Bad
Company Bad
Company Looking through director Joel Schumacher's resume
shows some surprising entries. He wrote and directed St. Elmo's Fire?
He wrote The Wiz and Car Wash? I had no idea. I mention this
only because I couldn't come up with a way to start this review.
Bad Company is a cookie cutter exercise.
Jake Hayes (Chris Rock) makes his money hustling chess in the park and
scalping tickets. He is recruited by the CIA when his twin brother, an
agent in the middle of negotiating the purchase of a nuclear bomb, is assassinated.
Hayes goes through the whole La Femme Nakita training routine, under
the increasingly exasperated eye of Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins). In
a scant nine days, he is ready.
Rock and Hopkins are jarring together. It's not
that there isn't chemistry, there is. It's more a question of competing
influences. Hopkins will dominate a scene, and there will be tense drama,
and then Rock will pop his head into the frame with a clever one liner.
It's as if his contract stipulated he say one funny thing every two minutes,
regardless of the mood at that particular moment. While often funny, the
jokes are distracting in their timing.
The story meanders through some unneeded subplots,
inevitably crashing into an expensive, stunt man laden chase / fight sequence
at the end, where we are treated to yet another digital countdown which
stops less than one second before the bomb blows.
Grade: C-
Dogtown
And Z-Boys Here's an angle: I'll get rich being the guy who
reviews documentaries about subjects he has no interest in. I've done Keep
The River On Your Right, Chop Suey, Scratch, Life
And Debt, Better Living Through Circuitry, and American Pimp.
Now
comes one about skateboarding in the seventies. Dogtown was one of the
last rundown beach areas in California and the Z-Boys were the Zephyr Team,
pioneers in the sport whose influence is still felt, or so the movie tells
me.
It's strength is that it plays like a script. The
team has humble beginnings as surfers at a fiercely locals only, run down
beach. The surfers emulate the moves of their favorites on skateboards,
something done to pass the afternoon after the waves have died down. They
get some fame, some ride the fame to money, others don't. There's even
a glorious last stand where a split apart team reunites for one last fling.
The story is told through an insane amount of archival
material, interviews with everyone involved (except the guy "Last seen
in Mexico"), and a style that evokes how much fun everyone was having.
Grade: A-
The
Son Of The Bride There's nothing I like more than when a movie hits
me out of nowhere. Sure, looking forward to a film and enjoying it is good,
but nothing matches being moved by a film that started out as nothing more
than an entry on the week's to do list.
The Son Of The Bride is a tender look at
a man at mid-life crisis age. He doesn't go out and buy a sports car or
bag a trophy wife. He takes stock, keeps the things of value, lets other
things go, and moves on. Rafael (Ricardo Darin - one of the con men in
the excellent Nine Queens) is having trouble running the family
restaurant, suppliers are giving him grief, a deposit hasn't cleared the
bank, employees are late. His relationship with his daughter and divorced
wife are as rocky as with his girlfriend. To top it all off, his father
comes up with the idea of having a big church remarrying with his Alzheimer's
stricken wife, who Rafael hasn't seen in over a year anyway. Then two things
happen. An old childhood friend gets back in touch and he has a heart attack.
It all sounds terribly cheesy and formulaic, but
it is written with a tenderness and restraint that makes you all but forget
that these are standard plot elements we've all seen before. Darin joins
my list of favorite foreign actors with a role 180 degrees different than
one I saw him in just a few weeks ago. The script doesn't pander for cheap
emotion, adding a lot of funny moments.
Grade: A
Chelsea
WallsChelsea Walls is a pretentious, pseudo-deep, poorly lit, hard to look at (thanks to its use of digital cameras) load of whiny, I'm-a-true-artist-because-I'm-starving-and-can-say-things-that-sound-deep-but-make-no-sense load of crap. If you feel like sitting around for two hours watching a disjointed story set in the famous hotel for artists, more power to you.
Grade: D
REVIEW #2, ONE MONTH LATER:
I need to take another pass at this review. This
is something I have yet to do in my four years of reviewing movies. This
summer has been mercifully light on truly awful films. As I sit through
films that could, at worst, be described as mediocre, I think about the
real stinkers of the year, and this one comes up time and again. I find
it impossible to believe that I gave it a passing grade.
Chelsea Walls is the directorial debut of
Ethan Hawke. It was shot for some ridiculously low amount of money using
digital cameras. The medium does open up the doors to let in filmmakers
who might not otherwise get to make a movie, but that's not always a good
thing. Hawke parlayed his name to get a few bucks and some recognizable
names. The result shows in painful detail why actors shouldn't just be
handed a camera and allowed to direct. Scenes play out as if he set up
the camera, pushed record, shouted "Action!", and wandered off for a cup
of coffee. He chose (or was dumb enough to think it was a good idea) to
light most scenes with only the lighting already present in the room or
with light coming in from outside windows. It's hard to get into a scene
when you literally (yes, literally) can not see the characters. Hey Ethan,
I don't think a couple of fill lights would have compromised your artistic
integrity.
