June, 2005
The Longest
Yard
Official Site | IMDb
If you've read the Kicking
And Screaming review, you'll remember my interest in the place
Will Ferrell's career is at. Adam Sandler is Will Ferrell a few years
down the road. He made his name in juvenile comedies, took his name and
took a chance, and in one brilliant moment, gave us Punch Drunk Love. Unfortunately, he
didn't have the courage to follow through when his long time fans hated
it. He gave the serious stuff one more try with the supremely lame Spanglish, and after that self
fulfilling prophecy of a movie, is back to dumb comedy.
What little humor there is falls into one of two
categories: Chris Rock bringing things to a halt to do some of his
standup routine, or laughing at the concept of Burt Reynolds playing
football.
The Longest Yard
is the latest unnecessary remake. There was no reason for it. Nothing
in it could possibly do anything to further the careers of anyone
involved. It is either a step backward (for Adam Sandler, James
Cromwell, and Chris Rock), a needed paycheck (for Burt Reynolds, Cloris
Leachman, and Tracy Morgan), an attempt to make or further a
crossover (Nelly, Steve Austin), or just one more shot at glory for old
football players (Michael Irvin, Bill Romanowski, and Brian Bosworth).
It's the sad category of movie that isn't bad, just a waste of
everybody's time.
Grade: C
Cinderella Man
Official Site | IMDb
If you walked into Cinderella
Man completely unaware of what you were seeing, you would be
able to come up with a pretty short list of directors who had made it.
Half of the movie is the heavy handed, yet well made sentimental stuff
that is the bread and butter of Ron Howard. The other half is a
surprisingly well made boxing movie. These are two things you wouldn't
expect to find together.
During the depression, James Braddock (Russell
Crowe) is coming to the end of his career. He's slow, he's arthritic,
he's old. The once promising fighter loses his license to fight after a
bad fight where he put up such a poor showing, his share of the purse
was withheld. He's told to go home to his family, wife Mae (Renee
Zelwigger) and two children. Work is hard to find during the depression
and they barely have
enough to get by. Faced with a last minute injury to the original
opponent, Braddock's manager Joe (Paul Giamatti) gets him what is
basically a tune up fight for a championship contender. Braddock wins
and starts his march of the underdog which captivates the nation.
Howard's direction and a script by Cliff
Hollingsworth lay on the sentimentality hot and heavy. It's
absolutely nothing new from anybody involved. It's the prototypical Ron
Howard movie - the underdog, through
perseverance and hard work, triumphs, bringing everybody together in
the process. Zelwigger plays one of her two characters - the earnest,
sturdy woman, who purses her lips, gives a curt little nod, and lets
her man know she's standing behind him. You get kind of a warm feeling
watching it all until you realize that Howard is pulling the same
strings he's pulled in all of his movies. Mark my words, when one of
his movies flops, the media will be talking about he is one dimensional
and unimaginative.
But then there's the boxing. It is magnificently
filmed. A scene will start off in the ring, with Braddock's opponent
punching at the camera and then pull back to the very last row, or to a
bunch of people listening to the fight on the radio. Howard achieves
two things here. First, he gives a real sense of how the majority of
people experienced the fight. There are only so many front row seats.
The fights were seen by most, if they were seen at all, from poor
vantage points. The second thing it did was to drive home, especially
in the early fights, the fact that if these guys didn't win, their
family might not eat. They weren't fighting for titles, they were
fighting so that they could get another fight and put food on the table.
My recommendation: take your local AMC Theater up on
their money back offer. If you have no shame, you can lie, say you
didn't like it, and see it for free.
Grade: B
Kontroll
Official Site | IMDb
Kontroll
is the single most honored Hungarian film of the year, winning awards
at film festivals across the globe, including in my own home town of
Chicago. It's a sentence like that that makes me sad that I don't have
the time to devote to foreign movies that I once had.
Set entirely in the Budapest subway system, where
payment is on the honor system, the movie follows a group of ticket
officers. They're crappy job is to go around checking to see if people
who are not required to buy tickets have bought tickets. It's the kind
of thing that could lead to wacky hijinks or mind numbing insanity.
Writer/director Nimrod Antal chooses the latter. These guys aren't
insane, per se, they just exhibit some odd tendencies.
