mike-925 Reviews

A Mighty Heart (2007)

A Mighty Wind

[5/10 · 31 July 2009]

Angelina Jolie plays the vaguely black Hispanic wife of intrepid Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in this wispy little procedural. Jolie has managed to morph herself into a version of Halle Berry posing as a black person. Jolie is credible as a Cuban Latino.

Right away I was more interested in the audience than I was in the film. The film is very little about Danny Pearl and very much about Mariane Pearl, the brown-eyed wife of the Wall Street Journal guy who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan. First a black chick and her friend entered the theater after me. Then four girls in their early twenties all arrived together and sat down in front of me. Some of the girls in front laughed at some of the most terrifying events. It dawns on me that this is a chick flick.

The guy playing Danny Pearl gets short shrift. He's one of those nobody actors they use whenever the story is not really going to be about him. Jolie is pregnant with Pearl's child as they both work as reporters in Karachi. Danny leaves home in a cab and is not seen alive again.

The film then is about Mariane. The same day Danny leaves she becomes worried about him and phones around looking for him. She gathers a coterie of friends and fellow reporters in her apartment. Gradually, the Wall Street Journal sends some of its diplomatic and journalistic heavyweights.

Its getting crowded in that apartment, and the space for whirring laptops at the dining room table begins to decline precipitously. The Audience is starting to get a little bored already. They know what's coming here. Is this a good enough reason to make a movie?

First the Paki Police show up . Then the American FBI arrives, giving the film an opportunity to take some domestic shots at them for their past excesses. The FBI men are unsympathetic to Marianne's plight. Their chatter is unemotional, unapologetic, delivered in short, terse sentences. The FBI actors appear to have been selected for ugliness. Ten minutes later the FBI people have done their work offending the audience. They are not seen again.

Mariane keeps a chipper disposition in the midst of all this worry. The Pakistan police begin pursuing leads. Mariane and a female reporter friend mark up clues and leads on a white pasteboard with a felt pen. The jottings on the board would appear to be to help the audience understand. But the whole jumble is pretty indecipherable. The seven of us in the theater begin drumming our feet on the floor together in anticipation of getting this thing over with.

Mariane is now having to serve food to keep these people all chilled. I thought the friends and associates would eventually go home. But every time they show the dining room table, the hard core are still there, pulling down press accounts of new developments, on their hopelessly outdated, pre-XP , Millennium Browsers. I begin to wish I'd brought my own laptop along. Where do these people sleep?

Periodically, the movie leaves the house and begins chasing down suspicious locals. There are cabbies, informants, suspects and journalists to be contacted. Will Patton, one of the hard core at the house, is one of the journalists. He has very little to do but marvel while watching as the police torture a guy they have hanging from a hook in the ceiling. The film makers were kind enough not to do this at Mariane's house. Its a measure of how inured the audience is to torture. The audience, like most of America, is numbed by years of reportage and pictures detailing American outrages at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The torture scenes stir not a ripple of reaction from the chick-flickers.

Events are moving forward now. Pics of Danny sent to the Press reveal he is still alive. Mariane is not cheered by calls from her in-laws in the states. The veils are lifting. The Pakistan police trace down a big figure in the kidnapping: Sheik Omar. The audience starts to awaken from its slumber: "Sheik Omar.., oh yeah, I remember that name, maybe something's going to happen in this movie now!"

But we all know how its going to turn out. All we have to look forward to is our own dread at Mariane's reaction to Danny's beheading. The two Wally World Journal Diplomats are quietly summoned out of the house and downtown to watch the video. Then the pilgrimage back to the house to tell Mariane. This is the moment the chick flickers arrayed around me have been waiting for. Its a horrendous yowl, right up there with Olivier's Richard III scream and Brando's "Stella!" Lara Croft notwithstanding, Jolie is likely to be Oscar-nominated just for this primal scream.

The seven of us in the audience are happy now. We're all looking forward to getting into our cars and going home. The filmmakers are torturing us by elongating the aftermath. Mariane buries Danny. All of Mariane's friends, the various police associates and even, interestingly, one of the informers, are feted at a dinner with wine and toasts. This takes place in a long collage. Mariane's child is born. We are in bed with her as she recalls the couple's life together. Next we're served up one of those end pieces where, in short sentences, we are told what happened to each principle character in the film.

As the credits roll, we watch Mariane and her now four year old son walk down a sunny European street. So that's what its been about: Mariane and her son escaping back into the civilized world. I might have known. It's the theme of every Bwana and Mistress Saga set in an exotic, forbidding, dangerously uncivilized foreign setting. For the woman, returning to civilization is essential. Even if Bwana will be unable to attend.

Twilight (I) (2008)

Vampyr Love Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry., Never!

[24 November 2008]

The movie was great. Sun never came out, drizzled nearly every day. A rainy Washington, a dazzling vampire from an interesting vamp family. Somebody named Bella Swan's father, Sheriff's Department deputy Charlie Swan. That's the name of Marcel Proust's hero in the first of his seven novels, Swann's Way. Now I've got to find out if that is something the screenwriter dreamed up, or if the author was responsible. At first it was surprising, but about a third of the way through, you could see plainly how the author was going to keep the antagonism between the two characters roiling: The Vampire loves the girl so much, there's an inner struggle to keep himself from killing her and draining the blood from her body. Naturally, she eats that s**t up, as the FBI guy in Thelma and Louise would say. Each time the vamp goes through this "I want so badly to fang you to death" routine, Bella becomes more bellicosely aggressive. Its startling to guys watching to see how she goes after him. Kristen Stewart who played the girl at the swap meet who has the brief love affair with the young kid in Into the Wild, is doing all the acting in this film. She is mostly submissive and passive but she is the audience's moral guide. She even tells her father to quit eating french fries at lunch, to have a salad like her. The vampire is having nothing, thank you. Stewart has Piper Laurie's chipmunk teeth from the fifties movies Laurie did with Tony Curtis. When you finally see that Bella has jumped on the side of the Family, you know the Studios have at least two sequels in mind, maybe three. Wonderful rainy Washington State exteriors. The look of the film is exquisite and effecting right through to the end of the film. They're leaving high school though, which means no more cheering for the Spartans. She hasn't graduated yet so its only fair that the family place her in Jacksonville High for her last two years. If she isn't in high school, the sequel is going to lose fire. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the under-rated Lords of Dogtown (2005), which I thought one of the best films that year, was production designer on Three Kings in 1999, as well as on Antitrust and Vanilla Sky. Her direction here may make her the first new major woman director in the Big Leagues in awhile. The movie did $70 million this weekend, $4 million more than the James Bond opener did last week. Its a very big hit. I was scheduled to see the movie early Friday morning at 12:10 a.m., slept through the start, but took the trouble to drive by and discover 30 cars at the Rogers Theater in Sparta at 1:40 a.m.. That one showing in a thousand theaters early Friday at the same time, brought in $7 million. My niece pointed out to me that the film made back its cost including advertising and the cost of negatives on its first weekend, a rare feat in Hollywood. She heard about Twilight from a colleague where she worked in Chicago, and has read one or more of the four books. She is raring to see it today. I'm really onto this not because its a teen film- most of those are nose-holders, but because this is the latest example of an emerging genre known as the Blockbuster Chick Flick. As recently as last year, they were considered risky by H'wood. The reason was that in couple situations which were assumed to be a guy and a girl before the Massachusetts Supremes acted, the guy would choose the flick and it would be Unforgiven or the Hulk or some other male clunker like Appaloosa. But now more than ever, young people are bowling alone. The Studios pulled out the stops for the movie version of Sex and the City. That film was loaded with anti-Male jabs designed to infuriate young guys but at the same time pluck at the strings of a girl's heart. Masochist that I am, I found myself loving those jabs. In the nearly all woman theater where I saw Sex and the City, selected couples were forging the beginnings of same sex marriages as I watched. uh, the film. My niece has since purloined my single copy of Sex and the City forcing me to return to Red Box for a fresh one to make a copy from. Its no fun to watch at home, though, without a bunch of frenzied women in the seats nearby. Since then I have been to every chick flick, even the bad ones like 27 Dresses and the rest of the Judd Apatow awfulness, which aren't just chick flicks but also wallow in male excess like f*rting. Before Sex and the City, women clung to their copies of the Notebook DVD and other Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers. Sparks' latest, Nights in Rondanthe, was a limited success, possibly because there wasn't enough male bashing in it. Its a great time to be alive even with the financial world melting. But parents need to cut back in their efforts at reviving Ophelia. Its young Hamlet who needs resuscitation most.

21 (2008)

21 A Bad Shuffle of a Superb Nonfiction Classic

[6 August 2008]

21 is a poor version of Ben Mezrich's best-selling 2002 Bringing Down the House. The original story is about five Asian MIT students who walked off with $3 million card counting at various casinos around the country, beginning in the early nineties.

The movie makers have constructed a half-baked love story that isn't actually in the book. With the romantic intrusion, the thriller aspect of the original is lost. The book may have been tricked up a little. But 21, the movie seems bent on helping casino security Bull Laurence Fishburne keep his image intact and that of the Vegas casinos unblemished. Because the characters appear to be playing in real Las Vegas casinos, at least at times, it looks as if producers may have cut a deal with Vegas to soften both Fishburne's tough guy image and minimize embarrassment the Casinos suffered at the hands of the merry MIT crew.

In the book, the casinos and their pit bosses and security people were clods who never caught onto a thing for over six years. The movie hasn't got time for that long a wait. Fishburne is suspicious of lead Ben Campbell almost instantly.

Here's a major myth that grew up in the seventies that the book explodes: Casinos spread the story that once multi-decks were placed in shoes, card counting wouldn't work anymore. In fact, multi-decks actually improved odds for counting players by lengthening the period of time that dealer's hands stayed hot for players and cold for dealers.

In the film the MIT crew does all its work in Vegas. In the book, the MIT gang went to riverboats around Chicago, to Louisiana and Missisippi Indian casinos and even overseas to Monte Carlo and Cannes.

In the film, Kevin Spacey is an MIT math prof who spearheads the Casino Con and enlists his own students to be his players. A college girl is in love with the hero Ben Campbell. In reality, all of the players were Asians who wore disguises and masqueraded as rich orientals out to blow big money at the tables. Mickey(Spacey), the crew leader and organizer is an MIT prof and a professional gambler too.

