d_fienberg Reviews

Along Came a Spider (2001)

Full of Plot Holes and Pretty Much By-The-Numbers

[21 December 2001]

My first question is rhetorical: Are there any cinematic police departments that teach officers to shoot to wound, rather than shooting to kill? I suspect that most real ones probably do, actually. But in Along Came A Spider, there are at least two occasions when Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman at his most "Morgan Freeman-esque") has the opportunity to end a standoff by just popping a suspect in the leg rather than shooting them in the chest. Winging a suspect might allow for, say, a trial and sentences. All that good legal stuff. Instead, though, Cross feels perfectly comfortable killing suspects after either realizing they don't have any new information, or that they were actually guilty. This raises the question of when you last saw a thriller in which the cop or investigator captures the criminal at the end, puts them on trial, and gets their cathartic release watching them get sentenced to life in prison. Nah. Instead movies just look for cool ways for the hero to waste the bad guy in the final reel. And when that wasting occurs in a dull manner, as is the case with Along Came a Spider (I don't feel I've given too much away here)... Well, what's the point?

Along Came A Spider begins with a tragic accident in which Alex Cross leads a botched sting operation that leaves his partner dead (in a horrid special effects sequence). Cross is so shattered he hasn't recovered 8 months later. That's what we're told, at least. Mostly Morgan Freeman just looks a little tired. Once he gets launched on a new case, though, the 8 months of depression cease to be a factor. The new case involves the kidnapping of the daughter of a US Senator. The kidnapper (gravel voiced Michael Wincott) seems to want fame, I guess, though it's never fully important. Cross picks up a new partner in the Secret Service agent who feels responsible for the girl's kidnapping (Monica Potter). For around ten seconds Cross has an adversarial relationship with a federal agent (Dylan Baker) who is leading the investigation until he drops jurisdiction and basically lets Cross take over. Things twist and turn and there are "surprises" and double-crosses galore.

The fact that the surprises really aren't surprising is a moderate problem. The number of little details that make no sense are more problematic. There's a series of clues involving a Charles Lindbergh web page and web cam that are pretty foolish. In fact, any time the film references computers it seems out of its element. Every detail is off. But since the computer stuff is basically the only detective work in the movie, you've gotta wonder about things. At the end, Cross hacks into a suspect's computer, for example. He figures out the password in an arbitrary manner (and then enters the password into the only security field in computer history that actually shows the letters in a password onscreen as you type them) and he pretty much clicks on a series of files that might as well be labeled "Motive," "Kidnapping Evidence," and "Where I'm Hiding Away." But I guess we don't see these movies for their realism. But absent any thrills, I guess I'm at a loss. Beyond the obviousness of the plot, nothing about Along Came A Spider is really bad. But I have equally little to recommend it.

Like Kiss the Girls, Along Came A Spider is based on a novel by James Patterson. And like Kiss the Girls, Along Came A Spider is directed by a man who started in independent films and has graduated to making indistinct run-of-the-mill Hollywood thrillers. Lee Tamahori first made his mark with the searing Once Were Warriors, but since then he's gone from bland (The Edge) to dull (Mulholland Falls) to blankly innocuous (here). His style, which once seemed so fresh, has been so subverted that his next assignment is helming a James Bond film, the ultimate reward for a director who gets the job done without letting such "irrelevances" as personal style and vision cloud his judgement. In Along Came A Spider, Tamahori does nothing to call attention to himself, but also offers nothing of originality to goose the narrative along. Basically the suspense involves lots of thunderstorms, dark dank hiding places, and children in peril. That plus a climactic chase that makes you yearn for the skill of Dirty Harry. But basically all of the technical aspects of the film are acceptable (damning praise).

Morgan Freeman, of course, is never anything less than an intelligent, composed, strong on-screen presence and you frankly wish more depth could be added to the Alex Cross screen persona so that Freeman could have a little more acting fun. As his foil, Monica Potter is, as always, a blonder, blander version of Julia Roberts. Potter's only true acting success, in my book, was in the Robert Towne Prefontaine story Without Limits. Otherwise, she's pretty much coasted on charm and a resemblance to the biggest star in Hollywood. In the smaller supporting parts Wilcott is fine, Baker is wasted, and you wonder how Penelope Ann Miller's career has disintegrated to the point where she has a half dozen lines here as the kidnapped girl's mother.

So it's hard to know what to say about Along Came A Spider. You could pick at its plot holes for hours. But trying to pick it apart cinematically is a pointless endeavor. There's not much wrong, but there's not much here. This is a totally mediocre 5/10 film.

Cube (1997)

Sometimes Freaky, Sometimes Gruesome, Frequently Amateurish

[20 December 2001]

Cube, a Canadian film directed by Vincenzo Natali is generally a very well crafted science-fiction tale that's one part Asimov and one part Beckett.

The science fiction angle, focusing on a handful of people trapped in a mysterious perfect cube, is marvelously constructed. Even though it's obvious that the entire movie was shot in a single set, Natali, cinematographer Derek Rogers, editor John Sanders, and production designer Jasna Stefanovic do an excellent job to simulate a massive, geometrically precise prison.

The philosophical angle, though, in which the "prisoners" represent a tiny cross-section of society and each has secrets and special knowledge is a total crock. Natali and his co-writers have lead ears for dialogue and a totally false sense of existential social commentary. They aren't helped by a cast that feels only a step up from student films (which, to some extent, this is, I guess). The characters are collectively annoying and the individual performances do nothing to make the characters any more complex.

There's a abusive cop, a paranoid doctor, an office worker, a math student, and a caricature of an autistic man (and anybody who's ever seen a cinematic representation of autism will be able to guess what his special skill is). They're in a 14-by-14 cube with 6 doors. One door leads to a safe room, the others to torture and death. They have no food and no water and they don't know each other, so wouldn't you know that tensions would run high.

At its best, Natali produces a masterful amount of suspense. The booby-trapped rooms are wonderfully devised to produce disgusting results. And since the characters don't know if sound, body heat, or their mere presence will be enough to set off the traps, there's much fun to be had with the concept. The film's best sequence involves a sound sensitive room where the slightest noise produces a wall of spikes. The production team uses colored lights, askew camera angles, and tricky editing to create the contrast between rooms.

But the film really has nowhere to go. The ending is a letdown largely because Natali left himself nowhere to go. Since you don't care about the characters, their fates are irrelevant and since the purpose, location, and meaning of the Cube are intentionally ambiguous, any resolution would really feel like a cheat.

Cube has been compared fairly frequently to Pi, as mathematical thrillers. Like Cube's philosophy, though, the mathematics aren't as smart as the filmmakers seem to think. There's no intellectual process because only two characters have any mathematical knowledge, so their discoveries aren't organic, they're of the "Oh. Why didn't I think of that two reels ago" variety. Unlike Pi, there's no real conceptual mystery to unravel and the various solutions are just a little too convenient.

Because of Cube's limited resources and the levels on which it does succeed, I'm going to give it a 6/10. I admired the mechanical artistry, but wished the movie had more depth.

Crazy/Beautiful (2001)

Even If It's Too Familiar, There's Lots to Praise

[18 December 2001]

As it currently plays, Crazy/Beautiful is like Mad Love (or The Sterile Cuckoo, or any of your favorite "she's nuts, but he loves her eccentricity" romances) meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's a teen romance. It's a problem drama. It almost always feels like one of several other movies. And yet the cast is strong, the direction is frequently fresh, and for a long time that's enough to keep Crazy/Beautiful interesting.

Nicole (Kirsten Dunst) and Carlos (Jay Hernandez) meet on the beach. He's hanging with his homies and she's performing community service picking up trash. They hit it off, but they're both more complicated than they seem. She's a depressive alcoholic sun of a Congressman (Bruce Davidson), while he's a football player who dreams of going to the Naval Academy and rising up from the barrio of East LA. Naturally they fall in love, but naturally there are obstacles. He's going places and she's going crazy, for example. But will love overcome said obstacles? It seems possible.

Crazy/Beautiful's script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, frequently seems too structure-bound.In this roughly 100 minute film, you can easily chart the beats as Nicole and Carlos develop their relationship against the odds and fall in love only to have the odds escalated partway through Act 2. There's an awkward "Happy Montage" around the 45 minute mark that's painfully scripted. They also touch on many themes constant to the Outsider Romance genre.

Director John Stockwell (apparently Dean's son) seems to be making a slightly different film. This is as gritty as a mainstream studio teen romance can be. Stockwell and his DP Shane Hurbut revel in oversaturated day scenes and grainy night footage. The editing is pleasantly jangly, perhaps the only film in the recent teen cycle to effectively use a jump cut (unless I'm missing such freshness in She's All That or Can't Hardly Wait). Stockwell nicely shoots his attractive leads and gets fine performances from each.

You wish, however, that Hernandez's character was darker. His life feels oversanitized, but around the edges you see hints that things could have been more interesting -- the Hispanic girl his mother obviously prefers to Dunst, his less intelligent brother, etc. Dunst's character feels similarly sketched out. I wished her depression arc had been better established. There's no question that the character is messed up, but mostly she just seems to have a drinking problem. Since the film's dialogue makes it clear that the problems are far more serious, it would have been interesting to see that.

I get the feeling that Stockwell made a darker and more complex drama and that he had to tone down language, depression, and sexuality in order to land a PG-13 movie. And that's disappointing because I would guess that many of my complaints could have been handled with ten or fifteen minutes more footage. As it is, I liked this movie enough to give it a 6/10, but I wished that it had more to set it apart.

Hoffa (1992)

Was Jimmy Hoffa the Ultimate Mamet Hero?

[17 December 2001]

David Mamet's script for Hoffa doesn't go overboard to try

convincing us that James R. Hoffa was a saint. It becomes clear

very quickly, though, that the Chicago-born Mamet feels a certain

kinship with the Teamster Leader and as a result, Mamet's Hoffa

has more than a certain kinship with many of Mamet's theatrical

anti-heroes. Jimmy Hoffa is, simply put, a working man. He's a

dedicated, passionate, corrupt, manly man. He's full of bluster and

ego and talk. If he landed in the world of Glengarry Glen Ross or

American Buffalo, he would be right at home. That being said,

Mamet's Hoffa probably deserved a better home than the movie

that Mamet actually wrote and Danny DeVito directed. Despite a

typically committed performance by Jack Nicholson, Hoffa falls

apart because there's nothing to hold it together. It's like a

connect-the-dot puzzle that nobody bothered to connect. You kinda

know what it's supposed to be, but you're taking a lot of faith.

The movie follows Hoffa (Nicholson) and his composite of a best

friend Bobby (Danny DeVito) from Jimmy's earliest days recruiting

truckers on the side of the road. We go from strike to rally to

Teamster election and Jimmy picks up a variety of friends and

supporters whose actual relationship to the man remain vague.

Hoffa seems to have a wife. He seems to have made connections

to the mob. He seems to have had an antagonistic relationship

with Bobby Kennedy. Unfortunately, I knew all of these things

because I knew them coming in and having seen the movie, I

honestly know no more now than I did when I started. Hoffa makes

it clear that Jimmy was corrupt but that he was always corrupt in

service of the working man. I guess I just wanted more than that.

