February, 2005




    The Assassination Of Richard Nixon

Official Site | IMDb

    Sam Bicke (Sean Penn) is a self described grain of sand. He has a low end job selling office furniture that he's not very good at, he can't get a small business loan to get his tire business idea off the ground, he's separated from his wife. He's a loser of a guy who doesn't realize it and keeps plugging away. What he thinks he realizes is how unfair the world is. He considers quitting his job because his boss played a trick on him. We learn that earlier in his life he left his brother's business because what he considered good salesmanship, Sam considered lying. He thinks his black friend Bonny (Don Cheadle) should be more outraged at every perceived slur. He even tries to join the Black Panthers.
    His madness comes to a head in the form of Richard Nixon. Set near the time Nixon resigned, Sam sees Tricky Dick as the ultimate salesman and the ultimate symbol of what is wrong. He was elected to his first term by promising that he would withdraw from Vietnam, didn't withdraw from Vietnam, and then won a second term making the same promise. Sam hatches a scheme to hijack an airplane and crash it into the White House (this plan is based on a true story, the rest of Sam's life is more or less fictional). The smallest grain of sand will topple the most mighty. He records all of his thoughts and mails the tapes to Leonard Bernstein.
    For as great of an actor as Sean Penn is, it is his questionable acting choices that hurt the film. In real life, he's a guy who doesn't take anything from anybody. He's talented, confident, and recognized as being one of the best. These are all things that Sam Bicke is not. Sam Bicke is the polar opposite of Sean Penn, and Penn seems a little bit lost in the role. He conveys Bicke by stuttering and stammering his way through every scene. He goes a little too far in making Bicke out to be a loser. It comes across as caricature. There's very little that is human there.
   
Grade: C+

    Finding Neverland

Official Site | IMDb

    Now that it has been nominated for an Academy Award, your girlfriend will insist that you go see this. Don't worry, it's harmless enough. You'll have a good time.
    It's another one of those good, solid movies that I have absolutely nothing to say about other than it was a good, solid movie.
    Johnny Depp plays JM Barrie, playwright. His latest was a flop. While in the park writing, he makes the acquaintance of four young boys and their mother (Kate Winslett). Several months, a failed marriage, and lots of scandalous gossip later, Peter Pan is written.
    Is it worthy of the praise? Yes. Can I think of a damn thing to say about it? No.

Grade: A-

    Hide And Seek

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    Hide And Seek offers an interesting case study in two careers on different trajectories.
    First you have Robert DeNiro. He's made both his money and his name, and now seems to be motivated only by paychecks. The rumor, read in another review, is that he won't even look at a script if the fee is less than four million dollars. He's gotten to the point where he just doesn't seem to care anymore. He hasn't done anything of substance in a long time. Hell, he started off the decade by starring in The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle.
    Second you have Dakota Fanning. She is now ten years old. Her first movie role of the decade was as "Little Girl In Park" in the Jerry O'Connell "film" Tomcats. She then went on to an award winning turn in I Am Sam, and an impressive job in the otherwise crappy Man On Fire. sure, she's also been in The Cat In The Hat, and Sweet Home Alabama, but work can be scarce if you're a pre-teen. A role in a movie like Hide And Seek gives her a chance to anchor a movie, and show her skills. You can't just wait around for a starring role and a great script at that age. Sometimes one out of two is more than you can hope for.
    Each actor's reasons for taking the movie are obvious when you watch it. DeNiro, as widowed father David Calloway appears disinterested until the end, where his big opportunity to ham it up comes. Fanning, as his daughter Emily is good. She is scary good. You watch her and do not believe for a second that she is only ten. She sees this as an opportunity to impress people who might give her a better script and goes for it. Very professional of her to still do good work in a bad project.
    The story is not nearly as interesting as watching the two actors. David's wife dies, so he moves out to the country with Emily. Messages are scrawled on walls, pets meet their demise, all the while Emily blames it on Charlie, who David believes to be an imaginary friend. The antics escalate, it becomes clear that Charlie is real. Obvious suspects are trudged past us one by one - is it the neighbor who just lost his son, is it the cop that seems to be a little too into his work? When we find out who Charlie really is, it comes as a huge letdown. Not only does the answer turn out to be without imagination, it also doesn't play fair with what we have learned in the story so far.
    But go and rent this one. That Fanning kid better be a star.

