airfoyle Reviews

Lathe of Heaven (2002 TV Movie)

Muddy, opaque movie

[5/10 · 6 February 2020]

Sometimes a film adaptation of a book is better than the book, sometimes worse. This one is much worse. The premise of both the book and the movie is that one man's dreams can affect reality, can even change the past. Ursula Leguin was at pains in the book to explain how this might be possible, by focusing on the idea that reality itself might be a dream. In the movie, it is just a brute fact, never explained. The book has a somewhat hand-waving idea that only those in the vicinity of the dreamer, George Orr (Lukas Haas) including the dreamer himself realize, when he wakes up, that reality used to be different. This idea is gone, Hence we have someone exploiting George's powers even though it is never clear when the exploiter realizes George even *has* those powers. The climax of the book occurs when the exploiter tries to give himself the power to have reality-changing dreams and causes utter chaos. In the movie, he causes only traffic jams, and it's never explained why, or what he's trying to accomplish.

The budget for this movie did not include any special effects at all. That made it difficult to convey the idea of fundamental changes to reality. Leguin had George dream up climate change, plagues, volcanoes, abandoned cities, aliens, aerial battles with the aliens, and a final jumbling of all the realities together. Almost none of these things make it to the movie. The movie has a lot of rain at the outset and sunny skies later, but we can tell the sun is shining through the fake rain even in the early scenes. The book is set in Portland, Oregon, but the budget apparently could not get them out of L.A.

Black Mirror: Metalhead (2017) Season 4, Episode 5

Get the kid some other kind of teddy bear

[10/10 · 22 January 2018]

I thought this episode was superb. I didn't exactly enjoy it; more like it made me sick with dread, which was the goal, I suppose. Maxine Peake is chased through a post-apocalyptic landscape by an implacable enemy, a dog-sized terminator (appropriately called a "dog") launched by we know not who. She defeats it, but there are plenty more where that one came from. We never find out who deployed the dogs, or exactly how many survivors there are.

What makes these robots so scary is that they are more plausible than the Terminator-franchise humanoids. We won't deploy them this year or the next, but it won't be long. Of course, they won't be deployed _here_, at least not by us.

Many reviewers think this topic is not appropriate for Black Mirror. I thought this sort of thing was exactly what the series was about: how the technology we created might destroy us.

In cas you found the final shot, the box of teddy bears, baffling, I assumed that their goal at the outset was to replace little Jack's teddy bear, and the code on the box was the part number for that particular model. Moral: Don't be too picky about what sort of teddy bear you get.

Life of Crime (2013)

A pretty good Elmore Leonard story makes a good movie

[7/10 · 21 October 2015]

My wife and I stumbled on this slight-looking movie on our streaming device (Amazon), and stayed up too late because we got so caught up in the story. Only when we reached the credits did we realize it was based on an Elmore Leonard story. With John Hawkes, Yasiin Bey, Tim Robbins, and Jennifer Anniston and other fine actors in the cast, how can you go wrong?

Although the story has its share of humor (mainly handled by Mark Boone Junior as a Nazi) and suspense (will Bey, Robbins, and the treacherous Melanie, played by Isla Fisher, succeed in killing or maiming Anniston's character?), it's not as crazy or violent as, say, "Fargo" or "The Professional" (the Gary Oldman/Natalie Portman movie). I love those two movies, but they don't set some kind of new standard of excess that every movie has to meet. Not every director is the Coen brothers; not every actor is Gary Oldman. If you're so jaded you can't appreciate "Life of Crime," stop going to see action movies!

I gave the movie a "7" because for me a movie has to be a serious drama or a comedy you can watch many times before it can earn an 8 or 9. A solid 7 is a good rating for a story whose purpose is entertainment.

Ex Machina (2014)

AI as a Greek Tragedy

[8/10 · 13 May 2015]

Who would have thought that the Turing Test could be combined with nudity?

This film fulfills the unities of time and place extolled by Aristotle: a small cast, in a small place, over a small interval of time, work to an inevitable but unforeseen conclusion. The intensity is great, although there is no catharsis (for me anyway).

