seem. Each one changes over the course of the film, or we at least see a different side to every one of them.

It's watching these stereotypes develop (albeit in their generic ways) that makes this movie fun. That and the amazing shoot 'em up scene at the end. When the two protagonists make their final stand, you know it's coming, and it still keeps you on the edge of your seat. That's the sign of a good movie, and L.A. Confidential continues to deliver, even at a second and third viewing.

Grade for L.A. Confidential: 9

Catch the 3:10 to Yuma

2008-03-14T09:39:00.001-07:00

3:10 to Yuma is quite possibly one of the best westerns I have ever seen. Granted, it's not saying much, for I haven't seen that many westerns, but James Mangold (Copland; Girl, Interrupted; Walk the Line) crafts a western that becomes social commentary. It comments on such a myriad of social problems--racism, big business, mortgages and lending, war, even Blackwater--that I want to call it an issue movie. The good thing is that it never comes right out and takes a stand on these issues.

Instead, 3:10 to Yuma focuses on character, especially Christian Bale's character. Everything in the movie is about these characters, from the way they dress to the way they walk. Each one has a different way of drawing their guns, for example, so that every character is distinct. Especially Christian Bale's. He's struggling, and the narrative makes us feel his struggle long before he attempts to become a hero. That's the good part.

There are downsides, too, but I have to forgive them because the rest of the movie is so great. The main problem is with Russell Crowe's character--Bob Wade. He's basically Hannibal Lechter in the west. Sure, he may be a gentleman, but this movie makes no bones about his murderous nature. We may try to argue that his murders are warranted, but one scene in particular involves a fork, and I couldn't help but see him as a figure of true horror. What the movie tries to do at the end, though, makes no sense to me. I don't want to give it away, so let's just say that the ending is the worst part.

In another sense, 3:10 to Yuma is a great period action film. The social commentary elevates it, but the action sequences are wonderful. All practical special effects, too. No CGI stuff here, just guys with dynamite and men actually riding horses. I loved it.

Watch it through to the end and enjoy the journey. Then forget the ending.

Grade for 3:10 to Yuma: 8

Unveiling the Mystery of Alaska

2008-03-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

If you want to know about the great state of Alaska, just watch M. Jay Roach's Mystery, Alaska. Alaska has the following:

Cold

Hockey

Freezing snow

Adultery

Damn cold

Underage sex

Hockey

And that's just about it.

Now if you're not familiar with M. Jay Roach, he's the director of the Austin Powers films, so I was expecting this movie to be funnier. There are some reallly funny moments, but it made me appreciate how much the humor of Austin Powers should be attributed to Mike Myers. The director is just there to help manage things. Mystery, Alaska tries to be funny, and it manages sometimes, but it's really an ensemble romantic film tied around a Rocky story.

It's no Rocky, though. That movie had real gravitas. This one has Burt Reynolds, who should, like the Rolling Stones, quit. He's absolutely the worst part in this movie. He made me want to relive my junior high days. They were more fun than watching him. Russel Crowe is great, of course, but his acting is beside the point. He's only one small part of this larger town, and the movie doesn't focus on him, not like it should in order to be labeled a good movie.

The fact is, though--I guess I should admit it--I enjoyed Mystery, Alaska. It was a feel good movie about how it's okay to live in a small town. The people in small towns are just as good as the jerks from the big cities who look down on them and call them "hicks" or even "lumberjacks" in this case. Being from Central, SC, I sympathized with that point. It made me feel warm inside.

And the characters are likeable, too. I found myself caring about them. I wanted them to make good. I wanted their lives to be enjoyable. I wanted them to win their big hockey game.

But these things do not a good movie make. Mystery, Alaska is, finally, enjoyable but not great. Comforting but trite. Warm but, well, freezing-your-arse-off cold.

Grade for Mystery, Alaska: 5

The Ninth Gate to Mediocre Films

2008-03-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

Roman Polanski is an uneven filmmaker. Somtimes, he produces a great, original story that captures the imagination, as in The Pianist (2002) and Chinatown (1974). Other times, he manages to create creepy psychological drama, as in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976). In fact, Chinatown continues to be one of my favorite newer film noirs, and Rosemary's Baby is the ultimate example of how to combine horror and humor in what is ultimately a scary movie.

But sometimes Polanski's films are just okay, as in Frantic (1988) and downright bad, as in Pirates (1986). The Ninth Gate (1999) is one of those okay movies.

It's based on the book by Arturo Perez-Reverte called The Club Dumas, which was recommended to me by my friend J. Mark Bertrand. I loved it. The book was about a conniving book dealer who is researching two books at once--a lost version of a chapter by Dumas and another book called The Ninth Gate. What made Perez-Reverte's version great is the way that the main character, Corso, gets mixed up in both of them. By the end, it's almost as if he can't distinguish fantasy and reality, and so he ends up falling into several strange situations dealing with satanism and Dumas lovers. And they look a lot alike, too.

But Polanski removes all of the Dumas stuff and makes the movie solely about Corso and The Ninth Gate, a book supposedly ghostwritten by Lucifer. What he creates here is a creepy movie with a great character. Johnny Depp plays Corso as laid-back yet unscrupulous, and his acting fits the character superbly. For the first hour, the tension is taut and building. And then you learn what is actually happening, or at least what may be happening. And it goes downhill from there.

Sure the ending is left open, but it's not necessarily a good thing. Sure there is psychological drama. But by the end, I don't care anymore. The plot has become so ridiculous that I don't care about the characters or whether they manage to actually conjure the devil. And the movie incidentally features one of the stupidest sex scenes on film.

So all in all, it's an okay movie.

Grade for The Ninth Gate: 5

Guy Movie

2008-03-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

At first, I thought Shoot 'Em Up should be retitled Guy Movie, but then I decided that it was already kind of called that. It's not exactly a profound title, right? It's descriptive of the movie, though, for that's all it is. Shoot 'Em Up is the quintessential guy flick because it is a combination of action scenes with stupid one-liners broken up by prurient love scenes and absolutely no plot. Basically, it's action pornography, as in stupid, lurid, and sensational.

As a guy, I am appalled that movies like this get made. They have real actors here, too--Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and the gorgeous Aramaic speaking Monica Belluci. It's not like this is a kid's remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark or something like that. It's a real movie!

And they make it to appeal to guys like me. They think that us guys don't care to think about movies and all we want is senseless sex and violence. I'm so overwrought, I feel like writing in all capital letters and using multiple punctuation marks. IT UPSETS ME, DANGIT!!!!

The bad thing is that I actually kind of like it. It's like taking the cool action scenes from the best action movies and then stringing them together into an homage. It's not a parody, at least I don't think so. While it knows it's being silly, it's doing it earnestly. The actors are really acting and the action scenes are well-done. No, no, no, this movie likes what it has done, and there are a lot of guys like me who kind of like it, too.

But honestly, I didn't want an entire movie. I actually couldn't finish it. Good action scenes need to come in small doses, and this one comes on way too strong and lasts for way too long.

And if I were in an action movie, I would say, "Yeah, long and strong, just like me."

But really, it's not that funny.

Grade for Shoot 'Em Up: 4

The Conservative Trend?

2008-03-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

Juno is most commonly described as "quirky." It's said to see this apt description because there is an air of dismissal there, and Juno should not be dismissed. Nope. It's actually a powerful movie about love and motherhood.

But that doesn't really concern me right now. Sure, I could talk about the movie's strengths: the character's consistency and motivation; the likable and believable side characters; the witty dialogue that actually mimics how a teenager would talk.

Or I could talk about the flaws: how the intro credits falsely introduce something so serious; how the main character's intermittent narration only serves to confuse the point of view; how the dialogue changes depending on who is being spoken to.

Those things are important but they don't really say anything about how good the movie is. And it's good. But it's goodness is strange, for I think Juno is a part of a conservative trend in movies.

Take Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, both great comedies with a conservative message. Juno is like that, too. At once, it is a great argument against abortion. The main character decides not to have an abortion in a scene that is actually funny and not at all preachy. But it's the right thing to do, at least according to the logic of the movie.

It's also quite liberal, though. It says nothing about underage sex and just assumes that it's okay. It glances over the fact that Juno herself will never be quite the same. It glances over the fact that Juno and her now boyfriend now have a child, even if they aren't in contact with it. And it even leaves the Jason Bateman character in the lurch even though Juno has played a role in practically destroying his life.

Never mind that, though. The fact that Juno goes through with the pregnancy overshadows most of the rest of the plot.

It's all the other stuff that makes it a good movie.

Grade: 9

The Flux of Casanova

2006-08-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

I have talked before that movies must have several things to make them good:
· An interesting and engaging plot.
· Good acting.
· Good dialogue.
· Enjoyment.
I think I may be paring this list down to two basic components, however. Now I say that every movie must have
· A good idea and
· Must be well-executed.
I can define these however I want, of course, and they encompass the previous list.

Let me give an example. The new live action Aeon Flux (2005) is a bad idea well-executed. Now I must explain that, however, because the idea is really quite interesting. I remember watching the original mini-series when it came on MTV. I don’t think I saw every episode, and I certainly couldn’t get anything like a coherent plot out of it, but man, my memory says that show was awesome. Now that I watch the new Aeon Flux, I think perhaps I was a bit mistaken. The mini-series didn’t need a coherent plot. It didn’t need anything, really, because it was done in short segments, and it was only meant to look cool. This new movie does the same thing. The plot is confusing and when everything is finally revealed, it’s, well, stupid.

But boy does it look cool. I think the special features on the DVD were more interesting than the actual movie because they’re so concerned with set design and the filming of the movie in Berlin. Yeah, the settings are awesome. But the idea is a stinker.

The new Casanova (2005) with Heath Ledger is the same way. It’s a beautiful film, and I love the filming of historical Venice. So it’s well-executed. But the idea is stupid. Nothing about it makes any sense, and the historical inconsistencies drove me up the wall.

So when it comes to thinking about movies now, I will think in these terms. How do I know a movie is really good? When it’s a great idea and is well-executed. When it’s bad? A bad idea poorly executed…

These two films are simply bad ideas well-executed, and that makes them tolerable. But they’re anything but good.

Grade for Aeon Flux: 4
Grade for Casanova: 4

An Episode in the Life of...

2006-07-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

Capote is a rare thing: a beautifully shot film that subtly develops its characters through action and dialogue.

And that’s really about it.

The story’s okay, and the acting is good, of course, but those things are not nearly as compelling as the way this film develops the character of Truman Capote. I think what I like best about this character development is that the movie doesn’t try to be an all-encompassing biography. It gives us a snapshot into Capote’s life by showing him during a four-year period, concentrating almost completely on the writing of In Cold Blood. It’s not a biopic by any means, and yet I think it defines Truman Capote much better than most biopics do with their main characters, including the recent Ray. Give me a subtle movie like Capote over a drawn out life of a celebrity any day.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, for in some ways, the story drags on. As Capote waits to find out what happens to the killers, we the audience wait with him, wondering what will happen. It's kind of like being stuck on the ship in the middle of the Atlantic in Master and Commander. The main character’s in limbo, so we’re in limbo, too. But Capote manages to pick up the pace again rather quickly, and we watch with Capote as he witnesses what appears to become a seminal event in his life. The events of the novel Capote writes aren't that interesting, either, and watching Capote become a part of the killers' lives is only partially interesting. It's the way the movie develops Capote with this one event that continually moves me.

Watching this one event unfold and witnessing how it effects the main character is truly fascinating.

Grade for Capote: 7

P.S. For those skeptics, I have a few stinkers I’m waiting to review. They can’t all be good, right?

A Good Night, Indeed

2006-07-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

George Clooney’s sophomore directorial effort—2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck—is pure entertainment. Sure, it’s couched in terms we all know: constant preachy-ness, actual news footage, pretentious black and white in the age of color, and an all-star liberal cast coming together to make a statement, but this is still a movie that entertains and means to.

Everyone seems to want to talk about the statement, which is important, granted. Remember George Clooney’s speech at the Oscars? He said something about the way entertainment needs to do more than simply entertain; it needs to educate by tackling the tough issues of the day. That’s what Good Night, and Good Luck does. It says something or other about the importance of the media to do more than kowtow to either the authorities or the public sentiment, which generally tow the same line, anyway. The media needs to report the news, but not simply objectively. Reporting means to dig deeper, to go behind what people say to actually investigate how or why people say it. I appreciate that kind of investigative journalism, but that’s not what makes this movie good.

As I have constantly said, issues don’t necessarily make for good movies, so let’s forget that this is an issue-movie. First of all, it doesn’t present itself as an issue movie. Yes, it’s about the fall of McCarthy, but it’s really about the characters. In fact, I would call this movie itself a bit of investigative journalism. Instead of simply describing what these characters did in order to help expose McCarthy, it tries to give us a glimpse of these characters at specific moments in time in order to make us understand how they could go about it in the first place.

What I appreciate about it is that it doesn’t try to present every aspect of each character. In fact, we only see two of the characters outside of work, and even that is unnecessary. The two characters in question, played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, have to hide that they’re married, and I kept wondering why we needed to know this fact about these two characters who do nothing to advance the plot. But their marriage is the point because it shows us the time period we’re talking about. Whereas Clooney knows he’s dealing with an educated audience—he offers no introduction to the main character or McCarthy, after all—he wants to give us a glimpse into what real life was like in those days. We never leave the CBS offices at all, except to see how this couple who works there has to hide their own marriage. Sure, CBS may not censor its reporters, but it certainly isn’t a bastion of liberalism, either.

The kind of censorship the movie deals with, then, is the censorship of a period, a moment in time, and that message is much more powerful now than the simple message about the media. When Ann Coulter’s books Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Godless: the Church of Liberalism become bestsellers, we know something about keeping our mouths shut. Especially if one happens to be a Democrat and—gasp!—a Christian.

But I digress.

What makes Clooney’s work so entertaining is that it isn’t a bit pretentious. Sure, it’s an issue film, but it’s doing so in the guise of presenting fact. The facts take up less than 90 minutes, too. And in the age of three-hour-long epics, that’s a fact I can appreciate.

Grade for Good Night, and Good Luck: 8

Tribes and Rituals in Jackson's Kong

2006-07-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Before we watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong, my friend asked me, “I want to know what you think about the portrayal of the natives.” So I was looking for them, hoping to see something juicy.

I wasn’t disappointed.

In the original King Kong, the natives have an interesting civilization. They live on one portion of the island, and they sacrifice young women to Kong in order to appease him as the lord of the jungle. Besides taking the woman off of the ship, however, the natives are basically harmless. Sure, they may worship Kong as a deity, but they also go about their daily lives. We don’t see any of that, of course, but their part of the island seems just as lush as the rest, and the people have to survive.

In Jackson’s version, we get numerous hints that this civilization is doomed. We see absolutely no infrastructure or evidence that the people actually live decent lives. There are a few rotting fish on a stick, which shows that they probably get their subsistence from the ocean, but the overall view of these people is completely bleak. I hope a group of explorers don’t visit my town or come into my house and say, “it’s obvious that this civilization died out years ago” when in reality, I’m just laying down in a back room taking a snooze. Jackson takes great pains to make this village seem completely foreign to us:

Nothing but jagged rocks
No visible communication among residents
Murder of all they contact
Creepy girls who greet visitors by slowly raising their arms

The list could go on, too. But my real question about this society is where do all of the skulls come from? The island is supposedly the last blank space on the map. So is it feasible that other tribes still go and the tribe fights wars? The rest of the island is huge, but it’s inhabited by the dinosaurs, and this seems to be the only tribe on this side of the wall. So are these just the skulls and bones from their own dead? Or do they routinely kill off half of their citizens?

No matter what the truth is, we’re meant to think it’s weird and scary. Is Jackson meaning to make this tribe out to be a bunch of bloodthirsty incomprehensibles? It sure seems like it. They aren’t too tough, of course, because we don’t see them again after the initial killing. Even though there is only one person guarding the gate, he’s enough to ward off the entire tribe.

The fact and problem is this: the people on the island don’t appear to be any kind of viable civilization. How they have survived so long is a mystery, and they’re probably about to die off, if their surroundings are any indication. We aren’t meant to have pity them, and we certainly aren’t meant to think about them after they disappear and their primary deity is seized. In the original, we see Kong kill some of the natives, and we see them as real people. Here, they're monsters.

An interesting minor plot point to say the least.

Does the New King Kong Rule, Too?

2006-06-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) deserves several entries, so the next couple or few will be devoted to analyzing and teasing out some of the strands Jackson includes in his latest epic. This one, however, will simply review it as a film.

Not that that task is as simple as it sounds. The problem is that Jackson is an auteur. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was held back by a giant story that was in some ways unmanageable. As the series went on, it became more and more tangled and messy, eliminating certain necessary plot points and adding in some others. In King Kong, however, he doesn’t have that problem. The original story is actually quite simple, and Jackson knows what he’s doing here. That’s the auteur in him. Because the story is simple, he can and does do whatever he wants. There is no part of King Kong that is not absolutely purposeful. He wasn’t held back by anything, and he thus created an epic film that defies simple reviewing.

Not that it’s that great, however. It’s worth watching, certainly, and there are parts of it that are amazing. As a whole, however, it’s actually too epic. I told my movie-watching partner that the movie was too overdone, and he asked me, “What, you expect subtle out of a giant monkey movie?” And I wonder: is it a “giant-monkey movie” or a “giant monkey-movie.” It’s both, of course, and that’s where the problem comes in.

There is so much action here that we don’t get to really see these characters. In fact, they become caricatures. The first half of the movie is a vaudeville film, an example of an early comedic drama. The second half turns horrifying, especially as we watch King Kong bounce through the jungle destroying his beloved prey. Where the characters developed in the first half are caricatures, the characters we see in the second half bear no relation to them. Characters are killed off willy-nilly, and we see these characters do things that are completely uncharacteristic.

But this isn’t a movie about characters, you may try to tell me. It’s an action film, right? Yes, it is, and the action sequences are astounding. The fight between King Kong and three tyrannosaurus rexi is incredible, possibly one of the best action sequences I have ever seen. The dinosaur sequences don’t let up, and I found myself wishing they would stop. While it was too much, I still could not look away.

But that’s really it. Sure, it’s also a monkey love story, but that part is actually kind of beside the point. It’s touching, but then we see the main female lead go back to her standard male beau at the end. Why doesn’t she reject him completely?

So as a film, King Kong doesn’t really hold up. It’s all purposeful, yes, and Jackson certainly knows what he’s doing, but that doesn’t mean that it makes for a great movie. It’s a good one, of course, and it’s a lot of fun to watch—a spectacle, in fact—but it doesn’t get ranked as high as I thought it would. Yes, I'm disappointed.

Grade for King Kong: 7

Corking The DaVinci Code

2006-06-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

So many people write about unlocking it, I want to say finally that the whole thing should be corked, put a stopper in it, toss it out to sea for someone to find a few million miles or years from now. Maybe they will find it fresh again.

Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code (2006) focuses on one thing—talk, talk, talk—and all of that talk makes one movie boring.

First, I need to apologize to my audience. Yes, I went to see this terrible film. I was hoping it would be good (for I enjoyed the book), but my expectations weren’t too high. I know I should have resisted and not gone to see it. I know I should have boycotted it even on DVD. Why should I pay to see something that will be so terrible? I know, I know. I have no excuses. My mom is in town, and she enjoyed the book, as well, so she and I went to see the film. It was nice to get out, too.

Even if the movie did stink.

It kept going and going, like an old, worn out Energizer bunny. Imagine watching the Energizer bunny beat on his drum for two and a half hours while you get very small glimpses of Paris or London, and you will know what this movie is like.

