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Reviews
The Bucket List (2007)
Don't Miss This Bucket!
What makes this movie better than just another Disease Of The Week Movie is that it CHOOSES LIFE. That is no small distinction as it could have easily been condescendingly mawkish and all-too-precious. The gimmick is that two men are given separate diagnoses that they each have less than a year to live. Nicholson is a powerful CEO, Freeman is a humble automobile mechanic. That they share the same hospital room is a device that we accept, because the opportunity to see the likes of Jack Nicholson spark off of Morgan Freeman is too delicious to quibble over. Sean Hayes is perfectly imperturbable as Jack's efficacious personal assistant, Rob Morrow is appropriately low-key as Jack's doctor. Morgan has a loving family that he undervalues, Jack is as wealthy (and as alienated) as Citizen Kane: their only common ground is their fatal illnesses. One day Morgan writes a wish list of things he would like to do once he gets better, a list that Morgan tosses away once he is given the bad news. Jack takes Morgan's list out of the trash, criticizes it for being "too weak", and the movie kicks into high gear. Morgan has made a career to being Best Friend Forever to very unlikeable people; from DRIVING MISS DAISY to SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION to MILLION DOLLAR BABY; but he has never had a better foil than Jack. Jack has been tempering his machismo with surprising tenderness for several years now; from AS GOOD AS IT GETS to ABOUT SCHMIDT to SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE; this movie allows him to ruminate about religion, family and Carpe Diem: it is a summing-up of his acting persona. The screenplay by Justin Zackham is wise without being arrogant. The sure-footed direction is a remarkable return to form of our old friend Rob Reiner. It has the elegiac tone of TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, the exuberance of COCOON and the coolest acting duet since BUTCH CASSIDAY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. So get a BUCKET of popcorn and a BUCKET of soda pop and SEE THIS MOVIE!
Take the Lead (2006)
Parry and Thrust in Detention
The musical is the third rail of American movies. After CABARET, musicals stopped being about anything apart from toe shoes and fallen arches. Then Disney; starting with THE LITTLE MERMAID; took the musical into an animated, kid-friendly place. In MOULIN ROUGE, director Baz Luhrmann combined the Mix Tape with Consumption to provocative effect. Then CHICAGO brought back the femme fatale in high-kicking, going-for-broke style. The problem with doing musicals is that the performers who have a song-and-dance background have sublimated their skills to carve out a movie career. Hugh Jackman can't go from playing Wolverine to breaking-out in song! Christopher Walken, Jenna Elfman and Charlize Theron are trained dancers. We hardly ever see them bust a move because movies have become dead from the neck down. Thus, the stealth musical has become the High School Musical. Starting with FAME, then DANGEROUS MINDS, then SAVE THE LAST DANCE, and now TAKE THE LEAD, music and dance are depicted as critical elements in high school life. In FAME, heck, we're in the School of Performing Arts, so it's only natural that the students poured into the streets and performed the theme song atop New York taxicabs. In DANGEROUS MINDS, students studied Bob Dylan to learn self-respect. In SAVE THE LAST DANCE, a ballerina learns hip-hop in order to qualify for Julliard. But the greatest stealth musical of the last 20 years is the ludicrous, luscious and legendary FLASHDANCE: welder by day, stripper by night with aspirations of becoming a ballerina. What is admirable about these above movies is their embrace of interracial relationships. Of course, the fluidity of high school relationships allows that most of these romances will collapse by Graduation Day; still, the High School Musical has more ethnic flava than your average John Hughes movie. High school provides a sturdy structure upon which to build a Woodstock fantasy: if you Shake It Fast, Your World Will Follow. In TAKE THE LEAD, Alfre Woodard is a no-nonsense principal in an inner-city school. Woodard is fending-off an attack on the school's limited fiscal resources by an overzealous Math teacher. The teacher is an elitist; Woodard is a realist. Woodard is just trying to keep public education real, then Antonio Bandera strolls into her office. Banderas wants to teach ballroom dancing at the high school, so Woodard sticks him with the kids in Detention Hall. This arrangement should collapse as soon as it starts, but both sides have something to prove. Banderas runs a small dance academy that is just becoming financially secure, but he can't turn his back on troubled kids. Why is