"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" might as well be the mantra of the *Indiana Jones* movies. It might even serve as a title for the next sequel, should there be one. *Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull* offers more of the wasn't-broke-didn't-fix-it same, which is what makes Indy fun. The movies were originally inspired by 1930s serials, and the *Indy* movies have more or less become a series, even if it's been almost two decades since we last saw the intrepid archeologist swing his bullwhip and don his dusty fedora.
*Kingdom of the Crystal Skull* acknowledges the years passed -- instead of the pre-war 30s, it's set in the post-war, Cold War 1950s. What was Indy (Harrison Ford) doing in the ensuing years? Some spying, maybe, but it's a little vague. As this movie opens, however, he's in the trunk of a car being driven by Russians, who've captured the infamous Area 51 military base. What they're looking for should be obvious to anyone familiar with the lore of Area 51, and certain mysterious events that occurred in Roswell, NM.
The Russkies are led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a paranormal researcher whose personality is as severe and unforgiving as her precision-engineered black bob. Less precise than the haircut is Blanchett's Russian accent, which is -- how do you say? -- rather loose. Spalko seems to have learned to speak English in Blanchett's own native Australia, not that the actress was in danger of earning a bazillionth Oscar nom for this movie. Anyway, Spalko's interested in space aliens and mind control, which according to legend, were among Stalin's obsessions too.
There's a daring escape, involving the usual Rube Goldbergian stuff, and, just to give the movie some Cold War relevance, Indy survives an atomic bomb, too. After his own personal Red Scare, Indy gets a taste of red-baiting government paranoia, which is where *Crystal Skull* dips a toe into contemporary political issues, but --fear not! -- ever so briefly.
Indy meets a switchblade-wielding, Brando-wannabe, Harley-riding hooligan named Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) who enlists his help in finding his kidnapped mother and a fellow archeologist named Oxley (John Hurt). Turns out Ox and Indy have history -- they once shared a mutual obsession with finding a legendary Mayan crystal skull. Turns out Indy and Mutt's mom have history too -- she's Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), who hasn't been seen since she was the spunky heroine of *Raiders of the Lost Ark*.
*Kingdom of the Crystal Skull*, like all the *Indy* movies, is a Steven Spielberg gestalt, so the various pieces -- space aliens, religious artifacts with history-altering powers, fascism, family drama, children searching for lost parents -- fit together and make sense about as well as can be expected. So what happens when those old warriors Spielberg and Ford become Cold Warriors? Pretty much the usual stuff. Creepy, cobwebby caves. Skeletons. Poison darts. Quicksand. Monkeys. The *Indy* movies are well-oiled machines at this point, and they need to be with all those moving parts. This one's got wall-to-wall action, lots of clever stunts, and a script by David Koepp that doesn't really innovate, but mixes up familiar elements (snakes again!) in a familiar but new enough and fun way. This Indy's a little more PC than he used to be too -- he's not shooting brown-skinned people anymore, and he's actually trying to *return* a priceless artifact rather than plunder it. Maybe he's getting soft in his old age.
But not too soft. Ford looks energized playing the whip-cracking, wisecracking hero again -- even when he's supposed to be a slightly creaky, cranky old coot, he's got a twinkle in his eye. And although Spielberg hasn't been directing any *fun* movies lately, he still knows how to engage the gears and create glorious, inconsequential mayhem.
26May2008
Prince Caspian (2008)
It's been a year since the Pevensie kids saved Narnia and discovered that they were kings and queens. England is still at war, but High King Peter (William Moseley), who is just another schoolboy in his unenchanted homeland, has only other schoolboys to fight. Until a portal opens up in the London Underground, that is, and the Pevensies find themselves back in dear old Narnia. Emphasis on the old -- they soon discover that a millennium has passed in Narnia since they've been gone.
Other things have changed too. Humans, known as Telmarines, rule the land, having exterminated all the talking critters, fauns, and centaurs, and stilled the once lively trees with their genocidal ethnic cleansing. The Telmarines are little better to each other. As *The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian* begins, young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) must flee his homicidal uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto), a usurper who has stolen the crown and has plans to pass it on to his own infant son once his inconveniently alive nephew Caspian is out of the way.
