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Reviews
Saving Jessica Lynch (2003)
Well done, glad I watched it
Saving Jessica Lynch: a first-impressions review
Thumbs up.
I thought this was a good movie. It did not romanticize or heroicize Pfc. Lynch or what she endured. NBC didn't make her a female Rambo. The movie spent a lot of time showing what her Iraqi co-rescuer, Mohammed al-Rehaief, risked to tell the Americans about her confinement.
The Nasariyeh battle sequence was well done. My only complaint would be showing the fedayeen just standing in the middle of the street, hip shooting their AK-47s. That's a good way to (a) get killed, as a fair number of them did and (b) shoot the sky, not your targets. But for all know, the fedayeen there really did that. Heck, in Baghdad they charged Abrams tanks with pickup trucks, so their open-battle skills seem not to have been very great.
There was a lot of action about the firefight what wasn't presented, of course, but the movie was not about the whole battle. It tracked Lynch and those involved directly with her.
It was good to see the American military officers and enlisted members portrayed with decency and humanity. The Iraqi medical staff were sympathetically presented, which accords with what I recall was written about them once Nasiriyah was secured and western media moved in. The fedayeen leader was something of a caricature, but on the other hand, when you portray Nazis or those like them, can you really overplay their evil?
The sequence when the SOF uncovered the American bodies from the sand with their hands could have easily been overplayed. But it was understated and evocative without being maudlin.
All in all, this movie was a worthy presentation for Veterans Day weekend. Kudos to NBC.
PS - I am a retired US Army artillery officer.
Open Range (2003)
Fine revival of the Western genre
How many times has The Western died and been resurrected? It was dead in 1992, then Clint Eastwood brought it back to life with his Academy-Award winning Unforgiven. The next year Kirk Russell breathed more life into the genre's renewal with Tombstone, a pretty good, if inventive, retelling of the Wyatt Earp legend. Kevin Costner starred in another Wyatt Earp movie released the year after that, called, natch, Wyatt Earp.
Then the genre faded away except for some comic films such as Shanghai Noon. Now some critics say The Western is alive again with the release of Kevin Costner's third directorial project, Open Range.
Costner previously directed 1990's Dances With Wolves, which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Directing. It was a big hit, even at three hours plus three minutes long. Next he directed The Postman, 1997, which didn't do well at the box office and was three hours minus three minutes long.
Now comes Open Range at relatively svelte two hours, 15 minutes. The Oscar buzz has already started for Robert Duvall's performance. I am wondering whether it is actually possible to make a bad movie if it has Duvall in it. He is an actor of unbelievable talent.
As fine as Duvall's performance is, the movie would be good even with another actor in the role. I can easily imagine Gene Hackman in Duvall's role, or for that matter, Michael Gambon, who does play in Open Range as the heavy.
The story itself is one you've seen a hundred times before in Westerns going back to the 1930s. Mean Denton Baxter (Gambon) owns a one-street town in the middle of nowhere. The sheriff is his lackey. Baxter's special hatred is reserved for `open range' cattlemen, who drive their herds around the open country, foraging and grazing wherever they happen to wind up. That's what Costner and Duvall do.
Costner plays Charley Waite, a man with a past. Duvall plays Boss Spearman, a man with a past. Come to think of it, Costner tends to play Men with a Past, especially when directing. It works in Open Range, though - why else but to run away from his past would a man spend 10 years riding the range with a crusty guy like Boss Spearman?
Baxter's men do bad things to Spearman's two other employees. The conflict is drawn. The showdown on Main Street (okay, it's the only street) is inevitable.
There are three things that save Open Range from being a mere hack retelling of one of the hoariest Western themes. The first is the performances of Duvall and Costner. Costner downplays his part commendably well. Costner has always played the hero's role anti-heroically, and here it works perfectly. He is a coiled spring; when released the result is almost shocking.
The release comes in the gun battle. Costner's direction of the gunfight sequences is deft and sure. The pacing, the editing and the camera work are superb. From literally the first shot to the last, the old cliches are avoided. Its setup brings to mind a number of other last stands such as those in High Noon or High Plains Drifter, but the fight itself is nothing like them.
The whole story revolves around the gunfight. No matter how good the rest of the movie is, a substandard gunfight would torpedo it. Instead, the gunfight is so well done that you forgive the movie's shortcomings in other parts.
