meadowlark Reviews

Across the Universe (2007)

A romance that emerges from Beatles songs like Venus from the sea.

[8/10 · 1 November 2007]

Directed by Julie Taymor. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood.

"Across the Universe" is a romance that emerges from Beatles songs like Venus from the sea. Young Jude (Sturgess), a shipyard worker in Liverpool, leaves his steady, Liverpudlean girl to look for the father he never knew. He ships out and jumps ship in America to find his father, a professor at Princeton.

Or so Jude imagines. Turns out his father is a janitor at Princeton. He had sired Jude while stationed in England during WWII. Time present is sometime in the mid-sixties. Dad now has a family and has no place for Jude in his life, but he does find a place for him to bunk in the building he maintains.

Some student pranksters hit golf balls from a rooftop, smashing through the window of a fraternity house. In the ensuing chase by frat boys, one of the pranksters, Max (Joe Anderson) is given shelter by Jude. Max has a sister, Lucy (Wood), whose boyfriend is shipped off to Vietnam early on.

Jude and Max become fast friends, and Jude spends Thanksgiving with Max's family, where he and Lucy meet. Max gets his draft notice, burns it, and drops out of Princeton. He and Jude head for New York, where they rent space in a loft run by an aspiring singer and Janice Joplin figure.

The film follows Jude, Lucy, and Max in an exploration of "the sixties", cross-cutting among scenes of football practice, with square-jawed young athletes and comely cheerleaders, to an urban uprising in Detroit, to scenes of campus protest and clashes with police, to battle scenes in Vietnam, featuring Max, who let himself be drafted, despite his attitudes toward the war and authority in general.

All of the venues come together (sorry, Beatles titles are in my head) in one way or another to form a maelstrom that swirls around the young lovers, drawing them in, bringing them together, hurling them apart, then casting them who knows where?

The main set piece features a psychedelic trip, a magical mystery tour on the Merry Pranksters' bus, made famous in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Dr. Robert (Bono) sings and commands the bus as a kind of Ken Kesey figure.

Along the way, they take in a show by Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard). Words cannot do justice to the visual effects during this trip, and throughout the film for that matter, so I will not do them an injustice. The visuals, however, do complete justice to the Beatles' music and to that whole milieu. The drug-joke is that if you were there, you wouldn't remember. Not true. I was there, and I remember.

Taymor makes excellent use of the music, which outlines the plot. She gives some Beatles numbers a clever twist, as when "I Want You" comes from the Uncle Sam recruiting poster, and sometimes insightful, as when a lesbian cheerleader (yeah, yeah) sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from a distance to a stereotypical blonde cheerleader. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, the originally upbeat number is transformed into a ballad of longing and heartbreak.

"Across the Universe" is an unabashed musical, right from the opening shot. I recommend it to anyone who was there in those times. For those who were not, I recommend it for its fresh presentation of the Beatles' songs and for its visual delights. For those who abhor musicals, stay home.

The Core (2003)

Sweet to The Core.

[8 April 2003]

The Earth's core is coming to a screeching halt. In three months we'll all be toast, because the things that keep Earth from being the cat in the microwave will be destroyed. Someone has to get down there and give that sucker a goose!

This is a fun, Jules Verne-ish, kind of movie, so never mind trying to pin down the technology. It is pulp science fiction, written with humor and heart.

Never mind that Dr. Ed 'Braz' Brazzelton (Delroy Lindo)---a genius whose research was stolen by his former colleague, the archly slimy genius and careerist, Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci)--- has retreated to the desert where, with no apparent source of funds, he putters around building what appears to be a massive gattling-laser and develops materials with marvelous qualities found nowhere else on Earth.

Never mind that Zimsky's own pet project, Destini, the most powerful weapon of mass destruction ever conceived looks something like a giant sparkplug.

Never mind that billions are spent to build the core-boring ship (christened Virgil, after the poet who descended into Hell), a vessel that must withstand unimaginably high temperatures and pressures, and...when it gets stuck among giant crystals down there, the crew can get out in their thin little suits to work it free.

Never mind that these top flight scientists and engineers calculate distances in feet and miles.

Oh, and perhaps the oddest anomaly-when three of the crew have to choose which of them is to carry out a crucial, and perhaps fatal, task, they draw straws. Yep, three broom straws. You have to have experienced Virgil to appreciate the incongruity. Did the cleaning lady perhaps leave them behind while tidying up the ship?

Somewhere in the film critics' restroom, there must be scrawled on the wall: "For a fun time, go see The Core."

Mister Peepers (1952–1955)

One of the best comedy series ever, and that's not just nostalgia talking.

