January, 2005
Beyond The Sea
Official Site | IMDb
Surprisingly enough, the most uncomfortable part of
this Bobby Darin biopic isn't Kevin Spacey's singing. Spacey has a
genuine respect for Darin, which is why he made this film. It seemed
like he was taking it one step too far when he insisted on doing all of
his own singing, but it turns out all right. Spacey more than holds his
own.
Not at all surprisingly, the most uncomfortable part
is the fact that a 45 year old Kevin Spacey is trying to play a twenty
something year old Bobby Darin. Add to that the fact that he spends the
movie wooing and later married to Sandra Dee played by a 21 year old
Kate Bosworth, and the creepy factor gets cranked way up.
The film itself is a weird melange (or was it a
miasma?) of fantasy and reality. The film opens with Darin walking
backstage on his way to a show. He takes the stage, starts singing,
sees a kid in the background and stops. Turns out he's filming a movie
about his own life. He goes to talk to the kid (William Ullrich) who
turns out to be Darin himself as a boy. Cue flashback to his childhood
where the two Bobbys get to talk with one another. He was a sickly
child. Rheumatic fever damaged his heart to the point where the doctor
said he'd be lucky to live to fifteen. He discovered music which kept
him going and gave him his ticket out of town. Instead of just leaving,
Spacey (who also wrote and directed the film) feels the need to lapse
into a fantasy sequence where he's accompanied out of town by a song
and dance number. "Wait, that didn't happen!" protests young Bobby.
"Memories are like moonbeams. Make of them what you will," responds old
Bobby. We are treated to this narrative interruption technique every so
often.
And so it goes. He meets Sandra Dee while making a
movie in Italy. Instead of seeing at least a rough approximation of
what happened, we see another dance number to "Beyond The Sea" as Bobby
follows her around town, popping up as a waiter or gardener or whoever
happens to be around. These scenes are technically proficient, but
still sometimes unintentionally funny.
And for a love song to Bobby Darin, which this
obviously is, Spacey spends a surprising amount of time dwelling on the
last few years of his life. Darin has an awakening of sorts when he
finds out something about his mother. He gives up show business (which
was passing him by anyway), grows a bad mustache, stops wearing a
toupee, lives in an Airstream trailer by the ocean, and writes protest
songs. Spacey spends what seems like an inordinately long time focusing
on the period where Darin wrote "Simple Song Of Freedom" and his desire
to get people to respond to it.
Grade: C+
House Of Flying Daggers
Official
Site | IMDb
You know, all that stuff I said Zhang Yimou's
previous film, Hero applies
here. This belongs to that genre of beautifully, epicly even, filmed
martial arts movies with romance, colorful costumes, elaborate sets,
and beautiful scenery. It is still so underrepresented in mainstream
America that most of us probably aren't capable of differentiating a
good film from a great one.
The House Of Flying Daggers are a resistance
movement, way back when, when these kinds of movies are set. A
policeman, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) goes to the new local brothel to
check out reports that one of the dancers there is not only a member,
but also the daughter of the old leader. He finds the blind Mei (Zhang
Zyi) who is indeed who he thinks she is. Jin gets sent on an undercover
mission, pretending to help her escape only to get deeper into the
organization. Unfortunately, the emperor's soldiers aren't in on the
plan, and they hunt down Jin and Mei.
The plot is a little more straightforward than Hero's, but who's here for a plot,
anyway? It is another visually stunning movie that, in a time and place
where we've only seen a small handful of movies of this kind, really
stands out. The fights aren't little, chopped up bits, but long takes.
If we continue to only get one or two a year, the genre will take
awhile to outstay its welcome.
Grade: B+
Hotel Rwanda
Official Site | IMDb
In 1994, Rwanda was torn by civil war between the
Tutsi tribe and the Hutu tribe. The world turned its head and looked
the other way. Soon, a million people had been killed.
Hotel Rwanda
is a movie of power, but diluted power. It stars Don Cheadle as Paul
Rusesabagina, the manager of one of the local luxury hotels who
shelters over 1200 Tutsis from Hutu mobs bent on genocide. He uses his
years of contacts to call in favors, finding generals willing to be
bribed to look elsewhere before they come to his hotel. The Tutsis came
to the hotel because that was where the UN was camping. They thought
their salvation lied with the international community who instead
played a game of not my problem. As news cameraman Jack (Joaquin
Phoenix) puts it "People will see the news and say 'That is terrible'
and go back to eating their dinner."
