March, 2005
Cursed
Official Site | IMDb
The story behind the movie is more interesting than
the movie itself. It seems the totally inaccurately, self
described "Master Of Horror" Wes Craven delivered an R rated cut
of the movie which was dripping with gore. The studio said they wanted
something PG-13, Wes walked, the movie was recut, but Craven's name
stayed attached to it, even being used in the advertising. They'd
already paid the guy, why not. The upside for Wes is that it's been a
long time since he's been credited with working on anything this good.
The movie is a run of the mill, teens turning into
werewolves flick. I'm intrigued by the developing artistic relationship
between director Wes Craven and writer/producer Kevin Williamson. Given
free reign, Craven would give us blood splattered gore fests. Given
free reign, Williamson would give us comedies masquerading as horror.
Their work has recently become a parody of itself. This is the first
time when they've been able to temper each other well, even if Craven's
tempering was studio mandated. Maybe instead of producing movies that
get D's and F's, they'll start giving us stuff that gets C's.
Grade: C
The Jacket
Official Site | IMDb
I'm sorry, even I have a hard time swallowing this
one, and I'm the guy who accepts the theory that a sci-fi writer gets
one freebie concept per story that we don't question. This freebie is a
little much for me.
Amnesiac veteran Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is
committed to an institute for the criminally insane after the guy who
picked him up while hitchhiking kills a cop and runs. The treatment
prescribed by Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) involves putting him in a
straight jacket and locking him inside a morgue drawer. Becker thinks
this will jump start the brain back into normalcy. What it really does
is allow anyone locked inside to travel into the future. While in the
future, Starks meets Jackie (Keira Knightley) who tells him he's been
dead for a few years. The two try to find out why he died. Turns out to
be a huge anticlimax.
There's a strange economy of characters at work. No
one is superfluous. If a character is introduced, it's a sure bet he
will serve some great purpose later. The extra budget must have been a
bit light. No point in mentioning that, really. Just wanted to pad this
out to three paragraphs.
Grade: C+
Robots
Official Site | IMDb
Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) is a young robot
with a dream. He wants to leave home and go off to Robot City, meet
local insutrialist/tycoon Bigweld (Mel Brooks) and become an inventor.
Bigweld's company welcomes inventors and is all about making things for
the greater good. But for some never disclosed reason, Bigweld has
become tired of it all and has gone into seclusion. Taking his place is
Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) who wants to crank out corporate profits by
pushing shiny, new upgrades, rendering much of the population obsolete.
Rodney hooks up with a group of colorful good guys to defeat Ratchet
and convince Bigweld to come out of retirement.
Robots is
a depressingly familiar film. The nuts and bolts of the story is a
tried and true formula you've seen in every post-Shrek animated offering. Young,
wide eyed dreamer goes to the big city. He quickly has his dreams
dashed, but, in the process, meets a great group of friends. A nemesis
is provided in an almost comically evil character. One of the friends
is voiced by an over the top comedian (Robin Williams in this case) who
goes more over the top than usual. Add in a love interest who is
impressed by the youngsters pluck and innocence. It's all there, as
predictable as the tides.
This is a movie whose story exists only to get the
animators from one chance to show off how powerful their computers are
to the next. And show off they do, the movie looks great, but that's
about it.
Grade: C+
Man Of The House
Official
Site | IMDb
I can't really fill you in on all the whats and
wherefores of Man Of The House.
To watch and completely follow any movie, no matter how trivial,
requires total attention. Total attention is earned when you present a
compelling story and when you don't give your audience anything else to
think about. This one gives you one really big other thing to think
about, and that is what the hell is Tommy Lee Jones doing in this
movie? Here's a guy who has made big budget action movies, well written
dramas, and blockbuster comedies. He has no more dues to pay. He
doesn't have to answer to anyone in Hollywood. With that in mind, I
spent almost all of this movie's run time puzzling as to why he
involved himself in such a low profile (and I mean low profile in the
anonymous Hollywood filler product sense and not the hip, indie,
working for scale sense) nothing of a comedy. This is the kind of movie
that stars a B-lister, has a modest budget, debuts somewhere in the top
five, and plays for a few weeks before disappearing, only to show up a
couple months later on basic cable. His being in it is a real head
scratcher.