The reason I give Ex Machina 8 points instead of 10 is that it's not hard to find plot holes. Early in the movie Caleb, the winner of a contest among employees of Blue Book, a huge search-engine company, is flown to the isolated estate of Nathan, the owner of the company. Its isolation contributes to the classical unity I described earlier, but is hard to justify economically. (Who cleans all the glass the house seems to consist of? Robots? Morlocks? If so, they're offstage.)

The cast is great, especially Oscar Isaac as Nathan, who seems to radiate malicious intent. The special effects are terrific but never distract from the human (?) interactions among the players.

Chef (2014)

Very disappointing

[6/10 · 28 May 2014]

My wife and I went to this movie because its IMDb rating (7.9 as of 2014-05-26) was higher than the ratings of the other two movies we were considering. I cannot tell a lie: my wife liked it. I was dismayed (by the flick, not her opinion of it).

First, the good things: Robert Downey Jr. does a terrific job of sketching a character of eccentric loathsomeness with the 5 minutes he has on screen. Scarlett Johansson is always fascinating, although she vanishes from the movie about a third of the way through. Oliver Platt has some nice moments. Emjay Anthony as the kid is quite solid. (Why do boys in movies always have long hair? Is it to make them look younger than they are? But not this time; I think Anthony is 11, playing a 10-year-old.) Sofia Vergara is charming, and pretty if you like busty women (which I don't).

The bad things: Dustin Hoffman is wasted playing a key character whose actions are so irrational he should wear a sign around his neck saying "Plot device."

Come to think of it, everybody in the movie is wasted. The plot is full of holes big enough to drive a food truck through. There are no plausible conflicts in the movie, and even most of the implausible ones are resolved by everybody deciding to be nice.

Early in the movie the chef, played by director Jon Favreau, is told by his ex-wife, played by Sofia Vergara, that he would be happier driving a food truck than being chef of a classy L.A. restaurant. I thought her suggestion was to establish that she was somewhat ditsy; what self-respecting chef would want to drive a food truck? She turns out not to be ditsy at all; she has some sort of career that makes her more prosperous than her ex, although I couldn't figure out what that career was. The food truck materializes, the music gets more Latin, and the movie becomes a father-son-bonding road trip. Then the fairy godmother appears, waves her magic wand, and all problems are solved.

It's somewhat strange that people love to watch other people cook, while cooking less and less themselves. My advice is to stay home and make yourself a cubano sandwich; it'll fill you up more than watching Jon Favreau make a few thousand of them.

Clear History (2013 TV Movie)

Better than "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

[8/10 · 1 September 2013]

Not everyone is a raving fan of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The show is often like watching a root- canal procedure as Larry David's character plunges himself into one unnecessary, painfully embarrassing situation after another. There's some of that in "Clear History," but the character has mellowed. You can understand why people like Rolly, the name of the hard-luck case Larry David plays here. He's irascible, but then the other people in his little community are just as irascible and just as quirky; he fits in well. "Clear History" is a farce, a word that I wouldn't exactly apply to "Curb." It's a sequence of disasters based on carefully timed misunderstandings. The scene where Rolly is on the way to stop one such disaster when he has to pause when he encounters two friends who have just been in a motorcycle accident is priceless. He tell the two friends that he just doesn't have time to help them; the two friends are incredulous and angry, but he's actually right! If you were in his situation, you wouldn't help them and you wouldn't be able to explain either. The crush Rolly develops on Kate Hudson's character is also believable and funny, especially the way it (of course) comes crashing down around him.

The cast is terrific. Watch for Liev Schreiber in an uncredited role.

Inspector Bellamy (2009)

Pleasant interlude with Chabrol, Depardieu, and Bunel

[8/10 · 27 November 2010]

I suppose when I rate this movie more highly than many other people it's because I haven't had enough exposure to Claude Chabrol. For me this falls under the category "French movie," not "Chabrol movie." So those who are less discriminating may like the movie as much as my wife and I did.

European movies are better than American to the extent that they show ordinary people's lives lived at any ordinary pace. They're worse when they indulge in incomprehensible or surrealistic profundities. "Bellamy" teeters on the edge of the latter now and then, but gives us many pleasures of the first kind. It's a murder mystery, sort of, but more of the "what happened?" than the "who did it?" variety. In addition, it's a view into the life of Inspector Bellamy and the people in his life. His relationship with his wife is simple but enviable (perhaps improbably so). Marie Bunel is perfect as the wife.