[1 October 2002]

I was about 13 or 14 when the series began and about 17 or 18 when it ended. One of the best comedy series ever, and that's not just nostalgia talking.

Just look at that cast---Wally Cox, Tony Randall, Arthur O'Connell, Jack Warden, and the inimitable Marion Lorne. Randall and Cox played off each other perfectly, Randall as the worldly, man-to-man advisor to Cox's shy, soft spoken, science teacher.

Cox was perfect in every way for his role, and Randall played his self-consciously masculine character with a subtle irony that perfectly expressed both their relationship to one another as human beings and their relationship to the world as types. Consequently, the viewer could identify with them both and on both levels.

Great writing, and not a mean syllable in it.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

Not quite as taut a movie as "Das Boot", but my favorite submarine movie next to that one.

[24 July 2002]

Trying to keep up in the arms race, the Soviet Union hastily launches its first nuclear sub on a mission to fire a test ballistic missile, thus demonstrating its own cutting edge capabilities to the Americans. Haste, however, makes waste, and, that demonstration's having been achieved, one of the on board reactors springs a leak and overheats, threatening an explosion bigger than that at Hiroshima.

Prior to launch, the boat's captain, Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson), is bounced down to executive officer. He sees himself as a father figure with respect to those under his command, and sees them as his family. The powers that be figure he needs to be replaced as captain by someone with a more demanding management style, namely one Alexi Vostrikov (Harrison Ford). Vostrikov drives Polenin's "family" mercilessly, welding them into a "crew". Unfortunately, he was a much better welder than those who built the boat.

A submarine movie is guaranteed drama, so it all becomes a matter of execution, and director Kathryn Bigelow keeps our attention submerged in the action for--whoa!--two hours and eighteen minutes. That's ok, it moves right along. Some of the dialogue gets a little sententious, but hey, these are Russian Commies, so you have to expect that.

The boat (they call submarines "boats", because they're not built to ship things--otherwise, they'd be called "ships") was doomed right from the laying of the keel (so maybe they don't have keels...you know what I mean). Several workers lost their lives during its construction, and the champagne bottle didn't break at the Christening (or whatever Communists do to boats on their maiden voyage). Personally, I myself even felt a little nervous on seeing that the bow appeared to be reinforced with Duct Tape, so I can imagine how the crew--er, family--felt when initially heading down the hatch, so to speak. The K-19 promised to be a K-9.

Actually, she was built pretty well, except for some pipe welds in reactor three. And her design had leap-frogged that of the Americans, who at that time had basically put reactors in converted conventional subs. The real problem was that haste and a little too much of that Russian "can do" attitude had put her out to sea ill-equipped. No backup systems for the reactors and, worse, no radiation resistant suits. Instead, she had been outfitted with protective suits designed for working around dangerous chemicals, little comfort when you're trying to weld the holes shut in a live runaway nuclear reactor.

All in all, a gripping drama. Well cast--Ford and Neeson play well off of each other, and Peter Sarsgaard ("Boys Don't Cry", "Another Day in Paradise") adds another solid performance to his resumé. Director Bigelow keeps it light enough on the Russian accents so as not to be distracting. Not quite as taut a movie as "Das Boot", but my favorite submarine movie next to that one. And it reveals, finally and definitively, why the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. They spent way-y-y- too much on their uniforms.

Road to Perdition (2002)

Visually impressive, but despite all the blood, betrayal, and mayhem--and the urban industrial setting--the movie is not at all gritty.

[24 July 2002]

Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) is an enforcer and exterminator for his gang boss and father figure, John Rooney (Paul Newman). Trouble is, he is being betrayed and, ultimately, hunted down by his brother figure, Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig), who is himself a kind of a Richard Widmark figure. Connor goes gunning for Michael, with tragic consequences for the Sullivan family.

Michael and his son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), go on the lam, robbing banks of their ill-gotten deposits from the Capone gang. As a result, they are pursued by yet another gunman (Jude Law) who works for Capone, and who seems to be trying to meld his hobby of photography with his profession as a hired killer. Pere and fils hope to fight their way through to perdition--well, that's Perdition-on-the-Lake, where Aunt Sarah has a nice house and a dog waiting for them, at least for Junior.

There are enough cold-blooded murders in this movie to keep theaters cool through Labor Day, despite that the story is essentially about the relationships between fathers and sons, and how maybe some good can come out of even the worst of lives.

