| Return to the Family Room | |
Devin's Favorite Movies:
While I briefly (thank God!) worked for Twentieth Century Fox, I got Matt Groenig to sign a Simpsons picture for me:
At Media 8 I met Liv Tyler and she graciously signed a page of my Lord of the Rings desk calender:
List of Movies Reviewed (using a 5-star rating system)
Heat**
Starring Al Pacino, Val Kilmer, and Robert Di Niro, this cop versus
crook character study, while blessed by the usual great acting
from Pacino and Di Niro, is dragged down by a fairly obvious plot
structure and horrendous scripting. Al Pacino plays a Los Angeles
detective who is so obsessed with the game of cops and robbers
that he cannot find time for his personal life. As he pulls together
the elements of a case against a band of high-aiming robbers,
his marriage and his relationship with his step daughter begins
to fall apart. Di Niro plays the leader of a band of robbers.
This group is not your knock-off-the-local-7-11 variety, but far
more organized and classy. Conversely to Pacino's character, as
Di Niro's character's criminal endeavours begin to unravel, prospects
for personal happiness come into fruition. In a sense, the two
characters are tied together like a see-saw, each playing and
paralleling the other. In fact, it is a major theme of the movie
that detective and criminal are actually two sides of the same
card...kindred spirits, and both eventually end up recognizing
this.
The problem is that this somewhat interesting parallel character study is lost in a sea of ridiculous plots elements, the most glaring of which is a completely unbelievable 15 minute shootout in the middle of the day in crowded Downtown L.A. While some may be able to suspend their disbelief and look beyond the plot holes and incorrect police procedure that glare at the audience throughout the movie, this critic prefers to reserve his suspension of disbelief for fantasy and science fiction films, not cop movies set in present-day Los Angeles.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Casino***
Another in the series of Martin Scorcese's study of organized
crime and the "good fellas", Casino, while comprised
of top-notch acting and a fairly compelling story, ultimately
falls flat from its distracting stylistics, its derivative characterizations,
and a general lack of sympathy or empathy for the main character.
The story involves Ace (Robert Di Niro), a bookie in the Midwest who gets picked by the Heartland mob bosses to run the Tangiers casino in Las Vegas (a thinly disguised Aladdin Hotel). Ace makes the casino over in his own image, kicking out the card sharks and cheats and legitimizing the casino, turning it into a lean, mean, money-making machine. Things quickly begin to sour, however, as Ace's boyhood friend, Nicky (Joe Pesci), who is sent over to make sure no one muscles Ace's operation, spirals out of control, busting heads (literally), pulling robberies, and generally bringing down all sorts of heat on Ace and his casino. Things get worse for Ace when he picks up a hustler/hooker (Sharon Stone) and falls in love with her, placing his trust blindly in someone completely unworthy of that trust. Most of the movie involves the decline of Ace's casino-based world. Ace has invested his heart and soul into the casino, and the casino, essentially, becomes his raison de etre. When love and friendship start to jeopardize his casino, Ace finds himself caught between conflicting loyalties, and this, ultimately, is his undoing.
While Di Niro and Pesci are great actors, and have this genre down pat, they are playing characters here that we have seen before. Ace is the slightly cocky, self-assured, but quiet man, and while Di Niro plays him competently, one gets tired of seeing Di Niro taking a drag on a cigarette and smirking wryly in what seems to be his standard pose these days. In addition, the Ace character has no depth. The film hinges upon the relationship between Ace and Nicky, but we are really given no indication of why two such opposites (Ace's quiet, controlled, mechanical approach and Nicky's unfettered, wacked-out, wild approach) seem to have such a bond with each other. In addition, Ace is an enigma. He seems to have scruples, and a genuine desire to make it legit with his casino, but he still resorts to illegalities and strong-arm tactics from time-to-time, while, at the same time, decrying Nicky's use of same. While enigmas are the sign of a complex character, since we are given no background and very little insight into Ace's psyche, such enigma comes off as almost random and incomprehensible.
Pesci's character, Nicky, is almost indistinguishable from his character in Goodfellas, and this hurts the story because Pesci comes off less as Nicky and more as someone trying to reprise his acting chemistry from Goodfellas. Of course, few do this character better than Pesci; the short, clown-like guy who will lash out violently at the slightest provocation, but if one wants to see Pesci in this role, one can watch Goodfellas and get the same with a better storyline.
On the other hand, Sharon Stone's performance is brilliant. This film has solidified her reputation as a serious actress (as opposed to a sex symbol). Stone's high class hooker/hustler whose diamond exterior is only skin deep is played with intensity, and Stone makes us believe and understand her character's abrupt changes from coquettish kitten to drugged-out codependent.
The real problem with Casino was Scorcese's direction. The story is essentially told as a narrative in the first person, and the narrative is pretty much continued throughout the entire movie. I have no inherent problems with narration. In many cases, they an draw one into empathy with a protagonist, especially if the protagonist is someone whom normally we would not care for. The problem here is that there are three narrators. Not only does this muddle the viewpoint of the story (i.e. through whose eyes are we viewing events?), but one of the narrators speaks for a mere 15 seconds and his voice is never heard of again, and this on a plot point that was hardly essential. The two main narrators are Ace and Nicky. Ace is clearly the dominant narrator and it should be clear to anyone watching that this is really Ace's story as told to us by him. This makes Nicky's narration distracting. In addition, I despise voices from the grave. If someone is narrating a story to me, he had better live through the film. If someone is narrating to me in a film, the point of view of the film suggests that he is sitting before me telling me the story. Therefore, I assume, as a listener, that the storyteller is alive (not many corpses tell stories). Not so in Casino. At least one of the two principal narrators dies, and this left me feeling cheated.
Aside from the narrative device, Scorcese also includes an inconsistent mish-mash of directorial tricks that distract from the story. There are numerous freezes, especially when big decisions or turning points are about to be made (usually accompanied by narration voice over). We get subtitles in several places, most giving us a time and place reference, but some of them reflect the hazy memories of the narrators, and one of them subtitles a coded telephone conversation between Ace and Nicky. A variety of bizarre camera angles is also presented to us, as when Ace first beds his new love and the camera is titled 90 degrees so that it appears the two are standing up rather than lying in bed. If such directorial tricks were more consistent or seemed to have a point they would be at least tolerable and at best effective, but here they seemed like a half-hearted attempt to make the film look like Oliver Stone directed it.
Despite its annoyances and derivativeness, Casino is not by any measure a bad film. Sharon Stone's performance shines, and although Di Niro and Pesci essentially reprise earlier roles, they do so with skill. And although Scorcese's direction is at times distracting, the story is nevertheless compelling as a character study of a man who tries to be loyal to all the various competing and, at times, mutually exclusive, facets in his life. In this, Casino succeeds, for we see what happens when a man who has built his entire life around singleminded determination and loyalty must divide his loyalties, and, thereby divide himself.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Heavy Metal is an animated compilation of stories based upon the sexual/sci-fi/fantasy genre found in the magazine of the same name. In this case, the movie is a set of short stories bookended by a single overriding story during which the remaining stories are narrated. The single thematic device throughout the film is a green sphere which seems to be evil incarnate.
Essentially, the structure of Heavy Metal is similar to other multi-storied films, like Four Rooms, in that a variety of artists/directors are given a single premise and then allowed to run with it. A better example is probably that of Pink Kom Kommer, the sick and twisted animation favourite out of the Canadian animation scene.
The stories presented in Heavy Metal are:
While the stories herein are of passing interest to a fan of science-fiction and animation such as myself, there is really very little to recommend them. Some of the stories seem to have almost no point, like the convertible descending through the atmosphere (other than a wow-what-a-cool-image effect), and others are just downright dumb, like the cocaine-sniffing pilots who drive a ship shaped like a big seventies happy-face.
A few of the stories do have some kick to them. The story of the avenging female warrior and the demons is at least engaging as a fantasy/swords and sorcery story, and the story of Den (which was actually a continuing story through the life of the magazine) had a few tongue in cheek laughs as we are privy to the thoughts of a young adolescent thrown into the body of a musclebound hero. The cabbie story was also passingly interesting, if underdeveloped. In addition, the animation style varies greatly from story to story, and this in and of itself should be of at least passing interest to animation fans.
Nevertheless, aside from hardcore types, the stories in this film just don't merit much in the way of interest. They are either too short to have any real development to them, or they are just plain pointless and childish.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite is a rather light and airy affair, which has none of the portent and subtext of Woody's more serious comedies (like Manhattan or Annie Hall) and none of the exuberance of his earlier slapstick affairs, like Sleeper or Take the Money and Run.
The story involves Woody as Lenny Winerib, a sportswriter who is unhappy in his marriage to his wife (Helena Bonham Carter). Lenny's wife is obsessed with her own personal ambition to make a name for herself as a matron of an art gallery in the trendy New York gallery scene. The couple tries to salvage their marriage by adopting a young child, and although their son does alleviate their problems for a time, they manifest several years later. As Lenny watches his wife grow more and more distant, he turns his attentions to his son, and becomes obsessed in finding who the mother of his son was.
Lenny's search eventually turns up a hooker, (played by Mira Sorvino), who also stars in Adult Videos, and he takes the not-too-bright woman under his wing, making it his duty to set her straight and make a life for her.
The conceit throughout the film is that Lenny runs through life with a metaphysical link to a Greek Chorus and the cast of Oedipus Rex. The Greek tragedy takes place in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater, and the players start by narrating Lenny's story, intertwining it with lines from Oedipus, but eventually succumb to Lenny's story wholeheartedly, and eventually drop all pretenses of Oedipus, acting as chorus for Lenny's story and eventually even intruding in upon his world. For example, Lenny is told of his wife's brush with infidelity from Tireus, the blind seer from Oedipus, disguised as a blind street bum.
While this conceit has some amusing moments, the whole Greek tragedy thing left me hollow. Lenny's story is by no means related to a Greek tragedy, nor are there many parallels to Oedipus or any other Greek tragedy. In fact, Lenny's story has almost no tragic overtones and probably about 30 seconds of irony at the very end of the film. So, one wonders why Woody Allen chooses to intersperse what is already a very light and trifling story with ridiculous sight and sound gags involving Greek Tragedians. Evidently, he thought the whole highly amusing.
Mira Sorvino's portrayal of the dumb blonds hooker is first rate, and Woody, of course, plays Woody. However, seeing the aging Woody hooked up with the dollfaced Helena Bonham Carter is stretching things just a bit. When is Woody going to give up on the cute young things and start to have relationships (on film at least) with someone his own age?
All in all, Woody really has nothing much to say in Mighty Aphrodite, other than, I suppose, if you meddle in people's affairs, it will turn out for the best.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Piano,
The***
The Piano, which won much critical acclaim for director Jane Campion,
and actors Holly Hunter, Anna Panquin, Harvey Kietel, and Sam
Neill is set sometime in roughly the Victorian era and is the
story of a mute mother (Hunter), and her precocious daughter (Panquin),who,
after the loss of her husband, is married off to a New Zealand
land owner living in the "outback" of Maori territory.
The mother, though mute, finds a means of expression through a
grand piano, which she plays marvelously, her husband having been
a famous German composer. However, she seems less than pleased
by her new marital arrangements, and while she turns a cold shoulder
to her new husband's affections (Neill) she finds herself falling
in love with a scruffy and partly-gone-native neighbor (Kietel).
The story revolves around the mother's piano. Her new husband trades the piano, which is the mother's pride and joy, to the neighbor in exchange for some land (which, almost incidentally, turns out to be a Maori burial ground), and then orders the mother to give lessons to the neighbor as apart of the swap. Seeing how much the mother loves to play the piano, and being lonely for affection himself, the neighbor offers to let her play the piano in exchange for increasingly sexual favours. Eventually, the husband finds out and forbids her to play the piano or to see the neighbor again. Without ruining the story too much, it is then that the mother realizes she has grown to love the neighbor and could never love her husband.
While the above is the plotline of the story, the movie itself tries to go much deeper than that. The piano is a metaphor, not just to us as the audience but within the story itself. To the mother, the piano symbolizes her happier days with her first husband, whom we are led to believe she loved very much. When she plays the piano, one senses that she is reliving those happier times with her husband. It is certain that her new husband senses this and becomes jealous of the piano and what it represents. In a sense, both the new husband and the neighbor come to see ownership and control of the piano and ownership and control of the mother, and certainly, the mother herself comes to regard this as true also. It is not until, at the end of the movie, that she is finally able to realize that the piano is less a refuge to sustain her through hard times than a crutch or, better yet, a deadweight dragging her down from any grasp at future happiness. The piano is her past.
The acting and direction in The Piano are superb. Anna Panquin is marvelous in her role, as are Niell, Kietel, and Hunter, who manages to get through her intense emotions without ever speaking a word. But despite this, there are problems with the movie that leave me unimpressed as a whole. The problems generally stem around the script. First, the movie has essentially a single conceit, the use of the piano as a symbol for the mother's past. While this is an ingenious symbol and is exploited well throughout the movie, one quickly understands this conceit in, say, the first half hour of the movie, but one finds that the movie has really nothing further to say. Some other plotlines and themes are pranced out in front of the audience for a few scenes but are never developed. It is almost as if the uncut movie or original script were a three hour affair but that the story got chopped up in rewrite or edit.
There is a tension that is developed between the Maori and the Caucasian colonials. This tension is primarily sexual, and Campion obviously juxtaposes the Victorian sensibilities against the openness of the Maori, who talk about sex very casually and flaunt their naked bodies without shame. But while this tension is set up, it is never acted upon or resolved. Similarly, the movie presents some brewing tensions between the Maori, who are angry over the purchase of their burial grounds, and the colonials, but this never goes anywhere. The Maori could have been used as a vehicle for showing the pitfalls of sexual suppression and oppression, with is already a partial theme developed by Campion in that the mother is bought and sold like an object through her piano.
In essence, this film would have made an excellent short story of around a half hour in length or as a longer film of around three hours in length. At its current feature-film length it is just too short and too long. The film is too long to sustain what is essentially a single theme, a single plotline, and a single conceit, yet is too short to develop all of the promising sub themes and sub contexts that were hinted at but never fully developed.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Leaving
Las Vegas****
On its face, Leaving Las Vegas is a pessimistic, depressing story
of an alcoholic man who wishes to drink himself to death and a
down on her luck hooker who lets him. However, Leaving Las Vegas
revolves not so much around its plot as around the subtext that
underlies the depressing elements of the plot. This subtext is
actually quite romantic, for it reiterates that love is possibly
the most powerful force in existence, and that in addition to
being blind deaf and dumb, it also, in its purest sense, has no
preconceived notions on what makes one a success and what makes
one a failure.
The storyline of Leaving Las Vegas involves Nicholas Cage as a man whose alcoholism has cost him a high-powered Hollywood career. In addition, for reasons that are not entirely explained, his wife and child are not with him anymore. Cage's character determines to drink himself to death, and decides that Las Vegas is the place to do it. So he sells his assets, books into a sleazy Vegas motel, and sets about his demise.
While in Las Vegas, he meets a beautiful hooker played by Elizabeth Shue. The two fall in love and then proceed to shove as much love and romance as two losers can have in the 4 weeks before Cage's character dies.
The performances of both actors are brilliant. Cage and Shue play their characters in a fairly low-keyed fashion for such flamboyant characters, which lends a sense of acceptance of the inevitability of their fates.