Mamet's script just bounces around and makes it impossible to

differentiate between the real people and the composites created

to move the plot along. This isn't really a movie about history.

And the director, DeVito sometimes seems to recognize that the

film is unhinged from true history. Several outdoor scenes make

no effort to hide the fact that they seem to have been shot indoors

on a soundstage. He instead plays up the almost surrealistic

orange sunsets or preternaturally starry skies. Had this been his

methodology for the whole movie, perhaps it would have been

interesting. He could have played the entire Hoffa story as a

legend, as a tall tale, like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. But other

times, he seems to be going for a realistic portrait of a historical

figure and it just doesn't work. DeVito's direction has a confusing

over-reliance on overhead shots, which try as I might I just couldn't

understand.

The film is structured in a series of only slightly motivated

flashbacks recounted on what may be the last day of Hoffa's life.

The transitions in and out of the flashbacks are more than a little

clunky and draw more attention to just how arbitrary the whole

venture is. While most members of the audience may be able to

guess what's going to happen in the "present" sequences, they

may be at a total loss to explain why things keep going back to

various points in the past. Once again, there's just nothing holding

this together.

Nicholson's performance is really the only reason to watch Hoffa,

and even that's just because you can tell he's trying so hard. His

Chicago accent frequently wavers in intensity, but the character is

always thinking and always attacking and it's fun to watch (though

you wish the movie didn't need to be 2:20 long). DeVito's part is

underwritten and it's not the actor's best work. And nobody in the

rest of the cast really stands out. DeVito even manages to get a

bland performance from the usually excellent J.T. Walsh (R.I.P.).

**Final Tiny Spoiler**

The final mistake in Hoffa, and the mistake that destroys the movie

for me, is that the ending makes a totally uninteresting speculation

on the mysterious disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. It's better to

leave a mystery than to provide such a anti-climactic resolution. I'd

give Hoffa a 5/10 entirely for Nicholson and for Stephen Burum's

handsome cinematography.

Scary Movie 2 (2001)

Welcome to Amateur Hour!

[9 August 2001]

Memo to the Wayans Brothers: That scraping sound you're hearing? It's the bottom of the barrel. Actually, I'm sure you've been hearing that sound for a year now, so it's time to give it up.

I'm not convinced that the Wayans Brothers have truly understood parody since the fleetingly amusing "Don't Be a Menace..." A good first rule of parody, you see, is that you shouldn't parody something that was already a parody to begin with. The original Scary Movie broke that rule, mocking the already self-referential Scream movies. And the people loved Scary Movie and for despite being as memorable as glass of water, it still had its moments. A good second rule for parody is not to mock things that were already horrible, trashy bombs to begin with. Well, Scary Movie 2 is a mock-up of the "recent" slate of "haunted house" movies. But nobody liked House of Haunted Hill or The Haunting. They were just bad movies. But in this distinctly sorry sequel, the Wayans Brothers manage to make the awful even worse. There aren't more than half a dozen chuckles in the movie and with the failed jokes coming pell-mell, this movie becomes painful to sit through.

The movie opens with a brief play on The Exorcist with James Woods in the Max von Sydow role. Marlon Brando was originally going to play the part. But Woods is fine. Certainly better than anything else in the movie. But that scene is over quickly. It's a year after the first Scary Movie and Shorty (Marlon Wayans), Ray (Shawn Wayans), and Cindy (Anna Faris) are in college. There's a joke at the expense of Save the Last Dance that isn't so bad. But then the movie quickly goes into its "plot." A psychology professor (Tim Curry) has assembled a group of students to go to a haunted house for some kind of study. The house has a knocker shaped like huge testicles. It isn't funny. And neither is anything inside the house.

Once everybody is assembled we meet the two disabled characters that the movie will laugh at for the next hour. Chris Elliot plays Hanson, a caretaker with a stupid accent and one baby hand. And David Cross (of Mr. Show) plays Curry's double jointed assistant. Neither character is funny, but they're both plenty annoying. Rounding out the cast we have 90210 alums Tori Spelling and Kathleen Robertson. Neither has any background and their links to the main plot and the characters from the first movie are tenuous. They're just there. As is Christopher Masterson, always reliable on Malcolm in the Middle, totally stranded by awful writing here. Night Court's Richard Moll appears briefly as the least scary, least funny, least interesting villain in the history of cinema (why'd they even bother?).

The characters run around in circles and they make jokes that aren't funny to begin with and get even worse with repetition. A pea soup barfing contest in The Exorcist scene is only worth a chuckle at first and then after it's gone on for a minute it's just mind-boggling. Or a trash-talking parrot. I guess it's funny the first couple times, but by the time it does a "Weakest Link" joke, you realize that it's just past its expiration date. There's an amusing take on Hannibal. The Charlie's Angels joke is good for another chuckle. And... I'm trying to think of other positive moments. But it's just too tough.

The film is badly directed by Keenan Ivory Wayans, but the editing might be its most embarrassing technical feature. What can you say about a movie that runs 82 minutes and still feels like it's laden with too many pregnant pauses. The movie could have been much tighter. That wouldn't have made any of the jokes funnier, but it would have cut ten minutes off the mess.

The other alternative is that the three editors were just working with what the actors gave them and they couldn't find any takes that were better. Every performance is awkward and the movie feels badly improvised. You watch the actors and you can see them waiting for their next lines of dialogue or for the next not-amusing prop to come into play. The best of the acting is grating (Elliot and Cross), but Masterson, Spelling, both Wayans Brothers, Faris, and Regina Hall are frequently shockingly bad. I let Curry and Robertson off the hook because he is totally wasted, while she was always my favorite 90210 girl and I firmly believe that given the right material, she could probably act.

When I saw the movie, nobody laughed. Sure, there were titters for the first fifteen minutes -- anticipatory good humor, if you will. But the main body of the movie, the haunted house scenes, played to total silence. Nobody seemed grossed out. Nobody seemed offended. And certainly nobody seemed amused. Should have kept that "No Sequels" promise, boys. This one's a 1/10 bomb.

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

Oh Brian DePalma How We Miss You!

[9 August 2001]

Granted that The Rage: Carrie 2 was a movie that didn't need to be made and granted that The Rage: Carrie 2 is inferior to the original in every single possible way, it still isn't a horrible film. Stephen King wrote a nifty novel that really put its finger on something about teenage girls -- or rathere, more appropriately, something about why men fear teenage girls. Brian DePalma and Sissy Spacek were the perfect pair to bring his vision to the screen. But under the appropriately exploitative direction of Katt Shea, some of the basic elements of the plot remain emotionally effective.

Actually, the basic elements of the plot are strikingly similar. In fact, you kind of get the impression that writer Rafael Moreu basically rewrote the original and then had to change a few things. The prom becomes a post-football party. The boyfriend goes from the awesome William Katt and his curly waist length hair to the blandly innocuous Jason London. Instead of Betty Buckley's gym teacher trying in vain to help the telekinetic teen, we get the return of Sue Snell (Amy Irving) whose nightmare at the end of the original is one of cinema's great "gotcha" moments. But basically, Moreu respects the story arcs of the original.

Ugly-duckling Rachel Lang (newcomer Emily Bergl) has secret powers that she can't control in moments of rage. She's a bit of an outcast, but she has a couple friends, including pre-American Pie Mena Suvari and Eddie Kay Thomas. But we quickly find out that the football players at their school has a sortta "Spur Posse" thing going where they bed girls and get a seemingly arbitrary number of points for each girl. When Suvari falls victim to one of the jocks and kills herself, Rachel is alone. Oh, and did I mention that Rachel's mother is locked up and insane and that her father... Well, let's just say Rachel has some connections to that ultimate high school pariah Carrie White. Seeing the opportunity to correct history, Sue Snell tries to do for Rachel what she couldn't do for Carrie. And in the process gives an absolutely ridiculous lecture to her about telekinesis being a recessive hereditary condition... And you just know that when all the kids are talking about a big party... something bad just might happen.

On one hand, Katt Shea is the perfect person to direct this movie. Shea is a master of trash cinema (Poison Ivy and Stripped to Kill are career highlights). She milks her camera angles and swirling moves for all she's worth. Echoing and correcting DePalma's classic girl's locker room scene from the original, she manages to set three different scenes in the men's football locker room. But to keep the guys interested, she makes sure that Rachel, being taunted by evil football players, for some reason chooses to answer the door in a towel. Shea also milks the violence for all she's worth, unblinkingly depicting several versions of bloody carnage. Still, she's no DePalma. No matter how fancy her moves, she can't achieve the operatic carnage the steered the last thirty minutes of Carrie.

As our new fashion misfit, Emily Bergl is sensitive and meek in early scenes, but she's probably too attractive. The film lacks the wonderful moment of revelation where we discovered that even homely Sissy Spacek could be beautiful. Despite the fact that she was 23 when the film was made, she actually looks like a high school student. The same can't be said for Jason London, who looks every bit of thirty. Ditto Dylan Bruno who plays Rachel's principle torturer. In fact, the females all look the right age and the men all look like yuppies. It makes for a strange mix.

The film also suffers from a lack of interesting adult roles. Buckley was fine in the original, but Piper Laurie's terrifying presence is missing. You know it's missing because Laurie's famous "They're all going to laugh at you" is sampled several times in this new film.

For its first hour The Rage works by making you sympathize with Rachel. You know where the story's going, so the pathos kicks in early. Shea keeps the pace moving well during that time. But as the film approaches its big bloody climax nothing seems exactly right. You miss the endless circling of Katt and Spacek at the prom. You miss Nancy Allen's evil glee (totally lacking in Rachel Blanchard and Charlotte Ayanna in this movie). So the final result just isn't satisfying enough.

As a final note, I'd like to make a plea to all teen movie writers: That scene where the students are in English class and a blow-hard teacher is lecturing them on a book that just happens to have the same theme as the movie they're in? It's a dramatic crutch that suggests you don't have enough intelligence to make points on your own. So the teacher in The Rage is babbling about Romeo and Juliet and London and Bergl have a moment. Are we supposed to believe that they're star-crossed lovers? "She's telekinetic. He's boring. Will they find love?" That's just lame. This movie, though, isn't better than a 5/10.

Sugar Hill (1993)

Over-long, but frequently poignant drug epic

[8 August 2001]

As titles for this film go, I prefer Sugar Hill to Harlem. The title Harlem speaks to where the characters are. The title Sugar Hill refers to an ideal that has been lost and may never be regained. Harlem would be a simplistic title for a simplistic movie, while Sugar Hill is an appropriate title for a movie that frequently aims high and sometimes succeeds. So you'll forgive me if if I refer to it as Sugar Hill in this review (plus, I'm not really sure where it was actually released as "Harlem").

