muertos Reviews

Pearl Harbor (2001)

An utter waste of money, talent and history.

[1/10 · 29 January 2005]

Pearl Harbor is a movie so spectacularly awful that it would be funny if it wasn't so infuriating. There hasn't been a big-budget re-enactment of the Pearl Harbor attack since Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970, and, due to the utter failure of this movie on every level, it's unlikely it will be attempted again for a long, long time.

The writing is ludicrous. It's a series of situations and set pieces strung together without a single regard given to character development or even plausibility. The acting is beneath contempt. Ben Affleck should never have been let anywhere near this film, and in the "love" scenes between himself and Kate Beckinsdale, it appears patently obvious that the actors completely detest each other. The attack scene is filmed and edited like a Saturday morning cartoon. And...excuse me...in real life Pearl Harbor was a DEFEAT. There was none of the stupid garbage with slick fighter jocks dogfighting Japanese Zeros. This film makes it look like a victory! And, excuse me...FDR could not stand up by himself. The scene in the cabinet room where he rises from his chair was simply laughable.

This film is beyond bad. It is insulting. It's a 6-year-old's coloring book passed off as history. Aside from that, it's probably the limpest, shoddiest big-budget "epic" produced in the last 10 years. The day it opened in theaters was truly a day of infamy.

The Rock (1996)

Exhilarating action.

[8/10 · 29 January 2005]

The Rock is an exceptionally well put-together action film that leaves you completely breathless. It's not high art, but it may be one of the more evolved examples of the 80s/90s action blockbuster, and it's certainly a lot of fun.

The whole plot is merely a mechanism to buddy up Sean Connery as a grizzled but still tough ex-antiterrorist operative and Nicholas Cage who plays (tongue in cheek) a lab-bound FBI agent. Ed Harris makes a terrific bad guy as the mad general armed with some really icky chemicals. Why does he choose to take over a prison instead of, for example, hide a VX rocket under a populated street and threaten to trigger it by remote control? Well, because it's in the script! Now carefully add the set pieces. A crumbling old fortress full of lots of pieces of twisted metal where bad guys can impale themselves on. A mine car run obviously designed by the same LSD-tripping mining engineer who designed the one in Indiana Jones. A furnace that belches flame and swishes various sharp metal implements at you every few seconds. (This is the most fun!) If The Rock was a video game it'd be Doom II. Still, it's very exciting to see Connery back in his old form, and Cage bringing up the rear. Every scene crackles with tension and suspense, but you get the feeling it's not totally serious, as there's a comic edge to a lot of the film, especially the dialogue.

This movie could only be made in the Clinton era. It disdains politicians in that oh-so-familiar Hollywood way, but it carries a certain amount of venom toward the military mindset as well, portraying Marines as homicidal testosterone-flushed automatons. I can't see a Hollywood producer getting near a script with that kind of subtext today. But, overall, The Rock is a good time, cheap harmless fun.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

My favorite Kubrick!

[10/10 · 26 January 2005]

So being a Kubrick fan is a trendy thing these days (and has been for quite a while), but you can always spot someone who's not that serious about it when they tick off their favorites (invariably 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Dr. Strangelove) and omit any mention of Barry Lyndon. It may not be the best Kubrick, but it's probably my favorite of all of them.

Ironically Thackeray's book, which was written as comedy/satire, was not really an epic. Stanley obviously thought otherwise! For three hours we move up (and then back down) the social ladder in 18th century Europe, along the way getting to see a loquacious highwayman, a battle in the Seven Years War, Hardy Krueger as (shockingly!) a German military officer, a lot of people in chalky makeup with beauty marks, Leon Vitali puke, and a Marisa Berenson hairstyle that's got to have a "wingspan" of 18 inches. Kubrick rivets together the somewhat rambling plot line with two duels which he places at the beginning and ending of the film, one comic, the other harrowing and disturbing. He also does a neat job of turning the tables and turns the hero into the villain and elevates the twitchy Lord Bullingdon (Vitali) as the true hero, despite portraying him earlier in the film as a sniveling coward--an outcome that even Thackeray probably wouldn't have seen coming! The real star of Barry Lyndon is the visual look. After seeing this film you will never again see an 18th/19th century period piece the same way again, because after this film, done entirely in natural light and candlelight, the blaze of modern electric lights on studio sets will be all the more glaring. Every frame of this movie is as meticulously designed as an 18th century oil painting. That's Kubrick for you. The torture that he and his cast and crew must have gone through to get all of this stuff right is the viewer's windfall. I can't take my eyes off Barry Lyndon. Clearly a masterpiece, and criminally underrated.