But the movie is aimed more toward the eyes than the heart. I haven't seen the graphic novel (so-called, I suppose, because of having better production values than a regular comic book), but I bet I could pick out 90% of its panels from the movie, which seems to move from panel to panel.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The shots are well-composed and effectively lit, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film as a moving "comic". It is stylish, if you're looking for that, but not at all realistic, if you're looking for that.

The setting is somewhere in the Calumet Region just south and east of Chicago, a land of steel mills, oil refineries, gambling and prostitution and, at the time of this story, speakeasies. I grew up near there and wish director Mendes had taken more advantage of the exteriors heavy industry can provide for a gangster movie such as this. When all the mills and plants and refineries are going full blast, they could provide inspiration for the graphic novel version of Dante's "Inferno", with perdition to spare. It was awe-inspiring, but nowadays is considerably quieter and a whole lot rustier.

There are also some nice shots of the flat prairies of northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana (supposedly so, at least--it sure looks like my old stomping grounds) and the lovely dunes at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. And a flatland crossroads that looks suspiciously like the one in Hanks' "Cast Away", or, more appropriately, in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest". It brought a tear of nostalgia to this old flatlander's eye.

I recommend this one as a theatrical, visual delight. But, despite all the blood, betrayal, and mayhem--and the urban industrial setting--the movie is not at all gritty.

Men in Black II (2002)

The talking dog scenes played a major role in keeping the movie from being a...well, a dog.

[5 July 2002]

The wicked alien, Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle), lands on Earth to recover a powerful light device with which she intends to destroy Laranna, Queen of the Universe (Paige Brooks) and take over the whole works. Since the MiB mission is alien control, they can't allow that. What's more, if that device doesn't leave Earth by a time certain, Earth will be destroyed!! And only former agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) knows where it is.

Needing his old partner back, agent Jay (Will Smith) gets rid of his incompetent new partner, Tee (Patrick Warburton). Jay seeks out Kay who has been neuralized (memory wiped clean of any MiB traces) and turned out to pasture in a small Massachusetts town, where he is the Postmaster. Together again, they set out to save the world.



After a reasonably clever introduction, the movie falls on its face, ker-thud, in the sequences where Jay gets rid of his partner and saves a subway train from being entirely devoured by a huge subway-dwelling alien (it's set in Manhattan). We took in a 4th of July 11:40am showing, and there was a good turnout. Alas, you could feel the anticipation congeal, as the subway sequence labored on to its conclusion, which, thank goodness, consisted of a pretty good sight gag.

Things picked up, however, when a talking dog showed up, and the movie won us back, but it had burnt up a significant chunk of good will by then.

I found all the characters to be either interesting or engaging, and often both. Even the animated characters, which I'm not always that fond of, were a lot of fun.

The plot was just about right, consistent, not too complicated to follow, and humane enough to allow for a touch of romance (provided by Rosario Dawson). It accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was to provide a structure on which to hang jokes. The jokes weren't bad, some were really clever---individually---but they didn't seem to find a rhythm, and so, in concert, fell somewhat short of orgiastic mirth. Except for the dog scenes, which played a major role in keeping the movie from being a...well, a dog.

I can hear Will Smith, even now, bemoaning "A dog stole my movie!"

Lara Flynn Boyle was straight-on deadpan as the wicked alien, and could have been hilarious. But, aside from her first entrance, they gave her nothing funny to do or say. Smith and Jones work well together, and I wouldn't mind an MiB III, if they could find a script with just a teensy bit more wit to it.

Did I mention the dog was great?

Worth seeing at matinee prices, but don't set your expectations too high, given those flat early-on sequences.

The Bourne Identity (2002)

Liman respects the reality of his characters and situations more than one finds in most action-adventure flicks, and he handles all the elements skillfully.

[17 June 2002]

The Bourne Identity - at the movies Directed by Doug Liman . Written by Tony Gilroy, adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Ludlum. Starring Matt Damon and Franka Potente. Support from Chris Cooper.

Jason Bourne (Damon) is pulled out of the Mediterranean by fishermen who at first think him dead. But he revives, and one of the fishermen, who apparently practices surgery as a hobby, digs two bullets out of his back and a small capsule out of his hip. The capsule contains the access number of a Swiss bank account.

Having been deposited by the fishermen on the Marseilles waterfront, Bourne heads for Switzerland and the numbered account. He has lost his memory, although he finds he knows English, French, and German, and in an early run-in with two Zurich cops who are hassling him as a homeless person, he discovers he is exceedingly proficient in martial arts as well.

The next day, he goes to the bank, signs in to the account, and finds in the safe deposit box numerous passports in his and others' names, all bearing his picture. Also, there are substantial sums of money in various currencies, as well as a gun. He leaves the gun and takes the rest in a red bank bag.