Sugar Hill opens with a series of pictures of urban life in the Sugar Hill part of Harlem. Since the photos are all black and white and since the people look happy and middle class, we know that these pictures are of the way things used to be. We then meet our two "heroes," Raynathan and Romoello Skuggs, as children who stand by and watch as their mother ODs on heroin and dies before their eyes. Even though she was a junkie, their mom wished for great things for her sons, but as we move into the present, Roemello's voiceover tells the hard truth: "The boy you loved as become the man you feared." Roemello (Wesley Snipes) and Raynathan (Michael Wright) control the drug trade in a part of the borough. They live a ghetto fabulous lifestyle with fancy rayon suits and fine cars. They get nice tables at classy restaurants. But things are about to change. The local mafioso Gus (Abe Vigoda) is letting a new dealer (Ernie Hudson) move in on their turf. Roemello wants out, having seen what drugs did to his father (Clarence Williams III), once a promising musician, now a struggling drug addict. But Raynathan -- the less intelligent, but more emotional of the brothers -- wants to start a turf war. The film has a "B" story involving a romance between Roemello and a beautiful woman (Theresa Randle) who loves Roemello, but is affair to be around him.

Sugar Hill plays a bit like New Jack City (both movies were written by Barry Michael Cooper). At its best, it feels like a smarter and more mature film than Mario Van Peebles's classic modern blaxploitation film. There's a complexity to Sugar Hill that New Jack City lacked once it regressed into a cops-vs-gangsters story. There's no law in Sugar Hill, no Judd Nelson to mess things up with moralizing. In Sugar Hill we've only got bad and worse.

Snipes's Roemello rules over the city like a God, holding the fate of thousands in his hand. Director Leon Ichaso goes a little too far to make this point. Snipes is constantly shot on rooftops and verandas, anywhere he can look out on his kingdom and loom over it. As a visual metaphor, it's effective, but it sometimes places a little too broadly, which is at odds with Snipes's wonderful, internalized performance. Snipes is physically intimidating, but as an actor he has sufficient brains to carry the film. His Roemello is the ego to the id of New Jack City's Nino Brown.

Actually, the film is full of amazing performances accentuated by the script's willingness to stop the action to allow the characters to tell stories. As the burnout father, Clarence Williams III (that would be "Linc" from the original Mod Squad) is just amazing and the story he tells Raynathan as he's about to shoot up is a devastating show-stopper. Vigoda also gives a performance tempered by age, and also has a super monologue, where he remembers the way Harlem used to be. Michael Wright's Raynathan grows on you. At first the acting seems too manic, but when you realize that it's a cover for how deeply he depends on his brother, it gains depth and Wright carries the film's final twenty minutes. Randle is fine in her romantic moments, but becomes shrieky when the role calls for high-pitched emotion.

Sugar Hill goes on for too long. It runs over two hours and there's no excuse for that. The plot involving Ernie Hudson's ex-boxer (Hudson is also excellent playing against type here) has confusing moments and there are several peripheral mob characters whose roles are never fully explained. Theresa Randle also has a very strange and random encounter with a basketball star (Vondie Curtis-Hall) which seems to have been in the script for symbolic reasons that just don't pay off properly.

On the whole, Sugar Hill works for me because of the consistent aura of sadness which fills the film. This movie isn't anywhere near as fun as New Jack City. It's not flashy, it's somber. But it worked well enough for me to give is a 7/10 recommendation.

Boiling Point (I) (1993)

Antiquated and Dull Procedural Thriller

[3 August 2001]

What I learned from Boiling Point: There seems to be a pretty set investigative routine if you're a federal officer: You find a shady perp. You try to get information. They tell you they won't squeal. You offer them a deal. They say it's not good enough. You finally dig in and threaten to do something illegal or unethical. They get scared and give you enough information to find another, slightly more involved, shady perp. You find that perp and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It takes four different variations on this theme before I realized that nothing was actually happening in Boiling Point.

Boiling Point begins with a nice premise. Jimmy Mercer (Wesley Snipes) is a federal officer whose partner is killed in a poorly executed bust. He's given seven days to kill the killer before he gets demoted from the Los Angeles office to, horror of horrors, Newark. At the same time, life-long crook Red Diamond (Dennis Hopper) is given seven days to pay off his debt to a mobster. He tries to work up a scheme with his old prison buddy Runnie (Viggo Mortensen). Red and Jimmy have intersecting lives, you see. They pass each other at a luncheonette. The use adjoining urinals. They're unlucky in love. They frequent the same high class hooker (Lolita Davidovich). And, well, it was Red and Ronnie who killed Jimmy's partner. So we know that they're bound to meet in the end.

In some ways, despite the settings, Boiling Point is a surprisingly down-to-earth old fashioned film. There's no sex. The violence is muted. The language is only slight. The debt Red owes the mobster is only $50,000. The peripheral crimes are only counterfeiting. It's all so very small and restrained. This movie could have been made in the 40s or 50s, a period conjured up by the nostalgic scenes dancing at The Palace.

It's fitting, then, that Boiling Point was directed by James B. Harris, who's something of an old-timer himself. Harris produced several of the old classic Kubrick films including Lolita and the similarly themed masterpiece The Killing. Harris has only directed periodically, helming James Woods in 1987's Cop and 1982's Fast Walking as well as two other films in thirty years.

He clearly intended for Boiling Point to been seen as a slow and involving character study of two men approaching an important deadline. There's not even a pretense of action. Basically Snipes and his partner (criminally underused Dan Hedaya) wander from one underworld functionary to another getting one tiny piece of information at a time. One guy tells them there's a guy. The next guy says he has red hair. The next guy says his name is Red Diamond. Etc. Meanwhile Snipes as two cryptic conversations with his ex-wife. Hopper goes out dancing twice with the prostitute. And somehow seven days pass. There's one very slow car chase. The Breakfast Club's Paul Gleason makes a brief appearance. And the film's only explosion is done in such clumsy slo-mo that you wonder why they bothered.

And the point, I guess, is that cops and detectives and officers don't necessarily live sexy exciting lives. And that criminals are sometimes boring and innocuous as well. So what Harris does is take a normally wacky villain in Hopper and make him quiet and slow. And he takes an exceptionally vital physical actor in Snipes and makes him quiet and slow. And he takes a quirky dark actor in Mortensen and doesn't bother to give him a character. And the result is predictable. You can't get involved with any character for even a second. There's no sympathy and no and very little understanding. Nobody gives a bad performance, but the actors all seem handcuffed. I suspect this was intentional, but that doesn't make it compelling. The writing occasionally has an appealing grasp of the criminal jargon, but nobody seems to enjoy saying it.

The lives of our characters keep weaving back and forth as they pass through the same spaces initially unaware of each other. For such a conceit to work, though, the film would have to be amazingly edited. The fact that the editing is just horrible is what finally deadens the movie. Never for a second does the film gain any kind of rhythm or pace. It just goes from scene to scene, building nothing.

Boiling Point is an amazing example of how to mute a cast full of charismatic actors. It's flat, gray, and antiquated and hardly even worth 3/10.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Beautiful Imagery Mingles With Awful Narrative

[14 July 2001]

People obviously play video games for reasons. They play because they can put themselves into the world of the game. They play because they wish to embody the game's hero. They play for the intellectual challenge. Or they play for the rush of adrenaline. I wonder, however, how many people play video games solely for how they look, irregardless of how dull they might be or of how insulting they may be to the player's intelligence. For those people, though, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within will be a great time at the movies. For most people, though, I suspect Final Fantasy will serve as more of a historical footnote, an idea of what technology can do and why it's still a long way from replacing people.

The assumption I'm under, you see, is that just as everything on the screen is computer generated, the script as well was produced by plugging a series of sci-fi cliches into a computer. The programmers obviously clicked the "New Age Mysticism" button, but failed to click the buttons labeled "character" or "logic." For me, Final Fantasy, as pretty as it was to look at, was dull, unintelligible, and totally uninvolving.

As such things go, the plot involves an Earth overrun with shimmery "phantoms" which came over on an asteroid thirty years before the beginning of the film. The "Phantoms" suck the life forces from people and humans have retreated to a number of enclosed cities, where they plot to take the Earth back. On one hand, there's the military faction led by General Hein (voiced by James Woods). They want to blow the Phantom Crater back to the stone age. On the other hand, we have the intellectuals led by Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na) and Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland). They fear General Hein's plan will kill the spirit of the Earth. And they have an alternative plan involving eight spirits. The origins of the spirits and how they're gonna stop the phantoms makes no sense. Occasionally Captain Grey (Alec Baldwin), Ross's former flame) expresses confusion about what's going on. The audience share's his confusion. In response to his queries, Ross tells him not to worry about it. The film share's her blatant disregard for the audience.

Final Fantasy is frequently amazing to look at. The computer generated imagery is at its best in a series of dreams that give Dr. Ross completely irrelevant conclusions as to the true nature of the Phantoms. Dr. Ross herself is an amazing creation, though her movements and appearance are vastly superior to those of any of the supporting characters. She has a physical depth that none of the others match. The phantoms are fun to look at and it's frequently entertaining to watch the computer guys emulate real camera tricks and cinematic devices.

But the characters aren't interesting. They're flat. They're weakly motivated. And they keep saying stupid things. As a result the vocal talent is stranded. General Hein is so uninteresting that you wish James Woods were playing the role live action. You see, human actors can give shading to parts when the writing isn't up to snuff. These cyber-actors are just trying to look superficially like humans. The cyber-actor playing Ross can't act. She can't pull off any of her emotional scenes. She's empty. A real actress in the role may have had a fighting chance. Baldwin sounds bored and Buscemi has one lame one-liner after another. It gets increasingly annoying.

In terms of its visual strength and "Green" politics, Final Fantasy reminded me of Princess Mononoke. The more conventional animation of that film was far more beautiful and the characters were far more compelling. Princess Mononoke was truly magical. Final Fantasy has all the mystic powers of a "Got Your Nose" trick. There's just not much to this 3/10 disappointment.

Bamboozled (2000)

Spike Lee Lets His Powerful Material Down

[7 July 2001]

Towards the end of Bamboozled, Spike Lee lets go of his narrative for a minute and turns to the film over to a parade of archival material. From classic films and cartoons, this footage shows the image of African-Americans that the white media constructed for decades. Dancing wildly or alternatively lazy, eyes popping out of their heads and stupidly eating watermelon. For a brief moment, Spike Lee is showing the audience, rather than telling us and the result is incredibly powerful. In these moments, Bamboozled reminded me of Marlon Riggs's 1991 documentary, Color Adjustment. Using similar material, Riggs showed the way that the mediated images of African-Americans helped to maintain the political status quo. Riggs relied on the primary sources and on traditional talking-heads documentary style to make his point. And I can't help but feel that his approach was far more effective in its subtlety than Lee's in his bombast.

Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is a low level television executive at a floundering network. His boss (Michael Rappaport) thinks that Delacroix's work has been suffering because it hasn't been black enough and he sets him to creating a truly black show. In his frustration, Delacroix plots a revenge by suggesting a revival of the minstrel show with one major twist -- the show would feature black actors in blackface. He brings in two street performers (Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover) as his stars and he assumes that the show will never actually make it on air. But much to his chagrin and the dismay of his assistant Sloan (Jada Pinkett), the show is a massive success.

