Swing Vote is yet another one of these movies that I would never have rented and probably have never watched but I am nonetheless reviewing. Why? Because when you are on a five-hour flight and this is what they offer, it’s what you watch. In addition, if you expect to have a busy week in Arizona, a quick movie review lets you get out a blog entry without investing too much time.
The movie is at least topical, with an election just three weeks away. In this movie, an incumbent Republican President Boone (Kelsey Grammer) is running for a second term is in a close reelection contest with liberal Senator Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) from New England. It just so happens that the electoral vote is tied 270-270, with New Mexico being the swing state. New Mexico though it precisely tied, with exactly one vote in dispute.
The vote belongs to Bud Johnson, played by Kevin Costner. Bud is frankly a wreck of a man who also comes with the baggage being a mostly mentally absentee father. He lives in the hitherto unknown town of Houston, New Mexico in a trailer with his prepubescent daughter Molly played by Madeline Carroll. Molly would prefer to live with her estranged mother, who is even more of a wreck than her father is. Molly though is an unusually smart and perceptive girl. She tries to persuade her father to vote, but voting is the farthest thing from his mind. Color him politically apathetic.
On voting day, Molly waits for her father to pick her up after school. Bud is a bit distracted from losing his job at the egg packaging plant and elects to get drunk instead. For some reason Molly thinks that he may be late because he went to vote instead. When she checks out the polling station, she finds it empty with just one sleeping poll worker in attendance. So she surreptitiously attempts to vote for her father. However, the electricity is cut off in the middle of her voting attempt. That is why the vote is in dispute.
Costner does a decent job of portraying a born loser with a happy go lucky attitude, which at least is a much different kind of part for him. Politics though is the farthest thing from Bud’s mind, which is why when some people from the Board of Elections accost him, he is surprised. He is too drunk though to answer coherently, so his daughter assists. For some reason election officials decide to wait ten days before he will recast his ballot and thus select the next President of the United States. Bud’s identity eventually becomes known, thanks to an intrepid and cute local TV news reporter played by Paula Patton.
With the leadership of the free world at state, President Boone and Senator Greenleaf and their staffs relocate to New Mexico with the sole duty of trying to persuade Bud to vote for them. Bud’s likes and dislikes quickly are probed and analyzed, but essentially Bud is too drunk and incoherent to give much in the way of thought about weighty national issues. He soon finds hundreds of people and press camped outside his trailer day and night, as well as stacks of mail from ordinary Americans pleading for him to vote for their preferred candidate.
So the movie veers between light comedy and an uncomfortably intimate portrait of a dysfunctional man and his daughter. If there is a star to this movie though it is not lead Kevin Costner, but Madeline Carroll, whose portrayal of Molly Johnson is startling for its maturity and quality. There is little meat to this movie although it has its moments of poignancy. You have better uses of your time than to rent this movie, but if you see it nonetheless you may find a few endearing qualities that make it not a complete waste of your time.
2.8 on my 4.0 scale.
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October 12th, 2008 at 01:20am
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Washington Post movie reviewer Ann Hornaday says the recently released movie Ghost Town falls into the genre of “the Really Good Movie”. Because it has been a while since I had seen a really good movie my wife and I made a point of going to see it.
I am not sure I would throw Ghost Town into the really good movie category, but I can comfortably place it in the pretty darn good movie category. This is probably because except for the last twenty minutes of so, Ghost Town, while often interesting and amusing, is also difficult to endure.
Specifically, it is difficult to watch Bertram Pincus, D.D.S., a generally loathsome character portrayed by British character actor Ricky Gervais. Pincus suffers from a fatal flaw: irritable man syndrome. In real life when you encounter someone like this antisocial dentist, you would immediately move to the other side of the room. In Ghost Town, since Pincus is the lead character, you have to inhabit his word for 102 minutes. Pincus is a dentist who moved from London to New York City because he hates crowds (go figure). He works in a multi-partner dental practice in Manhattan. He likes his profession in part because he so rarely needs to have meaningful conversation with anyone. Mostly he wants to be left alone. At the end of his workday, he is completely comfortable retiring to his condominium. He is not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge except he is not obsessed with thriftiness and has a gentle self-deprecating sense of humor.
Pincus must have hit the big 5-0 because he reluctantly checks into the hospital for a colonoscopy. In doing so, he also manages to irritate everyone on the staff. After he wakes up, he discovers that he can see ghosts. Apparently, while in the operating room he was technically dead for seven minutes. Unfortunately, he cannot distinguish between ghosts and real people, which makes life very confusing. Moreover, the ghosts wandering around Manhattan are there because they have some unfinished business. Pincus is their sole conduit with the living. Because he is a loner and ghosts have little respect for his privacy, this is quite annoying. In addition, they sure are persistent, following him en masse around the city and occupying the spare seats in the dental office. He sometimes has to invent clever ruses to escape them. One of the ghosts is Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear). While in the process of setting up a love nest for some hanky panky, Frank had an unfortunate encounter with a falling air conditioner. Frank latches onto Pincus with more force than a lamprey’s mouth to the hull of a ship. This is due to the convenient fact that Pincus just happens to live in the same apartment complex as his wife.