Jones plays Texas Ranger Roland Sharp. He has to
bring in Morgan Ball (Curtis Armstrong of Revenge Of The Nerds fame) to
testify in a big case. Things go wrong, Ball ends up dead, and the only
witnesses are five University Of Texas cheerleaders. As he must, as
this aspires to be a comedy, Sharp moves in with the five girls,
putting them under protective custody.
The writers believe that the premise is comedy
enough and deliver a script almost devoid of humor. The only lively
bits are when Jones interacts with ex-con turned minister Percy Stevens
(Cedric The Entertainer). The rest is a boring mish mash of two
generations clashing. Jones plays Sharp as the quintessential
tight-ass, never cracking a smile, always playing by the rules, always
getting things his way ("Are you always such a dick?" asks a
cheerleader. "Yes" answers Sharp with complete seriousness). It's an
unimaginative character played with no extra added effort by Jones, who
may have been having second thoughts about the project. The
cheerleaders are your run of the mill bubbly, looks obsessed, social
butterflies who chafe at Sharp's rules. There are attempts to make them
multidimensional (such as Heather (Vanessa Ferlito) who sees
cheerleading as sort of a purgatory after her rough childhood without a
father) but they end up being interchangeable, except for the ditz,
Evie (Monica Keena) who stands out because of how badly her character
is acted.
Man Of The House
tries to trick you with one of the oldest tricks in the book - it ends
on a heartwarming note as the girls help Roland find love with a
university professor (Anne Archer, also slumming it) and he makes
things right with his daughter. Don't fall for it, those last ten
minutes don't make up for the rest of your wasted time.
Grade: D
Be Cool
Official Site | IMDb
Now well into year seven of my movie thing, I find
that I have to make embarrassing admissions less and less. Time for the
first one in awhile: I've never seen Get
Shorty. All I know about it is that for the version they showed
on airplanes, they changed a line about a "plane crash" to a "train
crash". I really want to go to the video store and rent a copy. It is
thought very well of by a lot of people. I need to see the movie and
compare it to the thudding bore that Be
Cool is.
Chili Palmer (John Travolta) has tired of the movie
business and decides to get into the music business. He discovers a
fabulous singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milian), who,
unfortunately, has a crappy contract with black gangsta wannabe Raji
(Vince Vaughn). Chili thinks he can just talk Raji into giving him the
contract. As a character trait, this is fine. He's this unflappable guy
who always has the right thing to say and can extricate himself from
any situation with just his words.
The problem is the dialogue isn't all that snappy.
To pull off a character like this in a movie like this, you need a
writer with a golden pen. Elmore Leonard (who wrote the book the movie
was based on) is one of the most hit and miss authors out there. For
every book that turns into Jackie
Brown, there's one that turns into The Big Bounce. His dialogue, and
the subsequent screenplay written by Peter Steinfeld is as flat as a
pancake. It's the kind of material that looks great on paper, full of
in jokes. I'm sure everyone in the script meetings got a lot of
giggles. Stuff like the opening scene where Chili says "Unless you're
willing to get an R rating, you can't use more than one F word. You
know what I say to that? Fuck it." and that being the only F word in
this PG-13 movie. Or Steven Tyler of Aerosmith thinking that Chili
wants him to be in a movie saying "I'm not one of those singers who
shows up in movies." Sure, it probably looks amusing in print, but on
screen, it draws attention to itself. You find yourself derisively
saying "Ha ha. I get it." Some of it is clever, some of it is amusing,
but on the average, it leads to a long evening at the movies.
The forced dialogue is at least separated by long
sections of plot involving Chili, Edie (Uma Thurman) a friend who owns
a record label, Raji and his boss Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), producer
Sin LaSalle (Cedric The Entertainer), the Russian mafia, Linda's
contract, and how to get it. It isn't exactly plot overload, but it
does make it necessary for a labyrinth, lucky series of events to play
out exactly right for the final resolution.
I'd say go rent Get
Shorty instead, but I'm really in no position to offer such an
endorsement.