Bulcsu (Sandor Csanyi), for example, left a
promising architecture career for his life underground. And it truly is
a life underground, he never leaves, sleeping on benches, eating fast
food. The entire movie, in fact, is set underground. The only light of
day we see filters in from the tops of stairways. He leads the misfit
team of collectors. He works with the new guy, the old guy who doesn't
care anymore, and the narcoleptic. Teams compete, not for any
discernible goal, just to be the boss's favorite.
Everybody is on the lookout for a killer who pushes
his victims in front of trains. It's not so much the loss of life, it's
the inconvenience of having upper management come down and give them a
talking to. All that cameras can see of the killer is a hooded figure
who darts out from seemingly nowhere and disappears just as quickly.
Suspicion falls, naturally, on the over stressed collectors who get to
enjoy an overwhelming moment of group catharsis when the company
psychiatrist comes to talk to them.
It's wonderful in its surrealness. Part comes from
the unfamiliar concept of harassing people to see if they have a
ticket. What is everyday for a Hungarian is strange to an American.
Plus, Antal set out to make a movie that was a little bit off. From the
strange characters, to the nightmarish set and lighting, to the girl in
the bear suit, to the late night rave, to the suicidal games they play
in their off hours, it's truly an experience. Antal has made a strange
and compelling debut with almost no budget.
Grade: B+
Layer Cake
Official Site | IMDb
Matthew Vaughn, producer of Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels,
and Snatch (and also of the
Madonna bomb Swept Away for
that matter) tries his hand at directing a movie about modern day,
English gangsters. Stick with what you know.
The unnamed lead character refereed to as XXXX
(Daniel Craig) is a successful cocaine dealer about to retire. He's
been able to stick around as long as he has by sticking to his own set
of rules, mostly concerning playing it safe - knowing your suppliers,
paying your bills on time, keeping a low profile. His boss has other
ideas about retirement and throws XXXX two jobs that he normally
wouldn't touch: unload an obscene amount of stolen ecstasy tablets and
find the missing daughter of the next guy up the food chain. Things
unravel, as they have a tendency to do, and soon, instead of retiring,
XXXX is just looking for a way to survive the whole mess.
Layer Cake
doesn't try to be clever and funny like Lock, Stock... or Snatch. For his own movie, Vaughn
gives a straightforward story that tries to be menacing rather than
funny, and it mostly succeeds. Most of it is the casting. Craig keeps
things on an even keel while all around him falls apart. The supporting
cast, featuring Colm Meaney and Michael Gambon looked like they were
two seconds away from breaking character, leaping from the screen, and
beating me up. The acting is great.
But this a movie we've seen before and, as such,
needs an angle to stand out. Layer
Cake lacks that new angle. The lead who follows a strict set of
rules only to find he has to break them to get by, the boss who won't
take no for an answer, the ruthless henchmen, the drugs stolen by a
stupid underling, it's a movie of standard plot elements thrown
together. It is a very well made, very well acted, very familiar movie.
Grade: B
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Official Site | IMDb
Mr. Smith (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. Smith (Angelina
Jolie) are both getting bored with their marriage. The spark, ignited
by a chance initial meeting in Columbia, is long gone as the drudgery
of nine to five jobs and a huge, sterile house settles in. It doesn't
help that each has a secret life as top assassins for competing firms.
The two discover each other's secret when they are both sent to do the
same job. Do they kill each other, or does the discovery provide the
much needed kick to their marriage, sending them on the run when they
become targets? What the hell do you think happens?
There is a very basic miscalculation in this movie.
If you've seen the trailer, you know about their secret lives, that is
no surprise. It seems like writer Simon Kinberg and director Doug Liman
knew this was going to be the case going in and over compensated. The
opening of the movie is deadly dull. The two sit in therapy (questioned
by an uncredited William Fichtner) and respond in low monotones. At
dinner, Mr. Smith asks if the Mrs. has done something new with the
potatoes. She says she's added peas. Mr. Smith responds "Ah....peas"
with absolutely no inflection to his voice. There was a need to sell
the fact that these are two people completely bored with each other.
They sold it too well, when the action finally starts, way too far into
the movie, an usher has to go around the theater waking people up.