Pincus, being an irritable man, has hardly endeared himself with Frank’s wife Gwen (Téa Leoni). In fact, he has repeatedly ignored her requests to hold the elevator door and refused to share cabs with her. Yet in order to get Frank to leave him alone he must help him with some unfinished business with Gwen. Since Kinnear also excels in playing irritable characters, Bertram and Frank become a new Odd Couple somehow deserving of each other. Unlike Pincus, Frank at least is attractive or was before he had his encounter with immortality. To rid himself of Frank, Pincus finds that he must try to develop a friendship with Gwen. It proves an uphill task, made worse by Pincus’s pathological tendency to say the worst possible things at the worst possible time.
What makes this all endurable is its underlying light comedy. Pincus may be irritable, but he is irritable in a largely benign way that usually lacks in overt hostility. Over time, we learn that much of his irritability can be traced to a past relationship whose baggage still weighs him down. The same was true with Ebenezer Scrooge.
The light humor and the potpourri of ancillary characters make the movie generally endurable but as a moviegoer, you have to ask, toward what end? This becomes clear in the last twenty minutes of the film, causing the film to become unexpectedly poignant and endearing. God (or at least scriptwriters) works in mysterious ways.
Ghost Town is a solid B+ of a movie. At times, it drags and feels a bit slow. You may find that its light humor is not enough to make you endure Pincus and want to exit the theater instead. However, if you make it all the way through, rest assured that your patience will be rewarded.
3.1 on my 4.0 scale.
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September 24th, 2008 at 05:27pm
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Am I the last person to review this movie? Somehow, I doubt it but there probably will not be many more reviews after mine. The movie was released on July 18 and I did not see it until the Labor Day Weekend. Hey, I’ve been busy. Had I spent my teenage years reading Batman comic books, perhaps I would have been at its first midnight show.
My wife and I did manage to see it before it snuck out of theaters, but not before the movie grossed more than half a billion dollars. It seems likely to hold the record for highest grossing movie for at least several years, perhaps until the next Batman movie comes out. Are those kind of gross box office receipts warranted?
Maybe. The public has voted two thumbs way up. Every critic has noted the late Heath Ledger’s outstanding performance as the twisted Batman arch-nemesis, The Joker. Cesar Romero he is not. I will echo that he gives a fine performance and certainly makes the movie. I have not seen many of his movies so I cannot say whether it truly was his greatest performance, but given his short life it seems likely. Ledger makes The Joker a compelling character. It is hard not to find him far more interesting than Batman.
If you are going to make a Batman movie, you have to think big and have financiers with deep pockets. Suffice to say the producers literally blew a ton of money (up) in this movie. Even destroying the Batmobile was not enough; they had to destroy a hospital too. Clearly, the money was not wasted. I doubt though I am the only theatergoer that is becoming inured to special effects. They can be done so well these days that they have become trivialized. Special effects rarely elevate the story for me and the same is true here. The Dark Knight could have been just as good if they had spent half the money. The Joker’s wild criminal confluence is what is important. Within a week, he has turned Gotham City inside out and is close to unmasking Batman.
The story is fantasy of course, which is why it is easy to overlook minor plot points like how one master criminal could possibly whip up such calibrated mayhem in such a short period of time. But the whole Batman scenario is fantasy too. More than a few parts of this movie reminded me of V for Vendetta, which I reviewed and liked very much. Both V and The Joker clearly had their emerging psychos twisted and perturbed at an early age. At least V though has something of an altruistic motive. The Joker is more like a cat that enjoys toying with its prey before consuming it.
The movie succeeds at being fully engaging. Still, it has its flaws. One is its length. At two and a half hours, many people are not going to be able to sit through it without at least one dash to the rest room. For this movie, skip the soda and buy only the popcorn. Although an excellent movie, a half an hour could have been chopped from this movie. It would have been a better movie because it does tend to drag and feel muddled in places.
Most of the cast from Batman Begins is back and that includes cinematic luminaries like Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox. With its relentless focus on The Joker, Christian Bale as Batman seems almost ancillary. Katie Holmes, who first played prosecutor Rachel Dawes, must have been too busy raising babies and doing mysterious Scientology stuff with Tom Cruise to reenact her role. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I admired very much for her performance as Lee Holloway in Secretary (2002) gets the honors this time. Here though she hardly comes across as the sort of glamorous gal prosecutor with brains that would attract a billionaire like Bruce Wayne; in fact, she seems rather plain. I really liked Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Gordon in the first movie. He improves on his performance in this reprise. Aaron Eckhart won the role of prosecutor Harvey Dent and plays the role convincingly and with lots of gusto.
It is Heath Ledger though who steals the show and carries us off with it. We are in his demonic control from its first minutes. What a tragedy to lose Ledger, not just because he had such a promising career ahead of him, but because this role is impossible to adequately reprise without him. Consequently, the short-term profits of the Batman franchise are likely to take a tumble in subsequent installments.
Overall though I preferred Batman Begins. It is marginally the better movie, in part because it was more tightly directed and the story of Batman’s beginning was more compelling than Batman’s descent into darkness, which this film chronicles almost as an afterthought near its end. It is likely that Batman Begins, with it relatively more modest box office receipts, will be seen as the best movie in this franchise when it finally retires.
This movie rates 3.3 on my 4.0 scale.
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September 9th, 2008 at 08:24pm
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Isaac Asimov may have died in 1992, but his writing has immortalized him. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited over five hundred books. I was fortunate enough to meet Isaac Asimov, who showed up as a surprise guest at a science fiction convention in the mid 1980s in Arlington, Virginia. (He was notoriously fearful of flying, and only attended conventions he could get to by car or rail.) He remains the author of some of my favorite and most influential books, including the delightful Foundation Trilogy, a series that more than fifty years later still feels fresh and timeless.