The subtext rules this film. Here are two people that are on the bottom rung of society. They really have almost nothing to offer the other. Cage's character makes it clear to Shue's character that he will drink himself to death in about 3-4 weeks time, and that there is no way he is going to stop drinking. He will be drunk most of the time; he will have violent outbursts, DT's, and temper swings; he will throw up; etc. Shue's character makes it clear that she will not give up her job, which involves sleeping with a variety of dubious johns.
Nevertheless, they share a love as intense as any presented on film, and their love, devoid of long term hope for the future, sexual pleasure, glamour, need, wealth, or any other pretension, is stripped bare to its vital essence, an unquantifiable essence that binds and overpowers. That is what Leaving Las Vegas is about. By stripping its characters of any and all the trappings of normal lives, they present a sort of primeval love that causes us to re-evaluate our own loves and our own sometimes selfish reasons for giving and accepting love.
In the end, if one realizes what Leaving Las Vegas is really about, you can leave the theatre, not with a spring in your stride and a whistle in your mouth, but at least with the knowledge that both characters experienced a thing both rare and precious.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Fargo***
Fargo is an amusing movie, generally enjoyable but, ultimately,
without much to say. Despite its popularity with the arthouse
crowd, the film is light fare (despite some blood) and probably
constitutes brain candy for the Miramax-set.
The film involves a down and out car salesman who, in order to raise some desperately needed cash, hires two men to kidnap his wife. The plan is for his wife's father, who is wealthy, to give the husband the ransom money. The husband would then keep half and give the other half to the "kidnappers". In reality, the husband tells the father the kidnappers want much more money than the kidnappers are aware of. There is, in this film, no honour amongst thieves.
The plan goes haywire when the kidnappers start to kill people in order to cover their tracks. This brings in the police chief of the small town of Brainerd, who, female and pregnant, tracks down the killers and unravels the kidnapping plot.
But Fargo is not about its plot. The entire movie takes place in Minnesota and North Dakota, and really focuses on the mannerisms and speaking quirks of those who hail from that region of the US. The names and accent are heavily Scandinavian in origin, and this sort of sing-song lilting accent make everyone seem a bit goofy and simple. Fargo juxtaposes this impression against a rather serious plot. The female, pregnant police chief, who must mother her husband, babysit her deputy, and is the exact opposite of hardboiled, still gets the job done in a competent and decisive manner.
That is the hook of Fargo. Taking what is essentially a standard hardboiled murder mystery that would normally be sent in Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago, and where the police chief would be some sort of Al Pacino type, and transplanting it to small town middle America, with waddling, easy going police officers and the crunch of snow and wide open, flat vistas.
The wrenching of sensibilities is interesting, and is basically what the movie is about, and to be honest, the accents are amusing and different enough to make the movie entertaining and worthwhile on its own. But do not go in expecting an art film or a film with something really important to say, because what Fargo is really saying is that the human condition happens everywhere, even in Fargo.
Then again, maybe that is something important to say.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
James and
the Giant Peach**
James and the Giant Peach is a partly stop-motioned and partly
digitally-rendered children's tale in the genre of Toy Story and
Tim Burton's The Night Before Christmas. Based on the book by
Roald Dahl, the author of the Willy Wonka books, the movie tells
the story of one James, orphaned to a pair of wicked aunts, who
seeks to escape to the city of New York, where dreams come true.
His chance is given him by a passing supernaturally-oriented vagrant
who gives him the equivalent of some magic beans. When James spills
the beans (so to speak), the magic is infused into a peach tree,
which proceeds to grow a giant peach. James enters the peach,
and finds a host of giant, talking, anthropomorphized bugs who
live within the Peach.
The peach eventually breaks free of its tree, rolls down to the local bay, and out to sea. James and the bugs are on their way to New York.
The effects in the movie are great...as wondrous as Toy Story and every bit as seamless. However, unlike Toy Story, and possibly due to Roald Dahl, the story itself seems far too random to make any sense. Characters and events sort of happen at random and without explanation. We never find out what happened to James' parents, nor who the vagrant is, nor a host of other questions. While it is true a story of a giant peach does not lend itself to logical explanations, if a story is to entertain adults and even children of the late pre-teen age, it should at least have an internal consistency.
That said, the movie is probably worth seeing just for the effects, but do not go in expecting a Toy Story. In addition, the music seems quite lame compared to the great Disney songs of late.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Executive
Decision*
Now, don't get me wrong....I like a good action movie, even if
a bit mindless, but really this movie was just plain bad.
The story involves a group of Arab terrorists who want to strike at America by blowing up a jumbo jet full of nerve gas over Washington D.C. A strike team, consisting of Steven Segal, Kurt Russell, John Leguizamo, and others, is sent aboard the plane, transferred to it via a modified F-117A stealth fighter, and the fate of America hangs in the balance.
The problems with the story are many. First, almost no background or motivation is given to the villains. In a movie like Die Hard, for example, the main villain (Alan Rickman) was given at least an interesting personality, but these Arabs, including the head terrorist, are simply cardboard targets.
In addition, whereas most action adventure flicks at least have a couple of sub plots and twists to keep the thing fresh, this movie is a completely linear, one strand story, and since we all know whether or not the good guys are going to succeed, the lack of subplots makes the whole thing very uninteresting.
The only surprise in the whole movie is the quick demise of a main character (I will refrain from saying which). Other than that one distinguishing moment, the whole story is contrived. And let us not forget, of course, the inaccuracies which abound, like F-14s arming Sparrow missiles instead of Sidewinder missiles at a range of less than 2 miles.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Spy Hard*
Let me start by saying that I loved Airplane and Hotshots, so
I am not so much of a stodge that I can't appreciate this genre,
but Spy Hard shows that they are running out of fresh ideas for
the parody genre.
Need I explain the plot? Leslie Nielsen is every secret agent you've ever seen and he is out to save the world and the girl, and not necessarily in that order. The gags are both sight and sound gags, and especially targeted are a crop of recent movies.
Weird Al Yankovic's opening song is probably the best part of the movie, and quite funny, and of course, there are some chuckles at the ensuing inanity during the movie, but the novelty of the rapid fire Zucker comedy formula now wears thin, and there is nothing to distinguish this parody from the previous ones.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Mission
Impossible***
I was never a fan of the original series, being too young to really
get into it when it first aired, so I went into Mission Impossible
with no preconceptions. The plot involves Ethan Allen (Tom Cruise)
who is a master of disguise for the Mission Impossible strike
team. When a mission is betrayed, and the rest of his team is
killed (including the Peter Graves' character), Ethan is suspected
of being the mole, and goes to ground to prove his innocence and
find the real mole.
The movie is entertaining, its plot twists being convoluted enough to keep you guessing for a little while anyways, although I find others' criticisms of the plot being too confusing as unfounded. The plot is logical and easy to follow if you pay attention. This is not a Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, and except for the last 5 minutes the explosions are kept to a minimum. The tension in Mission Impossible is more subtle, generated by elaborate schemes (called games in the movie) and more cerebral considerations. This is a good thing, for it keep Mission Impossible fresh and is more true to its original nature.
What's more, excepting the last 5 minutes of action packed special effects, the movie was quite believable and events flowed in a logical fashion. The movie's big question....who is the mole....has all the trappings of a mystery story (a lot like Usual Suspects, in fact).
The only criticism with the movie is that some characters diverge so wildly from their nature in the TV series that purists may be offended. Otherwise, the movie is well worth the price of admission.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Dragonheart***
This innocuous movie stars Dennis Quaid as a knight who is betrayed
by his young princely charge. Disillusioned, the knight loses
his chivalric way and takes up slaying dragons, until he meets
Draco, the last dragon (voice by Sean Connery). Draco fights the
knight to a draw and then, with an itinerant priest and the obligatory
beautiful damsel, gets the knight to battle the evil prince and
set the kingdom free for the peasants.
Don't expect a lot from this movie. Dennis Quaid's acting is wooden, and it takes a bit of time to get used to James Bond's voice coming out of a dragon, but the story doesn't take itself too seriously, and the whole has a kind of joyous lighthearted air that is a bit like Willow.
The real star is Draco. The dragon is brought to life excellently, in some really state of the art special effects, especially when Draco does his stuff in the water.
Dragonheart is probably a good one to bring the kiddies to, since they will certainly fall in love with the dragon (who is not too scary) and the story is at least interesting enough to engage adults as well.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Independence
Day***
The biggest blockbuster of all time. What can I say? Aliens, who
are not really explained very well with regard to their motivations,
are hellbent on annihilating all life on earth and conquering
our beloved third rock, and they do a great job of it before a
ragtag group of Americans lead a last desperate fight to save
the world. Guess how it turns out?
This is not a bad movie by any means. It is nice to see a truly ensemble cast, with plenty of heroics to go around, as a turn of fare from the usual one indestructible guy against the world. And yes, there are a share of deus ex machinae here....you just have to overlook that kind of stuff in what is essentially a high-tech version of a 1950's alien invasion movie.
The special effects are...well...special; all well done. Jeff Goldblum is his usual zany scientist sort of self, and Bill Pullmann actually pulls off his role as president. Will Smith is marvelous, playing a kick-ass pilot who seems to eat and breathe adrenaline. So pick a hot summer weekend, kick up your heels, and enjoy this movie as the mindless shoot-em-up entertainment that it is!
For those looking for realism, or even plausibility, look elsewhere. Creating computer interfaces for alien computers inside of 24 hours is ridiculous, and other inanities range from marines flying F-18s to a crop duster pilot flying a modern attack-fighter jet like an ace.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Eraser**
When are movie makers going to realize that an action star plus
spectacular (and unbelievable) stunts does not a great action
film make? Eraser stars Arnold Schwartzenegger as a federal marshall
known as the Eraser because he takes people who are a part of
the witness protection program and makes them disappear by giving
them a new life. Of course, he only works with the most dangerous
of cases, and so a lot of fighting and danger is involved. In
his latest assignment, the Eraser is given custody of a woman
in distress (Vanessa Williams) who knows about a treasonous shipment
of high tech arms from a weapons contractor to some unexplained
and dangerous third party. Of course, everyone is in on this scandal,
from the Washington establishment to people in the Eraser's own
organization.
Arnold jumps through a barrage of close scrapes and explosions, but never once are we ever in suspense as to how the outcome will be. Given that, the complete lack of inventiveness makes the whole thing rather pedestrian and boring. Unlike Terminator 2, this movie has no subplots, no subtext, and nothing new to bring to the genre. Arnold is as wooden as ever, but this time the movie itself follows his lead and is just as uninspiring. It is simply a lady in distress scenario and the invincible Arnold simply plows through killing all the bad guys.
The stunts are another problem. In an effort to bolster the lackluster story, the writers and director have concocted a bunch of stunts for the Eraser that are so outrageous that they become unbelievable and cartoonish. In one instance, the Eraser opens a cargo door on a cruising 747. He manages to hang onto the outside of the doorway with his fingertips while his body flails away outside of the plane threatening to be sucked into a tail engine. He finally tosses some debris into the engine, causing the jet problems, and then drops his parachute. The Eraser then jumps freefall after his parachute pack and catches it (Galileo would be appalled at the physics of this), puts it on, and then manages to take a revolver and shoot the pilot of the jet, which has swung around to ram him as he floats to the ground. The writers here should take a cue from Die Hard, where the hero was more of an ordinary Joe thrust into an extraordinary situations. The stunts in that movie were more believable and, therefore, more exciting.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Lone
Star****
Lone Star is an exquisite little film that bears much resemblance
stylistically to Fargo. In fact, the Sheriff from Fargo has a
bit part in this movie. Ostensibly, Lone Star is a murder mystery.
Two scroungers in the Texas desert unearth a 40 year old corpse
of a corrupt and evil sheriff who used to strike terror in the
hearts of the citizenry during the 1950's. The story centers on
the current sheriff, a man who follows in the footsteps of his
deceased father, a beloved sheriff of the 1960's who, it is widely
believed, killed the former corrupt sheriff. The story also follows
a Hispanic school teacher who was the high school sweetheart of
the current sheriff and finds herself falling in love with him
again.
The film's story structure is at the same time much more complicated than the above presents and, at the same time, it is merely incidental to the main theme of the film, that of borders and our relationship to them. By borders is meant not only the ever present political boundary of the nearby Rio Grande, but of borders of culture, race relations, authority, corruption, societal taboo, etc. And it is an unfortunate fact that most of these borders, just like political borders, are not actual barriers, but are the creation of narrow minds.
Almost all of the characters in Lone Star are straddling a border of one sort or another. Big O, the black barkeep must bridge the border between Darktown (as the black neighborhood is called) and the whites of the city. In turn, he is fascinated with Black Seminoles, Negroes who skirted the border between black and Indian. The sheriff, who is Anglo, and the school teacher must initially skirt the border of interracial relations, and in the end skirt a much more unexpected border. Similarly, as the current sheriff investigates the 40 year old murder and his father, he discovers that his father also skirted a border, in this case between a corrupt sheriff and one with principles and ethics.
The story itself is wonderful on several levels. First, the murder mystery, which is certainly on par with a traditional murder mystery as far as clues and twists go. Second, the story is truly an ensemble one. Many different characters are presented and their stories are interwoven into the main plot. For example, a subplot concerning Hollister, the old mayor, a subplot about Mercedes Cruz, the schoolteacher's mother, a subplot about a black army colonel, the son of Big O, and his relationship to his son. Third, all of these characters and subplots are tightly interwoven. As we watch, the tie that binds the subplots is initially weak and loose, but then the tie tightens and we find that every characters is intimately connected with the other. The past events are presented excellently. The movie makes much use of flashbacks, and uses a wonderful technique of melding the flashback into the present by focusing on a common object.
As one watches the various characters dance their little dances around their own personal borders, most of their own creation, we realize that, by their ties, they are dancing a common dance....one that we all dance throughout our lives.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Trainspotting***
This is an amusing and sometimes disgusting little piece about
a group of young Scottish losers and their wacky lives. The core
of the group are a set of young male heroin addict ne'er-do-wells
who constantly try to straighten up and kick their habit, but
then fall smack back into it (pardon the pun). Along the way,
they must rob and steal and commit all sorts of societal heresies
to support their habits.
While a comedy at its heart, this film does not in the least glamourise drug use. In fact, some of the comedy stems from the very repulsiveness and disgustingness of their sordid lives. This provides for a rather unique hero/anti-hero tension. The soundtrack is great, featuring Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, and a host of other very appropriate artists. The filmwork is quite imaginative. One particularly good scene involves a heroin overdose where the OD'er literally sinks into the carpeting in the floor and, for his entire overdose, we look through his eyes out from a sort of cubby-hole of carpeting, symbolising the utter feeling of liquidity that a heroin addict feels while under the influence.
With all this to recommend itself, Trainspotting is a bit spotty when it comes to story. The whole is rather episodic, and while it has a lot to say about its characters, it has little to say about life in general. We are not immersed into their world but instead feel like outsiders, alternately laughing at and then pitying the characters. This distance keeps Trainspotting a little too safe for a film with such subversive potential, and that does disappoint slightly. Nevertheless, this is certainly a fine little movie that Generation Xers and other malcontents should enjoy.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A
Very Brady Sequel***
Yes, it's the Brady's, and they're back for more mindless shenanigans;
this time an impostor impersonates Carol's first long lost husband
in order to obtain a priceless artifact that the Brady's have
set in their home as a living room decoration.