Grade: C

    Boogeyman

Official Site | IMDb

    Shame on you Sam Raimi and Rob Tappert. You've got reputations that you should be considering. Why, oh why did you allow your names to be attached to this rancid pile of dog doo? Are you guys so intoxicated by your own recent, mainstream success that you're putting your names out for the highest bidder? Bruce Campbell should take you both out behind the woodshed and thrash you to within an inch of your life for being associated with Boogeyman.
    Young Tim Jensen, conveniently, lives in one of those great horror movie houses. It's an old, creaky, wood frame number that sits way out in the middle of nowhere. Tim's room, of course, is in the attic where all of his innocent bric a brac can loom menacingly in the nighttime shadows. One particularly scary night, the boogeyman takes his father away.
    Jump to fifteen years later (if this post office thing doesn't pan out, I'm going to start a business whose only product is captions that read "15 years later" in various fonts, I'll make a million) when adult Tim (Barry Watson) is still scared of closets. He gets a troubling message about his mother (Lucy Lawless, if you can believe it, who, at one point, gets to don the worst aging makeup I have ever witnessed), but decides to go off for a weekend with his girlfriend anyway. He has the first of many acid flashback dreams, and gets a call that his mother has died.
    Being the dutiful son, he races home, alone. He makes a quick stop at the Murrow Childrens (no apostrophe) Psychiatric Hospital where the doctor that treated him as a child helpfully suggests that the only way to get over his fear is top spend a night alone at the house where it all started. That's some solid advice, doc. Fortunately, the house has sat, as all the scary houses seem to, completely unoccupied and untouched by vandals since the day he left.
    People start disappearing. First his girlfriend Jessica (Tory Mussett), then his childhood friend Kate (Emily Deschanel), then his Uncle Mike (Philip Gordon). Plus, the creepy little kid that starts hanging out with him (Skye McCole Bartusiak) carries around missing children posters. If this were a movie that had any self respect, there wouldn't have been a boogeyman, it would have been Tim who was responsible. His flashbacks set him up as being terrorized by his father who would lock him in closets so he wouldn't be scared of the dark. What better entrée into the world of a schizophrenic serial killer? If you're that rare person who is both smart and stupid enough to see this movie, you'll have come to that pretty obvious conclusion pretty quickly.
    But this is a movie with no self respect. Turns out there really is a boogeyman behind it all. We take forever to get to that point, however. First we have to sit through a hopelessly bloated 86 minutes whose scares are as predictable as they are infrequent. It's quiet, it's quieter, it's even quieter, BAM! there's something in the closet. These rare moments are separated by mountains of padding - close ups of feet, Tim slowly moving down a hallway only to realize he doesn't want to see what's behind the door followed by Tim slowly moving back down the hallway, low angle shots that make it look like something is watching. Every bad horror trick is employed, not to shock, but to stretch this mess into a releasable length. The closing sequence is the weirdest. He walks into the abandoned house of an old cook (again, thoughtfully left untouched and uninhabited for fifteen years) where he figures out that he has to face the boogeyman. He chases the boogeyman from one house to the next, via closets, until he ends up in his childhood room. There he, as near as I could tell, looks at the boogeyman, breaks a doll that vaguely resembles something scary, and then kicks the boogeyman. "He's not coming back", Tim confidently proclaims. Why? Who knows. Just because Tim said so.