This is a very good movie, what keeps it from being
a great movie that really says something is the way the horror is soft
peddled. We see things through Paul's eyes. To this character,
everything is off at a distance. He sees a few seconds of footage a
film crew captured. Obviously empty houses burn on the street as he
drives by. People fall over dead after being bonked on the shoulder
with a machete. Even the movie's most powerful scene seems sanitized.
Paul realizes that in the pre dawn fog, those bumps he's driving over
are actually human bodies, and that the bodies stretch down the road as
far as the eye can see. The bodies are in that movie state where no one
is bloodied, no one is mangled, they're all just lying there
motionless. You have absolutely no trouble believing that, once the
take is over, all the extras will stand up and head over to craft
services for their free lunch.
How much do you fault the makers of this film for
this? It's all a matter of perception. Are they under budgetary
constraints that don't allow for extravagant scenes of butchery, or are
they trying to make a film that offends as few people as possible? It
sure felt like the latter to me, which is ironic considering that this
film was about making every Westerner who saw it feel ashamed for not
doing anything (which it does a half hearted job of) as much as it was
a movie about Paul (which they did a fabulous job of).
Grade: B+
Darkness
Official Site
| IMDb
Darkness
is a film of stunning ineptitude. Dimension Films originally planned to
release it on August 2, 2002. After pushing it back several times, it
dropped quietly on Christmas Day, 2004. This is, in fact, one of those
cases where a stink bomb of a movie sat on a shelf for reasons of
quality. It should have stayed there. The film was released in Europe
to a decent response. What we got to see in America was an edited
PG-13 version, rather than the original R version. From what I
understand, the only thing removed was some of the gore. The gore might
have made this film passable, barely.
The film opens with a grainy montage where we learn
that forty years ago, a bunch of kids were held captive in a house in
Spain. One child escaped. Forty years later, a family moves in. Mark,
the father (Iain Glen) has some sort of problem where he spontaneously
chokes and acts all kooky (he feels the need to take a pick ax to the
floor to find the "larvae" that talk about him behind his back). It is
painfully obvious, long before we're supposed to be surprised by it,
that he is the child who escaped. Maria, the mother (Lena Olin) is one
of the most poorly written characters I have ever seen. She is utterly
convinced nothing is wrong. If this woman were in The Exorcist, she would pass off
the green vomit, the head turning 360 degrees, and the crucifixion
masturbation as the results of a mild case of indigestion. When a
large, ritualistic carving of a snake is found under the floor, she
thinks nothing of it and still thinks the daughter is making it all up.
The daughter, Regina (Anna Paquin) is the only one
with a head on her shoulders. It's lucky that everyone in Spain speaks
English, all the television programs are broadcast in English, and
every newspaper is written in English. It makes her investigations so
much easier. She becomes convinced that something is up with her
younger brother Paul (Stephen Enquist - another rotten child actor who
the director has the good sense not to give too many lines to). It
seems he's suddenly scared of the dark, sees children when the lights
go off, and gets mysterious bruises around his neck (which little Miss
optimist Maria claims are self inflicted as a mean of getting
attention).
The house suffers through all the Standard Scary
House symptoms. The lights flicker, there's a secret room, shadows move
in front of the camera, none of which creates any more than a tense
moment or two. It all exists for no purpose. Mark pulls a picture of
three women out of the secret room. Who are they? We're never told.
There's an old record player. Significance? None I could see.
Director Jaume Balaguero doesn't help set the mood
much either. In the movie's worst scene, Regina is left home alone and
the darkness starts to play tricks with her. We repeatedly go back to a
shot of a swing set being rained on in slow motion. It didn't make
sense to me either. I suppose I could give Balaguero the benefit of the
doubt and chalk this up to the people who reedited the movie, but what
would be the point. It certainly had to have been his decision to
create tension and show a panicked character by shaking the camera.