If we didn’t know it before, be assured that an exciting book does not necessarily make for an exciting movie. The car chase at the beginning is so blurry, in fact, that I couldn’t tell what was happening. The rest of the action is like that too—blurred and muted in favor of explanatory dialogue delivered by an excellent cast. I love Audrey Tautou in Amelie (2001), Dirty Pretty Things (2003) and L’Auberge Espanol (2003), but she is probably the worst one here. Her smile is too vibrant for Sophie, and when she tries to brood, she reminds me of my cute daughter who is obviously faking her tears. I hate Tom Hanks (Maybe I will explain why in some future entry.), but he is really good here. His long hair doesn’t look stupid, and he is able to make the lines convincing. Ian McKellan is awesome, as usual, and the best scene is when we watch Hanks and McKellan banter about the Holy Grail, arguing as to what is historical and what is myth. Paul Bettany and Jean Reno are not at their best here, but they’re still good and interesting to watch.

Besides having a bunch of good actors, though, this film has absolutely nothing going for it. Sure, it’s filmed well, too, but neither of those things can make up for a plot that doesn’t hold together in its film version.

So I say cork it.

Yet I fear there’s an Angels and Demons (2007?) waiting in the wings…

Grade for The DaVinci Code: 4

If I Could Flow, I Would Hustle

2006-06-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

The event that got me blogging again after a few months’ hiatus was The Academy Awards and the fact that the Three-Six Mafia won for best song.

After watching Hustle and Flow, I now see why they won.

This is a good movie, probably better than Crash, the film about race that won Best Picture for 2005. It’s better because it’s subtler. It details all of the same issues—race, poverty, crime—but it does so in a way that is simply about real life, especially one person’s struggle to overcome the situation he’s in.

The way Terence Howard portrays D-Jay is difficult: difficult to understand his speech, difficult to follow his actions, and difficult to comprehend his motivations. But that’s just it, isn’t it? People are complicated and individual. What I like about Hustle and Flow is that it doesn’t try to become a stand-in for all black people or all people in the ghetto, like Crash tried to do. The characters in Crash are allegories or “everymen.” They represent the people of their race or of their situations. When I watch Crash, I am meant to see myself in the characters, more than likely in the Brendan Fraser character, or possibly in the young cop character—you know, the white people who don’t think they’re racist, but they really are. This is all white people, the movie says: “even though you think you’re enlightened, you’re really just covering up your prejudices.”

It’s a good statement, and more true than most of us would care to admit. It’s also a bit heavy-handed. Issues don’t make for good movies, in general, and Crash is an issue film, a movie with an agenda.

Hustle and Flow may have an agenda, too, but it’s just to show the circumstances surrounding one man’s life and his dream to escape it. The fact that his escape is through music makes it even better. My only complaint is that the movie didn’t spend more time on how they created the music. I could watch Sugar sing those lines over and over… “You know it’s hard out here for a pimp…”

Grade for Hustle and Flow: 7

The Fog of Doom

2006-06-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

No, it’s not a new documentary about Donald Rumsfeld. It simply combines the titles of two of the worst films I have seen in a while. I guess we’re in the dog days of originality because every script that isn’t a comedy or drama seems to be based on a comic book, video game, or even an earlier film. Did someone decide to remake The Omen just because the date June 6, 2006 was approaching? It seems so. These remakes are coming out willy-nilly and The Fog (2005), a remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) is a useless example of it.

Let’s take the story on its own without looking at the original, which I haven’t seen. It is far and away one of the worst horror films. I have written quite a bit about the new style of horror that is scary while being visually creepy. This one does neither. It hearkens back to an older style of ghost story that just doesn’t hold up. I’m scared pretty easily, I think, and no part of this movie scared me. When I watched it at night by myself I didn’t have to turn the volume down or look away because I knew something was coming. In parts, I think I laughed at the plot’s “coincidences.” Nevermind the silly relationships among the half-plotted characters; let’s examine why the fog kills whom it does. No, wait, we can’t do that because there is no relationship between their deaths. Sometimes the fog targets specific people and just tries to get rid of them quickly. Other times, it takes its time and tortures them. It has to leave during the day, too, because, well, fog only comes at night, right?

Stupid. Just plain stupid.

Doom (2005) was so much better that I felt vindicated. Don’t get me wrong, it was still bad, but it was at least enjoyably bad. Whereas The Fog was serious and didn’t know what it was doing, Doom knew that it was a silly premise and it seemed to relish it. At one point, there is what looks like a cage match between one of the monsters and a marine. At the end, the two main characters strip down and have a superhuman wrestling match, which is awesome. Sure, it attempts to be serious while it’s doing these things, but how can it really? How can it go into a first-person shooter mode at the end and turn around corners just like one does in the video game and not know how silly it is? The Rock tries to be so serious as he orders around other maries that I can't help but laugh.

Stupid, sure, but fun, too.

I’ll take Doom over The Fog any day.

Grade for The Fog: 0
Grade for Doom: 3

Immigration and Race in The Last Stand

2006-06-08T06:39:00.000-07:00

I did something that I haven’t done in a long time: I went to a movie theater and saw a new movie. Heck, it wasn’t even free.

What would inspire Chad to pay $7.50 to see a movie? X-Men 3, of course. The first one was okay and the second one was one of the best superhero films I’ve seen. I was leery of the third one, however, for it wasn’t directed by Bryan Singer. Nope, he left to go do something silly like Superman Returns (which I’m looking forward to, as well).

I don’t even want to talk about the merits or detriments of the film, however. Let’s say that it is decent—not inspired and full of more holes than my pair of leftover 1980s jeans.

What I find compelling is the resonance of these films according to when they are released. In an earlier blog entry called “Terrorism Lessons from the Movies,” I discussed how X-Men 2 became a film about heroes labeled as terrorists and an evil military industry trying to convince the world to go to war with these terrorists for its own selfish reasons. How interesting that the film is then released in March 2003, right as the US is invading Iraq.

Here, the dichotomy isn’t between the terrorists and non-terrorists, but becomes a question of innate properties. In fact, X-Men 3 captures the intent of the original X-Men series, which began in 1963, when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. The X-Men are mutants, meaning that they are somehow genetically different from all “normal” people. Some mutants have super powers, but some are just physically different. They’re seen as inferior because they are different, even though they have done nothing to choose their difference. As X-3 points out, there are lots of mutants that aren’t even “out of the closet,” so to speak. These mutants want to be like everyone else, and for the most part, they fit in.

In X-3, a company releases a cure for being different. Mutants can be permanently cured if they take a serum. This unleashes some mutant outrage, too, because many mutants don’t think there’s anything wrong with being mutants; they’re different, yes, but they’re also gifted. There are protests on both sides, and one group of mutants (Magneto, et al.) want to destroy all of the normal people and establish their own rule. The X-Men side doesn’t agree with the dichotomy of normal/mutant, but they don’t think violence is the answer—diplomacy is.

And when is this movie released? When the immigration question is at its height. Racism, immigration, reaction, and questions of belonging are all tied up here. In fact, it’s the most compelling thing about X-Men 3.

Grade for X-Men: The Last Stand: 5

Judd's Twisted Demise

2006-05-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Ashley Judd needs to stop. I hereby proclaim that the Ashley Judd thriller (and its imitators) has played itself out and needs to retire.

Sure, I enjoyed Kiss the Girls (1997) when it came out. Heck, I even thought Double Jeopardy (1999) was somewhat entertaining. But now there’s Eye of the Beholder (1999), High Crimes (2002), and Twisted (2004), along with the perhaps-promising Bug (2006), which is being directed by William Friedkin.

While visiting with my folks recently, my dad told me I had to see this great thriller playing on cable, but he couldn’t remember the name. If you know my dad, you know that’s not unusual. He never knows the names of anything, and half the time he sleeps through movies. It’s kind of his thing.

So I vote to watch House of Wax (2005), which looks humorous, but he realizes after five minutes that he has, yep, already seen it. So we turn to Twisted, against my will, and after fifteen minutes, he realizes that, indeed, this was the thriller he had been telling me about. “It’ll blow your mind,” he says.

Not only did it not blow my mind, but it wasn’t even twisted, not in the least. I called the whodunit during the first thirty minutes, even explaining why the killing was done and noting the other murders that had been committed. I even told my dad, who was probably asleep by now, how Judd’s character was knocked out to be able to do it.

In other words, this was a twisted thriller that wasn’t exciting or twisted and left me feeling gypped of two hours. The only thing that was the least bit interesting here was the main character’s penchant for casual sex. Such a thing isn’t really unusual in Hollywood, of course, but it is generally accompanied by some sort of romance or love story. Here, Judd’s character picks up a stranger and then has a kind of masochistic sex with him, and we never see him again. And this isn’t the first time she has done this. We learn that she is trying to find companionship, even following in her mother’s footsteps, but it’s still weird for a heroine to do such things. What happened to the good Ashley of yore?

What the casual sex points out is how everyone in this movie is twisted, which may be the point. The only good character is the one who is supposed to be bad, played by a very bored Andy Garcia. Twisted comes out demonstrating the Calvinist tenet of total depravity. The entire world is twisted, it claims, even the ones we think are good.

Grade for Twisted: 2

The Life Hectic with Wes Anderson

2006-05-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

I watched Rushmore (1998) one time and fell in love with it. Its characters were smart, engaging, and sincere in an innovative way. The fact that the film was made in Houston right after I moved there made it all the more attractive. Then came The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), and I didn’t love it at first. It was engaging and intriguing, but it didn’t grab me right away, making me dub it One of Those Movies That Has To Be Watched Several Times, like The Big Lebowski (1998). Now comes The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and I can’t even call it that.

Regarding a film as One of Those Movies That Has To Be Watched Several Times is a type of copout, anyway; I realize that. It’s what you do with movies that are good but not necessarily fully enjoyable the first go-round. Almost all of the Coen brothers films are that way, for example. They’re great on first watching, but they get better with multiple viewings. Then there are movies that are intriguing but not enjoyable at all. Some of the more arty films are this way, especially the really out-there ones like David Lynch’s earliest, Eraserhead (1976). I know they’re interesting, but I don’t want to watch them again, or at least only in an I-can’t-turn-away-from-the-accident stare.

The Life Aquatic is one of these movies, and it may be partly because of my viewing habits that I say this. My wife likes these kinds of movies, so I have to watch them with her, yet she can’t bear to watch more than 45 minutes of a movie in one sitting (she starts feeling like she has to “do something,” which I don’t understand one bit. Like watching a movie isn’t “doing something?” Wait, that’s a sluggard talking…). Watching The Life Aquatic in four sittings really changed the viewing experience, and it pointed out the fact that this is really two different films about the same person.

The first two segments were boring. Nothing happened, and the characters weren’t even compelling enough to make it into a drama. Bill Murray is such a non-plus actor that he appears to bumble through every scene he’s in, and it didn’t work in this movie because the dialogue or situations didn’t make up for it. I wanted to quit watching after the first segment, but my wife wanted to keep going. During these first two segments, I felt as though the movie violated rule number two: a movie must be enjoyable in order to be good. There are different ways to be enjoyable, of course, but this one didn’t have any of them. I wanted to stop and burn it like we did with 13 Going on 30.

But then came the third segment, and all of sudden this drama turned into an action film. Suddenly, the characters were chasing pirates and I was intrigued. The change happened very suddenly, but it was also quite subtle. One moment Bill Murray is tied up and trying to stay alive and the next moment he is wielding a machine gun blowing people away.

And it worked…sort of. The change is purposeful, I know: it demonstrates Steve Zissou’s mid-life crisis and change and he becomes a hero for his son. Where he was a bumbling fool, he is now a rejuvenated man who takes charge. He rescues his crew and destroys the bad guys in the process.

It doesn’t make up for the first two segments, however. Even if it’s purposeful, I still have to enjoy a film. So I rate The Life Aquatic barely fresh.

Grade for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: 6

The Tensions of Being Zorro

2006-05-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Mask of Zorro (1998) saw the emergence of Catherine Zeta-Jones and the solidification of Antonio Banderas as American movie stars, and they’re both perfect for their roles. What I find intriguing about these stars is that the two of them now command multi-million dollar salaries, and they gained their status (at least for Zeta-Jones) through a movie that is about--to put it simply--protecting the poor.

Like I say, that is putting it simply, but the main plot of The Mask of Zorro is about the plight of the poor workers who, whether free or slave, are forced to serve the people in power. These people are sometimes literally chained, but they are always metaphorically chained. Zorro is their savior, first by helping to banish Spanish rule and then by preventing the evil men from coming back to subjugate the same people is the name of, not colonialism this time, but a type of industrial capitalism. These poor people’s lives don’t seem to change during any of these powers, either. I guess it doesn’t matter who’s in power, it sucks to be poor.

So in effect, Zorro accomplishes nothing. Sure, he drives the Spanish out of town, but nothing really changes for the people. He tells his wife that he’s done, but all he has really done is, well, driven the Spanish out of town. And that’s before the Spanish ruler comes and burns his palace down, leaving him with nothing. Then it becomes Banderas who has a fortune to live as he pleases, and promises not to fight anymore. Has the plight of the people changed? Probably not. We know Santa Anna promises to take care of them, but he’s too busy waging an expensive war, isn’t he? Besides, all he says is that he will give them some food. Heck, he probably makes them join his army.

The poor Zorro character, however, marries rich and now has his family and fortune to think of. No more worries for him. No more being drunk on the street fighting for booze. He has made it through his hard work and dedication to swordfighting and fighting for people who could not fight themselves. Or at least to his good looks and dancing ability, for those are the things that captivated Zeta-Jones's character.

What would call Zorro today? We would probably brand him a terrorist, but I probably shouldn't say that. It's a movie, after all, and there have to be villans and heroes and never the twain shall meet. Besides, he’s doing good for the people against the conniving capitalists, so it’s all okay.

What a revolutionary movie that doesn’t even seem to have a clue about its own revolutionary tendencies. No one ever mentions the tension between the rich Zorros and the poor people they are supposed to protect. The movie insists that what he does is right, but it’s odd to think that the capitalists are simply being industrious and doing what they need to do in order to make their money. Heck, they are even working to free California from Mexico, which is a good thing, too, right?

Let’s see a tortured hero who sees the conflict between his own riches and the complete lack of the people around him. He lives poor, too, and he serves the people by providing food for them, as well as independence. Independence is necessary, sure, but I would rather have food...

Zorro and Childhood

2006-05-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned before, “the heist” is my favorite genre. They’re generally smart and witty, because, well, criminals who can get away with such antics have to be smart and witty.

As a child, however, my favorite genre was the action/adventure film. I loved Indiana Jones and his bumbling swashbuckling. I loved watching every kind of action/adventure film, such as Romancing the Stone, King Solomon’s Mines, Die Hard, Big Trouble in Little China, any Swarzenegger film, and any funny, action-packed hero adventure.

I admit I still have a penchant for this genre, even though my wife seems to despise those films. No, that’s not quite fair. She actually likes them based on their ratio of humor to action. If there’s a lot of humor and not that much action, i.e. killing, then she enjoys them. If it’s really an action movie with a little humor, she doesn’t want it. But this humor/death ratio is especially difficult to quantify, so I tend to play it safe and watch these movies without her.

So I watched The Mask of Zorro (1998) by myself this week, mainly because I was tired after working until 10:00 PM but not quite ready to go to bed (the wife was already in bed, of course). This Zorro film is a return to the action/adventure comedy of yore. There’s lots of yucks and lots of yells, including some tantalizing swordplay for the 12-year-old boys. It reminded me of a movie I would have loved had I seen it in 1985. Heck, I loved it in 2006. It’s all well-done, and it all works.

The problem is that it’s all been done before. Literally. Perhaps I am getting too old for this genre, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s not the “oh, another man in search of revenge who learns from a great master how to defeat the object of his ire…yawn” thing. No way. I love the action and loved this movie, in general. But a lot of it is taken directly from Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. At least half of the plot is borrowed, stolen, shanghaied, as it were, from a nineteenth-century novel.

I won’t divulge too many details here, but if you have seen any of the decent movie versions of The Count of Monte Cristo (and you have tons of versions to choose from), you know what I mean. The half of the plot that is not stolen from Dumas is actually really interesting, but I couldn’t forgive the cheapness of the escape from prison scene, which is taken almost directly from Dumas.

As a whole, I still love this genre, and I wanted to love The Mask of Zorro. But it can’t be rated that high when several of its main plot points are plagiarized.

Grade for The Mask of Zorro: 5

P.S. Next time I will discuss communism and poverty in The Mask of Zorro…If I feel like it, of course.

Faith Renewed!

2006-05-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

All is right with the world, for The Skeleton Key has renewed my faith that Hollywood is still churning out stinkers.

The Skeleton Key (2005) is a “thriller/horror” film starring Kate Hudson and Peter Sarsgaard, who sports a terrible southern accent here. I first saw Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, and her mix of naivete and young maturity there made her irresistible. Since then, she has done nothing but crap. How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days was moderately entertaining as far as romantic movies go, but the rest of the Hudson oeuvre has been terrible. The Skeleton Key is no different, and I wonder why the producers decided that she was the best one for the role.

The problem with The Skeleton Key is not the acting, though, which is generally fine. It’s the mix of thriller and horror that just doesn’t work here. The back of the DVD compares the film to The Sixth Sense, and I knew it was going to be bad right then. When a film has to compare itself to some other great movie, it doesn’t have its own thing going for it. What made The Sixth Sense great was not just its originality but its truly horrifying sequences. Sure, there was drama and tenderness, but it was also really freaking scary. The Skeleton Key tries to do the same thing. It builds up the scares throughout the entire movie, making us anticipate that something really terrible is going to happen. Even these anticipatory scenes aren’t scary, though; they’re merely anticipating a scare that, well, never actually comes. The ending, which tries to present itself as a “switch” or “play” in The Sixth Sense vein, doesn’t even work. Here, we do know what’s coming, and it fails to be scary.

That I just can’t handle. The “thriller/horror” dichotomy doesn’t work anymore, and when a horror film isn’t scary, I’m distraught. I love horror films, and I am more scared of them as I get older, with scenes stuck in my head for weeks and years. If a horror film can’t even do that, trash it. The Skeleton Key has absolutely nothing going for it, except a moderately interesting plot. If it can’t scare me, it isn’t worth watching, though. The very title is a metaphor for the entire movie: a weak attempt to make it seem scary without really being scary. The title has something to do with the movie, yes, but it is not the key to it by any means. The producers simply thought it sounded good. Weak, boys, weak.

What I did like about this film is its racial plot. Blacks and whites intermingle here in a way that is different from any other film I have ever seen. The entire idea is only specifically mentioned once, at the end of the movie, but it’s there underneath the entire time, at least if we read the movie backwards, knowing what will happen at the end. Some of the plot takes on strange overtones if we see the characters as their “true” racial selves. Notice I didn’t say “racist,” although there’s some of that. I’m talking about a mixing of races that is truly original. I can’t really say more on this subject without giving away the twist at the end, but this one facet of the film brings it above a zero and makes it, well, not exactly worthwhile, but not a complete waste of time, either.

Grade for The Skeleton Key: 3

A Dearth of Badness?

2006-05-04T06:54:00.000-07:00

What has happened to all of the bad movies? Since I haven’t had a chance to actually watch another movie, I have been reviewing my own reviews to review how I re-viewed several films, and I was astonished by the number of high ratings I have been giving. Heck, it’s been since November 10, 2005 that I gave a rating below a 5, and that five was given to Femme Fatale mainly because of my disappointment with Brian de Palma. What has happened to all of the bad movies? Why are my reviews consistently high?

There are several possible explanations for this phenomenon, so let me go through them:

1. I rate things too highly. There’s something to this one, I admit. If I bother to watch an entire movie or read an entire book, I generally like it, and it’s not until I have time to ponder it that I realize that it’s actually a stinker. I recall one situation when I couldn’t quite condemn Blair Witch Project 2, even after a friend’s goading. I still haven’t gotten over that one. However, I do think I’m willing to call a movie on its own stupidity, at least after some thought. I’m a teacher, after all, and even if I like a student, I know when a thesis is a piece of garbage, and I have to rate it as such. The same goes for movies, and I have given some low grades in the past.