His movements are reported back to a CIA operations chief (Cooper) in Langley, who is reeling from Bourne's failure to assassinate an African leader (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who was powerful as Simon Adebisi in the tv series, Oz ). Fearing that Bourne has at the very least compromised the covert op-and may even have turned renegade-he orders Bourne killed.

Seeking his identity and suspicious of what his past must have been, Bourne goes to the U.S. Consulate, where he finds himself pursued by Marine guards. Escaping the Consulate, he meets up with a vagabond young woman, Marie Kreutz (Potente) and offers her $20,000 to drive him to Paris, where one of his aliases, a Mr. Kane, has an apartment. There he finds himself the target of assassins. He doesn't know who is after him, or why, but ironically, the skills he has learned in that very life that now demands his demise, are all that keep him going. That and Marie's little red car.



This one is a boy's adventure fantasy with archetypal subtext. Nearly all the physical action is of the "don't try this at home" variety. But it is, for the most part, very well done, almost to the point of being believable. Given that one goes into this genre willing to suspend a whole lot of disbelief, the action is certainly acceptable, all except for one five or six story plunge down a stairwell, which one might accept only in a super-hero movie.

Martial arts and car chases are not among my favorite story elements, but Liman gives us only one, maybe two, encounters that shout "obligatory martial arts ballet". Others of his fights are quick and to the point, the way serious martial arts fighting would be in real life.

As for car chases, although I am no connoisseur, I've always thought the car-chases-train sequence in The French Connection to be the best chase I've ever seen. I'd say that Liman equals that masterpiece when he has the Parisian gendarmes chase Bourne and Marie through the streets of Paris in their little red car.

I find Damon convincing as an action hero, and Potente's character exudes the aura of a side-street, bathed in shadows and mist, which the pursued hero can duck into for respite. I love the way she lets the action come to her and then responds in a spontaneous and wholly believable manner that scarcely requires words.

Their relationship is chaste. They share a slightly awkward hug and kiss at one point. Would one wish for more "chemistry" between them? Well, Bourne does have a few things on his mind which are a bit more demanding of his attention than a sexual romp. I guess what I would have liked is for Marie to have mothered him, and for Bourne to have responded to her with more vulnerability. I know that he has had the vulnerability all but trained out of him, and he can't afford to let his guard down, but I would have wished for some embrace of genuine respite in which he accepts and succumbs to his need for her to hold him and make it all better.

Not to get too Oedipal about it, but Bourne has been reborn, having been all but dead and then passing through a symbolic, watery rebirth by which he has shed his past and has a chance to follow his better instincts-once he discovers what they are, for they can only be determined in contrast with what he once was. And Marie does have an accepting, protective attitude toward him, which, under more favorable circumstances, could blossom into the love of a lover. For lovers, at their best, mother each other as well.

I wish Liman had brought out that aspect of their relationship more, expanding the story's human dimension. But even as it is, he respects the reality of his characters and situations more than one finds in most action-adventure movies, and he handles them skillfully. We attended a Sunday matinee that had very few and scattered empty seats. The audience responded enthusiastically, and there was even a humorous scene which inspired communal laughter.

I liked the picture and recommend it, martial arts and all.

Hollywood Ending (2002)

I go to see all of Allen's movies, even the bad ones. For anyone who doesn't do that, pass this one up.

[6 May 2002]

Hollywood director Val Waxman (Woody Allen) has lost both his wife (Téa Leoni) and his touch behind the camera. He is up in snowbound Canada shooting a commercial. Leoni convinces her new fiance (Treat Williams), who heads a major studio, that the new script he has, a straight-forward story with a New York setting, is just up Allen's alley. Allen gets the gig, but on the day he is about to start shooting, he wakes up with psychosomatic blindness.

Blindness is not a bad central metaphor in a story about a film director, but as a matrix of jokes, it has its drawbacks. Absolutely no one on this planet, including each and every blind person, could ever suspend their disbelief enough to accept that a director could complete a whole film while blind and while convincing almost everyone involved that he is not blind.

But then, this is a farce. So, taken at farce value, the script and performances had better be really, really funny. "Hollywood Ending" misses both really's and nearly all the funny. There are a few decent one-liners but not nearly enough, and without the brilliant one-liners, Allen's hilariously neurotic persona becomes merely fidgety–and pretty damn irritating. Worse, the dialogue is left with mere talkiness. No, it's not even talky–it's chattery. An early scene between Allen and Leoni in a restaurant is painful to endure. You can see what Allen is aiming at, but he never even comes close. It was awful.