Capricorn One (1977)

More of a concept than a movie.

[2/10 · 25 January 2005]

Capricorn One is a movie that limps along for two hours on the supposed strength of its premise: what if we never really landed on the Moon back in the '60s, and it was just a public relations stunt? This film is screamingly obvious about the fact that it's supposed to be about the moon landing, not Mars. All of the space hardware shown in the film is Apollo moon stuff. (Try to tell me that three guys can live in that space capsule for over a year, or that the rickety tinfoil-covered lander would have a hope of surviving a touchdown in Mars's gravity). The lead astronaut (James Brolin) was obviously told to look and act as much like Neil Armstrong as possible. The snide NASA chief (Hal Holbrook) is an amalgam of the slide-rule/pocket-protector types of "visionary scientists" who were demonized by the '60s counterculture backlash against technological one-upmanship as an element of social or political policy. Elliott Gould "stars" as an afro-headed, bell-bottom-clad Woodward/Bernstein type uber-reporter-hero as immortalized by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, whose salary demands evidently outstripped Peter Hyams's budget (I'd be astonished if they weren't considered for the reporter role). Even the Vice-President, played by David Huddleston, is the same cardboard archetype of movie politician that could only have existed in post-Watergate Hollywood. The script is merely a showcase of stereotypes, and the only thing binding the story together is the pathology of paranoia, which makes very little sense to anyone who isn't as terminally paranoid as the makers of this film.

The biggest indictment of Capricorn One comes from the fact that the movie simply runs out of steam about halfway through. That's because the whole movie is based on the premise, "What if the moon landing was faked?" The script doesn't have the courage to ask the natural follow-up questions--"What if it WASN'T faked?", or, more importantly, "Why does it matter?" Instead we have an hour of astronauts being chased through the desert in a scenario so bizarre at times it seems to be Mad Max meets Easy Rider. What happened to the biting sociopolitical commentary? Nonetheless, this is worth seeing just for a showcase of how hysterical 1970s conspiracy paranoia eventually became, and how low Hollywood would sink to mine it for a lousy buck. Oh, and O.J. Simpson's pre-slasher performance is not to be missed. Aside from Elliott Gould's wardrobe, it's the comic high point of the film.

Sunset (1988)

Unbelievably bad.

[2/10 · 25 January 2005]

I would rather be stretched on the rack than sit through this atrocity again. Blake Edwards, the very talented comedy/musical director who gave us The Pink Panther and Victor/Victoria, lays an egg with this unbelievably stilted attempt at a mystery/comedy/film noir/western. Maybe that is one of the main problems, that Sunset never knows exactly what it's supposed to be.

A (barely) pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis wanders around aimlessly trying to find some chemistry with a good-natured James Garner, who plays an impossibly young-looking Wyatt Earp now on the prowl (such as it is) in Hollywood in the late 1920s. A prostitute is brutally murdered (hilarious, ha ha) and naturally nobody knows who did it...hmm, you don't think it's the Malcolm McDowell character, who aside from playing his role from the pure Snidely Whiplash school of acting, has raped and/or murdered every female character in the film. Gee, Bruce and Jim, do you think you MIGHT have a clue here? After various grisly rapes, murders, shootings, a bashed-in nose with a frying pan, etc., the "heroes" put together the clues served to them on a silver platter and quickly get ready for the climax, which is about as surprising as the sun setting (no pun intended) in the west. By this time no one in the audience gives a damn who did it (they've known for the last 40 minutes), and one is left with the valiant hope that something dreadful will happen to the "heroes" before they mount up and ride off into the...well, you get the idea. Blake churned out a bunch of crap in the late '80s, but "Sunset" is unquestionably the nadir of his decline. Thinly-plotted, badly acted, and incompetently written, it's sad to see such a great director sink to these depths.

Angel Heart (1987)

Don't bother with this turkey. Read the book instead.