Unquestionably, Asimov provided the frame for which most modern science fiction evolved. It should be heartening then to know that one of his most famous books, I, Robot, actually a collection of nine stories loosely organized around Dr. Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist for U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., made it to the big screen in 2004.
Sadly, this big screen adaptation is barely recognizable. We have Dr. Susan Calvin, still a robopsychologist, and we have the three laws of robotics clearly spelled out by Asimov in his stories and not too much else. For this reason the credits say it was adapted from Asimov’s stories. Moreover, of course it was modernized for the 21st century. The year is 2035 and the place is Chicago, which is home to the U.S. Robots, Inc. U.S. Robots is the premier robot manufacturer for the planet. There is nearly one robot for every five humans. Thus far, robots have proven to be wholly benign. They do much of society’s scut work.
Will Smith plays Homicide Detective Del Spooner, who is called to U.S. Robots to investigate what appears to be the homicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning, its creator and the inventor of the three rules of robots, the most important of which is that a robot is never allowed to harm a human being. It is soon clear that Detective Spooner has this thing against robots as well as most things new, even to the point of driving a motorcycle without automation controls and wearing a pair of 2004 canvas sneakers (product placement!) Nonetheless, he has more than a casual connection with the late Dr. Lanning because as we learn his left arm is a robotic arm, surgically applied some years back by none other than Dr. Lanning himself.
Dr. Lanning seems to have jumped to his death from his office at U.S. Robots, but Detective Spooner soon ascertains he could not have done so unaided, and begins to suspect that a rouge robot killed him. That is supposed to be impossible but it is the only plausible explanation he can come up with. The suggestion does not sit well with Lawrence Robertson, the CEO of U.S. Robots, who is in the midst of rolling out a new higher class of robot to the world.
That is as much of the plot as I need give away. Ably assisted by the CGI wizards at Weta Studios in New Zealand, Director Alex Proyas creates a convincing vision of Chicago in 2035, a city transformed by automation and the omnipresent robot. The city still has a gritty feel to it but thanks to many robots as well as V.I.K.I., the master computer of U.S. Robots, humans are freed from tedious jobs like collecting trash and tending bars. These robots look much modernized from the metallic things that were illustrated in the pulp magazines back in the 1940s.
Will Smith is both one of the executive producers and stars in this movie. Women may appreciate the many scenes of him with his shirt off. With all his rippling muscles, I figure he must spend his hours off the set doing nothing but lifting weights and taking steroids. While Smith is an excellent actor, as I noted in movies like this one, I do not feel he was the best choice for this particular role. Nor is Bridget Moynahan as Dr. Susan Calvin. Still, both are good actors and willing to give their best to their parts, which results in dutiful performances but little in the way of stellar acting.
You would expect a robot movie to be cerebral, but Director Proyas instead gives audience more of what they are likely craving: action sequences with lots of special effects. This helps to make up for the minimal suspense in the movie. It is soon clear that there are at least some rogue robots out there and it is only a question of figuring out why they are acting in this manner and who is responsible.
There a few plot holes and gaffes. It is unclear why the older class robots are stored in old shipping containers along Lake Michigan instead of being disassembled and recycled. Perhaps it made for some neat climactic ending scenes. I also noted one scene in which Spooner twists an officer’s arm with his non-robotic right arm. Overall, though if you like lots of special effects and action, there is little to disappoint in this movie other than its rather shallow plot.
The movie gets an A for the special effects and stunts, but a mere B for the acting, and a C for the plot that leaves little in the way of hard cognitive thinking. So overall the movie disappoints, which is why I give it just 2.8 on my 4.0 scale. It is worth watching if you have nothing more compelling to watch, but not worth going out of your way to see.
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September 1st, 2008 at 11:43am
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Tags: Movies, Science Fiction
Every few years an “end of the world as we know it” flick or two shows up. We have had more than our share of these films recently including The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Children of Men (2006) and more recently I Am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith. Of the three, you can definitely skip The Day After Tomorrow, you absolutely must see Children of Men and you should try to work in I Am Legend if you possibly can. While this film is not quite as good as Children of Men, it is fine end of the world entertainment.
There is a bit of formula in all these movies. This one follows the “we made a cure that went wrong” formula. A scientist discovers a way to cure all known cancers. Presumably, there was initially much rejoicing, but the rejoicing did not last long. The cure apparently mutated into an infectious disease that ends up killing ninety percent of the human race. Of those who remain, the vast majority mutate into albino man-eating vampires who recoil at sunlight but who spend their nights in search of prey. This explains why Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith), a research scientist, has steel shutters and doors for his tony Manhattan abode, which are closed promptly at sundown. He sleeps in the bathtub with a loaded gun. His house also has a lab in the basement where the research geneticist works feverishly to find a cure for this disease.
Fortunately, to keep himself fed and amused, there is plenty of plunder in Manhattan, but it is a lonely life. Aside from his basement research to engage his mind, he has only his dog Sam for company. Sam is his last link with his family. While his wife and young son sought refuge outside the city, he elected to stay in Manhattan so he could work on a cure for the disease. In flashbacks, we watch his family leave the city in dramatic fashion. Apparently, the virus first began to spread in New York City. The government quarantined the city, even to the extent of blowing up the bridges leading into the city. Dr. Neville is one of the less than one percent of the population who is immune to the virus. This is fortunate because he is also perhaps the only person left who can find a cure for the disease.