And what of the story? You really don't want to
know. It is set in the famous Chelsea Hotel, haven for artists. The story
jumps from room to room as we get to be a fly on the wall and listen to
some of the
most self-pitying, morose, pretentious layabouts you could ever hope to
run into. Every character is drawn from the idea that if you are a drunk
or an addict (preferably both), everything that comes out of your pen or
your brush or your typewriter is True Art.
It is the invalid syllogism:
True art is produced through suffering
I am suffering
Therefore, what I am producing is true art
No, it is not true art, you and your audience are
just too strung out to realize it's utter crap.
Ethan Hawke will have you believe that he is one
of the last embodiments of the soul of the beat generation. Indeed, this
is the kind of movie that people to whom that means something can look
down their nose and say I just don't get it because I don't appreciate
true art, or I don't have an artist's soul, or some similar BS. Don't fall
for it, this is a movie devoid of any value as true art or anything else
for that matter. Just because you may appreciate the place an artist is
coming from doesn't automatically make anything they do good.
Grade: F
The
Bourne Identity Here's one sure fire way to get me to like your movie:
populate with lesser well known actors that I like. I watched this thing
saying "Hey! Look who it is!" every so often. Sure, there's Matt Damon
as Jason Bourne, super spy, assassin who has lost his memory and tries
to figure out just who he is, why his Swiss bank safety deposit box has
so much money and half a dozen fake passports, and why he is so darned
good at kicking ass. Yeah, we all know about him, nothing special there.
But you go past Matty boy and there's a lot of other
talent. You've got costar Franke Potente (of Run Lola Run) as Marie,
a woman whose help Jason enlists. Back home at super spy headquarters,
Chris Cooper and his boss Brian Cox (L.I.E.) send out operatives
to stop Jason at any cost. One is played by Clive Owen (the Croupier
himself), a really fine actor, who it amused me to know end swaggers his
way through the movie without a single line of dialogue until his final
scene. Helping out in Paris is the communications expert played by Julia
Styles.
Even if you're not there to play Spot The Supporting
Cast, you should still have a good time. It's a well paced and exciting
thriller as Jason and his innocent female companion dash around Europe
one step ahead of their pursuers.
Grade: B
The
Sum Of All Fears I could go on and on, but my thoughts on this one
can be summarized in a few sentences. I have other things to do, I don't
feel like bullshitting for a page and a half.
The movie presents an effective "what if?" scenario
concerning nuclear attack, not from another country, but from a rogue group
(the politically correct choice here being Neo-Nazis). The actual plotting
is not that great. It requires our hero, Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) to be
everywhere that something is happening, do everything that needs doing,
and to do so quickly and efficiently. It's pretty darn lazy, especially
when you get to final crisis point.
But what counters that is this impression you get
from Tom Clancy that he knows what the hell he's talking about. He may
be full of crap, I don't know, but the actual information is presented
with an authority (and with some pretty damn good special effects) that
makes you watch.
The end result is well researched cliché
that I responded somewhat positively to for some reason.
Grade: B-
The
Imporatnce Of Being EarnestFor the most part, this is a pointless review. You're either the kind of person who enjoys an English, period costume comedy / romance based on a play by Oscar Wilde or you're not. I will say that I did think the movie kind of dragged a little bit at points and was kind of flat. But like I said, that's kind of beside the point.
Grade: B-
CQ It is Paris 1969 and a science fiction movie called
Dragonfly
set in the far off year 2000 sits without an ending. The original director
(Gerard Depardieu) has been fired, and the young American editor Paul Ballard
(Jeremy Davies) takes his place. Ballard is in Paris to make his own film,
a work of "total honesty", which petty much consists of him sitting around
in his bathroom talking to the camera and filming everything in his apartment.
There's some juicy internal conflicts to be had
here which would have made a pretty good movie. You could have Ballard's
struggle to make his totally honest film conflict with the bloated, sci-fi
epic which is paying the bills. You could look into how his crumbling relationship
is further eroding with his increasing infatuation with the Valentine (Angela
Lindvall), the actress playing the title role of Dragonfly. Hell, you could
even look at the artistic impotence he must feel as he can't come up with
an ending.
But unfortunately, writer/director/relative Roman
Coppola skims the surface of all of those possibilities, coming up with
a meandering film which never really seems to come to any sort of point.
Grade: C+
American
Chai The reason I support independent film is because,
by definition, it is free of the studio system, where a story might pass
through dozens of hands in the trip from the writer's mind to the screen
where it is diluted beyond recognition. In a way, I don't blame the system,
I'd want some say if it were my twenty million dollars on the line. That's
not to say that independent filmmakers have some sort of magical gift where
everything they touch turns to gold. Take American Chai for example.
Sureel (Aalok Mehta) is a first generation Indian-American. His parents
still live by the value systems of their own country. Sureel is not allowed
any girlfriends, can't drink, can't party, and can't even see R rated movies.
Of course, Sureel has been sneaking around behind their back for years,
culminating at college where instead of majoring in pre-med like his parents
think (and are paying for), he is a music major. There are some pretty
effective sequences where we learn that college kids are college kids,
no matter what their background and what their parents may think they are
up to.