It turns out that forty years ago a ritual was
started where six children had to be killed by those who loved them
(please tell me you weren't in the least bit surprised when we find out
the grandfather was behind it all) to unleash "the darkness". To
complete the ritual, the child who escaped has to be killed during a
solar eclipse. Maria and boy toy Carlos (Fele Martinez) find this all
out over the course of an afternoon when they track down the architect
of the house who tells them he was told how to design the house by some
mysterious middle man to be a temple. Then, they stumble upon the
ancient text that describes the whole thing after about ten seconds of
browsing at the local public library.
Now never mind that we're never told what this
darkness is, or who the people were who wanted it released, or what
happens should it be released, or why anyone would want to release it,
details apparently don't matter. I guess we're just supposed to be awed
by the fact that evil wins. Oops gave it away. You know what that
means.....
Grade: F - with the full realization that the European version is at
least ten minutes longer and probably better
The Phantom Of The Opera
Official Site | IMDb
It's been one of those hip, pop culture type things
to rip on Andrew Lloyd Webber. I've done it, never quite knowing why I
was doing it. After all, one strives to be hip. Now, at the age of 32,
I have finally had my first Andrew Lloyd Webber experience, and I
understand: his music is total crap. I mean, I could figure out that
that was the reason why people slag on him, but until I actually had to
experience the pain of the repetitiveness and tunelessness of his music
and the triteness of the lyrics, I couldn't even begin to know.
The grade I should give this movie is a complete
mystery to me. On the one hand, you have the awful music and a story
which could be effectively told in twenty five minutes. On the other
hand, you have a beautifully mounted production, (cue phrase I never
thought I'd use) expertly directed by Joel Schumacher. The sets and
costumes were lavish.
When I got tired of listening to the music, I had
the opportunity to watch the two leads, who are obviously primarily
actors and not singers. Emmy Rossum was radiant as Christine, although
she never seemed to understand that when the voice on the soundtrack
was hitting some long, loud, high pitched note, her face should show at
least some effort. Gerard Butler as the strangely handsome Phantom
didn't even bother to learn the lyrics to "Music Of The Night". His lip
syncing errors, especially in that song, were numerous.
Grade: Ummmmm......let's see.....Awww, what the hell C-
White Noise
Official Site | IMDb
It's a movie setup so classic, it should be bronzed,
and then put into a drawer never to be used again. Jonathan Rivers
(Michael Keaton) wakes up to find a bright, sunshiny morning and his
loving second wife Anna (Chandra West) finishing up her breakfast.
Jonathan walks in on Anna dressing, hoping for a pre work quickie. The
glowing Anna announces she's pregnant. Hopping in the car, she smiles,
says "I love you", which Jonathan can't hear over the engine and speeds
away for another happy, contented day of wonderfulness.
You can't possibly do any more to doom a character
to death before the day is out.
But wait! All isn't lost! Raymond Price (Ian
McNeice) comes to the rescue with a good bit of news. Anna has been
trying to contact Jonathan via Electric Voice Phenomenon (EVP), the
process by which the dead try to communicate with the living through
televisions and radios not tuned to any stations. Jonathan and new
friend Sarah (Deborah Kerr Unger) buy in hook, line, and sinker and
start looking for messages. Sarah is able to maintain a normal life,
but Jonathan has one of those jobs that lets him sit around in a
bathrobe all day watching videotapes full of static. He eventually
finds Anna who starts giving him glimpses of people who are not yet
dead and need his help.
Now here's where they lost me. They're making a film
about a supernatural phenomenon popular with the Art Bell types, which
I would bet all but my very last dollar is pure malarkey. They can't
just make a movie about the phenomenon, they have to add all sorts of
stuff to the made up thing that isn't part of the made up thing. All
EVP is supposed to provide are grainy images and distorted audio
recordings. Suddenly, in this movie, the images are clear enough to
give recognizable clues, the voices are as if they're in the room, and
the whole thing becomes a sort of clairvoyant exercise. I don't need
more mythology on top my mythology. Sure, Suspect Zero wasn't a good movie,
but it played fair by the "rules" of technical remote viewing.