Grade: C-
Crash
Official Site | IMDb
I'm a bit behind in my reviews. I've been trying to
take them in order, but every so often an intense experience, such as
Paul Haggis's Crash comes
along forcing me to drop everything and write as soon as I get home
from the theater.
Crash is
shit.
That may be at odds with some of what you've been
hearing about this film, plus it is rare that I come out with such a
clear cut, non minced word review, so I will repeat myself.
Crash is
shit.
Capital S, Capital H, Capital I, Capital T, SHIT.
S.H.I.T, shit.
It's greatest fault is not that it says absolutely
nothing about its chosen subject, it's greatest sin is that the subject
it says absolutely nothing about is racism. If you're a follower of the
media, you know that, for the most part, it is comprised of gutless
idiots, who put their job and their popularity to their readers above
all else. So when a movie about a hot button issue such as racism comes
along, they are too lily white cowardly to tell you the truth.
That truth is that in Paul Haggis's (who is also
lily white, and I'm not talking about lack of backbone) world,
everybody is racist and everything they do is shaped by that racism,
and how those attitudes are stereotypical misconceptions. When I say
everybody, I mean everybody - white, black, Korean, Persian, Thai,
Latino, they all have it in for anybody different than they are. And
not in a way that says one iota about the subject. The one character
trait in undeveloped character after undeveloped character after
undeveloped character is their racism. Character after character
parades across the screen, inviting hatred, not just dislike, but
active, virulent, cross-the-street-to-punch-them-in-the-face hatred.
But it's a film about racism and racism is something
we need to confront and talk about and overcome. You know what, fuck
you. Grow a spine. Say "Yes, this is a film about racism, but it is a
bad film about racism." Have the guts to say that a piece that doesn't
bother to say anything about the subject is worthless in a discussion
of the subject. Better yet, let's have a discussion about how the topic
has gotten to the point that just mentioning it is mistaken for depth.
To add insult to injury, it's not a very well made
film. It isn't so much a rip-off of Robert Altman, as it looks like it
came from someone for whom Robert Altman was too much to handle, so
they had to rip off someone who had ripped off Robert Altman. It's a
dilution of a dilution.
We're to believe that the City of Los Angeles
contains exactly fifteen people, and that these fifteen people
(spanning just about every ethnic spectrum you care to name) are all
connected and meet up, or happen to be in the same place at the same
time. It's sloppy film making which devolves into an exercise of how
many connections can be made. And here's a thought, let's connect two
scenes by cutting one character opening a door in one set with a
different character opening a door in a different set. You know what,
that was so easy the first time, lets do it three hundred more times.
But back to Paul Haggis and how he demonstrates
that, as far as racism, character development, and dialogue go, he
doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. One of the first
characters we meet is Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock). She and her husband,
LA District Attorney Rick (Brendan Fraser) are car jacked by two black
men. While Rick sits in the living room and worries about how to keep
both the black vote and the law and order vote once the story breaks,
Jean notices that her locks are being changed by a hispanic man with
tattoos. She immediately and loudly goes on a tirade about how she
wants her locks changed again in the morning, because she's afraid the
locksmith is going to go off and sell the keys to his gang banger
friends who are going to come back, rob, and murder them.
Back up a minute and read that again and explain to
me how that is saying thing one about racism, and how it isn't just
trying to shock and be cheap and exploitative. I won't even start about
how, at every turn, it felt like the "name" actors only took their
roles because the script gave them the opportunity to say things they
can't normally, and do so it in the name of art.
I won't even go into Matt Dillon's racist cop with a
sick father, or Thandie Newton's outrage because her black husband
didn't stand up to two well armed policemen, or the Persian shop owner
who thinks everyone is trying to cheat him. Their actions are, for
the most part, on the same level as Bullock's character's and just
furthered my anger at Haggis for overestimating the depth of his
material.
And don't even get me started about how the comic
relief were the two black guys.
But it's all supposed to be okay, because the
characters are victims of their misconceptions. When one of them stands
up, and says or does something hateful and ignorant, we're supposed to
have an air of superiority, and rise above it all. If we see that the
reason the black man hates the white man is misguided, maybe the white
man can see that his reasons are equally as foolish. (cue Paul Haggis)
But you know what, I think you're too stupid to figure that out on your
own, so, while being completely superficial, I'll club you over the
head and try to shock you.