Spike Lee's criticism is against black performers and image makers who allow the negative representations of their people. The film is a harsh indictment not only of Delacroix, for letting down the African-American community, but of talented tap dancer Manray (Glover), who prostitutes his talent towards the negative depictions of his people. The hubris of Manray and Delacroix is juxtaposed with the guilt and better judgment of Womack (Davidson) and Sloan. Strikingly, the film actually takes its strongest stand against the brilliant artist Manray, suggesting that his was the greater betrayal.

Delacroix is doomed from the beginning in Lee's loaded didactic script. He's Harvard educated, wears ugly suits, and speaks with a goofy accent. It's unclear whether the accent is an example of a horrible performance or a horrible decision by the director, or possibly both. The accent is annoying in ways that distract the viewer from his true character flaws. I can't image that Lee meant for me to forget Delacroix's reprehensible actions to concentrate on his stupid voice. It certainly pulled me out the of the movie and directed my antagonism at the filmmaker who didn't have any better ideas, rather than at the character of a TV executive whose ideas were evil.

Lee's script (always the downfall of a Spike Lee movie) goes off in too many directions. It touches on Delacroix's father, a comedian who plays what appears to be a modified version of the old Chittlins Circuit. Naturally the father doesn't think much of Delacroix. And it touches on the Mau-Maus, a group of rappers/revolutionaries who naturally don't think much of Delacroix. And the script finally makes Pinkett's Sloan into a school marm of a woman who's the overly-erudite symbol of all of the wrong done to both blacks and women. Sloan's character plays like Lee's response to perpetual criticism that he can't write for women. It's worth pointing out that he still can't.

The movie's failings are made all the more unfortunate by the importance of its lesson. When Lee steps back and teaches the audience about lawn jockies, Amos and Andy, Mantan Morland, and other negative racist depictions, he's doing a great service. Among the film's documentary moments are pieces of brilliance, including a touching scene in which the two minstrel performers burn cork and add water, following the traditional recipe for face-black. But for every time Lee educates us, he bashes us over the head with references to his own movies (even though Bamboozled is shot on digital video, it has moments clearly borrowed from Mo' Better Blues and Do the Right Thing) or, even worse, he makes too-obvious references to Network (Including a repeated misquoting of the famous "mad as hell and I'm not going to take *this* anymore" line). Lee never lets anything, however powerful, rest on its own merits.

Wayans is just horrible playing a character who wouldn't have been compelling even in an In Living Color sketch. And Pinkett is forced to suffer through Lee's dialogue and several awkward, seemingly improvised scenes with Mos Def as her Mau-Mau brother. But as the performers, Davidson and Glover are excellent, with Davidson giving the film its only true center of regret, and Glover combining acceptable acting with his outrageous tap dancing skills.

I wish I could recommend Bamboozled. I wish I could say that its message and material were of sufficient merit to make the movie required viewing. But probably the Marlon Riggs documentary (Color Adjustment, if you've already forgotten) should be the required text. Spike Lee continues to need lessons in trusting the intelligence of his audience. The alternative is a film like this film, an important idea unsalvaged by a bad execution. This is a 4/10.

Forever Mine (1999)

Slow and largely uninvolving Romantic Drama

[6 July 2001]

There is a mystery at the heart of Forever Mine, the most recent downturn in writer-director Paul Schrader's roller coaster of a career. The mystery involves a man in the first class section of an airplane to New York, circa 1987. The man looks a little bit like Joseph Fiennes, but he is wearing a goofy make-up job to imply scarring and he is speaking with a goofy accent to add intrigue. And thus the mystery can be summed up with a series of questions: Who? Who is this man? What? What is he going to New York to do, dressed as a drug dealer? And Why? Why would anybody cast Joseph Fiennes for a part that required acting? Sure, Fiennes is perfectly skilled at looking soulful, but anything beyond that -- accent, characterization, etc -- is out of his range.

We cut quickly from the plane to "14 years earlier" where we see Fiennes again, now much younger. We know he's younger because he isn't scarred and he doesn't have a goatee. He also isn't speaking with a thick Cuban accent anymore. He has a strange accent that waffles between British, "American," and "Latino." Fiennes is Alan, a cabana boy at a Miami resort. His friend Javier is trying to convince him that he should enter the drug game to make some real money. But Alan has clearly seen DePalma's Scarface, Blow, and a number of other drug movies and he has more legitimate dreams, starting, apparently, with bedding the wife (Gretchen Mol) of a New York businessman (Ray Liotta). Alan and the wife, Ella, begin perhaps the most public affair in cinema history. They make out down the beach from her husband, they get all kissy at local bars, and then have emotional conversations outside her hotel room. And the husband doesn't find out. But then it's time for the couple leave, but soulful Fiennes cannot let Ella go. We're not really sure why, though. As a character, she's a total cypher. Schrader gives her one or two expositional confessional moments, but that's about it.

So of course the relationship is at least temporarily doomed. But in Schrader's universe we knew that before Alan and Ella even kissed, because we know that she's Catholic and that guilt and morality will quickly come into play. As with several other Schrader works, religious fervor is the central plot device, which leads to Alan's deformity, Ella's regret, and the film's film act.

Beyond the Catholicism, though, there's not much at stake in Forever Mine. The two leads have minimal chemistry and the film is plagued by constant continuity errors and cliched plotting. I was troubled by the fact that the 14 years between the flashback and the framing device had done nothing to age any of characters. And I was perplexed by the fact that even though Alan's friend Javier starts out as the the man with the connections, he ends up as a glorified servant. I didn't understand why Schrader couldn't be bothered to develop either Ella's character or that of her husband. And I was just annoyed by Fiennes's inconsistantcy as an actor.

Schrader seems to be having fun with his own background and the backgrounds of his actors. There appear to be obvious references to Goodfellas and Taxi Driver, while Fiennes's 1987 persona has a strange similarity to Robert DeNiro. And all of the elements seemed to have been in place for a fine film. This was Schrader's follow-up to the minor masterpiece Affliction and Fiennes's follow-up to Shakespeare in Love. It was also Mol's first starring role after Vanity Fair jumped the gun and made her an "It" Girl shortly before the release of several small parts. But really nothing comes together. Schrader plots an affair without any twists or originality beside the Catholic guilt that have always fueled his violent Graham Greene-esque visions. The political context that justifies the period setting is hardly worth the effort. The drug subplot goes nowhere. And when Ella sits reading Madame Bovary to a group of senior citizens, the symbolism is just infantile.

Forever Mine never was released in theaters because the company producing it went under. It premiered on Starz! and moved to video. It's hard to imagine it having any real box office potential under any circumstances. This film is a 3/10 at best.

Finding Forrester (2000)

Well Made, but Beyond Derivative

[2 July 2001]

It's tough to get to the heart of Finding Forrester because of its muddled pool of influences. Good Will Hunting is an obvious point of comparison -- both are stories of blue collar prodigies reticent to use their talent because of their backgrounds and both were directed by Gus Van Sant. The issues of integrity and classism as well as the trite climax are reminiscent of Scent of a Woman (and once you add the athletics angle, you may also recall School Ties). The reclusive iconic author with a passion for baseball sounds like a subplot from Field of Dreams. And whole chunks of plot and character dynamics seem borrowed from the William Hurt story arc of Smoke. What's even more troubling is that Good Will Hunting, Field of Dreams, and Scent of a Woman tended towards clichés anyway so Finding Forrester feels either like a slick piece of mimicry, or a film written by a man who had never seen a movie and thus didn't know how to avoid dozens over too-familiar tropes. The lack of originality is troubling and yet Finding Forrester largely works because of Van Sant's proficient direction and excellent performances all around.

Newcomer Rob Brown plays Jamal Wallace, a basketball player from the Bronx who has a dirty secret. At every opportunity he's writing in one of a series of journals or reading one of a series of great books. He knows poetry and the history of the BMW corporation, and yet he gets C's at school. His test scores and hoops skills attract the attention of a ritzy Manhattan private school. At the same time, Wallace meets "The Window", a reclusive white guy who's always watching the schoolyard ball games. The Window turns out to be William Forrester, a Scot whose lone novel is still inspiring people forty years after its publication. As happens in movies, Forrester gives Wallace lessons in writing, but those lessons are really lessons in life. Wallace, meanwhile, tries to bring Forrester out into the real world. But in the end, everything that happens is about determination and being true to your own principles, while all the while chasing your dreams. In case you didn't get that "dream" motif, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" makes a couple appearances in the film.

Written by first-time screenwriter Mike Rich, Finding Forrester is a 135 minute movie that feels like it should have been longer. The film touches on a half dozen plotlines that never get developed or that just get discarded. Anna Paquin has several appealing moments as the rich white girl who's attracted to Jamal. But her story arc is abruptly dismissed. And Jamal's rivalry with the rich point guard on the prep b-ball team? Also dismissed. And Jamal's relationship with his friends from the Bronx? Patched up all-too-neatly at the end. Ethical issues involving the end of Jamal's basketball season are passed off as well. It would have been tough to resolve these things without more clichés, but leaving them hanging is even more problematic.

Yet through it all, the film coasts on the charm and professionalism of all of the actors. As Forrester, Sean Connery isn't really breaking any new ground, but like Paul Newman, our memories of the actor as a young man add additional gravity to everything he does as an older man. Rob Brown may not have acted before, but he's a natural, giving his role the necessary physical and intellectual characteristics. While F. Murray Abraham's bitter English teacher is a stock character he's always fun to watch, and in smaller roles Trevor Smith Jr. (sometimes known as Busta Rhymes) and Paquin excell.

Van Sant and ace cinematographer Harry Savides make everything look beautiful, a decision which sometimes weakens the film's sense of place. An overpolished subway stop and a selectively shot playground don't give any depth to the Bronx and Manhattan settings. Van Sant was much more successful with Good Will Hunting's Boston locales. But Van Sant moves the film at a good pace despite its length and continues to be a master with actors.

Finding Forrester's greatest gift is that even with all of the recycled material, nothing is ever so obvious as to be painful to watch. And since you've seen it all before, you can concentrate on positive theme and the excellent acting. As nice as those things are, though, they only add up to a 6.5/10 light recommendation.

Ocean's Eleven (1960)

Overlong and Underwritten, but COOL...

[24 May 2001]

I guess that in 1960, if you brought Frank, Dino, and Sammy together in a movie, you could be skip a certain number of formalities. You could do away with character, with suspense, and with pacing. You could leave plot holes the size of Texas. You could have a half dozen major cast members without any dialogue at all, in fact. Because all you had to do was let Sammy and Dino sing a little and let Frank sweet talk the dames. Toss in some Rat Pack regulars (like Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop), a few friends (watch for Shirley MacLaine's couple minutes), a few cameos (Red Skelton) and there you have a movie. Today, viewers may be intrigued by the stars and amused by the appearances by TV mainstays Norman Fell and Caesar Romero. But it's easy to look at Ocean's Eleven from a distance and wonder what the point was.