Another added aspect is that there are evil spirits
trying to communicate. Not only can they communicate, they can
apparently break out into our world and become corporeal creatures. The
spirits in this movie are represented by three shadowy figures who, we
are led to believe, are responsible for killing Price and later
trashing Jonathan's office.
Soon, Jonathan is in full Batman mode, protecting
the innocent. He's off after a woman who has disappeared. Anna sends
him visions saying she's in the same place where her own body was
found. Serial killer anyone? Not to give away an ending or anything,
but it seems that there are times when the evil spirits can work on
their own and times when they need to convince someone to do their work
for them.
Here is another movie where the trailer greatly
oversells the finished product. The trailer was creepy and promised
some good entertainment. The movie was a slow, murky, retread of things
we've seen a thousand times before with a paranormal phenomenon wedged
in for good measure.
Grade: C
Troubling trend - this movie was preceded by trailers for three
separate Scary House movies.
In Good Company
Official Site | IMDb
It's a wonder to me that there aren't more movies
like In Good Company. In a
time when so many movies are coming out made by so many different
people, I am amazed that almost every movie I see elicits some sort of
emotional reaction, whether positive or negative. If you run the
numbers, it would seem that there should be more movies, like In Good Company, that are supremely
average, neither good, nor bad. I'm sure I've mentioned others, but the
last one I can remember off the top of my head is Jennifer Lopez's The Wedding Planner, and that was
four years ago.
Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) is head of sales for a
sports magazine about to be bought out by Globecom CEO Teddy K (a
curiously uncredited Terrance Stamp). K is big into the whole
meaningless corporate jibber jabber thing. One of his rising stars,
Carter Duryea (Topher Grace) is sent in to take over for Dan. Now
Topher's a bright guy and realizes he's in over his head, so he keeps
Dan on as his "wingman" to show him the ropes.
The two men's personal lives are complete opposites.
Carter is a driven career man whose wife has just left him. Dan has a
loving, pregnant wife and a daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson) who is
about to enter college. Carter invites himself over for dinner one
night, and a relationship develops between him and Alex.
And that's about it for an emotionless 109 minutes.
The magazine starts failing, eh. They young lovers fall in to bed,
great. Dan worries about money, so what. The most fire this movie ever
shows is when Dan decks Carter after finding out about the
relationship. Other than that, it shows why movies so rarely reflect
actual real life (and not the "fake" real life we're led to believe
movies like Closer
represent). Most of our real lives are pretty ordinary, and not fodder
for an entertaining movie. These are real, honest, recognizable people,
and that is this movie's biggest problem. We can see all of these
people everyday at work. Why should I pay nine bucks?
The movie does have some nice, understated
performances and a wonderful soundtrack, so I can't give it a true
average grade.
Grade: C+
Elektra
Official Site | IMDb
Elektra is
an action adventure movie with limp action and lame adventure. It's
pretty hard to recover from that.
Elektra (Jennifer Garner), as you may remember from
the better-although-you-thought-nothing-could-possibly-be-worse Daredevil, was killed. She is
revived by Stick (Terrance Stamp), who preaches an inner peace, beat up
your opponents with staffs, know yourself, be the ball kind of
non-descript mysticism. By bringing her back from the dead and
incorporating religion, the writers were free to set this movie in a
completely different, supernatural universe than the movie which
introduced the character. How convenient.
Sometime before the movie, Stick has deemed Elektra
not worthy of his teachings and has expelled her from the idyllic,
drapery covered, forest shanty town that he uses as his training
compound. Elektra takes this poorly and becomes an assassin. The movie
opens with one of scenes that has nothing to do with the rest of the
movie where she kills a guy who isn't shown to be particularly evil. Is
Elektra a hero or someone who will kill anybody if the price is right?
Her next job takes her out to an island which
apparently only contains the vacation house she is put up in and a
house where Mark (Goran Visnjic) and his daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout)
live. The withdrawn Elektra strikes up a friendship. Three guesses as
to which supernatural child prodigy the target turns out to be when the
order comes down a few days later.