This is cheap, manipulative, poorly written,
obvious, assaultive crap trying to disguise itself as art under the
premise that it makes a valid point about an explosive subject.
Grade: F
How much do I mean this grade? During one scene near the end (the one
with the gun, the Persian, and the little girl) I gave the movie the
finger. Yup, I was in such a fit of apoplectic rage at what was going
on, the only response my pummeled brain could come up with was to flip
off the movie. Honestly, my wife was there with me. You can ask her.
The Honeymooners
Official Site | IMDb
I buy Cedric The Entertainer as Ralph Kramden. To a
very great extent, the goal of this movie was to take The Honeymooners and make us buy
the all black cast that replaced the all white cast of the fifties
television show. I absolutely bought Cedric The Entertainer's Ralph
Kramden. I know I'm repeating myself, I'll say it again. I bought
Cedric The Entertainer's Ralph Kramden. He hit the perfect mixture of
bluster and despair. Here's a guy, that for all his talking, falls flat
on his ass more often than not, and only has the love and support of
his family and friends to see him through. It is a tragic character.
You go a long way in selling this movie when you cast an actor who
understands this.
I didn't so much buy the rest of the casting,
though. Trixie (Regina Hall) and Alice (Gabrielle Union) were just
there. They existed so that the male leads could be married. There was
nothing special about them. Then again, you could say pretty much the
same thing about Joyce Randolph's and Audrey Meadows's interpretation
of the roles. Ralph was the focus, so knocking off points because the
females weren't well developed isn't entirely fair.
I didn't buy Mike Epps as Ed Norton at all. Whereas
Cedric got inside the character and understood what it ws about, Epps
plays Ed Norton as if his only defining characteristics were his hat,
vest, and job in the sewer.
The story also didn't hold up very well. Ralph's a
guy all about getting rich quick. It's an idea ripe with opportunity
for inventiveness and full of comic possibilities. All the writers
could come up with was a lame idea to convert an old train car into a
tour bus and training a racing dog. If anything lets this project down,
it's the script.
But for all that, Cedric nailed his character so
well that the movie at least comes within the same Zip Code of working.
Given a better script and a better co-star, this movie could have been
good.
Grade: C-
High Tension
Official Site | IMDb
Damn, this movie should have been good. It really,
really should have been good. The trailer promised a French slasher
flick, about a woman who is out to get revenge against a sadistic
killer who offs her friend's family. It promised blood, guts, gore, all
infused with some European sensibilities (read: lesbianism).
This movie promised a lot. So did the Atari
corporation when they marketed Pac-Man for the 2600. We all know how
that one turned out.
The version that premiered at the Toronto film
festival was too much for our American sensibilities, so some of the
goriest gore was trimmed. That was fine, Roger Ebert says of this movie
that it is still "perhaps the hardest R for violence the MPAA has ever
awarded", although I've seen both this and Braveheart, so I might quibble.
Admittedly, what we got wasn't the director's true vision, but I doubt
that those two minutes that IMDb claims were removed would have fixed
the massive problems the movie had.
Marie (Cecile De France) is tagging along with her
friend Alex (Maiwenn) who is going to visit her family far, far off in
the country. They live in an old farm house a good five thousand miles
away from civilization. Marie sits in the back seat, smokes (this is a
European film after all), and makes googly eyes at Alex behind her back
(this is a French film after all). As they arrive, Alex drops the line
"They're French is even worse than mine". We soon realize the full
implication of this statement as everything the family says is dubbed
into English. This movie isn't dubbed. This movie isn't subtitled. It
is half dubbed and half subtitled. Think about the stupidity of this
approach for a few minutes. Those responsible were perfectly fine with
letting some of the characters speak French, the rest needed to be
dubbed (and dubbed badly, the kind of dubbing where, no matter where
the characters may be on screen, the sound engineer in the studio made
sure everything was crystal clear).