The movie constructs a fiction that Campbell only wants to make $300,000 to finance his education at Harvard as a doctor. The truth is the real Jeff Ma never went to Med School and never wanted to. Ma and the four orientals who took down Vegas, worked the various casinos for nearly ten years and only gave it up when most casinos in the country had identified them and they could no longer play.

Somewhere in the middle of the book Mickey and the Ben Campbell character modeled on Jeff Ma split, and begin running separate teams in the casinos. The movie has Mickey (Spacey) fingering Ben and his team to Casino Security. That would have exposed Mickey too. Its absurd. In fact, though there was some minor bad blood after the split, it was in the interests of both teams to keep quiet about one another. And that is what they did.

In the book, the players wore disguises always and changed them often so they wouldn't be recognized when they returned to the same casinos. The movie talked of disguises but Ben never actually wore won except once. It made no sense. He'd have been caught on the second visit without a disguise. In the film, one of the hand signals to tip the Ben to the 'hot' blackjack table, was so blatantly obvious, no pit manager or security bull could have missed it.

The movie left two nerdy friends of Ben Campbell's lurking around MIT clueless about Ben's weekend table action. Those characters and the plots around them were lame. The whole college crosscut was so weak they might just as well have eliminated it altogether. Trying to merge the college weekdays and weekend gambling simply didn't play. Campbell (Jim Sturges) was supposed to have been half-enticed into the ring by his yen for fellow student Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). But the romance seemed half-hearted once underway. The book knew better. The deceptions and nearly being caught by security time after time took up all the action and made the book a unique thriller.

Movie makers constructed a supposed collusion between Campbell and Security Bull Fishburne to get even with Mickey. The tacked on ending was so absurd anyone could see through it. In fact, Jeff Ma is not a WASP like the one Campbell portrayed, but an oriental. The four fellow Oriental MIT students worked the casinos for nearly ten years and were well into their thirties before they quit. Only near the end of that time were they thoroughly caught, identified and forced to stop. I'm not sure any of them ever graduated from MIT. Ma didn't.

Spacey and Fishburne give routine performances as if they couldn't take the film seriously. I wonder why? In the washroom afterward I told two twenty somethings what a pack of lies the film was and gave them the book title so they could read the true story. 21 could have been a remarkable film in the hands of a writer-director like Dave Mamet. The film was market designed as a cross between Wedding Crashers and a bad Adam Sandler movie. A few of the six college students behind me kept mistaking ordinary lines as American Pie easy laughs, but the rest of the audience stayed silent.

The Filmmakers, who are not worth mentioning, destroyed a perfectly wonderful story that could have been a great movie. They doubled down in duplicity.

Swing Vote (2008)

Capraesque Swing Vote Just a Warmup for 'W'

[6 August 2008]

It's worth mentioning the Capraesque Swing Vote with Kevin Costner, an innocuous light comedy I saw Sunday night. Costner's a lowlife and his daughter has been trying to get him to vote. When he passes out outside the tavern as the polls are about to close, the daughter slips in, registers while the American Legion-capped voting official sleeps, then is unable to complete her voting machine ballot for her Dad, when the cleaning lady at the town hall accidentally pulls the plug. She retains the stub receipt in her Dad's name. In Texico, New Mexico, half way between Tucumcari and Truth or Consequences, this means her DAD gets an opportunity to re-vote within ten days. It develops that New Mexico is the Florida 2000-like critical state and there is an absolute tie for the Presidency. Democratic challenger Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) comes to town toting Willie Nelson, who Costner character Bud Johnson has played in a Willie Nelson sound-alike country band. GOP President Kelsey Grammar parks Air Force One about 500 feet from Costner's double-wide, and tries to tempt Costner with a job as a lobbyist for the Oil Industry on K street, while the two are shooting skeet between the big plane's wings. One of the funniest parts is the Secret Service guys wearing hair nets, attempting to clean up Costner's double-wide- they put me in mind of Harvey Keitel and those madcap FBI men, secret feminists trying to keep Thelma and Louise from coming to any harm. The Secret Service guys are ridiculous, but Costner and his daughter come to rely on them for everything, including political and personal advice. It develops Costner doesn't know the issues as well as his 11 year old daughter, so she and the Secret Service guys put on a two day public affairs seminar for Bud (yes, lots of Budweiser product placement, Costner is rarely without one in his hand) based on the tons of letters sent to Johnson's trailer. Its a real Meet John Doe moment as Costner, his daughter and the Secret Service Guys sort through the letters. Working behind the scenes are a Bob Shrum- like political maestro working for Dem Challenger Greenleaf, Art Crumb (Nathan Lane), matched on the Republican side by a disreputable Rove-like Reptile Martin Fox (Stanley Tucci). Greenleaf, as anti-NRA as one can be, flip-flops and comes out Pro Gun recommending Uzis for everyone when he hears Bud Johnson has been shooting skeet with the GOP President Andrew Boone, played by Cheers psychaitrist Kelsey Grammar. Advised by the Rove-like Tucci that Bud favors Roe Vs. Wade, President Boone flip-flops too, backing the pro-life movement and recommending fourth trimester abortions even for men who care to have one. The pundits, led by Chris Matthews and a rejuvenated Aaron Brown, without his trademark glasses and looking older, ponder the issues, as the two candidates stage a debate for just one voter: Bud Johnson. The movie is hitting every Frank Capra-Meet John Doe mark as Costner-Johnson sings a Doe-like everyman tune to the two candidates in front of their podiums, in the shadow of Air Force One near the decrepit trailer park with the nation looking in on TV. The debate closes and Bud returns to the polling place he's never actually been to before, casting his ballot as John Barrymore inevitably did in the Great Man Votes. I knew the audience wouldn't be told who actually won. Instead, the cute local anchorwoman Kate Madison (Paula Patton) who kept the secret which prevented her from moving up to the networks, thus preserving her small town values, holds the hand of Bud's daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll?!) as the country awaits the verdict. But the movie ends without one. It was a nice little comedy but did only $6 million the first weekend, overshadowed by a third week of the $400 million powerhouse the Dark Knight

Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

If We Could Get The Ruskies Interested in Afghanistan Again..,

[5/10 · 24 December 2007]

Maybe the US could then hightail it out of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The movie is directed by Mike Nichols. But it doesn't particularly strike me as a Mike Nichols film. Its flabby and not funny in the clever way his films used to be funny. The problem is probably the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, head writer on the West Wing, not a particularly comic or well written series.

Charlie Wilson is a small bean GOP Congressman from Texas, aged 53, in 1980 when he has an idea how to get the head of his subcommittee to up the amount of defense aid for Afghanistan from five million dollars to half a billion, equipping the Afghans with rocket launchers that could bring down Russian Helicopters that harass Afghan villagers to keep them in line.

Wilson (Tom Hanks) does not appear to be consorting with the White House on this at all. Its the Reagan White House after all. Wilson consults with some CIA Beastie Boys led by Gus (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Gus has an ordinary Joe background. He minces few words, is not particularly respectful toward Wilson, has a serious paunch, black horn rims and smokes.

Wilson has to observe a protocol that compels him to get Russian rocket launchers captured by the Israelis, who have the largest collection of them in the world, having captured them from Israel's Arab enemies in the Middle East. American rockets cannot be used because the US must play by rules which say the American Govt. is not officially at war with the USSR, so the weapons can't be American. Gus and Wilson jump the Iraquis and the Egyptians through a few hoops in conferences with the Israelis, to equip the Afghans with some great weaponry. And Presto, the Helicopters are going down in large numbers every week.

Wilson is in some tabloid trouble while arranging this, having been photographed by US Attorney Rudy Guliani's men in a limo, possibly sniffing cocaine. Wilson has an all female staff. His public relations woman is a trashily dressed number affectionately named Jailbait. The staff regularly punctuates his meetings on the Afghan Weapons matter with new developments in the cocaine and special interests investigation, with Jailbait regularly developing new PR responses to placate the omnivorous press. Gus thinks its a nice diversion, since no one is likely to believe this minor Texas Republican is conducting his own private war with Russia out of a desk drawer. Wilson's aw shucks Texas mien, overt sexism verging on pigginess, combined with a yen for Jack Daniels, is an easy cover for the private Arms Race he is conducting through a small house subcommittee.

Julia Roberts plays a rich Texas contributor who both gets it on with Charlie, promotes Christian values and stages dinner parties for contributors willing to help fight the war in Afghanistan against them ungodly Ruskies. Its a frivolous role. Roberts plays it out almost by the numbers, but the main action is Charlie, Gus and the Beastie Boys.

The real Charlie Wilson is 80 years old, retired from Congress and ailing. He's being interviewed on TV to provide publicity for the movie. The film has to shovel a lot of information at the audience to make them understand how the politics work. The result, a too talky movie, is ironic, coming from one half of the witty comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

The Holy Girl (2004)

Don't Cry For Argentina's Precious Teen Age Girls!

[7/10 · 10 December 2007]

I've just seen this scintillating HBO foreign movie from Argentina. It is so slick, so stacked with moral cards, the filmmaker couldn't bring herself to show the apocalyptic ending. Its called the Holy Girl. The film is about a divorced woman who works in a hotel where she lives with her daughter. The hotel is playing host to a physician's convention. Her daughter Amalia and other girls her age (16) are taking Catholic instructions from a lay woman on how to discover one's religious calling. The mother, Helena, has just learned her ex has had twins by another woman in Chile. She is jealous.

Amalia and her girlfriend Josephina mix sexual chatter with spiritual uplift at Instructions each day. Josephina tells her the instructor makes love with a strange man the minute she can break away from the class, a myth both lusting teenagers would like to believe. The two girls pretend at making love together in place of the real thing. One of the doctors at the conference attracts the eye of the mother who begins to play up to him. He is married. Meanwhile, the daughter is standing watching a street musician perform when the same doctor - his name is Nano- comes up close behind her and rubs his penis up against her rear end while standing behind her. The girl's face is fearful and distorted while this is going on. Doctor Nano abruptly stops and moves away. The daughter tells her friend she has been 'groped.' But secretly, she is smitten with the fiftyish Doctor, and spends the rest of the film trying to coax him to make love to her.

