October, 2005
The Greatest Game Ever
Played
Official Site | IMDb
If The Legend Of
Bagger Vance, Bobby Jones,
Stroke Of Genius, and now The
Greatest Game Ever Played have taught us anything it is that
golf is a very easy sport to film beautifully. Director Bill (Pullman?
Paxton? Give me a second , let me look it up) Paxton pulls out all the
requisite stops, with lush green grass, picturesque vistas, balls' eye
view, slow motion swings, views of how the players visualize shots,
period costumes, and that absolutely necessary shot from inside the
hole as the ball falls in.
The greatest game ever played (as dubbed by a
newspaper at the time) was the final of the 1913 United States Open
golf tournament. Twenty year amateur old Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf)
was a working class boy and former caddie at The Country Club in
Brookline, Massachusetts. When the US Open came there, one of the
members sponsored his entry, a big no no in a very class conscious
game. The English dominated the game, and they sent their best in Harry
Vardon and Ted Ray to reclaim the title. Armed with his home course
advantage, Ouimet took Vardon and Ray to an eighteen hole playoff.
It's a squeaky clean affair, nothing spectacular. If
you like to have your class conflicts explicitly spelled out for you,
and not simmering below the surface where you might need some insight
to figure them out, this is the movie for you.
Grade: B-
Serenity
Official Site | IMDb
Joss Whedon gets it. I never watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Firefly, but apparently I should
have. If Serenity is anything
to go by, Joss completely gets what action adventure, science fiction
should be. This movie stands as a superior example of the genre.
Serenity is a beat up old space ship captained by
Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion). Whedon's script puts us through the
requisite scenes of the ship and her crew doing a couple jobs that have
nothing to do with the main plot. The plot arrives in the form of River
(Summer Glau), an ass kicking psychic rescued from the clutches of the
Alliance, the universe's malevolent government. It seems that the
Alliance's scientists foolishly showcased River to a group of
government officials. She read their minds, knows all the secrets, and
is now on the run after being sprung by her brother. The crew take her
across the galaxy to expose the government's big secret, chased by
their top agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises mostly
produce good movies, I'm not disputing that, but when you look at them,
they're always so clean. If you looked around the bridge of the
Enterprise, all the lights work. Or you look at a bad movie, like The Island, and the things that are
meant to be shabby have had a lot of money spent on them to look
shabby. Serenity feels real.
The shabby interior of the ship looks organic, as if the set designer
had ten minutes to throw something together, which is absolutely how it
should look. Whedon helps out with some non traditional camera
movements that give the feeling of being in the room. This is about as
tactile a movie as I have ever seen. I felt like I could reach right
out and touch it.
Grade: A-
Wallace & Gromit In The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
Official Site | IMDb
I find reviewing Wallace and Gromit movies to be one
of those pointless exercises. The only thing that would be newsworthy
and warranting a review would be if it weren't good. That's not the
case with Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.
Inventor Wallace inadvertently creates a
were-rabbit, a giant monstrosity which wreaks havoc on a town getting
ready for its annual vegetable festival and competition. It's left to
long suffering Gromit the dog to clean up the mess. It is full of dry,
situational, English humor, and clever claymation animation. It's not a
home run, but it is another solid effort from Nick Park and Bob Baker.
Grade: B+
Waiting...
Official Site | IMDb
If you're looking for some Upton Sinclair-esque
expose of all the behind the scenes antics that go on at your local
chain restaurant, Waiting is
not the movie for you. It's another generic workplace comedy where
exaggerated characters find themselves in ridiculous situations. We all
have a few laughs and go home.
Our troupe includes ring leader and voice of
experience Monty (Ryan Reynolds), guy-who-shouldn't-be-there Dean
(Justin Long), jailbait hostess Natasha (Vanessa Lengies), bitchy Naomi
(Alana Ubach), clueless manager Dan (David Koechner), oracle dishwasher
Bishop (Chi McBride), and a bunch of others, all seen through the eyes
of the new guy Mitch (John Francis Daley). The antics are juvenile,
beyond the requisite scene where the bitchy customer's food is
befouled. Perhaps the most juvenile is the penis game, the object of
which is to trick other people into unintentionally looking at your
penis. What fun.
This is a perfectly serviceable comedy. There are
laughs, but nothing quotable or memorable. It's only short term purpose
will be to keep Ryan Reynolds' name fresh in our minds.