Elektra finds a conscious and goes on the run with
her new friends. It turns out that the hit was called in by a group
calling themselves The Order Of The Hand. There are two arms of this
sinister,
goalless uberevil. The first consists of a bunch of Japanese men in
suits sitting around a large table on the thousandth floor of a
skyscraper. The other is a group of superhero villains, each with their
own superpower. One can take a shotgun blast to the chest, and merely
wipe off the shot, another's breath can kill vegetation, yet a third
has tattoos that spout killer animals. This is all well and good until
they each become a nameless, faceless victim for Elektra to take out.
They went through the trouble of creating interesting villains and then
reduced them to the level of a Red Shirt from Star Trek.
There's no plot to speak of, giving plenty of time
for useless flashbacks and obvious nightmares. The fighting is poorly
realized, with most fights being between mismatched foes and lasting
only a punch or two.
Grade: D-
Assault On Precinct 13
Official Site | IMDb
Explain Ethan Hawke to me. Here's a guy who makes
big budget, Hollywood movies and uses the money, influence, and favors
he pulls down from those to make small, independent movies. That's not
unusual. What's unusual is the projects he's chosen in the last few
years. His Hollywood product consists of brain dead action movies (Training Day, Taking Lives, Assault On Precinct 13) - some bad,
some passable, but nothing where the focus is on the acting. His pet
indie projects (apart from the continuing story in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset) have all been
steaming loads of crap. A partial list of his
not-in-a-multiplex-near-you output consists of such names as Chelsea Walls (my worst film of
2002), the interminably talky, Richard Linklater tragedy Tape, and his original text, set in
modern day New York Hamlet.
Assault On
Precinct 13 is the familiar story of a handful of good guys,
under siege, holding out against an overwhelming foe. The good guys,
led by Hawke's Captain Roenick, are the skeleton crew on command during
the last night that Precinct 13 will operate out of its current
building. A snowstorm forces a busload (well, three) of prisoners to
take shelter in the building. The highest profile prisoner is Marion
Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), crime lord, cop killer. The siege comes
from a group of cops out to protect a secret.
It's a movie with silly problems, like the loud,
prolonged gun battles that no one seems to hear, or the forest in the
middle of the city, or the fact that the bus just happens to end up at
the right spot. But it is nice to see Gabriel Byrne again. And the
movie realizes the audience it is aiming for and doesn't skimp on the
violence. Most movies are too ratings conscious these days to show an
icicle going in the eye or a guy getting stabbed in the throat. It's
nice that the director gave us some credit for being grown ups.
Grade: C+
Alone In The Dark
Official Site | IMDb
There are movies that are so bad they're good. They
are rare. Even rarer are films that are so bad, they transcend being
good. You get tired of laughing at it and poking holes in the plot.
They're good for awhile, but they come out the other side again and
make you forget that you were enjoying yourself. They're so bad,
they're bad. (...and you get three hours of continuing credit toward
your philosophy degree if you can follow that)
You know you're in for a good time when the
backstory is given via a novel length crawl accompanied by a pompous
voiceover.
You get an inkling that you are in for something
really special when you meet the hero, Edward Carnby (Christian
Slater). He is dressed in a sleeveless muscle tee and a leather
overcoat. He jumps in a cab. He observes to the cab driver that they're
being followed. With a hearty "Do you want me to lose them?" a chase
ensues. Honest to God, the music was straight out of a seventies cop
show, with wacka-chicka guitars and horn section pops.
I crept forward in my seat, expectantly. Could it
possibly an F movie that I would recommend people see?
After the car chase, where Carnby escapes his killer
who was able to take two gunshots to the heart and live, we learn some
more backstory. Carnby is a paranormal researcher. He has returned from
Chile with an Abskani artifact. The Abskani believed that there were
two worlds, the light and the dark. They succeeded in opening a gate
between the two worlds and were wiped out before they could close it.
Carnby was one of twenty children experimented on 22 years ago in the
hopes of reopening the gate. To combat threats such as this, the
government set up Bureau 713 - The Agency For Paranormal Research. The
threat is so great that they have the budget for a continually manned
war room, and the ability to call in dozens of special forces soldiers,
tanks, heavy machine guns, and helicopter gunships at the drop of a
hat. Carnby used to work for them, and is not on very good terms with
the current leader, Commander Richards (Stephen Dorff).