Aside from the blindness, the only other funny concept (aside from the unintentionally funny notion of Allen's having a live-in girlfriend (Debra Messing) who's young enough to be his step-daughter) is that he hires a Chinese cinematographer who has done most of his work with the Red Army and speaks not a word of English. That necessitates a translator (Barney Cheng), who fits nicely into the plot and contributes a few laughs, but otherwise nothing at all is made of the cinematographer. Somehow, I've got to believe there's a joke or two in there somewhere when a blind director is working with a Red Army cinematographer who speaks only Chinese.

Perhaps the best joke comes right at the end, and it has a nice logical twist to it if you interpret "Hollywood Ending" in more than one way.

Not only is the script not funny, it is a bit clumsy. A sub-plot with Allen's son by his first marriage, which ties in with his blindness, is not introduced until, oh, maybe 3/4 of the way into the movie. Ok, maybe the son is mentioned a little earlier, but there's no indication at that time that it's more than a passing attempt at a little joke.

Well-photographed and a good job by Leoni. I go to see all of Allen's movies, even the bad ones. For anyone who doesn't do that, pass this one up.

The Year That Trembled (2002)

Once the film zeroes in on the main characters and plot events, it grabs your attention and hangs on.

[15 April 2002]

Helen Gardner (Marin Hinkle) teaches at a high school near Kent State University. She is an activist against the war in Vietnam, as are some of her students. On May 4, 1970, they hear news of the shootings at Kent State. As a result of her activities, Helen is fired from her job. She marries a young aspiring lawyer (Jonathan M. Woodward) who throws his energy into a legal suit on behalf of those students who were shot.

Four of Helen's senior students (Jonathan Brandis, Charlie Finn, Sean Nelson, and Lucas Ford) graduate and rent a farmhouse next door to their former teacher and her husband. We follow these people, as well as others they become involved with, for the next year as they stave off the law, protest the war, and try to make some beginning in life while facing the likelihood of being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

The title comes from a poem from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass".

"YEAR that trembled and reel'd beneath me!/ Your summer wind was warm enough-yet the air I breathed froze me;/ A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me;/ Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself;/ Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?/ And sullen hymns of defeat?"

Jay Craven captures in drama the times and the concerns that "Hair" captured as a musical, as he focuses on one of the pivotal events of that time--the shooting of students at Kent State--and how that event and the war that spawned it, affected others in the surrounding communities.

He skillfully interweaves stock footage of film and tv broadcasts from that period, with the fictional lives of some young people (and some old) who were closely connected with those events and were trying to figure out how to relate to a society that seemed to have lost its way.

But the film is not abstractly political, keeping its attention on the personal concerns of the characters in all their ambivalence. Jonathan Brandis, in particular, brings a strong screen presence to his role as the point-of-view character in an ensemble cast, and Charlie Finn provides engaging comic relief as the goofy, but believable, Jim "Hairball" Morton. Henry Gibson, Fred Willard, and Martin Mull show the sympathetic–if not altogether trustworthy–other side of the generation gap that had split along some fault-line in time.

The film is somewhat structurally unfocused in its early part. It took a while to get a sense of each character–longer than can be afforded in a feature film, I'd say. Hairball, for example, at first seemed simply awkward as an actor, rather than goofy as a character. Jay R. Ferguson was excellent in his crucial role, but could have gotten the same effect with less screen time. Others could have been given shorter shrift or perhaps no shrift at all.

But once the film zeroes in on the main characters and plot events, it grabs your attention and hangs on.

Oleanna (1994)

Mamet does a masterful job. I'd watch it again.

[20 November 2001]

William H. Macy plays a professor, and Debra Eisenstadt plays a student who needs an A in the class she is taking from him. They argue as to why she should or shouldn't get an A. In the course of their arguing, the student finds cause to charge the professor, who is up for tenure, with sexual harassment and takes her case to the tenure committee.

The movie runs about an hour and a half. It was slow going, but as I was about to flip away from it (watching it on cable), I checked how long it had to go, and it was about half-way through. I figured, oh well, there's still some Canadian Club I need to get rid of, and tomorrow's a holiday, so I stuck with it. And I'm glad I did.

It is not a good movie, and maybe not even a very good play. Mamet's direction is ultra-stagy, even more declamatory than live theater would normally allow for, let alone a movie. For about an hour and a half, the actors hurl complete sentences and big chunks of paragraphs at one another.

Are Mamet and the actors really that insensitive to the conventions of film? Not likely. I think he chose that artificial manner in order to distance the audience from the characters and bring the ideas to the fore–perhaps in the same vein as Bertolt Brecht's notion of "epic theater".

