wraith-13 Reviews

Blade: Trinity (2004)

Blade Trinity blows goat (I have proof)

[2/10 · 10 December 2004]

Maybe Wesley Snipes is getting tired of playing the lugubrious vampire slayer. Or maybe, after three movies, screenwriter David S. Goyer is getting bored writing the humorless lead character. This would explain why, in "Blade Trinity," vampire turned good guy Hannibal King gets all the good lines. Hannibal's potty-mouthed sense of humor seems imported from a Kevin Smith movie and Blade is reduced to his straight man. Trinity feels like an attempt by Goyer to set-up a new franchise starring the Nightstalkers, a group of anti-vampire young guns lead by Hannibal (Ryan Reynolds) and Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel), the daughter of Blade's mentor.

In the first two films of the series, Blade was a seamless combination of the 70's blaxploitation movie cool of John Shaft and the violent edge of Japanese anime's Vampire Hunter D. Now, with the Nightstalkers in tow, Blade comes off like a grumpy old vampire slayer telling the kids to keep the racket down and get off his lawn. In one scene, he chastises the Nightstalkers, saying "What do think this is? A game? Look at how you're dressed!" Indeed, Hannibal and Abigail run around half naked, showing off chiseled abs and sinewy biceps. Meanwhile, Blade, bundled up for the winter in a leather trench coat, black vest and long-sleeved, red crew neck, looks like his mother dressed him. Of course, his mother was a vampire.

The plot of "Trinity," such that there is one, has the Vampire Nation led by Danica Talons (the hilarious Parker Posey, in a film that probably cost more than the rest of her filmography combined) awakening the original Count Dracula to aid in their war against Blade. According to the movie, Dracula was born in ancient Samaria and has spent the past few generations slumbering in Iraq. Can someone please tell me then, why he comes out of his tomb looking like Nick Lachey from MTV's "Newlyweds?" And while I can accept that Dracula speaks perfect English, when he starts using phrases like "parting gift" I have to ask myself, has Dracula been watching The Game Show Network?

I have a great deal of affection for "Blade II," which was directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Writer/director Goyer brings no visual style to the table and the cinematography makes the film look like a documentary shot on 16mm film in the mid seventies. The colors in the daylight exteriors are so washed out, they make Joe Carnahan's steely blue "Narc" look positively lush by comparison. And while we're on the subject of daylight exteriors, didn't Goyer get the memo that this is a vampire movie? I know that Blade is a "day walker," but who wants to see the world's greatest vampire slayer chase the world's oldest vampire through an apartment building in the middle of the afternoon like Agent Smith and Neo in the first "Matrix?"

Ultimately, the mark of a good comic book movie is that it's entertaining enough to distract you from the obvious questions that would render most comic book movies completely implausible. For example: Abigail's habit of listening to her i-Pod while hunting vampires. At best, this is a riff on Gary Oldman's Beethoven loving sociopath in "The Professional" and at worst, it's blatant product placement. However, it begs the question: when hunting hoards of vampires, wouldn't you want your hearing unobstructed? Also, for all the cash the Nightstalkers must spend on high-tech equipment, they spend an awful lot of time engaging the vampires in hand to hand combat. Since vampire disintegrate when pierced with silver, wouldn't a pair of silver, spiked boxing gloves save these guys a lot of energy? Maybe Blade should ditch the Nightstalkers and do a Marvel Team-Up with Wolverine?

Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003)

A thought provoking look at the thin line between `the famous and the not so famous.'

[23 April 2004]

If it hadn't already been used, a perfect alternative title for a movie about Los Angeles DJ, Rodney Bingenheimer might have been Almost Famous.

Listen to how Alice Copper describes Bingenheimer: `He was accepted by the Rolling Stones, he was accepted by The Beatles, he was accepted by The Beach Boys…' This slightly unflattering choice of words is significant. Not `was friends with,' not `hung out with,' not `partied with,' but `was accepted by.' One critic called the documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip the greatest rock & roll movie ever made. I'd have to watch Stop Making Sense and The Velvet Goldmine again before I could make that commitment, but in my opinion, Mayor isn't even about rock & roll. It's about fame, or the proximity to fame. It's about acceptance.