Carnby learns that the other nineteen children from
the orphanage have disappeared (he was lucky enough to escape back then
so the experiment didn't take in him). He wants answers, so he calls on
his old 713 friend Fischer (Frank C. Turner) who reluctantly helps
("They'll kill me if they find out....but I'll check")
Meanwhile, back at the museum, assistant curator
Aline (Tara Reid....I will pause until you stop laughing....assisstant
curator....Tara Reid....I know...I know....lets get it together and
read the rest of the review, hmm?) who is Carnby's ex-girlfriend,
expert in Abskani artifacts, AND works for Professor Hudgens (Matthew
Walker), scientific advisor to Bureau 713, studies hard. As assistant
curator, Reid gets to wear metallic eye shadow, gobs of mascara, lip
gloss, skimpy outfits, and, I suppose so we'll buy that's she's really,
really smart, glasses.
Carnby pops in for a visit just as some form of
ultimate evil is unleashed by the traitorous crew of a ship Hudgens is
on. The monster makes it to the museum, looking for the artifact that
Carnby has. We know there's a threat because the lights keep going on
and off. No, there's no special, moody, lighting effect. Someone
literally flips the light switch on and off. After killing a guard
("Did you hear something?" Aline asks from a full ten feet away), the
monster chases down Carnby and Aline. Their solution against this phase
shifting, exoskeleton is to try and lock the door of the room they're
hiding in. Bad move. Fortunately Richards shows up to save the day.
The threat having passed, Aline and Carnby have time
to pause thirty seconds for sex.
Richards is called to an abandoned gold mine which
is conveniently just outside of town. The boys back at the 713 nerve
center say there is a high concentration of activity there. So,
everyone is off to fight the danger. Of course, the assistant museum
curator gets to tag along. The gold mine leads to some underground
caverns where the experiments took place. The laboratory is right
outside the door to the gate which looks like it could have been taken
out with a quarter stick of dynamite.
Things have become tedious long before we get to
this point, however. If the movie would have just stopped about halfway
through, with no resolution, with no final conflict, hell, even right
in the middle of a scene, I might have been able to recommend it to
fans of truly bad cinema. But it didn't, and I had to suffer through to
the end.
This is a movie whose money was spent on semi
believable monsters and three recognizable names. I feel sorry for
Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff, Slater especially. This has
desperately needed paycheck written all over it. Reid gets what she
deserves. She proves how useless she is in anything other than teen
comedies. The rest of the actors, some of whom are bit part veterans of
dozens of bad movies, might as well have been extras. You could see it
in almost all of their eyes, "I just did a scene with Christian Slater.
That's as good as it will ever get for me."
Grade: F
Bonus note number one: The associate producer/visual effects
supervisor/dialogue editor was a guy named Max Wanko. How could I
possibly let that go without mention?
Bonus note number two: In his review,
Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington uses the word
"pustulence".
Bonus note number three: I thought I should share the lyrics to the
song
playing over the end credits. Think German metal music sung by guys
with a poor grasp of English. "I'm in love with my lust"?!?!?!
Wish I Had An Angel by Nightwish
I wish I had an angel
For one moment of love
I wish I had your angel
tonight
Deep into a dying day
I took a step outside an innocent heart
Prepare to hate me fall when I may
This night will hurt you like never before
Old loves they die hard
Old lies they die harder
I wish I had an angel
For one moment of love
I wish I had your angel
Your Virgin Mary undone
I`m in love with my lust
Burning angel wings to dust
I wish I had your angel tonight
I`m going down so frail and cruel
Drunken disguise changes all the rules
Old loves they die hard
Old lies they die harder
I wish I had an angel
For one moment of love
I wish I had your angel
Your Virgin Mary undone
I`m in love with my lust
Burning angel wings to dust
I wish I had your angel tonight
Greatest thrill
Not to kill
But to have the prize of the night
Hypocrite
Wannabe friend
13th disciple who betrayed me for nothing!
Last dance, first kiss
Your touch, my bliss
Beauty always comes with dark thoughts
I wish I had an angel
For one moment of love
I wish I had your angel
Your Virgin Mary undone
I`m in love with my lust
Burning angel wings to dust
I wish I had your angel tonight
I wish I had an angel
I wish I had an angel
I wish I had an angel
I wish I had an angel