2. Movies are getting better. Hah! I can barely write that without chuckling through my keyboard. Let’s see: R.V., Stick It, Silent Hill, Scary Movie 4, The Sentinel, The Wild, and The Benchwarmers all tell me that #2 just isn’t the case. There are still a lot of bad bad movies being made. And those are just the bad ones in the top 10 grossing movies of the week…

3. I’m more choosy. If numbers 1 and 2 aren’t the case, then this one must be true. With so little time to watch movies these days, I must be more picky in the films I choose to actually watch. My wife requested the Jennifer Garner film 13 Going on 30, and we watched fifteen minutes of it before turning it off and returning it to the library. Life (and time, these days) is just too short. I would much rather watch some great old film or an established modern classic with my precious movie time.

Don’t worry, though. I will go back to reviewing crap soon enough. My work project is about over, so I should be able to settle down into a life of active sloth by working the remote every night. And let’s see what’s on the queue: Garden State, The Legend of Drunken Master, Dr. T and the Women, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Mask of Zorro, Ride the High Country, Flightplan, Goldfinger, Layer Cake, Stalag 17, Corpse Bride, Enron, A History of Violence, Collateral, and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Life will be good.

A Bunch of Good Ones

2006-05-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

Yet another week without much movie watching. Life is sad.

On to The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s classic starring William Holden and Ernest Borgnine.

Let me be honest: I don’t like westerns. I have never enjoyed them because they are generally so much like morality tales. After watching The Wild Bunch, however, I now see that Westerns should be divided into two camps: the John Wayne camp on the one side, with its heroes and the white man’s triumph, and the Clint Eastwood camp on the other side, with its anti-heroes and struggles with honor.

I’m sure you know which side I like.

I’ll be honest again: I didn’t mean to get The Wild Bunch. I thought I was requesting The Wild One (1954) with Marlon Brando. I was upset when I got the movie but not after I began watching it. The Wild Bunch is far and away the best western I have ever seen. It’s high praise, yes, but keep in mind that I don’t really like westerns and haven’t seen very many of them. I plan on changing the now by requesting all of the Clint Eastwood westerns, the version of the western I like.

The Wild Bunch is far more than a Western. It takes place right after World War I, so there are a few cars, machine guns, even political maneuverings of the Mexican kind. Its setting sets it apart, first of all: the movie is set at the end of the West itself. There are no more Apaches to kill. Instead, there is a Mexican general name Mapache. The people who terrorize towns can no longer do so because the capitalists have the capital to fight them through any means necessary, which means hiring bounty hunters and getting people out of jail to hunt their old comrades.

Along with the end of the West comes the end of the characters’ way of life. They’re smart and they’re honorable, but they’re also endangered. One cannot be a smart, honorable anti-hero and get away with it anymore. The people in power—whether they be railroad capitalists or Mexican generals—will destroy whatever gets in their way, and that thing in their way seems to be the smart, honorable anti-hero. Forget trying to make their way in the world today, for that way of life has simply ended. What we see here is that the West is now a place of stark contrast, where the poor live in complete poverty and the rich live in absolute splendor. The two only meet when the poor serve the rich.

Besides the setting is the plot itself: aging gunmen flee their way of life in America while being pursued by an old comrade who now works for the railroad. They end up in Mexico, working for a general who is terrorizing the Mexican populations while fighting for power in his region. There is a poor resistance movement that enters the picture, as well, but we can’t expect that these aging gunmen will join them. All they want is to make money and stay alive. One doesn’t do that by joining the resistance.

So everything about this movie, including its scenery, brutish violence, and stark sexuality, set it apart from anything else I have seen before 1970. It’s an amazing story, and I can’t think of any way to make it better. Therefore, it receives my first 10 rating.

Grade for The Wild Bunch: 10

Is Kong Really King?

2006-04-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Don’t worry, everyone! I’m not going away for another few months like I did in November. Nope, I have just been a bit too busy to watch many movies. This entire past week, I have only watched one movie, and that isn’t nearly enough for my taste. If I had my way, I would watch one a night, at least. My wife would go crazy, but it would be worth it…

I haven’t watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong yet, but I decided to do some preparation by watching the original 1933 version with Fay Wray.

On the one hand, I completely understand why every director probably wants to remake this movie. It has everything! Special effects, large beasts, beautiful women, carnage, heroes, and even metacommentary on filmmaking. I want to remake this movie! It is probably the perfect movie in a way that James Cameron’s Titanic is a perfect movie. These perfect movies incorporate every possible plot into an end-product that is interesting, satisfying and appeals to everyone (as King Kong even points out through its own meta-narrative).

On the other hand, I see no reason why this film should be remade or why any self-respecting director would think that he or she could do it better. As a perfect movie, King Kong even incorporates great acting and amazing special effects. Sure, they pale in comparison to what can be done today, but man, those effects still look cool. You actually get to watch Kong crush people with his teeth and destroy overhead trains. And it looks pretty good, too. Okay, the special effects could be redone, but what does this really do for the movie?

Basically, I really wanted to see Jackson’s version, but that was before I watched the original again. Now I want to see it even more to understand why Jackson felt as if this was the movie he had to make. If it’s just an homage, there’s really no point. Just watch the original and get the same thing. If Jackson thinks the old one is flawed and needs updating, then the man needs to read Shakespeare on hubris. Lady Macbeth might have something to say about his big head, after all.

My question is this: What does Jackson do that makes a remake worth it? I haven’t seen the 1976 Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange version since I was a kid, but I don’t remember it being that spectacular. The only thing I can think is that Jackson felt that younger audiences needed to be exposed to King Kong. What young person is going to watch and enjoy a film from 1933? Probably none. I know I didn’t like it when I saw it many years ago. I thought it was hokey and slapsticky. Now I know it’s all a part of Merian C. Cooper’s genius.

After all, Kong is King, at least the original one…

Grade for King Kong (1933): 9

Coens Fail!

2006-04-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

I love the Coen brothers. They are perhaps the best team of producers/writers/directors out there. Not everything they do is gold, but it’s always quality fun. Raising Arizona, for example, is my favorite comedy of all time. I laugh just thinking about that movie.

The Coens have always seemed to defy genre. Or perhaps they blend genres together. What is Fargo, for instance? Do we call it a comedic thriller? Or a thrilling comedy? And don’t ask me about O Brother, Where Art Thou? I have no idea what to do with that gorgeous monstrosity.

On viewing Ladykillers (2004) this weekend, I have now seen every Coen brothers film, and I can now confidently claim that they’re all, well, good. Not much more to say than that. Sadly, Ladykillers is the weakest of them all.

Ladykillers is a comedy wrapped in a heist film, but of course it’s not really a heist film at all, so I don’t consider it a part of that—my favorite—subgenre. It features Tom Hanks leading a group of robbers to the vault of a casino. They pose of Renaissance-era musicians to practice in an old woman’s basement in a small Mississippi town. Sounds like Coen gold, right?

No, not really. I don’t think I laughed at all during the whole movie. We get to watch Tom Hanks stumble over very stilted dialogue (purposeful, of course), but his character is interesting in theory and boring in execution. Not that Hanks doesn’t do a good job, for he is obviously a talented actor. It just isn’t really funny; when a character has a method of speaking that is odd, and he must keep that method up throughout the whole film, it must be continually funny and also completely necessary for that character. When Nicolas Cage does it in Raising Arizona, it works because it’s actually a funny way to go through life and H.I.’s way of speaking incorporates everything about the character. Here, it’s not funny, just odd. And he has to do it throughout the whole film. Sigh.

Ladykillers, is, though, a morality tale in true Coen brothers fashion. Who wins in the end? Well, Bob Jones University for one. You know, the one thirty miles from my home town. The school that didn’t allow black people to attend until the late 1970s, that maintained its “Biblically-based” policy against interracial dating until 2000 when the scandal broke over visits by prospective Republican presidential candidates, that doesn’t allow any kissing or hand-holding or anything else on campus or off, that doesn’t allow dates off or on campus without a chaperone, that doesn’t allow women to wear pants or anyone to wear shorts on campus.

I won’t tell you how this school wins, but the irony is strewn all over the place like Linda Blair’s vomit. I snicker when I think about it, but the movie’s execution of the scenario isn’t funny. Sure, the events are interesting and ironic, but they aren’t funny like I think they’re supposed to be. In fact, I think this film would make a much better hour-long TV episode of The Twilight Zone. As a movie, I’m disappointed.

So come on, Coens, go back to giving us something really good…

Grade for The Ladykillers: 6

The Symbology of the Feminine Fatale

2006-04-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

Rating Femme Fatale and re-evaluating Brian de Palma wasn’t very fun. I like de Palma, you see, and I don’t want to downgrade his status from auteur to talented hack. But sometimes these things are necessary as directors let their talent slip.

I have never watched a Brian de Palma film looking for symbolism before, but I think I will have to from now one, because Femme Fatale included some of the most blatant symbolism I have ever seen. And frankly, I feel gypped by it.

Although we don’t quite grasp the importance of the symbolism until the end of the film, it’s all over the place. During one scene, I was really intrigued by the fishtank, which seemed to be overflowing. I couldn’t see the bottom of the tank, however, so I didn’t know if it was purposeful—if there was some kind of recirculating system or something. I kept wondering whether the fish wouldn’t just jump out. At the end, you see the same scene again, and it’s normal now: ah, I said, it was overflowing to show how different everything is in that reality. It also mirrors the bathtub, which was overflowing. And her emotions, which are... you get the point.

Then there are the posters all over Paris, which all include pictures of the main character, along with the words “déjà vu.” How bizarre, I kept thinking. I guess she’s famous (and she is, in the movie). But there’s more to it than that, which I can’t reveal without giving away a bit too much of the plot.

I love symbolism, but in movies like this it seems a bit too much. I remember my English teachers who would variously try to convince us that everything was symbolic of either God, gods, sex, or emotions, depending on which teacher I had. One teacher told us that the river in Heart of Darkness was female and the boat traveling on it was like the sperm trying to reach the grand, final place of the female to implant its imperial seed. We all tittered and made fun of her sexual preoccupations. But Joseph Conrad probably had something like that in mind, although probably not quite so blatant.

But movies aren't imagined in the same way that books are. When I read, I have to picture the characters and events in my mind, whereas in a film, the director has done that for us. Film is mimetic in a way that books are not, and the difference in symbolic effects lies therein.

Real life doesn’t include such symbolism, you see. As a reflection of an imagined reality, films fail to reproduce any semblance of reality when they include symbolism. I wish real life were that way, but it isn’t. I wish I could tell my wife were angry because she is wearing red, but she doesn’t wear red when she’s angry. I wish rivers were really metaphors for the turmoil of society, but they’re actually just rivers. Sometimes a rose is just a rose, sure, but it’s always that way in reality. In a poem, a rose can take on multiple meanings. In real life, it’s just a rose. Sure, we can imbue it with meaning by giving it to someone we love, but then it’s really just, “I love you, so I’m giving you this rose.” If we want to be poetic and score points with the women, we may make up some crap about how the opening petals represent our burgeoning love, but we all know we’re just making that up. It's really just a rose.

In a mimetic visual medium like film, symbols just don’t work as well as they do in books. I still like ‘em, though, and I’m thinking about changing my title to "symbologist." Maybe I can get my PhD in the field and go teach at Harvard…and go on adventures interpreting the sacred feminine...

The Rise and Fall of Brian de Palma

2006-04-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

I have seen most of Brian de Palma’s movies, and I tend to enjoy them all. Whether I am watching one of his mobster films, such as Scarface, The Untouchables, or Carlito’s Way, or one of his horror thrillers such as Carrie, Sisters, or Dressed to Kill, I tend to like Brian de Palma. Even his bad films are well done. Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes are terrible films, but there are still entertaining parts to them. They attempt new things and, although they may not always succeed, they’re generally interesting to watch.

In continuation of my quest to see movies by famous contemporary directors, I requested Femme Fatale (2002) from the library. It wasn’t until I actually got hold of the movie that I realized that it was that movie. You know, the one you heard about with the gratuitous sex scene between Rebecca Romjin-Stamos and some other woman. I was let down, for I had heard the film was bad, but I was also piqued that I got to watch that movie.

Like all Brian de Palma films, there are interesting things here. The sex scene, for instance, while not quite as titillating as I was hoping, err, as I had read, is still rather interesting for such an actress. The good girl Romjin-Stamos, indeed, is no good girl here. She spends the rest of the film screwing people over, both literally and figuratively. It’s weird to watch because, well, this is ex-Mrs. John Stamos! They are divorced, aren’t they? Anyway…

De Palma even includes some interesting split screen shots, as he has done in previous films, but they’re only necessary here because the shots themselves are so boring. Watching the split screen was less exciting than watching one decent single screen.

So what’s redeeming about this film? It’s certainly not the story. That part of the movie is so convoluted that I can’t begin to explain it without giving away some major part. It’s all surprise, you see, but it isn’t really, because we don’t really care as we watch it. That’s the biggest problem here. When things unfold, I sigh. I don’t scream or gasp. Nope, I sigh. Okay, I say. That kind of makes sense. De Palma doesn’t make me care about these characters enough to care what actually happens to them. And that's a sure sign of weakness. It's like when Obi-Wan's master gets killed in Episode 1 of the new Star Wars films: frankly, I just don't care. It's a strong director that makes me care about the characters, and this movie didn't feature that strength.

So have I re-evaluated de Palma? Yes, I have. I still want to see his latest project, another crime thriller, but right now, I think he’s mainly just a really good hack. Yes, his movies are all well-done, and there are good parts to each of them, but they’re not stunning. Yes, I’m including Scarface and Carrie in here, too. They’re good, sure, but they’re basically good action and horror films. And let’s face it, Scarface gets boring in some parts. (I actually think Carlito’s Way is the better gangster film.). Carrie is a great horror movie, on the level of The Shining, but isn’t its greatness in large part due to its source material? Could any other director have done these movies? Maybe not any other, but with such good source material, the movies should have been good, nonetheless.

Grade for Femme Fatale: 5

Seeking the Truth and Other Cock and Bull Stories

2006-04-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

With Ron Howard’s movie version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code coming out in a month, I want to offer some thoughts on the book.

First, everyone should read Mark Bertrand on The Da Vinci Code. I agree with most of what Mark, as well as most of what the Salon article he references, say about Dan Brown’s novel. Basically, Mark dismisses Brown as a terrible writer, while the Salon article assumes that he’s a terrible writer and then dismisses him based on the bogus history purported as truth within The Da Vinci Code. All of this stuff is great. Me, I enjoyed the first half of the book and then simply finished it because I felt like I had to. I admit that I felt some tinges of guilt as I was reading it. Even though I reacted with anger that such typical and trite stuff could be so popular, I still kind of liked it. But don’t tell anyone.

The problem is that people tend to dismiss Brown very quickly, in a huff of deserved intellectual highbrowness. Yes, he’s a hack author who basically passed off some very suspect “history” as fictionalized truth. But The Da Vinci Code is also one of the bestselling books of all time. I have gotten emails from Christian groups describing how people have "lost their faiths" over this book, and that we, as Christians, need to know how to combat it or how to minister to people who have had their faiths shaken. My own mother-in-law, who was visiting while I was reading it, wondered why I would read such a blasphemous book. I guess she thought I should have better things to do with my time. While it's easy to dismiss these kinds of responses very quickly, as well, I'm not sure that we should dismiss either of them.

Yes, it's true that Brown is not a great writer. The book is engaging in the way that a silly action movie is engaging (and full of the same number of holes, too). One page chapters are a sure sign that an author is trying to create a false sense of suspense, after all. All of that contributes to its popularity, surely. But what do we do with a book that is so popular because of its false religious/historical suppositions? How do we engage a novel and a culture that is enthralled with the novel? We can’t just dismiss it, because this means that we dismiss the public as a bunch of gullible idiots who are “going to hell” by virtue of their own gullibility. The argument would be something like, “if someone is going to lose their faith over The Da Vinci Code, that person didn’t have real faith in the first place.” There’s something to that argument, sure, but we can’t let it rest there, either. All of these religious refutations aren’t quite the right track either, because why bother reading “history” from either side, when the people involved clearly have such agendas?

Will I go see the movie? You bet. I can’t wait, in fact. I think it will be good, and that’s enough for me to go see a movie no matter how blasphemous it is. Am I a “good Christian” for doing so? Maybe not. But at least I’m “seeking the truth,” as the tag line to the film claims I should do. Hah! That gets me every time I see it. Seek the truth by, well, not believing this movie is truth.

I haven’t rated a book here before, but why not, just so I can compare the book with the movie?

Grade for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: 4 (silly but engaging)

Transcribing Mamet's Oleanna

2006-04-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

I like David Mamet. If there is one director/screenwriter who is best at the snappy dialogue, it’s Mamet. House of Games (1987) and Heist (2001) are two of my favorite examples of my favorite genre—the confidence game or the heist. I consider the two kind of interchangeable, after all, even though one is the other but the other isn’t necessarily the one. Yeah, it’s confusing. Think rectangle and square…

I taught an Introduction to Drama class for sophomore university students a few years ago, and Mamet’s Oleanna was included in our text book. Since my reasoning that semester was to only teach things I had never read, I included it on the syllabus, and my students had a hard time with it. Everything the professor did that was “wrong” was so subtle that my students couldn’t see it.

The movie version loses that subtlely. Because we generally watch movies in a single sitting, we watch the three acts of Mamet’s Oleanna (1992) one right after the other, and the professor’s “badness” really shines through. Even though we may not pay attention to what he does in the first act, when the student brings it up in the second, it’s blatant that, yes, he committed those wrong actions.

Most of you are lost, I know. This film is not well-known, and for good reason, I think. Mamet was attempting something different here: to film a play as a movie. A movie with only two speaking characters. And no music. And have the actors act like they were acting in a play.

But a play is not the same medium as a movie, and simply changing a few camera angles doesn’t make for a good movie. It’s tedious and, well, boring. The dialogue is typical Mamet fare, but we’re forced to listen to a professor who speaks like your boring college English professor; you know, the one who used all of those big words without explaining them, the one whose convoluted sentences required diagramming to understand them, the one who could never get to a point because he said he wasn’t trying to preach but to make you think. Damn that guy, right?

Damn straight. And here he is again. In the play, I respond to it because I can slow down and read it. In his movie incarnation, the professor becomes sometimes incomprehensible, and his incomprehensibility is purposeful, I think, to demonstrate the student’s perceptions of him.

But wait, did you say there were only two speaking characters? Yep, a teacher and a student. It’s weird. Let’s just say that the teacher tries to “help” the student and the student then vies for power. The three acts are basically the three versions of who holds power in the student/teacher relationship. That part is really compelling, too.

The bad part is that the girl is left holding the cards at the end. Sure, the teacher can overpower her, but she wins in the end. She claims she just wants understanding, but that’s what he wanted, too, right? It’s all a vie for power between groups who have it and groups who do not.

Wow. This blog entry has failed, I know. It failed because I’m rambling, but also because I’m rambling about a provocative movie that most of you have not seen. Where I want to go off discussing the film, I’m forced to step back and try to explain what happens in it, and that just ruins it.

Grade for Oleanna: 5

Naturally Bad Santa Kills Thirty in the Bad Lands

2006-04-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

Terrence Malick doesn’t make movies very often, and until 1998’s The Thin Red Line, he had not made one since the 1970s. No wonder that I didn’t really know who was until then. He now has four movies to his credit: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005).

The Thin Red Line was impressive: its scale was remarkable, the characters were interesting and engaging, and the photography was vivid and teeming with life. The only problem was that those things don’t necessarily make for a good movie. I have to actually enjoy movies to call them good, and The Thin Red Line wasn’t enjoyable. Sure, its technical work was some of the best I had ever seen, but the movie was just a bit too sprawling—it needed a lot of editing to make it into a good, coherent film.

So I had never really sought out Malick’s other films until I noticed Badlands in the library. Knowing that my wife was going out with her cousins on Friday night, I grabbed it. For those of you who know my wife, you know that it’s better to keep these movies from her. Trust me.

Now I am a Malick fan. This one had all of the beautiful technical details of The Thin Red Line without the lack of editing. It included all of the beautiful scenery and photography, but it wasn’t overdone like in his newer film. Here, it’s all set to serve the story of these two lovers, played wonderfully by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Those two actors are so good that they made me believe that these characters would actually do the terrible and crazy things that they do in the film. Few actors could have done that.