Rodney Bingenheimer's greatest achievement is that, for a generation, he introduced the most influential artists in modern rock to America radio. His second greatest accomplishment was his ability to be accepted. So many larger than life personalities try to force themselves into the spotlight. Meanwhile, quiet, shy, unassuming Rodney Bingenheimer has lived at the edge of the spotlight for his entire adult life.

Pamela Des Barres (who appears in the film) is arguably the world's greatest groupie. Bingenheimer is probably a close second, despite the handicap of being male (being a groupie, like being a fashion model or porn star, is one of the few pursuits in patriarchal society where being male is a handicap). But, while Des Barres is a pop icon, published author and happily married to former rocker Michael Des Barres, Bingenheimer is single, lives in a modest home with tattered furniture and has a once-a-week, 3 hour late-night radio show.

George Hickenlooper's Mayor of the Sunset Strip is a thought provoking look at Los Angeles and the thin but often uncrossable line between `the famous and the not so famous.' From its opening it seems to ask the question, why is one of the most influential men in American radio not a household name, when so many less deserving souls (cough-Carson Daly-cough) are. From the first frame of the film, I found myself sizing Bingenheimer up to come up with an answer. He's a short, skinny, funny looking guy. He's got what you'd call `a great face for radio.' However, he doesn't have a radio voice and after twenty years on the air he has not developed a radio persona. Perhaps this is why he will never reach the heights of Wolfman Jack, Kasey Casem or Rick Dees (yes, I just used `heights' and Rick Dees in the same sentence. No small feat). He lacks the authority of a Kurt Loader and perhaps was just born too early to take advantage of MTV, the network that can make less-than-handsome music aficionados like Matt Pinfield into TV personalities.

Over the span of the film, we see Rodney with the likes of Oasis, No Doubt, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Coldplay and Cher (who Rodney says was like a mother to him, although she looks remarkably younger than he does. Hmmm …). Many of these artists and many more credit Rodney with being the first to play their music on American radio. In photo montages we see old stills of Rodney with Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. We see film clips of Rodney with Jerry Lee Lewis, The Mamas and the Papas and John Lennon. The list is so impressive; if you saw it out of context you'd swear the pictures were fakes. The diminutive Bingenheimer often looks matted into the footage like Woody Allen in Zelig or Tom Hanks in Forest Gump.

Before the credits roll we will see Rodney betrayed by his best friend. We will see his unrequited love for a young girl who insists they are `just friends.' In one humorous and painful scene, we see his estranged family searching the house for pictures of Rodney in desperate attempt to look less estranged. Throughout the film two seemingly opposing questions dominate: With all these famous friends, why isn't Rodney more successful? And, why did all the famous people gravitate toward him to begin with?

In the end, perhaps the fact that Rodney Bingenheimer couldn't parlay his access to the rich and famous into wealth and fame is not the tragedy of Rodney Bingenheimer. Perhaps the fact that we find anyone who doesn't cash in on their proximity to fame tragic is the tragedy of America. Rodney Bingenheimer is our inner geek, the star-stuck autograph hound in all of us. Hickenlooper's film holds up a mirror to a celebrity obsessed culture, a culture fixated on something 99.9999% its members will never experience. Perhaps this is the tragedy of all our lives. After all, as bad as we may feel for Bingenheimer, the fact remains: WE are watching a movie about HIM, a movie in which he is hanging out with David Bowie, and we are not.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

Not as bad as the critics say

[27 January 2004]

Butterfly Effect is not nearly as bad as the critics will have you believe, but that's not exactly high praise. The plot concerns Ashton Kutcher's Evan, a college psych major who discovers that by reading aloud from his journals he can return to the most traumatic moments in his life and change them, thereby changing his own past present and future and that of those around him.

The critical savagery of Butterfly Effect is probably fifty percent due to the omnipresence of Demi Moore boyfriend Ashton Kutcher in the media, and fifty percent due to the fact that it's an average execution of an intriguing premise. The thing that surprises me most about the reaction to the film is that many of the critics who hate it attack Ashton Kutcher's persona rather than his performance. It's as if they can't forgive the star of Dude Where's My Car and MTV's Punk'd of trying to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, these same critics give the film a pass for it's irresponsible depiction of children.