Caspian soon has other kings and queens to deal with, when he meets up with Peter and his sibs, King Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Queen Susan (Anna Popplewell), and Queen Lucy (Georgie Henley). The legendary monarchs rouse the Narnian Underground to action with help from a grumpy Narnian named Trumpkin (Peter Dinklage), and a swashbuckling mouse, Reepicheep (voiced by Eddie Izzard who, as he so often does, simultaneously steals and saves the movie). The Narnians are none too fond of Caspian, seeing as how his people tried to kill them all, and much of the plot of *Prince Caspian* concerns the factional fighting between Caspian, Peter, and the Narnians on one side, and, on the side of evil, King Miraz and his court of double-dealers, double-crossers and backstabbers. Loyalties shift on both sides in the march to war between the true Narnians and the Telmarine invaders, who, having discovered that the Narnians are not extinct, can think of nothing better to do than to exterminate them all over again.
There's a lot of conflict in *Prince Caspian*, between all the in-fighting and backstabbing, and all the swords and catapults and whizzing arrows. This sequel is considerably darker in mood and more violent than the first movie, *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* (2005), and far less enchanted and enchanting. The ol' magic is pretty much gone from Narnia, and doesn't reappear in the movie until pretty late in the game, when lion king Aslan (Liam Neeson) finally returns. At that point, the sword fights and slayings and massive battles have grown rather tedious, and the story is much in need of the deus ex machina that only Aslan (the Christ figure in the movie's loose theology) can provide.
The emphasis on action and battle scenes in *Prince Caspian* comes at the expense of characterization, although the screenplay by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and director Andrew Adamson occasionally sparkles with moments of wit. The diminutive mouseketeer Reepicheep, who finds people rather unimaginative (and easy to fight) is a source of much amusement, as is the diminutive, angry, put-upon Trumpkin, who objects to being patronized by the big people, and especially to being called "dear little friend" by the considerably taller Lucy. Prince Caspian himself is fairly dull, with Barnes doing not much more than perfect his "blue steel" look, and simmer, occasionally in the direction of Queen Susan. Susan has become, it appears, a reluctant hottie both in Narnia and back in dear old England. The Pevensie kids themselves have backseat roles in *Prince Caspian* -- this isn't really their story, and they serve primarily to inspire the Narnians, and to provide several of those four-across (plus one Caspian) walking-towards-the-camera scenes that in movies signify solidarity, readiness, and a host of other notions related to doing what must be done.
While the story this time around is more relentlessly violent, and on a far larger scale, it is oddly less moving than in the previous movie, in which the cruelty and violence, directed at characters and creatures one could actually care about, was far more disturbing. *Prince Caspian* is essentially a medieval war movie, a *Braveheart* for kids, with the brutality, ferocity, trauma, and gore of the battle scenes dialed down accordingly. Scaling back the savagery of the depiction of war is all well and good, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. The problem in *Prince Caspian* is that the sense of peril is also diluted. Not only does nothing bad happen to anyone noteworthy in the film, but there's never any real sense that anything bad *could* happen to them. There's a certain necessity and inevitability to everything that occurs in *Prince Caspian*, but no sense that necessity will lead inevitably to tragedy. With characters that are less than enthralling, faced with threats that are less than compelling, *Prince Caspian* is less than spellbinding.
19May2008
Speed Racer (2008)
You might think that a movie called *Speed Racer* would be, well, speedy. But you'd be wrong. Somehow, this careening, flipping, flying, neon-candy-colored zoom zoom movie about a boy who drives a fast, fast car just spins its wheels, and rather slowly at that.
*Speed Racer*, some of you will recall, was a proto-anime cartoon, exported from Japan, and dubbed for the amusement of American kids such as myself back in the 60s. Oh, how I loved *Speed Racer* and his supercool racing car, the Mach 5. Apparently Larry and Andy Wachowski (*The Matrix* trilogy) loved them too, but maybe not in the same way I did.