This is not so much a movie or a play as it is a staged philosophical dialogue. It examines the power relationships between man and woman, teacher and student. When the student comes to the professor to reveal the case she has built against him, it shows how words and deeds in one context can be given a whole different thrust and meaning when used to "build a case". Or are they really that different? Perhaps her case focuses and explicates the real underlying relationship of those words and deeds. Those are the kinds of questions Mamet raises, and I think it is a masterful exploration.

But is it a movie? Well, it is certainly dramatic, if stilted, and the dénoument is devastating. It may not be a good movie, but Mamet knew exactly what he was doing, and I'd watch it again.

Don't Say a Word (2001)

If it were a comedy, it would be "zany". Come to think of it...

[1 October 2001]

A facile piece of hackery featuring Michael Douglas in full tizzy. He's a New York psychiatrist who does a favor for his colleague and pal (Oliver Platt) on Thanksgiving eve by seeing an apparently autistic eighteen year old girl (Brittany Murphy) who has suffered every mental malfunction in the book over the past ten years. She is fresh from having carved up an orderly, and Platt wants to save her from a lifetime of loneliness and medication, presumably so that she can kill and kill again. Anyway, she can be saved only if Douglas will spend an hour or so talking with her–or trying to–and I mean right now!

The next day, Douglas goes to wake up his own little girl to take her to the Thanksgiving Day parade, and--dang!--she's been kidnapped. No good deed goes unpunished. It seems that Douglas's new patient has, locked in her brain, a six-digit number that is the key to a gang of bank robbers' recovery of a ten-million-dollar ruby that got away from them when their heist went awry ten years ago. (They just got out of prison.) Since he is the presiding psychiatrist, they want him to get that number for them, or they will kill his little daughter. They give him until five o'clock that afternoon. Well, there goes Thanksgiving out the window. Why do they need it by five o'clock? No one ever says. Oh, I know--the time element lends suspense to the plot.

Actually, it is a fun plot. If it were a comedy, it would be "zany". Come to think of it, as an action-suspense-melodrama, it's...zany. Give this one a wide berth, unless you just happen to be in the mood to sit mind-benumbed in the dark, sucking on Jujyfruits and letting production values slide across your eye balls.

The Closet (2001)

...good sight gags and droll observations on how people perceive one another...

[1 October 2001]

An accountant at a condom factory (Daniel Auteuil) is about to be fired because his position has become redundant. He worries that he won't be able to keep up his alimony and child support payments to his cold-hearted ex-wife and indifferent teenage son. A new neighbor suggests he pretend to be gay, so that management will keep him on for fear of a discrimination lawsuit. Now that he has "come out of the closet", some of his colleagues mischievously set out to broaden the mind of the company homophobe (Gérard Depardieu).

This one has some good sight gags and droll observations on how people perceive one another through the distorting lense of their own prejudices and assumptions.

What Women Want (2000)

It reminded me of one of those late 50's early 60's romantic comedies.

[1 October 2001]

A new creative director (Helen Hunt) is hired by an ad agency (run by Alan Alda) to bring it up to date by appealing to the women's market. Mel Gibson, an account executive and a real man's man, was slated for that position, and he wants to get rid of Hunt. At her first staff meeting, Hunt gives each person a package of various women's products, and each must come up with a campaign for at least one of the items.

At home, Gibson tries out the products in a tour de force of cross-dressing. Funny, if not roll on the floor hilarious, and he does it with an aplomb that makes it look so easy that you at the very least have to admire his skill. In the process, Gibson falls into a tub, followed by a live hair dryer, and receives a shock that alters his brain so that he can hear the thoughts of women. As a result, he bowls everyone over, especially Hunt, with his creative insight into the women's market. Now he's got her right where he wants her...or so he thinks. But creative insight turns out to be a two-edged sword.

I liked this one a lot more than I thought I would. It reminded me of one of those late 50's early 60's romantic comedies, at least in its earlier scenes. In fact, I liked it so much that it made me feel sorry for Woody Allen. His "Curse of the Jade Dragon" suffers by comparison. I mention it, because Allen's film also stars Helen Hunt and, interestingly, has a similar situation–a woman is hired on to bring a company up to date, and she threatens to disrupt the man's career. Even mind-alteration is involved, although of a different kind.