Unfortunately, lurking in the dark skyscrapers and warehouses of Manhattan there remain many of these crazed albino mutants. If he can capture one of them, he can use them to see if one of his potential cures can work. Needless to say, his success rate thus far has been zero.
No question about it though, these mutants are bat-shit crazy, which is why Dr. Neville makes sure he is home before sunset. Nonetheless, he maintains a lonely vigil of visiting a pier along the Hudson River at noon each day. There he waits seemingly in vain for others like him to show up. He broadcasts a radio transmission that tells the world that he is alive and can offer food and shelter to survivors. Is anyone out there to hear him?
I Am Legend is something of a departure for Will Smith, who more typically is cast in more “black” roles. Acting in films like I, Robot, Smith is showing that he is a versatile actor who should not be typecast. Thankfully, Smith is up to the challenge of his eclectic role. He comes across as completely plausible as the obsessed research scientist. Smith gets to stretch his acting abilities quite a bit in this movie and it is all for the better. Not to spoil too much of the plot but two people eventually do respond to his broadcast, a woman named Anna (Alice Braga) and her son Ethan (Charlie Tahan). Anna tells Dr. Neville that there is a colony of survivors in Vermont and that they should join the others there. Dr. Neville is convinced that the colony, if it exists, is a trap. Moreover, he cannot leave his research, which seems promisingly close to finding a cure for the mutation. He also thinks that Anna is something of a nutcase, because she said that God told her to seek him out.
For a violent movie, it is often incredibly scary and yet not terribly gross, which is my favorite kind of violent movie. You may find yourself spending more time gripping the armrest of your chair than eating your popcorn. This is another one of those movies where I wonder how in the hell they made the movie, because it portrays an empty Manhattan where the deer run amok in the streets and grass is coming up through the pavement. No doubt, this magic took a lot of CGI and matte paintings. Much of it had to have been filmed in New York City, a city that never grinds to a halt.
There are a few convenient plot holes and inconsistencies, but nothing to really bother you. Chances are you will be too engaged by the movie to care. At 101 minutes it feels longer than it is. If we have to have more end of the world movies, more like I Am Legend, please.
3.3 on my 4.0 scale. Rent it!
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July 19th, 2008 at 09:43am
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Some movies are improved by having read the source material before seeing the movie. If you have, like my wife, then the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian should leave you entranced and very satisfied. As in my case, if you have not then this movie may not mean quite as much to you and may feel more than a bit formulaic.
Granted, I did see the first movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe back in 2005 and really liked it. The same actors playing the Pevensie children are back for the sequel, yet in the intervening three years they naturally look quite a bit older. At the rate they turn out these movies, the actors may mature long before their characters do in the books. All are competent actors for their young ages, but not always totally convincing in their parts. I found Anna Popplewell, who plays Susan Pevensie, disturbingly attractive, with her dark hair and eyes and gorgeous lithe figure. Susan can give Legolas a contest with the bow and arrow, and at least Anna Popplewell can act, unlike Orlando Bloom. I looked up Popplewell’s age in IMDB and she is above the age of consent, so I can feel good about lusting for her.
Sequels rarely live up to the original and that is the case with this movie. It is several hundred years later in Narnia, and the residents have grown complacent. Narnia is now mostly a myth and a council rules the land, since Prince Caspian is apparently too young to ascend the throne and his father is dead. Caspian, played by the boyish and devilishly handsome Ben Barnes, becomes a marked man the moment his aunt gives birth to a son. He is hustled out of the castle by Doctor Cornelius (Vincent Grass), a sort of Professor Dumbledore-lite because his evil Uncle Mirax uses the birth of his son to try to kill him and to put himself on the throne. Out in the woods Caspian meets the thought to be extinct creatures of Narnia. He blows a magical horn given to him by Doctor Cornelius, which has the effect of summoning Lucy, Edward, Peter and Susan back from London during the Blitz to Narnia. It is just as well for they have been itching to get back to Narnia anyhow. I guess dodging all those V-2 rockets isn’t exciting enough for them.
It takes them a while to realize the Narnia they left is largely gone and that many hundreds of years have elapsed. It is not too long before they encounter Narnia’s oppressed creatures and Prince Caspian, although there are the usual suspicions and fights you might expect as they straighten out the new pecking order. Aslan, the mysterious God-like largely benevolent lion seems to be absent. Only little Lucy sees him at all, and the others discount her sighting as the product of her overactive imagination. Uncle Mirax uses Prince Caspian’s departure to consolidate his hold on power and become the evil King Mirax.
Overpowered by his forces, the marginal forces of Narnia, led by King Peter, launch a night attack on the King’s castle. It is only partially successful and leads to many deaths. The Narnians are forced to retreat to a catacomb deep in the woods, but their eventual defeat of course seems inevitable against King Mirax’s superior army. Their only hope is for King Peter to challenge King Mirax to a dual to the death. Naturally, this tactic proves reasonably successful as King Mirax feels he must show his superior skills to his people.
So there is much swordsmanship, profuse sweating, battles mixing real and animated participants, glorious CGI and wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is pretty clear that with the book having its source in a series of Christian-oriented children’s books that good will triumph over evil somehow, if only the good residents of Narnia can show their moxie. Okay, I will spoil the plot: somehow, they do win against all odds. Aslan does show up at a rather anticlimactic point toward the end of the movie. Prince Caspian, aided by all the other youthful kings and queens around him, finds his courage and eventually claims his kingdom. The Pevensies get to return to London.