The movie is essentially the same as the first Brady Bunch movie, primarily a fishes-out-of-water story chock full of references to the Brady Bunch series and other series of the same era and ilk.
For those of us who grew up with the Brady Bunch and still know the plot of every episode (the author of this review admits as much personally), the movie is great fun simply spotting all of the references. In addition, the taboo romance between Greg and Marsha is quite amusing. On the whole, however, anyone not really into the schmaltz of the series will not really appreciate what is otherwise a mindless piece of fluff of a film.
As usual, however, the cast is dead on; they have the inflections, mannerisms, and dialogue down pat, and a few times you actually forget that these are not the original Brady cast members. Nevertheless, this should probably be the last of the Brady Bunch movies, as pretty much every Brady episode and schtick has now been covered and any further films will likely be tedious and overdone.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Yet another action flick, The Rock at least has three things going for it: a semi unique plot, Sean Connery, and Nicolas Cage. These three elements are enough to keep the film afloat after so many other action clones have floundered and drowned.
The plot is straightforward enough. A US marine corps general who spent decades doing illegal covert ops for the US government wants honour and recognition and survivor's benefits for the men that have died under his command. To draw attention to his cause, he and a group of elite marines steal a bunch of really nasty chemical nerve gas and then hijack Alcatraz, take some tourist hostages, and threaten to launch the nerve gas in rockets into San Fransisco unless the US government pays millions of dollars to him and his men and into a benefit fund for the families of the men who died under his command. In order to stop him, the FBI calls upon a toxic chemicals expert (Nicolas Cage) who is something of a geek and a wise-cracker who seems completely ill-suited for a commando raid, and the enigmatic Mr. Mason, imprisoned for thirty years without a trial because as an operative for British intelligence in the 60's he tried to steal a bit of microfilm from the US that contained all of J. Edgar Hoover's secrets. An almost Bondian secret agent, Mr. Mason is an escape artist as well, and is the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz (of course, that was all covered up by the government). Since he escaped from the Rock (he was recaptured later), the government figures he can get a Navy Seal team inserted into the Rock and the bad guys can be stopped.
What is interesting about the plot is not the standard wacko bad guy holding everyone at bay under threat of dire consequences. Lord knows that's been done before. What is interesting is the fact that the Rock completes the evolution that has been occurring in movies recently from the bad guy as Russian Communists to the bad guy as Drug Dealer to the bad guy as an American patriot. Certainly this is a commentary on our times and incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing.
The other strong points of the movie are the two lead actors. Connery displays his usual panache in this role, though a bit more brutal than Bond ever was. But Cage is wonderful (as usual), because he manages to capture that ordinary-guy-in-extraordinary-situations similar to Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard. We do not think of Cage's character as some sort of unstoppable superman but can relate to him because he acts like most of us might act in a similar situation.
That said, the movie is still not the paragon of well-done action movies. There is a gratuitous chase scene in San Fransisco that pays homage to Bullitt but offers absolutely no real plot development. And of course, we pretty much know how the movie is going to end. But hey, it's good for a night's raucous entertainment.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Hey. You really have to get this movie to like it. It is not your standard action flick. Escape from New York, to which this film is the sequel, was not your standard action flick either. Both had this certain campy-hip sensibility that did not take itself too seriously at all. The basic idea was to parody modern day ideas by transplanting them to a futuristic punk-like setting and then blowing the ideas way out of proportion. Escape from L.A. takes this lampooning to even greater heights.
The story is simple and similar to Escape from New York. Snake Pliskin (Kurt Russell) is coerced by the government to enter Los Angeles, ravaged into anarchy by the Big Earthquake that turned it into an island, and recover a super weapon targetting device stolen by the President's rebellious daughter and turned over to a Che Gueveraesque revolutionary who now holds power in Los Angeles. Everything is lampooned, from Peter Fonda as the surfer looking for the perfect, tsunami-sized wave, to the plastic surgery rejects that populate Beverly Hills.
Like Snake himself, the movie expects the audience to roll with the punches. You won't find any deep meanings and not much in the way of spectacular stunts either. The camp's the thing here kiddos, and it is done up enough to make the whole movie amusing....at least to this writer, who lives in Los Angeles.
The special effects are themselves campy, although some interesting computer effects are present, and Kurt Russell simply mugs his way through the scenery. The rest of the cast is pretty pedestrian, although Steve Buscemi can always do a weasely slimeball with some aplomb.
If you enjoyed Escape from New York, then you "get it" and Escape from L.A. should be more of the same for you.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
John Travolta plays a mild mannered not-to-bright hick in a small country town in Northern California who, one night, is accosted by a bright flash of light from the skies. From that time, he gains amazing cognitive powers, including the ability to read books at a pace that would cause the envy of Evelyn Woods, the ability to detect upcoming earthquakes from ionization and minute vibrations, and even the ability to move things with his mind.
All of this at first seems like a blessing to the man, who invents solutions for many of the world's problems right in his own small house. However, he finds that even having a godlike intelligence does nothing to fill the real void in his life, amore; this in the form of a new single mother who has moved into the town. Of course, his blessing is also a curse, as he becomes the target of an FBI probe and a gaggle of townsfolks who are either afraid of him or want to exploit his abilities for their own gain.
This portion of the movie is actually quite engaging. Travolta is an astonishingly talented actor, and he plays his character with a very low-keyed intensity that one does not see often in the movies. In addition, the enigma of what exactly has happened to him, and the interesting dual-edged predicament he finds himself in (are his newfound powers a blessing or a curse, and how can he reconcile the two of them?) keep the viewer engaged.
The problem comes in the last 20 minutes of the film, and, unfortunately, they were enough to completely ruin the film for me and made me feel cheated and angry as I left the theatre. Unfortunately, to review the film's ending I must give it away.
It turns out that the mental abilities are actually the side effect of a rare brain tumour that somehow heightens brain activity so that the 75% of the brain not normally used by human begins becomes utilizable. The strange lights he saw were the result of a seizure caused by the tumour. Of course, the tumour is malignant and inoperable and eventually kills him. The next 15 minutes of the movie are various scenes of people looking wistfully into the heavens and sobbing at his loss.
BLECH!! Not only is the tumour revelation wholly unsatisfying (I would have rather they simply left it a mystery that came and went unanswered...after all, the point of the film is how he copes with his new abilities and how the people around him judge him differently), but the fact that he ends up dying a slow and dramatic death by cancer and the 15 minutes of sobbing and wailing at the end of the film are clearly blatant attempts by the filmakers to squeze tears out of the audience. Anyone with a modicum of filmgoing experience knows that to get tears from a good poriton of an audience, all you really have to do is show people crying on screen. Crying is as infectious as laughing or yawning. I personally felt manipulated and betrayed by these blatant attempts, and they really sour the entire movie.
I don't know about you, but I do not enjoy a movie where I walk out feeling as though I'd been had!
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
This could have been a good movie. Elizabeth Shue and Kyle McLaughlin have both proved themselves capable actors. The movie I had hoped for would have been a sort of modern-day Lord of the Flies, exposing the thin veneer of civilization that keeps up from our always lurking, latent bestial selves.
Alas! Instead the Trigger Effect turns out to be nothing more than a liberal piece of propogandizing against gun ownership. I had wondered what the title 'Trigger Effect' had to do with a massive power outage, but I figured 'Trigger' referred to the event that might have TRIGGERED the outage. Silly me!
The movie is set in Los Angeles. An unexplained massive power outage sweeps across the entire western portion of the United States, apparently west of the Rockies. Being Los Angeles, everybody with a gun starts rioting and looting, and the citizens who have handguns start shooting innocent people whom they mistake for looters.
A suburban family (Kyle and Elizabeth), worried about the raging violence and having helped shoot a looter in the back, flee with their semi-wacko friend in their car headed to the safety of Colorado. Along the way, gun-toting bravado results in an accidental shooting of the wild friend by someone who may or may not have been a carjacker (the movie makes the guy sinister but then turns around and suggests he was an innocent victim). As Kyle's character seeks to get help for his shot friend (the shooter stole their car), he comes to a house inhabited by a suspicious black man who also has a gun. The climax is merely a Mexican standoff where both parties eventually realize that their guns almost cost them their lives.
So peripheral is the actual power outages that supposedly drives the story that we never find out why it happened (although for some reason much of the action takes place with a looming Three-Mile Island-shaped reactor in the background...presumably an offhanded indictment of nuclear power) or if it ever gets fixed or how wide the outage was.
If thinking about the Brady Bill excites you enough to have to take a cold shower, then you might get a kick out of this movie and its guns-as-villains. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A study of revenge, Sleepers, based upon a true story, involves the story of 4 youths from Hells Kitchen, New York, who through mischief and mischance are sent to a reform school where they are tortured, both physically and sexually as well as emotionally, by a group of sadistic guards. Later in life, grown up men now, two of the boys meet one of the guards and shoot him. At their trial, the prosecuting attorney, who is one of the four boys, decides that instead of trying to convict the murderers, he will arrange for the two to get off not guilty, and at the same time use the trial to exact revenge on the remaining guards.
The cast and acting in this film are top notch. Jason Petric and Brad Pitt are great as two of the four boys grown up. Dustin Hoffman's role is minor, but he reintroduces a Ratso Rizzoesque defense attorney. Robert Di Niro plays a tough Catholic priest with a moral quandry like no one else can, and the supporting cast of Bruno Kirby and the four boys are also wonderful.
The film essentially is divided into two roughly equal (timewise) parts. The first deals primarily with the boys growing up in Hells Kitchen. Their commission of a crime and horrendous incarceration is really just a denoument of the entire first part, which is a nice touch because Sleepers does not want to be another reform school flick. Instead we gain a wonderful sense of life in the melting pot of poor New York in the sixties. The film is almost a loss of innocence-type piece.
The problem is that the film has to have a second half. Enrapt as I was at the boys and their lives, once we jump to their adult lives the film has pretty much finished with character development and now focuses entirely on the scheme to take revenge against the guards. While this is not entirely poorly done, what was a character study now becomes a trial drama, and the change is a bit jarring and, frankly, disappointing. In a sense, the jump in time is too far. We never find out the details behind the slide into serious crime that two of the four boys take, nor why the remaining two did not turn to such a violent life. Their relationships with Carol, a central female figure, are also glossed over. Having given us the start of a group of characters, we are abandoned. The movie makers should have decided whether this movie was to be a loss of innocence movie or a trial drama and gone one way or the other fully. As it stands now, the movie is about 1.5 hours of wonderful character development and then an hour of denoument.
Despite the fact the the courtroom phase of the movie is weakly done, the movie is worth recommending if only for the first half. Sleepers is a pedestrian treatise on revenge and its merits and its effects, but it is a wonderful slice of life in a corner of New York.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
This wonderful movie, suitable as family fare for the entire family, involves a little girl (Anna Panquin) whose mother is killed in a car accident. The girl is shuffled off to her eccentric inventor father who lives in rural Canada. There, trying to cope with her new surroundings and depressed at the loss of her mother, the girl adopts some abandoned goslings and, in effect, becomes the mother to them that she, herself, has lost. When the geese begin to get the urge to migrate south, but do not know how, the father (Jeff Daniels) and his girlfriend (Dana Delany) concoct a scheme to build ultralight aircraft for the father and girl and to lead the geese south for the winter to a safe place in North Carolina.
Not only is the acting and writing in this film wonderful and touching, but the geese are wonderful! They imprint on the little girl and follow her around to great comic effect. In addition, the plot of this story is so unique that the sight of a bunch of geese following an ultralight is engaging simply because it has never been seen before.
The film successfully avoids being too weepy or sappy, although there is a bit of rampant environmentalism towards the end that gets a little preachy, but that can be forgiven since 99% of the film does not seek to manipulate our heartstrings but simply presents its story in a very tender and low key fashion. Wonderful for the kids, Fly Away Home is also a treat for the adults.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Hailed as the film that could not float, with its overballast budget, Titanic is best described as a traditional Hollywood epic, no less sweeping in its emotional breadth as Lawrence of Arabia is in its spatial breadth. TItanic always has that "disaster-film" angle to it lurking in the background, and of necessity the structure is Irwin Allenesque...personal side stories slowly intersecting with the inevitable gotterdammerung. Nevertheless, Director James Cameron manages to pull the thing off nicely for several reasons.
First is the wonderful structure of the film, the majority of which are flashbacks told to a salvage crew by a survivor. This flashback structure not only puts a narrative spin on the whole picture but also elevates the story to a tragedy, since we know who lives and who dies beforehand. In a sense the characters' fates are as inexorable as the iceberg.
Cameron has made the film a love story as much as possible, and really the last hour is the only portion that is really disaster oriented. The characters are compelling, even though the story of a woman about to be married to a husband she does not love falling in love instead with a "bad boy" is a common one, mainly because Leonardo DiCaprio is so damned good as the free willed Jack Dawson and Kate Winslett is stunning in her role as the stifled rich girl.
The ending disaster third of the movie is in some ways typical. Lots of harrowing escapes at the last moment that really are not very exciting, but the filmakers have done such a damned fine job of making a huge ship sink that the entire thing is fascinating even without the main characters involved.
The only real drag on the whole thing, 3 and a half hours that shot by, is the sappy ending that spends a bit too much time jerking your tears. Cut that part in half and Titanic is destined to become a classic.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A science fiction premise that borrows heavily from The Abyss, Sphere has an excellent cast and builds some nice characterizations in the first half hour and then falls flat on its face, delivering nothing in the way of mystery, wonder, revelation, or resolution.
The premise is that the navy has discovered a giant spaceship buried under the ocean floor and tests date the ship to 300 years ago. A team of experts are chosen to investigate, and these eventually explore the ship and find that it is a ship from the United States of the future and that a mysterious golden sphere is being held in its cargo hold.
Eventually one of the crew enters the sphere and upon his return things start going wrong for the research team, which are attacked by jellyfish, giant squid, and other assorted not-very-threatening or impressive foes.
Now, I won't give away the movie, but suffice to say that the explanation as to what is occuring left me dumbfounded simply because its full potential was never exploited. Furthermore, too many questions are left unresolved. We find out what the sphere does, but not why. We don't find out where the sphere came from, nor if it is alive. The big problem is that after 2 hours of movie we know almost as much about the sphere as we did an hour and a half previous. Why did the ship come back in time? The answer is speculated upon but never confirmed. It's almost as if the entire movie is really the first half of a four hour mini-series, and this left this reviewer feeling jipped.
Performances are top notch, with Sharon Stone playing a strong female with a screwed-up past and Samuel L. Jackson lending about the only edge of menace to the movie. Dustin Hoffman is Dustin Hoffman and we all know he can act well even with crap for a script, and this movie is a prime example of just that.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
You have to go into The Wedding Singer knowing that this is an Adam Sandler movie, and therefore the fare is going to be light and goofy...and it is. But what is nice about this movie is that Adam has shed some of his more annoying and grating trappings and really plays an all around loveable guy, which is good because the movie lives or dies on whether you empathize and root for Sandler's likeable loser.