The plot is barebones. Danny Ocean (Sinatra) is getting the men of the 82nd Airborn unit together again for their latest mission. They're going to take out five Las Vegas casinos at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Ocean is a bit of a womanizer whose wife (Angie Dickinson) still loves him. Jimmy Foster (Lawford) is a rich playboy who wants out from under his mother's thumb. Josh Howard (Davis Jr.) is a garbage man who likes to sing. The rest of the gang includes a slow talkin' Texan, an ex-con who just wants to put his kid through college, and a bunch of other guys who seem to be mostly along for the ride. Ocean's gang is being aided by Spyros Acebos (Toch of Evil's incomparable Akim Tamaroff). And somewhere lurking on the outside is Duke Santos, a self-made millionaire with designs on Foster's mom and the gang's loot. In a perfect world, hilarious and suspensefully cool hijinks would ensue.

But for a long time, nothing really happens. Getting the band back together takes nearly an hour of screen time. And it's impossible to watch that hour without thinking, "Gee, I'm no editor, but I know the movie would have worked better without that scene..." nearly a dozen times. This is made all the more disconcerting by the amount of talent at work behind the scenes on this movie. The editor who left the plot sagging was three time Oscar nominee Philip Anderson. The frequently bland (though at least blandly colorful) cinematography was by Oscar winner William Daniels. And directing the whole thing was Lewis Milestone, whose proficiency with comedy (The Front Page) and pathos (All Quiet on the Western Front) make him one of the great unsung directors of the early Hollywood Sound period. But the focus of the film seems to have been letting the Rat Pack get away with whatever they want, for better or worse.

But why, oh why, doesn't Frank Sinatra sing? Dino gets to sing "Ain't that a Kick in the Head" over and over. And Sammy Davis Jr. gets two times through "E-O-leven." But Frank doesn't sing. He doesn't dance. He doesn't romance any of the dames. He doesn't punch anybody in the face. The remarkable thing is how Frank and most of the gang are able to retain their aura of Cool while doing absolutely nothing. They don't really act either, not that anybody embarrasses themselves, but they only rarely seem to be having fun (perhaps looking like you're really enjoying yourself isn't Cool). A late scene in which Sammy expresses amusement at the blackface the other robbers must don gives a hint of the kind of fun we're missing.

There's some fun to be had in Ocean's Eleven. In the climactic New Year's Countdown, for example, Milestone makes use of the first recorded "balloon wipe" to cut between the five casinos. And even if Frank, Dino, Peter, Joey, and Sammy don't really seem as cool as you may have heard, or remembered, they're still a heck of a lot cooler than the people you hang out with. Still Ocean's Eleven is only good for 6/10.

Permanent Midnight (1998)

There's Something about Jerry (Stahl)

[16 May 2001]

First, let me apologize for the easy joke in the one line summary. It was simply too easy to pass up. And sometimes writers fall back on easy cliches, especially in headlines.

Actually, make that especially in headlines and in movies about substance abuse. Simply put, Permanent Midnight fails. And it doesn't fail because of the direction, or the writing, or the performances (thought there are certainly serious flaws with each), but because it doesn't have anything new to the discussion. Permanent Midnight on one hand is about the depths to which drugs can drive a man, but it's also about the superficiality of Hollywood. The problem is that neither angle has anything remotely original in it and so barring something remarkable in the execution, there's really no point in making the movie. Permanent Midnight, though, features many good things, but nothing remarkable enough to justify the "been there/ done that" feeling that remains when the narrative is finished.

Permanent Midnight features a framing story that feels made up. Since I haven't read Jerry Stahl's book of the same name, I cannot speak to the truth of the framing sequences which feature Maria Bello as an ex-drug addict named Kitty. I can only say how painfully convenient it is for recovering Jerry (Ben Stiller) to have this blond angel more than willing to hear his story of degradation. Not a moment between Jerry and Kitty rings true emotionally, but at least it gives writer/director David Veloz and entre into the story, not that the story actually goes anywhere. You see, when Jerry arrives in LA he's already a junkie, living with his friend Nickie (Owen Wilson), who's also already a junkie. He marries a British TV producer so that she can get her green card and she helps him get a television writing job. As shown in the film, there's nothing about his life that leads the the progression of his drug addiction. He just gets deeper and deeper and befriends shadier and shadier characters.

There's an arbitrary point at which he obviously decided to quit (since he's clean in the frame story), but by the time we get there, it seems so obvious and so unsatisfying as to make the journey feel wasted. No matter how bad things seems to get, the audience knows it could always be worse, because we've seen worse drug addictions in a dozen movies of varying qualities. Throughout the flashback, Jerry makes no real attempts at recovery and yet only falls to a certain level. He never makes it to hell. Nothing in the film has a payoff.

Much of the problem, then, is in Veloz's episodic screenplay. Characters wander in and out and nothing really comes together. Jerry seems strung-out, but he never seems horrible, so we can't really pity the people who trust him and love him because he doesn't really do any serious damage to them. Everything just comes and goes.

The film is filled with tiny "star" cameos which meet with only occasional success. Owen Wilson and Janeane Garofalo are always good to have around, as is the perpetually psychotic Peter Greene. Cheryl Ladd, Fred Willard, Andy Dick, and Connie Nielsen, though, provide uninteresting one shot encounters.

Veloz perhaps wisely avoids drug movie hallucination clichés. Aware that he lacks the visual sensibility to rival Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Trainspotting, he restricts his flourishes to a single drug nightmare and to boring New Wave-y jump cuts and the like. Veloz clearly sets the film up as Ben Stiller's show.

As Jerry Stahl, Stiller is never less than solid. He makes it clear why people would continue to trust Jerry even with all of his problems. The script, however, gives no indication of the genius that everybody attributed to Stahl, making it difficult to feel that the character is wasting his talent. Stiller, then, is fleetingly amusing, fleetingly harrowing, and always acting. When the character, in a moment of true desperation turns to his neck for an uncollapsed vein, it's Ben Stiller shooting up into his neck, not the character. It's tough to watch, but you feel for an actor on the edge, rather than a character.

So people in Hollywood are so self-absorbed that they don't notice what's going on around them. OK. I've seen that before. And amidst all that egomania, people with problems are allowed to fall through the cracks. And I've seen that before. And recovery is possible? In a one-day-at-a-time way? I've seen that before as well. I kept waiting for Permanent Midnight to offer me something new and different. But it was only more of the same. There's enough good there for a 5/10.

The Negotiator (1998)

Wonderfully Performed Tense Thriller

[7/10 · 22 March 2001]

In paying tribute to the late J.T. Walsh, director Stephen Frears praised Walsh as the consummate character actor. Frears presented the importance of such actors declaring that you cast a veteran character actor in a small, but crucial role in your film and you can just forget about that part because you know that whatever they do will be right. Character actors blend into the scenery, but even still, you always remember their faces, as if they'd come some close to stealing a movie from the stars, but not quite. Character actors rarely come entirely out of the background, but they make it so that the background is worth watching as well. Walsh truly was uniqu e, nearly stealing films from Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, John Cusack, Nick Cage, and Anthony Hopkins. No matter how evil or conflicted the character, Walsh presented equal measure of regret, reluctance, or weakness. Nothing was ever easy. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Walsh departed with two movies already in the can including The Negotiator.

Clearly F. Gary Gray, the director of The Negotiator subscribes to Stephen Frear's confidence in Hollywood's most underappreciated workers, as he goes Frears one step further. The Negotiator is a movie where *every* role is filled by an actor more appreciated as a character actor. While the film's ostensible "stars" Samuel Jackson and Kevin Spacey had both top-lined movies with great critical success, but both are still critical darlings more than major box office draws, so what kind of moron would have them starring as police negotiators in an explosive summer action movie? Probably the same genius who would back them up with Walsh as an Internal Affairs investigator, Ron Rifkin as the chief of police, John Spencer of LA Law and The West Wing as another cop, David Morse as a S.W.A.T. team leader (!!!), and Paul Giamatti as a snitch. Because of this amazing line-up of super-actors, ever character has performance-related depth and the film works despite a script redolent of the middle ground of Die Hard clones and a running time a full twenty minutes too long.

So Jackson's a negotiator, inevitably the best we've ever seen, but when he's framed in a murder and some kinda crazy benefits scandal, he finally has taken too much and he takes Walsh, and the people in his office hostage. But he's tough because. he knows the rules of engagement. Or something. He says that he'll only talk to Kevin Spacey's West-side Chicago negotiator, while all the while the members of Jackson's squad want to take him out. Why? Because it's all a damn conspiracy. Well duh.

Every second of James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox's script feels recycled, but it doesn't matter because the cast is used to underwritten characters and they work hard to sell every line. Jackson is remarkable, essentially carrying the film. Spacey is electric in what really amounts to little more than an extended cameo. He arrives a while in as things are already threatening to lag and he lifts the film up with him. There aren't many scenes where Jackson and Spacey actually share the screen, but when they do, it's something special. It's like watching the Royal Shakespeare Company perform the collected works on Joe Eszterhas. You don't know why it should work, but clearly it does. Otherwise, it's worth it to watch Walsh cheat expectations on just how crooked his character is, or to watch David Morse play a soldier. Rifkin and Spencer have played nearly the same roles before, but they're pros and that's what counts.

F. Gary Gray holds it all together by giving the actors room to work, while borrowing his more staged scenes from films as diverse as The French Connection and that little movie with Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, and the guy from the Bolshoi ballet. Even if the action looks familiar, it's well paced and with Titanic cinematographer Russell Carpenter behind the lenses, even that great cinematic cliché, the police funeral gets a new look, even if that scene's most powerful moment is still an extended close-up of Jackson's tears.

Usually in movies like this the tension comes from a pounding score and quick editing. And while Graeme Revell (providing the pounding score) and Christian Wagner (with the quick editing) do their jobs, there's more excitement in watching all of the acting pros at work. This is a solid 7.5/10 testosterone fest.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

An Interesting Love-it/Hate-it Experience

[21 March 2001]

Dancer in the Dark is a film where your responses will be based on a series of conditional statements. *If* you like Icelandic chanteuse Bjork's music... *If* you like Bjork's voice and persona.. *If* you like director Lars Van Trier's shakey cam aesthetic... *If* you like Lars Van Trier's typically hyperemotional style.. *If* you like Hollywood musicals... *If* you like long depressing working class drama... *If* you like naturalistic performance styles...

The problem is that there's a noticable domino effect at work in Dancer in the Dark. It's a safe bet that if you answer "No, I don't" to, say, two or more of the above statements, you may well HATE Dancer in the Dark. It won't be a state of ambivalence, rather a passionate distaste. On the other hand, if the pieces work for you, it's possible to get carried away with your praise of the film. And in all honestly, both opinions are valid. And strangely, I find myself on the fence on most of them.

Dancer in the Dark is the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy story of Czech immigrant Selma (Bjork), a factory worker who's saving all of her money so that her son get get a eye operation which would prevent the early blindness that she's experiencing. Selma's only pleasure comes from the musicals she loves. She goes to see early Hollywood musicals with her friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and she's also doing an amateur production of The Sound of Music. [As an aside, Bjork may make the freakiest Maria in Sound of Music History] The film's tragic complications are put into motion by Selma's landlord, a policeman (David Morse) who may be lying about his wealth.

It has been much discussed that Dancer in the Dark's plot is always melodramatic and frequently inane. There's no point in saying anything about its plausability, about how Selma finds herself seemingly testifying against herself in a murder trial, or, well, anything in the film's final act. None of it makes much logical sense, but then again, neither does a magical nanny who flies into town on an unbrella, so we clearly cut musicals some slack.