For the record, I am no longer giving the Wachowskis the benefit of the doubt. I still think *The Matrix* was brilliant. I still think everything they've done since has kinda sucked. But back to *Speed Racer*. As they have done before, the Wachowskis have blended live action and computer generated imagery to create a pretty cool looking movie. *Speed Racer* is more or less a computer animated movie with live actors in it. The colors are supersaturated and bright, but this is nothing you haven't seen before if you have ever had to spend any time watching Playhouse Disney and Nickelodeon, where the visual cortexes of young children are desensitized to a video world as colorful as a bag of fluorescent jellybeans. The movie's visuals have a kicky, Pop Art plus PlayStation kinda thing going on -- everything zips and zooms and twirls and blurs, and none of it really makes a lot of sense, but it keeps on moving fast anyway because if you don't stop, you don't have to stop and think. I do not recommend *Speed Racer* for people who are prone to migraines or seizures, as I'm pretty sure this movie could induce either after about three minutes. Remember the infamous *Pokemon* episode that supposedly sent hundreds of Japanese children to the hospital with seizures? Child's play compared to *Speed Racer*.
So, superbright colors: check. Fast cars: check. Plot? Boy howdy, *Speed Racer* has plot to burn (and I *would* recommend burning, in this case). At two and a quarter hours, this movie is an endurance test comparable to the Paris to Dakar Rally -- you get the sore butt, but no prize for finishing it. How can a movie with so much visual pizzazz be so boring?
Speed (Emile Hirsch) races cars for his family business, Racer Motors. He idolizes his older brother Rex, who died -- although is body was never recovered -- during an offroad race following some family drama involving Pops Racer (John Goodman). This we learn in a series of flashbacks. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is endlessly supportive of young Speed and all her boys. Little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) idolizes big brother Speed, and gets into mischief with his chimpanzee chum Chim Chim. And then there's Speed's galpal Trixie (Christina Ricci), who bats her eyes and tries to get Speed to move to first base -- but he's too busy zooming around the racetrack. The movie's best character is the Mach 5, a pretty darn cool car that can hop and spin and drive sideways and go real fast. The car races in the movie are like a crazy hyperspeed combination of Formula One racing and demolition derby. Crashing and burning is pretty commonplace. Maybe that's because the cars in *Speed Racer* mostly drive sideways, kinda like all those cars in commercials that are always skidding sideways to make you think they're really cool cars instead of terrifyingly unsafe deathtraps. Personally, I like my car to go fast, but primarily forwards and backwards. I've had little need for sideways driving in my life, and I'll stick to my guns that the shortest distance (and therefore the fastest route) between two points is a straight line. But sticklers for physics and the laws of nature will need to check their kooky preconceptions about gravity and centrifugal force at the cineplex door if they're gonna make it through *Speed Racer* without suffering a cerebral blowout. Apparently driving frontwise is for chumps. Skidding sideways is how the true racers do it.
Anyhoo, Speed wins a race, attracts the attention of a lot of corporate dirtbag types who want him to sign up and sell out. Most persuasive is Royalton (Roger Allum), who makes him an offer he can't refuse. He refuses it anyway, which gets Racer Motors into hot water. So Speed is recruited by the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox) and Inspector Detector (Benno Fürmann), who want to crack open the shady world of corporate sponsorship and crime rings and fixed races and whatnot. Speed and Racer X and fellow racer Taejo Togokahn (South Korean star Rain) enter the Casa Christo offroad race. The very same race in which big brother Rex Racer mysteriously died. Cue ominous music.
After the climactic finish of the grueling, action-packed, extremely fatal Casa Christo race, the oversaturated and enervated viewer would be right to think it was time to kick back and watch the credits roll by. Not so fast there, chump! There's *another* big race to be won. And then another... no, that's really it, but it feels like the movie will never end.
The actors are pretty much adrift in *Speed Racer*. It's probably really hard to act in a movie where most of the sets and all of the action are happening in a computer somewhere, and you're just standing in front of a green screen. This is likely the kind of thing that gives Method actors wake-up-screaming nightmares. So I hesitate to blame the actors for the shallowness of the characterizations in *Speed Racer*. The lousy, beyond cartoonish dialogue must also be blamed, and if the movie's script and dialogue and wooden acting are intentionally crummy in order to imitate the original cartoon, well, that's an artistic gamble that doesn't pay off. Emile Hirsch (*Into the Wild*) is a good actor, but he looks completely lost in *Speed Racer*, even when he's not driving a pretend car, and is actually interacting with other actors. His Speed is a natural born driver, a boy who is One with his vehicle, but he's otherwise hollow inside, like a race car with no driver behind the wheel. By contrast, Allum, in a scenery-chewing performance, manages to chew the virtual scenery just fine.