Adam plays a wedding singer, a really good wedding singer who can work over the most unruly relative of the bride or groom like a master conductor. On his own wedding day, however, his bride deserts him at the altar, which, needless to say, leaves him feeling bitter about weddings and love in general and, of course, affects his performance as a wedding singer hilariously. Enter Drew Barrymore as a waitress who is about to marry a junk bond dealer who dresses and acts like a Miami Vice reject. The wedding singer and waitress meet and fall in love and a whole host of obstacles must be surmounted for them to finally come together.
Now, the plot is trite, and the movie is even conscious of this fact, on occasion playing sly jibes at its own romantic pretensions. But it is the performance of Sandler and Barrymore, who have great chemistry together, that make the picture work. Sandler does vulnerable and slightly pathetic perfectly.
The film actually has a third character though, and in some ways this one steals the show. That character is the time period in whcih the film is set...the 1980's. Everything in the film reeks of the 80's. It's in every character's dress, words, cars, etc. And it is certainly in the music, which is almost a tour-de-force of 80's pop music. This resonated with this reviewer because he grew up during the 80's and so everything had a keen sense of relatable nostalgia to it. It is this 80's shtick that elevates the movie above what is otherwise simply a sweet, well-done, but ultimately forgettable romantic comedy. If you did not go to high school or college in the 1980's, quite a bit of the nostalgia value will be missing and it is likely that you will not enjoy the movie as much as I did.
Nevertheless, if the 80's was your generation, then I recommend this film.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Some movies define a generation. Star Wars did it for the mid-Seventies and eighties. Matrix does it for the late 90's and 2000. A truly unique concept, in fact a unique package, with ground-breaking plot, style, choreography, and cinematography. Already, in the two years after its release, the movie has spawned a score of knock-offs and Matrix wannabees.
The story involves an ordinary Joe (Keanu Reeves) who is contacted by a subversie group that promises to show him a secret that will shatter his life. Keanu accepts the gauntlet and comes to realize that the entire world he lives in is a hoax, a computer generated delusion constructed by a civilization of machine-lifes to keep humans quiescent while they are harvested for their life energy (almost like human batteries). With the help of the enigmatic leader of a group of humans who have gotten wise to the hoax (played by Samuel L. Jackson), Keanu turns out to be a messiah figure who can master the virtual reality program well enough to turn its parameters against the machines that control it.
What results is a wonderful treatise on the nature of reality and what lies hidden underneath. More importantly, the movie reflects some of the growing paranoia we have against the potential ravages of technology as well as issues of privacy in the internet age and the concept of "Big Brother". In this movie, Big Brother isn't merely watching, he is crafting reality. The movie has a wry sense of humour when it is needed, but still manages to take itself seriously in a very "hipper-than thou" sort of way. The result is very very cool.
The fight scenes in the Matrix borrow from the best of Hong Kong martial art movies, but meld this into some pretty terrific technological effects that illusrate the super-human abilities of the agents of the machines and of the messiah character. In addition, many of the action scenes are choreographed like a ballet. Of special note is a scene in the lobby of a building where the computer agents are holding Samuel Jackson's character hostage. The blend of music, slow motion, close-ups of bullet casings, and the ever-prevalent 'tude create a virtuoso scene that will resonate long after the movie is done.
The only problems with the movie are a few minor plot holes (to be expected in any science fiction movie) and the somewhat annoying contrivance of the humans having to enter and leave the virtual world via a phone line.
All said, the Matrix is an almost perfect blend of science fiction sensibilities with a modern hipness and freshness that will be the standard future sci-fi flicks are measured against for years to come.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Star Wars - The Phantom Menace ****
Many people did not like this movie. I did. Is it on the par with the original Star Wars? No. How could anything be? That was fresh, a type of science fiction, especially with regard to the special effects, that no one had ever done before. Nothing can recapture the magic of that.
But I went into The Phantom Menace with the understanding that this would not be the first Star Wars movie (A New Hope). Instead, it would be a movie that had the immense task of laying the groundwork for what might end up being a nine movie series. Given a two hour science fiction movie can easily have 15 minutes of expository setup at its beginning without too much complaint, the entire The Phantom Menace could have been taken with simply introducing plotlines and characters and germinating the seeds that are to sprout throughout the rest of the series.
The Phantom Menace thankfully didn't take it to such extent, but the fect is that a lot of this movie had to be expended to set up the rest to come. And for that, some of the action and "gee-whiz" stuff had to take a back seat.
In essence, The Phantom Menace is an allegory for the rise of Hitler in pre-World War 2 Germany. In fact, many of the machinations being utilized by the nascent Emperor to consolidate his power almost exactly mirror the circumstances that gave rise to Hitler. The story involves two Jedi Knights who must save a planet from being used as a war ground by forces that seek to destabilize the Republic and set the ground work for an Emperor to arise. The plot involves the Jedi learning of a growing evil, fighting their nemesis (a Sith Lord, a predecessor to Darth Vader) and discovering and welcoming a young Annakin Skywalker into their midst. Along the way the Jedi befriend a klutzy creature (Jar Jar Binks), take part in a fabulous "chariot race" ala Ben Hur, fight the evil Sith Lord, save the planet and the princess, and discover Annakin's nascent potential as a Jedi. There are a few neato creatures along the way, and a fairly well-done large scale battle on the planetary surface. Many of the later characters are introduced: The Emperor, Obi Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, the Skywalker family, C3PO, and R2D2. There is also a big space battle at the end of the movie, and, in fact, this space battle was really the worst part of the movie, mainly because the way the day is saved is silly.
A lot of people, Star Wars fans included, particularly hated the character of Jar Jar Binks. He is the comic relief for the movie, and is no different really than that provided by C3PO in the first 3 movies. After all, who could call C3PO anything but annoying? Jar Jar is certainly slapstick, and some of what he does falls into the realm of pratfall and bathroom humour. Nevertheless, I felt his character was well developed, fairly well executed, and certainly integral to the plot.
The rest of the movie is Lucas. The writing is sometimes wince-able, and some of the creature designs are rather silly, but the special effects are awesome, and Lucas fills the screen with neat little tidbits. The pace of the movie never lags, and many of the set pieces are really fun to watch. It is my feeling that once the full 6 (or 9) movie series is completed, one will be able to watch The Phantom Menace as it was meant to be, an introduction to the universe of Star Wars and a set up for greater things to come. In this it serves admirably.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ****
Forget all of the hype surrounding this movie. Many folks, in my opinion, simply think it very artsy and "with-it" to jump on the bandwagon gushing about this film. For another perspective, the film bombed in Southeast Asia, where martial arts movies are de riguer and most Hong Kong moviegoers and Chinese moviegoers are still trying to figure out what the hell all of the hoopla is about.
So it sounds like I am going to trash the movie right? Wrong. The movie is certainly at the height of its genre. The picture is lushly photographed and the fight scenes, to one raised on stories of fantasy and swords and sorcery, are certainly very neat and the zipping around in tree tops and up walls is something to see. The story is also clever and there are some good set pieces (such as a great fight in a forest inn). But, whether the result of bad writing or simply the result of poor translation into subtitles, the dialogue sometimes made me wince with a steady stream of clinkers and silly lines, and on at least two occasions deaths that were supposed to be taken seriously by the audience got hysterical laughs instead. In addition, the plot (or plots, for there are several interwoven here) is certainly nothing new, involving the old hero wanting to put his sword into the sheath for the last time and settle down but being dragged back out of retirement for one last heroic escapade (can anyone say Unforgiven?). There is also a mildly charming bit of sexual tension between two of the lead characters, but what the hell...who watches a martial arts movie for the plot anyways?
As mentioned, the fights are wonderous to behold. In the world of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, martial arts have progressed almost to the point of sorcery. The combatants walk up wall, fight while leaping from thin branches high in the treetops, and otherwise defy gravity in every conceivable way. This combined with a nice array of weaponry and some wonderful sound and editing work makes each combat a pleasure to watch again and again.
As a martial arts movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is certainly one of the best, and because of that I feel it deserves a 4-star rating. As a piece of filmic art taken in the context of movies as a whole, however, it certainly is deserving of cult or niche status, but no more.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Ich! Blech! Patooey!
What more can I say? I have played the damned game devotedly for over 25 years and to think what a crappy hackneyed job the writers and director did with this piece of dung just galls me. This is without a doubt the worst fantasy movie ever made. Worse even than such gems as The Barbarian, Beastmaster 2, Conan the Destroyer, and Hawk the Slayer.
The story is at its base tired and trite. Handsome and dashing ne'er-do-well is reluctantly thrown into a cauldron of evil bad guys and finds himself having to save the world. Did I mention that the world can only be saved by recovery of a long lost magic item? Did I mention that along the way he learns that he is an oprhan and that he may have some sort of destiny or birthright? Did I mention that he first despises and then grows to love the pretty girl he falls in with and then has to rescue from peril over and over again? Did I mention how bad this movie is?
There you have it. Ridley, our hero, is saddled with the most annoying character ever seen in a fantasy movie, a bumbling shucking and jiving thief played by Marlon Wayans. This character was so annoying that people actually clapped and cheered when he got killed (yes I just ruined part of the mopvie for you...you can thank me later). The movie was shot on a very tight budget, so the special effects are sparse, and in many places laughable. The combat scenes are straight out of He-Man, with almost no blood and little grit. There is almost no characterization at all, which, of course, means no character devlopment, and strange folks are simply paraded into the heroic band with no motivation and hang around for perhaps a tidbit of comic relief. A certain dwarf character comes immediately to mind.
The acting is bad all around. Ridley is constantly smirking, even when he should be scared out of his wits. Marlon Wayans should be beaten soundly about the face and head for opening his mouth at all in this movie. Thora Birch, playing an embattled queen, should stick to teenager flicks. The actress who plays the lady-in-distress opposite Ridley sure has the whining and pouting routine down to a science (too bad they don't give an oscar for that) but little else. Oh, there's a dwarf and dark elf ranger running around too, but they do almost nothing of substance.
The bad guys are no better. The actor playing Damodar, the penultimate baddie, thinks being evil means sneering and squinting at your foe and talking in whispers. Guess what...that was novel maybe 50 years ago. And Jeremy Irons, playing the really big baddie Profion, chews more scenery here than a cow chews cud. It's plainly clear that even a fine actor like Irons has to pay the rent sometimes.
So despite all that, what about its relation to the game D&D? Well...I suppose you could say it is. There are no clerics. Elves have weird healing powers. Beholders are so stupid that they can be fooled by the wildly inventive trick of tossing a stone in one direction and then running to another (did it occur to the director that Beholders have 10 eyestalks and could look in both directions at once?). Magic is silly...apparently mages need to have pixie dust powder in order to cast their spells, which is a new one to me. There are almost no real "monsters" in the movie. The beholders show up for literally 2 seconds. The villains are almost exclusively humans. A few orcs are tossed into a tavern scene (yes, the obligatory Star Wars cantina rip-off...what'd you expect?), but the monsters we D&Ders know and love are simply absent. In fact, there is almost nothing to really tie this movie to D&D specifically.
Is there anything good to say? Well, I guess I can think real hard. There is a scene where Ridley negotiates a maze full of traps that is at least mildly entertaining and shows some decent examples of thieves and use of thief skills ala D&D. There are some moderately neato scenes with dragons fighting each other at the end of the film, but it feels more like a "look at our really neat CGI" than anything.
All in all, Courtney Solomon and his writers have basically killed the D&D movie and have assured that no future one's will ever be made. Thanks Courtney.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Like Crouching Tiger, Hiden Dragon, much ado has been made during the 2000-2001 movie season about this film. And like the former, while it is a good film, I think it has been over-hyped in the media. The film does take a very objective and well-rounded look at the issue of drug trafficking, without prosteletyzing too grossly for or against the legalization of drugs, though its certainly slanted towards the drug-as-a-disease-rather-than-a-crime point of view.
The film is essentially a parallel tale of four intertwined plotlines, each showing a different aspect of the drug trade and the Drug War and each invariably becoming linked to the other so that the entire sordid process becomes a chain of cause and effect in the mind of the viewer. The first and best story involves Benecio Del Toro in an Oscar-worthy performance as a cop in Tijuana who must walk the razor thin line between corruption and efficacy in the ever-changing world of Mexican drug enforcement. This is without a doubt the crowning storyline in the movie and the story and the characters are wonderfully shaded, with no one being entirely black or white here. As a Mexican cop whose heart is in the right place, Del Toro is also no idiot and realizes that in order to make a difference on the mean streets of Mexico, one has to "play the game" and in some cases sell (or at least rent) one's soul to the Devil, in this case a corrupt General who seeks to eliminate rivals in the Tijuana drug trade under the cover of being Mexico's foremost drug warrior.
The second story involves Michael Douglas as the newly elected US Drug Czar. Unfortunately for him, his daughter has been seduced by a boy who is heavily into drugs, and before long she is hooked on crack and whoring herself in the bad parts of town for a hit. This story stretches the elastic of believability. While its point is a valid one, that drug addiction is pervasive and strikes the well-to-do as well as the down-and-out, the Czar's daughter's descent from prep school girl to crack ho is to quick and too all-encompassing for me to really believe it. She seems to have no regrets and there is really no struggle of conscience. While drug addiction is a rather totalitarian master, surely there must be some resistance or struggle on the road from rich girl to crack ho.
The same critique can be levelled at the third story, that of a wealthy businesman's wife (played by a very pregnant Catherine Zeta Jones) who learns, when her husband is arrested, that he is actually a high-up in one of the major drug cartels. Having lived a life of social acceptance in the beutiful circles of high society, she finds her preconceived notions of her life, her husband, and morality torn apart. At first angry at her husband for his deception, and for placing the lives of her and their son in jeopardy, somewhere in the middle of the movie she suddenly comes to embrace her husband's career and leaps into the politics and machincations of the cartel with a vengeance. I found the wife's change from innocent dupe to evil mastermind to be extremely unbelievable and far too sudden and inexplicable for my tastes. We are not even sure why she makes this change. Is it because she was used to her pampered lifestyle and wants to maintain it? Is it because she loves her husband enough to overlook his deception? Or it is because she sees the futility of trying to fight what is inevitable? We just are not given enough background about her to puzzle out this stratling transformation.
The final story involves two FBI agents who work the law enforcement side of the US drug equation. They provide a contrast to the methods Benecio Del Toro's character has to use and their story also acts as the glue that eventually binds the other two stories together. Nothing really groundbreaking here, though the banter between the two agents is the sort of speudo-philosophical stuff pioneered in Pulp Fiction and overused since then.
The film is shot in a sort of documentary style, with lighting and film stock similar to that used in Three Kings, grainy and often washed out. Of particular note are the scenes shot in Mexico, which are entirely shot through a yellow filter. This makes everything look drab and lifeless in Tijuana but also serves as a metaphor for the fact that good and evil, right and wrong, and purity and corruption are not clear cut in Tijuana viz a viz the Drug War.
My main critique of the film is that, in trying to handle four stories, they of necessity scrimp on motivation and characterization, as mentioned int he case of the cartel boss' wife and the rich girl. Frankly, each of the four stories could have easily been made into a full-length movie, and the Benecio Del Toro story could have been a masterpiece in and of its own right. But jammed together into a single movie, while the four plotlines help to show how different lives are affected by the trade, they also give short shrift to the characters. All in all it is not an entirely satisfactory compromise.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A caper flick from Guy Ritchie, the frenetic English director of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch melds the traditional caper flick with the new English sensibility of movies like Trainspotting. The result is inventive and hilarious, and this is punctuated by some nicely innovatinve camera work and editing that really keep the piece jumping along.