Oh yes, I seem to have left that out of my summary. As Selma becomes increasingly overwhelmed by the real world, she begins to fantasize that she's in a Technicolor musical. You know, the kind of musical where prison guards, jury members, and factory workers know all the words to the same songs and know all of the dance steps?

Lars Van Trier is too amused by his own deconstruction of the musical and that's one of my major problems with the film. He seems to think he's being so cute with the various characters discoursing on musical conventions before he goes and tinkers with the same conventions. I'm not sure, though, if he's subverting the genre or embracing it. Or if he just doing a mixture, in which case it just isn't as interesting an idea as he thinks it is.

Also, it's hard to tell which part of the genre the film is playing with. When Selma and Kathy go to the movies, they watch old black and white Busby Berkeley kinds of movies. But when Selma goes into her fantasies, she's in a bright technicolor musical which contrasts with the handheld digital video look of her normal life. It's unclear to me how compatible these two visions are.

The film's songs, written by Bjork (with lyrics by the director), revolve around the idea of the found rhythm of life. Selma makes music out of the clattering of machines at the factory, the footsteps of prison guards, and the sounds of a train. The organic generation of her songs also plays against the grain of musical tradition, in which the sounds tend to be completely extra-diagetic. Again, I'm not sure how to deal this that.

I also just dislike Bjork. That said, she's excellent in the film. Or at least perfect for it. I just didn't really enjoy the songs because I don't enjoy Bjork's music. However, one of the pleasures of watching the film on video is that you can go back and watch the musical numbers a second or third time to try to get into the songs. For the most part, this failed for me, but after two viewings I finally began to enjoy the train song, "I've Seen It All." Once again, I accept that people who like Bjork more than I will probably find much more to enjoy.

On video the drab "real life" portions of the film perfectly retain their immediacy. And the performances of all of the leads stand out wonderfully. The musical sections, on the other hand, have been very poorly pan-and-scanned and Lars Van Trier's intended effect seems to be partially lost. Either way it's easy to respect cinematographer Robby Muller's superlative work.

So in the end, I just don't know about Dancer in the Darker. It's interesting and original. It's also pretentious to an extreme degree and the melodrama is a bit more than my taste. Van Trier's ability to drive his female stars to the brink of insanity is a skill, but I'm not 100% convinced about its artistic greatness. The mixture of elements is frequently compelling, but never completely pulled me in.

So I'm giving this one a 6/10. That's probably more moderate than most reviews this film will get. I'd expect lots of nines and tens and a few twos and ones.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

20 Years of Quality Depreciation in One Bad Sequel

[21 March 2001]

I've actually lost count of the sequels to John Carpenter's seminal 1979 indie-slasher flick Halloween. There was at least one with Jamie Lee, the freaky one with the Halloween masks, probably there was one in 3-D, and there may have even been one which involved a Jamaican vacation and Mario Van Peeples. Or else that was a Jaws sequel. It's tough to keep it straight.

Whatever, none of them really amounted to anything. The terrifying premise and execution of the original were lost and the Halloween franchise was basically dead by 1995. Enter Kevin Williamson and Jamie Lee Curtis. Williamson was, of course, famous for briefly rejuvenating the genre with the Scream series, while Curtis was, of course, famous for sadly rejuvenating her career with the My Girl series. So when Jamie Lee and Kevin said they were interesting in reviving the franchise, Dimension films gave the thumbs up and the filmmakers set to work actually believing that they were making something better than the five or six sequels which preceded it.

Williamson apparently turned in a 10 page plot outline and fled (Robert Zappia is credited with the script) and perhaps Curtis should have done the same. Halloween:H20 (an inane title having nothing to do with water) features higher production values, a higher profile cast, and more Jamie Lee than any film in the series since its second installment. But that sure doesn't make it any good.

In terms of tone, H20 definitely harkens back to the original. Things happen slowly and the setting is nearly as prominent as the actors. The film opens in Illinois, like the first one, but after a sitcom semi-star is killed, the scene shifts to a ritzy private school in California where Laurie Strode seems to be the head mistress. But naturally, she doesn't call herself Laurie Strode anymore and since this ritzy private school apparently has little use for background checks, her past as serial killer's victim/sister and her present as near-psychotic alcoholic have both been ignored. She has a son who wants to go to Yosemite, a boyfriend whose actual occupation is vague, and a security guard who looks a lot like LL Cool J.. Life in her poorly developed world isn't so good and if Jerry Springer ever had a show called "My younger brother killed my older sister and then broke out of the lunatic asylum wearing a painted William Shatner mask, tried to kill me and may still be at large," she would be right in the middle of things bawling her eyes out. When she isn't drinking or running a school, Laurie also teaches English, obsessing over monsters and final confrontations in Frankenstein. After listening to her whine for a bit, it's almost a relief when the school empties out and Michael Myers enters for half an hour of blood enhanced revelry.

Director Steve Miner, who must stay up late at night wondering if he'd rather be remembered as the director of the "Frozen Mel Gibson Movie-of-the-Week" Forever Young or of several episodes of Dawson's Creek, seems to have decided that Carpenter's original used Michael Myers too sparingly. And so, subtly out the window, Miner also manages so make Michael Myers seem fairly benign. What Miner doesn't realize is that Myers's blank mask isn't really scary if we keep seeing it, that having him lurk around every corner is always scarier than putting the guy in the middle of every frame. H20 isn't scary. It isn't suspenseful and despite the presence of a whole school of randy teens, it isn't even sexy. Miner paces the film well in the sense that even though it's dull, it moves every quickly.

Despite having to listen to Laurie's psychiatric problems for the first and second acts, the film is neither provocative nor original. The mutterings about final confrontations are superficially interesting, but if the payoff is so weak, why bother. The cast is attractive, but from Creek's Michelle Williams to Josh Harnett to that twerp from Little Man Tate, the kids are all wasted. They don't have parts and they don't have sex, so why even bother? It's fun watching Curtis kick ass for a while, but after watching her twitch from the first three quarters of the film, even that isn't sufficient payoff. Why bother?

H20 uses John Carpenter's original score for mood, and John Ottoman (the editor/composer of The Usual Suspects) adapts the theme into the overall score to great effect. But while H20 uses the same music, the same mood, and the same stars, it isn't smart enough, terrifying enough, or cool enough to live up to the original.

Vertical Limit (2000)

Best if you don't take it seriously at all

[7 March 2001]

It's amazing the things they can do with special effects now! First we have the wonderful sequences where the Alps are made to look a little tiny bit like the Himalayas. Then there are various scenes of what appear to be computer generated avalanches. Not bad! But the true achievement of Vertical Limit comes with the appearance of one of the first entirely computer generated actors in a major motion picture. And who knows... within ten years perhaps those crazy technicians at Industrial Light and Magic will make a "Chris O'Donnell" that can show life-like emotions.

But I'm too mean to Mr. O'Donnell. In reality, his only flaw as an actor (beyond his inability to deliver dialogue outside of a high voiced monotone) is that his screen presence is just too blandly benign. When that presence is correctly used, O'Donnell isn't really a disruptive force. See Cookie's Fortune for evidence. However, in Vertical Limit, O'Donnell just doesn't have the charisma or presence to hold the movie together. It's likely that even a proven action star couldn't have overcome the cliched script and perplexing resolution, but O'Donnell adds nothing to this movie.

O'Donnell plays Peter Garrett, a former mountain climber and current photographer for National Geographic. In the opening scene of the movie we see Garrett forced to make a touch choice which led to his father's death. Naturally things are a little tense between Peter and his sister Annie (Robin Tunney), who was also involved in the opening accident. Annie, though, has continued to climb and she's about to go on an expedition to summit K-2, the world's second tallest mountain. The trek is being funded by billionaire sportsman Elliot Vaughn (Bill Paxton), who's using the trip as a publicity stunt for his new airline. Wouldn't you know it, though, an accident leaves three climbers stranded on the mountain with only 36 hours to live and it's up to Peter Garrett to put together a team of climbers for a rescue mission. That team includes a French-Canadian babe, two crazy Aussies, a devout Muslim, and the inevitable hairy mountain man (Scott Glenn), who knows the mountain better than anyone. If you can't look at those character types to know who's going to live and who's going to die... Well, then Vertical Limit will contain nearly endless thrills and chills. Otherwise, you're pretty much going to watch people slide down tall mountains.

The first 50 minutes of the Vertical Limit script (credited to Robert King and Terry Hayes) are a little twisty and jargon-heavy. The moments involving the Pakistani army are arbitrary and the guilt laden conversations between O'Donnell and Tunney are necessary to the plot, but nothing more than perfunctory. After the rescue mission gets going, though, people mostly stop talking and the movie picks up.

Director Martin Campbell is fairly proficient at directing this kind of glossy, big budget action movie. He lacks the style that Renny Harlin brought to Cliffhanger (hey, "Euro-hack" is a style, isn't it?), but he's a master of pacing. Working with Oscar-winning editor Thom Noble, Vertical Limit comes together very well and produces some very solid action moments.

MAJOR AND TOTAL SPOILER BELOW

***************************

Vertical Limit ends on a strange note. We're looking at pictures of the men who died on the mountain during the movie. It becomes clear that the rescue mission led to the death of six people and the only person who was saved was Robin Tunney's character. Are we supposed to feel that it was worthwhile because the Glenn character revenges his wife's death? That's bittersweet. It would be tough to argue that the loss of human life was worth saving one climber and yet the dead are looked at as heroes.

There's no point in talking about the acting in this film. Tunney is nice for me to look at. I assume looking at Chris O'Donnell will also please people. And Scott Glenn is amusing and comes the closest to acting. The supporting characters all blend together completely.

Vertical Limit is not a horrible movie, but for its first hour it's fairly dull and as a whole it only delivers on a hint of its promise. This is a 5.5/10.

Absence of Malice (1981)

Fairly Offensive, in Retrospect

[7 March 2001]

[Several Vague Spoilers Throughout]

Absence of Malice strikes out against the rights and the privileges of the press. The movie suggests that sometimes the press doesn't do their research as well as they should and that they don't worry about who they hurt. OK. The problem is that nothing that Sally Field's reporter does in the film is her fault. Corrupt sources and a justice department run by injustice hardly seem like the fault of the media and yet in the end, the press gets the brunt of the blame, while the flaws with the law are mitigated by a Wilford Brimley cameo and a number of red herrings.

Furthermore, Absence of Malice is a rather offensively anti-feminist movie. Sally Field's character has clearly sacrificed all hopes of womanly happiness to progress her career and now she realizes that everything she's done to be a good journalist has made her an unappealing woman. When her paternalistic boss assures her that she's a good newspaper woman (as if that's not offensive enough), she looks at him with Sally Field-weepy-eyes and says, "What if you delete the first part." In Absence of Malice, it's clear that every time Sally Field does something traditionally female, she's being a bad journalist. Sexuality is something that gets in the way of their jobs for both of the two female characters and as a result both characters are clearly unhappy. It's just a mess.