Grade: C-
Hostage
Official Site | IMDb
The gloves are coming off once and for all. I am
fucking sick of bad child actors. There are good child actors out
there. Plenty of them. Many movies are able to cast kids who don't ruin
every scene they are in. I can only assume the reason bad child actors
still get work is because of laziness on the part of the production
team.
This week's bad child actor is named Jimmy Bennett,
who we will also have the displeasure of seeing in the upcoming remake
of The Amityville Horror.
This kid apparently came from his pained facial expressions 101
class right to the movie set. His only future, if this movie is any
indication, is in dubbing women screaming in slasher flicks. I wouldn't
be surprised if his girlish shrieks are responsible for the shattering
of movie goers' eyeglasses all over the country.
Little Jimmy plays little Tommy Smith. He, his
father Walter (Kevin Pollak), and sister Jennifer (Michelle Horn) are
being held hostage by three local misbegotten youths. Looking at a
still photo of the trio would go a long way in telling you what kind of
a movie this is. The actors aren't allowed to convey that they are bad
seeds with their acting skill. Instead hair, make up, and costume have
to go overboard to tell us this. None look as if they've washed or
combed their hair in the last month. They wear grubby t shirts and
leather jackets. They drive an old, rusty, beaten up pickup truck. This
is one of the many small ways that the director doesn't allow the
audience to figure things out for themselves. They're bad guys, they
will be dressed as such.
This small town in the mountains of California is
lucky in one respect, their chief of police is an ex SWAT, ex chief
negotiator for the Los Angeles Police Department. Jeff Talley (Bruce
Willis) lost a couple of hostages and has taken this much easier job.
One of his officers responds to a silent alarm at the massive Smith
complex and gets killed as the situation escalates much quicker than it
really should have. She is shot by Mars (Ben Foster) the moody loner
who is the new addition to the group of hooligans, joining brothers
Dennis (Jonathan Tucker) and Kevin (Marshall Allman). All three roles
are overacted almost to the point of comedy, but past the point of
being utterly annoying.
There's a problem. Seems that Walter was an
accountant cooking the books for some powerful people. The hostage
taking took place at a very unfortunate time, just before he was to
deliver a DVD full of files to his employers. To get their item back,
they kidnap Talley's family, telling him they'll kill his wife and
daughter if anyone goes into or out of the house. Over the next hour of
movie time, Talley does nothing but go into and out of the house. I
think he was trying to keep the children inside safe, even though the
bad guys make it quite clear that this is just a business thing and
show no interest in actually killing anybody. Of course, Talley has to
go lone wolf, putting everyone in his sight at risk. He can't bring
himself to let anyone else in on his predicament, even though the bad
guys never tell him not to. So he clashes with the county police who he
brought in when he could have followed the kidnappers demands by saying
"They've got my wife and kid. They don't want anyone going in until
they get here." Seems a whole lot simpler to me.
But that's what Hostage
is - a movie overblown in every respect. Overblown acting, overblown
plot, overblown characters, hell, even an overblown score.
Grade: C
Steamboy
Official Site
| IMDb
Disclaimer: Steamboy
is being distributed in America in two versions. One is dubbed
in English and 106 minutes, the other is in Japanese with English
subtitles and is 126 minutes. Unaware of this until afterward, I saw
the shorter, English version.
In 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira hit America and became a hit
not so much because it was great, but because it was different, bleak
and violent. Otomo is back with Steamboy.
It was ten years in the making, using mostly hand drawn animation. It
was the most expensive Japanese animated film ever, costing around $20
million.
Set in Victorian England, steam is king. Three
generations of the steam family are all inventors, making steam powered
devices (if you have one of those weird medical conditions where you
have violent reactions to the word steam, you might want to skip this
one). Ray Steam (voiced by Anna Paquin in the English version) receives
a package from his grandfather Lord Steam (Patrick Stewart) who is in
America working with his son Eddie Steam (Alfred Molina) on a steam
powered something or other. The package contains a steam ball, a new
steam powered invention which contains water of the highest purity
allowing for incredibly high steam pressures to be built up which can
fuel steam devices far more powerful than any steam device that has
come before (okay, I'll stop screwing around with the steam thing now).