Badlands made me reassess Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), too. Notice that in my review of Stone’s films above, I didn’t mention Natural Born Killers as one of his masterpieces, and that fact is that Killers suffers from its overdone style. While it attempts something interesting, the style of the film eventually overpowers its own story and leaves the movie and its viewers a bit, well, empty. I’m sure its defenders would say that this is the point, but all stone achieves is a satire on our fascination with criminals, and I don’t see the point of that when Malick had already done it in Badlands.

These two films—Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994)—share a similar plot but with different ends. Natural Born Killers is there to glorify and make us love the characters while undermining their glory at every turn. In other words, its purpose is to make us question our own love of violence. And it does it in a sick and playful way that I think works against its own theory. Badlands, however, isn’t content to make fun of its characters. Where Natural Born Killers’s psychology within the film remains on the level of “violence is cool, so it’s cool to be a killer,” Badlands takes us inside its characters and explains how they could actually do the things they do. Some things are left up to mystery, but Martin Sheen does what he has to, not what he wants to. Woody Harrelson is humorous as a killer, while Sheen is tortured.

It's a big difference, one that makes Badlands a remarkable movie.

Grade for Badlands: 9

Bad Santa, Good Movie

2006-03-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is hilarious. I don’t think I have laughed so hard at a film since the third time I watched Raising Arizona, and it’s no coincidence that the Coen brothers produced this movie.

I want to stop right there, but I can’t. Let me tell you two things: first, I used to teach at Prairie View A&M University, and my students there loved this movie and couldn’t believe that I had never heard of it. Second, my wife tells me that I make inappropriate jokes and laugh at inappropriate things.

Those two facts probably tell you why I found Bad Santa so funny. First, I didn’t know anything about the film, and second, I share the inappropriate humor of eighteen-year-old freshmen.

Billy Bob Thornton is the bad Santa, and he is such an amazing actor that his comedy appears completely believable. Whereas another actor may have hammed this film up, Thornton plays it like he is a character from Monster’s Ball. So I watch him curse at eight-year-olds and stumble around drunk staring at women's behinds, and I crack up. It’s so preposterous, yet so believable coming from Thornton. I must have laughed a million times just hearing Thornton say “What the f*** do you want?” or some variation to a five-year-old. It’s just hilarious. I laugh just thinking about it.

But that’s where this movie’s goodness ends and its badness begins. The other actors are terrible: Bernie Mac, who I generally like, has a bit part, and he serves no purpose in the film. I think he's only there becuase he's cool. John Ritter’s role is more important and funnier, but he only appears in half of the film (I think he died during the filming, God rest his soul). The actor who played the elf is actually pretty good, but his character’s actions are completely unbelievable, which brings me to the plot of Bad Santa.

The plot is, well, stupid. Every part of it makes no sense: a drunk bum who can crack uncrackable safes? A Santa and elf who have robbed stores for seven years in a row? Has no one caught on to their scheme? The ending is completely preposterous, as well. Such things wouldn’t happen.

The bottom line, I guess, is that Bad Santa is not a good movie. It’s funny, sure. Man, is it funny. (“What the f*** happened to you?” Hah!) But it’s only funny if you like inappropriate humor incorporating vulgarity, sex, and little kids, not particularly in that order, thank goodness. And I guess I enjoy those things…

Grade for Bad Santa: 6

From Nixon to the Fourth of July

2006-03-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

From Nixon to the Fourth of July

If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I have been trying to go through the back-catalogue of important contemporary filmmakers, and today I will briefly discuss Oliver Stone. His oeuvre is impressive: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Talk Radio, JFK, The Doors, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, Comandante, Alexander, and the much anticipated first non-documentary film about 9/11, World Trade Center.

He has made some great films—Platoon, JFK, and Wall Street—but he has also made some real shite—U-Turn, Alexander. This weekend I watched two of his films that I had never seen before: Born on the Fourth of July and Nixon. And they’re both good. It may be strange to compare these two films or to review them together, but they share a common theme that runs through most of Stone’s movies: communism is good and government conspiracies abound. Yes, they really are the same theme, for most of the government conspiracies involve communism in some form, especially Cuba. JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Nixon all involve Cuban/American conspiracies, although the idea is just hinted at in Born on the Fourth of July.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Stone’s documentary Comandante is actually a glowing portrait of Fidel Castro. Part of Stone’s film-making mission is to make American government look bad (especially Republicans) and to make Cuba look good. Nevermind that he never actually takes us to Cuba: the point is that we know its there and our government has used it in a myriad of ways, from patsys to excuses for war.

I’m not criticizing Stone for making movies with disagreeable politics. I’m no neo-con myself, and I sympathize with nearly all of Stone’s sentiments (stopping way short of praising Castro, of course). But political statements and movies don’t always mesh. That’s the problem with Born on the Fourth of July, which was a big deal when it came out. The simple fact is that it’s not that great of a movie (I hope you're getting used to me stating my opinions as facts). It’s well-done, but it’s too heavy-handed. The first half is really good, but then the movie descends into a simple argument against the Vietnam War. If it had remained a movie about a vet’s ability to cope with the war, I would have been much more receptive. Making the main character into a hero makes it much too simple.

Even though Nixon is the lesser-known film, it’s the better of the two. Stone isn’t content to bash Nixon. He gives him his due, I think, and he uses the Nixon tapes as a way to flesh out what happened with Watergate. Some of it is conjecture, sure, but conjecture can make a good movie—just see JFK. Nixon is a complicated figure whose childhood and family relationships all play a role in his descent. Stone doesn’t merely argue that Nixon got a bad rap, either. The film indicates that Presidents or all people in positions of power get embroiled in intriguing situations that we, the public, would probably be better off not knowing about. And that kind of message makes for a decent movie. The editing gets confusing and annoying at times, and we can see the style of Natural Born Killers coming through, which brings the film down. Overall, though, this is the better movie.

Grade for Born on the Fourth of July: 7
Grade for Nixon: 7.5
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2006-03-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

Dreams of 3 Women

No, I’m not talking about orgies here, although that theme recurs throughout Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). Like Martin Scorsese, Altman is one of the most acclaimed (and prolific) directors who has nevertheless never won a best director Academy Award. Probably rightly so, too. Don't misunderstand me: I like Altman’s films. Short Cuts and The Player are two of my favorites, and Gosford Park was an amazingly clever reinvention of the mystery.

But his films just aren’t best picture material, are they? They’re all really good—that’s why the Academy awarded him the lifetime achievement award this year—but they’re all flawed. It’s as if someone keeps interfering with his films, inserting annoying little traits or characters. Sometimes that overlapping dialogue trick gets confusing or simply grating, and the camera just doesn’t stop moving, zooming in at what seems like inopportune times. Sure, it’s neat, but it’s not best picture stuff.

3 Women is different from anything else he has done. For the first half, I was completely engrossed: the characters were interesting and the plot seemed completely fleshed out. On second thought, the characters were one-sided, but it was completely appropriate, considering the turn-around halfway through the film. The characters had to be one-sided to make the twist work. Everything changes at this point, and the characters begin to morph into one another. I won’t give anything away, but it gets really interesting and quite confusing. The ending seemed like a let-down, but on second thought, it wasn’t. I can’t say what happens, but it gets weird. What we thought isn’t the truth, and all of it becomes very dream-like. It isn’t until the end that we really understand who the three women even are, but even then, we can't be sure that it's the final word.

The film’s confusion and play on reality makes it a precursor to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which appears ten years later, or even more so to his Mulholland Drive. It’s interesting that Altman made a film like this at all, for it’s a complete departure from any other of his films, which, although perhaps not traditional, at least have somewhat coherent plots. 3 Women kept me guessing during its second half, and I only partially feel as if everything was resolved. In that way, it may be better than a Lynch film where nothing is resolved.

Overall, this film is worth watching. I had never heard of it before, but I think that’s because of its complexity and subtlety on the one hand and its competing simplicity of character and overt metaphors on the other. It may not be a M*A*S*H or Nashville, but it's still good.

Grade for 3 Women: 7

2006-03-23T14:28:00.000-08:00

We Three Kings

I know I shouldn’t start a blog this way (or the way I just did), but I have been trying to figure out what to say about David Russell’s Three Kings (1999). I saw the movie when it came out, and I remember liking it back then, but it takes on an eerie prescience now that there is another “gulf war” and another "invasion" of Iraq.

The soldiers keep wondering what they’re doing in Iraq, but they definitely support their own mission to free Kuwait. It’s a worthy goal, perhaps. But the people of Iraq want the Americans to finish the job and support their own rebellion against Saddam. Bush told them to rise up against him, but then he left and wouldn’t pursue the dictator. Now, seven years after the movie, American soldiers are attempting to do what everyone felt like they should have done back then: remove Saddam.

But what has happened in the meantime? If we take this movie as the truth (which it isn’t), then the people of Iraq wanted Saddam gone. Everyone except the people in power wanted Saddam gone, and many of the soldiers didn’t want to be in his army, anyway. But now that the US has actually removed Saddam, it seems that everyone has turned against the Americans. They thought we (at the peril of including everyone in the US military) were evil then because we abandoned them, and they think we’re evil now because we didn’t. Perhaps it’s really all because we abandoned them? What has happened to make us invade NOW rather than twelve years earlier?

The only answer is 9/11.

But that’s an incomplete answer, isn’t it? A bit of a ruse, perhaps? Saddam was NOT connected to 9/11 no matter what percentage of the population thinks he was. So the question becomes unanswerable—there is no reason to invade now rather than back then, and the soldiers still don’t know what they’re doing there. Whereas they were freeing Kuwait back then, they think they’re freeing Iraq now. The difference is that Iraq doesn’t seem to want to be freed.

Yes, I have descended into a diatribe, although I didn’t want to. But I guess that’s the power of a movie like Three Kings. I intended to write about how the style of the film competed with it’s serious and often gut-wrenching story, but all of that is overshadowed by the very plot of a war in Iraq. Is it even possible to talk about a movie about the 1991 Gulf War without discussing the present war? I guess it is, but I can’t seem to do it.

Maybe next time I will tell you why Three Kings doesn’t deserve an A. Or maybe I will continue with why this film depresses me…

Grade for Three Kings: 8

2006-03-22T07:25:00.000-08:00

Is There Really an Upside to Anger?

I have actually been trying to post, but I think Blogger has been having some problems. Sorry about that. Now on to my review:

It’s not that Upside to Anger (2005) is a bad movie, for it is actually quite good if you consider all of the criteria for a good movie: it features good acting, pretty good dialogue, and a somewhat interesting storyline. It’s just that it’s rather bland.

Yes, that description is bland, but I really don’t know how else to describe it. It should be a good movie, but nothing about it gripped me. It reminded me of one of the Weitz brothers movies (About a Boy, In Good Company), but it wasn’t witty enough to be one of theirs, and it was a bit too implausible, too. Without the wit or realism, where is a comedic drama?

Nowhere, that’s where, and that’s why I have trouble recommending this film. My wife had two responses to it. Afterwards, she said that it was a “good movie.” But during, when the young daughter propositions her “boyfriend” with sex in her bedroom, my wife declared that our own daughter was not allowed to have boys in her room. And that sums the movie up for me. No, it’s not that provocative. No, it didn’t make me ponder any mysteries except some contingencies about strict parenting. In fact, the few things it tried to make me ponder were simply ridiculous.

That same young daughter, for example, enters as the narrator during a few parts of the film, and that’s where the title comes. She says that there is an upside to anger at the beginning, and then at the end she reveals what that upside is, and I just don’t buy it. She says that “the upside to anger is the people who come out of it.” The reason I don’t buy this is I have no idea what it means.

It could mean that people change because of their anger and they’re better people at the tail end. That’s the more plausible explanation. But the mother, the angry one, becomes a bitter wreck and everyone hates her, including all four of her daughters. They claim that she used to be the sweetest, nicest, most loving person on the planet, but I couldn’t help muttering "bitch" throughout the movie, which kept earning askew glances from the wife. So there’s no upside to anger there, at least from what I can see. It could be that she reverts to her sweet self after the film’s resolution, but we don’t get to see that, so I can’t assume it. All we see are the three years when she's just plain mean.

The other meaning to the upside to anger as the people who come out of it is that there is a new person in their lives in the form of the drunk and stoned Kevin Costner. Sure, he’s a nice guy, and everyone loves Fun Bobby, or Fun Costny, but is that really the upside to anger: that it attracts drunken bums? Maybe, but that's doesn't really seem like too much of an upside to me.

I guess I just don’t get it.

Grade for The Upside to Anger: 6

2006-03-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

To Eternity and Beyond!

In lieu of actually reading James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, my book club decided we should just watch Fred Zimmeman’s 1952 film version starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Deborah Kerr. After watching the movie, I wish I had just read the book.

I know, I know. It’s one of the “singular cinematic experience, one of the landmarks of American film,” “the most daring movie of 1953,” “an acting bonanza,” and I agree that it is all of those things. The cast and their acting was incredible, I admit. Even though I had never heard of Montgomery Clift, he prefigures James Dean, especially the Dean of Giant. And Burt Lancaster, whom I had seen before but never really paid attention to, was amazing as the duty-torn sergeant.

The females, however, were almost negligible, and not really because of their acting. The romances just weren’t developed. Parts were good, such as the first interaction between Kerr and Holmes in their bedroom discussing his infidelity. But the affairs were ridiculous. They’re scandalous, yes, but in a very veiled way. For instance, when Lancaster and Kerr first kiss, the screen fades to black, and I think, whoa! What happens in that blackness? I assume they must have had sex. But then when they meet again, it doesn’t seem that they have because she mentions how his kiss is so great. That second meeting, by the way, is the famous romp in the sand, and it was quite a disappointment. It’s over before you know it.

The entire romance portion of the film seems tacked on, too. It just isn’t necessary to the story, which is really about three soldiers who can’t get attached to women. One of my book group said that yes, the romances were tacked on. But she was glad they were, because they made the movie more palatable for women. But the romances seem to be written by guys: the females are either damaged or completely needy, and the men feel as if they would be better off without them. The entire movie seems to be a romantic male fantasy.

I mean "romantic" as in the sense of freedom, which seems to be what the army represents. Sure, it’s its own repressive society, but it’s also a version of male freedom from responsibility, at least home responsibility or feminine responsibility.

What I appreciate about the movie is its unconventional nature. For 1953, this film was probably a breakthrough: adulterous love affairs, living with unmarried women, the debauched life of soldiers, the corruption of the army, and the conflicts within soldiers toward their own sense of duty. All of that’s really great, and I know it.

The problem is that I’m watching this movie in 2006, and it doesn’t seem that interesting. Sure it’s not a one-dimensional John Wayne film, but it’s also weak compared to Platoon. Still, I have to give it its due.

Grade for From Here to Eternity: 8.

2006-03-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

The Oscars Reloaded

What a strange Oscars night it was, too. I didn’t make it through the same thing, which I may have to complain about later, but I got to see what I think was the strangest Oscar moment ever. No, I’m not talking about Ben Stiller’s funny but drawn out “green screen.” No, I’m not talking about the running theme of go to the movies—it’s better on the big screen! I’m talking, of course, about the Three 6 Mafia winning the Oscar. Sure, Eminem won it a few years ago for “Lose Yourself,” but he didn’t show up to perform it or to accept the award. Eminem’s a bit different, anyway. It’s like Ludicris introducing Three 6 Mafia. They both clean up nicely, and, heck, they can both almost act, graduates obviously from the David-Duchovny-school of non-acting.
The whole music award was insane, anyway. First, there’s Dolly Parton with an uninspired song, and she’s the only person on stage! Then comes “In the Deep” from "Crash," and it’s one of the most cluttered stage performances I have ever seen. I guess the song is so boring they had to give the audience something to look at. It’s a good song, sure, but the focus was on the background, not on the singer or the song. Then came Three 6 Mafia and they had a similar sort of “from the movie” montage during their performance. And I couldn’t understand a word of it, except for the amazingly catchy chorus, which I have been singing ever since. Yeah, it’s a good rap song. Yeah, the hook is good. Yeah, it probably fits well into the movie.
But it’s definitely a departure from what generally wins Oscars.
Don’t get me wrong. While I’m not the biggest fan of rap music, I do like some of it. Some of my best friends are rappers—no, wait, that’s my excuse for something else. Yes, I do feel like a character from the movie “Crash” right now. Anyway, it was weird to see the performance and definitely weird to watch the acceptance, which, as Jon Stewart said, was the most inspired acceptance he had ever seen. Man, was it ever.

I plan on continuing this, by the way. Next time, expect to hear about the stagy-ness of the Oscars.

2005-11-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

Return of Dawn of the Dead

I want to watch the new Dawn of the Dead again, which says something about my movie-watching habits. I watch Paris, Texas once, and I think I know everything about it. With Dawn of the Dead, I feel as if I have only scratched the surface, so I need to watch it again. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but sometimes pop culture holds some hidden gems, and this one is definitely pop culture: special effects, terrible acting, and all-around silliness. I'm not sure if it holds any hidden gems, but, boy, is it fun.

In case you don't know (or more appropriately, live with a spouse that doesn’t let you watch horror films), Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) is a remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Like many people I know, my spouse doesn’t let me watch horror movies (I have to watch them after she goes to bed), and my libraries don’t have the original version, so I haven’t seen Romero’s original in many years. From what I remember, though, it was very different from this remake, in ways that make it sometimes less interesting.

Snyder’s version has some great points. In fact, I think it’s one of the better horror films to come out recently. It begins with some scenes that continually caught me off guard, even though we all know what is eventually going to happen. It open as a nurse sees some bizarre stuff in her night shift, but nothing is so remarkable that it makes much of an impression on her. One memorable part occurs as the nurse is leaving: she sees some paramedics bring in a badly wounded guy on a gurney, and as she walks out of the hospital, she sees the ambulance there with two legs sticking out of the back. She gets startled and goes over to it, thinking that something has happened to the driver, which is the same thing we are thinking, but it’s just the paramedic resting. And that’s genius, yes it is. That’s the way horror movies are supposed to work. Snyder knows that we know what is going to happen—the world is going to be taken over by zombies—so he has to make the lead-in play on that knowledge. I kept expecting a zombie to appear everywhere during the first fifteen minutes, whether at her car window, in the morgue, in the ambulance, or on her doorstep. And the movie knows this! So it keeps messing with me, teasing me, letting me into this person’s normal life, until it all goes to hell in a way I wasn't expecting.

And to hell it goes pretty quickly. We don’t just see one zombie here—no way, there are immediately hundreds of them everywhere, killing everything, and they cause all kinds of chaos. With zombies running everything, there is of course no power, no water, no TV, no nothing. Eventually, this group of survivors is left with nothing, which would have made this an appropriate remake for 1999-2000. The zombies here are not the caricatures of old, either. Sure, some of them are funny looking, but they’re fast, too, more like in 28 Days Later (2003) than in Night of the Living Dead (1968). When they see people they want to eat, they immediately go after them en masse.

So Snyder’s version is smart, but really only a technical or plot level. That’s where this one fails the original. If I remember it correctly, the original had more about consumerism. Here, it seems to be a coincidence that the survivors hold up in a shopping mall, whereas in the original it was a comment on our consumer society. We get one comment from Ving Rhames’s character that the zombies go to the mall perhaps out of habit or instinct, but this idea is never developed. Yeah, it’s a good hideout, but the story never reaches anything beyond the plot level, or even nearing the level of allegory. The way the people attempt to escape to a create a new life could be allegorical, but the movie doens't explore this idea--it's ripe for it, but it doesn't let us go there. Zombies are not a metaphor here, not like in previous zombie films (fear of nuclear holocaust, fear of technology, rage); they’re just zombies, and you have to get away from them or they will eat you.

Which makes for a decent horror film, but I don’t think it moves much beyond that. That movement beyond is what I generally appreciate about horror movies, and this one just doesn't deliver it. Still, it’s a fun ride.