Grade: C-
Into The Blue
Official Site | IMDb
Credit where credit is due time. The only point in
making this movie is that Jessica Alba looks fantastic in a bikini. The
producers and director realize this and do absolutely nothing to hide
the fact that they realize this. They knew the movie they were making
and, bless their hearts, they made it. What is even more remarkable is
the fact that the story around Ms. Alba and her swim wear wasn't the
painful ordeal you might think it would be.
Dive bum Jared (Paul Walker) welcomes his friends
Bryce (Scott Caan) and new temporary female companion (Ashley Scott)
for a week in the sunny Bahamas. Bryce is a lawyer who gets use of a
house and boat as thanks for services rendered. Two discoveries are
made. One is a sunken ship full of unimagined wealth. The second, a
plane full of cocaine that didn't make it to the landing strip. The
problem: to claim the shipwreck, they have to positively identify it.
They don't have the money to do that, and if they report the plane
crash, someone else with the money will claim the ship first. Leave it
up to the no good friend and his ditzy chick to come up with a bad
idea; recover a couple kilos and sell them to finance the dive. It
seems reasonable, all the way up to the part where he tries to sell the
drugs back to the owner of the plane.
Here's a fun game: time how long Jared manages to
hold his breath during the final fight. This isn't a movie requiring
fun games to pass the time, but they certainly never hurt.
Grade: C+
Elizabethtown
Official Site | IMDb
I have spoken of Cameron Crowe before, usually in
the context of "once in a lifetime" movies. A once in a lifetime movie
is one that a writer or director could look at and realize that they
have reached the top of their craft. Good things may still come, but he
or she will never be able to recreate that particular magic. For a
movie goer, a once in a lifetime movie is one whose run time flies by.
One where you (well, at least me) sit forward in your seat with your
hand over your mouth not wanting the experience to end, knowing that it
must and it must soon. You leave the theater thinking you will never
see a movie that good ever again, even though another once in a
lifetime movie is only a year-and-a-half or two years off. With Say Anything..., Singles, and Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe is
responsible for three such movies. With that kind of a record, what do
you do with a movie that is merely good. In the world of romantic
comedies, Elizabethtown
stands above most others. In the world of Cameron Crowe, it's a weaker
effort.
Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has just lost his
company (headed by Phil DeVoss - Alec Baldwin in a terrific one scene
role) almost one billion dollars. While arranging his suicide, the
phone rings; his father has died while visiting his home town and Drew
has to collect the body. The hometown is Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where
everybody possesses a down home, folksy charm. They all knew and loved
Drew's father and won't hear any of it when he reveals the family's
plan of flying him back to Oregon to be cremated. Drew's days are spent
being charmed by the local folks.
But I'm getting ahead of things. On the flight to
Kentucky, he meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), the only flight attendant on
a flight where Drew is the only passenger in coach. She drags him up to
first class, and keeps him awake talking. She sends him off, armed with
a map, a hotel coupon, and her phone number. The next night, at a hotel
overrun by a wedding party, he calls Claire because no one else is home
to take his call. The phone call lasts all night, culminating in a
meeting to watch the sun come up. These two sequences tell you all you
need to know (and all that Crowe seems to want to tell us) about
Claire. She's not a real person. She is infinitely wise, infinitely
personable, and always has the right words instantly at hand. In a
different movie, you'd learn that Claire was a figment of Drew's
imagination, the vehicle through which his grief stricken mind gets
through his ordeal. But this is not a different movie, and Claire is
very much flesh and bone. She is, perhaps, the most artificial
character Crowe has ever stuck in a movie. Here is a girl who meets a
complete stranger at work and open her entire life to him. That this
girl would meet this guy in this situation was a little too much. She
claims to be a student of human nature, maybe she recognized a person
in need. Either that, or there's dozens of guys out there who never
found the nerve to call.
Drew's family takes a back seat to the budding non
romance. Claire seems to be there whenever he needs her to be, and even
when he doesn't realize he needs her to be. She must have called in
some favors at work, because she seems to be awfully available. Each
scene together ends with a voiceover where he catalogs the "last look"
they have just shared.
Drew's mother Hollie (Susan Sarandon) is a mess. She
copes by being in constant motion - learning to cook, fixing the car,
taking tap dancing lessons. She has sent Drew to Kentucky because she
is still looked at as the evil woman who stole this beloved man from
town, even though that happened thirty years before. She finally
achieves some calm and blows into town for the memorial service. She
turns her speech into a standup routine and then tap dances to "Moon
River". It's a scene that walks the line between touching and
ridiculous.