The film does have some irritating attempts at profundity, but they are not too distracting. It's more distracting wondering how Gerard Depardieu, the Inspector, can have a brother played by an actor 20 years younger that he supposedly grew up with.

The City of Your Final Destination (2009)

Surprising failure by Laura Linney

[6/10 · 26 September 2010]

I never thought I would see a movie in which Laura Linney was the weak link. This movie had the potential to be a standard Ivory-Merchant adaptation of a mildly pretentious book of the touchy-feely genre. It looked different in the video store, but that's what it turned out to be. Well, lots of people love that kind of thing; just not me.

However, I really do like good actors such as Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney. Charlotte Gainsbourg is quite good, in her own inimitable and mysterious way. And Alexandra Maria Lara, whom I had never seen before, is outstanding in this flick.

The huge disappointment, however, turns out to be Ms. Linney, who I have never seen misfire before. She plays an utterly charmless woman, which she must have seen as an interesting challenge, because she is said to be a very charming person. Unfortunately, she overdoes it, and produces a character repellent beyond belief. Meanwhile, Ms. Lara is showing her how it's done, playing another obnoxious woman, but with the occasional vulnerability that makes us not want to flee whenever she shows up.

Marnie (1964)

Shockingly stupid movie

[4/10 · 23 May 2009]

Some of the minor roles in this movie were good. Diane Baker was convincing, and Louise Latham did a great creepy mother. But Tippi Hedren could have been replaced by a mannequin. Sean Connery is a fine actor, but he had to say a lot of absurd things on the way to making some decisions that made no sense at all. I don't know about the novel this movie came from, but the screenplay was a mess. Hedren is supposed to be simultaneously a master criminal and a near-psychotic wreck. (I'm not spoiling anything; we see this much at the beginning of the movie.) Connery is supposed to be attracted to her. None of this is remotely believable.

I don't know enough about movies to know good directing from bad, but in this movie even I could see that the directing, or at least editing, was amateurish. To establish that a character sees something happening we are shown the something, then a cut to the character looking, then back to the something, then back to the character, etc. You could go out and buy popcorn while all this is going on. Not what you associate with Hitchcock.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Oh, come on, people, this is not one of the 250 great movies of all time

[6/10 · 12 January 2009]

I will say up front that I have never seen a movie based on a comic book that I really liked, except the animated ones, or the quasi-animated, like _Sin City_. You would think the graphic novel and film would have a lot in common, but in the end they're trading in different kinds of images.

This is basically just another Batman movie. Same silly premise, that a super-rich hero battles --- over the shrinking remnants of Gotham city --- villains with seemingly unlimited resources in personnel and explosives.

I will agree that Heath Ledger's performance is amazing. Can this be the same guy who played the gay cowboy in that other movie? It is a real pity that he died. I can't help but thinking that if he were still alive, and we were wondering what he would do next with his great talent, this movie would not have an average rating of 9.0 (as of this writing).

There are a lot of other fine actors (Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, for crying out loud) who are basically wasted pretending to take their characters seriously.

I did like the heist sequence at the beginning, including the Joker's first few lines and the bit with the bus. Really very droll; gets your hopes up. But, from then on, it's just a lot of people being blown up while the survivors emote angst --- dark, brooding, comic-book angst.

Great World of Sound (2007)

So-so movie with some great cinema verite' nuggets sprinkled in

[6/10 · 9 January 2009]

One good thing about this movie is that the cheap indie feel for once works in a flick's favor. The record-company executives are seen to be scam artists (by us) from the very beginning. We see gold records being spray-painted as the opening credits roll. But the men sucked into the scheme only gradually become aware that they're conning people. You have to suspend some disbelief to accept that it takes them so long to figure it out.

The plot focuses on two of the "record producers," played by Pat Healy and Kene Holliday, who go on the road to audition local talent and persuade the bands to make a contribution to the production of their records. One of them gets really good at it, and is more reluctant than the other one to get out of the game.

The movie has a lot of rough spots and a few bright spots. Kene Holliday's performance is quite good.