Meanwhile Helena is trying too. The Doctor is seriously interested in doing something with Mom, and slightly troubled about the young girl. He used to bring his wife to these conferences but doesn't any longer. Amalia keeps pressing him, making him more nervous. He conceives a little play-let of a doctor patient interaction to be played in front of the audience of doctors.

Meanwhile, Amalia's horny girl friend Jospehina is seen having sex with her brother Julia, when their folks walk in. Needing a distraction to keep the parents from taking notice, she reveals that Amalia has been 'groped' by one of the conference doctors. The parents resolve to tell Helena what has happened. Increasingly nervous about what he knows of these developments, Doctor Nano has summoned his wife and family to travel to the hotel and join him. Nano is just finishing having sex with Amalia when his family arrives in the hotel lobby. Meanwhile, another doctor tells him one of the conference doctors has been caught having sex with a salesman's rep at the conference and has fled to save his reputation.

A frantic Nano considers his own options. The play-let is underway. Josephina's parents have alerted the conference organizer that one of their brethren is a child molester. Onstage, Helena waits in a chair for the doctor to enter stage right. Instead, Nano stands backstage petrified to go on. The filmmaker cuts to the two sixteen year olds swimming together in the hotel pool, chatting amiably about girlish matters, the big showdown event apparently behind without disturbing them greatly.

Here's the way I think it really ends: Waiting backstage, Nano decides to chuck the career, the family, everything. He pulls off his white doctor's smock, runs down to the pool and grabs Amalia who is waiting smiling for him, her suitcase already packed. The two of them move to Chile near the mother's divorced husband who has just had the twin boys. Later Josephina moves with her brother Julian to Chile to join them. Later still, Helena joins her daughter in Chile where mother and daughter have ribald sexual encounters Nano-a-Nano with the harried doctor, now more nervous than ever.

You see there is an element of Pedro Almovador humor infused in this film. The movie is being vaguely subverted by subtle comedy at every turn, including a running joke about a foreign immigrant women in the hotel who no one knows or likes. She sprays rooms for bugs, smells, roaches, no one quite knows what she's spraying for; she enters rooms when it is most inconvenient for the people already in them.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

No Movie For the Squeamish: Coens Return to Their Blood Simple Roots

[9/10 · 10 December 2007]

The Coens are back and at their primitive best. They've taken Cormac McCarthy's novel and changed it into a novel of details like the novels of Jim Thompson. Most of the film is without dialog. Characters don't get to talk much. They act, think, strategize, hide, enter and leave a dizzying array of motels and hotels and then leave them. There are more doors opened and closed in this slow character study than any film since Mr. Blanding Built His Dream House.

Josh Brolin is a new fixture in films to me. He reminds me of a younger, grittier Harrsion Ford. I first saw him in the one of the Tarantino-Rodriquez Grindhouse double feature B films in the spring playing a mad doctor. I think he may have played another role in the other film. Then he was even better in American Gangster as a wonderfully corrupt detective. In No Country, he surpasses himself. If he didn't have to share billing with Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones,he'd be up for best actor honors this Awards Season.

Tommy Lee Jones seems almost to be repeating himself in Missing and the Three Burials of Elquiedas Estrada. In each succeeding film he wears less makeup, the face is more lined, the acne scars more visible. His character is more like a commentator than the cop catching the bad guys of audience expectations. He is more like the Walter Matthau sheriff after Kirk Douglas in the 1960 film Lonely Are The Brave. Matthau mostly comments on the out of place cowpoke making critical remarks to his deputy rather than seriously chasing Douglas into the Mountains. Jones embodies the idea of a present too violent for 60 year old peace officers like himself to referee and regulate. Tommy Lee has conversations with two old character actors, one, Barry Corbin, who appears to be a fatherfigure. Jones' father and grandfather were lawmen, neither lived past 40, but all of them were tougher birds than he. Instead of seriously confronting the malign Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee's character mainly just tries to think along with the serial killer and hit-man and with Josh Brolin. He's not thinking too well either. He certainly should have offered police protection to Brolin's wife on the two occasions when he interviewed her.

The movie starts when Brolin, hunting antelope, wanders on the scene of a revenge shooting and massive drug buy, discovering five roll-barred trucks and dead men with Uzis and machine guns scattered all around. He finds bricks of cocaine among the strewn bodies, spent shells and weapons. There's a Mexican man still barely alive and wanting water, but Brolin has none. And in a valise, between $1 and $2 million in $100 dollar bills. Brolin takes off with the satchel, tells his wife nothing, then wakes up in the night feeling the need to get that still living Mexican the drink of water he craved, a fatal mistake for Brolin. Because it is when he returns to the scene that the panoply of bad guys led by malign monster Javier Bardem first get a line on him. If he hadn't returned he'd a gotten clean away.

Hype about the film suggest the Bardem character is a monster. But I was not convinced by the film itself since I had seen him a few years back playing a fearful and fleeing Cuban homosexual. Bardem weighs a few more pounds for Old Men, but he didn't scare me any. I thought he was pretty predictable. The Audience was pulling for Brolin against Bardem the collector of the lost loot. The film never did show who gets the valise with the money in it though it seems likely Bardem did.

Instead, three ironic scenes were shown as epilogue to the showdown over the money, the last featuring Tommy Lee talking to his wife about dreams he'd had the night before about his father and grandfather.

The film ends without the kind of easy moral of most thrillers and westerns of which this is both. If you want to see the Coens as they were in the beginning, this is the film.

Hitman (I) (2007)

Mechanical Response to a Robotic Thriller

[5/10 · 27 November 2007]

Hit-man is based on a video game. There is also some Quentin Tarantino Robert Rodriquez input to the film.

But Hit-man's main character reminds me of the lead character in a groundbreaking TV series called Profit that went nowhere on Fox TV for six or seven episodes in the early nineties.

Profit was the most malign lead in a TV series who had ever been devised. His role was to undermine the corporations he works for and the people he works with. He was hard to rout for. He got sympathy for his childhood. He grew up without parents or emotional contact. He was raised in a cardboard box. Hit-man has a similar background. How could Fox have risked putting a series like that on?

It gets easier and easier as relationships between men and women continue to decline. Hit-man refuses to make love to the squeeze who crosses his path in the film, though she is writhingly appealing.

The video game addicts who are the audience for this film can't wait to get back to their computer terminals so its no problem that lead Timothy Olyphant wants nothing to do with the girl.

Right away I noticed how inhuman and video game-like the character and the whole movie are. The characters need no emotional contribution from me or anyone else as part of the audience. I laughed at the more outrageous action scenes because there was no chance I would spill emotion over anyone in the film.

Hit-man is a mechanical thriller that lets you know of its soulessness right away. I wasn't bored with it, though I think it is in many ways a comedy.

La Vie En Rose (2007)

Edith Piaf - the Other Side of Midnight

[6/10 · 22 November 2007]

I've just finished watching the Edith Piaf biopic that came out this summer. The film is quite mysterious about the nature of all Piaf's various physical ailments. The actress playing her displays what appears to be a serious case of arthritis already in her teens. Piaf drank and used drugs from her teen years, and took drugs to snuff effects from three auto accidents. The amount of alcohol and drugs she ingested were the major, but mysterious backdrop to the film. It was difficult to understand why she started taking the drugs in the first place. She starts out as a poor urchin but by her teens she is partying night and day. The film captures her life as a tragedy. Its shocking to see this woman looking more like 84 than the 48 she actually is when her liver is giving out in 1963. I went and checked the wikipedia account against the film and found it mostly accurate. The film was not pleasant.

The little Sparrow as she was nicknamed by a French Night Club Owner was unable to adapt to a normal lifestyle. Her drinking and drugging certainly contributed to her early death. Why not tell us about that?

It was hard to watch this woman drag herself down. Why not show the story of Edith discovering a young male nightclub singer in a provincial club, falling in love briefly with him, then watching that same Yves Montand ascend to a career greater than her own?

This story insists the audience already know Piaf's story and songs, as many of the French surely do. The film was made for a French audience and for HBO. It breaks the boundaries of the usual, predictable, triumphant biopic, which should have been a good thing.

Americans may not even be able to understand what was different and important about Piaf from watching this fiercely critical French film.

The English title of the film is the title of her most famous song, La Vie En Rose.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

A High Quality Dime Novel of a Movie

[8/10 · 30 October 2007]

After 15 years as outlaws, Frank and Jesse James were tired, beaten and worried about their futures. Without the experienced Younger Brothers, former Confederate guerrilla raiders, all captured in the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery fiasco, the outlook for their outlaw future was bleak. Jesse grew suspicious of the uneducated stumble bum 20 year olds who helped on their last train robbery in Glendale, Missouri.

The two hour and 40 minute movie is about Jesse and five of the young fellow robbers after the Glendale train holdup. It reminded me a little of a movie of the seventies called Bad Company, which featured a number of young 20 year old men footloose on the late nineteenth century prairie. Frank just walked away from it all, moving with his wife to Virginia, leaving Jesse surrounded by nimcimpoops. One of the young men, Wood Hite, used his position as Jesse's cousin to jockey for position among the other young criminals. Wood and Dick Liddil, another of the gang, visited Wood's father and the older man's young bride in Kentucky. Liddil was already romancing Wood's sister back at a prairie home hideout in Missouri. There was bad blood between the two men. When Liddil romanced the old man's young wife in the privy late the first night after the two of them got to Kentucky, it was the last straw. Liddil went back to Missouri and holed up in an old house on the prairie until Jesse rode in and asked him to ride with him to find another gang member. When they got to the man's house, Jesse started roughing up the subteen brother of Bob and Charley Ford. Liddil stopped him. After that Liddil went to the Missouri hideout run by Wood's sister where Bob and Charley Ford were living. Hite came up the stairs with his gun drawn, to kill Liddil, who jumped out the window. Bob Ford killed Wood with one shot. He and Liddil dumped the naked body in a nearby ravine, drawing a titter from the two 70 year old ladies sitting down in front of me in the audience. The news was kept from Jesse for fear he' d kill Liddil and the two Ford Brothers. Jesse was getting more nervous about his young associates. He went to visit another fellow outlaw, Ed Miller at his lonely farm house on the plain, invited him to go to town for dinner, then shot him in the back of the head. Bob had already been talking with the Governor of Missouri about killing Jesse for a pardon and the $10,000 reward. Brother Charley was reluctantly concluding too that Jesse, ostensibly planning a bank heist for the three of them, intended to kill he and Bob when it was over.