[2/10 · 25 January 2005]

Angel Heart is a dreary mishmash of overblown egos, lofty expectations, misplaced symbolism, and garish excess. Its "thrills" aren't thrilling, its "mystery" isn't engaging, its characters are uniformly repulsive and it tries to score so high on the shock meter that it comes off as nothing but a common exploitation film. This is a highly disappointing result given the excellent novel from which it was adapted, and a major career fumble for talented moviemen Alan Parker and Robert DeNiro.

This movie was infamous when it came out in 1987 for the long battle with the MPAA to avoid the dreaded "X" (now NC-17) rating, specifically for some steamy antics involving Lisa Bonet, then under the (thankfully) mistaken impression that her stint on the Cosby Show would springboard her to stardom. A movie this bad doesn't even deserve to be remembered for that controversy, because the scene involved (I won't spoil it for you) is a yawner. The plot is unusually choppy, and Mickey Rourke's limp portrayal of Harry Angel leaves the viewer totally unsympathetic and thus indifferent as to whether he solves the "mystery" or not. Killings and other bloody business masquerade as "atmosphere," and except for looking grody or artificially spooky there's no real attempt to give this film a strong flavor. It's really hard not to burst out laughing at the final shot of the film, something you don't want to do after sitting through a "scary" movie.

Missed opportunity for all concerned. Hopefully for you too, because if you're smart you won't waste your time on this rubbish, and read the book instead.

Robot Monster (1953)

A masterpiece!

[1/10 · 25 January 2005]

Robot Monster is the Citizen Kane of abysmal 1950s science fiction. It has everything modern viewers have come to expect from movies of this genre: a laughable plot line, completely improbable situations, ludicrous acting, unbelievably awful special effects, cheapjack production values, gaffes galore, and examples of how to fail miserably at every major aspect of motion picture production. For good measure it also sports easily the most ridiculous "monster" in the history of film! The plot is so thin that it can't even be stretched comfortably over the film's 66-minute running time without generous padding. A family, headed by the requisite German-accented scientist and including a "hot" chick, a "manly" guy, and two cutesy-poo kids wander through the desert after Earth has been annihilated by a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a plastic diving helmet. That's basically it, except for some nonsensical pap about an immunity serum. When the guy in the monkey suit is far and away the best actor in the picture, you've got a MAJOR problem--but compared to John Mylong as "The Professor," Ro-Man is Laurence Olivier. You could drive a semi through the plot holes. The dialogue clangers pile up like horseshoes on George H.W. Bush's lawn. You feel embarrassed for director Phil Tucker, and almost ashamed to laugh at this movie when you learn that the bad reviews of the film drove him to attempt suicide. The experience of watching this film, even with its abnormally short running time, is so excruciating that it feels like you've wasted five hours of your life. It's so bad that after a while you begin to marvel at its very badness, and ultimately you come away awe-stricken.

I call it a masterpiece because under normal circumstances only a talented and determined genius could make a film that sinks as low and violates so many rules of film-making, storytelling and suspension of disbelief as this one does. It takes real talent to make Ed Wood look like Stanley Kubrick, but Phil Tucker pulled it off. For that alone he deserves a place in film history.

Sideways (2004)

Best film of 2004!

[10/10 · 25 January 2005]

"Sideways" is a triumph any way you slice it. It's a vastly entertaining comedy with a human heart. It's the rarest of birds: a truly character-driven story where the movie takes the time and trouble to get you into people's heads and understand their motivations. You can't help but sympathize with Miles Raymond (played beautifully by Paul Giamatti), the bumbling, beleaguered wine enthusiast and would-be novelist, whose simple desires--to love someone and to have the chance to say something worthwhile creatively--seem to keep getting thwarted. Thomas Haden Church as the scuzzy best friend Jack is another brilliant characterization, and the two female lead roles--Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh--are both extraordinarily talented actresses as well as being lovely to watch. The real star of "Sideways," though (aside from the wine), is the script. It always keeps you guessing, confounds your expectations, and never delves into cheap Hollywood schtick. This is the kind of movie where throughout the film you see a cliché coming and think, "Oh damn, I hope they don't go in THAT direction..." and then, sure enough, they don't. The comic tone varies from pure slapstick to very highbrow cerebral stuff, and the movie makes no apologies for that. My favorite scene is Virginia Madsen's speech about why she likes wine. It's worth the price of admission just to see her give it! It doesn't have togas, sandals, superheroes, or spiderwebs, but "Sideways" is the best film of 2004.