Still, the movie is not that much worse than its predecessor. In my opinion, you cannot film too many movies in glorious New Zealand. The acting is mostly competent all around. In addition, there are a number of new characters that add a lot of fun. One of them is Reepicheep, a swashbuckling mouse voiced by Eddie Izzard. Yet, the movie is at times confusing. Aslan when he appears speaks mostly in mystical mumbo jumbo. Considering the odds the Narnians faced, couldn’t he have arrived a wee bit sooner?
If you are a fan of the books, see the movie. If you have never read them, you will find this movie reasonably engaging, if predictable. Bring the kids, particularly if you want them to grow up with good Christian values. It is at least gloriously realized.
3.1 on my 4.0 scale.
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July 5th, 2008 at 10:25am
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As a general rule, all-digital pictures do not impress me. Generally, I get the feeling from these pictures that the phenomenal special effects are substituting for mediocre storylines. Granted, the wizards of digital effects seem to be making quantum leaps in the technology every few years. So it can be fun to attend a Pixar movie just to see what new tricks their team has assembled. But movies in this genre that actually draw me in are few and far between.
Thankfully, WALL-E is one of them. This movie is a delight for people of all ages, and that includes middle-aged men like me. It succeeds on virtually every level and comes perilously close to feeling like a classic. Maybe it is a classic. Sure Shrek, along with Shrek 2 and Shrek 3 were fun, but they were escapist entertainment. WALL-E though will surprise and delight you. It also feels very prophetic. Somewhere up in heaven, Dr. Seuss is smiling.
After its inhabitants abandoned it seven hundred years earlier, WALL-E is perhaps the only functioning robot left on Earth. It was built to compact trash and considering there is nothing much left of the planet but huge heaps of trash, WALL-E has plenty of work. By day he compacts trash by throwing it into an inner chamber. What emerges is a nice cube of compressed trash, which he symmetrically adds to the mounds of trash around him. WALL-E must have been programmed to take the nights off. He is smart enough to head indoors in the evenings, or whenever one of the frequent hellacious dust storms moves through the abandoned metropolis that he inhabits. For entertainment he watches a videotape of Hello Dolly! It is a pretty simple life but lonely. Except for one cockroach, he appears to be the only living thing left alive on the planet.
WALL-E stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth-Class” and I must say WALL-E does his job remarkably well. He is an unpretentious robot but also ingenious at ensuring his own survival. He even has something of an endearing personality and looks for interesting objects among the voluminous junk that he compacts. WALL-E is a simple and straightforward creature. If a hobbit could be a robot, he would be WALL-E. Except for a cockroach, WALL-E does not have is anything resembling companionship. That changes when another much more advanced robot called EVE is dropped off by a giant mother ship. EVE has oversized powers to move around and blow things up, but WALL-E is smitten with her blue robotic eyes and ultra clean design. Once EVE realizes that WALL-E is not dangerous, they make something of a robotic friendship. When suddenly one day the mother ship returns to retrieve EVE, WALL-E is panic stricken at the thought of losing his only friend. Somehow he manages to board the ship with EVE, who gets to report to her bloated human masters that a small plant that WALL-E has found has been recovered.
On the ship, WALL-E will discover humanity and we are not pleasant. We are extrapolations of the Internet craved denizens many of us already are: bloated to gargantuan proportion, endlessly obsessed with our computers and assisted by legions of robots to make sure we never have to move a finger. We sip concoctions provided by the beverage department of the BIG-n-LARGE Corporation, which owns this cruise ship. Humans have become so absorbed in their digital lives that they have only a vague idea where they are. BIG-n-LARGE, a 27th Century version of Wal-Mart caters to our every capitalist impulse. We have lost even our ability to walk. The mother ship has been on a 500-year cruise of distraction. It is only when biological sensors on EVE report that she has brought back to the ship something alive that this strangely myopic world of grossly obese human and robots gets a chance to discovers something called reality.
The parables for 21st century man are unmistakable. It was humorous at times to watch the animated humans on the screen munch on endless high calorie snacks while the humans next to me in the theater were likewise stuffing their gobs with all the wrong foods. Mostly though I was too enrapt in the story to give my fellow patrons much attention. Much of WALL-E is cinema magic: charming, engaging and cleverly realized. The artists at Pixar have rendered a macabre future Earth so real that much of it is indistinguishable from CGI.
Pulling off a movie like this is quite a trick, but director Andrew Stanton (who also co-wrote the screenplay) pulls it off. Just who is this Stanton fellow? It turns out that this is his genre. He wrote the screenplay for many other digital classics including Finding Nemo and Toy Story. WALL-E though is clearly his tour de force and it borders on genius.
How good is it? It is so good that I was dreaming about the movie all night long, remembering key parts of the dialog and singing snippets from Hello Dolly! from the movie days later. I can see myself owning the DVD when it comes out and enjoying it many times. It is so good that even though it is all computer-generated, I would put it on par with my favorite animated movie of all time, Spirited Away. It is also good enough where you will to want to see it in the theater. Even with a HD Blu-Ray player, seeing it in the theater will be a superior experience.