The box also contains a dire warning not to let anyone from the O'Hara
Foundation to get their hands on it......
.....which they do about five minutes later. Ray is
kidnapped, taken to the London Exposition where his father is working
for the O'Hara Foundation in the steam castle. Lord Steam envisioned
the castle as a playground, with carousels and ferris wheels. Eddie
Steam has taken that vision and turned it into a war machine, a place
where the highest bidders can come to stock up on the latest, most
advanced weapons. The idealism is a little too simplistic. Lord Steam
goes rants and raves about how science should only be used for the
betterment of humanity, Eddie's more profit motivated. The steam ball
is the key to getting the castle off the ground, both literally and
figuratively.
Just in case you found yourself about to enjoy the
movie, the prepubescent granddaughter of the foundation head (named, of
course, Scarlett) shows up. She's is every cliché of the spoiled
little rich girl. Her every word shows she has no concern for anyone
but herself. She leads the life of privilege, and only wonders why she
isn't more privileged. Every scene that has her in it drags the movie
down in much the same manner an Olympic sprinter would be dragged down
if you hit him with a baseball bat halfway through a race. To be asked
to buy, even for one second, that there is a budding romance between
Scarlett and Ray is laughable beyond imagining.
A little over an hour in, Otomo decides that we've
had enough plot. The last 45 minutes are a thundering cacophony of
action and huge machines breaking. Here's where the animation gets a
chance to shine. Steam powered war machines fight the more conventional
weapons of the British army. Huge, intricate machines buckle and fail
under huge stresses. It's fun to look at, but, unfortunately, difficult
to watch. It's presented under the theory that if you liked something
the first time, you'll love it the next twenty times. It's a sequence
(hell, it's a whole third of a movie) that beats you into submission.
You can only muster up an emotional reaction to what's going on so many
times before you get tired of it.
Grade: C
The Pacifier
Official Site | IMDb
The question is this: should a movie get special
treatment just because it is a family film? Sure, The Pacifier could be described
using such words as "safe" or "cute", but words that could not be used
to describe it are "funny" or "entertaining". You'd think that the
answer to the question is no, but it is still getting positive reviews
based solely on it being something you can take the kids to see. It's
not getting many positive reviews, mind you, but the fact that this is
a family film seems to be enough for some people. It was certainly
enough for the writers, who didn't even bother to write a story that
made any sense.
I'm giving away the ending in the next paragraph.
Don't pretend that you care. I know better.
Navy SEAL Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel) has been assigned
to protect the family of a murdered professor who was working on some
high tech, top secret, hush hush stuff. Turns out the superior officer
is the bad guy, out to sell the new tech to the highest bidder. He
assigns Wolfe to watch the family while he accompanies the widow to
Switzerland to get into the family safety deposit box. The bad guy
pretty much knows that the thingy is either in the box or hidden in the
house. Why would he send his best man to protect the house from bad
guys when he is the bad guy? And why, after the bad guy's accomplices
have been dealt with, would he expose himself as the bad guy when all
he would have to do is keep up with the act, retrieve the thingamabob,
say "Nice job Wolfe!", and disappear into the sunset? Oh, I'm sorry,
that's right. This is a family movie. It doesn't have to be good.
And it's not just that one thing. The key word seems
to be "cute" and not "makes any sort of sense".
The movie starts with Wolfe rescuing the
soon-to-be-slain professor from a group of "Serbians" who apparently
are keeping him prisoner on a boat, surrounded by a security force of a
helicopter and four jet skis just off of what looks to be the coast of
Florida.
Wolfe is supposed to be protecting these kids from a
potential deadly threat, yet still will cart one of the kids off
somewhere, leaving the others at home alone. He even has time to direct
the local community theater production of The Sound Of Music (no, really).
The children are hopelessly one dimensional -
misunderstood and whiny. When the eldest daughter gets busted throwing
a party her reaction is "What am I going to say to my friends." There's
some award winning writing.
One and only one attempt is made to attack the
house. Gee, priceless doohickey, you think maybe there's be some
attempt to actually acquire it. Nope, instead we get two ninja
assassins who come in and try to beat Wolfe up with sticks. No one ever
thinks to kidnap the eminently kidnappable kids who are left alone most
of the time.