And the plot is basically set up to knock the press, so it's very difficult to take it seriously. Sally Field plays a journalist who flirts with men, hangs out a bars trying to get scoops, and it fairly good at her job. She's fed a story linking a booze merchant with a troubled family past (Paul Newman) to the disappearance of a union boss, she jumps on it, never bothering to get comment from the suspect. Well, of course Paul Newman is innocent. And of course Newman and Field get involved. And frankly, none of it is the least bit believable. By the time Brimley shows up in the final twenty minutes to serve as a narrative crutch tying all loose ends together, it's really tough to care anymore.

And that's too bad, because naturally Newman is excellent. And Field isn't bad either considering how horribly the material treats her. And Brimley's just plain fun when he shows up.

It just doesn't cover the fact that Kurt Luedtke's script doesn't go anywhere. Since the mystery never develops and the sexual relationship is a contrived sham, your appreciation of the film rest entirely on how totally you buy into the ethical argument. But Luedtke and director Sidney Pollack have stacked the deck -- when given the choice between sympathizing with the newspaper's fat lawyer, the weasely prosecutor (Bob Balaban), and Paul Newman, what's the point? Since the entire back-story is a McGuffin, there's never really anything at stake besides ethics and it's fairly difficult to make a compelling story about something that vague. It's impossible to watch the movie and feel that there's been any clear-cut wrong doing, and yet the indictment against the press is fairly complete.

As much as I liked the acting and as much as the film is professionally made and technically superior, I can't really give this one more than a 5/10.

Nurse Betty (2000)

Fun to Watch, but Politically Confusing

[6 March 2001]

Feminist critic Tania Modleski argues that soap operas feed off of fears of social isolation. She argues further that the never ending narratives of soaps perpetual viewing practices over long periods of time. Housewives who watch soaps are, then, watching their ongoing narratives as a way of paralleling the elogated and unending plots of their own drudgery. The soap opera form, then, is opposed to the traditional cinematic (an inherently male medium) form, which requires unambiguous action and conclusions similarly lacking in duality and variation of meaning.

In Nurse Betty, the main character (Betty, played by Rene Zellweger) is a Kansas waitress, who watches her favorite soap, A Reason to Love (a not very coded comment on soaps as a catalyst to a life of quiet desperation), at work. She also watches tapes of each episode at home. She discusses every episode with her best friend and subscribes to soap opera magazines. Rather than using soaps as a form of isolation, she uses her show as a way of creating a community for herself. Of course the soap's reenforcement of family structures has stunted her social growth. Her husband, Del (Aaron Eckart) is screwing around and Betty seems to know, but she does nothing to change the isolated world in which she lives. Then, on her birthday, Del is brutally murdered by two hitmen (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) and Betty witnesses. She goes a little around the bend and becomes convinced that she is living in her favorite soap and heads out West to try to win back the affections of her favorite character, Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). All the while, she's being chased by the two hitmen who are convinced that she's running off with the drugs.

Nurse Betty is Neil LaBute's first director effort that didn't come from his own script. Of course, nobody really praised the direction of LaBute's first two films (In the Company of Men, and Your Friends and Neighbors). Both films had a spare and claustrophobic look. They were insular chamber pieces about misanthropes and the not-so-nice things that people do to each other to screw with their minds and their bodies. Nurse Betty, on the other hand, is a warped fable.

The locales make it easy to compare to The Wizard of Oz, but I don't really like that comparison. I'm not honestly sure how to handle Nurse Betty's allegorical meanings. When she witnesses the death of her husband, Betty doesn't really make a decision to change her life. She doesn't make any choices, a trick of her psyche causes her mind to believe that her life has already changed. She has gone from waitress to skilled nurse without actually contributing to the process. But for all of her new-believed professional credentials, what Betty really wants is a man and she's incapable of seeing behind the curtain to realize that the man she wants (Dr. David Ravell) doesn't exist and that the man she finds (actor George McCord) is an ass. She's incapable of seeing through the illusion. Whether she gets her mind straight is really just a plot point and that's a little disappointing.

Frankly, Nurse Betty feels overwritten. John C. Richards and James Flamberg's script never feels real, but even worse it never feels fully like the bloody fairy tale it's aiming for. To return to the Wizard of Oz allusion, with Nurse Betty, you can always see the men behind the curtain. It always feels as if two screenwriters are moving the plot along, rather than like Betty is doing anything to move things along. The plot structure is classic elementary chase drama -- we go back and forth between the hitmen and Betty. And while getting Betty to Los Angeles was easy, in order to keep things going, Richards and Flamberg introduce a Hispanic roommate whose actions and character are painfully unmotivated. Nothing comes easy to this movie, including the various twists at the end, which would be surprising except for the fact that they just aren't interesting.

LaBute's direction is fine, I guess. He mixes the brutal with the fantastical with decent skill. He errs, though, in his collaboration with cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, whose work is just distracting. Sure, the frames look nice when they're tinted various primary colors, but I don't understand what that had to do with anything.

The biggest strength of Nurse Betty is the acting. Zellweger proves that when the material is right, there aren't many actresses better. Her greatest liability would seem to be her baby-doll voice, but she always plays off her atypical line readings to create truly complex characters. This film wouldn't work without her. Morgan Freeman is also strong, but when did he last give a bad performance? And this is truly Greg Kinnear's best screen acting to date.

Nurse Betty bothers me, I guess, because I don't understand it. I can admit that. On one level it seems to have feminist undercurrents, but on the other hand it has elements straight out of the anti-feminist backlash of the late 1980s. My discomfort about two men writing a woman's fantasy to be directed by another man is tough to overcome. While the actors on screen make everything seem effortless, the film's plot seems to be working much too hard. And the result is a frequently entertaining jumbling with enough pleasant moments to get a 6.5/10, I guess.

Arthur (1981)

Warm, Hilarious Alcoholic Fun

[6 March 2001]

If you consider that Arthur is basically a character study of an eccentric alcoholic and lacks much by way of a third act plot structure, it's a wonderfully successful movie. It's fairly easy to ignore the fact that even at 97 minutes, the film is running on pure charm for more than half that time. Wonderfully performances and a uniquely droll script (in 1939, it wouldn't have seemed unique, but in the past few decades, it has very little competition in its screwball genre) make Arthur well worth returning to.

Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) is a funny alcoholic. As such, we'd hardly care about him. He wouldn't get into the finest restaurants. He wouldn't go on elaborate shopping sprees. And we wouldn't get the girls. However, Arthur is also the heir to a fortune approaching a billion dollars. He's never worked a day in his life and he has two servants, Hobson and Bitterman, who have been with him forever. But his father finally makes an ultimatum -- either Arthur marries the devoted (and rich) Susan Johnson (well pre-LA Law Jill Eikenberry), or he'll be cut off. And wouldn't you know it? This happens just as Arthur is falling in love (perhaps for the very first time) with waitress/aspiring actress Linda (Liza Minnelli). Will Arthur choose the money or the girl? You've seen this kind of movie before, so you know where it's going.

Steve Gordon's script is so wonderful that you forget that as a director he's basically standing as far back as possible and letting the cast kick the great dialogue up a notch.

Arthur is about Dudley Moore's laugh. It's the first thing we hear and it rings through the whole film. It's a manic uncontrollable thing and probably if your neighbor laughed like that, you'd get sick of him within an hour. For some reason, Moore makes sure that we never get sick of Arthur. We don't get sick of his life of privilege, of his demands, of his embarrassing himself and the people who love him. We don't get sick of his silly rationalizing for his drunken state. And these are remarkable facts. Moore also gets to play the piano (a brilliant skill), fall over things (one of Moore's best), and kiss a horse (no comment required). Moore also has terrific chemistry with Minnelli, who certainly hasn't been better since. Minnelli's character's major flaw is that you never really get the minute she stops liking Arthur for his money and starts loving the man. I don't blame her for that.

The first two thirds of the movie, though, completely belong to John Gielgud. One of the three greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation and this is what most filmgoers remember him for. Playing a butler! And yet the amazement of his performance is that you never feel that he's slumming, even when he's sitting in bed wearing a cowboy hat. Beyond just being the moral center of the film, nobody does better service to Gordon's dialogue. Gielgud's Hobson may be quick to tell people off, but you never doubt he cares.

As I said earlier, the film doesn't really make it all the way to the end. It's not a spoiler to observe that the ending feels arbitrary and unmotivated. You would also be correct in wondering if this film's depiction of alcoholics is troublingly frivolous, even for a light comedy. But honestly, see how long you're troubled for. I suspect it won't last through Arthur's first dinner date with hooker in stretch pants.

This is a 7.5/10, I think. And I'll alert the media.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

One of the worst directed movies ever

[25 February 2001]

I'm blaming Roger Christian for many of the failings of Battlefield Earth. But truly he's hardly the most responsible party. I could blame L.Ron Hubbard for writing an insipid book. Or John Travolta's ego for making the insipid book into the insipid movie now available. I could blame Giles Nuttgens for some truly ugly cinematography. Or the entirely special effects crew could be blamed for seemingly spending 75 million dollars to create cheesy "afterburner" effects on cardboard looking space crafts. But ultimately there's just too much blame to go around. All that can be said is that Battlefield Earth is possibly even worse than you may have heard. And that's impressive.

The plot is a mishmash of science fiction clichés, the kind of things a Phillip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein would be embarrassed to even think, much less write. Battlefield Earth takes place a thousand years in the future. Now, we're told on at least two occasions, Man is an Endangered Creature. The planet Earth is ruled by tall, ugly aliens called Psychlos. The Psychlos don't really like the Man-Animals and, for no good reason, keep them locked in cages. But it isn't as if Man is doing so well even without the Psychlos. We're living in caves again and nobody has developed proper grooming standards. That's the premise. There isn't really a plot beyond the fact that Johnny Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) wants to lead a rebellion and Terl (Travolta), the Psychlo Security guru, wants to stop him. Things blow up, people say stupid things, and there's a stupid subplot involving Ker, another Psychlo played by Forrest Whitaker, who must have desperately needed this paycheck.

There isn't a single piece of the alien technology that looks cool, or even interesting. That's a flaw for a science fiction film. Similarly, none of the images of destroyed humanity (like the shell of the Denver Public Library, or an old mini-golf course) are the least bit evocative. That's a flaw for a post-apocalyptic drama. And none of the action scenes achieve any kind of pacing or momentum. And that's a problem for any film.

For some strange reason virtually every shot in the film is at a jarring angle. If Christian's point is that this is a world askew, he probably could have made it was one slightly tilted camera angle. Instead, the artistic pretension just seems silly. Ditto the lengths Christian has to go to to make us believe that the Psychlos are really tall. He'd have been better off using actors in stilts rather than the low angle shots and other tricks he uses. Also, is there any reason why the film keeps going back to slow motion over and over? Slow motion, even used in moderation, is kinda tacky, but it just pulls me out of an action sequence when you add that level of contrievance.