Cameron Crowe movies always have a killer
soundtrack, and this one is no exception. The movie ends with a
sequence built almost entirely through music (it is also a sequence
that employs the trick of ending a movie with one great sequence to
make you forget that what came before it wasn't as good). Claire makes
Drew promise that he will drive home. He hasn't really mourned yet, so
you know it's up to her to completely break him down and see him
through to the other side as only not quite real movie characters can.
She prepares what can only be described as the most wonderful (if not
improbable) gift that any movie character has ever given to another
movie character: a photo album which contains a detailed map, complete
with places to stop and a soundtrack which will take him through this
42 hour trip. Of course, we're not supposed to stop and think that this
means she has made him between 35 and 40 CDs in the week they've known
each other, or that her knowledge of roadside America borders on the
encyclopedic. If we do stop to think that this gift would take any real
person many months to put together, we are robbed of enjoying a magical
solo trip home across America.
The version released to theaters is eighteen minutes
shorter than the version screened to a poor reception at the Toronto
Film Festival. From what I've been able to find out, the original
suffered the problem of not knowing when to end. Fixing this was a good
thing. That version also contained more of the road trip. Cutting from
the film's strongest sequence was a bad thing. The theatrically
released version ends very abruptly, there needed to be a little more.
I must rent the DVD to see these eighteen minutes.
This is a flawed movie that I feel a great affection
for.
Grade: B
Domino
Official Site | IMDb
Last we saw of Tony Scott, he was giving us all
headaches trotting out every visual trick he ever learned, or even
heard about, in Man On Fire.
His overuse of style there bordered on the incompetent. In Domino, he reigns it in
significantly, to the point where it is merely annoying.
Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) grew up in a house
with some money. We meet her vain, materialistic mother, and we see
some of her upbringing and school experiences. These episodes are
sprinkled throughout the movie in Tony Scott's own infuriating,
inimitable, non linear way. She decides she's a tough girl and joins up
with a group of bounty hunters, led by father figure Ed Moseby (Mickey
Rourke).
There are about half a dozen time lines going on. In
one, Domino is being questioned by FBI Agent Mills (Lucy Liu) about a
load of money that disappeared. Domino tells her the story of how she
got to the interrogation room in a couple more timelines. It's a slight
story, punched up by Scott's style and by the addition of Mark Heiss
(Christopher Walken), a producer of a reality television show following
the bounty hunters.
Keira Knightley is really starting to impress me.
She doesn't make the best movies out there, but she is completely
unafraid to play any type of role. Her resume includes such diverse
titles as Pirates Of The Caribbean,
Love Actually, Pride And Prejudice, King Arthur, and now Domino. Any problem a Keira
Knightley movie may have is not caused by Keira Knightley.
Tony Scott is getting there. He's almost got it to
the point where his material goes past watchable to really good. Let's
see if Domino is part of a
progression or merely an aberration.
Grade: B-
Good Night, And Good Luck
Official Site
| IMDb
Good Night, And
Good Luck is the equivalent of an operating room. Everything is
clean, everything is in its place. You have the utmost faith that
everything done there will be done correctly. Both are good things, but
both strike you as sterile.
The performances are all top notch, with David
Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow, the man whose television news
commentaries helped to bring down Joseph McCarthy (who is portrayed
only through archival footage), but past the performances and the
attention to period detail, there's not as much meat on the bone as I
would have liked. We see Murrow's attacks on McCarthy, but it is never
put in any sort of context. The only back story we get is from Murrow's
newscasts. You know why McCarthy was bad, and I know McCarthy was bad,
but you run into trouble when you make a movie about a factual event
and assume everybody's up to speed. It was so not fleshed out that
there was only one small, inconsequential subplot added.
This movie was wonderfully acted, wonderfully shot,
and wonderfully directed by George Clooney, but the script didn't feel
so much as it had been written, rather copied from official transcripts.
Grade: B
The Fog
Official Site | IMDb
Where do you start with a movie like The Fog? We've all seen them -
movies whose writer or director is so intent on making a horror movie,
and so worried about the effects, that no time is spent on the script
which consequentially makes no sense.
The movie opens with an unexplained scene from
sometime in the past. These scenes always are the point of whatever
horror is going on, but we can only see them a little bit at a time. A
group of men row a boat. The boat is chained to something and stops.