If seeking summer entertainment, WALL-E is guaranteed to push all the right buttons. Run, don’t walk, to your local theater. This movie may be a classic and you might just want to brag to your grandchildren that you saw it in an old-fashioned movie theater.
3.5 on my 4.0 scale, one of the few movies I have ever rated so high.
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June 30th, 2008 at 07:48pm
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For producers, the lure of disaster movies is understandable. They see dollar signs floating in front of their faces when they consider how much money some of the great disaster movies made. So why do so few disaster movies satisfy? Take The Day After Tomorrow, which the wife and I sat down and watched last night. Why is it that despite its impressive special effects and its overall decent acting it sucks so much?
The movie was timely, preceding the documentary An Inconvenient Truth by a full two years. The Day After Tomorrow suggests what might happen if we leave global warming unchecked. What could happen? Why another ice age, of course, and we are not talking about one that takes a few years to get going, but only needs a week to frost much of the top half of our planet.
Yeah, I had a hard time buying that too but apparently when enough glacial ice melts it changes the Gulf Stream, which makes certain spots in the Atlantic cooler than normal, which somehow causes a great atmospheric sucking sound. That would be massive amount of cool air pulled from the stratosphere. Soon the northern hemisphere is awash in super-sized arctic hurricanes. New York City is hit by a massive hurricane related storm surge, which quickly freezes over because the hurricane brings with it super cold air which seems to deep freeze everyone north of the Mason Dixon line.
Frankly, the CGI in the movie is very impressive. It must have taken a few supercomputers to digitize Manhattan and then apply all those fancy special effects that blow out windows on skyscrapers or send enormous a storm surge toward the New York City Public Library. Digitally lodging a Russian ship between skyscrapers must have been quite a trick too. The set for the New York City Public Library alone must have chewed up much of their budget.
Who is acting in this movie? We have a solid cast of actors including Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, a NOAA meteorologist with a penchant for talking back to the Vice President of the United States. The VP, by the way, has more than a passing resemblance to (and attitude of) Dick Cheney. Jack Hall has a disturbingly bright son named Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is visiting New York City to compete is some sort of collegiate version of “It’s Academic”. (Is it only me, or does Jake Gyllenhaal look an awful lot like Tobey McGuire?) Sela Ward plays Jack’s wife Lucy, a physician, who has the unfortunate duty to tend to a young hairless Tiny Tim-like cancer patient at a hospital while a new ice age begins. Sam of course has a love interest, the extremely brown-eyed Laura (Emmy Rossum) who holes up with him (and others) at the New York City Public Library. Will they consummate their affections or is it just too cold for them to generate any heat? Do we care? No, not really.
The problem with this disaster flick, which is true of most of them, is that it depends on spectacle and formula in the hope that we will overlook plot holes bigger than those arctic hurricanes. I am no climatologist but I do not have to be to be skeptical that a sudden massive big freeze across the northern hemisphere is about as likely as my suddenly developing a sixth toe on my right foot. Moreover, it is hard not to laugh rather than feel horror when huge chunks of ice start pummeling pedestrians in Tokyo. Godzilla would be amused.
This movie is full of incidents that require an unreasonable suspension of disbelief. For example, Sam and Laura, on a plane ride to New York are caught up in some amazing turbulence. Baggage pops out of the overhead bins. What really got my attention was that you could hear thunder at 30,000 feet. I never have. There are a couple of ridiculous shots, like airliners flying into massive storm clouds. Hello? Is someone asleep in the cockpit? On every flight I have been on, pilots avoid storm cells. They fly around them.
Then there is the cockamamie subplot. As if dealing with a new Ice Age is not enough, what does the one scientist who knows the most about this phenomenon do? Naturally, he and a couple of his NOAA buddies risk everything and try to high tail it from Washington D.C. to New York City to rescue his son Sam who is very much an adult. You would think they might take a snowmobile, since the drifts are soon dozens of feet deep, but they take an SUV instead and when that goes out, it is time for the skis and snow sled. It must be a hundred degrees below zero out there but they are not intimidated. Anyhow, Jack said he was going to rescue his son and by god, he will do it no matter how insane it is.
I guess it helped that he spent time in the Antarctic retrieving ice cores. Naturally, the movie starts out there where we find Jack and his coworkers. Suddenly the Antarctic ice shelf they are on separates right next to them. Hundreds of miles of ice and naturally it splits between their living quarters and their research station. Um, yeah.
Moreover, what is with the international space station being the only orbiting satellite capable of conveying imagery of the weather from space? The last I heard we had hundreds of satellites up there snapping pictures of the earth but no one at NOAA can seem to figure out what is going on until the astronauts on the International Space Station tell them.
And how likely is it that millions of Americans, after a little grumbling, would find welcome in places like Mexico and that FEMA of all agencies would be equipped to take care of tens of millions of displaced Americans in places like Mexico? Do you think FEMA’s warehouses and people are trained for that sort of emergency? Do you think Americans will be all brotherly when survival itself is at stake? I would like to think so but I am sorry, no, not in today’s “you’ll get my gun when you pry it off my cold dead fingers” America. Perhaps this sort of myopia is due to the presence of Fox News in the movie. As we know, the folks running Fox News think America is back in the 1950s.