Against this backdrop of suspicion, Jesse was telling the Ford Brothers he wanted them in on the holdup. Bob and Charley were running out of time. When Jesse got on a chair to adjust a picture, both Fords reached for their guns. Bob Ford just got his shot off first. Bob high-tailed it to the telegraph office and wired the Governor that he'd shot Jesse dead. The Fords were arrested, tried and convicted of the murder of Jesse. Just before the hanging the Governor of Missouri pardoned them and even gave them some of the $10,000 reward.

For two and a half years Bob and Charley re-enacted the killing of Jesse on Broadway, Bob playing himself, and Charley playing Jesse. 800 performances in just under two years. Afterward, Charley, never much for the theater, shot hisself to death in 1884. Bob lit out for the territories, establishing gambling joints in the gold fields of Colorado, making alliances with corrupt lawmen and organized gamblers. After Jesse's death, Bob thought people would consider him a hero. They didn't. He visited the wives of many of the men Jesse had killed, expecting to be thanked. He wasn't. Gradually he realized his dime novel sense of things had been juvenile. He started to grow up some. But a disgruntled old man angry over Ford's traitorous murder of the sainted Jesse, shot Bob to death with a shotgun in the gambling tent Bob had erected temporarily in Creeg, Colorado.

There was no dime novels for Bob Ford or Robin Hood legends neither.

Frank James turned himself in personally to Governor Crittenden of Missouri not long after Jesse was killed. A deal had been cut to prevent his extradition to Northfield, Minnesota. Frank stood trial in Missouri and Alabama. Due to the Robin Hood legacy of the James Brothers, no jury would convict him. Frank took a job as a shoe salesman and later worked at a St. Louis theater which advertised "come get your ticket punched by Frank James!" He worked as an AT&T Telegraph operator. In 1902, he and Cole Younger, now out of jail, took to the lecture circuit together. Frank lived until 1915, long enough that he could have been a technical adviser on a western film. However, they didn't make the first silent about Jesse and he until 1921.

Though Brad Pitt plays Jesse and the much older Sam Shepherd plays Frank in this ensemble movie, the best performance among many very good ones, belongs to Casey Affleck, the second great performance I've seen from him in two weeks. The story is told in dialog much like that in the dime novels. People are perpetually puzzled, joking and weird like they appear in dime novels. The childishness of the younger gang members dominates the screenplay. This artsy film will probably be nominated for Oscars. Affleck will be nominated for a best supporting actor if he's not nominated best actor for Gone Baby Gone. The films 160 minutes glided by without notice because the film was continually interesting. It will certainly be nominated for best director and best picture.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Reconstructing the Western For a Doubtful Future

[7/10 · 10 September 2007]

I was 12 when I first saw 3:10 to Yuma with Van Heflin and Glen Ford. Two years later, something of a remake appeared. Kirk Douglas was trying to get a somewhat companionable Anthony Quinn to jail in Last Train to Gun Hill.

The star vehicle state of modern Hollywood films is now making it more difficult to remake these western morality tales.

Christian Bale, a desperate rancher on the verge of bankruptcy and facing foreclosure of his mortgage is supposedly the lead in the new 3:10, but Russell Crowe playing the outlaw Ben Wade is the real lead. Fifty years ago, Van Hefflin played the Nester making some money on the side to take Glen Ford to jail at Yuma prison.

Looked at closely, both 3:10s and Last Train are buddy westerns. The films are about a pair of hard men gradually warming up to one another, becoming friends. But there's a lot more company on the stagecoach to Contention to catch the train this time.

There's Christian Bale as the failed farmer Dan Evans looking for some quick money for delivering Wade. His son William complicates things by following Wade and his father without the old man's permission. Also along for the ride is a grizzled, gray and wrinkled Peter Fonda, as a Pinkerton Security Man who has been a mercenary in many a Pinkerton black bag job.

Fonda is gut shot early on in the game, during an elaborate stage robbery, in which the Pinkertons have equipped the stagecoach with armor, a Gatling gun, and Pinkerton men to guard the payroll. Normally being gut shot in a Western means certain death. But the law of the Western has been abrogated here so Fonda can get something more than a cameo in the film. A Veterinarian in nearby Bigsby removes the bullet so Fonda can stay on. Later though, Fonda becomes disposable. Wade, responding to Fonda's goading, gets an opportunity to rough Fonda up some, then casually throw him off a convenient cliff to his death.

That's another problem here. Since Russel Crowe is the lead, he gets special privileges in his role as an outlaw. He makes sketches of benign birds, betrays knowledge of books he's read, chides the Pinkertons about their lack of education and a philosophy. This leader of an outlaw band is a renaissance man. Worse, when Bale runs into trouble evading Wade's gang, which is trying to spring their boss, Wade sometimes changes horses midstream and helps him. This happens so often, the audience is in doubt about just who is going to be the hero of this horse opera, Evans or Wade. Who's going to leave the larger mark on impressionable William Evans, Ben Wade or Will's father Dan?

All through the film, the dwindling group delivering Wade to the Train, is dogged by Wade's gang. But good guy opportunities are missed. The marshal of Contention has enough firepower in the hotel room to simply scatter gun all seven of Wade's men on the street below. But the gang starts offering money to all the murderers and scalawags in town to help recover their boss, Hearing this, the Marshal and his deputies throw in the towel, put down their weapons and are wiped out to the man, by Wade's gang, when they step outside.

After this, Dan Evans and the last Pinkerton are having their own doubts. But Evans sticks it out and agrees to deliver Wade to the train. All along the trail, Evans and Wade have been trading bits of their pasts to one another, warming up in their respect for one another and warming up audience respect too. Now they've made it to the train station. Lead is flying everywhere and both are revealing secrets. Evans dumps the last chapter of his biography on Wade, who admits that he's been to Yuma twice before and escaped both times. This leaves a relieved Evans off the hook for Wade's proposed hanging at Yuma.

Wade is enthused about his new pal too. So enthused that he resolves to help deliver himself to the train. Just then Wade's second in command Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) arrives and pumps five bullets into Evans, meaning its more than a flesh wound this time: its certain death. Wade amazes the audience after being handed his gun and holster, by promptly shooting all five of his remaining associates to death in an elaborate bit of gun play, in anger for the wanton killing of his new friend, even though Dan isn't quite dead yet. Wade's son Will watches his father slowly die, then turns his colt on Wade, who has one in his own hand. But Ben turns his pistol over to the lad with some consoling words, then hops cheerfully aboard the train to Yuma.

My own thinking is that the Western died in the Sixties when Americans realized they had no more frontiers in the face of the endless Cold War and the failure of the war in Vietnam. The appearance of two westerns in a single weekend- the other one is Shoot 'Em Up With Clive Owen and Paul Giamati- causes one to reflect that Americans may be rethinking their destinies. Maybe we can conduct a war while spending what we want at the mall, enduring a sub prime lending crisis, with Wall Street demanding lower interest rates to lift the Stock Market. We can do it, that is, while undercutting the moral firepower of our new Westerns. We're not likely to win many wars this way either.

The Invasion (I) (2007)

Invasion of the Melodramatists

[6/10 · 3 September 2007]

Kennethy Tynan, the British theater critic, raved about Don Siegel's original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Body Snatchers, you'll remember, is the name reserved for those who snatch cadavers for physicians to learn anatomy on, in 19th century England. Boris Karloff played one in a forties movie.

The Invasion is the third remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This one is a little bland. Nicole Kidman is the lead. In a surprising opening tease, Kidman is seen rifling a pharmacy for prescribed drugs. The audience learns moments later that Nicole is a divorced psychiatrist, with a physician boyfriend and an ex who works for the Center for Disease Control.

Like all grownup films now, the family is the focus of the film. Nicole is having the usual dust ups with her ex (Jeremy Northam) when a returning Columbia space vessel enters American airspace with a new toxic virus on board. Slowly, the virus begins to infect Americans.

"People are being replaced!" said someone in the first remake. Well, not exactly. This film isn't that literal. There are no pods for people. The people themselves transform into obedient zombies. Removing the pods removes some of the great fear of the first three Invasions. For the most part, folks have just come down with a virus. It grows a frosty film on one's body but can be peeled off in the initial stages. One must not fall asleep once contacted by the virus. Big Deal!

Very quickly, Nicole's young son Oliver (Jackson Bond) has contacted the virus. Boyfriend Daniel Craig, looking more relaxed and natural than in his recent dull turn as James Bond, wants to help. He has his friend Dr. Stephen Galeano put the virus under the scope to see what its all about. Meanwhile, Nicole's Ex has contacted the virus and the whole CDC is now on the Virus Invasion Rollout Team.

Oliver becomes a pawn between Nicole and her Ex, in the fight for dominance of the 'new species.' Oliver is infected with the virus, but unaccountably - in a turn reminiscent of the recent 28 weeks Later- falls asleep, but is NOT transformed into a 'pod person.' Galeano realizes Oliver's blood could be the template for a vaccine to defeat the virus and the growing Invasion Army.

Nicole and Olvier escape to a pharmacy and convenience store, where, since she's been hit by the virus too, she injects herself with a serum to keep her awake and instructs Oliver how to plunge a syringe in her heart if she appears to have fallen asleep. The Pharmacy is stacked to the ceiling with offensive product placements.

Nicole's Ex and the CDC Team in charge of spreading the virus, have now realized Oliver's blood could defeat them and have launched a search for him. Nicole's boyfriend Daniel Craig is too ineffectual to do anything but set up more opportunities to scare women in the audience already finding their own husbands and boyfriends seated next to them, wanting as saviors.

Eventually, Oliver is snatched from the Jaws of the Invaders, a serum is created. The world is saved. But worse, all the bad guys have gotten the serum too, and are ordinary law-abiding folks again. Its as if the whole incident didn't take place. This is a mistake. Bad guys should be consigned to oblivion and destruction. There is a possible setup here to ditch her ineffectual boyfriend Craig and return to her odious ex-husband. Its as if we've watched a Douglas Sirk weeper about a family stricken by the flu virus, and all the emotional torpor that follows in its wake. Its like Freddy from Elm Street raking you with his claws, but leaving no marks.