One leans over the edge. On cue, he is dragged from the boat. Cut back
to modern day Oregon. Stevie (Selma Blair), the local DJ gets ready to
start her shift (playing hip, college music on an island described as
being two miles long). The station is crammed into the top of a
lighthouse. Note I didn't say "old" lighthouse. There was room for a
radio station in the top of a functioning lighthouse. She seems to be
the only DJ. I guess they just turn off the station when she's not
there, which must not be very often considering she is shown working
the morning drive, evenings, and the overnight show. She must be so
fatigued that she loses all awareness of the microphone. Half the
things she says on air aren't near enough to be picked up.
More flashbacks tell us the bad thing in the past
had something to do with lepers getting screwed out of some land and
being left to die as their ship was set on fire. Apparently their
ghosts are back and they're pissed. Also back in town is Elizabeth
(Maggie Grace). She went to New York, but returned because she had some
spooky feeling she belonged here. I wonder if she fits into all this
somehow? Bad hoodoo starts going down as soon as she gets back. Voices
seem to call to her (an aside - It's night. You're alone. A disembodied
voice calls your name. Does anyone else see wandering out into the fog
along the coast wearing only a T-shirt and panties as being a bad
thing?)
An unnatural fog rolls in, and people caught in it
die. One group of kids on a fishing boat gets hacked up real good. The
survivor has a video of it happening. Of course his friend back on land
doesn't show the tape to anyone, allowing suspicion to fall on the
survivor. Later, an old book, hidden behind an underwater rock wall
comes to light. Everyone recognizes right away that it is important,
but no one bothers to sit down and read the damn thing.
Meanwhile, townspeople are developing leprosy and no
one notices.
It's time for the ghosts' final attack. A fog rolls
into town. Within ten minutes of it hitting, people are in such a panic
that overturned cars litter the streets and buildings are ablaze. City
hall turns out not to be that great of a refuge after an incriminating
painting is found on the wall (aside #2 - If you had just murdered a
bunch of sick refugees - women, children, everything - would you keep
it quiet, or would run right back to town and paint a wall sized
mural?) (aside #3 - If you discovered a wall sized mural detailing an
atrocity perpetrated by your ancestors, would you destroy it or just
stick a bookcase in front of it?)
Death. Destruction. Murder. Mayhem. Until the lead
ghost sees Elizabeth, who by now you recognize as being played by the
same woman as in the flashbacks. Ghost man takes her off to wherever,
problem solved. I guess she was the descendant of this group of people
who were all killed....
And just in case you were too dense to figure it
out, the closing credits play over their old wedding picture.
Grade: F
Doom
Official Site | IMDb
There are only two questions that a review of a
movie version of Doom has to
answer:
1. It is a video game movie not directed by Uwe
Boll, so it at least has a fighting chance of not being a failure.
2. Yes, there is a scene shot from the marine's
point of view with the gun barrel in the bottom of the shot.
Grade: D
Dreamer: Inspired By A True Story
Official Site | IMDb
I've figured out a little something about Dakota
Fanning - she hasn't figured out the concept of a paycheck movie yet.
She does projects she wants to do. When what should be a paycheck
movie, like this one, comes along, she doesn't half ass it once the
money's in the bank like many actors do, she still gives it her all.
The Crane family seems to be stuck in a rut of bad
luck. Ben (Kurt Russell) loses his job training race horses. The farm
is being sold off bit by bit around him. He owns the only stables in
the state not to have any horses. He lost his job over Dreamer, a horse
that fell during a race and would have been put down if not for the
intervention of daughter Cale (Fanning). They nurse the horse back to
health, while Pop Crane (Kris Kristofferson) fills Cale's head with
ideas that Dreamer can race again.
Yes, Dreamer:
Inspired By A True Story is a Disney movie aimed at twelve
year old girls that I saw just because it stars Dakota Fanning. I will
admit this. And like everything she is in, she makes it better just by
being there. The actors around her don't seem to phone in it as much
(or maybe I'm just reading too much into it). This is a fine family
film. They (they being at least half the reviewers who reviewed this
movie) say that before girls discover boys, they like horses. If you're
that age, first thing you need to do is to stop reading my reviews,
you're far too young. The second thing you need to do is to get your
parents (or better yet, your older sister) to take you to this movie.
Grade: B