Grade for Dawn of the Dead: 6

2005-11-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

I didn’t know there was a Paris, Texas

I’ll be honest here. Wim Wenders is one of those directors I have always heard about and never seen. Nope, I have never seen Wings of Desire (1987) or Until the End of the World (1991). The guy has around thirty movies to his directing credit, and I have never seen a one of them. I was interested, sure, but his movies always sounded like they would be boring, and I tend to veer away from those really intelligent movies.

Then my wife starts looking for movies about Texas—we live in Houston, after all—and she stumbles across this film called Paris, Texas (1984) that she has never heard of. So of course she requests it from the library, along with View from the Top (2003) and The Trouble with Angels. I figured they were all of the same caliber—terrible, that is.

As it starts, I see that it’s directed by Wim Wenders, and now I’m intrigued, because I’m supposed to know this guy, being a film lover and all.

Paris, Texas chronicles the story of Harry Dean Stanton’s character, and the film opens with a shot of him wandering through the West Texas desert wearing a ragged suit. He manages to make it to an apparently empty bar in the middle of the desert. He’s parched, so he goes to the refrigerator but finds only beer, so he grabs a cube of ice, begins to suck on it, and then collapses. There was some guy sitting there all along, and the film cuts with the guy murmuring, “What the hell?”

It’s quite beautiful, actually. I think it’s one of the best scenes in the entire film, and that’s saying a lot, for there are a lot of good scenes here. We don’t know anything about the guy, and my biggest complaint is about how it finally reveals the back-story. This same scene is also really interesting and compelling, however. It’s a bit pretentious and long-winded, but the works in a remarkable way.

So I’m having trouble saying anything coherent about Paris, Texas, and think this has to do with both the meandering plot and the way I will be forced to give everything away simply through the process of describing it. Let me not do this by giving you several reasons to see this movie:
· Parts of it take place in Houston.
· It was made three years before Blue Velvet (1987), and it traces a lot of same ground, except in Texas, which makes it more interesting.
· It will make you appreciate what you have—families are fragile and precious, after all. If there’s one thing that this movie does well, it’s showing us how all of our positions are relative and how those things shift so easily.
· It’s named after a place that you never actually see, except in a photograph—now that’s interesting.

Harry Dean Stanton is an Everyman who wants to make everything right after he screwed everything up. It’s sad, yes, but it’s interesting to see this child-like character attempt to make up for his own childishness. Watching him grow throughout the movie isn’t as interesting as it could have been, but Paris, Texas still does it pretty well.

So the bottom line is that when I have to deal with an intelligent movie, I’m without words. I think my strength is drawing out pop culture drivel. And with that in mind, I will review the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) next time. Now there’s a movie with some undiscovered layers! When it comes to Paris, Texas, it seems like it’s all rather obvious. It’s too smart to draw anything out because Wenders meant for all of it to be there anyway. Which sounds as if I’m saying that these other films don’t know what they’re doing, which isn’t quite the case.

Maybe I will explain all of that later…

As a sidenote, I think I am going to start watching movies about Texas and especially about Houston. I would love to get recommendations from readers—the two or three of you who keep coming back….

Grade for Paris, Texas: 8

2005-11-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

It Sure Ain’t the Top

For a while there, I was stuck on trying to figure out whether movies were conservative or liberal, and my aggregate response should have been obvious: we’re talking about Hollywood, not the New Republic, so of course films tend to be conservative. Yet I have been determined to find a conservative film. I know they exist, in early films at least, but I just want to know if there are any conservative filmmakers out there.

I think I may have found one. His name is Bruno Barreto and he’s Brazilian. I know none of you have heard of him, which probably has something to do with the fact that his average rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 49%. Yeah, pretty much his film seem to suck, and View from the Top (2003) is no different.

Yep, I actually watched this piece of crap. I could blame my wife—she’s the one who picked it—but I still sat through it. It’s not as bad as Bridget Jones 2, but it never made me laugh and a few scenes made me cringe. I know I tend to say this a lot, but what made Gwyneth Paltrow make this movie? She’s an Oscar-winning actress for crying out loud! Why, Gwyneth, why?

But let’s not go on about how bad this movie is, or why Paltrow decided to star in a film with Christina Applegate. Let’s move on to how this film is conservative.

The plot is typical, although the setting isn’t. A country girl—Paltrow—wants to break away from her small-town heritage and make something of her life. Her destiny seems to be to marry someone who will more than likely beat her, and to work at Big Lots for the rest of her life, so she decides to go for the glamorous job of stewardess. She gets a job at a small company and eventually proves herself and moves onto a big company. She finally makes it! But there’s a catch. In order to strike it big-time (which means flying international from New York to Paris), she has to leave her boyfriend, who is sticking around Cleveland. Well, guess what?

--I’m going to spoil the movie now, but I don’t feel bad because I don’t want any of you to actually watch this piece of drivel.—

She does it! She leaves her boyfriend behind and becomes a super-successful stewardess! Yep, she makes all feminists proud and decides that she doesn’t need a man to be happy! She strikes one for team Steinam!

She isn’t happy, of course, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she has broken away from our patriarchal strictures and made something of herself that is independent of man.

But then she goes back to him! She leaves it all behind and decides that being with him is much more important than her job. In the final scene, she goes crawling back, and he says (the words are not exact quotes here), “So you’ll stay here in Cleveland?” Yep. “And you’ll be happy?” Yep. She gives it all up, because the women should stay where their men are. That’s right. Women have to give it all up for the men they love.

At this point, I was really happy. Here was the conservative film I had been waiting for. Never mind that not even Mike Myers could make this movie funny. Never mind that Paltrow sports a rural accent and what seems to be a mullet through most of the movie. Here was my conservative film!

But then there was one more scene, which came on briefly as the closing music started. It showed an airplane flying, and a somewhat familiar voice was speaking to the passengers. Then it shows us Paltrow in the pilot seat! Yep, she’s now flying internationally from Cleveland as the pilot!

Damn, I thought. Foiled again.

As somewhat of a sidenote, the movie equates mullets and Southern accents with unsophisticatedness. By the end of film, Paltrow has lost her accent. Not uncoincidentally, she has also become a pilot.

Anyway, the movie turns out to be less conservative than I thought. Even thought the pilot scene seems to be an afterthought, it lessens the conservatism without particularly ruining it. Paltrow still stayed with her boyfriend, after all. She had to give it all up and start anew because that’s what a good girl does for her man. Sure, she takes over the traditional male role as pilot, but it was staying with her man that forced her to have to do that. And how many years did she have to rot in Cleveland to get there?

Overall, this film stinks, and I don’t want any of you to watch it.
Take my word for it, please.

By the way, I will be reviewing a Wim Wenders film next. So all of you who have been waiting to see me tackle something more intellectual, this will be your chance…

Grade for View from the Top: 1

2005-11-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

More Woebegone Films from Kevin Smith

I can’t tell what Kevin Smith is doing. I mean, why would someone who obviously has oodles of talent make schlock like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? It could have been good, though. After all, it chronicles the two Quick Stop hangouts that have been ubiquitous since Clerks, who, incidentally, made some of the funniest scenes in that early film. I’m sure they will even be a major part of Smith’s new one, The Passion of the Clerks, which is set to come out this year.

Basically, the Bluntman and Chronic strip has been sold to Miramax, and Jay and Silent Bob have to stop it. Why? Because people are using this newfangled thing called the In-ter-net to comment on how stupid the characters are. So they have to travel from New Jersey (bold move, Smith!) to Hollywood, falling in love and causing mischief along the way. It’s a plot as preposterous as Bluntman and Chronic itself. In fact, it all seems to be a ruse to show Hollywood that it “had it coming,” as the tagline suggests, because there are intermittent spurts of movie parody that verge on becoming no different from Scary Movie or any other parody of film. These spots are probably the weakest in the film, too, offering absolutely nothing new.

The whole thing makes me question why Kevin Smith made this piece of drivel. The only redeeming feature is the charisma of Kevin Smith himself, aka Silent Bob. His little quirks are quite endearing, and he reminds me more and more of one of my friends who recently moved to Austin. Just some of Smith’s gestures make him charming, smart, and humourous, too. These really are funny guys, but a bunch of profanity does not make for a good movie. Yes, I think the number of times the f-word is used is ridiculous. Come on, Smith, South Park did it first, so there’s no use in trying to outdo the amount of profanity you can fit into 90 minutes. At the end, one of the characters says that Hollywood turned Bluntman and Chronic into one big gay joke, and heck, that’s all this movie is, too!

Which screams self-referentiality! Jay and Silent Bob makes the most references to itself as a movie than any other film I have seen. It doesn’t do it subtly, either. In case you don’t catch some of the references, characters actually look at the camera to remind you that you’re watching them in a movie. It’s not like The Simpsons, where a character makes a statement, “There’s never anything good on Fox,” and then they move on. Here, they make that kind of statement, pause, and glare at the camera, before moving on to say whatever it is they’re getting at (which is generally nothing, by the way). But even the plot appears self-referential, too. People talk about how dumb Jay and Silent Bob are? No, when would people ever do that? Should I expect these two guys to show up at my door and kick my ass, like they do in the movie?

If this film references itself so many times, does that mean that Kevin Smith made the film he meant to make? I sure hope not. Yes, there are really funny parts, but they’re also very stupid. It’s as if Kevin Smith wanted to make his own Dumb and Dumberer. I hear that he made the movie on $20 million, which means that all of the famous actors basically volunteered to be in the movie. Are they happy with the product? Was Kevin Smith happy with the product?

After watching Clerks for the first time (see one of my previous blogs), I was ready to give Kevin Smith his due. But now, I’m not so sure. And Jersey Girl is sitting on my counter just waiting to go in the machine…

Grade for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: 4

2005-11-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

Feel the Rays

Yes, Jamie Foxx was wonderful portraying Ray Charles, and he probably deserved the Oscar for it. Foxx was able to somehow embody Ray Charles; at various moments, I thought I was actually watching Ray Charles on screen, not watching Foxx’s portrayal of him. It was quite weird and amazing at the same time.

Besides Foxx’s great acting, however, Ray didn’t have much to offer. And it made me think about why I didn’t like it. In the same way that Runaway Jury made me question why I don’t like crime/jury dramas, Ray made me realize that I generally don’t like biopics. I always thought it was partially because I don’t like the way they age characters in movies, and I still can’t stand that. Watch A Beautiful Mind, and you will see what I mean. The aged Russell Crowe just looks silly, and nevermind great young actors trying to act old. It never works. But Ray didn’t really age through the movie. They gave him a little bit of gray hair at the end, but they didn’t overdo it. I guess that’s due partly to the fact that the main action of the film ends by 1970. So I can’t really blame my dislike of the film on the “aging.”

I think it’s just something about the biopic that doesn’t make for a great movie. They’re always flawed. Of course I’m speaking generally here, that the movies are bad, when really, a lot of respectable people love these films, so maybe I’m just talking about my own personal taste. But, to my own personal taste, these films are well, never all that great.

People are fascinating, yes, and the hour long biography on A&E can be quite engrossing. But a movie is a different animal. We need one central plot that can be wrapped up in two hours or so, and people’s lives can’t generally be reduced to that. Ray did a better job than most, I admit. It managed to tie everything together with his flashbacks. I was glad it didn’t just start with him as a kid because the flashbacks helped us see how the past fit into his present. But consider all of the plots here: the death of Ray’s brother, his marriage to what seemed like an angel, his old manager, his new manager, drugs, rehab, and the list goes on. Too many plots? Maybe not, because the film did a good job of making everything tie into Ray’s brother’s death.

But too many things were left unfinished. What about his marriage? Did it become a real marriage? Or what about his son? What happened to him? Did ever become a real father? What about his new manager? Was he actually stealing from him? What about any of the other characters we were introduced to throughout the film? If they’re not with Ray, they’re simply offscreen, forgotten, dismissed. But what about his mistresses? Did he continue to have them? Did he adopt his other son?

Yes, I’m being hard on it, I know. Overall, it’s a decent film, and it was enjoyable to watch. The drug and rehab scenes were way too overdone and seemed to be taken directly from Requiem for a Dream, but the movie was beautiful otherwise. So this film has flaws, but it’s still worth watching. Is it best picture quality? No, so I’m glad it didn’t win. But it’s still good.

Grade for Ray: 6

2005-10-31T12:48:00.000-08:00

The Allegory of Clothes

(Please take this with a grain of salt…)

I slacked off this week because I have had some difficult movies to deal with: Hotel Rwanda, Ray, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Hitch, and Contantine, to be exact. How does one write about such powerful movies?

Through allegory, of course.

I will focus on Hotel Rwanda for right now and leave the other movies for later.

Kevin Dettmar has a great essay about Clueless and Wayne’s World that argues that these movies are allegories of music. How do we know whether a person is “good” or “bad?” By the music that is played when they enter. Good music, good person. Sorry music, sorry person. It makes sense.

And then there is the allegory of clothes. The title of Thomas Carlyle’s 1833 work Sartor Resartus means the “clothier reclothed” or “tailor retailored,” and it establishes the allegory of clothes. It tells the story of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, whose name translates to “god-born devil’s dung,” who describes how the world (especially Britain) is ready for a new set of clothes. Clothes represent revolution of the French kind, and Carlyle establishes that the same should go in Britain. He is tired of philosophy and wants people to act, almost inciting revolution himself: “Thou foolish Teufelsdröckh! […] Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand this much: The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?”

Hotel Rwanda, too, is an allegory or clothes, although not quite the same way. Here, the main character, Paul, is immaculately dressed. It does two things: it shows how much he has bought into the West’s business ideals, and it paints him as very different from everyone else. While the rest of the people are dressed very modestly, if not poorly, Paul always wears a suit. By the end of the movie, however, he is unshaven and barley able to put on a shirt. It’s a neat transformation, and the movie charts the progress of the country through Paul’s own clothing degeneration. It’s an allegory of clothes. By the end, he has no longer bought into the West’s ideals. He no longer has to look his best, because, well, he’s just trying to stay alive.

The most powerful moment, besides all of the killing, is when Paul has to change his clothes because they are bloody. He puts on a shirt and begins tying a tie, but he does it incorrectly. So he breaks down. It’s as if the clothes just don’t work anymore, just like the West. Or they just aren’t worth it, just like the West. Or they’re too difficult to maintain, just like the West.

Do the business models of the West translate to Africa? Not when the country’s in chaos, they don’t. Of course it’s much more than that, but Hotel Rwanda is also an allegory of clothes.

Rating for Hotel Rwanda: 8

2005-10-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

These Are Real Women

I generally don’t enjoy films that are merely snapshots of people’s lives. Too often, these movies have no controlling plot, at least not one that is woven throughout. Real Women Have Curves is a snapshot of one girl whose plot traverses just a few weeks but encompasses the girl’s entire life. And that, I can appreciate.

The main character, a young girl from a rather poor immigrant family, graduates from Beverly Hills High School and must deal with her conflicting pressures to go to college, to work at her sister’s factory, and to get married. Her life is foreign to me, for I’m more like her boyfriend, from a standard middle-class family whose parents share his same views on life. The main girl's family, however, just doesn't understand her. The girl's mother turns out to be the villain, but it’s not because she’s actually villainous; it’s just because she tries to hold onto a lifestyle that is difficult to maintain in the United States.

The part that I really can’t understand is that the mother doesn’t seem to wish that her daughter will have a better life than she had. She has this idea that her life was difficult and she managed to plow through it, so now it’s her daughter’s turn to follow in her footsteps, to get married and take care of her children. There’s something to that, I guess, but I just can’t understand it.

Not with my daughter, I kept thinking. Sure, she’s only one year old, but I want her to have much MORE than I had. She should have someone there to tell her that graduate school in English is NOT the way to go…Alright, so I’m projecting, and I’m basically doing what the mother in this film does, I know. Even though I pretend to want my kids to be independent, some element of me wants to control them just like every parent. The difference, I guess, is rather minor, but it means that I don’t want my kids to be just like me. I know my life isn’t perfect, and I understand where I screwed it up, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to my kids.

If a movie can inspire this kind of dialogue within me, then that’s gotta be a decent movie, or at least provocative. And Real Women Have Curves is definitely a decent movie.

I have one complaint, though, which is also a kind of praise. The title is heavy-handed enough, but most of the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with the idea that real women with curves are beautiful, too. One scene, however, is way too much, as it tries to hammer it home that these are real women, and they don’t have to look like models; they’re beautiful just the way they are. It’s funny, but it also made me wish that they would stop. Not because I don’t believe it, but because I’m a chauvinist pig, I mean because I can’t stand it when a movie simply preaches. Overall, this film is pretty subtle, but this part was just way too preachy. If it’s Michael Moore, I expect it. When it’s a narrative, I don’t want it.

That same scene, and the rest of the movie, however, did make me appreciate the way people are, including myself. It's cheesy, I know, but there's something really pleasing about this movie. It's provocative, yes, but it's also rather nice. I won't say "feel good," becuase then I won't like it, but there's something about this film that makes me appreciate who I am and what I have. And it's still a good movie.

Grade for Real Women Have Curves: 8

2005-10-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Art of Bridget Jones

Consider this blog entry a response to one reader who told me the following:

“You … criticize whatever intellectual wankery is thrown your way but you review these movies that are like the dross of popular culture. … You should check out The A List by Jay Carr and start going through that or Ebert’s The Great Movies. I want to see your critical mind deal with movies like Red by Kieslowski or Ikuru by Akurasura or Through a Glass Darkly by Bergman. I think you would have more fun with these.”

I take these responses to heart, so I am now changing the format of “My Life in Movies.” In light of this change, I will now review that little-known art house flick, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. This movie not only fully engaged me but made me question my own perceptions of beauty and reality. The title’s provocative ambiguity sets the stage for a film that moves through dream and reality to make a statement about people’s need for affection…

Ah, I can’t keep this up. This film sucked, big time. This movie is the worst of the “dross of popular culture,” as my friend called it. Sometimes popular movies can be subtle comments on morality, reality, or temptation, but this one is none of those things. Whoever decided to throw this movie together had already fallen off Bridget Jones’s edge of reason.

I enjoyed the first one because it was atypical, but this one is merely a cheap rehash of the first one. In fact, everything about this one is exactly the same as the first one: woman looking for love can’t choose between two men, even though she knows she should choose her sense instead of her sensibility. The only thing vaguely interesting about this movie is seeing how much weight the waifish Renee Zellweger put on. But then we’re forced to watch her waddle around in some terrible shots that are designed to highlight her weight. There are several plot turns that are new here, but they are completely ridiculous. I normally don’t use words like “stupid” to describe movies, but this one deserves it. It’s stupid, pure and simple.

So, my friend, I won’t keep up prattling about Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. This movie is terrible, and shouldn’t even garner a review. Maybe next time, I will get a chance to review a Werner Herzog film…

Grade for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason: 0

2005-10-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Horror and the Thrills

Rewatching Jaws has spawned a new debate within me. Basically, I can’t figure out what to call this movie. Is it a horror film, or is it a thriller? Is it a thriller with horrific elements or is it simply a thrilling horror movie? In the past, I have discussed horror as a wide genre that incorporates Psycho, as well as Halloween and The Sixth Sense. But that may be too broad. Is The Silence of the Lambs a horror film? It certainly scared me, and in some ways, the movie is very similar to Halloween, which no one can deny being a horror film.

I think Spielberg may have the key here, but in some ways, he's misleading. He said that when he read the script for Jaws, he thought it was basically the same story as one of his previous films, the wonderful made for TV movie Duel. It's about a semi-truck that terrorizes this a salesman, who acts as a kind of everyman. The whole movie is kind of like one big tense car chase, but the truck itself is quite horrific. Jaws is the same thing in the water, except that the mechanical beast has become a living beast, one that will not stop pursuing the Orca and its crew.

It sounds like a great horror movie to me.

What are the elements of horror? Scares? Jaws is scary, but I don’t think it’s all that scary, at least not past watching it the first time. For most of the film, the guys on the boat are perfectly safe as they walk around the boat with Jaws safely in the water, out of reach. The only way one would get killed is if he were to fall in. The shark itself looks pretty mechanical, too. Not very scary looking. The opening scene could be scary, but not once you know what is going to happen.