*Speed Racer* is supposed to be a family movie. It's all about the family love and loyalty and father-son bonding and death by piranha and all that. Plus, the entire Racer family cheers like mad every time a car crashes and explodes into a massive fireball -- as long as it's not one of *their* cars. Good, clean, brightly-colored fun.
12May2008
Iron Man (2008)
In the universe of the superhero, there are the ones with the superpowers -- the mutants, the aliens, the radioactively altered -- and then there are the gadget guys (where are the gadget girls?), the ones with the cool tools and techie toys. Marvel Comics' *Iron Man* falls into the latter category. Tony Stark is no Everyman -- a technical wunderkind, a billionaire, a hard-drinking, wiseass libertine, he hops the globe in his private jet, his lavish playboy lifestyle financed by a profitable business in high-tech weaponry. He's a showman too, personally demonstrating his latest wares in desolate Afghanistan.
Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is enjoying a scotch on the rocks in the back of a Humvee when his convoy is attacked by, ironically, the very weapons he manufactures. He's kidnapped by an Afghan warload (Faran Tahir) bent on the domination of something or other. Anyway, the warlord and his militant group are bad guys who shoot a lot of innocent villagers. And they want Stark to build them their very own high tech missile. Stark's got a handy-dandy assistant and translator in Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a fellow captive and surgeon, who saved Stark's life by implanting some sort of magnetic contraption into his chest to keep the shrapnel out of his heart. Or something like that. The important thing to note is that Stark has a heart after all, even if it's full of steel and wires and scraps culled from weapons of mass destruction. As long as he's part machine anyway, Stark goes ahead and builds himself an armored suit... witness the clanky, clunky, rusty, birth of Iron Man, whose mother was, it turns out, the necessity of invention.
The invention of necessity is the job of the storytellers, and in this story, tin man Stark grows a conscience to go along with that heart, to the surprise of all and the dismay of many, most of all Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Stane runs Stark Industries and keeps the board of directors happy while the hepcat's away. Certain plot twists involving the chrome-domed Stane will be evident to anyone familiar with the hairstyles of the rich and villainous. The flaw to *Iron Man*, although it's certainly not a fatal flaw, is that the plot hews to a fairly standard superhero origins storyline (with companion supervillain origins subplot), which means there are not too many surprises in that department.
On the other hand, screenwriters Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby favor genuine dialogue and substantive and sometimes uneasy laughs over macho-posturing catchphrases, and there are plenty of unexpectedly complex pratfalls and hearty yuks in *Iron Man*. Director Jon Favreau (*Elf*), emphasizes character over action, which is, in the superhero action movie genre, a rare thing. (Don't worry -- there's plenty of rapid-fire action in *Iron Man* too.) There are several terrific scenes in *Iron Man* that capture Stark and his companeros in moments laden with personal history, with past disappointments, and with unspoken feelings, and Favreau exhibits a light and lighthearted touch that gives the movie plenty of zing for the buck, to go along with all the bang. I've always said that big movies need small stories, and the best parts of *Iron Man* are the little touches, the small details. It's what makes *Iron Man* a great fit for Downey, an actor at least as well known for his checkered past and misspent youth as for his wunderkind talent. Downey gives genuine resonance to Stark's uneasy and complicated conflict between nascent morality and a natural gift for mayhem. The cast, which includes Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's loyal and supercompetent personal assistant Pepper Potts, and Terrence Howard as Air Force pilot/loyal friend/skeptic Rhodey, is particularly good, which means *Iron Man*, like that custom-fitted suit of armor and armory, can be built around the characters instead of the other way around.