A side note: I noticed the film was released at the exact moment the Columbia space vessel was returning to earth, with NASA churning up drama about a hole in the Columbia spacecraft to attract public attention. In the future, all films will be timed with real events taking place in reality to heighten the fear and the drama. May the best publicists- Studio or NASA- win!

Death Sentence (2007)

Six Degrees of Violent Separation From Kevin Bacon

[7/10 · 3 September 2007]

Bacon is a mild-mannered vice-president of a sub-prime loan operation, with two boys and Kelly Preston for a wife.

After a hockey game, he and his son stop for gas in a bad neighborhood. Two carloads full of violent, shaved metal heads descend on the gas station. One of them cuts the throat of Bacon's son with a machete. Bacon and his family are devastated by the murder.

In the last stages of the trial of the one murderer, learning that the others are only going to do a couple of years, Bacon gets angry and decides not to testify against the murderer of his son. Oh, Oh, we've been here before. In moments, we're in Bacon's garage looking for suitable weapons: A machete, a knife, a scythe..,

Bacon tails the kid who macheted his son to death, to his Cabrini Green-like, rundown apartment. Almost accidentally, he kills him.

The cops know instantly that Bacon did it and so do the pals, who are mostly the Darley Brothers. In a plot turn that is hard to believe, the cops decide to just referee the war that ensues between Bacon and the Darleys, rather than arrest Bacon for murder. Aisha Tyler, a cool black woman cop, tries to warn Bacon the Darleys are animals. The Aisha character is beyond belief.. She never loses her cool, while Bacon is losing his constantly. I haven't seen her kind of cool since Peggy Lipton left Mod Squad.

The Darleys come after Bacon leading to a long chase sequence in a six layer parking ramp. Bacon manages to kill another one of the chasers by dumping a car with one of these grunge killers six stories, to his death. The Darleys are angry now. They go after Bacon's wife and remaining son. Aisha leaves a cop outside to watch the place. The Darleys cut the cops throat and manage to shoot Bacon and his entire family.

Bacon is alive and really angry now. He learns his wife is dead, his son hanging on by a thread.

A word here about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre cinematography of the film. The hangouts of the Darleys, Bacon's garage, the gang's hideouts, the gas station, all look like a cross between the settings in Saw and the depraved Texas Chainsaw settings of the 2004 and 2006 remakes. The idea is to convey the same aura as todays hardcore horror films.

Bacon is now in his grungy garage again, transforming himself into the Travis Bickel figure from Taxi Driver. He puts on his kids jeans and black leather jacket, shaves his head bald. Ironically, he goes to a gun dealer. who turns out to be the father of the Darleys (John Goodman). Goodman, aware that it is his kids Bacon is after, sort of wishes him well. A lot of family values in this film.

Now we're in the showdown. Bacon steals one of the gang's own cars and rams into one of the Darleys parked in front of their abandoned church hideout, killing him. The oldest brother of the Darleys is the one most bent on revenge. he arrives at the gang's lair, runs into his father, offs him with a 9 millimeter in a minor dispute, then goes looking for Bacon, who has a double-barreled shotgun, and three semi-automatic pistols at the ready. Gradually, Bacon has killed the entire gang except for the oldest Darley brother. The two men wound one another repeatedly and Darley runs out of Ammo in a massive gunfight in the church tabernacle. The two men sit exhausted next to one another, in a church pew. Except Bacon has one more pistol in the pocket of his leather jacket. He reaches for the 357 magnum, turns to Darley and says "Ready!" Noting Bacon's Bickel-like Get Up, Darley says "you're just like us now!" Bacon offs him and the credits roll.

Somewhere in Death Wish Heaven, the late Charles Bronson is rolling his eyes.

Rage at Dawn (1955)

Randy Shows His Outlaw Side

[6/10 · 17 August 2007]

This is one of the non-Bud Boetticher Randy Scott programmers that Randolph Scott made. Even his bad westerns were a slight cut above most John Waynes after 1950 . I think I saw Lee Marvin playing a bad guy with no lines.

Programmer or no, the cast makes its worth seeing: Forrest Tucker, J. Carroll Nash, Denver Pyle, Ken Tobey and Edgar Buchanan.

In black and white Tobey could play the lead as he did in the Thing, because his red hair would appear dark. But in color films, his coloring won't allow him leads.

Randy's a Pinkerton or Federal Agent trying to find out who is pulling all the train robberies. He and Tobey pull a robbery of their own to stir up the real train robbers.

Forrest Tucker and his sister live on a working ranch near the town. Its a masquerade. The cowpunchers out there rob trains by night. Ray Teal is the sheriff, another familiar figure in western films. The gang are the Reno Brothers: Tucker, Nash and Myron Healey, another perennial bad guy, who would live to play a TV actor specializing in westerns on the TV show Fame. I believe Elvis, Richard Egan and William Campbell were the Reno Brothers in Love me Tender.

Edgar Buchanan is the Judge. He and Teal and the prosecuting attorney are all getting pay-offs from Tucker and the train robbers.

Meanwhile, Randy is romancing the sister, (Mala Powers) under the nose of her jealous and angry brother Tucker. As usual, those florid kerchiefs of Randy's anger a lot of he-men like Tucker, leaving them spoiling for a fight. But once the judge, sheriff and prosecutor realize Scott is "one of them," a thief, the Reno Brothers ask him to throw in with them in the robberies.

Scott baits a trap to capture the Reno gang. But one of the Renos, Denver Pyle, wants him to get Laura Reno away from the gang before its too late. With no beard, Pyle is playing a 'normal' character for a change. The Renos are captured, but a gang of vigilantes comes to string them up right in the jail. Randy is unable to stop the hanging. Two former friends are arrested as vigilantes. Scott and Marla Reno ride off into the sunset together on a buckboard.

The Astronaut Farmer (2006)

2007, A Texas Space Odyssey

[6/10 · 5 August 2007]

I'm watching Billy Bob in Astronaut Farmer. Its a ridiculous story about a Texas farmer named Farmer who wants to launch a rocket into orbit from his barn. The local banker is after him cause he hasn't paid the note on the homestead lately.

The government's starts to hassle Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton). His waf (Virginia Madsen) is bein' patient. Billy Bob throws a brick through the window of the local bank when its manager sends a note demanding immediate payment of the loan.

Billy Bob summons his lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson), who seeks the advice of a New York lawyer acquaintance, who advises them to notify the press. This brings Congress, the CIA, the FAA, the FFA, the Military and NASA to Cayahoga county to hold hearings in the local hah school gym. While Billy Bob is explainin' to the committee, a kid in a basketball outfit comes in, dribbles once preparing to shoot, sees he's interrupting and dribbles out.

Billy Bob's wife has to leave her groceries at the counter when her credit card won't fly at the food store. She considers leaving her husband. The FAA Chief privately warns Billy Bob in the Mens room that the government will fire a missile at his barn if he tries to launch. Farmer's lawyer emerges from a stall to tell him they're just trying' to scare him. Everyone buttons their pants and drifts out of the john.

At the very moment when all seems lost, Billy Bob's pop (Bruce Dern) up and dies. A bank representative tells him they will foreclose on the farm in two weeks. The press, with its microphones and satellite dishes is parked just outside the ranch. There's a couple of FBI men who keep musing in front of their station wagon at what a folly this all is, for Billy Bob and the government. The family has an old-fashioned funeral for Dern, with horse wagons toting the wooden coffin out to the lone prairie, and the family decked out in stetsons, suits and string ties. I swear Virginia Madsen is wearing one of those bonnets and a prairie length dress from covered wagon days.

With everything hanging in the balance, Farmer gets into the rocket and launches it himself, at the first opportunity. If goes up fifteen feet, falls back to the ground, then takes off on the ground like a bat out of hell, directly toward the Press Area, sending reporters scrambling. Billy Bob orbits off over a cliff briefly in the satellite, then falls into some rocks suffering contusions and broken ribs, requiring a hospital stay. The Chairman of the FAA gives a speech in town saying he told everybody it was folly.

Billy Bob's wife inherits enough from her father to stop the foreclosure. Her husband is in remorse; "I don' wanna hurt this family no more!" His oldest son is encouraging: "We can rebuild in the barn using some of the wrecked stuff!" Billy Bob starts wearing the astronaut suit he retrieved from a NASA dumpster again. He starts a running regimen as training. The family secretly begins preparing for a second launch.

The two hapless FBI men are still foraging for clues. Headquarters tells them Billy Bob has bought more 'rocket fuel' from the fertilizer store. A phalanx of federal, state and local official cars make a beeline for the ranch. The race is on. Billy Bob's holdin' his helmet in hand, ready to step aboard "Dreamer" again. The FBI stops a man in a mysterious pickup. "Rats, its one of own own men undercover!" Billy bob is saying "Roger" to his wife, who is riding the launching controls from a nearby trailer. His wife pushes a joystick filched from an ancient Atari video game computer: "Ignition, we're launched!" The Federal Phalanx is just outside the Gates, but Billy Bob is headed for orbit. The whole community is happy to see him go. Even the law enforcement types dance a little jig. Headed toward orbit from Cuyahoga county, Billy Bob is exuberant. The NASA folks in Houston are cheering at this blip on their radar screens, but they're unable to communicate with him because there's no CB radio equipment at the NASA command post.

Billy Bob shouts to his family from Orbit in the spinning satellite. There's a 2001 Blue Danube moment in space. The kids all say "Hi Daddy" from 'Mission Control.' Billy Bob opens his bottle of Nexium and lets the pills float weightlessly, He grabs one and gobbles it. In space, His electrical systems shut down, and he loses contact with his family. NASA and the joint chiefs announce that no flight has taken place, its all a hoax. Meanwhile, the family is calculating when the Capsule will float to earth and whether Billy bob will have enough oxygen to make the trip. There is enough oxygen. Billy bob drifts to earth somewhere in the African Velde, the music swelling. A gorgeous amber sunset serving as a backdrop, Billy Bob walks away. Hold it, this ain't no African Velde. Billy Bob's waf and kids just drove up in the Land Rover. Our hero has landed right smack near the bosom of his family! They drive away to celebrate at the Dairy Queen. The music swells triumphantly. Fin

75 Degrees in July (2000)

Hoped for Love Affair Never Appears

[4/10 · 4 August 2007]

A fight breaks out in a local tavern. I leap into the fray and ask "what were the issues?" Then I laugh. There are never any real issues in tavern brawls.