The film takes a while to get going (Kutcher's does not appear in the films first half hour, which is essentially back story). The first act of the film belongs to the main characters as children, first as grade -schoolers then as teen-agers. In rather rapid succession we see these kids coerced into sex and child pornography by a pedophile, murder a dog, inadvertently kill a mother and her infant child and engage in brutal physical attacks upon one another.

Now, I'm the last one to call for the censorship of an artist, but I feel that it takes a very sensitive filmmaker to approach topics such as these without appearing to exploit the children it presents. This is true even when the subject of the film is child abuse, and it certainly true when child abuse is merely a plot device in a sci-fi thriller.

In his dramatic debut, Kutcher give a competent performance as do his supporting cast who must inhabit several different versions of themselves in Evan's different realities (particularly Amy Smart, who goes from waitress to sorority girl to prostitute). The casting of the kids at various ages was very well done. I'll even forgive the gaping plot holes that seem unavoidable in time-travel movies (like when a prison bound Evan goes back in time and changes one thing about his physical appearance, but it has no further repercussions, when the whole point behind the butterfly effect is that small changes can have huge and unpredictable repercussions).

However the film is overlong, feels rather structure-less and completely falls apart in the end. The characters and their dialogue are perfunctory for a thriller. It's average at best before you factor in the rather callous treatment of very sensitive issues regarding children.

The Man from Elysian Fields (2001)

Andy Garcia goes for broke.

[9 December 2002]

No one ever accused director George Hickenlooper of being too upbeat. His films share a pessimistic world-view and a love for flawed antiheroes that has been out of vogue in mainstream Hollywood since the 1970's. While The Man from Elysian Fields is his first film as director that he didn't write or co-write, it shares the same sensibilities of his most personal films; namely a struggling artist's middle American values being a casualty of life in contemporary Los Angeles.

Andy Garcia is said artist, Byron Tiller. After his first novel received rave reviews but little sales, Byron is unable to get his second novel published. He can't afford to support his family, and after suffering a series of indignities to try and make ends meet, he strikes a Faustian bargain with a gentlemen pimp, Luther Fox (Mick Jagger) the owner and operator of Elysian Fields escort service. Tiller uneasily accepts his new role as a male escort, and low and behold his first client, Andrea Alcott (Olivia Williams of Rushmore), is the wife of a dying Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who needs help writing one last book before he dies.

From this rather novel premise (one of Garcia's first lines is 'it's a premise, it's allowed to be ridiculous'), the plot proceeds much as you would expect it to. But, hey, in tragedy, there aren't many places to go but down. What makes Elysian Fields worth watching are the performances. The late James Coburn is excellent as the crotchety old writer, Tobias Alcott. His ruminations on death are made all the more poignant by the fact that this was one of his final performances. Top billed Jagger is wonderfully understated as Fox, and Julianna Margulies does a good job of breathing life into the somewhat thankless role of Mrs. Tiller, the stock movie wife who is basically there to constantly tell her workaholic husband that she wishes he were home more.

What's really significant about Elysian Fields is the way that Garcia, Hickenlooper and screenwriter Phillip Jayson Lasker have crafted the character of Byron Tiller. The indignities that Tiller suffers at the start of the film (at the hands of the publisher who rejects his book, his father-in-law, who refuses to loan him any money and the former boss who refuses to hire him back) could have been a set up for the 'emasculated man re-masculated' plot. This popular revenge fantasy in which the white collar, white male rages against the machine (Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space) is rendered improbable when the hero is turning tricks. This is the emasculated man, further emasculated. Garcia goes for broke, giving a brave performance as the not always likable Tiller. When he makes a last ditch effort to assert his manhood against the deceptive Mrs. Alcott, she coyly rebuffs his ranting and raving and his castration is complete. Jagger, as Fox says it best when he reminds Tiller 'don't forget that they're paying you, not as a writer, but as a whore. I guarantee, they haven't forgotten.'

Swordfish (2001)

Smarter than your average summer action film.