This movie was an ordeal. Writing about it is an
ordeal. I could go on and on like this for pages more. I am trying to
hold it to standards of quality that no one involved with the
production seemed to care about. I watched this movie and could tell
that nobody involved gave a damn whether or not is was any good. All
they wanted was a "safe", "cute" movie that they could use to empty
patron's pockets.
Grade: D-
The Ring Two
Official Site | IMDb
The Ring
Part One in a nutshell:
1. Overuse of the gotcha.
2. A convoluted plot.
3. A heroine who takes small pieces of evidence and
makes stunning, while correct leaps of logic. A heroine who needs to
research something and finds that one obscure page in that one obscure
book within two minutes.
The Ring Two:
1. Nope
2. Nope
3. Nope
Sounds like a good thing, doesn't it?
It isn't.
The Ring Two
is, dare I say it, almost boring. Unlike the first one, this movie is
in no danger of being overrated.
It's more of the same, only without the frights or
mystery of the first. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her son Aidan
(David Dorfman) have moved from Seattle to Astoria where Rachel hopes
the fresh air and change of scenery will do them both some good. Only
problem is that the evil Samara has followed them there and is looking
to take over Aidan's body. Rachel doesn't need to discover what's going
on, she needs to figure out what to do.
And that's about it. We get lots of slow tracking
shots that pan slowly across dark rooms. We get lots of atmosphere.
It's not that the movie isn't scary, it's that it doesn't even try to
scare us. I could count the attempts (not successes, attempts) to scare
on one hand.
The plot was very straightforward, which I suppose
you could count as either a good thing or a bad thing. No one will walk
out of this saying that they didn't understand what was going on.
However, some might be saying "That's it?"
Grade: C
Melinda And Melinda
Official
Site | IMDb
Two playwrights sit in a New York bistro (In a Woody
Allen film? No way!) and debate the essential nature of what it is to
be human. One (Wallace Shaw) says that our nature is best described by
comedy. The other (Larry Pine) says we are more defined by tragedy.
Another person at the table pipes in with a true story that happened to
a friend: an uninvited guest shows up at a dinner party. The two
writers spin their own tale around the situation.
In the comedy, Melinda (Rhada Mitchell), the
downstairs neighbor of out of work actor Hobie (Will Ferrell) and
independent filmmaker Susan (Amanda Peet) has just overdosed on
sleeping pills. Feeling sorry for her, Susan fixes Melinda up, she goes
for someone else, and Hobie has plenty of time to think his adulterous
thoughts.
In the tragedy, Melinda is roaming the country,
trying to put her life together after losing custody of her children
and being committed. She shows up on the doorstep of independently
wealthy Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and working actor Lee (Johnny Lee
Miller). Feeling sorry for her, Laurel fixes Melinda up, she goes for
someone else, and everyone has plenty of time to think adulterous
thoughts.
The movie almost succeeds in spite of Woody Allen.
The movie is constructed well. Scenes from each story are intermixed.
Little details overlap, such as Melinda meeting her boyfriend while
playing piano. Rhada Mitchell pulls off playing the same character as
both a comic and tragic role as if the other didn't exist. She deserves
a lot of credit. However, the comedy isn't particularly funny. It's
almost like what we're watching is the output of two bad playwrights.
Then there's Woody Allen, who keeps making different
kinds of movies, but each featuring the exact same character. What's
more, in his recent movies, it is becoming obvious which roles he is
writing for himself, but becoming too old to play. In this one, he is
obviously Hobie, and Will Ferrell (as did Jason Biggs in last year's Anything Else) does his best to
oblige. He goes out and does his best Woody Allen impersonation.
Someone stumbling in in the middle might think they were watching an
episode of Saturday Night Live.
Instead of focusing on the material (and yes, it is as archaic and
anachronistic as always), we focus on Ferrell stuttering,
gesticulating, and slowly having a breakdown.
Compared to his recent output, Melinda And Melinda is a step in
the right direction. Compared to his heyday, it shows how increasingly
irrelevant Woody Allen is becoming.
Grade: C+