And the Sea Will Tell (1991 TV Movie)

Well-made, underrated film.

[7/10 · 18 January 2005]

For a TV miniseries based on a true crime thriller, you'd expect standard movie-of-the-week fare. And The Sea Will Tell is instead a pretty taut thriller, well-written, well-acted and artfully put together. I'm convinced that this film isn't more well known because it had the misfortune to air for the first time the very night the ground campaign began during the first Gulf War. If you were watching CNN (and who wasn't), you missed it.

Rachel Ward, a highly underrated actress, is slightly miscast as the naive "hippie" waif Jennifer Jenkins, but she makes the best of a pretty meaty role, and her chemistry with Richard Crenna is spot-on. There's less chemistry between her and Hart Bochner, but his performance is excellent--he's certainly come a long way from his cartoonish portrayal of a slimy executive in Die Hard ("Hans...boobie...would I lie to you?"). The whole series, however, is stolen by James Brolin and Deidre Hall. The interweaving of flashbacks to the characters' time on the island with the courtroom scenes is skillfully done--something that, incidentally, Buglioisi failed to do well in the book this film is based on.

There's also some attention to detail here, and even (GASP!) some approaches at mise-en-scene. The Palmyra scenes, though colorful and lush, have a strange darkness and malevolence about them. I especially like the moody magic-hour sky in the oft-shown sequence of Ward and Bochner boarding their neighbors' yacht on the crucial night, and the rusty, moldering remains of military hardware that lurk in the underbrush. When contrasted with the chic mid-80s San Francisco in which the courtroom scenes take place, you definitely get the sense that the Rachel Ward character has come a long way. You don't see a lot of that kind of subtlety in a TV feature.

This is a story that probably should have been a Hollywood feature. Barring that, however, it's still an excellent film. Recommended.

Burnt Offerings (1976)

Now I know why they don't do haunted house pictures much anymore.

[5/10 · 18 January 2005]

My experience with Burnt Offerings mirrors that of a lot of people on this site with numerous old horror films: they remember a scary movie that frightened them as a child, and then decades later get to re-experience it on the miracle of DVD. The reality of the movie seldom turns out to live up to your memories of it. Such was the case with Burnt Offerings.

The plot hangs on the slimmest of reeds: dimple-cheeked suburban family moves into a spooky house for the summer while the owners are on vacation. There's just one catch: there's an invalid old lady who lives in the attic, and they have to take care of her. Say WHAT? This doesn't strike anybody as odd? Or even an insurance risk? As soon as you realize the movie refuses to show you the old lady you already know what the gag is going to be, and when Karen Black finally makes good on it, it's about as surprising as the revelation that there are cowboys in Texas. Before we get to that point we have to go through the usual spooky-house machinations: creepy noises, a cursed swimming pool, and uncommonly bipolar behavior from the various other cast members, most notably Oliver Reed, who to his credit at least does the best he can with the thinness and contradictions in his role.

Bette Davis's makeup co-stars (as Bette Davis), and does a frighteningly realistic imitation of a weird Kabuki mask. Karen Black, prematurely aged and wrapped in Victorian-era laces, looks like she's going to break into monologues from "The Belle of Amherst" at any moment. Burgess Meredith obviously had a wonderful time wheezing and hacking through his role (which was probably shot in one or maybe just a few days), but you can tell he thinks the script is utter pap. In the plus column, the scene where Oliver Reed tries to drown his son in the pool--and especially his grief afterward--is pretty believable, and the special effects of the house reconstituting itself isn't bad for 1976 technology. There are still some unintentional laugh-out-loud moments, especially the schtick involving the chauffeur. The chauffeur in particular scared the heck out of my sister and I when we were kids, but seeing this movie again today, it's just silly when it should be creepy.

Haunted house movies are tough to do. Writers and directors who resist the temptation to go in the blood-and-guts, straight-horror direction have a challenging time paying homage to the creepy old thrillers (both literary and cinematic) without it coming off as hokey. This is an amusing film, but if you're expecting to be scared, good luck.

And Your Mother Too (2001)

As good as it gets.

[10/10 · 18 January 2005]

The plot summaries and overheard scuttlebutt on this movie are completely unreliable. Reading about it you get the impression it's either a funny road-trip movie or a teen sex comedy. Actually, it's a brilliant piece of film-making.