The issue here is there was supposed to be a love affair between the manacled cowboy son-in-law of the King Ranch Sized mogul, and the returning artist daughter. That's what the audience wanted. With the affair would be the terrible, tangled web of why the two must have the affair and why it must fail.

All jinxed romances must fail. They often have a nice moral even when they do fail. The film was acted in something like daytime soap opera slow motion. The filming was gorgeous, the actors second tier, the net effect something like a classy Lifetime Channel romance film.

But the last word on 75 Degrees is "Where's the Beef?"

If the director could get in touch with me, maybe we could see what could be done about taking this back into the editing room, try to clean it up and make something of the film.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

John McClane Falls Mainly on the Plain

[7/10 · 26 July 2007]

What distinguishes Die Hard films from the other thrillers with pyrotechnics, is the relationship the John McClane character has with his buddy and his antagonist, in the film. Sometimes, as tn the first Die Hard, the buddy and the antagonist are the same guy: "Happy Trails, Hans!"

The dialog that ensues from these relationships is sometimes superb and always interesting. Bruce Willis' John McClane distinguishes himself as something more than a show host serving up the blown up cars and imploded rail lines and bus terminals.

McClane must relate.

The new and most interesting curve in Die Hard Four is Matt Farrell (Justin Long), a charming and impish young geek and computer hacker, who in manner and demeanor is the opposite of the muscled take charge McClane.

McClane is casually attempting to break up a relationship his daughter is having with a lowlife, when the FBI calls to have him do a routine pickup of Farrell, part of a larger roundup of computer hackers nationwide.

McClane has trouble finding Farrell. Meanwhile, pandemonium is breaking out in the Y2K world of Terror that surrounds us today. A clean cut goody-two-shoes government anti-terror planner, smeared and fired for trying to alert the government how easy a high tech disaster could be launched, gets angry and decides to create mayhem and chaos himself.

This clean cut Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) is the bad guy match for McClane's affections, to Matt Farrell's shape-shifting slipperiness. That's good. McClane needs at least one guy who is simple and easy to understand.

Gabriel is already setting off cherry bombs and firecrackers everywhere before the aging McClane -over fifty now and hairless- manages to track down and corral the smooth and elusive Farrell. McClane's capture is difficult. But Farrell backpedals with Matt pretending he is all cooperation with Mac, when in fact he is stalling and planning to escape.

McClane really has almost no time to take him to the Precinct. Instead he finds himself enlisting Farrell's high tech know-how in a pinch. Farrell warns him, at one point, that if he tries to hot-wire this car the old low tech way, he is liable to set off the airbags knocking them both senseless. Farrell instead pulls a PDA from his backpack, and fakes his way into the car's computer to start it. McClane is impressed, but not admitting it.

Quickly the FBI Bureau Chief Learns that Gabriel is so many leagues more sophisticated than Government agencies, it is going to be difficult to stop him let alone catch him. McClane learns that many of the other geeks in the roundup have been assassinated, except Farrell, who narrowly escapes that fate moments into his capture by McClane. Big John deduces that the murders have something to do with Gabriel's plot to show America how easily it can be devastated and reduced to a pile of steaming rubble.

McClane eventually helps Farrell escape the clutches of the bureau so the two of them can track down and defeat the Gabriel Nemesis.

They are a dynamic duo. McClane's stress becomes unmanageable when he learns that Gabriel has taken his daughter prisoner. I was for him bringing the lowlife boyfriend along for the ride because there would be more laughs, but the producers wouldn't listen to me.

Young Farrell keeps riding to McClane's rescue, always diffident and fearful that he has no tactic that will work this time. Finally, Farrell pulls out the stops. He's out of ideas and needs to commune with HIS GURU from Philly: WARLOCK!

McClane is leery about this tangent, but agrees finally. He and Farrell journey to a rundown alcove in Philly, Warlock's lair. It looks suspiciously like the ruins of the black neighborhood Philly's mayor ordered torched a few years ago, to quell an insurrection of black folks. The Audience is dismayed to learn that Warlock is just plain old Clerks Director Kevin Smith, now on his knees after several flops, and forced to play portly character parts in other people's films. You remember Kevin. He's the silent guy who stood outside the convenience and video stores in Clerks selling drugs, while his taller, slimmer partner dripped a patter of obscenity-laced sexual innuendos to passing women. Anyway, Kevin Smith is the Guru here. The audience reluctantly accepts this. Even Warlock, who has also narrowly missed being murdered, is out of gas idea-wise. Both he and Matt Farrell have been able to use the cell phone system even though it is dead for the rest of the country, by harnessing system algorithms through their PDAs. With this avenue fading too, the two geeks' blackberries gasping for power, Warlock and Matt go looking for some low tech information: they look up an address in the phone book.

There are showdowns with Gabriel, attempts to save McClane's daughter at a power plant, more high tech derring-do, and many last minute saves of the doddering McClain by the Y generation Farrell. It all comes out in the end. The film is able to put its heel down in two major demos, the Ys and the Boomers, so the end is set to come out foursquare behind the values of movie audiences in both generations.

Watch this space for a Revenge of the Nerds sequel to DH Four, when Farrell goes ballistic and tries to date McClane's daughter!

The Return of the Soldier (1982)

Rebecca Takes the Measure of the West

[10/10 · 25 July 2007]

just saw this exquisite 1982 movie Return of the Soldier, based on Rebecca West's novel. Its about a shell-shocked fortyish Captain who doesn't even tell his wife he has returned to British soil, but remains in a hospital in London. He's lost his memory and is a boy again, with a lingering yen for the lower class sweetheart he pursued 25 years earlier. Its a delicate story. He is lingering in his boyhood, while the reader discovers his wife is an unbearable, aspiring socialite who wants him to resume his place in society. Living with them is his cousin Jenny, who loved Chris Baldry the soldier, when they were growing up as playmates, but has settled into spinsterhood. The lower class woman, played by Glenda Jackson, is Margaret Gray. It is SHE who is notified that Chris is back in England. Chris' wife Kitty is shocked when Mrs. Gray comes to tell her that Chris is in a hospital in London. Kitty (Julie Christie) is vacuous and snobbish. Why, she asks herself, was this other woman sent a telegraph about Chris rather than her? Chris has forgotten totally about Kitty. He wants to renew his relationship with Margaret. The now married Margaret is reluctant to meet him, but then does and continues to meet with him. There is a psychiatrist (Ian Holm) who warns Kitty and Jenny that Chris' temporary happiness with Margaret will disappear if he 'cures' him. Jenny realizes how empty Kitty is for Chris and forms a secret loving alliance through Margaret. They both are in love with him. Jenny wants to help. Late in the film Kitty reveals that Chris and she had a boy who died five years ago. Telling Chris this, weighs the Shrink, will certainly restore him to 'normal.' But is this a good idea? Chris, barely aware that he and Kitty were ever married, is unaware of his child and the child's death. The psychiatrist, just learning of the child, believes such knowledge will restore Chris. Jenny and Margaret have Chris all to themselves because Kitty believes he is faking and refuses to accept Chris's illness in reverting to his youth in his forties. The film leaves her mostly out of consideration concerning whats to be done with Chris.

But Jenny and Margaret, in the child's perfectly maintained bedroom- with Kitty too in the novel, but not in the screenplay- discuss what they believe should be done about Chris from their separate perspectives. Margaret is the critical one here, because, though married, she has half fallen in love with Chris again. Jenny's social stature, Jenny believes, will be threatened if Chris does not right himself. She does not reveal this to Margaret, however. Margaret decides, looking ahead, that Chris cannot maintain his fantasy over time, but must return to something like a real life. While Kitty and Jenny look on from the window of the house, Margaret approaches Chris outside and tells him of his lost son. The buoyant war victim's head sinks, his shoulders slump, he looks away. He walks dejectedly toward the house. Fin

I read some criticism of this first novel of Rebecca West. The novel was written something after the first war. The movie is never quite clear who Jenny is, his cousin or his sister. It would be more rousing if she were his sister, of course. The criticism doesn't make it clear either. I'm sure West in her novel, makes sure Jenny is her cousin, not her sister. West is no Henry Miller nor an Anais Nin, whose book Incest (about her relationship with her father as an adult to get even with him for molesting her as a child) I considered reading, but then decided against. Rebecca the author has a need to restore Chris too. She too has outposts in her head for the Society her novel excoriates first but finally embraces once more.

Hairspray (2007)

Hairspray Drives Racial Integration in Sixties Baltimore

[7/10 · 23 July 2007]

Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) is an overweight four foot ten high school girl with a dream: to star on a Baltimore afternoon teen dance show of 1962, the Corny Collins Show.

A blend of Rock 'N Roll High School , Grease and the Civil Rights Movement, Hairspray's art direction is a big part of its success.

Kinky casting including John Travolta in drag as Tracy's inflated laundress of a Mom Edna, highlight this small film. Michele Pfeiffer is Velma Von Tussle, a former Miss Baltimore, and a defender of the white status quo. Mother and daughter Amber (Britney Snow) are in a continual battle with Collins (James Marsden): the daughter to get her image in front of the camera, and Velma to steer the show in the whitest, blandest direction.

When Tracy comes late to class, she is sent to detention, where she finds all the black kids who appear on Negro Day on Corny's show, practicing steps in detention. They soon learn that Tracy is a talented dancer.

The production numbers on the Collins show are funny, lyrical and a send-up of early sixties teen fashion, song styles and high school vapidity. Guys are wearing tight shirts pants that don't quite reach their shoes, revealing white socks. Women are mostly in control of the movie discussion. This is a chick flick first. I was one of two males with 13 young women at the 9:55 p.m. showing.