The gadgety hardware stuff in *Iron Man* is pretty darn cool, of course -- Stark is a man who likes style *and* substance in his machines -- and there's a lot of fun to be had in Stark's experimental phase and the frequency with which he falls to Earth (the movie certainly plays around with the Daedalus and Icarus mythology, although it's ice, not heat, that is Stark's downfall). But there aren't really any surprises in the movie's fight scenes (well, maybe a few) -- the best stuff is in the details, in all the little servos and gears and character alloys that keep this big picture moving as smoothly as that shiny metal suit.
5May2008
Baby Mama (2008)
Tina Fey is funny. She's not particularly funny in *Baby Mama*, in which she plays it straight while everyone else runs comedic circles around her. Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a VP at Round Earth (a Whole Foods-style organic grocery chain). She's climbing the corporate ladder, making money, living in a posh pad in Philly, doing the whole successful single woman thing, but... can she have it all? Of course, even asking the question implies that she can't. And in Kate's case, what she can't have is a baby.
Babies are the accessory du jour in Hollywood these days, and in movies, babies in utero are the comedy plot prop du jour. Kate desperately wants a baby. She gets all dewy-eyed every time she sees one. She sees a fertility doctor (John Hodges) who tells her he really doesn't like her uterus. She's too impatient to adopt -- she lives a stopwatch life and it's ticking fast and loud. And so, she hires a surrogate to gestate and birth her offspring.
That would be Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), a gum-chewing, trashy clothes-wearing, dumber-than-dumb blonde from, as they used to say, the wrong side of the tracks. Angie and her doofusy, ne'er-do-well common law husband Carl (Dax Shepard) -- whose idea of a job is to stay home all day trying to win concert tickets on the radio -- need the surrogate's fees, but Kate needs a baby even more, which is how the Kate and Angie odd couple comes to pass. After Angie and Carl break up, Angie moves in with the controlling, nervous Kate, who disapproves of her junk food junkie ways and TV habits and general slovenliness, which is a set up with comedic potential that results in scant actual comedy.
While the bun is in the oven, Kate's got a couple of other projects going, including launching a new store (which, in the movie's universe, takes less time than gestating a baby), and launching a tentative romance with a smoothie shop owner (Greg Kinnear). Plot complications ensue.
*Baby Mama* was written and directed by *Saturday Night Live* alum Michael McCullers with minimal pizzazz and a sappy, happily-ever-after ending that would make Fey's *SNL* alter ego cry "feh." This is the sort of movie in which the small parts are far more fun and inspired than the lead character, reflecting, perhaps, the movie's *SNL* roots. So many of the movie spin-offs that have emerged from the sketch comedy show have fallen flat in part because its quirky characters work best in small doses. It's easy to imagine most of the supporting characters in *Baby Mama* working in a short sketch comedy routine, and they work well here in appropriately parsimonious amounts: Siobhan Fallon is a hoot as a supercilious birthing coach with a pwobwematic speech impediment; so too is Steve Martin as Kate's aggressively New Agey, ponytailed CEO boss; Romany Malco is Oscar, the sort of snarky doorman who is always hanging around with helpful advice and who, here, serves as a kind of surrogate baby daddy for Angie and Kate. Sigourney Weaver is weirdly funny as the hyperfertile Chaffee Bicknell, who operates the surrogacy agency. Poehler invests Angie with a lot of goofy energy and a fair amount of sweetness, which salvages her character from the fairly crudely sketched, white trashy slot she occupies. All these characters skip and whirl around the fairly stiff, mostly immobile Fey, whose job here is just to be the smartest girl in the room. She *is* the smartest, but also the least invested with a personality. In a broad, topical comedy like *Baby Mama*, smart is good, but smart *and* funny would have been even better.
28Apr2008
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008)
For decades, two of the most popular movie stars in the world have existed in tandem, operating within the same movie genre, in geographical proximity, but never actually appearing together. Until now. Jet Li and Jackie Chan together in the same movie is like two parallel universes (or maybe just two really massive stars) colliding. I am happy to report that the world did not end, the very fabric of space-time was not rent (so far as I know), and the movie, *The Forbidden Kingdom*, ain't half bad.