While Barry Pepper's performance is just awful, I have no way of telling what the blazes John Travolta is doing. He speaks with a strange stilted accent (British, not Psychlo), his hand gestures are wooden, befitting the silly suit he's wearing, and it all just smells like a bad Saturday Night Live skit performance. Remember the skit where he played a potentially gay vampire? Imagine that gay vampire in an alien suit in a really horrible movie and that's what you have here. My point is that Travolta is funny. Sometimes the humor is intentional (the scene where the Psychlo discover the Man-Animals' food of choice is a hoot), but why does he keep using the word leverage? I kept waiting for Inigo Montoya to arrive from the Princess Bride saying, "I do not think that world means what you think it means." It's all just a mess.

I watched the movie with a friend who has extensive experience with film editing and he insists that Battlefield Earth was fairly well edited because it looked like the cutting covered up a lot of even worse work. So with that in mind, congrats to Robin Russell for her excellent work on a 1/10 mess.

The Coca-Cola Kid (1985)

About Two-Thirds of a Really Fine Movie and Then an Awful Mess of a Last Act

[23 February 2001]

The opening titles for The Coca-Cola Kid make it clear that the film is in no way sponsored by Coca-Cola or the Coca-Cola bottling company. Obviously the company felt comfortable enough with the final product to let the film use their name, but it's hardly a glowing picture of the soft drink giant. In The Coca-Cola Kid, Coca-Cola is the face of American Imperialism. When company trouble shooter Becker (Eric Roberts) declares, "The world will not be truly free until Coke is available everywhere," he's speaking without irony. This film, then, is about Becker's attempts to help Coca-Cola colonize Australia, but what starts off as a film of comic promise and originality becomes bogged down in convention and cliché to the point that it's difficult by the final reel to remember what was so appealing at the beginning.

The Coca-Cola Kid fits nicely in the genre of American Corporate Fish Out Of Water tales. If you've seen the delightful Local Hero, for example, you'll know that no matter what kind of tough American goes off to the rural wasteland, he'll change, enlightened by the small town quirks and wisdom he was meant to subvert. That's not really giving anything away in this film, because the last act doesn't play out as you expect. In fact, it hardly plays out at all.

Becker arrives in Australia to help boost lagging sales. It turns out that there's a whole region of the country where no Coke is sold at all. Becker, a former marine with the proverbial "unorthodox way of doing business," discovers that that region is ruled over by T. George McDowell (Bill Kerr) a gruff man of homespun wisdom, but more importantly, homemade soft drinks, made from real fruit. Even though their first encounter is rough, Becker is determined to fight off the advances of his secretary-with-a-secret (Greta Scacchi) and the hotel waiter who mistakes him for an arms dealer to do the job he was sent to do.

Directed by Dusan Makavejev, The Coca-Cola Kid develops a wonderful momentum early on. In fact, the first hour of the film is an absolute gem. Eric Roberts's performance to that point is perfect. His presentation to the bemused Coke officials is comic gold, as he waxes poetic about the fizzy beverage, even holding it up to the light bathing the room in its brown glow. Roberts's early scenes with Scacchi have a nice screwball touch and his interactions with Scacchi's moppet daughter provide a nice depth for the character, hinting at something beyond his intensity. There's a nifty sequence where Becker enlists a studio band to try to come up with the "sound of Australia" where they go through several absurd suggestions before coming up with a truly catchy jingle.

I'm not sure how far it is into the movie, but for me things begin to go south immediately after that recording session. For reasons completely unclear to me, the secretary has Becker invited to a party to catch him in an awkward position. This involves completely random intimations of homosexuality and ends of feeling both forced and pointless. The scene is so clumsy that it leaves a bad taste that begins to spread.

It rapidly becomes clear that The Coca-Cola Kid isn't going to omit a single convention of Australian culture. You want an old bushman with a diggerydoo (inevitably misspelled, but my dictionary is letting me down)? You've got it. An adorable wounded Kangaroo? Bingo! And a slightly inbred man singing a rousing chorus of "Walzing Matilda?" Yup-Yup. In fact, the vision of Australia put forth by the film is so cookie-cutter that it's hard to feel bad about the culture being overrun by American interests. You support Coke because you figure they're at least putting forth a good product.

Eric Roberts's performance finally ends up being a little infuriating because he's not given any opportunity or reason to be anything other than amusingly scary. The film falls apart at just the point you wish Roberts would go through the obligatory character alteration, but there's just no chance. He's stranded. Ditto Scacchi. She adorable and makes the sexiest Santa in the history of cinema, but her character's payoff is weak. Bill Kerr is excellent for the most part, but you can't help but feel that his cagey old Outback Vet is a character we've seen a thousand times.

The Coca-Cola Kid's best and most consistent feature is its cinematography by Dean Semler. The Oscar winner (for Dances With Wolves) does what the script and director can't do -- he creates the ironic counterpoint between the Outback, the big city, and Eric Roberts. The film has a dynamic look which, unlike the narrative, doesn't fall apart at the end.

I do feel bad about only giving this movie a 6/10, but I guess I should have just turned it off early. Off to drink a Coke...

Bring It On (2000)

Energetic, Well-Scripted Fluff

[20 February 2001]

"Cheerleaders are dancers who have gone retarded," says Sparky, the modern dance-influenced choreographer who from $2000 dollars a pop teaches cheerleaders the mysteries of Fosse-inflected "happy fingers." Bring It On, which was a surprise hit in the fall of 2000, clearly believes that cheerleaders are far more than hoofers gone to seed. Despite the frequent jokes at their expense in the film, Bring It On shows cheerleaders are spirited, athletic, graceful, and most importantly, relevant to the 21st Century. Colorfully shot, attractively cast, and snappily written, Bring It On is hardly a great movie, but it's perfectly appealing for most people and I'd guess that the millions of cheerleaders and former cheerleaders nationwide will get a lot more out of it.

The plot is simple. It's like Rocky. Or Varsity Blues. Or any other sports movie you've ever seen. New captain of the five time national cheerleading champions Toros, Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) is shocked when the new girl on the squad (Eliza Dushka), a gymnast, tells her that all of the routines that made the squad famous were stolen from an inner city school in East Compton, two hours up the coast. Determined to prove that they can do it themselves, the Toros go through a fairly short journey to self-empowerment. There's a pounding bass line, lots of teens in short skirts, some fun flipping, and a lesson about being true to yourself and believing in others.

The film also takes on any number of myths about cheerleaders. Are male cheerleaders all gay, or do they just like grabbing girls' rears? The answer, of course is a little from column A and a little from Column B. Are cheerleaders all airheads? Well, the issue of whether or not these girls go to class is done away with in two minutes at the beginning of the film. From that point on, education, books, and homework are never mentioned. Any occasional signs of intelligence are held up to ridicule, though these "sweater puppets" are all quick with a witty retort, so they must have something going on upstairs. And finally, is cheerleading a sport? Well, this film comes out firmly on the side of yes.

For all of its verve, Jessica Bendinger's script is too reductive for the movie to be taken very seriously. The white girls are obviously upper scale and spoiled. Naturally the white girls don't have any sass at first and naturally they borrow it from their African-American neighbors. The black girls are supposed to be poor. Not that that's really depicted in this day-glo colored world.

In fact, through the wonders of Hollywood Central casting, the squad from East Compton actually looked even more racially homogenous than the "Buffys" from San Diego. This is an inner city high school that has a cheerleading squad featuring a dozen girls with identical light complexions and straight hair. The racial assumptions at work here would be offensive if the movie placed any premium on reality. Instead, as directed by Peyton Reed, everything is colorful, glossy, and easy on the eyes. The intricate cheerleading routines are mostly shot from strange angles or awkward close-ups to make it impossible to tell if the cast is actually doing any of the cheering stunts at all.

When Kirsten Dunst makes good small movies (see The Virgin Suicides or Dick), nobody goes to them. So I suppose it's fitting that this movie was a smash. She's always an entertaining screen presence and for now she's still young enough that it isn't ridiculous for her to keep playing high school characters. How her career progresses as she matures remains to be seen. The rest of the cast seems like they were picked from the set of a WB series. Now since I kind of like a number of WB series, I don't mean this as an insult in any way. The Warner Brothers network has proven a good training ground for attractive young women to read catchy dialogue and everybody in Bring It On seems very skilled with the zingers. And as the aforementioned Sparky the choreographer, Ian Roberts is just hilarious and his scene is easily the funniest part of the movie.

In the end, Bring It On is fairly satisfying. It's also amusing to note the strange directions that this movie is able to stretch the limits of the PG-13 rating in terms of language and certain forms of implied sexuality. But that's neither here nor there. Bring it On gets a not-to-be-ashamed-of 6/10 from me.

Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986)

When a Movie's Bad by Troma Standards...

[19 February 2001]

I happen to be of the opinion that Tromeo and Juliet is a very good movie. I'm not qualifying that in any way at all. If more Hollywood movies had that level of intelligence and humor, it'd just be more fun to go to the movies. I also really like The Toxic Avenger. But let me tell you, there's absolutely nothing less appealing than a really bad Troma movie. But as my summary indicates, Class of Nuke 'Em High isn't *really* bad. But it's certainly bad.

When a pipe at the local nuclear power plant bursts, some people think the townspeople should be warned. But not the portly man in charge. He sends in cleaners and goes about his business, unaware that the nuclear sludge has leaked into the ground and that the kids at the high school a quarter mile away may be in danger. But of course things have been bad at Tromaville High for a while. The National Honor Society, for example, has become a gang of self-mutilating punks who ride their bikes around down and decorate themselves with body art ranging from the ambisexual, to the multipierced, to the truly odd. Was it the radiation that made these good kids go bad? Who cares! When a geek drinks nuclear waste from a water fountain and dies a kinda yechy death, nobody thinks anything about it. But when some atomic weed turns two popular kids into sex-starved animals, well, that's not entirely relevant to the plot either. Actually, looking back at Class of Nuke 'Em High, I don't entirely understand how one event led to the next and why anything happened at all. This isn't really "good-bad" plotting, it's just confusing.

Troma films operate on a basic principle of anarchy which stretches from the absurd plots (it never feels like a Troma film has much more than a basic ten word premise, anything more than that is gravy) to the hammy acting (John Waters's acting troupe looks like the Royal Shakespeare Company compared to these guys) to the special effects. At their best, though, there's a true joy that comes with their "artistic" freedom. Troma films can doing anything, show anything, and say anything. That's why it's disappoint watching this film. It's just doesn't seem to go anywhere. There's some sort of inherent satire of the high school comedy going on, but nothing is ever taken to the extreme where it would be at best hilarious or at worst offensive.

The special effects look especially cut rate. Much as I enjoyed the images of the mutants with bodily fluids pulsing just beneath their skin, I would have liked to see more of that and fewer close-ups of bubbling waste. And the dialogue reaches all of its high points entirely too early. When one of the nerds-turned-cretins is accused by his girlfriend of caring too much about money, his quick response is something to the effect of, "That's what you get for dating a yuppie." I wanted more of that and less endless footage of the cretins terrorizing the school.

Class of Nuke 'Em High shouldn't be anybody's introduction to Troma. It has all of the bad traits of the company's films without any of the amazement that comes from watching every rule of cinema broken. Class of Nuke 'Em High just makes you remember why things like good writing, quality acting, and production values are mostly good things. This is a 2/10.