Then there is the formula. Of course, there has to be an evil Dick Cheney-like global warming skeptic and of course, the heroic scientist has to be vindicated in his calamitous predictions. As for the love interest between Sam and Laura, it is as predictable and saccharine as it is passé. And of course Mrs./Dr. Hall has to take care of a sick kid with cancer, yet somehow they must have found places for all the other infirmed in the hospital. The movie just would not have the same drama if she just went home and bundled up in her woolies. They amount to many cheap gimmicks to try to ratchet up the tension in the movie. Yet they feel so artificial that the whole movie, which is on a shaky ground anyhow, falls flat. Frankly, I could have cared less whether any of these characters survived and that includes the homeless man and his pet dog. Not to spoil this movie, which is utterly transparent but yes, somehow against all odds Jack does make it to New York City, huffing and puffing. He makes the journey from Philadelphia to New York on foot where he at last reunites with his son Sam.
So if you find your heart racing from all the excitement, this is likely your first disaster movie. Frankly, I thought The Wizard of Oz was much scarier. It is not quite a disaster spending time watching this movie. As I said, the special effects are awesome and the acting passable. What this movie really needed was a better script and a director more skilled than Roland Emmerich. It needed someone who could take these competent actors and actually make you care about them.
If you liked Twister (1996) you will probably like this movie, but Twister was actually a better movie. At least Twister had some cools lines like, “We’ve got cow!” There is no inspired dialog in this flick.
2.6 on my 4.0 scale. There is nothing that merits your attention except possibly the cool special effects.
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June 17th, 2008 at 07:55pm
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Mark |
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Tags: Movies
This may be my first review for a movie that predates my birth. Even more surprising, I saw this famous Alfred Hitchcock movie in an actual movie theater, specifically the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Some years ago the American Film Institute, which used to show movies at The Kennedy Center, renovated the old Silver Theater. It is good that they did because otherwise this historic theater would have met with the wrecking ball. My father, whom I took there as a Father’s Day present, remembers taking girls to the Silver Theater as a youth.
This was my first trip to the AFI Silver Theater and I will definitely be back. For a film junkie this theater is something of a nirvana. Here you can see historic (and some modern) films the way they were meant to be seen: on the screen. In this case, Rear Window has been digitally remastered. Even so, the film is surprisingly grainy. Either Hitchcock was using poor film stock or the film degraded considerably over the years. This film is part of a Jimmy Stewart film festival at the AFI.
Rear Window is not one of Hitchcock’s better-known films, nor is it the only one to star Jimmy Stewart. (His best-known Hitchcock role was probably as Detective Ferguson in Vertigo.) Rear Window deserves more attention because it is a surprisingly engaging and well-done film. Current cult director M. Night Shyamalan was clearly inspired by Hitchcock. One only has to see Rear Window to see elements that Shyamalan has borrowed from Hitchcock.
For example, Shyamalan’s movie Lady in the Water takes place in an apartment complex. Rear Window also takes place in an apartment complex. While Rear Window does not have Lady in the Water’s mysticism, both films have a collection of oddball apartment dwellers. Jimmy Stewart, playing L.B. Jefferies, is a convalescing international photographer with a broken leg. He is stuck in his apartment with nothing else to do during a hot, sticky Brooklyn summer than watch his neighbors. His apartment happens to face inward onto a courtyard, giving him an intimate view of the comings and going of his neighbors across the courtyard. These were the days before air conditioners. We find a couple sleeping on their balcony to avoid the heat. Much of the movie literally drips with sweat. At the start of the movie, we find a hobbled Stewart in a leg cast and wheelchair sweltering with his neighbors in 92-degree heat.
For a movie this old, it is surprisingly racy. Indeed, the MPAA belatedly gave it a PG rating. It includes scenes of a dancer always practicing her dance steps through her open window in little more than a bra and panties. It also includes Grace Kelly in lingerie and the (then) shocking suggestion that as an unmarried woman her character planned to spend a long weekend nursing her boyfriend.
Jefferies discovers his apartment complex is a real Peyton Place. The cast of eccentrics include Miss Lonelyheart, who stages elegant dinners for a boyfriend that does not exist, the Songwriter who seems to have parties every night, and the newlyweds who remember to shut the blinds at the last moment. It is at these times that you realize parts of Lady in the Water are homage to this important Hitchcock film. Through Jefferies, Hitchcock quickly draws us into the lives of these strangers across the courtyard. Jefferies’s attention though soon focuses on Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr, who was obese even then). Lars and his wife have a fight. Yet his wife mysteriously is never seen again. Jefferies wonders what happened to her, and through the open window, he watches his neighbor engage in some very peculiar actions. He grows convinced that Thorwald murdered and dismembered his wife.
The movie also stars the entrancing Grace Kelly in her prime. If you have never seen Grace Kelly in a motion picture, this movie is a great one to watch to make her acquaintance. She is both achingly beautiful and an excellent actress. In this movie she plays Lisa (that’s “Leeza”) Fremont who is something of a fashion snob. Their difference in values suggests to Jefferies that their relationship is doomed, but he cannot quite find the courage to end it. An insurance company nurse also visits Jefferies daily. She performs physical therapy, changes his sheets, makes him meals and most importantly gives Jefferies the opportunity to spout his conspiracy theories about his neighbors. Jefferies is also pals with Lieutenant Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey). After seeing enough suspicious activities, Jefferies tries to enlist Doyle’s help for some shoe-leather work.
While Doyle remains skeptical throughout, Lisa and Jefferies’s nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) eventually become fully engaged in the Lars Thorwald mystery. Did something happen in that apartment or is Jefferies making much ado about nothing? Hitchcock of course keeps you guessing.