The premise is really simple. A group of bandits, led by Benecio Del Toro, rob a diamond shop of a bunch of gems, including a particularly huge one. Once news of this gets out, every thug and lowlife in Britain sets out to nab the thing. To describe the plot any further would simply be an excercise in futility, as the diamond gets passed around to a huge cast of characters, each chasing the other.
Standouts include Dennis Farina as the US boss who hired Del Toro's character in the first place, and Brad Pitt as a gypsy bare knuckle fighter with an overzealous love of his mum and an almost completely incomprehensible accent (this is intentional...even the thick Cockney limeys cannot make heads or tales of his speech).
Of course, there is the now obligatory Pulp Fiction type banter between bad guys, casually discussing the merits of the existance of God as they blow people away, but while that whole conceit is tired and getting a bit annoying, Snatch moves along in so sprightly a manner that even that can be forgiven. The plot starts fairly loosely, with a lot of characters and subplots, but as expected, by the end of the movie everyone is basically within the same two city blocks of each other (or dead) and all hell has broken loose. Guy manages to tie the ending up nicely, which is certainly important for a movie with this plot structure. Overall, very well done.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Tim Burton's revisioning of the 1968 classic movie is less a reworking and more a completely different adaption of the original book. However, in no sense is this new verion truer to the book, which had the apes with technologically advanced cities and driving cars and flying jets. The 1968 version's excuse for the low-tech apery was simply budget constraints in an era when special effects were very difficult to pull off. What Tim Burton's excuse is, I don't know.
What the new Planet of the Apes does do well is show how really well done the original 1968 version was. That version was a exquisite blend of sci-fi hokum, quasi-philisophic musings, a surprise ending that even now ranks as one of the best in cinema history, and some chase scenes and one liners that are stand out. Hell, it even has a bit of 1968 youthful rebellion thrown in in the form of a young chimp always complaining about being put down by authority figures. Does it get any better than that?
Burton's version, on the other hand, is an extremely linear tale with nothing new to bring to the equation. Man (Mark Wahlberg) crashes on planet where apes rule. The humans here can talk (though they really have almost nothing worth saying), which puts a damper on great moments like in the original when Charlton Heston first utters those immortal words "Get your stinking hands off of me you dirty filthy ape!", but they mostly serve as potential victims to follow Wahlberg's character around on an invisible leash. One of the humans is a famous model and Burton does his best to dress her in skimpy clothes, but unlike the rather amazing chemistry between Heston and a mute human female, there is nothing to this woman. The sympathetic chimp is played by Helena Bonham Carter, and as played she is really quite obnoxious, not likeable, and very unchimplike. Vera and Cornelius were so well done in the original that you yearn for Carter's chimp to exhibit some sort of personality other than a very underdone subtext of sexual yearning for Wahlberg's character that is never developed.
The battle scenes are pathetic, with there really only being a single fight, and that is resolved in what has to be one of the least unexpected and worst instances of eus ex machina in motion picture history. Many of us were literally fighting to stop laughing at the crucial battle climax. The "surprise ending" makes no sense and was obviously tacked on because Burton felt obligated to follow the format of the original. The ending tries to embody a sort of Twilight Zone plot ironic plot twist to it, but even if you somehow could not guess the ending, plot twists only work when they...well...actually twist the plot in a logical manner. This one does not.
Are there good points to the movie? Well a few. Tim Roth as the evil ape Thad goes way over the top, but Roth is fun to watch no matter what he does, and it is interesting to see his usual sneer covered in fur this time. There are also a handful of obscure homages to the original movie, and a fan like me can have a fun time spotting the dialogue and references. The costumes, while being lauded by some as the best thing about the movie, struck me as rather pedestrian...adequately done but not miles ahead of the 1968 makeup jobs. I mean, you still felt like you were seeing humans in ape makeup. The actual motion of the apes was updated, and this was probably the only thing in the movie done better than the original. While I enjoyed Roddy McDowell's hunched swagger as Cornelius, these apes in the new version leap and jump and cavort much more like real apes. Score one for CGI!
All in all though, this movie just had nothing really to recommend it. So why did I give it two stars? Because simply being a movie about talking apes with Charlton Heston in it gets you an extra star all by itself.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Guys...this is a movie about a video game OK. So chill. Do you go to a movie about a video game and expect Max Ophuls or Sergei Eisenstein? No. You expect a big breasted muscle-buffed woman toting 2 automatic pistols to jump and spin and kick ass on all sorts of inventive bad guys in all sorts of interesting settings. That's exactly what you get with Tomb Raider. You weren't promised more...so why expect more?
Tomb Raider stars Angelina Jolie, who is my vote as the aobsolute best possible incarnation of Lara Croft, ultra-chested star of the Tomb Raider series of video games. Here, Croft must follow the legacy left by her deceased father (played in a nice turn by Jolie's real life father Jon Voight) to stop a nefarious group loosely based on the real life Bavarian Illuminati from gainging control of a mystical artifact that allows its possessor to control time. Goofy plot? Yep. But who cares. It all sort of makes sense in a video game sort of fashion.
Croft apparently inherited a lot of money from her father. Bruce Wayne-level money that allows her to not work for a living and train away in her big mansion with a permanent butler and her own personal computer geek. Lara's "profession" is, following on the heels of her father, tomb raiding, which involves entering dangerous tombs and ruins in search of prize artifacts (which she presumably sells on the open market). One should just assume she is in the same line of work that Indiana Jones is and move on from there.
Convoluted plot aside, what makes this movie is some fairly amusing dialogue (including witty and sometimes flirtatious banter from our heroine) and the simple pleasure of watching Angelina Jolie kick ass in tight clothing with big guns. The tomb settings are ingeniously rendered and the tricks and traps are clever enough to keep even a jaded D&D dungeonmaster tickled. The fights are well choreographed...especially one where Lara is strapped to elastic training bands (don't ask) and runs all around the walls and ceiling of her mansion defeating the bad guys who have invaded her sanctum sanctorium.
What you get is a decently acted and decently scripted comic book of a movie with a very strong heroine figure and a bunch of neat monstrous villans and exotic locales. Exactly what you want in a Saturday matinee popcorn movie.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Final Fantasy bills itself as the first photorealistic fully animated feature length movie, and that isn't such a far-fetched boast. While Toy Story and Shrek did much to advance the cause of computer-generated feature length movies, Final Fantasy is truly a technical step beyond in rendering very life-like humans on screen for large amounts of time. Are the humans completely 100% unmistakable from real life humans? Nope. We aren't quite there yet. But where we are is that unless you take yourself out of the movie and consciously look for flaws, you won't find them. That means with Final Fantasy, once immersed in the movie, one can forget that one isn't watching real life actors.
By now you've heard of all of the facts and figures; how each human had over 60,000 individual hairs programmed and rendered, liverspots, pores, etc. Let's just say it works, and it heralds a time in the not too distant future when there really may be cyber-thespians (and then with $20 million actor fees out the window, maybe movie ticket prices can come back down to sane levels!).
So what about the rest of the movie? Well, I went to see the technology frankly, and to me simply watching the latest in CGI is worth the ticket. That in and of itself might have gotten the movie 3 stars. But what pleasantly surprised me was that the movie itself was pretty good. The plot involves a dying earth of the future. The earth has been invaded by some sort of alien creature that seems to be less bug eyed monster and more spirit or ghost (hence the sub-title of the movie: The Spirits Within). These creatures have basically ravaged most of the earth, and humans now dwell in isolated cities protected by energy barriers that keep the spirits out (most of the time).
A group of scientists believes that the way to defeat the aliens is to...and try to stay with me here...find 7 special energy signatures in 7 random life forms on earth and coalesce them into an energy wave that will activate the Gaia spirit (i.e. Mother Earth) to defeat/join with/absorb the alien spirits. These scientists are opposed by the military, which simply wants to blast the aliens into oblivion and to hell with all this mamby pamby we are the world new age spirit crap! (I for one was on the side of the military).
Yes, the whole New Age spirit stuff is a bit hokey, but it is also a nice change from the typical Aliens clones you see in many other movies. These aliens are not green skinned slime bearing stomach popping aliens with acid for blood. These are ectoplasmic ghosties who are spectacularly rendered on the screen and who kill with a single touch.
The acting is all well done and the dialogue is believable, as is the main character, a female scientist named Aki. Guns, ships, and chases are all exciting and well paced, and the ending is far from hokey and actually left me satisfied. I must say, without ruining it, that the ending was also not your typical everyone ends up happily ever after crap you see to often from mass-appeal movies.
All in all Final Fantasy surprised me with its tehcnological acumen and its plot. Well done in both respects.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Alright, you will either love me or hate me on this one. I loved A.I. I thought it was one of the most fascinating movies I have seen in a long long time. A.I. was a script in development to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, who developed storyboards for it and shooting summaries but died before he could actually make the picture. Steven Spielberg took over and shot the movie. Many people have complained that the movie is either too Kubrick or too Spielberg. My own feeling is that it weaves the best elements of both talented directors into a seemless whole. The movie is neither as preachy or as smaltzy as many Spielberg movies can be, nor is it has staid and set piece as some Kubrick movies can be.
A.I. involves the story of the first robotic boy programmed to love. The tale chronicles his adoption by a family and his subsequent abandonment by same and his later trek (through space and time) to regain the love that was, essentially, hard-wired into his body. On its surface then, A.I. is a simple retelling of Pinocchio, and Spielberg makes no secret of this, in fact overtly paralleling the traditional fairy tale in the story. In its subtext, A.I. is a story about the nature of love, of humanity, of loyalty, of family, and of life and death. Pretty big stuff huh?
What makes the story is excellent writing and acting and a sort of fearlessness with regard to the plot. The movie, like many Kubrick movies, goes where it wants to go without any sort of bowing to the expectations of the audience. This was true of Eyes Wide Shut, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and even Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket. The plot is not there to cater to you...you are merely along for the ride. And what a ride it is. The story spans literally millions of years and the ending involves a very nice touch of irony (that I won't mention for fear of giving the ending away). It (the ending) is a nice barometer to test a given movie-goers ability to soar with a plot, no matter which way it twists. The end of A.I. is completely unexpected, but not in a Sixth Sense or Twilight Zone surprise way. Some people, like me, revelled in the ending...revelled that we could be taken so far afield, like the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey, and yet still be brought back to the very basic human issues presented in the movie. Others were completely thrown for a loop by the ending and thereby hated the entire film because of it.
Aside from the ending, the scenes of the robot boy interacting with the family are excellent, and even the rather campy Mad-Max type tone of what can best be described as a Thunderdome for robots is poignantly done and advances the story nicely. Jude Law adds a great bit of panache as a giggolo robot who tries to help the robot boy regain his love and gain his humanity.
A.I. was so full of interesting questions and situations that it is probably the only movie so far in 2001 that I really feel I need to see a second time in order to absorb all of the nuances. That, in and of itself, says wonders about the movie.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A slight but somewhat amusing movie from the duo that brought you Swingers, Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn star as two losers who try to make good for their crusty mob boss (played by Peter Falk). Favreau plays the more thoughtful and introverted of the undynamic duo, one who is in love with a stripper (Famke Janssen) and in love (in a paternal fashion) with her 6 year old daughter. Vaughn plays a foolish, arrogant, cocksure loser who is always shooting off his mouth and saying and doing the wrong thing, a man who has seen one too many mob movies and wants to revel in the lifestyle.
Favreau's character's main goal is to make enough money in order to allow his girlfriend to stop stripping so that he and she and her daughter can settle down to a normal life. The two get their chance when they are recruited as low level mules making a drop off of money in New York. I won't ruin the surprise ending, but suffice to say that, loserhood being endemic, they screw it all up. In doing so, however, Favreau and Vaughn's characters learn what is really important in life and Favreau's character attains his goal, or at least the most important part thereof.
The movie is well done, both the writing and the acting, and Vaughn plays his obnoxious character to the hilt. You really just want to reach into the screen and smack him one. The problem with the movie really is that it is essentially a one-theme and one story arc movie and although it doesn't wear thin over its running time, it also doesn't rise beyond what is essentially a mildly amusing loser piece.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Quintessential Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut is either a masterpiece or a piece of utterly worthless drivel. I've not heard anyone have a middle of the road opinion about it. I consider it a brilliant movie, but I am an admitted Kubrickophile. As with most Kubrick movies, the pacing is methodical and the movie writhes and turns so that you really have no idea where you are going to be taken nor where you end up. I will say for the record that the movie has the best ending line of any movie...you can judge for yourself.
The story concerns infidelity, both of the heart, the mind, and by deed. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play a wealthy married couple who seems to have everything going for them. Great looks, great jobs, great social life. But when Kidman's character confesses that she had an erotic dream and the object of her erotic dreaming was someone other than her husband, Tom's character begins to become embittered and to begin to question his own fidelity (or to test it). He then embarks on a strange sexually tinged odyssey (and the parellels to The Odyssey are present) that takes him into all sorts of bizarre encounters, each both testing his fidelity and, at the same time, forcing him to confront his marriage and the nature of sex and loyalty in our society. This journey culminates in his infiltrating an illuminati-like secret society of sexual dilletants. This society discovers his infiltration and threatens to sunder his marriage and his life.
The movie, as mentioned before, is 100% Kubrick. Diffuse lighting in the background. Unique musical score that is integral to the movie. Stately, measured shots. And encounters, characters, and dialogue that are by no means obvious and are there to paint a thematic landscape and to get you to think.
The acting was top notch. Some people have a generic problem with Tom Cruise, though I personally think this is merely "pretty-boy" bashing. Cruise does a great job here of playing the all-together doctor who suddenly doesn't have it all together, and his performance is restrained and, no, he does not go through the movie smirking as some idiots have reported. Kidman is really exquisite in this movie. The scene where she is smoking pot and talking with her husband is a great piece of acting, and while her character is relegated to the background in the second and third acts (the story is essentially Cruise's character's story), she adds the right element to her part. Sidney Pollack also does an excellent turn in front of the camera as Cruise's character's friend.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
While the first American Pie movie was a gross-fest, what distinguished the movie from any number of preceding (and subsequent) teen gross/sex-fests was the underlying heart and conservativism of the movie. Unfortunately, in American Pie 2, all the gross is here (and then some) but the heart is gone, and what is left is a "been-there-done-that" movie that simply goes through the motions.
The plot of the movie is simple. The four horny friends from the first movie are back, with the obnoxious Stiffler along this time, each trying to resolve his particular sexual dilemma. For one it is the difficulty of a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend who is overseas. For another the issue is one of maintaining a friendship after the romance is gone. For a third, can he erase his obsession for a certain older woman? And for Stiffler...well the name says it all...can he score and how often? All of these are just subplots to the main story: Can Biggs' character get enough sexual practice and experience in a short period of time so that he can be worthy of doing the nasty with a beautiful foreign exchange student for whom he pines.
Along the way we meet all of the inane characters, including Eugene Levy as the over-compensating father, and the red-headed "band-camp" girl. Of course, in the end everything works out, and everyone gets laid, and those who were pining for the wrong woman end up with the right women. La de da!