[7 June 2001]

A few years ago, John Travolta starred in the hostage drama, Mad City. Travolta played a hostage taker who dies in the end. The new film, Swordfish, opens with Travolta giving a direct to camera monologue about the lack of realism in Hollywood movies, and how just once he'd like to see the bad guy get away in the end. He uses as an example of a movie whose ending he didn't like, Dog Day Afternoon, a hostage in which the hostage taker, Al Pacino, doesn't get away in the end. Just when we think that Travolta has broken character, and the fourth wall, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is surrounded by FBI agents and a SWAT team with guns trained on him. He defiantly walks through them and into the World Bank, dropping us smack dab in the middle of a hostage drama, this time directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in Sixty Seconds).

Travolta is Gabriel, a techno-savvy, international terrorist so ruthless, he not only straps C-4 explosive to his hostages, he wraps the C-4 in metal ball-bearings so that if they try to escape they will not only be blown to smithereens, but the ball-bearings will scatter, perforating everything in their path-vehicles, buildings, bodies- like so much Swiss cheese. Gabriel needs to steal a few billion dollars from a government computer to fund his global counter-terrorist activities, so his beautiful assistant Ginger (Hale Berry, in an image changing , femme-fatale role) seduces ace cyber-criminal Stanley (Hugh Jackman, of The X-Men). Stanley doesn't know whether to do the deed, and use Gabriel's money to sue for custody of his daughter, or cooperate with over zealous FBI agent, Roberts (Don Cheadle) in order to stay out of prison.

In the end, Swordfish is an action thriller of slightly above average intelligence, which makes it light years more intelligent than the recent crop of below average action flicks, such as Sena's last effort, Gone in Sixty Seconds. The themes of domestic terrorism, anti-government sympathy and not quite by-the-book FBI agents, elevates what would otherwise be standard material. The film benefits from its early June release not only because it is in between the blockbusters released on Memorial Day and 4th of July weekends, but also because it coincides with the media coverage of the Timothy McVeigh execution and alleged FBI cover-up. Travolta's Gabriel shares some of McVeigh's controversial views, but this slick talking, multi-millionaire is more Hugh Heffner and Aaron Michan than McVeigh. Sena also gets plenty of miles out of an appealing cast, particularly Travolta and the always dependable Cheadle. Berry has never had this much on-screen edge, although her topless scene feels gratuitous and calculated, both by the actress herself as well as the filmmakers. (That's supposed to be a negative criticism, but I know I just sold more tickets.)

As summer action movies get dumber and dumber, give Swordfish some credit for staying ahead of the game.

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the film going public of 2001. If you remember one thing I tell you today, remember this: see Moulin Rouge

[30 May 2001]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the film going public of 2001. If you remember one thing I tell you today, remember this: see Moulin Rouge.

If Mercutio can do ecstasy with Romeo and sing disco songs in drag, then why can't a love story set in Paris of 1899 be a splashy rock opera with 80's and 90's pop songs? Director Baz Luhrmann showed his flair for anachronism with his 1996 adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and uses it as the heart and soul of his latest film, Moulin Rouge.

Satine (Nicole Kidman) is a beautiful courtesan and star dancer of the decadent Paris nightclub. She is conned by artist Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo, kneeling inside prosthetic legs to make him look shorter) into seducing a ruthless and powerful Duke, convincing him to back a musical written by a fledgling writer, Christian (Ewan McGregor). The Duke agrees, but at a price, Satine is to be his and only his. Faster than you can say Stephen Sondheim, Satine falls in love with the Christian, after being wooed by his genius poetry (actually, lyrics from songs by David Bowie, U2, Paul McCartney and Wings, among others).

Luhrmann keeps the story moving at break-neck speed, switching back and forth from Busby Berkeley-styled musical numbers, romantic melodrama, and the high camp of French comedy. The effects can be emotionally distancing (as most musicals are), since there is twice as much singing as there is dialogue. But what Moulin Rouge lacks in character development, it more than makes up for with earnest performances and sumptuous visuals. Kidman's timeless beauty and McGregor's energy bring charm to their stock characters. As visual stylist, Luhrmann has few peers (the Coen Brothers and Lars von Trier among them). His use of visual effects, camera moves and editing, steam roll through what would be static, expository moments in a film by a lesser director. The costumes, sets and elaborately choreographed and photographed dance numbers, make Moulin Rouge like nothing you're likely to see this summer, or this year. A strange hybrid of Cabaret and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where lascivious nightclub patrons sing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and grown men wrap themselves in makeshift veils to sing Madonna's "Like A Virgin."