Blood? Yeah, there’s blood, but Jaws is not exactly a gore-fest. The disembodied leg that floats to the bottom is pretty gross, but it’s not Texas Chain Saw Massacre-gross. Even when Quint buys it at the end, we don’t see the guy get cut in half. It’s pretty gross just because you watch him fight to keep out of the shark’s mouth, kind of like when Hooper is in the tank and Jaws breaks through it. You just know they’re going to die, and yet you watch them try to fight to stay alive. Yeah, that gives me the creeps.

But I’m still not sure. My impression now is to call this a thriller and not a horror movie, even though it scares me so much I can’t stand to go in the ocean.

Maybe next time I will talk about Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime and how terror and horror fits into that. Or may I will talk about how what my one-year-old daughter and terrorists have in common.

As Kurtz says, "The horror! The horror!"

2005-10-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

Why I Hate Water

My favorite line in Jaws is when Brody’s wife (Brody is the chief of police, played by Roy Schneider) tells Hooper (the shark guy) that Brody won’t go near the water. She says that it’s something from his childhood, and she asks him for the clinical name for his phobia. He mumbles one word: “drowning.”

That’s genius.

If my wife asked me why I hate to go in the ocean (or sometimes even lakes and swimming pools, especially at night), I would probably mimic Brody and mumble one word, but my word would be a little different. Mine would be “Jaws.”

I remember seeing Jaws when I was way too young, probably around six or seven years old (what were you thinking, Mom!), and that film freaked me out. Of course, I didn’t even have an opportunity to go to the ocean until I was older, about six years later. And at that time, I didn’t really think about sharks. Yeah, I guess I remembered the movie, but my fun in the ocean overcame whatever residual fears I had. But then I saw the movie several more times, read the book and its sequels, along with other Benchley books, and now I am completely freaked out by the ocean. In fact, it’s only getting worse as I get older.

Yep, I blame Jaws. I know it’s a cliché, but that movie really did make me afraid to go in the water. Like Brody, I have read about the ocean, and I am mystified that they still don’t know what’s down there. Oh, great, yeah, they finally got live footage of a giant squid. Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better. Did you hear that? A GIANT FREAKING SQUID. Those are supposed to only exist in Jules Verne books, not actually in the ocean. But they’re down there, and there could be other despicable things down there.

Here’s my take on it. The ocean is like space. In general, mankind is not meant to be there. We can’t breathe in either environment, and if the technology screws up, we’re dead. There are two main differences between space and the ocean in my eyes. One is that you don’t have people “swimming” in space for fun. Nope, that’s left for professionals. In the ocean, anyone can just jump in, no telling what is under there. And that brings me to the second difference: we have no proof that creepy things live in space. Yeah, it’s scary because it’s space, but we should be relatively certain that nothing is going to fly under us and bite us in the keister. In the ocean, there’s all sorts of creepy stuff under, and like space, they’re not even sure what’s down there!

That’s my view of it, and that’s why, the older I get, the more afraid of the ocean I become. Last time I went out on a boat in the ocean, we jumped off to go snorkeling, and I tool one look under the water and saw that it was so murky that I couldn’t see anything. So I began hyperventilating and jumped back onto the boat. No thanks.

So this one isn’t really a movie review, but it’s inspired by Jaws, which I’m in the middle of rewatching. I will give my complete review later.

2005-10-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe Revenge Isn’t So Sweet

This entry will be short (thank goodness, you say!). I wrote the last entry sometime last week about The Count of Monte Cristo and The Italian Job, and then the sermon at my church on Sunday happened to be about relationships. The pastor touched on revenge, of course, and it made me think about the films through this light.

It seems that revenge is one of those things that I never really think about, especially in film. Whereas whenever I see adultery or other things like that, I immediately balk and begin ranting about how a movie can glorify such things, I never really consider how the notion of revenge is very similar. There are tons of films that are based solely on revenge; in fact, it is a common tenet in most movies—a person is wronged and must get back at the wrongdoer. Nearly any action film has a component like this, and they generally make the wrongdoer the villain and the person seeking revenge is the hero. But this isn’t the way the Bible sees it.

There are plenty of passages in the Bible that condemn the notion of revenge, leaving that for God to decide. There are some others, especially in the Old Testament, that call for revenge, but I think we have to read those as if the people are called out to do God’s direct will. We don’t really have that luxury today, I think. (I understand that there are lots of theological points here that could be debated, and I would love to hear anyone else’s point of view.)

Yet it seems that we still yearn for justice, which is a good thing, right? The desire for revenge may be wrong because of our self-righteous or angry motives, but the underlying desire for justice is right. Of course we want the guilty to be punished. It’s like when someone cuts me off in traffic, and I secretly want them to get a ticket. My dad curses them with “I hope all of your children are born without hair,” but I can’t quite get past simply wishing that they will crash and burn—literally.

But that’s just not right, is it? And it isn’t right when Mel Gibson does it, or Inigo Montoya does it, or Al Pacino, or anyone else. Maybe I need to start thinking about what these revenge movies are telling me, and perhaps even doing to me. Until now, I am ashamed to admit, I have always taken them at face value. They’re just action movies, after all…

2005-10-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Sweet Revenge in France and Italy

Due to the life-upheaval that we Houstonians knew as Hurricane Rita, things are just now beginning to settle down. Therefore, I will begin blogging again! Not that I haven’t been watching movies, mind you, for I have watched quite a few while staying with family and then back at home.

For this installment, I have decided to join two movies of similar caliber and overarching plot: The Count of Monte Cristo and The Italian Job.

The Count is the newest one with Jim Caviezel and Guy Pierce, which came out several years ago. Overall, I think this movie is pretty good. I don’t remember seeing Jim Caviezel in anything before The Passion of the Christ, so it was nice to watch him portraying an actual flawed human being. I couldn’t get Jesus out of my head while watching him, especially every time he would brood, and he does aheckuvalot of that here. Yep, this movie is all about revenge. The story is by Alexandre Dumas of The Three Muskateers fame, so this film is a historical action drama concerning the double-crossing of Jim Caviezel and his consumption with revenge.

I’m not sure if the premise translates too well to modern times, however. I felt kind of like I was watching Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet again, even though The Count sticks to its historical premise. Still, when Guy Pierce (spoilers here, but most of you have probably seen SOME version of this film) betrays Jim Caviezel’s character, I’m not sure if the motive really comes through. Supposedly, he does it because he envy’s Caviezel’s character, who is of lowly birth, which Pierce’s character is of noble birth. But that reasoning doesn’t really work nowadays, especially with our American dream and all that crap…I mean, stuff. It’s just that we don’t really believe so much in that—people are not held down by their birth status, at least not to the extent that they were back then. And most rich people don’t begrudge people who work their way up. Yes, I’m simplifying here, and I realize that we do have a kind of embedded class system, but it’s still much easier for a person to make good, even if their parents did not. I could have a whole blog about this, but I’m afraid I will say something upsetting.

So we leave France and go East to Italy, even though most of The Italian Job doesn’t take place in Italy but in L.A. I have mentioned before that heist films are one of my favorite subgenres, so I naturally enjoyed this film, even the second time around. This movie basically wants to be Ocean’s Eleven, and it couldn’t quite do it. The snappy dialogue just wasn’t there. And the heist wasn’t all that compelling, either. They spend just a few hours planning it, and then it happens and that’s really it.

I have two favorite parts here: one is when the jewelry store clerk talks about the mercantilism centered around Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I enjoyed that historical fact, and I loved the way the guy realized where the spoil was from. It really was a nice touch. My other favorite part is every part with the Russian, who was awesome. I loved the way, it just kept showing him, although we had no idea how he would fit in until the end. That was clever.

The Italian Job is way too much like a long commercial for the new Mini, however, and the film came out right as the Mini came out, which was not a coincidence. I know it’s a remake, and someone told me that the old had the old mini’s in, but this one didn’t even really need the cars. The original idea didn’t even pan out, so it was just three people driving around in supped-up Minis. I didn’t like that aspect.

The Count of Monte Cristo: 6
The Italian Job: 7

Both these films are flawed, but they’re still enjoyable, and I really enjoyed both of them.

2005-09-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

I Want to Run Away!

Runaway Jury (2003) showed me why I don’t like these John Grisham-style legal thrillers. I have never seen The Practice or any other legal TV show since L.A. Law and Ally McBeal went off the air, and these shows weren’t even about the courtroom. I never consciously avoided these other shows; I just never got around to watching them, just like I have never seen The West Wing or 24. Even though I love to read (even popular fiction), I have never picked up a John Grisham novel. I saw A Time to Kill (1996) and The Rainmaker (1997) back when they came out, and I remember enjoying them but thinking they were a bit overdone. I don’t avoid Grisham novels and movies because I’m a snob (I’ll be one of the first to see The DaVinci Code, after all), but simply because these thrillers generally bore me.

I know that seems improbable because these movies are all about suspense. The idea is to keep you guessing what will happen or how it will be proven, and both sides generally engage in duplicitous behavior that is exciting yet also deplorable. But these films are also kind of simplistic.

I’ll keep my comments to Runaway Jury for now because I just watched it last night. Overall, it’s a decent film featuring decent writing and decent acting. With a cast of Dustin Hoffman, John Cusack, and Gene Hackman (who I generally love), it should have been much better, though. Rachel Weisz was in it, which made it more bearable, for I think she is one of the prettiest women in movies, but she couldn’t make up for the unbelievable plot.

I know gun companies are evil, and if there is anyone who doesn’t think so, Runaway Jury sure pounds that home. I think this is one of its flaws, too. They’re way too evil here. They meet in dark smoky rooms to discuss buying juries, and they engage in all kinds of evil behavior such as breaking and entering, arson, kidnapping, etc. The head of the company doesn’t even care about the law, and he even threatens Gene Hackman, who is working for him. Gene Hackman isn’t exactly evil here—that job is left to the gun corporations—because he is what seems to be a moral relativist. He doesn’t believe in what cannot be bought or pressured. But the gun companies are evil. Just by hiring Hackman and thinking they can buy the jury, they have demonstrated their contempt for the law.

So the plot was a bit too much of good vs. evil for me, at least for a thriller like this. Is this the way all courtroom dramas are? Now I’m thinking about A Civil Action (1998), which I remember as being decent, and it seemed to be the same way. Maybe that’s why I generally don’t like them. Real life isn’t like that. Give me a conflicted character who is caught between two positions and that’s more believable. These characters here are just too bland. But then again, I love Star Wars, so maybe it's about pretense...

The only thing that redeems the film, perhaps, is that Cusack and Weisz are morally conflicted characters, at least through most of the movie. Sure, they turn out to be the good guys, but we don’t learn that until close to the end. I’m sorry if that gives away the plot, but you really should see it coming from a mile away.

Grade for Runaway Jury: 5

2005-09-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I Feel Like I Am Julia!

I remember hearing about Being Julia when it came out last year, but then I didn’t hear anything more about it. I happened upon it on the library movie list and decided to take a chance on it. Although it isn’t the type of movie I typically enjoy, it turned out to be quite interesting.

Despite my enjoyment by the end, the beginning of Being Julia is probably one of the most meandering plots I have ever watched. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single plot, just a series of wanderings by this character Julia. That may be the point, but it doesn’t make it that entertaining.

Juila is a popular actress on the London stage before the start of WWII. Despite her continued popularity, she is aging (like Annette Bening herself) and feels as if she needs a major change. In fact, she wants to quit acting altogether, at least for a while, and her husband, played by Jeremy Irons, doesn’t want her to because they would lose a ton of money invested in the play. Basically, she is in a mid-life crisis where she has everything she wants and still doesn’t know what she wants. I generally respond to this plot because it seems to be what we all go through. It’s a bit demoralizing when the person is so wealthy, however, and acts just plain spoiled. In fact, I tend to have no sympathy for those people. It’s mean I know, for we’re all human, and we all have the same basic intangible wants, such as true appreciation and love and security, along with interesting conversations and good music (alright, I added those in). But sometimes the rich seem to have it made, and if they don’t appreciate that fact, they should give me some of their money. Maybe that will make them feel better. Of course no one ever gives me any of their money, though, so everyone just stays miserable.

For Julia, her misery lasts until the young American male comes along, and the movie slides into a glorification of adultery. Here, the film tries to make this okay by suggesting that the husband is okay with it. I’m not quite sure if that’s true, but whatever—it’s still weird. Things don’t work out with the young man, and I’m not giving anything away here, because everyone knows it won’t, except for Julia, who thinks she has fallen in love with him.

And that’s when the real plot begins, over half-way through the film. The turn it takes here is interesting and quite enjoyable. I won’t give this part away because it is a surprise, and a good one at that. This is where the movie and its characters redeem themselves, and it makes this otherwise muddy, mediocre drama quite enjoyable. All of the actors in the film are excellent, but if the plot had not taken this turn, I probably would have hated this movie.

But because it did turn, Being Julia gets a 6.

2005-09-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Glad I Never Worked at a Convenience Store

Actually, I did work at a convenience store: my first job was stocking the cooler everyday at a local fooder, stop and shop, grab and go. I didn’t talk to anyone, though. I just went in, restocked everything in the cooler, swept and mopped the floors, collected my $8 for two hours of work, and left. What do you want? I was only fifteen.

But my lack of interaction with witty store employees makes me wonder about the movie Clerks (1994). I am behind the times, I know, for this is my first time seeing it. I enjoyed the twoKevin Smith movies I have seen—Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997)—but I didn’t love them enough to watch all of his other films. When it came out, everyone told me that Clerks was really boring, and I was on a bit of an independent-hating kick, so I didn’t go see it. But everyone else saw it, so I had no one to watch it with. Now all I can say is that that “everyone” who told me the film wasn’t that great are a bunch of idiots.

Sure, it’s low budget and the acting is sometimes terrible, but the witty banter is excellent! I have blogged about my love of witty dialogue before, so I won’t rehearse that here. But I really liked seeing people discourse about the politics of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the chosen destiny of video store clerking. The character Randall was a terrible actor, but his lines were excellent. He was random and spontaneous but completely purposeful—somewhat like people I knew in college—and I responded to him.

But let’s face it: I’m more like Dante, as I’m sure most of us are. I may not cheat on my girlfriend/wife (I don’t, I swear!), but I’m one of those people who can’t tell anyone no, just like Dante. And his name isn’t coincidental, either—Dante Hicks. He is the purveyor of the hell that is the town where they live. Stating it like that may be making it a bit too austere, but that’s really what he seems to be doing.

He is an observer of everything, not usually a willing participant. While everyone else does whatever they feel like, which seems to be the film's mantra, we don’t see Dante do anything that we judge as completely wrong. He is guided by a set of loose rules that make sense to me. In fact, I would probably do most of what he does (EXCEPT go out with another girl while I’m dating someone else, I swear!). But this guy simply observes everything that goes on around him. He participates in it sometimes, but only because other people goad him into it. They’re always pushing him to do things he doesn’t want to do. And although we only see one day in the life of Dante Hicks, the film leaves us with the idea (NOT the optional ending, mind you) that this is what happens to Dante everyday. The next day will be just like this one, even though he keeps saying that it’s a terrible day unlike any other. We know it’s not.

The real plight of clerks, then, is the monotony. They have to engage in witty banter because that seems to be what their life consists of. Randall may be the foil for Dante, but he’s really no better off, except, as he says, he has come to terms with his monotonous life. Dante, however, is merely an observer, like his namesake. He won’t stay long.

Grade: 8

2005-09-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Not when I was Thirteen

I remember hearing a couple of years ago about this small art film called Thirteen (2003) that was co-written by one of its young actors. After seeing the film, I think you can tell that it was written by someone so young. However, I don’t that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Let me begin with the worst thing about this movie, which is the acting. These actors are young and inexperienced, and it shows. However, they’re also convincing. I believed that these kids were going through this, so their acting couldn’t have been all that bad. One of the girls played up the fake nice girl too much, and the other one played up the irate bad girl too much, always screaming at her mother that she hated her. But perhaps real life is like that. In some ways, these girls appeared as stereotypes or caricatures, with the exception that they change over the course of the movie. But maybe caricature is the point. Perhaps we’re all just caricatures when we’re thirteen. In some ways, I know I was like the main character. I rebelled against everything my parents had or did, like most of teenagers. But watching it onscreen is demystifying, like pulling the veil back on the wizard to find some horror beneath it. This isn't like watching kids in a Disney flick; this is like watching you when you were thirteen--not a pretty sight.

So if the acting was the worst thing, and I still found it convincing, then this must be a good movie, right? Yeah, it really is. The problem, though, which has nothing to do with the quality of the movie, is that the plot is terrifying.

I have daughter that is nearly a year old, you see, and I am dreading the point twelve years from now, primarily because of this movie. Yes, I always dreaded the teenage years, but, man, this film made me AFRAID of them! Watching the downward spiral this nice girl travels is one of the worst things I have ever seen. I was afraid that she would end up dead or in a hospital, but, as my wife called it, there is a touch of hope.

Watching Holly Hunter (wwho was excellent, of course—I have always loved her, ever since Raising Arizona (1987)) struggle with her daughter was disheartening and hopeful at the same time. I won’t tell you what happens at the end, but it really is very neat without being cheesy. In some ways, my wife and I are probably like Holly Hunter’s character. We’re both still into popular culture, and I want my daughter to do what she wants and make her own decisions, as long as she doesn’t hurt herself. That’s what Hunter tries to do here. Even though her daughter fights her every step of the way, she still struggles to reach her, and it’s wonderful to watch, although, as I keep saying, scary, too.

Overall, this film is pretty great. Yes, it’s a bit too much at times, but not on the scale of Kids (1995), which is just hopeless and so unbelievable (yet true, I’m sure) that I can’t consider it. This film seems somewhat realistic, which is what also makes it so scary.

Grade: 7

2005-08-31T14:24:00.000-07:00

The Tide has Come!

As I have said many times, I generally love action movies, as long as they feature an exciting plot with amazing action sequences, good acting, and decent dialogue. Yes, it’s difficult to get those things in action films, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes one will overrule the others, such as when a movie’s action scenes are so amazing that the cheesy dialogue doesn’t matter. Although I haven’t seen Top Gun (1986) since I was a kid, I remember it being that way. Yes, the dialogue was cheesy and the plot was overdone, but the airplane sequences were great! At least when I was a kid. So I have liked director Tony Scott ever since I saw Top Gun back then.

Until now, I couldn’t tell you any other movie Tony Scott had directed. I can rattle off many of Ridley Scott’s films, but not his brothers’. On a whim, however, I requested Crimson Tide (1995), and when the credits came on, I felt like my friend who saw The Fugitive (1993). When they announced that Tommy Lee was in it, his jaw dropped, and he uttered, “Nawwww….”, until they showed that it was actually Tommy Lee Jones and not the drummer for Motley Crue. In other words, I had no idea that Tony Scott had done this movie, or that he had done any other movies besides Top Gun.

Based on these two films, my love for Tony Scott is solidified. Yes, he has tarnished his record with some terrible films so forgettable that I hardly remember them—Days of Thunder (1990), anyone?—but Crimson Tide is an excellent submarine film (True Romance (1993) and The Hunger (1983) are both worth watching, too). I don’t love submarine films, or maritime films in general, because they’re always so claustrophobic. I know that’s part of the point, but it makes me a bit uneasy. Yes, Das Boot (1982) is great, but these films are generally unexciting and uninspired.

Crimson Tide, however, is quite riveting. My only complaint is that the film is a bit too long. At a running time of nearly two hours, my heart couldn’t take it. With the series of “mutinies,” the movie is simply too taut to be bearable for two hours. And I kept thinking, “I hope he’s right; I hope he’s right!” If you have seen the movie, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t seen it, well, you should.

Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman are great together. They’re both such good actors that it’s nice to see them play off one another. And there are some other familiar faces that I enjoyed seeing, as well.

Overall, Crimson Tide is a great action film that features superb dialogue and great acting. The plot is interesting and engaging, although not the best I have seen. The action scenes are pretty sparse, though. Perhaps I should call this a thriller rather than an action film because it really doesn’t feature too much action. But the movie is so tense that I didn’t miss it.