But nothing new is brought to these characters, and the gags themselves are not that funny. A nod to the first movie has Stiffler again imbibing a rather noxious substance...but it was about as shocking as it could get the first time around. This time it plays as homage...bad homage. There is an initially amusing scene where the guys, in the hopes of seeing two lesbians do their thing for them, must engage in a sort of homo-erotic obstacle course. But the scene is far too long and we get it after the first two minutes while the pseudo homosexual gags just keep on going and going. The piece-de-resistance is Biggs' character getting his hand superglued to his shlong. This might have been funny had the scene not been played a million times before on the trailers and advertisements for the film. As it stood, everyone in the theatre knew what was going to happen before it happened and so what might have been the movie's only real laugh turned into a mild titter.
Here is hoping that desert is over and there is no third helping.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Star Wars - Attack of the Clones **
The fifth installment in the space opera series that redfined science fiction and fantasy for Hollywood and the world clearly shows its age. The entire premise is beginning to wear thin, and one has to be glad, in a way, that there are no current plans to do episodes 7-9.
The movie, on its own, is fairly horrible, but compared to the legacy of the first trilogy, this is utter drek in comparison. Even the first movie, The Phantom Menace, was imbued with a heart and spirit that, in this case, seems to involve simply going through the motions. Of course, maybe I have just begun to tire of the series instead.
The plot involves Annakin Skywalker's fateful conversion into Darth Vader. His slide into evil merely begins here, and we are given the causes, including a headstrong stubborness to do things his own way, his vaciliating crush on Queen Amidalah, and the slavery and then tragic death of his mother (the latter the defining event that essentially pushes him over the edge). Meanwhile, we learn that the erstwhile Emperor has been maneuvering the Republic into a cataclysmic war with the Trade Federation and rebellious Republican elements in the hope that, in the destruction wrought by both sides, he would be able to step into the power vacuum. Obi-wan Kenobi discovers the existence of an army of clones ordered created by a mysterious figure in the past and the Jedi use this ready-made army to battle the Trade Federation, even with the knowledge that someone engineered the war from the start and that they are playing directly into someone's nefarious plans.
The movie boasts some good points. Annakin's slide, while not handled as subtley as possible (it should have taken 3 full movies to document it), is also not done brazenly and the viewer can at least accept his changing paradigm. In addition, many of the special effects and set pieces are memorable. Most significantly a battle in an arena between out heroes and three monsters right out of a D&D novel and the portion of the story dealing with a stormy planet which is home to the beings responsible for breeding the clone army. These are both done wonderfully.
But the movie also boasts some heinous parts. First, the dialogue between Annakin and Amidalah is just horrible, with enough cliched clinkers to make me wince. Lucas cannot write romantic dialogue, and I have to imagine that some of the quick and witty repartee amongst the characters in The Empire Strikes Back cannot have been written by Mr. Lucas at all. In addition, the entire opening sequence, which has Annakin and Obi-wan joking and playing with one another as they chase a deadly assassin through the city "streets" is completely incongruous. I thought Jedi take assassination attempts on their charges rather more seriously.
The large scale combat sequences are well done technically, but when is Lucas going to realize that armies at that tech level are not going to fight by lining up a hundred yards from the enemy in perfect Napoleanic battle formations and starts firing at each other. Let's see some tactics and strategy here!
And finally, there is a scene where, for lack of a better phrase, Yoda "opens up a can of whoop-ass" on an evil Sith Lord. You either love the sight of Yoda bouncing around with a light saber or you despise it. Although the sight wasn't as bad as I had feared, and no one in my theatre giggled at the spectacle, I think it was a bad choice to have Yoda springing around like a Mexican jumping bean with a light saber. I'd have rather he used his telekinetic powers to battle his enemies.
Overall, the movie is certainly a must-see for Star Wars fans, as it advances the plot well enough. But you do have to suffer through the first half of the movie, with its horrible dialogue, before getting to the action. Let's hope the final installment is a step up from here.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring ****
The first installment in the movie version of what I consider to be one of the greatest literary works of all time is an excellent movie but as an adaption falls short in some areas.
In case you just came back from a forty-year long visit to Mars, the Lord of the Rings tells the story of Frodo, a hobbit (a three-foot high man) who must bear an evil ring of power through all sorts of horrible dangers to drop it in the fires of Mount Doom from whence the ring was forged. At its heart, it is a story about the power of friendship and the capability of the meek to change the world for the better. The first book (and film) introduces the characters to us as well as the menace of the ring and starts the fellowship on its way towards Mount Doom. Along the way they fight a traitorous sorceror named Saruman, are pursued by nine wraith-like undead spirits mounted on black horses, battle the avalanches of a treacherous mountain pass, and finally travel underground through abandoned dwarf mines in one of the best sequences ever filmed for fantasy or science fiction.
The casting is well done here, with the hobbits being true to their literary counter parts. Ian McKellan does an excellent job of playing Gandalf, which requires a formidable mixture of sarcasm and humour while at the same time retaining enough dignity and majesty to portray the powerful wizard in battle. Viggo Mortenson is superd as Strider, and he pulls off the role of a dirty ranger who flashes glimpses of future kingliness with panache. Orlando Bloom as Legolas veritably ooozes elf in the movie and enfuses Legolas with a catlike grace that clearly distinguishes him from simply a human with pointy ears. Gimli is a bit brusque, moreso than in the book, but Rhys-Davies at least does not make a complete caricature of him. Christopher Lee is a very eerie Saruman while the conception for Sauron in the first flashback scenes of the movie are well exectuted.
The entire movie is full of good points beyond the casting. The fight scenes do suffer a bit from shaky camera syndrome, but they are realistically done, and bloody enough to be brutal. The orcs are mean and nasty and the battle in the Mines of Moria with some orcs and a cave troll is truly memorable and awesomely choreographed. The dreaded balrog of Moria is also finely done, and there is no mistaking the power of whip and flame wielded by this malign beast when you see him on the screen towering above Gandalf.
In addition, Jackson does a superb job of making the ring itself into another character in the story. As Boromir says "it is amazing that so many could suffer for such a little thing". Jackson has made sure that we understand what is wrapped up in such a small bauble of jewerly.
Where the movie suffers is when it veers from the book. While it is a sad necessity, it is fully understandable that the entire book could not have been crushed into one movie, even at 3 hours long. And therefore, something had to go. But some of the choices made were questionable. Farmer Maggot is a good choice to cut, as was Tom Bombadil. But I found that the missing Barrow Wight sequence should have been included in the movie as it is a very creepy scene and would have been a chance to at least have Tom Bombadil pop in to rescue the hobbits. Also, the wolf attack near Caradhras was omitted, which is strange because it is a nice action sequence.
But these are quibbles compared to the one really big problem I had. Cutting episodes for time constraints is one thing, but changing key points and motivations simply to put a new spin on things is something else altogether and unacceptable in my opinion. In the books, Frodo, for all intents and purposes, is swept along by events. He is the classic victim with very little say in his own destiny. In the entire trilogy, there is really only a single choice that Frodo makes on his own...the choice to spare his companions by going into Mordor alone. In the books, this is a choice he makes, entirely of his own choosing, and because of that, it is a poignant example of friendship and self-sacrifice that provides the thematic hinge for the entire story.
However, for reason entirely unknown to me, in the movie, director Jackson has decided that Galadriel will advise Frodo to depart alone. Even more, Frodo informs Aragorn of his intent to depart and Aragorn lets him go! Sorry, but the fact that in the movie Frodo essentially has to get permission from the grown-ups to validate his decision takes much of the moral weight from it. I found this change appalling.
Other changes that annoyed only slightly include hopped-up roles for Arwen, a much less subtle conversion of Saruman to evil than in the book, and a few continuity problems.
That said, the movie is a triumph of astounding visuals, well-done writing, excellent character development, and some kick-ass battle scenes. I can hardly wait for the delights to come in the next of the trilogy, The Two Towers.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
I am a marvel comics buff, and although Spiderman is not first amongst my favourite comic characters, he ranks high up there in the pantheon. That said, this movie is a very good effort. The story, as most first installments of comic book hero-movies do, involves the origins of the character. In this case, Peter Parker, nerd extraordinaire, is bitten by a radioactive spider and gains the powers of a spider, including spider strength, the ability to shoot webs from his wrists (thank God they don't come out of the closest parallel to a spider's spinnarets!), the ability to climb vertical and upside down surfaces, and the ability to sense danger. With all of this, Parker learns that with power comes responsibility, and he begrudgingly accepts his role as superhero, defeating his first nemesis, the Green Goblin, in the process.
The movie does a good job of capturing Parker's initial ambivalence over his role as a superhero, and while spiderman is not spouting his trademark witticisms in this installment, that is in keeping with the fact that Parker is new to spiderman and has not yet developed his panache and style yet.
Beyond that, the movie makers have obviously taken great pains to model spiderman after the comic book, and one can see this in the poses spiderman takes at times in the movie that mimic classic poses he takes in the comic book. This goes a long way to help convince old timers such as myself that this is the spiderman of the comics.
The casting is all first rate, from J. Jonah Jameson, the man you want to punch out, to Tobey MacGuire as the nerd thrust into the spotlight, and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, the girl next door you want to ogle at all day long.
The only real problem I had with the movie was that at times the CGI effects, when spidey was swinging wildly, made him seem less fluid and more like a ragdoll. I hope the effects are improved for the next installment, because spiderman should move with grace.
I rank this movie up there with the first batman in terms of true-to-comic effectiveness.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers ****
The anticipated sequel to the Fellowship of the Ring does not dissapoint. It is fair to say that if you enjoyed the first movie, you will enjoy the second, but if you disliked the first movie (whether by being someone not interested in the genre or a Tolkien purist) then you will find the same things not to like in the second installment of the trilogy.
The movie picks up right where the first leaves off. Frodo and Sam trudge through the wastelands adjoining Mordor and, along the way, meet and tame Gollum. They are, at the end of the movie, accosted by Faramir and some Gondorians but are finally released to continue the quest. Interestingly, the movie does not end where the book does, saving Shelob and Cirith Ungol for the final movie. This is not altogether an unwise move on Peter Jackson's part, since too much of Frodo's side of the third book involves dreary treks through Mordor and much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair over the burden of the ring, and that would not necessarily play out well on screen for an hour or more. In fact, aside from Gollum, the Frodo side of the movie is basically throw-away. There is some trudging and whining about the ring, but aside from their capture by Faramir, Gollum steals that side of the show.
Gollum is quite simply amazing. Fully a CGI creation, though rendered with the help of a stage actor named Andy Serkis, the work on the character is flawless and allows the audience to be both reviled by him and somewhat symapthetic to him. Gollum's fractured motivations are all well presented and he provides some humour as well.
The other side of the movie and the books involves mainly the battles and intrigues surrounding Rohan. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas pursue the abducted halflings, meet Eomer, catch up with Gandalf, abandon the halflings to Fangorn Forest (at Gandalf's request), muster Rohan, and then fight the Battle of Helm's Deep. The latter is a massive set piece battle taking some 40 minutes of movie time. All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, though truth be told, the constant intercuts and flashbacks to Aragorn pining away with Arwen in Rivendell are just too appendicized in the books to hold any interest for me in the movie. They constantly felt like interruptions, though they did serve to heighten the tension brewing between Eowyn and Aragorn, which Jackson develops nicely.
The action sequences are quite well done. The Battle of Helm's Deep is exciting and chock full of stuff to see. There is also a lesser battle against goblins riding wargs which is quite well done. In addition, if you watch carefully you can catch Legolas doing some pretty spectacular maneuvers during the battle scenes. There is one specific one involving his mounting a horse which literally left me agape. On the other hand, there is also a Legolas maneuver where he slides on a shield down a set of stairs while shooting a bow that was simply cartoonish and laughable.
I had a great worry about how the ents would be portrayed. I worried that they would be given short-shrift or made to look laughable, sort of hi-tech rejects from H.R. Puff-n-stuff. To by great enjoyment, they were neither. The ents are perfectly rendered. Fantastical and definitely tree-oriented without being silly. Their stature and movements portray a glacial majesty and their voices and slow drawling are done perfectly to convey the entish outlook on life and to make their final assault on Isengard all the more poignant.
Problem with the movie were slight. In addition to the items detailed above, I was quite distressed at the way Faramir was changed in the movie. In the books, Faramir is portrayed as almost the exact opposite of his brother, Boromir. He does not, despite the halflings' worries, covet the ring and is wise enough to send them on their way. In the movie, however, Jackson has Faramir basically acting as much of a jackass as his brother, abducting Frodo and hauling him back to Gondor. That is not the Faramir I know and there is really no reason he should have changed it.
I also disliked the way Theoden's recovery was handled. My impression of Grima Wormtongue's possession of Theoden was that it was a subtle one. A slow leeching away of vitality and will. Jackson has Theoden looking so shrivelled and emaciated that one wonders how such an unsubtle transformation could not have been instantly noticed by the subjects of Rohan. When Gandalf does drive Saruman's influence out of Theoden, the man suddenly un-ages some 50 years...it is far too unsubtle a thing.
Overall, the Two Towers is a fine carry forward of the vision of Tolkien, and it looks as if the trilogy of movies is set to become a classic of the genre.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
While this movie, commercially, was one of the biggest box office bombs of its time, costing somewhere between $120-180 million, it is by far not a bad movie at all. In fact, the animation is stunning, the CGI effects pretty seemlessly grafted with the drawings, the voice overs quite good, and the story both faithful to the original Stevenson novel while at the same time different enough to interest even a long-time fan of the novel such as myself.
The story is basically Treasure Island by R.L. Stevenson, but set in space. However, this is a weird sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs space where physics really apply less than what Stevenson himself might have imagined space travel to be like. Spaceships are basically duplicates of their oceanic analogs, though they are fitted with gravity generators to allow crew to walk the decks and rocket thrusters to "sail" through the firmament. Of course, issues like beathable air and protection from the extreme radiation and temperature of space are conveniently ignored. The pirates and characters are an aglomeration of aliens and cyborgs, all well rendered.
I was quite happy that the musical numbers in the movie were kept to a minimum. What you get is basically a straight-ahead action movie that's animated. Will Jimmy Hawkins win the treasure? Is Long John Silver really a bad guy or does he have a kind heart buried in his burly frame? Same questions one asks reading or watching Treasure Island.
I recommend this movie to anyone with kids or anyone who has a bit of the ole kid left in them.
Now, why it cost $120 million to make? That I cannot answer. The animation is beautiful, but where the rest of the money went, I have no idea.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Martin Scorcese's flawed epic represents the third in his trilogy ruminating upon the role of violence in American society. In this case his gaze falls upon the blood and bones used as mortar and cement to form the foundations of the city of New York, the bedrock of American culture (at least, from Scorcese's perspective). The movie tells the story of the rough and tumble days of the mid 19th century in New York, when Tamany Hall and Boss Tweed ruled the city through vice, graft, and intimidation and when, in the poorer sections of the city, street gangs formed and carved out territory along ethnic and religious lines.
The movie is based upon true events. New York's Five Points area did indeed boast a variety of colourfully-named gangs, often formed to defend or harrass certain ethnic groups immigrating into New York city. In addition, set against the draft riots in New York during the Civil War, the movie also attempts to tell the story of rampant prejudice against blacks and resistance against the draft during the same time period.