Many of the performers on the show attend high school with Tracy, like Link Larkin (Zac Efron), who like everyone on the show, lacquers his pompadour with hairspray. Even a spit curl that hangs loosely from the pomp over his brow has had the life sprayed out of it. The hair on all the white dancers on the show is ludicrously glue-like, but that's nothing compared to the grotesque makeup showing every possible wrinkle on the parent types like Tracy's Dad Wilbur Turnblad (ChristopherWalken), a pathetic loser who peddles jokes and sight gags at a small Baltimore novelty shop. Paul Dooley as Mr. Spitzer, WXYT-TV's owner, looks like a zombie, with his deadly makeup, as does Walken, with his wrinkled face and obvious bad wig. Jerry Stiller as owner of a store for Big Girl Fashions, has little more than a cameo here, but his makeup and costume, like Dooley's and Walken's makeup and their carnival-like clothes, suggest the living dead. In opening scenes, Walken has one of those thin summer shirts of the fifties through which you can see the hung shouldered white undershirt below. Travolta's makeup makes him look grotesquely large playing Edna. Even Michele Pfeifer is showing veins in the neck. The makeup message is that adults are old and out of touch.

Their kids, by contrast, are fresh-faced and dressed in the most laughable high school and rock 'n roll costumes of the period.

The makeup and clothes of Link Larkin are modeled on the look of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. He even wears that slinky thin suit to school. Its the continental look: no belt. Link is a Johnny One-Note but he is a winning Johnny One-Note.

High school itself is given short shrift, but it is telling. In the teachers lounge, instructors are engulfed in cigarette smoke wearing the dullest suits and hairdos imaginable. The message here is that only the kids know anything.

Tracy and a friend show up to audition as dancers , but are driven off the show by Velma and the intensely white regular dancers including Alma. Tracey manages to break onto the show anyway after being tipped to dance natural by the black kids who appear on Negro Day on the Collins show, once a week.

If the parents are zombies, the white kids mostly dull pastel with the exception of Tracy, the black performers are the most colorful lively performers in the movie. The message: The lively blacks are not getting their just due in American high school society and on local TV dance shows. Corny's Negro Day co-host Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) is told by station manager Velma Von Tussle that Negro Day has been canceled. Tracy and her mother advise Maybelle and the black kids who are still wearing heavily processed conked hairdos, to march on WXYT-TV the next day. Tracy, risking her newfound stardom, marches too, and becomes a fugitive when she touches the head cop trying to stop the march, and is charged with obstructing justice.

Maybelle and the black kids, with Tracy and her Mom and Dad, decide to sneak their way onto the show to compete in the annual best dancer contest, which is decided by phone-in polling. A little black girl wins. Velma's daughter Alma embarrasses herself on the show. Corny Collins declares his show officially integrated and featuring black dancers every day of the week, their processed hair notwithstanding. Seaweed, a black dancer reminiscent of the Jackie Wilson of the Sixties who did a death-defying knee slide on Dick Clark's dance show, kisses the white Penny Pingleton, confirming that integration is now official.

Hairspray the musical has made changes in the original Waters film, improving it. Performances are extraordinary, except for Walken and Queen Latifah. Walken is stiff for the dance scenes with his wife Edna, though he is a professional Broadway dancer. He appears to have a permanently stiff neck. The Hip-Hop Latifah seems out of place in Hairspray. Allison Janey as Penny Pingleton's puritan Mom, Prudy Pingleton gets all the funniest lines. The new movie is funny, somewhat original and winning. I cannot remember for the life of me what the original Hairspray was about.

7 Men from Now (1956)

Randolph Scott - Man of the West

[8/10 · 5 July 2007]

Opening Scene: A rainy night on the purple sage. A single man, Randolph Scott, walks out of the darkness to a campfire under a ledge where two men sit drinking coffee.

Randolph Scott: "Don't mean to bust in on yuh, but I couldn't help but see your fire from the ridge." One Man: "What are you..?" Other Man: "Its alright, he just stopped by to get out of the rain, ain't that right, Mister?" Scott: "that's right!" Other man: "C'mon in!" Scott: "I'd be obliged for a cup of that coffee!" Other man: "Help yourself!" Scott: "Thanks!" Other man: "Mighty white, I mean, wet night for a man to be out?" Scott: "Sure is" One man: "you musta rode a long way?" Scott: "I walked" One man: "Ain't you got no horse?" Scott: "did have" (pauses to drink from coffee) "chiricawa jumped me about 10 mile back." Other Man: "they stole him?" Scott: "they ate him!" One man: "Don't I know you from somewhere, Mister? Scott: "Ever been in Silver Springs?" One man: "Can't say as I have." Scott: "I come from there." One man: "I hear there was a killin' in Silver?" Scott: "Yeah, I heard." Other man: (turning to his partner) "The rain's slackin' off, Clint, we'd better get moving before.," Scott: (Abruptly) "What's your hurry? (pauses to drink) No close town around." One man: "that killin' (takes slug from coffee)., did they ever catch up with them fellows that done it?" Scott: (looking directly at them) "Two of em!" (One man drops his coffee and reaches for his gun, the scene flashes to the two men's horses neighing and rearing in the rainy dark as four shots ring out in quick succession. The scene quickly fades. We see Scott riding over a beautiful sunny rise early in the morning leading a second horse behind the one he's riding, the chiselled man of the west with the colorful scarf and the cinched drawstring at the neck, to hold the hat against the wind)

And that's just the opening scene!

Waitress (2007)

Fried Green Tomato Pies at Sheriff Taylor's Whistlestop Cafe

[8/10 · 26 June 2007]

It seems that Sheriff Andy Taylor has established a Pie Cafe in Mayberry.

Three winning waitresses work at Andy's Pie Cafe. Its wonderful and down home.

The girls don't have many aspirations past the Pie Stop Cafe. Jenna (Keri Russell) just wants to dump her old man and make pies. Pie-making is a bit of a neurosis with her. When things are at their worst at home with the old man, she just sits down and creates an entirely new pie with totally off-the-wall ingredients. Its too bad they're consumed at Sheriff Andy's Pie Cafe. A psychologist might help her by simply analyzing the pies and their trimmings.

Jenna's old man is- are you ready?- Earl! The name has been getting a workout since the Dixie Chicks outed him in their famous song, only to have NBC do a TV series about Earl. With a name like Earl, the audience's expectations are already low. Earl is the husband from hell. The trouble is Jenna's gone and got herself pregnant by him.

Fortunately, there's a new married gynecologist in town. Jenna and he hit it off instantly. She jumps onto his lap right in the office.

The cook at Andy's Whistlestop is a piece of work too. Even Andy ain't what he used to be. He's now called Joe, he's 81 years old, stops for a pie ever day, is in love with Jenna, and owns most of Mount Ivy or Mayberry or wherever it is. Its Andy Griffith, of course, only in this film, his name is Joe. He's a persnickety customer, insistent about the particulars of his order.

But we're talking' about Cal (Lew Temple) the cook here. Cal can't say a kind word to any of the waitresses at Andy's. He's always complainin' they're not getting' the orders out fast enough. But who put Cal in charge, anyway? Joe (Andy?) probably did.

Jenna don' want the baby cause its Earl's, but Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion) is having none of that. He wants her to have the baby even if it is Earl's. I forgot to mention that, like Jenna, Pomatter is married.

Beckie starts another storyline when she tells Jenna and Dawn (Adrienne Shelly) that she has a new boyfriend too, but she ain't sayin' who it is.

Dawn is a mess. She ain't never had a decent boyfriend and she's spoilin' for one. Finally, she puts an ad in- one of those newspaper things- and gets a live one. He scares her pretty good. Jenna and Beckie aren't impressed with his free-associatin' poetry neither. But they decide Dawn's time has arrived. They put her through a makeover.

Meanwhile, Joe(sheriff Taylor?) has figured out Jenna is pregnant and asked her what she's gonna do. Jenna pledges Joe to silence. The audience knows that if Andy has figured it out, its only a matter of time before Earl finds out Jenna is pregnant.

There's the inevitable showdown between Earl and the Gynecologist, but the audience knows its all gonna turn out fine in the end. The identity of Beckie's boyfriend is revealed. Dawn finds the love of her life and marries him.

The acting in Waitress is first rate, particularly the acting of Andy Griffith and Kerri Russell. Adrienne Shelly's story and direction are wrought with just the right combination of green tomatoes and steel magnolias. She'll probably get nominated for best director and/or best script. I wouldn't be surprised if Sheriff Andy appeared in a TV series based on Waitress.

Dawn (Adrienne Shelly) is writer and director on this film. She started in acting then branched into making exploitation films and TV. Gradually she started making better features.

There's a serious postscript to this film. Adrienne Shelly was murdered by a construction worker who was renovating apartments below her office in New York, before Waitress was released, in November, 2006. The construction worker hung Shelly's body from a shower rod to fake her suicide after the two had exchanged blows arguing about noise from the renovation. He had knocked her unconscious, thought she was dead and was worried he'd be deported. So he hung her body from the shower rod. It was the hanging that actually killed her. The film is dedicated to Adrienne Shelly.

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Mr. Brooks Is Fundamentally Sound!

[7/10 · 4 June 2007]

Mr. Brooks is a surprisingly good plot, but the dialog and logic get dicey and out of control at times.

Kevin Costner is Mr. Brooks (Brothers). He is the quintessential successful businessman who owns his own company.

He has an interesting sideline too, that few people know about: He's a serial killer. Its not that he's not remorseful about it, he attends AA meetings, where he confesses that he is 'addicted.'

Mr. Brooks has a wife and a daughter in college. More important, he has an alter ego, Marshall, a conscience without a conscience, played by William Hurt. Marshall is invisible to everyone but Mr. Brooks. The film opens with Brooks killing a couple who like to open their bay window so everyone can watch them make love. In Burbank and greater LA where Mr. Brooks operates, the Press has dubbed him the Thumb Killer. He and Marshall discuss murder and its problems regularly but no one else can hear them.

Film makers have discovered that family, once verboten in all films, is now practically a requirement in any film for adults. At some point, Brooks learns his daughter has quit school because of a pregnancy, but later he learns she's a serial killer too. Its a complication that hardly matters to the plot so you just assume the writer threw it in to add a family element.