The brightest spots were the auditions of all the local acts. I loved every one of them. It seems clear that they really were amateur performers -- bands, singers, songwriters, some good, most not so good -- and I could not imagine how they were lured into making a movie about exploitation of bad local bands, and having their performances immortalized on celluloid. The editing of the auditions was perfect, so we never get bored with them. The dialog between Healy's and Holliday's characters as they sell their operation to the suckers seems improvised, and skillfully improvised.

The movie as a whole just sags too often, and when it does Pat Healy is always the main character on screen. He goes through the entire movie as if drugged, and at the end his character loses all credibility. Well, that's not his fault, I guess, since the script was the script; too bad he didn't get to improvise more.

I predict most people will not be able to sit through the whole movie, but don't give up before the auditions start.

In Bruges (2008)

Enjoyable but implausible

[7/10 · 25 December 2008]

I really enjoyed this movie, right up until the very end. One is not convinced that the last act of extreme violence would have been committed. There are other implausibilities as well. Why would the beautiful Belgian girl fall for one of the hit men so quickly and in spite of so much evidence that he is someone to stay away from?

But the two hit men are so well played by Gleason and Farrell that one forgives almost anything. They get pulled into various scenes that are absurd to the point of surrealism, and draw you in quickly to the humor, suspense, or both that Martin McDonagh has written into them.

I'll be very interested in McDonagh's next film.

Mirage (1965)

Dated piece of claptrap

[4/10 · 24 October 2008]

When I saw the high rating others had given this movie, I decided to give it a chance (on TV, I mean). I put up with the tight pant cuffs and the obtrusive sixties soundtrack, expecting an ingenious plot to emerge. But the last fifteen minutes are a gigantic anticlimax. The explanation of the main character's amnesia is hopelessly dated and implausible, as is the McGuffin -- the item the bad guys are trying to extract from the hero. The bad guys seem never to care whether they kill him or capture him alive, and the ending makes this behavior bizarre. (Fortunately, they are lousy shots when they aim at Peck's character.)

Gregory Peck is more wooden than usual. He always seems like someone who is on the verge of starting to act. The fight scenes are choreographed very awkwardly. When Peck's character attacks a man about to shoot him, he always manages to disarm the guy with a karate chop and never tries to pick up the gun. His character is both peaceable and versed in martial arts, at least the 60s-movie kind.

The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999 TV Movie)

Deep cast wasted on shallow characters

[6/10 · 5 June 2008]

I thought Helen Mirren, Eric Stoltz, and Julie Delpy did a great job, especially Helen Mirren, who can convey such shades of emotion so seemingly effortlessly. The movie held my attention because I kept wondering what she would do next, especially when she was seducing a much younger man.

Unfortunately, she failed to make us understand why Ayn Rand had such a hold on (some) people. I blame the script for this, I guess, but the writers may not have understood her success, such as it was, themselves. The places where we come closest to getting it are the scenes with Rand in front of large audiences, where she displays wit and aplomb. In the scenes where she is dominating a small group of regular disciples, it's hard for the viewer to understand what hold she had on them.

Other remarks: Julie Delpy's American accent wobbles occasionally, but Mirren's Russian accent is great. Peter Fonda is in this movie, which normally keeps me away, but his natural woodenness fits his character in this movie.

The Prestige (2006)

If you've seen one magician movie, you've seen 'em all

[6/10 · 21 December 2007]

This was a fine movie in some ways. The actors were excellent, especially Michael Caine. The action kept moving. The twists (and you know there are going to be twists in a movie about magicians) keep on coming.

However, the movie has a lot of flaws: The editing among all the different chronological sequences is confusing. I think the director intended us to be unsure of (for instance) who is reading whose diary when. It's not that hard to sort out where we are given a minute or so following every jump in time and space, but after a while it's annoying to think the director requires such tactics to keep us off balance.

The part played by Nicola Tesla is ridiculous. My jaw dropped toward the end of the movie after they asked us to accept such a preposterous piece of pseudo-history.

Scarlet Johanssen's accent is consistent, but how come it's the accent of an upper-class Englishwoman, when she's hanging out with these low-class magicians? At least it's better than David Bowie's accent. He is supposed to be Croatian but sounds like a stoned Scotsman.

The skimpy costumes worn by the magicians' assistants seemed too skimpy for Victorian times.