But more than the dry historical points, the movie is first and foremost about violence. The entire movie is stained red with the blood of its protagonists and antagonists, and it paints a not-too-pretty picture of old New York as a cesspool of dirt, vice, violence, larceny, greed, and hypocrisy. It also draws parallels to the upper class of New York, whose vileness is merely less overt and more insidious. Whether lower town New York was truly as vile a sewer as this movie depicts is debatable.
The plot itself involves the son (Leonadro DiCaprio) of an Irish gang leader (Liam Neeson) named Vallon who was killed in battle by a rival gang of "native" New Yorkers who resent the influx of Irish into the city. The child is spared his father's fate and sent to a reformatory for 16 years, all the while harbouring plans of revenge against the leader of the Natives (Daniel Day Lewis) who killed his father. However, in trying to get close to the leader of the Natives, known as the Butcher, the younger Vallon ends up serving the Butcher and the latter takes a shine to what he comes to view as his young protegee.
When young Vallon finally attempts to kill the Butcher, he is defeated and spared a gruesome death only because the Butcher was once spared a similar fate by young Vallon's father. Essentially, the Butcher hands young Vallon his legacy of an unending cycle of revenge. Despite an effort by a girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) to simply flee New York and end the cycle, young Vallon remains, builds an army of Irish, and amid the draft riots shattering New York, exacts his revenge upon his father's killer.
The film is shot well, and the violence, while brutal, is over-the-top only in a couple of places. The acting is first rate, and everyone keeps his or her brogue intact. Even Daniel Day Lewis' proto-Brooklyn accent is well done. The two problems I had with the movie, however, were that young Vallon's rise back into power was far too abrupt. The movie really, in its epic scope, needed to be about a half hour longer and really protray the struggle young Vallon has trying to unite the disparate Irish factions into a gangland army. In addition, the entire storyline concerning the draft riots seems tagged on. It really didn't add anything to either the plot of the movie nor its theme, other than a minor parallel between black racism and Irish racism (a theme amply dealt with anyways at other places in the movie) and in fact took much of the thunder (literally) out of the ending of the movie.
Despite this quibble, Gangs of New York is certainly a stand-out work amongst Scorcese's films and, assuming you can handle the prodigious and almost exhausting violence of the movie, can really shed some light on the way in which our nation was built upon the blood, bones, and guts of those who went before us.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
This is not a bad movie. In fact, it is quite decent in many places. So why did I find myself yawning halfway through it? Yeah, the beer and large dinner I had beforehand had something to do with that, but the movie was at least partially to blame. The problem is two-fold. First, Ben Affleck just doesn't bring much energy to his role as Matthew Murdock, the blind defense lawyer whose super powers enable him to become the Daredevil. For a man without fear, which is the Daredevil's tagline, Affleck sure plays him as someone who is constantly second-guessing himself every step of the way. Angst is fine in a superhero, witness Spider-man and even Batman, but only up to a point. We simply never feel Murdock's motivation for becoming the Daredevil and are never really invigorated by him. It's almost as if Murdock becomes the Daredevil reluctantly because he can't figure out what else he should do with his nights. Affleck should have played him with much more elan, even in the face of Daredevil's self-imposed doubts.
In addition to this, I am frankly quite tired of poorly lit fight scenes with fraction-of-a-second cuts and hyperkinetic camera movement. I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you as a director cannot make your fight scene interesting enough to let the audience actually see what's going on, you may want to either 1) reshoot the fight scene, or 2) get a job waiting tables. In Spider-man we actually get to see Spidey fight the Green Goblin. In The Matrix, we actually get to watch the fighting, some of it in slo-mo. But in Daredevil, we get mostly poorly lit fight scenes where you can tell things are happening because you can hear the grunts and oofs on the screen, but you're damned to try and figure out who is going what to whom. Watch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon a few times to see how fight scenes should be shot.
That said, the movie ain't all that bad. I was, in fact, pleasantly surprised by Jennifer Garner as Elektra. Elektra, for all of you who are not fans of the Daredevil comics, was the seminal character in the early Daredevil cycle and was one of the most beloved to fans of the book. She was a deadly assassin whose mixture of danger and love for Daredevil made for a potent literary cocktail. Elektra has to be both beautiful and deadly, the type of person who, when you look at her, you know she is bad news, but you still can't say no to her. Jennifer Garner, I assumed, was going to be a disaster because she has this California bimbette sort of thing going on most of the time. Fortunately, in the movie, she managed to cop enough attitude to pull off the whole Elektra thing adequately...and she looks really good in a tight leather suit. The real problem is that the movie, for want of time and plot, could not really get into Elektra's psyche very well and it also never really established her role as a very efficient and remorseless assassin.
Kingpin was fine as the villain behind the scenes, and I look forward to more of Michael Clark Duncan's work as the father of crime in a sequel. But the real outstanding work in this movie is from Colin Farrell as Bullseye. Colin plays Bullseye with the proper swagger and confidence and the movie does a very good job at displaying why and how a super villain with the weird ability to throw anything really fast and very accurately can be quite deadly.
Jon Favreau plays Murdock's lawyer partner, and he has some great one-liners delivered as only Favreau can. I am waiting for someone to now crossover the Daredevil movies with X-men so that Favreau and Famke Janssen can be re-teamed (as they were in Love & Sex).
All in all the movie certainly provides a good introduction to Daredevil for the unitiated and already a sequel and an Elektra movie are in the works. I hope that the writers for these movies, having now the freedom to cast off the origin aspect of the plot, can inject more energy and verve into future Daredevil movies.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Al Pacino plays William Burke, a CIA recruiter who seeks to recruit Colin Farrell as an elite spy for the agency. Most of the movie involves Burke pulling one mind-game after another on the recruits in order to test them and to determine who is worthy of becoming a "spook" and who is not. The premise of the movie is that these tests are not always apparent. Sort of like when you wake up from a nightmare and then realize you actually haven't woken up, you are still dreaming, then you wake up from that and you are still dreaming and so forth. The movie nicely string the audience along until they share Farrell's paranoia in wondering whether the scene unfolding on the screen is really a situation or merely another test.
All this is done fairly well, and Pacino plays this type of character very well and does his usual good job here. Farrell is also at the top of his game here, lending his recruit a good mixture of cockiness and vulnerability and, at times, he has this look like "have no idea what's going on, but I am sure the hell going to get out of this".
The problem with the movie is that the ending is a bit of a let-down. For a movie that really strings its viewers along (somewhat like The Game starring Michael Douglas), the ending of the movie makes a mere lame gasp at trying to continue the "is it real?" theme of the rest of the movie and basically ends in a mild sort of gotcha way that I could see coming from a mile off. One is also left wondering how the villain who is exposed at the end, who is supposed to be uncannily cagey, could be caught by what I consider to be such a simplistic ruse.
Overall, the movie is worth seeing. If you enjoy Al Pacino and like spy movies, you'll get a kick out of this movie up until the ending.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A horrible, horrible movie with some amazingly good elements gone very bad. The film stars Benecio Del Toro as a super elite soldier gone insane and Tommy Lee Jones as the man who trained him and now has to take him out. The film was directed by William Friedkin (of The Exorcist fame). We pretty much never find out why Benecio's character has gone insane. To some extent it seems to stem from one too many "wet" missions in combat zones, and to some extent it seems to involve some weird PETA-type fixation on the suffering of animals. I could certainly make a tenuous connection between the two, but the movie doesn't even try. It merely shows that this is one bad muthah who can kill anyone he wants at any time, and then has him go insane, which involves hacking up hunters in the American northwest.
Heeeeerrreeeesssss Tommy! Tommy Lee Jones yet again plays a cantakerous take-charge know-it-all veteran. This time he trained Benecio's character and only he can take him down. As Tommy hunts Benecio, the latter seems to possess some sort of magical teleport ability because he can seemingly come out of nowhere, whack you, and in a split second disappear, despite the lack of cover anywhere nearby. I mean, elite training is one thing, but this guy makes Gandalf look like a charlatan!
Now throw in some lame without-a-clue FBI agents and what you end up with is a ho-hum actioner that is as predictable as a Vegas slot machine...you lose.
Tommy and Benecio's characters get to meet several times. They fight. First with hands, then with knives (in this movie, no one can hit anyone with guns...even trained SWAT team members and FBI agents) they duel, bleed, and one of them dies. Guess which?
When I find myself falling asleep during an action movie, you know something has gone horribly horribly wrong.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
A really surprisingly classy movie that combines action elements with a very nice skein of character development and a social conscience. Bruce Willis stars as the commander of an elite "delta force" type squadron of the US armed forces called upon to extract an American doctor from a deteriorating civil war situation in Nigeria. When the force arrives, the doctor refuses to leave without taking a large group of indigenous personnel with her, for fear that death squads will torture and/or kill them if they remain. Although off-mission, Willis agrees and puts himself and his men in jeopardy in his attempt to save the indigenous persons from the coming menace.
There's plenty of combat here to satisfy action fans, and Bruce Willis really knows how to blend fully the super-hero archetype with the ordinary and vulnerable person archetype. He did this well in Diehard and continues this in Tears of the Sun. The Nigerian refugees, at first seemingly background, slowly move to the fore and become less plot devices and more characters in their own rights, full of fear, fight, flight, treachery. In other words, real people. You end up caring not just for Willis, but for the refugees as well.
The movie is timely, for it's main theme, stated explicitly at the end, is that when good men do not stand up against evil, evil thrives. This is something to remember given the war against Iraq raging right as this movie was released into theatres.
Combat is presented realistically. Even the American elite forces are vulnerable and afraid at time, though thoroughly professional. My only complaint about the movie is that the end clearly went for the tears and lasted a bit too long in an effort to jerk tears from the audience. Yeah, it was effective, and many in the audience were crying, but it was a bit much. Then again, the movie is called "Tears of the Sun", so maybe in this case they get a bit of a pass from me.
All in all though, quite a fine movie and an excellent blend of combat and character.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World****
I am a sucker for "Ship-of-the Line" movies. I loved Horatio Hornblower and The Bounty, so my predilections may come through a bit here. Nevertheless, the film is right up there with the classics of the genre, ably displaying the realities of life aboard a confining wooden "coffin" for days on end as well as the horrors of 19th century shipboard battle.
Taken from author O'Brian's twenty novel series, and specifically from two of those books, the film follows Captain Aubrey as he and his crew chase the French privateer Acheron around the Cape Horn and into the Pacific Ocean. Russell Crowe does a sterling job in melding Aubrey with some of the discipline of Captain Bligh, the amiability of Fletcher Christian, and the seamanship of Hornblower. He becomes a man you respect, even if you are aware of his faults.
Aubrey's foils are both the French captain of the Acheron, and his erstwhile friend and sometimes Pacifist the ship's doctor. And while we learn little of the former, for the story is told entirely through the eyes of the British crew of HMS Surprise, we delve fairly deeply into the interplay between the Doctor and Captain Aubrey.
Of course, in the end this is not a character study, but a historical action piece, and while the movie smartly does not hang its hat entirely on the action sequences, it recognizes that the audience is there to sea rough seas, wet men, and cannons a-blazing. These scenes are entirely well done, a nice blend of live shots and computer imaging that is relatively seemless unless one is leaning forward in one's seat trying to spot them. The battles are realistic enough, though I daresay there wasn't much in the way of tactics or maneuvering once these battles were joined. It seemed to be a case of whomever got the first shot off won. That may be realistic in terms of one-on-one ship combats of the era, but I do miss some of the maneuvering that preceded ship battles in others of this genre.
That said, the fighting is suitably loud and bloody to lend authenticity. We get to learn how these men fight and what it takes to bring down a ship larger and better armed than one's own.
And finally, to the film's inestimable credit, the writers and director resisted what must have been incredible pressure to include a love interest for Russell Crowe. Leave the beautiful damsel in distress who is picked up, initially hates the captain, is despised by the crew, and then falls in love with the captain to those 1950's pirate movies. Women had no place on board an English ship of the line, and aside from a few Brazilian harlots, there are none in this movie at all. I tip my cap to this bit of realism in place of Hollywood B.S.
Overall, there is almost nothing to dislike about this movie. You get a well acted yarn of the sea, well choreographed sea battles, nothing too ahistorical, and a fine portrayal of an admirable yet flawed Captian Aubrey. I highly recommend this movie.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ****
An absolutely wonderful and somewhat disorienting movie by the master of disorientation, Charles Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), this movie starts Jim Carrey is probably his most understated role since hitting the big time. Carrey is an introverted almost nebbish man who is trying to get over his recent breakup with Kate Winslet, a spitfire and hellion of a woman with an almost insane zest for life. When his yin starts to butt against her yang, the couple breaks up. She engages the services of an experimental treatment that erases a person and certain events in your life from your memory. When the jilted Carrey learns of this, he also engages the services of a memory wipe as a tit-for-tat measure.
The bulk of the movie involves the deconstruction of the relationship between the two, in a decidely stream of conscience and non-linear fashion. Like many good non-linear movies, there are many questions raised at the beginning of the movie that are slowly pulled together towards the end. I will not ruin the movie for the reader by giving anything away, but suffice to say there are plenty of surprises and twists and turns, as Kaufman has absolute free rein here to play with time, reality, and cause and effect.
The movie is a good one in spite of the temporal machinations involved. By that I don't mean to suggest the temporal distortions are bad or detract from the movie. They are indeed a wonderful part of the film and help to provide insight into the relationship by juxtaposing events in a thematic order rather than a chronological order. But, in many cases such a device could overwhelm the rest of the movie. However, both Carrey and Winslet do an outstanding job of protraying their relationship as real, rather than just a jigsaw puzzle to be put back together. You actually are intrigued by these people, to the point that even if the story had been an entirely linear one, the relationship itself would have made a compelling story.
In many ways, this is a nerd's love story. A thinking man's romance. It forces you to examine the very structure of relationships as it tears one down block-by-block on the screen before you. An exceptionally well done film.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
An H.P. Lovecraft adaptation by Stuart Gordon, the blood-fest meister of Re-Animator fame, I can say, as a fan of Lovecraft, that Dagon is both the best Lovecraft adaption on the market and, at the same time, a rather poor movie overall. This just goes to show you the sorry state of affairs of Lovecraft on the silver screen.
The film is based on the classic Lovecraft short story "Shadows Over Innsmouth", and details the horrific goings on in a small fishing village on the coast of Spain where the villagers have taken to worshipping Dagon, an Elder God from the depths of the ocean. When Paul (sporting a Miskatonic U. sweatshirt) and his new bride and some friends have their sailboat wash onto some reefs near the village of Boca, they make their way to the village to try to get some help. What they find, instead, are increasingly creepy villagers who are obviously hiding some sinister secret. It is now up to Paul and the others to escape the village before they become intimately acquainted with the secret of the village...firsthand!
This is a low budget movie; a coproduction with several Spanish film-makers, and this shows in the somewhat cheesy effects and the setting. Half of the dialogue is in Spanish, but I was able to follow everything even without activating the English subtitles on my DVD. The real problem with the movie is that it is too short. One of Lovecraft's strengths is his slow buildup of atmosphere, even in his short stories. And while the film does a decent job of trying to invoke the Lovecraftian genre (chants of Ia Ia Cthulhu n'ftaghn are right out of the Lovecraft books), the make-up effects are sometimes downright laughable, the villagers at times looking less like Deep Ones as described by Lovecraft and more like rejects from a zombie movie. In addition, the secret of the village is pretty much out of the bag from the beginning. In the first few minutes after Paul enters the village, we see unblinking villagers, villagers with gills, villagers shambling around, et al. A little more buildup would have been nice.