I think the mind-reading premise is brilliant and is set in just the right context, and Hunt and Gibson played off each other very well. I've seen Mel Gibson on a couple of Jay Leno shows, and he seemed ill-at-ease and sometimes a little abrupt, as though he were either very shy, not too bright, or for some reason just didn't want to be there. But what a difference when he's on screen and playing a role that in bygone days would have been filled by Jack Lemmon or Tony Randall or Rock Hudson. Ok, maybe he's not the all-round actor that Lemmon was, but he fit that particular role perfectly. And he even does a bit of a Gene Kelly routine!

Pollock (2000)

This movie has stayed with me longer than any I've seen in quite some time.

[3 April 2001]

Starring and directed by Ed Harris and featuring the Oscar-winning performance of Marcia Gay Harden. All the featured performances grabbed your attention. Most notably Bud Cort, Jeffrey Tambour as art critic Clement Greenberg, and especially Amy Madigan as art patron Peggy Guggenheim--a small gem of a performance.

This movie has stayed with me more than any I've seen in quite some time. It was a labor of love for Ed Harris, and it shows.

All the elements work together perfectly to achieve the picture's effect. It's not an effect I can sum up in a few words, but it deals with talent, ambition, self-destructive tendencies, and how they all play out in a milieu which itself is largely constituted of those elements and feeds on them. And yet it is more than just another flawed genius movie--because it is so well done. Harris's own talent and ambition carry the day, and he must feel very proud and satisfied with his achievement.

Not that he did it alone, but he was the driving force. As with any picture, many artists contributed, and for this one they all seemed to be at the top of their game. The art direction and cinematography surely must be credited for the film's homely and accurate images--right down to the bathtub in the kitchen of a Greenwich Village cold-water flat. Pollock's New York days were pre-loft, and you really get the feel of the cramped quarters and make-do way of life that supported the work of artists in that period.

And the interplay of the characters has exactly the same tone and mood. They ring perfectly true in their relationships and concerns and reveal how small greatness sometimes can be.

Even the score caught the drip and splash style of Pollock's mature years when he had achieved the height of his ambition.

This movie moved me and made me want to learn more about the life and times of Jackson Pollock.

Loved it! Loved it! Loved it!

15 Minutes (2001)

A slick, police-detective action flick with a great villain.

[12 March 2001]

Written and directed by John Herzfeld ("Two Days in the Valley").

The title comes from Andy Warhol's prediction that before long everyone would be allotted 15 minutes of fame.

This is a slick police detective action flick that features three stabbing murders, one murder by uncertain means and two major arsons.

Robert De Niro stars as Eddie Fleming, a flamboyant New York detective, loved by the media, and who uses that media to enhance his career--and his love-life as embodied in a live action tv reporter played by Melina Kanakaredes. Edward Burns plays Jordy Warsaw, a fire department arson investigator who, in effect, becomes Fleming's sidekick and student of the media.

This movie is really about the media and the cynical use thereof. Specifically it's a punch in the face of tabloid journalism, and the Burns character acts as the meta-conscience with whom we are, presumably, to identify...even as we wallow in the cynicism and feast our eyes on the mayhem and bloodletting.

Kelsey Grammar is the tabloid tv producer who takes the punch.

The best scenes go to the villains, a Russian and a Czech, who get the ball rolling when they enter the United States in pursuit of their share of a bank heist they helped pull off in the old country. Oleg Taktarov plays the Russian, who was bitten by the film-making bug when he once saw "It's a Wonderful Life". So enamored of that film is he (going so far as to register in a hotel under the name, Frank Capra), that he borrows a digi-cam from a shop window in order to begin his own film career in the land of opportunity. And a wonderful life it is that he proceeds to record.

The Czech actor, Karl Roden, plays the Czech. Though all the elements of the movie are well done, it would be another run of the mill cop flick if it weren't for Roden's smirking, serpentine villain. He really makes you want to take a shower after it's all over, and I mean that as a compliment.

The IMDb credits are a little sketchy, failing to mention Kim Cattrall (tv's "Sex and the City") and a noted real-life lawyer, whose name escapes me at the moment. He did a fine job as a thoroughly despicable defense attorney and should be given full credit for his 15 minutes.

In sum, news is business and will gravitate toward the bottom line, and that's a shame. Or is it?

As I said, this is a slick, commercial production, not gritty realism or art house sensitivity. For what it is--and especially for Karl Roden's villain--I recommend it.

You Can Count on Me (2000)

There's more to truth than what can be told.

[20 February 2001]

Mon Feb 19 08:42:39 2001

You Can Count on Me A brother and sister in upstate New York are orphaned at a young age, and we pick up with them as adults in their late twenties. The sister is maybe 30, divorced from a ne'er do well, and has an eight-year old boy. Her brother is a couple of years younger, a feckless drifter with both strengths and weaknesses.