The third thing that sets Open Range apart from hackery is the development of Costner's and Duvall's characters. Some critics have said that this makes the movie drag; one wrote, for example, that nothing at all happens for the first 20 minutes. Which is true in a way - there's no action sequence for that time, but this is not an action movie. I might also remind you that in Matrix 2, nothing happened for the entire *first hour,* and it *was* an action movie.
It may well be that this is a 115-minute movie told in 135 minutes. My wife thought so. I personally thought the extra time spent on character development was a plus, adding to the depth of the movie. Besides, movie tickets are so expensive these days that if the director wants to spend an extra 20 minutes telling the story, I don't mind.
(However, the other characters are relatively under-developed compared to Charley and Boss. That may be what makes the middle 20 minutes or so seem to drag.)
Annette Bening plays a spinster who provides the love interest for the movie. She is the town's doctor's sister. Conveniently she and the doc have a house just outside town where Boss and Charley can hang out while figuring out what to do about the fix they're in. The love interest between her and Charley is low-key and only once prominent. It doesn't really work very well, but it doesn't ruin anything, either. It just seems forced into the story, as if to make sure the movie included a major female role. After all, women buy theater tickets, too.
Whether Open Range will revive the Western again is an open question. But it is definitely worth seeing. It's visually outstanding, the dialog is good except for only a couple of places and the gunfight is one of the best ever in the genre.
Overall, I give Open Range five slugs out of six from a Colt Single Action Army.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
A grim movie, but could have been great . . .
I have always thought that if a movie isn't worth seeing twice, it isn't worth seeing once. So would I pay my hard-earned scrip to see T3 again? Yes, but only because my wife wants to see it, and couldn't go opening night with the boys and me.
For some reason I was disappointed at the end - but my disappointment is with the ending itself, not because its technical achievements were less than advertised (they weren't).
Obviously, I can't give away the ending here, so I won't. But be forewarned, this is a grim movie, a deeply pessimistic movie. And the first two were not. Thus, the ending was out of synch with the series. I found it jarring. (It's also an extremely obvious setup for Terminator 4, which had darn well better be made because to end the series now would be a travesty.)
That being said, T3 is an amazing piece of movie making. The main chase sequence is a definite contender for the best automotive chase sequence ever; IMO it wins hands down. (I say "automotive" chase because more than cars are used.) The sequence is long, paced just right, exciting and the integration between live action and computer scenes are absolutely seamless.
Arnold S. is back in fighting trim; during final credits a teenage girl in front of us said, upon her mother telling her Arnold is 55, "He looks fine for 55!" Kristanna Loken as the T-X terminator (terminatrix?) performs the role extremely well, although truth be told, there ain't a lot of acting required of her; she utters maybe six sentences in the movie. The rest of the time she simply pursues Arnold, John Conner and Kate Brewster with stolid implacableness. Having a "female" terminator does work well.
Kate Brewster, played by Claire Danes, is John Connor's love interest, although they don't so much as hold hands during the movie. As for her place in the story line, well, you'll have to see for yourself.
At first, I didn't take a shine to Nick Stahl playing John Connor, but before long I changed my mind. He turned out to play the role well.
Finally, Arnold plays the T-101 as, well, only he can. As he explains to Connor shortly after they meet, he is an entirely different machine than the one who saved Connor's bratty skin years before (in T2, Judgment Day, 1991). Unlike in T2, Connor and the T-101 in T3 never "bond" as they did (sort of) in T2. In fact, in T3, Connor tells the T-101 that his predecessor was the only real father figure he ever had - man, Connor led a really screwed up life!
Perhaps because of that, and the fact that sparks never fly between John and Kate, the movie seems mechanical. Okay, it's a movie primarily about two robots, but I'm not a robot and I want humanity for my money. The cast just seemed to be going through their parts like they were following a machine program; I kept waiting for some intensity and depth but it never arrived.
The one exception is Earl Boen's reprise portrayal of Dr. Silberman, he the tormenter of Sarah Connor in T2, the psychiatrist who disbelieved her wild story and confined her to a mental institution indefinitely. But then the two terminators came to the institution, one to kill her, Arnold to save her, and Reality with a Capital R took place right before his eyes.
Well, Silberman is back, and the few minutes his role takes are nearly worth the price of admission by themselves.
Overall, I give T3 six bags of popcorn out of 10, but I give it that many mainly because I really liked the other two, and I like Arnold as well. Otherwise, the whole movie cries out Marlon Brando's famous line in On the Waterfront: "I coulda been a contendah!" So close, and yet so far.