Despite these defects, a fan of Lovecraft can sense tha Gordon truly loves Lovecraft, has respect for the genre, and did his best with the limited tools at his disposal. A quick shot of the god Dagon is awesome, and the final sacrifice scene and ending are very Lovecraftian. No happy Hollywood endings here my friends! But a grotesque skinning scene late in the movie is way too long and way too graphic...more evocative of Hellraiser than Lovecraft. I could have done without that.
There are few cheap scares in the movie. Little of things leaping out at you or of hapless victims backing into bad guys. But there is also little in the way of spooky atmosphere or rising tension or dynamic revelation, the hallmarks of Lovecraft. What you instead have is basically an hour and a half of some fishy ombies chasing a nerdy guy around a creepy Spanish fishing village.
One day someone needs to get a decent budget and do Lovecraft properly.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ****
Peter Jackson finishes up his Box Office triumph and mighty nice adaption of Tolkien's classic with his final installment. Like the book, most of the movie involves battles, and the one conducted outside of Minas Tirith is quite well done, with superb special effects, and awesome production design. The trebuchets are nicely rendered, and the oliphants of the Easterlings make their appearance yet again, to spectacular effect. This movie is about as faithful to the books as the previous two were, perhaps slightly moreso since so much of it is battle and combat, which is hard to veer from given its chaotic and non-specific nature.
On the other side of Mordor, Frodo and Sam and Gollum continue their journey into the Black Land, and this entire sequence is also nicely done, from the battle with Shelob to the betrayal of Gollum.
The film is quite long, and the most common complaint from most moviegoers is the very drawn out ending. For most non-Tolkien afficianados, the perfect Hollywood ending would be the scene atop Minas Tirith where the hobbits are feted by all of Gondor. This is very reminiscent of the first Star Wars ending. But the film then has the hobbits departing from Gondor and saying goodbye to various friends and then making their hellos in the Shire. At this point, too, most of the audience thought the movie would end. But it goes on further, with Frodo's recurring wound and the departure to the Grey Havens. As the last ship is leaving Middle Earth, the audience once again expects the credits to roll. But Jackson keeps it going, as Sam returns home and finally closes the door to his hole, with Rosie Cotton and his daughter in hand. Then the credits roll.
This is actually very true to the books, and for Tolkien fans it is very important. But the choice is strange considering how much else Jackson chose to leave out of all of the trilogy and even this installment. Denethor's insanity and his burning at the pyre is very hasty and ill-edited, hinting of a pretty extensive addition for the extended DVD version. Likewise, Frodo's capture in the Tower of Cirith Ungol and Sam's rescue of him therefrom is very glossed over. There is almost no Mordor here. The two hobbits leave Cirith Ungol in orc disguise and spend ten seconds watching troops head for the Black Gate to fight the army of Gondor, and then bam, they are at Mount Doom. No sense of the miserable journey they had to make in the book. Again, it is said that the extended version has both of these omissions corrected.
I also missed the budding relationship between Faramir and Eowyn in the Houses of Healing in Gondor. The final scene in Minas Tirith hints of such a relationship, so it is likely played up int he extended version, but audiences in the theatre were basically left hanging on the whole Eowyn plot line.
That said, this movie is still a marvel and a spectacle, and completely does justice to the previous two movies, capping one of the best and most successful movie epics in cinema history. The extended version is likely, along with its extended mates, to take its place amongst the pantheon of classics of cinema.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
This George Roy Hill adaption of one of Kurt Vonnegut's classic novels is in many ways similar to The World According to Garp in both tone and structure. The story, ostensibly, is the life story of one Billy Pilgrim. Billy is an otherwise rather ordinary man in a rather extraordinary circumstance. You see, he has become unstuck in time. He experiences the entirety of his life in discrete, episodic fragments that seem to occur in random order rather than sequentially. We , the audience, experience this non-linearity in the same fashion.
Pilgrim experiences his absurd childhood, his service as a chaplain in WW2, his time in a German POW camp and the bombing of Dresden, life as a middle aged husband, his time on the Planet Tralfamador with a porn star in an alien zoo, and eventually his own death. All in bits and pieces.
The tone of the movie is both comic, internally within each fragment and from the juxtaposition and collision between adjacent fragments, and tragic, for we know Billy's ultimate fate but, like a trainwreck, we cannot swerve from it. Nor can he. The movie touches upon issues of fate, heaven and hell, the nature of life and death, the absurdity of war, the noble banality of middle class suburbanity, and ultimately shows, like Garp, that life is a set of events. It's the journey that matters, not the outcome. The structure forces Billy and us to examine each fragment on its own merits, without trying to determine where it is leading or where it has come from. From these pieces, a profound picture eventually emerges.
Initially, the viewer may be quite confused with the movie. But Hill slowly pulls in the coil of his rope, drawing the fragments into a tighter and tighter bundle until, at the end, it is pretty much rolled up into a tight ball and ends up making sense. This is very important for non-linear plots, which can otherwise seem either confusing or self-indulgent. Slaughterhouse Five is neither. It is noble. It is funny. It is goofy. It is heartwarming. It is tragic. It is ironic. It is wonderful.
The acting is consistently well done here. Billy Pilgrim is played with a very dry and sardonic, almost droll wit. His wife is suitably ditsy and pathetic. Billy's army comrades are also well done, and even Valerie Perrine as the porn star with whom Billy is trapped on Tralfamador does an adequate job. While the acting and dialogue is certainly not as dry as Bedazzled, it is still suitably underkey, which actually lends poignancy to even the sillier moments.
The soundtrack for the film is at times exquisite. The most amazing scene is when Billy and his dog wake up in bed, sit on the edge of the bed, and stare out at the night sky as a single star slowly emerges and begins to grow larger...the spaceship coming to take them to Tralfamador. The piano score during this scene and the scene itself is immensely profound. It reminds me of dying and ascending to heaven.
I highly recommend this film.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
The best movie ever made. Bar none. There is not a wasted scene in the film. There is not a single weak point in this film. It is an amazing work. Full of pathos and symbolism. Full of romance and heartbreak. Full of comedy and tragedy. Full of music and dancing. Full of brutal reality and immense fantasy. The story is both linear and fragmented. There are stories embedded within stories. Yet is all is woven together by director Bob Fosse into an autobiographical symphony. Every scene serves a purpose. Every scene advances the story and contributes to it.
The story is, indeed, autobigraphical. Roy Scheider (who got the role after Richard Dreyfuss backed out) plays Joe Gideon, Fosse's alter-ego. Joe is one screwed-up man. He treats women as sex objects, sleeps around, and lies to get them into bed. He seems incapable of giving and accepting genuine love. His marriage has dissolved, and he is a consummate workaholic, simultaneously directing and editing a motion picture about a stand up comic (a thinly veiled representation of the film Lenny) and a massive Broadway musical. He smokes, drinks, and pops a variety of pills (legal and illegal) to keep himself going. He ignores and neglects his young daughter, who desperately yearns for a father figure. In other words, he is a real a-hole.
It is only until Gideon reaps what he has sown, in the form of a massive coronary, that he finally begins to regret the ultimate shallowness of his life. And by then, it is too little to late.
On its surface, the plot might be mildly interesting, but Fosse is hardly content to simply tell this tale. It explodes onto the screen. There are fantasy sequences, with a amazing amount of symbolism if you really pay attention. In fact, the film bears multiple viewings to catch everything. Most central of the symbols is Jessica Lange, who plays a mysterious fantasy lady in white. Only later in the movie do we learn her identity. Gideon views life itself as a big production...a stage show, and the film often shows his life in this fashion, especially during the amazing hospital sequence when, under the influence of painkillers, Gideon begins to hallucinate.
But beyond that Fosse's adept dialogue, coreography, and use of sound are simply spectacular. In one scene Gideon is at a first read for his play. As his actors are seated around a table reading his script and laughing, he begins to experience the first symptoms of his heart attack. Fosse cuts off all sound except for the most intimate sounds generated by Gideon. These are magnified. His breathing. Scratching his head. Snapping a pencil in his fingers. Smoking his cigarette. Dropping his butt on the floor and stamping it out with his shoe. Rubbing his left wrist. It's a poigant moment, for Gideon is suddenly brought out of his all-consuming world and forced, by his own body, to focus entirely on himself.
Other wonderful scenes include three touching moments, one where Gideon finally relates with his daughter for a few minutes during a practice dance, another where Gideon and his ex-wife conduct a wonderful dialogue that is expertly mirrored by their dance moves, and a last where Gideon and a hospital janitor sing "Pack Up Your Troubles".
Additionally, there is an excellent sequence where, after Gideon has his heart attack, the producers of his show try to hire another director (John Lithgow) and then eventually determine, in a board room full of accountants, that they stand to make more money if the show never opens. Hilarious and, sadly, quite true (I know this firsthand).
And then there are the dance scenes. I normally hate musicals. Despise them in fact. But the musical numbers in this movie are in context (Gideon is producing a musical, and we get to see several wonderful numbers from that play) or part of drug induced hallucinations (and it is logical that Gideon, a director of musicals, would dream in musicals). Many of these scenes are classics, including the erotic "Take Off With Us" and the mind blowing finale with the song "Bye Bye Love".
These are not the only standout moments in the movie. In fact, to point them all out would practically require me transcribing the entire script into this review. The movie is that dense and that filled with substance. It's flabbergasting what a genius Fosse was in the making of this film.
So what, besides Bob Fosse exercising his personal demons, is the story about? It's about, ultimately, deciding what is important in life, and how we need to recognize and prioritize our lives so that we can leave with few or no regrets. It's about taking a long hard look at notions of success in life and seeing whether they ring hollow. It is about living and dying, and how in doing either you are doing both. It's about love and life and all that jazz.
I can recommend no other movie as highly as this one. It is an absolute must-see.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
The World According to Garp *****
George Roy Hill took on the daunting task of translating John Irving's amazing novel to the silver screen. Like Slaughterhouse Five, the movie is episodic. Unlike Slaughterhouse Five, the movie is entirely linear. Yet, despite this chronological fidelity, the movie is still chock full of fated tragedy, foreshadowing, and a very circular feeling to it.
On its surface, the movie concerns a man named Garp, who is born into the world under very peculiar circumstances to a very peculiar mother, Jenny Fields. Jenny is a nurse who eventually becomes a famous feminist after writing a manifesto that strikes a chord with women worldwide. Meanwhile, Garp yearns to be a writer, and he eventually succeeds, though his serious efforts are overshadowed by the almost spontaneous success of his mother's work. Nonetheless, Garp marries, raises a family, and must negotiate through a series of tragedies punctuated by moments of joy.
The World of Garp is punctuated by all sorts of odd characters and odd moments. There is Jenny Fields, who raped a dying man to conceive her son and who becomes a feminist icon while still walking around in a nurse's outfit. There is Roberta Muldoon, an ex-NFL player who is becoming a woman. There are the Ellen Jamesians, who have cut out their tongues to protest a little child whose tongue was cut out to keep her from reporting her rape. There is the plane that crashes into the house Garp is buying. There is a strange truck driver who refuses to stop at stop signs. No one in the movie is remotely normal. Everyone is damaged goods in one way or another.
Robin Williams plays Garp, and Glenn Close plays Jenny Fields. John Lithgow plays Roberta. All do a fantastic job, with Lithgow winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Williams performs admirably, and though he occasionally lapses into his "Robin Williams" persona, he still manages to play Garp well and make him endearing rather than annoying. Close manages to imbue Jenny Fields will the right combination of nursely sincerity, and a sort of menacing naivete. Other supporting cast are also well done, including Garp's children.
The story is, as previously mentioned, episodic, with moments of tragedy followed by moments of joy. But one of the most amazing facets of the movie is that, if you watch very closely, it appears as if everyone knows what is about to happen before it does. Everything is foreshadowed and, interestingly, most of the characters in the story seem to recognize this fact. The foreshadowing is not just for the benefit of the audience. The movie purports to show that life foreshadows itself. But even knowing their fates, the characters continue to live their lives to the fullest, for to live life, even a brief one, is better than hiding from life and living to a ripe old age. Life is a thing to be embraced.
Ultimately, The World According to Garp is about the nature of life. That life is cyclic. That children become adults, and then those children become adults, become parents, grow old, and die. That each life has distinct phases, and there is something to be reveled in at each stage. That it is composed of a series of events, and each event is like a page that goes to make up a book...the book of a life. Even the bad times. Even the most horrible parts of life such as the death of a loved one, are merely chapters in the book. And what makes a life worth living is simply experiencing it.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
Look, unless you have a child going along with you or are a player of the Yu-Gi-Oh card game you shouldn't even be considering this movie in the first place, no matter how good or bad it might be. The animation doesn't even rate a look by anime fans. But the movie is true to the cartoon series on TV, so basically if you like the cartoon series, you will like the movie. Oh, and if you don't watch the cartoon series or are not a total gaming geek who can pick up the rules of a collectible card game you will be completely lost...so don't even try.
I personally am a gaming geek and I did bring my child, who enjoys the cartoon series, to the movie. So I have a step up on this thing.
The movie is a continuation of the cartoon series (i.e. more of the same, but for 1.5 hours). The setting postulates a world where in ancient times an Egyptian pharoah contested with Anubis, a dark sorcerer, through proxies in the form of creatures tied to a game. The dark sorcerer and his creatures, who wanted to destroy the world, were eventually imprisoned in some unspecified extra-dimensional prison which key is a pyramid shaped puzzle.
Flash forward to the present day, where a man named Pegasus has quasi resurrected the powers of the ancient game in his design of a Yu-Gi-Oh card game. When a young lad named Yugimoto (who happens to be the Yu-Gi-Oh world champion) inadvertantly reassembles the pyramid puzzle, Anubis begins to stir. But he needs power to fully arise, and so he possesses a nemesis of Yugi's named Sento. Sento believes he should be the world champion card player and is jealous of Yugimoto. This makes him easy pickings for Anubis, who convinces him to trap Yugimoto in a high tech version of the card game. Anubis then links himself to the game, and as each of the two card players loses points in the game, their souls are drained and used to awaken Anubis.
Simple huh?
The heart of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe is the game, and in the cartoon it is played on holographic fields where the monsters represented by the cards actually appear and battle it out. The game battles involve a lot of talking and blustering and the combatants tend to have to explain the powers of every card they play out loud so that we, the audience, have some clue about what's going on. This makes little sense, since in reality the players would likely know the abilities of almost any card played, and it can get a bit tedious after a while.
The animation is not horrible, but it's on the level of Pokemon, Japanime with no artistic merit whatsoever, and the story is essentially a blur of card battles punctuated by a chase through an Escher-like dimension full of stupid mummies whom the characters spend a lot of time running away from, though why they are so afraid is unclear since when they finally do turn to fight they easily defeat the mummies.
When distilled to its essence, the movie is a long commercial for the real Yu-Gi-Oh collectible card game.
Return to the Movie Reviews Table of Contents.
| Return to the Family Room | |