The story goes almost nowhere with respect to bringing about visible changes in the characters, and its emphasis is divided among the three main characters--the sister, the brother, and the sister's son. It violates almost every principle of good story-telling except for the one Henry James held as essential, i.e., "it must be interesting".

And interesting it is. And engrossing. Amusing. Touching.

The title must be ironic. Or perhaps it means "you can count on me to be me".

What is it about? Pressed for an answer, I would say it is about what goes on "between the lines" in these people's lives. The characters and their words approach each other obliquely, and therein lies the interest, because the dialogue is so well-written, the scenes so well-edited, and the characters so well-cast and acted, that you are led into the silences and the subtext, where the action really takes place.

Laura Linney brings the whole of the sister's life into every moment we see her on screen. She is a loan officer at the bank, and her new boss is played by Matthew Broderick. The scenes between them are, to risk a cliché, pure gold. Mark Ruffalo embodies the brother's strengths and weaknesses in his voice and body language and in a face that owns the screen. Rory Culkin follows in the Culkin family tradition of fine child actors. He plays the silences perfectly, and it is in the silences that we see him, little by little, trying to crack the secrets and mysteries of grown-up life.

Written and directed by Ken Lonergan. An amazing piece of filmmaking in the way that it handles the stuff of ordinary life. Highly recommended.

Pay It Forward (2000)

Great performances, uneven script.

[30 October 2000]

Strong performances by the principals salvaged this one for me. Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, in what I believe to be her best performance yet in a feature film, and Haley Joel Osment, who demonstrates that his work in The Sixth Sense was no fluke.

I prefer off-beat scripts, and this one was about as on-beat as it gets, having the heavy, regular, thud of a bass drum. No button was left unpushed, no easy expectation unfulfilled, no heartstring untugged. The ending sequence was absolutely putrid and uncalled for. There had to be a better way to end the story. Even a rain of frogs would have been better. But I won't get into that, wanting to avoid spoilers.

I won't say it was a bad story. The concept was great, and the film's heart was in the right place, even if its head was up where only a script doctor would dare to probe.

All said, I recommend it.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Wasted opportunities--a standard teenage horror flick without the teens.

[30 October 2000]

Right off, I recommend it for its visuals. The building and its devices engage the eye and chill the spine. The early scenes depicting how the former mental institution gained its grisly reputation are...satisfyingly grisly. For the s&m inclined, some intriguing devices are put to use.

The Vincent Price-like evil character, Steven H. Price (an homage to Price's work in the 1958 version of this film) is strikingly introduced as the multi-millionaire designer of a roller-coaster guaranteed to horrify its passengers to the point of insanity. The roller-coaster sequences--and especially the fiendish imagination behind them--are brilliantly conveyed.

If only the filmmakers had sustained that early high level of imagination and horror, this could have been one of the best horror movies ever made.

But then it quickly degenerated into cliche--a half-dozen or so people tempted to spend the night in the old mental hospital by the prospect of each receiving a million dollars. And of course, they were picked off one by one, for no convincing reason.

The mayhem was very haphazard without being surprising. You never knew who--or what--was going to kill whom, but when they did, you weren't really convinced as to why they should want to do so. And so the whole plot got all flaccid and out of focus.

One of the characters was trying to break into television production by video taping the goings-on. And she caught a scene from the institution's grisly past on tape. Now that's the kind of idea that should have been developed--bring in something supernatural and drive the participants insane--or to the point where they couldn't tell if they were insane or not--where they (and we along with them) couldn't know for sure if these crazy things were really happening, or if it was all an illusion created to horrify them, as was the roller-coaster.

The filmmakers just never realized what potential they had for a cracking good horror tale.

FreakyLinks (2000–2001)

Appealing cast, good potential.

[12 October 2000]

Not a bad first episode--in the vein of The X-Files and Millennium. I like that. Not as witty as Buffy and not as heavyweight as The X-Files (yet), but the premise and its principle characters show promise.

The premise is that a group of twenty-somethings maintains a web site that features their investigations of weird occurrences. There is a wealth of such material to exploit, so the writers should never run out of plot ideas. This time around, there were quasi Blair Witch scenes which were not all that well integrated, but I hope the producers keep trying to head in that direction, so long as they don't simply become imitative. Overall, the plot was still a bit ahead of the execution.

The cast is very appealing. The lead guy (Ethan Embry) has a believable face, albeit not all of his acting seems to have caught up with his face. I think he will settle into it, though, and will become believable through and through.

With all the elements it has going for it, FreakyLinks has good potential for growth. I plan to continue watching it, and I hope it earns its keep.