The result is a taunt character driven movie that quickly sucks you in. The camera never even leaves Jeffries apartment. Jefferies watches all his neighbors’ comings and going. Since he is a photographer with a telephoto lens, he can also capture much of it. As a suspenseful movie, there is lots of mystery but little in the way of jeopardy until the very end of the movie. Suffice to say that when Stella and Lisa start to become private investigators, things turn dicey quite quickly.
What I also really liked about this movie is the way that Hitchcock so accurately captures life in noisy Brooklyn. You can hear the tugboats wailing on the unseen East River. You hear the constant sounds of the city, and of people noisily engaging in life. It was doubtless all staged on a Hollywood set, but it feels very much like Brooklyn. I also enjoyed its authenticity to period. This was the life my parents knew but that largely passed me by. Hitchcock makes use of his roving camera and shadow to accentuate the film’s engagement and mystery.
While probably not Hitchcock’s most suspenseful film, it may well be his most intriguing. You should see it if the opportunity presents itself.
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June 15th, 2008 at 09:59am
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Tags: Movies, Shyamalan
While I wait for inspiration to blog on more compelling topics, I can at least do the public a service by urging you to stay away from two spectacularly bad movies. Remember: you have been warned.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
I recently blogged about the movie To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). This was a surprisingly amusing and well-done movie about three drag queens trying to drive cross-country to compete in a national drag queen contest. A year before this movie came out another Australian movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, also starring three drag queens on an adventure was foisted on the public. I doubt it was widely seen in the United States, thank goodness. In the case of this film, Priscilla is not one of the drag queens, but the name of a beat up bus that Bernadette, Mitzi and Felicia take across the Australian desert for a gig the city of Alice Springs in Australia’s remote Northern Territory.
If you were ever wondering what it would be like for Hugo Weaving (best known for his portrayal of Agent Smith in the three Matrix movies) to play a drag queen, this movie will satisfy your curiosity. Let me save you the trouble though and tell you: ridiculous. I would hasten to add that he undoubtedly makes the worst drag queen on the screen, except he is assisted by two other drag queens, one played by Terrance Stamp, who is even worse. The only drag queen that is passable in this movie is Felicia, played by Guy Pearce.
While Sydney apparently can tolerate drag queens, the folks in the heartland are a predictable bunch of homophobes. The exception may be a group of Aborigines they encounter in the latter half of the film. I like to think that these outbackers are not so much homophobes as people who cannot stand seeing three drag queens do such a miserable job of portraying drag queens. In To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, at least these gals looked like ladies. These three do not come close and Bernadette and Mitzi are frankly remarkably ugly drag queens. As in To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, their vehicle breaks down in an inconvenient spot and they have to try to get by with the locals. Since they break down literally in the middle of nowhere, mostly this mean a lot of lizards. They eventually do make it to Alice Springs where we discover Mitzi has a wife and a son.
I am amazed we made it through the movie. I will confess that the sight of Felicia, propped on top of the bus as it moves through the desert, with a train tens of feet long flowing in the desert wind, was a spectacularly strange site and one my burning eyes would like to purge from my memory, but cannot. This is one drag queen movie (and there are not many) to not come within a dozen clicks of. Stay away!
Fool’s Gold (2008)
The airlines are truly in hard times when they put dreck like Fool’s Gold (2008) on as “entertainment” on a three and a half hour flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Denver International Airport, which was where I saw it. Tess (Kate Hudson) is married to Benjamin (Matthew McConaughey), a walking calamity of a husband who within the first five minutes of the movie manages to sink his wife’s boat while he explores underwater for treasure off the Bahamas. Apparently, Benjamin has only a few talents. One of them is making love and the other is finding (and ultimately losing) deep-sea treasure.
They end up getting divorced but fate of course keeps them together because while the boat sank Benjamin just happens to find a piece of treasure that suggests he and his now ex wife can find dozens of treasure chests hidden in or around the Bahaman island. To make ends meet, Tess works on a yacht serving food to a multimillionaire named Nigel played by Donald Sutherland. Nigel is the unfortunate father of an extremely attractive Valley Girl named Gemma (Alexis Dziena), who manages to be more annoying than McConaughey, which admittedly is a hard act to follow. Naturally, Benjamin, through many implausible scenarios, manages to convince Nigel to facilitate his treasure hunt.
The overacting and shallow stereotypes in this movie are excruciatingly difficult to endure. I know women swoon over McConaughey, but he is one of these pretty boy actors who basically cannot act. Here he serves merely to put eye candy on the screen for the women. This movie allows him to showcase all his stereotypes in all their gratuitous excessiveness. Perhaps he did “act” in the sense that he fit his stereotype to a tee. All the over the top acting, screaming and high pitched voices, as well as the transparent plot, made getting through it a real challenge. However, my flight was so long and so boring that I had little alternative. So I have watched it so you do not have to. Poor Donald Sutherland looks like he would rather be having a root canal. Frankly, I would have too. I hope he was paid well. The only fool’s gold here are the fools who pay to see this tripe. Don’t you be one of them. There are bad movies worth seeing for their badness. This is not one of them. It just reeks of mediocrity. If it arrives on HBO, change the channel. I don’t care how muscled McConaughey is or how much you may think Kate Hudson is cute and charming. Life is too short to squander it with trash like this. Yech.
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June 2nd, 2008 at 10:48pm
Posted by
Mark |
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Tags: Bad Movies, Movies, The Arts