I guess I just don't like magician movies. They're always about revealing how tricks are really done, and, as someone says early on in the film, If you reveal the secret of the trick, you instantly lose the audience's respect. To compensate for that, they have to rise to a crescendo of revelations, and it's never enough compensation for me.

Far from Heaven (2002)

Disappointing: Sentimental and Pointless

[4/10 · 5 September 2007]

Julianne Moore is a great actor, and I love Patty Clarkson, and Dennis Haysbert and Dennis Quaid aren't bad either, but they're all wasted in this silly movie. It takes us back to the fifties (the sets and costumes are quite entertaining), but solely for the purpose of allowing us to feel morally superior to the evil people they had back then. Their version of Hartford, Connecticut is like Selma, Alabama as imagined by Orson Welles, with dark odd views of racists and homophobes. I was a boy back then, but it wasn't _that_ bad. There were a lot of hypocrites around, but not that many Klansmen.

The black characters around Haysbert are all cartoons. Most of them are saintly, but when a black man takes a white woman into a bar patronized by African-Americans, some of the customers say mean things and no one says anything nice, not even the waitress. This is so we understand that black people can be just as mean as white people. To balance that, Haysbert's character slips in the fact that he has an MBA at one point, for no reason at all except to make sure we understand that black people really are equal to white people. I don't remember any conversations between two African-Americans without a Caucasian in the scene except those between the Haysbert character and his daughter. I kept expecting some kind of indication about what the black community _really_ thought about what was going on. Ditto for the gay community, now that I think about it.

There were lots of interesting avenues they failed to explore. James Rebhorn shows up as a de-homosexualizing shrink, but we see almost nothing of what he is trying to accomplish. They must have shot more footage involving him but decided they couldn't use it. I wonder how they decided to keep what they had. The movie is not really all that long. Maybe they just threw in the towel.

Anyway, the only point of setting up all these bogeymen and -women is so we can feel so good about ourselves in comparison. The characters are trotted through various set-piece scenes, Moore reacts to them as bravely as she can, and that's it. The plot comes to a thudding end.

Shattered (1991)

Too many plot holes, too little else

[4/10 · 19 August 2007]

About fifteen minutes into this movie you realize that it's not going to be very satisfying. The action develops very clumsily, as a man recovering from a serious accident is gradually eased into his life. This life seems to consist of a loving wife, two friends, an office, and a hotel, i.e., just the items necessary to move the plot along. If I were in the position this guy is in, I would be suffering from claustrophobia.

Naturally, our hero has "psychogenic amnesia," an ailment so rare in real life that many experts doubt it exists at all. Nothing I say will get novelists and directors to lay off this stuff, but I will register a protest anyway. It's more likely for a person in an auto accident to grow a second head than to wake up not remembering any details of his life while all his other faculties are intact. So let's have more second-head films!

Meanwhile, back to the movie in question. It's clear right away that things are not what they seem, but as we find out the truth it gets less and less plausible. The worst plot hole is (avoiding spoiler here) that Character 1 helps Character 2 dispose of a body, then demands that they take the matter to the police! No one in their right mind would cheerfully become an accomplice to the original crime and add a few new ones _before_ it occurs to them to call the cops.

The only good part of the movie was Greta Scacchi, especially her breasts, which are on display in fuzzy flashback after fuzzy flashback. Also the slow-motion shot of the glass breaking, representing the shattering of the hero's persona, which I never tired of, in spite of its being repeated several times.

Diggstown (1992)

A little bit too predictable and one-sided (slight spoiler)

[6/10 · 17 February 2007]

The cast of the movie is really great, and they're given some good dialogue. The only problem is that it quickly becomes clear James Woods, as the lovable-rogue con man, is all lovable and not much of a rogue; while Bruce Dern, as the evil mayor of Diggstown, is all evil. You know there are going to be some twists along the way to the end, but one sort of twist gets ruled out fairly quickly, namely, the kind where you find out you may have been rooting for the wrong party.

The movie involves a series of boxing matches, and all kinds of surprises can arise involving the details of each matchup. But I didn't find them too surprising; at the end you feel kind of deflated, asking, Isn't there one more twist coming? Louis Gossett, Jr., as the boxer, isn't given much to do. Heather Graham is given almost nothing to do. She looks great; in her later movies she looks like an anorexic. Oliver Platt's part is completely routine as Woods's sidekick.