Arriving at much the same time is The Killer
(Philippe Nahon). We're introduced to him with the lovely visual of him
receiving some oral gratification in the front seat of his broken down
van, only to discover that he was getting said head from a decapitated
woman. At least her mouth was open when he sliced off her head. The
Killer then moves on to Alex's family, killing them off in gruesome
fashion before taking Alex hostage. And here is where the movie scores
the few points it does, it doesn't skimp on the violence. The director
was out to make a bloody, violent film and he didn't back off on that
desire. There are points that are vomit inducing.
Such as the ending. Sorry, I'm going to have to give
it away. If you don't want to know, for whatever reason, I will say
that it makes no logical sense and commence to spoiling in the next
paragraph.
Turns out that Marie and The Killer are one and the
same. Yup, it's a little of the old Fight
Club. Only problem is that the two characters were at different
places at the same time. Take that scene in the beginning where he's
driving his truck up. How is she both arriving in the truck and
arriving with Alex at the same time. There's nothing to suggest that
she was just imagining being with Alex, they drove there together
directly from school. Later, after the killings, Marie is in the back
of the truck comforting Alex while the killer is driving the truck.
Don't give me the split personality crap (partly borne out later when
Marie and The Killer fight - are they fighting for dominance within the
same shell of a body?). Figments of imaginations can't drive. It feels
like a script that was never read in its entirety. The writer came up
with what he thought was a clever ending and never bothered to go back
to count the dozens of contradictions earlier in the script that
rendered the ending impossible.
Grade: D
Batman Begins
Official Site | IMDb
At any other time, I probably would have liked Batman Begins a whole lot more, but
we're living in the time of Spiderman
2. That movie so overshadows everything that it isn't good
enough just to make a good superhero movie anymore now that we've seen
that a superhero movie can be a great movie.
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is in seclusion in a
hell hole of a prison in what appears to be Siberia or some former
Soviet state. It's not the kind of place anyone would ever want to be,
but he's there by choice. He is rescued by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson)
who offers to train him in all sorts of mystical fighting techniques.
Ducard's training complete, Wayne is offered admittance into the League
Of Shadows, a centuries old group whose belief is that sometimes cities
become to large and amoral and need to be wiped off the face of the
Earth so that society can start over. This is a little too much for
Wayne, who wipes out the moutaintop training facility and returns home.
This is the origin story of Batman, based on the
Dark Knight graphic novels. We don't see Batman in the middle of his
arc, we see Bruce Wayne struggling to create Batman. Nothing is
finished, it's all in sort of an experimental stage, helped along by
toys provided by forgotten Wayne Corp. old school tech geek Lucius Fox
(Morgan Freeman).
Soon, the movie settles in to the standard formula
of good guy and the bad guys he fights. This time Batman is fighting
crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and Dr. Jonathan Crane / The
Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). On the side of the hero, do gooder
assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) and
last-honest-cop-in-town Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman).
It's a movie full of small joys. It is deeply
satisfying to see Liam Neeson kicking some ass. It is wonderful to see
that Michael Caine doesn't phone in his role as Alfred and uses all of
his considerable talent. It is great to see my home town of Chicago
filmed so beautifully and brilliantly. Even with all of the decay
digitally imposed upon it, it looked great.
The thing that keeps it from being a great work,
ironically, is the darkness of it. There's not much to latch on to in
this incarnation of Batman. He is a dark, disturbed individual, and
while it is a faithful recreation of the Dark Knight character of the
graphic novel, something gets lost in the translation to the big
screen. He never struck me as a hero to cheer on, just an unpleasant
guy who is doing the things that need doing. I found it hard ot have a
rooting interest. It is the right thing that good defeats evil, but you
just kind of wished that good had a better representative.
Grade: B+
Land Of The Dead
Official Site | IMDb
So what do you do when all of your new zombie movies
are just pathetic video games where the good guys and their
inexhaustible supply of ammunition do nothing more than walk down
hallways, blasting lines of the walking dead? You go and you get the
guy who invented the genre to make a movie and show these kids how it's
done.
George A. Romero, maker of the [blank] Of The Dead trilogy is back
with the fourth installment, a zombie movie whose most shocking element
is that it has a thought out plot. It's sometime in the near future,
when the zombie plague has forced the remnants of humanity into walled
off, well guarded cities. Even after the zombie apocalypse, the well
heeled still like to live in style. Enter developer Kaufman (Dennis
Hopper) and his Fiddler's Green (a reference to Nero?) luxury high
rise. The rich don't need to worry themselves with the zombie
unpleasantness, they can still have their fancy lifestyle. Of course,
not everyone can get in, so a whole other society of the less fortunate
live in the streets surrounding the tower.