The script, however, relies on every genre cliché
it can get its hands on. Sureel breaks up with one girl, and starts going
out with another that it is obvious he should be with. Of course, this
girl is amazing, yet hasn't caught the eye of anyone else before him. Of
course there's a scene where girlfriend number one wants back with him
and girlfriend number two walks in at exactly the most inopportune moment.
The father flips out when he discovers the truth, but comes around when
it is pointed out that he did pretty much the same thing to his own father.
I could go on.
But still, there is something here, being and indie
film, where the sins of the script don't seem as bad. I can't put my finger
on it, but I didn't seem to mind that I had seen this plot dozens of times
before.
Grade: B-
13
Conversations About One Thing I'll give it away: they're all about happiness.
They're also all between mopey, whiny, downers.
The only character that generates any sort of sympathy or interest is a
manager in an insurance claims office played by Alan Arkin. It is impossible
to get into any of the rest of the movie because the characters are so
flat and uninteresting. The twist that is supposed to bring it all home
is that the characters are connected to one another by random events in
their lives (think a poor man's Magnolia)
Grade: C+
Scooby
Doo The word is that, as originally envisioned, this
was going to be a movie more for twenty-somethings who grew up watching
Scooby Doo on TV. There were going to be Scooby and Shaggy pot jokes, there
was going to be a whole Daphne-Velma lesbian subplot, that sort of thing.
Of course, someone blinked, and we are left with this sanitized version,
rated PG only because of some sequences that might be too scary for some
of your more sensitive youngsters.
So instead of what had the potential to be a pretty
damn good movie, Scooby Doo ends up being a pleasant enough way
to waste an hour and a half. The story is bland enough that nothing of
it really sticks with you, but you're not upset at having lost ninety minutes
of your life.
Grade: C
Windtalkers John Woo gets to do a WWII movie. <sarcasm>Yay,
just what I've been waiting for</sarcasm>. Movie in a nutshell: ten
minutes of bloody, Saving-Private-Ryan-was-made-by-wusses battle
followed by five minutes of war movie cliché conversation. Honestly,
this thing even stooped to having the "What are you doing after the war?"
scene.
It's the story of Sergeant Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage)
who was the only survivor of a unit assigned to hold some ground. Freshly
recuperated, he is back in action, and does he have some demons to work
through.
Oh yeah, I seem to remember there was also some
brief bits about how the army used Navajos to transmit coded messages because
the Japanese couldn't crack their language. But since this movie is about
Enders, there's really only time to show their code talking skills in action
a few times. They get to radio in coordinates and link scenes with late
night banter ("We're in a secure location. Request hot chow and mail call.")
One gets the feeling that the film could have been called Fry Cook
and the end product would have been the same.
Grade: C-
Minority
Report There are certain things you resign yourself to as
a movie goer. Budget is inversely proportional to quality. If your star
cost you twenty million dollars, he, or the script written to accommodate
the investment will drag the project into the sewers. The bigger the director,
the bigger the laurels on which he rests. Special effects subtract exponentially
with their cost. Action is to intelligence as oil is to water.
It is generally a good thing when the beliefs to
which you cling occasionally make you look like an ass.
To say that Minority Report has everything
would be an understatement, and yes, I do see the semantic problem with
that statement.
The film is set in a future Washington DC where
murder has been all but eliminated. Genetic mutations have led to the existence
of "pre cogs". Three sit in water tanks, isolated from the outside world
and see murders before they happen. The vision is reported, the pre-crime
unit swoops in and arrests the guilty party before he has a chance to become
the guilty party.
A national referendum is on deck to decide the question
of whether the program should be expanded. Nothing would make lead detective
John Anderton (Tom Cruise) happier, except that the Justice Department
has poked its nose in. Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) is their investigator.
He says he's just there looking for flaws. Anderton knows he's there to
try to find an excuse for the Justice Department to take the whole program
away for themselves.
An apparent flaw does develop when Anderton is seen
to be guilty of a future murder. Further, the victim is someone he's never
heard of. His absolute faith shaken, he goes on the run not only to clear
his name, but also to figure out what went wrong with the system. He gets
some information and a disguised identity (in a squirm inducing sequence
featuring the always fabulous Peter Stormare) and comes to the conclusion
that he must kidnap Agatha (the always fabulous Samantha Morton), one of
the pre cogs.
Nothing gets shortchanged. Minority Report
melds as many disparate elements and melds them well as I can remember
in recent movies. The effects, spectacular as they are, serve the plot,
they are not the showcase. As an example, take the computer interface,
which involves manipulating the screen like a conductor. The action never
degenerates to explosions and car chases for the sake of employing stuntmen.
One chase in a shopping mall actually has Anderton standing still in plain
view for much of it. The suspense and mystery aspect is exciting. Anderton
takes the time to stop and think and solve the puzzle he's been thrown
in to. Is he really guilty or just being set up? And if he is being set
up, how did the guilty party beat a supposedly infallible system?
I don't whip this out too often, but bravo to Steven
Spielberg and all involved.
Grade: A