The performances of Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal are magnificent. They're young actors obviously without a lot of experience, but the richness they give to their characters really makes the viewer believe that their friendship operates on multiple levels--something the normal road-trip "buddy" movie rarely does. A lesser movie would have focused on how each of them react to the influence of Luisa. Wisely, however, the Cuarons have chosen instead to focus on how they react to each other as a result of her presence. That's far and away the more interesting story--and why this film is riveting.

The addition of the narrator was, in my view, inspired. Narrators are rarely seen in movies these days, but the narration in this film is perfectly balanced--the narrator is healthily detached from the action, but chooses to illuminate interesting details about the relationship of Tenoch and Julio, stressing the things they will not tell each other--and the narration makes the viewer a participant in the action rather than merely an observer. The characters undergo a pretty radical emotional transformation over the course of their adventures, but even at that the narrator finds time to tell us ironic anecdotes that illuminate modern problems in Mexico, such as the man who's killed on the bridge early in the movie. As a result the whole thing comes off brilliantly as a kind of subtle social satire, but even if you don't care about that element it's still fascinating to watch.

This is also a beautifully made film. I wonder how many casual viewers notice that the scene at the beachside bar, leading up to the infamous climax of the film, is done all in one fluid take. I also wonder how many notice the increasing entropy of the visions presented on the screen: at the beginning we see the well-ordered, colorful, upper-crust environs of Tenoch's family's house, and at the end we're cavorting around in squalid rural inns where clucking chickens shamble through the guest rooms and pigs run wild across the beach. The final scene of the film couldn't be more perfect. The plot device revealed in this scene is a little contrived, but at least it doesn't come totally out of the blue. Yet the characters' reactions--again more to each other than to the situation--are completely believable. This is a really eye-opening film and one that must be seen several times to appreciate all its subtexts. And it's damn fun to watch, too!

Rambo III (1988)

Ludicrous.

[2/10 · 18 January 2005]

Nowadays the chief claim to fame of this little bit of macho 80s tripe is, of course, the events in and regarding Afghanistan since it came out. Even the fact that this was the most expensive movie of all time when it came out--as well as one of the larger financial failures of Stallone's career--has faded from memory.

The script must have been written on a cocktail napkin: Rambo gets offered assignment; Rambo turns down assignment; Rambo's friend gets captured by bad guys; Rambo takes the assignment to rescue his friend. Standard issue action movie plot, but in this offering it's fleshed out even less than normal. For instance it's never exactly clear what the assignment IS that's offered by Rambo's former commander and his sniveling CIA sidekick (played with aplomb by Kurtwood Smith, who looks very anxious to get his paycheck and get the haole off this movie) except that it has something to do with Stinger missiles, which are never mentioned again in the picture, violating Anton Checkov's plot rule that a gun seen on the wall of the set in act one must be fired in act three. Every time the talented Richard Crenna is on the screen, another opportunity is blown for even minimal character development--the scriptwriters give him a hackneyed rant to the Russians about "you underestimated your enemy" (sounds like he's talking about Iraq circa 2003) and he spends most of the rest of the film cowering in a cell, waiting to be tortured and/or for Rambo to show up. As Troutman, Crenna never even gets a single line to say how much he misses his wife, or how he'd really like a beer, or how the sniveling CIA man let him down, or something. Yawn.

The most shocking thing is that at $63 million this is still very much a B-movie. You'd think at that price, and with exotic shooting locales like Thailand and Israel, at the very least it would look like "David Lean Meets Rambo." In fact it looks like it was filmed on the same dusty Burbank back lot where innumerable Westerns were made in the 1940s. Even the genuine Thailand locations might as well have been EPCOT Center at Disney World.

For my money my favorite part of the film is the ludicrous song played over the end credits, which is pure cocktail lounge cornball spiced up with that classic 80s My First Casio synth sound. I hoped against hope when the music credits went by I would see the title of it was "Love Theme from Rambo III," but alas, even this opportunity for a little tongue-in-cheek humor slipped the minds of the filmmakers. But then again, it's Stallone, who didn't learn to take himself with a grain of salt until the Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot era. Perhaps the addition of Estelle Getty with her .357 Magnum might have saved Rambo III from the utter waste of 102 minutes that it is.