Supplies are gathered by raiding parties, who
venture outside the city, looking for liquor stores or supermarkets to
empty. The best of the raiding parties is led by Riley (Simon Baker)
who has to put up with Cholo (the always intriguing John Leguizamo) who
would like nothing better than to ass kiss his way into a cozy
Fiddler's Green apartment. It falls to Riley to save the city after the
zombies start to evolve, developing rudimentary organizational and
offensive capabilities.
What makes the movie the breath of fresh air that it
is is shown by the fact that I could spend a couple of paragraphs
talking about the plot. Romero has a talent that others seem to lack in
this genre. He can make a zombie picture and infuse it with plot,
humor, social commentary, and satire. You can watch one of his movies
and see the parallels he's trying to make with the non-zombified world
of today. His zombies represent something much more than just bullseyes.
Grade: B
Madagascar
Official Site | IMDb
Madagascar
is the latest and best example of the commercialization of the animated
motion picture, showing how it has gone from family entertainment to
Hollywood assembly line product. It comes from DreamWorks who gave us
last year's horrible Shark Tale.
They follow up a terrible movie with a terribly depressing one.
The reason it is so depressing has little to do with
the movie itself, rather how the forces around the movie got in the way
of an entertaining experience. There was so much other crap going on
that the filmmakers didn't have the time (or the need? or the pressure?
or the pride?) to make it good.
Look at your marketing. Every commercial, website or
trailer you see for this movie will tell you in big, bold letters who
the "stars" are. Every child above the age of three can tell you that
this movie stars Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett
Smith, Cedric The Entertainer, and Andy Richter. Go to any website that
has production photographs and they will be dominated not by the
characters from the movie, but by pictures of the stars voicing them.
The promotional featurettes are almost exclusively the stars (not the
people who wrote, drew, or directed the characters) talking about the
characters they voice and how much they enjoyed doing it. It's an
admission that the movie itself isn't good enough to get people to
come, the movie requires stars to open well. This is a trend that
troubles me. It pretty much coincides with the creative death of the
Disney animated film. Can you tell me who voiced Snow White,
Cinderella, or even Ariel, for that matter, without going online to
look it up?
We all know that these days the formula for a
successful animated film is to throw in a bunch of jokes or material
that flies right over the kids head and is aimed squarely at the
parents. Few animated movies these days can actually pull this off and
make it feel natural (The Incredibles
being the best example of a movie that succeeds). The ones who can't
make it feel natural throw in their grown up pop culture references as
non sequiters. Madagascar is
no different, wedging in tired references, jokes, and songs from other
places with no regards to whether or not they actually fit. There is
one moment in the movie that jumped out at me as showing the depths to
which creativity has fallen. There is a general panic going on, people
running this way and that, screaming, when apropos of absolutely
nothing, one of the animals pops in from the bottom corner of the
screen, holding a book titled "How To Serve Humans", shouting "It's a
cookbook". Anyone over a certain age will recognize that as a "Twilight
Zone" reference, but what is the point of making it at that particular
point in the movie? There is none, other than the fact that successful
animated movies have adult pop culture references and this movie hadn't
had an adult pop culture reference in a few minutes.
Notice that I've gone all this way and haven't even
talked about the movie's plot. This is because every signal the
filmmakers and studio have given me is that the plot is unimportant. I
am there to see stars voice cartoon characters, see how many clever
references the writers can sneak in, and marvel at the computer
animation. If you actually pay attention to what is going on, more
power to you. I will say that the plot concerning a bunch of animals
who get shipwrecked on a remote island while being sent to a wildlife
preserve is halfhearted and underdeveloped.
I hope I can just blame this all on DreamWorks.
Pixar still puts out some good product. Disney has already been pretty
much counted out as far as animated movies go. Maybe if DreamWorks
stops putting out crappy animation and focuses on its core business of
crappy romantic comedies, everything will be okay.
Grade: C