Grade: F

    Hitch             The Wedding Date

Official Site | IMDb                                     Official Site | IMDb

    Valentine's Day is upon us and with it brings a couple of safe romantic comedies for your unimaginative dating needs. These two films also are connected in the fact that they feature big time television stars in their first starring movie roles. The fact that one shows the right way to do it and the other the wrong way is a lazy movie reviewers dream.
    In Hitch, Kevin James is used correctly. He's a star, not the star. He plays Albert, a bumbling, comic relief kind of guy who sets his sights on Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta), a wealthy socialite well beyond his dating means. Enter Hitch (Will Smith) the date doctor who helps men land the women of their dreams. Land is the wrong word, he's more of a teacher, pointing out to the guys how their being jerks or insensitive or plain repulsive and how they can better themselves. He sees Albert as his crowning achievement. If he can fix this guy to the point where a millionaire heiress will take him, he can do anything.
    Hitch, meanwhile, has his own woman troubles. He's fallen for Sara (Eva Mendes) but can never seem to do the right thing around her.
    James is given the opportunity to have a major role in this movie, but not have the focus put completely on him. Hitch will not sink or swim because of anything he does. He's essentially a second banana to Will Smith, who only makes movies better by being in them (and yes, that includes Bad Boys II, by far the worst movie of a few years back). James has the chance to get his feet wet, learning from a very skilled practitioner of the genre who was given a decent script to work with. Armed with this experience, it might be Kevin James playing the top banana in a few movies time.
    The Wedding Date, on the other hand, tosses Debra Messing in a little over her head and doesn't give her much to work with. This is a script that seems to have written itself. I don't mean that in a nice way. Way back when, people believed in a thing called spontaneous generation. They believed, that if you left a piece of meat out to rot, the maggots that eventually appeared were created from the byproducts of the decaying meat. Life created from nothing. That's what I mean about the script writing itself. I sincerely hope that someone dropped a bagel behind a desk somewhere in Hollywood, and a month later, out of the mold popped this script. It would depress me to think that someone actually invested time and effort into this unimaginative and predictable at every turn work.
    Kat (Messing), single New Yorker, has to go to her sister's wedding in England. Instead of showing up solo, she hires a male escort she read about in The Times magazine. Nick (Dermot Mulroney) is in such demand because he has the gift of knowing exactly what women need, and becoming that. They fly off to England where all the pre wedding wackiness you could imagine, or have seen in other movies, happens. The best man is Kat's ex. The script never bothers to tell us whether or not she wants him back or if she just wants to use Nick to make him jealous. It's as if this subplot came from the pen of a fifth grader. The family is wacky, the step father remains mostly silent until he can deliver that killer piece of advice at the end, there are secrets, betrayals, and you see every single one of them pages ahead of the point they actually happen.
    This movie demands that Kat and Nick end up together, bringing happiness and fulfillment to both. Even though we know it has to happen, the utter disappointment in the fact that no reason is given for it is still there. It was as if whole pages of the script were missing (or did I just fall asleep....no I was awake). In a movie short on character development as it is, Nick only lets out that he has rules, and that it is all business for him. Suddenly, he forgets all that and is in love. You can't even try to tell me that he and Kat's adventures to that point were the most romantic he's had. If this was all it took for him to fall in love, he must not have been as good at his job as he let on. Mulroney just sort of broods through his role, playing business man Nick exactly the same as in love Nick. It was as if he had expected us all to have read the production notes and character backgrounds before we came to the theater. He acted as if we all were already in on the private joke.
    Messing is radiant. She's a joy to watch on the screen, but that is not enough. This is this year's Welcome To Mooseport. Messing needed (as did Ray Romano) to wait for a better script with multidimensional characters and which afforded an opportunity to shine as part of a more equal ensemble.

Grade: Hitch: B-  The Wedding Date: D+

    Constantine

Official Site | IMDb

    Constantine should be a mindless action flick, but it isn't. I say it should in the sense that this kind of story always is. We meet our hero, we meet our villain, there's a few sentences of exposition, and the ass kicking and car chasing begins and ends about the time the closing credits roll. This one is different. There are action scenes, but they are separated by long sections of back story. This is an idea heavy think piece.
    Constantine (Keanu Reeves) is trying to buy his way into heaven by protecting Los Angeles from demons that are trying to take it over. Nice thought, but he's told over and over again that it won't work. Earlier in life, he committed suicide and was resuscitated. Suicide is a mortal sin, one for which there is no redemption. Now that he has lung cancer, his efforts are a bit more frenzied. But, as the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) tells him, "You're fucked".
    Police detective Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz) seeks him out. Her sister apparently has committed suicide, but she doesn't believe it for a second. She wants Constantine's help. He helps by showing her how to see everything that he sees. The two go around talking about the philosophy of the situation among themselves and with a variety of colorful characters, before finally gettting to the business at hand of preventing Satan's son from taking over the world.
    This is a hard movie to gauge my reaction to. A lot of it was very interesting. Ideas are presented and talked about, and as an audience, we are given time to think about them. So what if there wasn't wall to wall action. That's not a bad thing, right? Constantine held my attention, just not in the way I was expecting it to.

Grade: B-

    Million Dollar Baby

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    The furor over Million Dollar Baby meant that I went into it knowing the surprise ending. I watched the movie as if I were watching it for the second time, looking for clues and foreshadowing. I think I enjoyed it more because of it. Or maybe I enjoyed it differently. If the ending were to hit me unawares, I would have respected the movie, but would have been very shaken. Knowing the ending, I was able to appreciate the skill with which the story builds to the ending, dropping hints along the way that something is going to happen.
    I'm writing this a month later, you all know the plot. Female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) wants to be trained by Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) who doesn't want to train women. Eventually, she and gym manager Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman) wear him down and he takes her on. He has an estranged daughter, she has no father. They're a perfect match.
    The reason this movie is so good is because the script slows down long enough for us to get to know the characters and grow to care what happens to them. So many movies leave us with nothing more than "you should care about him because he's the hero". Character development seems to be an under used art. Paul Haggis' screenplay has plenty of it. The ending is so devastating because of the ninety minutes that precede it.

Grade: A-