this? The movie doesn't say. Woodard allows her car to be vandalized by a troubled student without legal repercussions. Why is that? The movie doesn't bother to tell us. But Banderas represents the small business community and Woodard represents the overburdened public school system. This movie suggests that only a goodwill arrangement between these two entities can produce a healthy high school culture. The film posits that broken families can be overcome, that criminality can be avoided, if only we devote some of our resources to those in our community who need it most: our kids. It's a valid point! The kids in Detention have been abandoned by every adult in their lives: their parents, their teachers and the PTA. They are dismissive of Banderas at first, but they're not violent, because they are still kids and kids are always in need of a parent figure. With great precision, Banderas becomes their life coach through the language of dance. He supports their best instincts and gently directs them away from their worst impulses. By using dance as a metaphor, Banderas gets past their defenses and engages them in a life outside of their experience and their expectations. By sponsoring their entrance into a citywide dance competition, Banderas shows that he believes in them as people. By not pitting them against each other but rather partnering them with each other, he always extols teamwork over selfishness. This movie is not about the Big Dance Competition or even about Becoming A Dancer. There is criminality. There is an acquaintance assault. And, yes, there is a Catillion. The movie has to fudge the dance scenes because it is physically impossible to become a competitive ballroom dancer in a school semester. (But enough about ABC network's Dancing With The Stars). This movies' intelligent use of music distinguishes it from most films of its stripe. How many soundtracks convincingly combine Gershwin with Ghetto Rap? Antonio Banderas has the posture and the presence to make this movie fly. If his voice work in SHREK II demonstrated anything, it proved that Banderas was funnier than full-time comedians Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy while being more self-aware than Cameron Diaz. He did more than satirize his work in THE MASK OF ZORRO, he lampooned his whole "Latin Lover" persona. Ricardo Montalban gave his up for cheap on FANTASY ISLAND, and Andy Garcia lost it big time in GODFATHER III, then never recovered from INTERNAL AFFAIRS. Banderas registers that he is no longer God's Gift, he does not demand that every female with the dew still on her flutter beguilingly in his presence. Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis and before them Paul Newman gave up their Alpha Male status just a few years before audiences would have taken it away from them without asking. Banderas continues to position himself for the second phase of his career and he is all the more appealing for it. In TAKE THE LEAD, Banderas plays the Big Dog in the Small Pond, but he never rubs the kids' noses in it. Banderas does this with the grace of a Gene Hackman, turning a small picture into a movie that could TAKE THE LEAD!
The Sisters (2005)
Anger In The Academic World
THE SISTERS is an honest attempt at American tragedy. We are living in the American century (expiration date: 2045 a.d.). Tragedy is historically the result of Fate, deprivation or ethnic conflict. Since America is poly-theistic, wealthy and multi-cultural, it is difficult to craft an authentically American tragic narrative. Americans have too many choices to be reasonably cornered-into making a tragic decision. American movies have historically been optimistic, that's why our entertainment has been so successfully exported around the world. We delivered Art Deco opulence with "Fred and Ginger" during the depths of the Great Depression, THE SOUND OF MUSIC during the escalation of the Vietnam War, and JAWS during the Watergate detoxification. America is not a tragedy-ridden culture, so we must stage our tragedies on an intimate scale, keep it close to home, so to speak. THE SISTERS wisely keeps the tragedy close to the chest. Child incest. Adolescent sexual abuse co-dependency. Marital emotional battering. Adultery. Homosexuality. Addiction to crystal methampetimine. And a jagged little green pill called "jealousy". Every American can relate to jealousy: that is our cultural Achille's Heel, after all. By layering one Hot Button topic over another, THE SISTERS leaves many promising topics unresolved, and perhaps fails to resolve any single topic satisfactorily. But compared to films such as ONE THOUSAND ACRES or THE UPSIDE OF ANGER, THE SISTERS covers its' territory with greater assurance and less contrivance. That is largely due to the lead performance by the always-impressive Maria Bello. Bello's movie career is one of depicting small hurts that