Some of what I've said in this review may not make sense to you. But take my word, about Moulin Rouge.

Scary Movie (2000)

Offensive, but funny.

[6 July 2000]

The opening sequence of Scary Movie is hysterical. A throwback to the days when people actually watched Saturday Night Live and would re-enact their favorite sketch the following Monday around the water cooler at work. In a riff on the "lets-kill-off-the-most-famous-member-of-the-cast" opening of Scream, Carmen Electra is being chased by a masked, knife-welding killer. She stops at a table where a knife, a gun, a hand-grenade and a banana lay neatly arranged. In true horror movie fashion, she arms herself with the banana. There are even better gags in the scene, but I wouldn't dare spoil them. Suffice it to say that this may go down in film and television history as the only time Carmen Electra could be called a scene-stealer.

Scary Movie starts off so well, that the rest of the movie has trouble measuring up to the promise of the beginning. However, director Keenan Ivory Wayans and writers Shawn and Marlon Wayans (along with four, count 'em, four other screenwriters) have made a very funny movie. That's right. I'm doing something I haven't done since the second season of In Living Color: using the name "Wayans" and the word "funny" in the same sentence.

Scary Movie is an obvious spoof on the teen horror genre, and when it calls too much attention to the horror movie cliches it ridicules, it's at its weakest. The stupidity of teen slasher flicks is not a new topic. Scream itself was a satire on slasher movie cliches: and the first rule of comedy is that you can't spoof a satire. The film finds its footing when it simply uses our familiarity with Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and their sequels as a jumping off point for over the top gags worthy of There's Something About Mary.

Much of the film's humor depends on violence against women, homophobia, out and out cruelty, even fat jokes. The Wayans Bros. push everything up to and then past the limits of good taste, but the film is so bold in its politically incorrectness, that you laugh anyway.

As parody movies go, Scary Movie isn't up to the level of Hot Shots! or Airplane!, but it's funny enough to be worthy of comparison to both. All serious criticism aside, Scary Movie promises laughs, and delivers them.

Blind Faith (1998 TV Movie)

One of the best movies you never saw.

[10/10 · 18 January 2000]

In a way, it is easy to see why a movie like Blind Faith was lost in the shuffle; a period piece with an all Black cast that deals with racism. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why no one has heard of a film this good. It was directed by Ernest Dickerson, long time cinematographer for Spike Lee, and it stars recognizable names, Charles S. Dutton, Courtney B. Vance, Kadeem Hardison and Lonette McKee.

The film was produced for Showtime television, had a very limited theatrical run in 1998 and was nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards. I didn't see the film until 1999, when it played at a Film Festival in St. Louis. When I read the cast list and saw who directed it, my jaw dropped. How had this film escaped my radar? I was even further shocked when I saw it. It is (along with Being John Malkovich and Boys Don't Cry) one of the three best films I've seen in 1999 and one of the most powerful films I've seen since Uli Edel's Last Exit to Brooklyn, ten years ago.

The film is the story of a young Black boy named Charles Jr., a cop's son, accused of murdering a young white boy in civil rights era New York City. He confesses to the crime and refuses to do anything in his own defense, which his uncle John, who is also his lawyer, can't understand. The boy has no history of violence or crime and was basically a quiet unassuming kid.In spite of the lack of cooperation from Charles Jr., John mounts a defense, even though the prosecution seems to have an open and shut case and is pushing for the death penalty. To give away more would be as big a crime as revealing the plot twists at the climax of The Sixth Sense or Fight Club.

What makes this movie so great is its subtlety and its realism. The Black characters are not saints and the white characters are not demons. Movies like this tend to sacrifice their power to sentimentality by making the minority characters into martyrs and heroes that are beyond reproach. Also, this film makes us like the white characters, so that when their racism finally shows, it is all the more shocking.Frank Military's script pulls off the difficult task of making us care about a story we think we've seen before, and then lets us know that we haven't seen it before. This movie is so much more powerful than preachy, Hollywood stuff, like Ghosts of Mississippi, that it eclipses those films completely. This is a hard hitting story of race and justice that all Americans need to see.