Grade: 7

2005-08-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Transport Me Outta Here!

With The Transporter 2 coming out soon, I figured I had better watch the first one to see why the need for a second one. And frankly, I just don’t see it.

In short, there is nothing worthwhile in The Transporter (2002) that I can’t get in far superior movies.

Martial arts action scenes? They’re far better in any other martial arts film: try Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999) or Hero (2004). In The Transporter, they’re too long and not that interesting. And they don’t fit with the plot that well, either. They were probably one of the best things about the movie, but they just weren’t executed well enough to make them engaging. And then I saw that the DVD included extended fight scenes. I avoided them.

Car chases? It could have been good, but the editing was way too choppy. Go for The French Connection (1971) or Ronin (1998) instead.

Plot? Terrible. Simply one of the worst plots for an action movie I have seen in a long time. I like the idea of “the transporter,” and especially one who simply gets mixed up in something, but the inclusion of the girl as the love interest didn’t work at all. And the daughter/father thing was tacked on and terrible.

Jason Statham was the best thing about this movie, and yet even he couldn’t make it work. He’s a hard-ass, and I love his ability to never crack a smile, but it gets old after a while. Snatch (2001) is one of my favorite movies, however, and watching The Transporter made me think about why I liked him there and not here. Statham needs a foil, a buddy, a side-kick, someone who is goofy that he can play off of. In Snatch, there was the guy who bought the gun that didn’t work. Statham played the same basic stoic character, but he was there to play off the other bumbling idiot. It’s like Laurel and Hardy or Martin and Lewis—the comic needs a straight man. But the straight man needs the comic, too! And here, there is no comic. Here, it’s simply straight man. And it makes for a really boring movie.

The Transporter gets a 3 out of 10 simply because the scenery is beautiful, and the action scenes were interesting for a brief while. You definitely won’t find me in the theater for the sequel, unless it’s to see a different film. I will probably get it from the library when it’s available, though. Even though the first one was stupid, I can’t pass up an action film.

2005-08-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

I Guess I’m In Good Company

Since the terms conservative and liberal have come up several times, I decided I would dedicate another blog entry to them. Specifically, I have been trying to figure out whether In Good Company is conservative or liberal. I know it’s one of them, but I’m not quite sure which it is yet. Maybe I will just explain why I think it is either conservative or liberal and let you fill in the rest.

Before I do that, though, let me say that I think this movie is excellent. In fact, I think I would say that it is one of the best drama/comedies that I have seen in a long time. The acting is superb, even from Topher Grace, about whom I was unsure at first. Scarlett Johanssen was as beautiful as ever. Her dad, played by Dennis Quaid, portrayed fatherhood with interest, compassion, and sincerity.

A lot of this good acting is due largely to a great script, full of wonderful dialogue that was witty yet not over the top. I used to love Dawson’s Creek, and now I love Gilmore Girls (I know, I know, I deserve a lot of flak for these loves), because those shows have characters whose dialogue is fun and funny and smart and exciting. But let’s face it: none of use actually talk like that. In Good Company isn’t that way. The characters sound like real people, and they have real problems that everyone seems to go through. It’s tear-provoking and then hilarious, the way real life is.

Perhaps that’s why I have trouble knowing whether it’s liberal or conservative—because portrayals of our lives are not liberal or conservative. I’m actually quite liberal politically, but I look over my blog, and I come across as a freakin’ prude. Maybe I’m both! But that’s the point. In Good Company seems to be both, too, and that makes it compelling.

In order to explain what I mean, I am going to have to spoil the movie for you, at least partially. So if you haven’t seen it, you may want to stop reading.

The main point of the movie is that Topher Grace is a mover and shaker in a sales firm. He is put in charge of sales for a magazine, something that he is probably not ready for, and he is put in way over his head. Dennis Quaid was the boss before him, and now he is made an underling of this twenty-something kid. At the end, though, the kid is fired, and Dennis Quaid is made boss again.

What’s the point here? The old can do it better than the young. That’s a conservative viewpoint, a kind of romanticizing of the old days. Dennis Quaid continually says that they can’t fire his team that has been with him for seven years, even though Topher Grace wants to. For Grace, it’s all about the bottom line, at least at first. Then he realizes that Quaid may be right: maybe these people are good at their jobs. They have families they have to support, and their jobs are their lifeblood. It’s difficult to fire someone when you know their situations, after all. Perhaps companies should not be concerned solely with money. Perhaps there is a human factor here, as well.

But wait! Topher Grace is actually pretty good at his job. Yes, he spends way too much time working and loses his wife because of it, but he’s also a good employee. He may stink as a boss, but it’s only because he demands so much of his employees. And he gets cut in the end, not because he has failed in some way, but because the company is sold and everyone belonging to the last guy is fired.

The company does make fun of the new idea of synergy, as expounded on by both Grace and Teddy K, played by Malcolm McDowell, and Grace’s idea for cellphones for kids is laughable, too, but only because it works. Whereas Quaid does well because he believes in his company, Grace does well because he knows what works, even if it is shallow.

So I guess it comes off on the conservative side. I hope that’s not why I liked it…

Grade for In Good Company: 9

2005-08-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Finding Sentimentalism

I haven’t revealed my source of movies yet, but I’m not too proud to say that I get them from the library, both my university library and my public city library. This source means two things, besides that I get my movies for free: 1) about half of the movies I get screw up in the middle because they’re scratched, and I never get to finish them, and 2) I rarely get to watch very recent movies.

I did manage to put Finding Neverland (2004) on hold a couple of months ago, and I finally got it and watched it. My initial reaction to this movie was that it was great: although a bit overly sentimental, it was still charming and uplifting.

I know he’s a favorite of many, but I generally don’t like Johnny Depp. He seems a one-trick pony to me. He’s always the slightly goofy guy who either doesn’t smile or smiles too much. It fit Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), but we had seen the same character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and Blow (2001). In fact, I was beginning to wonder whether Depp knew how to pick good scripts. He had hopefully already done Secret Window (2004) before Pirates was released. Now he’s choosing wisely. We have Finding Neverland and the anticipated, well-received Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). He’s great in Neverland. His Irish accent was good, and he was imaginative without being childish. Depp was gold here.

Although I have never really liked Johnny Depp (except in his 21 Jump Street days), I have always liked Kate Winslet. Ever since Heavenly Creatures (1994), Winslet has proven herself a good actress who knows how to pick quirky, good movies. Her list of movies is really impressive, with only a few dark spots (Titanic and Life of David Gale). And even these dark spots are somewhat redeemable. She is excellent in Neverland, too. She isn’t flashy, but she’s still beautiful, and she comes across as simply an excellent actress.

The kids are great, too, but they seem beside the point. Yes, the Peter character is well-done, but he really just has to stand there and either smile or look brooding. It’s Depp and Winslet who carry the show.

So this is overall an excellent movie. My favorite part was the editing, which was so necessary. This film was obviously much longer to begin with, and the editor did a great job of cutting to scenes without explanation. Yet we were able to figure out what was happening. It was wonderful to see a great drama that wasn’t drawn out. See my review of The Horse Whisperer to hear me gripe about these overwrought films.

But I’m thinking about the message of the movie now, and it makes me question it. People are never really gone if you imagine them—that’s not all that bad, is it? No, not really. It’s a nice sentiment, but that’s what is, a sentiment. I can live with that.

The part I can’t live with is Barrie’s relationship with his wife. Perhaps it’s the fact that I just finished reading Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth last night, but the movie didn’t spend much time on the scandal of Barrie, Mrs. Barrie, and Winslet’s character. As society players, all three of them would have been shunned for their actions. The mom was right when she criticized Barrie for putting Winslet up in the summer cottage: that’s what a rich man does for his mistress, not for a simple friend. And those things are expected to be “paid for.”

But let’s take a step back. Mrs. Barrie gets a bad rap here as a general witch, but she’s not all that bad. Barrie says that she has no imagination, but she’s right, too: she couldn’t join him in his flights of introverted fancy. Perhaps he never let her join, or perhaps she couldn’t, but it’s sad to see him forsake his marriage nevertheless. That’s what really bugs me here. Instead of trying to save his marriage, he lets it all go for another family of kids. Could he not have children of his own? Would that have satisfied them? Sure, they’re his “muses,” but couldn’t he have found that in his own family?

Barrie doesn’t exactly commit adultery, but he comes close to it. In fact, an argument could be made that he DOES commit adultery. The film makes sure we know that his wife runs off with another man, so that she becomes the bad one, but it’s really Barrie who has pushed her away.

Those kinds of strange familial messages bother me. They don’t take away from the quality of the film, but they do make it a bit more than simply a nice sentimental movie. If my kids watched this, I would have to have a long talk with them about marriage.

Yes, I know I’m becoming conservative in my old age. Perhaps I should just accept it.

Grade of Finding Neverland: 8

2005-08-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

Friday with Friday Night Lights

Billy Bob Thornton has always been a good actor. His movie choices, however, are hit or miss: some are really great (see Sling Blade and Bandits) and some, well, not so much (see Armageddon or The Alamo). There’s no consistency here about the types of movies he chooses—some seem like small arty films, and others are huge, big-budget blow-ups.

Friday Night Lights is one of his good ones, but not because of Billy Bob Thornton. He’s good, of course, but this movie is really about the players and only incidentally about the coach, played by Thornton. What makes this film good is a) the truth behind small-town high school football, b) the way the individual characters are dramatized, and c) the ending.

Throughout the movie, we are shown shots of the high school stadium, as well as the small Texas town where the movie takes place—Odessa, in West Texas. During the games, the entire town basically shuts down, and the businesses write “Gone to the Game!” on their windows. In fact, the town seems to internalize the school’s victories, putting tremendous pressure on the players and coaches. After one loss, the coach finds 20 for sale signs in his yard—that’s how committed these people are to this team. It’s a lot like my high school in South Carolina. In these small towns, there’s nothing to do, so the people take their local sports very seriously.

I appreciated these details, because they made the characters so real, which brings us to the next reason the movie was good: the individual characters were remarkably real. Everything here had been done before, sure, but these characters were not caricatures or one-dimensional kids; they were real people with real problems. My wife actually left the movie half-way through because one kid was abused by his father. It was gut-wrenching without being trite or over-emotional.

Which is what I loved about the ending. I won’t give it away, but it is powerful. This is not your typical movie, let’s just say that. Remember when I mentioned that all films were about overcoming adversity? Well, this one does isn’t standard. I really did almost cry here.

As a side note, there is only one piece of music throughout the entire movie, unless the students were at a party or something. The entire night I kept telling my wife, “I know this song!” I told her it sounded like a band we had seen open for Fugazi about five years earlier called Explosions in the Sky. She didn’t even really remember seeing the band, but I waited for the credits at the end, and ... sure enough, was them! I was vindicated!

Overall, this is a great movie, even for those of us, like me, who don’t like football. Grade? I give it an 8, and this could go up to 8.5, but I will stick with 8 for now. It’s not one of the best movies I have ever seen, but it’s good.

2005-08-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

Terrorism Lessons from the Movies

I was listening NPR—you know, that liberally biased station that should be shut down—and they said that the terrorists in Iraq had struck again, killing three more people. And that term was there, just as it’s always there: terrorists.

So I began thinking about ways to deal with this term, and whether there were any examples from movies that may help us understand it. As you know, all of life’s lessons can be garnered from film. So this entry is dedicated to that—a look at terrorism from the viewpoint of film.

Let me give two disclaimers here: 1) Filmmakers, and, thus, films are generally fairly liberal. We have to understand that before we begin. If we go to films looking for conservatism, we’re going to have a hard time, as I have already said in a previous blog entry. 2) I have not seen every film, so I can’t reference every mention of terrorism. In fact, I will have to use several of the films I have already reviewed here. I will try not to just rehash, but some of it will come up again.

First, there is X-Men 2, which I just watched again (since writing the review here, in fact). Yes, the bad guys are the U.S. military, or at least the corporation that operates under government and military jurisdiction. The bad guy’s name is Colonel Striker, after all. There’s an interesting reference to the first X-Men film, where the Senator, who is actually Magneto’s friend in disguise, asks Striker how he knows about the X-Men mansion. Colonel Striker says that he learned it from one of the “Liberty Island terrorists,” meaning Magneto.

But wait, terrorists? Who in that battle is actually a terrorist? According to Striker, and almost all of the general population, they’re probably ALL considered terrorists. The point is not that Magneto is a terrorist and the X-Men are good. No, all of them are bad, and therefore, they’re terrorists. Yes, Magneto wants to destroy things and kill all humans, so he’s really bad, but there is really no distinction between him and the X-Men in the mind of most of the human characters in the film. For us there is, sure. The X-Men are the cool good guys who just want to save the day. Watch Wolverine brutally kill those soldiers that are just doing their job, though, and we can’t quite say that. We’re supposed to “support the troops,” right? Not kill them.

Then I began thinking about that 80s movie Red Dawn (1984), starring Patrick Swayze. I liked it when I was a kid, and I really want to see it again, so I will have to look it up. But I was thinking about the plot of it: the Soviets invade and easily take over the U.S., so it’s up to a bunch of kids to start their own army to overthrow the Soviets. How do they do it? They stage ambushes, hide and then attack, and then generally try to kill every Soviet they see. If I’m remembering correctly, that’s what they do. And we call them heroes, patriots, freedom fighters. The actual war was over, though. The military had been defeated. What would the Soviets call those people? Terrorists?

Ok, ok, I know the analogies aren’t perfect—Iraq was ruled by a cruel dictator, and we have a democratically elected government.

But what if we were supporting a revolution in Nicaragua, say, when they had a government that we didn’t like? We didn’t invade, but we funded the “rebels” or terrorists. France, meanwhile, likes the government of Nicaragua and tells us we have to stop supporting this terrorism. We say no, so France invades the U.S. and easily overthrows our government, while all they want to do is to have new elections and have a new government.

Well, I live in Texas, and there would be a lot of Texans who would be exercising their right to bear arms and trying to kill every “Frog” they came across. Would they be freedom fighters, patriots, rebels, or terrorists?

Just some ideas that I’m pondering. Yeah, I know I sound like I’m saying the Iraqis are right for killing U.S. troops, but I really didn’t say anything like that. I don’t want any U.S. troops to die, or anyone else for that matter!! I’m really talking about the word “terrorist,” and how we use it. Our terms are loaded, and we use them as they help us define people, not as they really are.

Movies teach us that much.

2005-07-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

It Whispers to Me

As I was saying yesterday, my initial impressions of Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998) were pretty negative. The movie seemed too emotional, trying a bit too hard to make us break down and cry, and contained so many unnecessary scenes that consisted mainly of the beautiful Montana countryside.

So I was kind of dreading finishing the movie.

But then my wife commented that she thought the film was formulaic: a character is hurt and must overcome adversity, and we’ve seen that a million times, according to her. Yeah, she’s right. We have seen it a million times, because overcoming adversity is the basic story of all human life, or at least all human storytelling. So I couldn’t say that that generalization made the film formulaic. Every movie, novel, play, and short story follows that formula. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this film was NOT formulaic.

As a side note, let me say, that is generally how my mind works. Someone like my wife (and it usually is my wife) says something, and I have to disagree with it. It’s in my nature to disagree with people’s assertions. I am argumentative, I know. But thinking about people’s assertions is what allows me to come up with my own ideas, you see? I tend to begin by disagreeing and then try to come up with why. It pisses people off, but it helps me understand things.

So the plot of The Horse Whisperer, I decided, was completely non-formulaic. It isn’t just about a person overcoming adversity. Where does the horse fit into that? So I thought that maybe we see the horse overcome adversity, as well, but Redford doesn’t try to get into the horse’s thoughts. Sometimes he shows us what the horse sees, but it’s almost always just a blurred shot of Scarlett Johanson. The horse is important to the story, but it’s not really a character. I even began to see that Scarlett Johanson’s character isn’t the main focus. Nope, it’s Kristen Scott Thomas, who I had not seen since The English Patient (1996).

And this person has no adversity, at least not outwardly! She’s a highly successful writer (yea!) who has everything, except, well, a good relationship with her daughter and husband. The entire film seems to boil down to her making choices about ways to make her life more complete. Yes, she has everything, but she eventually realizes that she has nothing (yeah, yeah), and so she has to choose between going back to her life in New York or staying on a ranch in Montana.

It's an idea that could so easily fail miserably. Put a little too much emotion into this part, make it too obvious, and I would hate it. But the emotion I talked about earlier isn't about Thomas--it's about Johanson.

The film doesn’t hit us over the head with Thomas's plight, and I appreciated that. While it’s not exactly subtle, it’s not boneheaded, either. Scarlett Johanson’s accident becomes a catalyst for the end of Thomas’s character’s life as she knew it. As she struggles to help her daughter, she eventually learns who she is and what she wants from life. Could be terrible, yes, but the film's strangeness works.

The horse, for example, is a really odd element. It becomes a metaphor, I think, for the scarring of the people. Yes, it’s traumatized, just like Thomas, Johanson, and Redford are all scarred and must make choices. Redford even goes to the horse and tells it something like, “you have something to do tomorrow.” That’s the day before it “chooses” whether to be well or not. People keep asking Redford, “when will Pilgrim [the horse] be better,” and he always replies, “That’s really up to Pilgrim.”

Yeah, that’s right, Mr. Redford. We make choices about “overcoming our adversity.” Sometimes we don’t even know we have adversity, and we just feel miserable. Redford gets it right when he says it’s up to us to choose when we’re ready to be happy. I don’t want to get into any complex psychological theories about depression, and I don’t think this film tries to do that. It ends up making a profound statement, however, about how one deals with tragedy.

And I appreciated the way it did it. Sure, it was a bit too emotionally tugging, but it turned out to be pretty good, after all.

Grade: 7 out of 10. Definitely fresh.

2005-07-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Baby/Horse Whisperer

I have a nine-month old girl, and a friend of ours leant us a video-tape a few months ago called The Baby Whisperer by a woman named Tracy Hogg. She died sometime this year, I think, and I feel bad talking her, because I’m sure she was a very nice person. From the video, I got the feeling that she is very caring and understanding and really loves kids and people.

Nevertheless, she was a bit of a freak.

One of the things she said was that she always asked the baby if she could change its diaper before she took it off. What? Ask the baby? The baby is crying its head off because it has a load of crap sagging down its behind, and you ASK it for its permission to change it? She didn’t say, you wait for a “sure, go ahead,” but it was implied that the baby will give you permission. Weird, indeed.

It was the first time I had ever heard of this “whispering” thing, which seems like a way to say, “communicates with things that speak another language.” Tracy Hogg is a baby whisperer because she is able to understand and communicates with babies (it makes her weird, too—she says she likes to create an “aura of respect” around the baby—sheesh).

And now I have finished watching Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). The movie came out before Tracy Hogg’s books, but I wonder about this term “whisperer.” The movie says at one point that Redford’s character is a “horse whisperer,” and he replies with something like, “is that what they say?” It’s almost as if they expect us to know what a horse whisperer is, and I certainly would not have if I had not seen The Baby Whisperer.

Anyway, I watched this movie over the course of a week, and my initial perception of the movie was that it needed a good editor. It took me a week to watch it because it was 2 hours and 48 minutes long! There’s really no need to for a movie like this to be that long. There are good ones, I know, but these are generally movies that are attempting something grand—like Gone with the Wind or any of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Horse Whisperer was NOT an epic film. In fact, its scope was very small. Besides an introduction that takes place in New York, the entire movie took place on a ranch in Montana (with a brief interlude in “town” at a hoe-down). There are only a few characters, too. That’s all fine, but this movie is not epic, so it doesn’t deserve nearly three hours.

Much of that nearly three hours is spent looking at scenery. It’s beautiful, of course, but I would rather turn on PBS to see shots of beautiful scenery devoid of people and plot. Redford displays his mastery of “the shot” in this film by giving us the majesty and awe of the untrammeled country, but it should have been a part of a nature special, not a movie like this.

So my initial reactions were negative, to say the least.