A few days after killing the couple, Brooks finds a brooding young man with a beard in his outer office. The man, Mr. Brown sends photos in showing Brooks shutting the curtains of the house with the two dead victims laying on the bed behind him. With Marshall and he conferencing on this development, Mr. Brown is invited in to discuss what he wants. Mr. Brown wants to participate in the next murder. But Marshall and Brooks, like the audience, have their doubts about this guy.

Demi Moore is a cheeky heiress who pursues the Thumb Killer. She's on the LAPD, while trying to dump a gigolo hubby who wants a big settlement. The plot starts getting real complicated. Marshall and Mr. Brooks decide to kill Demi's hubby and lawyer girlfriend, pinning the crime on Mr. Brown or possibly on Demi. Its not exactly clear which. Then Brooks visits Stanford and kills another student using the same MO his daughter employed when she killed her first victim. Later he tells the daughter someone in Palo Alto has killed another college victim there. She doesn't appear to figure out that it was Mr. Brooks, her father, who did it, or even care that the new murder helps deflect attention from her.

On some level, this film is a bit of a comedy. Mr. Brooks keeps changing his mind about what to do about Mr. Brown. Finally Brooks makes Brown disappear and points suspicion for the couple murder at Brown. But Demi Moore isn't so dumb that some of this isn't starting to make her wonder too. Demi's a little short on things to do, so the writers develop a story about a killer Demi sent up, busting out of prison and wanting revenge. Costner's Brooks is a little bored too. So he offs Demi's revenge killers too. For no real reason.

Despite all the things wrong with the film, it is a pleasure to watch. The movie surprises all the time. Its a thriller in which the audience doesn't always know who to rout for. In the end, no character is found to be anything less than self-serving. In a film world of heroes and villains, a film without a hero is a nice touch. I can't even remember what happened to Mr. Brooks because its hard to care.

Dane Cook is adequate as the blackmailing Mr. Brown as is Demi Moore in her sketchy cop role. Brooks and Marshall's conversations often seem forced and unreal. Dane Cook's Mr. Brown is dumber, often, than his character should be, but sometimes he is too smart too. The storytellers make his character uneven and somewhat unbelievable. This film works wonderfully despite all these flaws.

Finally, the film has performed a great public service: It has taken the edge off all those Hannibal Lecter horror stories that have started to bore us. A serial killer doesn't have to be a terrible grind. He can be a nice guy. In its way, Mr. Brooks sends up Hannibal, news media horror stories about serial killers and the myth that all serial killers are alike. If Mr. Brooks isn't Mr. Blanding, Mr. Blonde or Mr. Moto, he's still a character the audience can make an emotional investment in, his own lack of emotion notwithstanding.

28 Weeks Later (2007)

Iraq War Politics and Family Values Mix Easily With Bloodstruck Zombies

[21 May 2007]

28 Days Later is one of the better, more serious horror films ever made.

But since its premiere, lesser zombie films have rushed to trade on the Zombie film's reputation. First there is Shaun of the Dead, a Brit kitchen sink comedy that shows us the lighter side of zombies and even how to deal with them if one ever encounters a real one.

Fox and the Brits are back with 28 WEEKS Later, a decidedly weaker effort than Days, with Iraq War failures intermixed with dabs of Family Values. The movie is bad but the politics are the cheekiest since the Full Monty.

What remained of Brit forces, wiped up the carnage of 28 Days Later. But this bigger production demands a mightier crew: Yes, I'm afraid they've brought in the Americans. The US Army with all of its smugness intact is ready to screw it up and make a mess. This way, see, we don't just have just a zombie movie here but a metaphor for the joint British-American Failures in Iraq.

Lets not forget family values. Robert Carlyle seems a bad choice for the father of two little girls. After all, Carlyle abandoned Frank and Malachy McCourt., left them to fend for themselves in Limerick Ireland. Carlyle wandered off to England for good when wife Angela and the family became a burden in Angela's Ashes. Also, he didn't provide the greatest fatherly example when stripped to the essential Full Monty in the movie by that name.

Six months after the quelling of the Zombie invasion, civilians return to the boroughs of London to find US Army helicopters circling over Big Ben and the Thames, and US Army sharpshooters on the roofs watching for re-emerging zombies to return for another blood feast.

Despite the American presence, the yanks in the cast don't seem genuine. Seasoned Americans- I'm one of those- can spot this instantly. Brit actors can fake the accent and the look the ticket in some varieties of American movies, particularly when there are other Americans in the cast. But these 'Americans' have to be modeled after signature American types. These GIS ARE Americans though. They just seem a lot like Brits. Without the f*ck*n' adjective in every three word sentence and the US uniforms, you wouldn't know they were yanks at all.

The problem is really that Brit filmmakers don't know that in a movie like this you make use of stock American types. They've got one guy, the Black US army general who is modeled on the authoritative figure, often cast as a cop, that Ernie Hudson plays in stateside movies. Hudson is macho. He's got all the cool left over from Richard Roundtree's portrayal of John Shaft in 1971 and some menace besides. This guy playing the general in command of US Forces in London is decidedly weak tea by comparison.

Carlyle's kids are angry at him for telling them their mother is dead, but tries to con them instead, saying he only said that the Zombie kissed their mom. When the mom turns up alive, apparently untouched by the zombie contagion, a combination of full-fledged AIDS with Rabies combined, a nurse decides that she and her daughters must be preserved at all costs. Their blood could be the source of a protective serum against the Virus.

The efforts to isolate and quarantine any stray zombie still operating go awry when Carlyle, overwhelmed by guilt for fibbing to his kids, tries to at least straighten it out with the suddenly alive missus. But she really did get kissed by a zombie, and for Carlyle, that's the rub. In the time it takes to passionately kiss his wife, Carlyle is transformed into the most rabid of zombies. He cuts himself a swath of victims-cum-zombies just in the hospital alone, that reignites the crisis of six months ago. Suddenly, the smug Americans on rooftops have to break away from the peeping tom role they've been playing with rifle telescopes and do some serious shooting. But like the Iraq venture, the sharpshooting soon runs amok. A rooftop shooter named Doyle stops shooting, realizing the sharpshooters are now killing innocent citizens, unable to separate zombies from human beings.

Doyle teams up with Carlyle's two daughters who are now fleeing poison gas attacks and rockets from those American helicopters overhead, along with sniper fire from his brethren still atop the city's major buildings. One sniper pumps a bullet into the statue of Lord Wellington in Trafalgar Square as Big Ben strikes the hour. Its all low comedy to make sport of the American GI ignorance of British tradition and landmarks.

Doyle is killed but the two daughters escape to a Soccer stadium where Doyle's friend, a black helicopter pilot, brings them aboard and the craft wends its way out to sea over the White Cliffs of Dover. I can faintly hear the strains of Vera Lynn singing When the Lights Go On Again, as the Yanks, aided by the pluckier Brits, mount a quick counterattack and end the film.

28 weeks later isn't a great film, but its a sly dig at the Bush Administration and the Poodle Acquiescense of Tony Blair.

Studio One: The Defender: Part 1 (1957) Season 9, Episode 20

Fifties Character Actors A Treat to See Again

[8/10 · 18 May 2007]

I'm looking at an old Kinescope on DVD, of a studio one that was presented as a drama by Westinghouse, complete with Betty Furness doing live commercials, in 1957.

This may have been, in effect, the pilot for the defenders since the structure is the same as the series. Steve McQueen is charged with murder. Old Hand Ralph Bellamy is the patriarch head of a father-son defense team. The young William Shatner, who was recognized then as the hottest new young actor around, plays the son. In the TV show that became the Defenders series, E G Marshall played the father and Robert Reed, who would later go on to debase himself as the father on the Brady Bunch, before being outed as gay, played the son.

Shatner is so young and innocent that he looks more like a young Ray Liotta than any version of his present self.

Martiin Balsam plays the prosecutor. There are all kinds of old favorites from that era in the audience, among the reporters and even on the jury. Ed Asner is sitting on that jury chewing gum and trying like mad to get the audience to notice him. There are guys who worked on soap operas back then. Yul Brynner, Sidney Lumet and Norman Felton worked in production and acted too, in those days. All three worked on this film.

Its grand to see this stuff. Shatner was getting the young man roles in every movie in those days. He was hotter then than Brad Pitt after Thelma and Louise. One of the sons in the Brothers Karamazov was played by Shatner. Shatner played one of the witnesses in the Outrage an Americanization of Kurosawa's Rashoman.

Anyway, Bellamy was defending Steve for murder, but actually wanted to see him found guilty. His son Shatner tells him he has to quit the case if he believes that. Father and son struggle over the question of their client McQueen's guilt. In the end, Ralph does the right thing and uses a courtroom stunt to get McQueen off. The son is happy and proud of his father again. As the jury leaves the box, Ed Asner parks his gum under the jury box rail. A bailiff catches him at it and makes him put the stale gum back in his mouth. When the bailiff turns away from him, Ed quickly parks the gum back under the rail.

Betty Furness does the concluding commercial live and I notice one of the gleeful women in a vacuum cleaner demonstration is the same woman that was on the stand testifying movingly for Steve McQueen just 20 minutes earlier. IMDb.com, in the spirit of the live fifties presentation, notes that Betty Furness played HERSELF in the film.

Sword of Honour (2001 TV Movie)

Noblesse Oblige and its Discontents

[18 January 2007]

Guy Crouchback has a problem. He believes in war as a great cause, but finds World War Two itself, wanting.

This two part film based on Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor is not the first rate production Brideshead Revisited was, but it captures some of Waugh's dismay with World War Two.

It is surprising Waugh found so much fault. Wars since have never come close to matching the sheer resolution that went into winning the great war that surpassed in every way the "Great War" that had preceded it.

The film is fairly commercial but captures many of the story points of Sword of Honor. As an antiwar film though, it doesn't even come close to matching Catch 22, the great American war novel turned movie that Mike Nichols directed in 1969. Catch 22 the movie was considered a failure.

So what to make of this one? Its a failure too, an even bigger one. But for those interested in Waugh, it is a gateway to one of his lesser known books. I've been reading Waugh for years but never heard much about this one. Seeing this movie has firmed my resolve to get an Amazon Reseller paperback if possible- my sister bought Kite Runner for 33 cents!- and see what the novel was about.