can spiral into tragedy. Bello doesn't roll with the punches that life throws, but no one takes a punch better than Maria. Bello is the actress that Courtney Love aspired to be back in the 1990's; raw, whip-smart and reckless; and a performer who always gives 110%. Bello's eyes are not blue, her posture isn't perfect, and she doesn't have an Australian accent. But Bello knows how to walk in high heels, has more than held her own against no less than Mel Gibson (PAYBACK), and registers every emotional slight with the facility of a Juliette Binoche. Bello made a romantic leading man out of William H. Macy (THE COOLER) and convincingly kicked Viggo Mortensen to the curb (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE). Bello takes potentially-thankless roles (the proprietor of COYOTE UGLY, for example) and slowly squeezes each moment into a diamond. In THE SISTERS, Bello plays a survivor of child abuse in an empty marriage who puts everyone she loves through hell by her relentless airing of familial dirty laundry. As Glenn Close might say, Bello will not be ignored! But unlike the proficient but somewhat empty tirades of Elizabeth Taylor in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, Bello uses her voice like a concert pianist: she is never just reciting the lines or playing to the back wall of the theater. Bello modulates her performance so that we can forgive the bombast and embrace the small truths which she utters. While playing a character who always has a frog ready to leap out of her throat, Bello never loses sight of the humanity behind the histrionics. It is one hell of a turn! By contrast, no one is better at phoning it in than Rip Torn, who; although he has the best lines in the movie; is also the least fully-drawn character. Tony Goldwyn is artificially parachuted-in to this family's seventh circle of hell, but he manages to acquit himself admirably. Eric McCormick starts in a dark place on the balcony and marinates there for the full stretch: we never really find out what's eating Eric. Is Erika Cristensen (TRAFFIC, anyone?) to be cast as an upper-class Meth addict for the rest of her career? Cristensen's recovery is remarkably painless, especially when compared to, say, Jamie Foxx's in RAY. Mary Stuart Masterson, like her fellow Brat Pack alumni Mare Winningham, brings effortless professionalism to roles that contain only hints of a person with an inner life. She is once again not allowed an emotional breakthrough in her buttoned-up Academic character. By setting the story in academia, a certain stuffiness threatens to muck-up the narrative but, again, Bello keeps it raw from tip to tail. In higher education, objectivity is in short supply and access to the inner circle is highly restricted. Just like family, if you think about it. Such isolation allows otherwise avoidable indiscretions to become violations of murderous magnitude. THE SISTERS recognizes that if you never let the cat out of the bag, when you least expect it, that cat will hand you your hat. As a warning against letting a little all-American jealousy get the better of you, THE SISTERS delivers the goods!
The Proposition (2005)
A Warts-and-All Western Omelete from the Outback
The brilliant, piercing anger of THE PROPOSITION comes from an irreconcilable conflict. What is more important: family ties, marriage vows, or the larger society? Ray Winstone is a captain intending to civilize an Australian outpost with harsh British justice. The Aborigines have a policy that if we kill one of their people, they'll kill one of ours. That policy drives the local politician David Wenham a bit bonkers. So Wenham takes an action that completely upsets the small town applecart. By pitting brother against brother, wife against husband and natives against the colonial invader, THE PROPOSITION manages to shake the mold off of well-worn Western clichés. Using aboriginal "dream-time" to unsettle the familiar Western narrative, THE PROPOSITION proves to be a spaghetti Western without irony. While it is impossible to build a Western town that doesn't look like a Hollywood back lot, this movie piles on the flies, kicks up the dust and displays the worst dental work in recent memory. KING KONG tried to make a setting sun profound; THE PROPOSITION actually pulls it off. Emily Watson delivers yet another impeccable performance. Watson has flawless porcelain skin and the best baby blues in the business. Winstone tries to protect Watson from the worst consequences of his decisions; instead, he puts her right into the cross-hairs. When all hell breaks loose it actually means something. Precious few films can claim that distinction. There are no heroes in THE PROPOSITION, but, at the end, there is a heroic moment. With its adult sensibility, fine ensemble cast and buckshot swatches of wisdom, THE PROPOSITON transcends the genre and hits the bullseye!