Next time, I will tell you why I think this is actually a decent movie. You will just have wait until then. In the meantime, if you want to know what it’s all about and you have three hours to kill, go rent it or get it from the library like I did. Just try to make it past the first half.

2005-07-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

Captain of the Atmospherics

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) came out last summer, and I really wanted to see it in the theater, but I just never got around to it. My action movie partner saw it before me, so there was no one to go with, and I had heard mixed things about it. I imagined that it was a really neat-looking movie that would end up lacking the umimportant things such as plot. Turns out I was right.

But this may not be a bad thing, at least not wholly. I watched the “making of” video that came with the DVD, and it was really interesting (and yet kind of sad) to see these guys work on a six-minute “trailer” for four years. Then they showed that trailer to people, and a major studio just ate it up. It actually turned out to become some of the first parts of the movie, where the giant robots invade. These scenes are by far the most memorable and interesting of the entire movie.

But the plot here is actually beside the point. Yes, there is a “world of tomorrow,” and the earth will be destroyed in the process, but all of this seems to have been created after the original movie short, which was just about robots invading.

And these robots, as well as everything about the film, are visually stunning. It’s not like War of the Worlds, where I asked “How’d they do that?” I ask that question because everything looks so realistic in that film. Sky Captain is more like Spielburg decided to make his remake look like the original film. It doesn't look realistic, but the creative way it is shot and even written makes it appear like a pre-WWII film.

Which makes me wonder the point of it. It’s really neat that a film can be made to look like one from the 1920s, but why not just watch a film from the 1920s? Everyone looking for style and creativity should watch this movie, but I don’t think there is going to be a slew of films copying it. It’s slicker than a 1920s film, of course, and there are the beautiful and funny people in it, but it seems like a one-shot sort of thing. There’s no point in doing it again if it’s already been done.

It’s kind of like listening to John Cage’s song where someone just sits at the piano and doesn’t play for four minutes. Yeah, it’s interesting and intriguing to listen to everything around you as music, but I don’t want to put this piece of “music” on each time I want to listen to something. There’s just no point.

As a side note, I have decided that my reviews will actually contain something about the movies themselves instead of just interpreting them, or at least part of the time. So I have decided to begin rating movies using the Rotten Tomatoes rating system of 1-10, where 6-10 means it’s fresh or good, and 1-5 means it’s rotten or bad.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow gets a six, just putting it in the fresh category. It gets this because it really is visually amazing, and it’s worth watching just for that. There are some funny parts, too, although they don’t really belong in the film. Nevertheless, they made me laugh.

And that can’t be a bad thing.

2005-07-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

The New Horror, Part II

I am trying to post at least two things a week on this 'blog, but it’s difficult. Creating such fabulous critiques takes time! Not that anyone’s reading, anyway. I just like to think of myself as having a web presence.

As I mentioned last time, I love horror films, but most of them never actually scared me. And then I saw The Blair Witch Project, long after it had become a phenomenon. I actually saw it in a dollar movie theater, and my wife and I were the only people in the entire theater. Yet the door kept opening throughout the movie, and I would look back, but no one was actually coming or going. Shivers here...

And then there was The Sixth Sense, which scared me, as well. And I’m actually frightened to even talk about The Ring, that movie scared me so much. I went to return a movie at 11:00 PM on a Friday, and I decided that I might as well watch a movie that night, seeing as my wife can’t watch horror movies, and she was already in bed. So I got The Ring, went home, and watched it until 1:30 AM. Sitting alone in my house in the dark watching that movie was absolutely terrifying. Especially because the DVD had a hidden special feature, where “the movie that kills” would come on. And it couldn’t be stopped! Nothing would turn it off! And then it went blank, and the phone rang. Gimmicky, yes, but actually very creepy.

And that adjective brings me to why I think these movies are scary, especially when juxtaposed with older horror films. The scare in those older movies is pretty generic. We know Jason or Freddy, or Michael is watching (sometimes we even get interesting camera shots from Michael’s perspective), and we know he is going to kill them, but we don’t know when. The how seems beside the point, too. With A Nightmare on Elm Street, we would see Freddy, and he just looked so silly that I couldn’t take him seriously. Yes, it was different because he wasn’t bound to using knives to kill people (being in nightmares, after all), but we knew it was coming, and it wasn’t scary. The only scary thing in those films is the “jump,” as I call it—when the killer jumps out from nowhere, or even when the cat jumps out from the closet. Yes, they would fake us out, and yes, we would expect it, but it was still scary. But then it was gone. It didn’t matter. It was just, whoo, breathe again.

New horror movies have improved on this jump tremendously, and that is why they’re scary. Whenever I watch a horror film, and I see a closeup of someone’s face, I get nervous. Why? Because the closeup means that I can’t see what’s going on around them. It means a “jump” is coming.

But the jumps have changed now. They’re no longer just, whoo, breathe again. Now they’re “oh my, that was creepy.” The Sixth Sense has perfect examples. At the beginning, when the kid tells Bruce Willis that the school was where they used to hang people, Willis doesn’t believe him, but then they walk past a stairwell, and BAM! there it is at the top of the steps—people hanging. It’s a jump, to be sure, but it still gives me the willies. When the kid meets the little girl vomiting all over the place, she just appears inside his tent when he turns around, and she’s really scary! These jumps are now so creepy that they get stuck in our minds as images.

The best one is actually from The Ring. At the beginning, when the reporter goes to the dead girl’s room, the mom opens the closet door, and it flashes the scene of how she found her daughter’s body. It isn’t traditionally scary because there is no danger—no one is going to die at this point, after all. But the image of the dead girl that flashed ever so briefly on screen is completely terrifying.

Someone told me that horror films are scary now because they’re more psychological, but I think that’s kind of a cop-out. Yes, they’re more psychological (if it can get more psychological than The Shining), but one of the reasons is that they’re projecting not just killers, but images of things that are simply, well, creepy. And that creepiness gets stuck in our heads and makes us say that, yes, this movie is scary.

Older horror films never made me say that.

2005-07-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

The New Horror, Part I

I used to love horror films. As a child, I relished A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and even the B-films such as The Evil Dead (1981) and Sorority House Massacre (1987). My wife says it explains a lot about me, and I agree, although I think I have different reasons for saying so. As an undergraduate, I even took an entire class on “the horror film,” taught by a great professor of film—Mark Charney at Clemson. We watched a lot of amazing horror films in that class, everything from the original Frankenstein (1931) to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980), yet I don’t ever remember being scared by any of the films.

Now I find myself getting way too scared by horror movies. Some of them don’t scare me, like Jeeper’s Creepers (2001), or any other movie about a simple killer/creature. These movies are all the same. I just watched The Grudge (2004) last night, though, and I was pretty creeped out by it, at least until the end. Overall, it was a pretty terrible movie, I think, not explaining much about the killers, etc. In fact, it was pretty similar to the plot of any 80s horror film—creature comes back from the dead to kill everyone, and now we get to watch as the people die in their various ways. Not too exciting, to say the least. All we’re really doing is waiting to watch the people die because we know that’s what’s going to happen anyway. Even the death scenes weren’t that compelling, either. One of my friends would always comment that you could tell a good horror film by the death scenes (The Omen (1976) being a wonderful example), and this one couldn’t even pull those off.

But the movie made me think about other horror films that still scare me when I think about them, and I can point to three of them in particular—The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Ring (2002). Yes, two of them are big budget Hollywood films, but I have never held that against them as some horror critics do. And The Blair Witch Project is an amazing movie for many reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed here. It redefined the genre and scared me in the process. Many people say it isn’t scary, and I don’t understand them. That movie freaked me out.

Then there is The Sixth Sense, which most people call a thriller. But let’s face facts here: as the director of Cabin Fever (2002) (another great horror film, although not scary) says, The Sixth Sense is a horror film that calls itself a thriller in order to win Academy Awards. There are images from that movie that still frighten me when I’m alone at night.

The Ring, however, is the scariest film I have seen in a long time, and watching The Grudge made me think about why these new horror films are scary. As a side note, let me say that I saw Ringu (1998) after seeing the American version, and I didn’t like the Japanese version nearly as well. It wasn’t as visually scary, and it didn’t develop the plot like The Ring did. I understand that the American version used elements from the sequels, and I think it made for a better movie.

I will have to give you my take on new horror films another day, though. This has already run a bit too long. Stay tuned next time for Part II.

As a side note, I’m halfway through Drew Barrymore’s Ever After (1998), and I’m contemplating putting it in the horror category.

2005-07-12T06:14:00.000-07:00

Robin Williams and The Fisher King

Finally a post that doesn't try to give some silly, unsubstantiated analysis of a film. This time, I pick on actors.

You see, sometimes there are actors that generally annoy me. Drew Barrymore is one. She generally picks terrible roles, and her persona off-screen seems to be a conglomeration of her characters on-screen.

Robin Williams is another of those actors that has always annoyed me. When I was a kid in the 80s, I loved him. Mork and Mindy was great, and Popeye (1980) was awesome. The way his forearms swelled always reminded me of my Dad’s strength. What do you want? I was four years old…I saw The World According to Garp (1982) when I was really young and didn’t really get most of it (Why did you let me watch that movie when I was eight, Mom?). And Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) is a wonderful film. Even Aladdin (1992) is my favorite Disney film, perhaps the only watchable one, because Robin Williams just goes crazy in it. Watching him on old talk shows is great, too, because he really is a spot-on, manic, funny man.

But then he started trying to act, and it all went downhill. Dead Poets Society (1989) was just overwrought and overly romantic. Awakenings (1990) was decent, but it kept beating me over the head with a silly message again and again. Cadillac Man (1990), Toys (1991), Hook (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and on and on goes the list of terrible films he has been involved in. And don’t even get me started on The Birdcage (1996). People kept trying to get me to see that movie, and I actually went with my parents, who freaked out at all of the homosexual stuff. I was embarrassed and couldn’t even laugh at the funny parts (which were limited anyway). Nathan Lane was the film’s only saving grace, and he was drowning in his own hamminess.

And then I saw Good Will Hunting (1997), and I didn’t even recognize this guy. Here, the story was good, the dialogue was good, and Robin Williams was actually quite powerful. He wasn’t even trying to make me laugh, and he was pulling it off. But then he went right back to the schlock of Patch Adams (1998), Jakob the Liar (1999), and Bicententnial Man (1999). Until Insomnia (2002), where he again shined. He was convincing, and the film was good (probably due to the great director and Al Pacino more than anything else).

Now I just watched The Fisher King (1991) for the first time since it came out. I remember liking it fourteen years ago, but it didn’t make a huge impression on me. This time, it did. Sure, it’s a bit hokey, and everything is wrapped up too quickly at the end, but the plot is great, the actors are great, and it isn’t just completely cheesy with one-dimensional characters. Even, gasp! Robin Williams is spectacular in it. He’s kind of the same character in parts as the one he played in Patch Adams, but it works in this film. We see parts of him we don't see again for five years.

So it appears that Robin Williams made a good dramatic film fourteen years ago. Am I wrong about him, then? Should he be crossed off the list of annoying actors? Not yet.

Williams started on Laugh-In in 1977, and in nearly thirty years, he has been involved in 66 film or television products. That’s more than two a year! No wonder he bricks more than he scores! This guy can’t seem to turn down a film, even crappy ones. He just cranks them out like the terrible sausage they are, one after the other, until finally he gets a good one. And then back to the sausage mill he goes cranking out another five years of bad films.

So Williams, my advice is to be a little more choosy. One movie a year is plenty. Then maybe I will cross you off my annoying list.

2005-07-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Isolationism and Troubled Times

I admit that I may have been misleading last time. I can’t think of any conservative films, at least not right now. And after thinking more about it, I have decided that the film I wanted to talk about is really a condemnation of conservatism, at least of the kind practiced by the Pat Buchanan types. But this film also projects at least initial support for Bush-type agendas.

I’m sure you have all guessed the film by now. It is, of course, M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film The Village. Yeah, it’s pretty blatant isn’t it? Not really, I know, but sarcasm doesn’t come through too well in blogs like this. Perhaps sincerity is a better tactic: The Village condemns isolation for a more interventionist policy.

I hate to just rehash plots, but I have to to make this analysis work. Shyamalan’s films are all centered around a “surprise” at the end, and I’m going to give that surprise away here. If you have not seen the film, go onto my next blog.

In The Village, a group of adults in the 1960s/1970s has each experienced a terrible tragedy related to the horrors of city life. And they meet one another in a counseling center, probably discussing the tragedies of their lives. So they get together and decide to forsake the city to create a new life as Luddite-type people who are completely removed from society. Not only do these people not participate in any activity associated with contemporary life, but they create scary monsters and stories to keep future generations from ever leaving the compound to see what city life is for themselves. The one girl who does leave is treated with kindness, and she even comments that the person she meets is not like what she expected from “the towns.”

The life on the compound is actually treated with great respect by Shyamalan. He doesn’t condemn it or suggest that it's ridiculous. Instead, it is seen as a valid alternative lifestyle. At least until the end, that is. Jealousy, evil, and even murder cannot be kept out of the compound, as we see everything basically crumble, and the alternative lifestyle becomes partially untenable. Then the people must break their vows to never return to the towns in order to get medicine that will save Phoenix’s character.

It’s a provocative premise, if not a great movie. The “surprise” at the end works against the premise, I think, because we forget about the premise by the end. Instead, it’s “Oh, so that’s what that was.”

But the plot is basically about isolationism as a viable alternative, treated with respect, and perhaps even the better way to live. But this isolationism cannot be sustained, and really doesn’t produce a perfect society, anyway. The people must break their vows and go outside their compound in order to survive.

So isolationism is out and interventionism is in. We are left to wonder how far they take their new relationship with the towns, but the fact is that it’s now an alternative. And once that happens, it’s…well, Iraq all over again…

2005-07-07T06:29:00.000-07:00

Dirty Liberal Invasion Films

I saw X-Men 2 in March/April 2003, and it was right after the invasion of Iraq officially began. There were a lot of news stories about why we were invading Iraq, and the debate was actually pretty fierce. Halliburton was all over the place, and in Houston, there were protests outside KBR (Halliburton subsidiary) headquarters downtown. Basically, the liberal view was that this war was being orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfiwitz, et al. as a means to control oil and to simply make money from government contracts. I didn’t buy it, at least not wholly. Nothing’s ever quite so simple, I maintain.

And then X-2 enters in the middle of this. If you have seen the movie, you know who the bad guys are—a private corporation that runs a paramilitary group and wants to eradicate all dissidents, I mean all difference, I mean, anyone who isn’t just like everyone else.

Not far into the film, this paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the government and acting as the U.S. army, invades the Xavier school. To save one the students, Wolverine brutally kills many of these soldiers. When he first killed one, I jumped. First of all, killing is generally minimal in these action movies—it’s generally limited to the main bad guy. The rest are either robots or simply knocked unconscious. Here, though, we get to see the good guys (the X-Men) kill the bad guys (soldiers in army uniforms who are simply doing their jobs). It was shocking to see the U.S. military in the role of the enemy, the bad guy, as it were.

Am I hinting that Bryan Singer is commenting on Iraq in this film? Not really. I do think films take on special prescience according to the cultural climate of the time, however. X-2 certainly seemed shocking at that point in time, where it would not have if it had been released five years earlier. Is the paramilitary organization actually Halliburton? No, I wouldn’t go that far. But the film does comment on the role and power of such organizations to manipulate government—see Patriot Act, etc.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith contains similar elements. In this film, we get lines like Skywalkers—“If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” And Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.” Or Padme’s “This is the way democracy dies—with thunderous applause,” when the Senate agrees to give the Chancellor supreme power. I may have gotten the exact quotes wrong, but you get the jist. Being released in 2005, we can’t help but read these lines as comments on the Bush administration.

And then there’s Spielburg’s War of the Worlds. Consider the basic plot—aliens have been planning this invasion for a long time. They have superior intelligence and technology, and they can easily wipe out the humans. The invasion begins, and they begin chewing up everything, terraforming to create their own world on top of ours. And what happens? They didn’t plan for every contingency, that’s what happens. Smartest beings in the universe, and they forget to bring their gas masks. Or more metaphorically, they didn’t plan on the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not the people that fights them off, but the climate itself.

I will ask myself the same question: is War of the Worlds an allegory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s way too complicated, I think. What is undeniable, though, is that an invasion movie is released in 2005, while the U.S. is still in the middle of its own invasion. The movie must therefore take on special prescience, or undertones, that it would otherwise not really have. It easy to substitute the U.S. for the aliens—they plan the invasion, go and wipe everything out in order to create their own land and government, and yet that little bit of resistance continually gnaws at them until they die, or in this case, leave. But I would never seriously suggest such an allegory (although I just did!). Instead, I would say that the film is commenting on invasions and how they never work. Resistance can come in many different forms, but it always comes.

Sometimes movies can be dirty little conservative films, too, and I will talk about one of those next time.

2005-06-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

A Pointless War

Steven Spielburg's War of the Worlds opened last night, and I was disappointed. After seeing that it received 72% fresh on http://www.rottentomatoes.com/, I expected much more from it, and, thus, I was let down. Spielburg's action is generally amazing, and this film definitely delivers on this account, but the story itself just seemed pointless.

Warning: if you have never seen the original War of the Worlds, or you have no idea what happens in this movie, you may not want to continue. I try not to give anything major away, but if you didn’t know this was an alien invasion movie, I suggest you go read another review.

There have been numerous stories of alien invasions, but the difference with this one is that we stick with Tom Cruise’s character (Ray Ferrier) the entire time. Besides brief expositions before the movie actually begins and again at the very end, we have no idea why this alien invasion has occurred, or even why it has suddenly stopped. All we see is Cruise and his kids trying to survive it.

Which isn’t all bad. The acting here is really great, and the family dynamics are interesting, too. My problem with this film is that there is no point to the invasion. I think back to Shayamalan’s Signs, which is a highly flawed movie, and I realize that what made that movie so compelling and different from other invasion movies is the reason for the invasion. The entire invasion occurred as a means for Mel Gibson’s to renew his faith in God. Crazy, perhaps, but it works to draw us into a logic behind the invasion. In Spielburg’s invasion movie, we know nothing. The narrator (Morgan Freeman) hints that the aliens were jealous of our planet, but this is never developed. Instead, the invasion simply happens, Cruse and company wade through it, and then the movie ends. As Bill Paxton says in Aliens, “Game over, man!”

The movie is also pretty tortuous for the audience, partly because of Spielburg’s mastery of suspense, and partly because of his relish of what develops into simple gore. This movie is “taut,” as one friend put it, because it keeps the audience on the edge of its seat the entire time. Even though we all know what is going to happen (this is a remake, after all), we still don’t know exactly how it’s all going to go down (Spielburg makes quite a few changes from the originals). Think Titanic on a global scale: yes, we know the ship is going to sink, but it can be a fun ride, too.

The goriness of War of the Worlds still disturbs me, because it’s unlike Spielburg. Saving Private Ryan was difficult to stomach, for sure, but there was a real point to it. We had seen similar things in Braveheart, but Spielburg was able to translate it to modern warfare, to show the human lives beyond the statistics. And it was compelling. And rated R. This movie is PG-13, and that’s a mistake, I think. One thing in the movie just seemed weird, and then it turned out to be really disgusting and, well, plain unnecessary. Spielburg knows that the hint is more terrifying than the specific, yet he eventually gets bogged down in this flick. He should remember Jaws, or Close Encounters and forget AI and Jurassic Park. In a lot of ways, this movie is akin to that dino blockbuster—it’s a big thrill ride gone awry.

What made his earlier films so good was the suspense but also the creativity behind the dramatization. Here, once we see the aliens, Spielburg is forced to just make us wait for it again and again. And the movie seems like one escape after another, until it simply, well, ends. And I was actually glad it did.
This movie is not all bad, by any means. The suspense and the visuals were worth watching. The digital effects were mind-numbing, making me say “how’d they do that?” That’s a phrase that I never say anymore, not since digitalization became so advanced. In fact, I don’t think I had said it since Jurassic Park. Like that movie, the digital effects may be the best thing War of the Worlds has going for it.