The task for *Forbidden Kingdom* director Rob Minkoff (*Stuart Little*) and screenwriter John Fusco was to make a movie to satisfy the martial arts movie aficionado -- the type with shelves groaning with DVD titles written in Chinese, someone who knows the various alternate English titles under which movies were released (not that I'm copping to that, mind you) -- while also providing entree to the newbies. On both counts, they succeed pretty well. With undisputed master Yuen Wo-Ping (aka Woo-Ping Yuen) choreographing the kung fu, and the formidable talents of Li and Chan together at last, *The Forbidden Kingdom* provides an entertaining and lively mix of kung fu styles and techniques.
The story starts in latter day South Boston, where Jason (Michael Angarano) is a kid obsessed with martial arts movies, and picked on by a gang of hooligans. He gets his DVD kicks from a dusty old Chinatown pawn shop owned by Old Hop (Jackie Chan). Old Hop is in possession of a magical golden staff which, via means poorly understood by contemporary physicists, transports Jason through time and space to the Middle Kingdom, a place that resembles ancient China. There, Jason is the Seeker, who must return the staff to its rightful owner, who happens to be the Monkey King (Jet Li, who amuses with a weird monkey-man impersonation), a popular, mischievous, god-like figure from Chinese mythology. The Monkey King has been imprisoned for centuries by the evil Jade Warrior (Collin Chou). But what matters is this: everybody was kung fu fighting.
Jason meets three warriors who help him with his task. Lu Yan (Jackie Chan) is a wine-swigging drunk who specializes in (what else?) the drunken kung fu style. Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifei) is a musician bent on avenging her parents, who were killed by Jade Warrior. The Silent Monk (Jet Li) isn't really silent once he warms up. He has devoted his life to finding the staff. The important thing is that Lu Yan and Silent Monk, owing to a natural misunderstanding regarding the staff, fight each other. Anyone who has ever speculated as to the winner of a Jet Li-Jackie Chan battle (you know who you are) will find the results not entirely surprising.
The Jet Li-Jackie Chan movie matchup could have been unimaginably awesome, really awful, or somewhere in between. *The Forbidden Kingdom* is somewhere in between, and if it is not exactly mind-bendingly awesome, it is not at all awful. The very different styles of the two stars -- Chan is Mr. Chopsocky slapstick, Li has generally been more somber and serious -- blend well here, with the contrasts providing character and humor. In recent years, martial arts movies have been touched by the arthouse angels, with movies like *Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon* and *House of Flying Daggers* taking the genre seriously and injecting them with a measure of artistic integrity and aesthetic gravitas. That's not *The Forbidden Kingdom*, which aims above all else to be popular entertainment, although it also takes the genre seriously enough, and maintains a high level of technical achievement, with good special effects, lavish set design (the movie was filmed in China) and peerless kung fu fighting.
The Monk, the Drunk, the Sparrow, and the Southie head for the mountain lair of the Jade Warrior, whose abuse of blue eye shadow is out of control. Much fighting ensues. Many Shaolin monks are involved, as is a witch (Li Bing Bing) who uses her long white hair as a weapon. But first, Jason must be trained in kung fu using the age-old pedagogic techniques of seemingly non-kung fu-related forced labor, and physical torture. This is, as we all know, how all the great kung fu masters were trained, and *The Forbidden Kingdom* does not depart from the tradition, although since Jason has dueling masters, he gets twice the torture. Embracing tradition is one of the strengths of *The Forbidden Kingdom*, which drops martial arts movie references like breadcrumbs, and combines folklore, mysticism, mumbo-jumbo, and lots of imaginative kicking, punching, leaping, flying, acrobatics, and wire fu in the service of an excessively complicated plot. That's how it's always been done, and there's really no reason to change it.
21Apr2008
Shine A Light (2008)
In the great Stones vs. Beatles debate, I'd vote "neither." But give Mick and company credit for endurance. And stamina. And stick-to-it-iveness. In Martin Scorsese's vibrant, lively documentary *Shine A Light*, the sixty-something geezers prove that they can rock on... and on, and on. They put the sex and drugs and rock n' roll in sexagenarian, and serve as poster boys for the Anti-AARP.
Not that the Stones look like spring chickens anymore. Sex and drugs and rock n' roll do take their toll, and so does time, but if they all look more than a bit weathered, they also look pretty fit for a bunch of guys who, if the legends about them are true, probably shouldn't still be alive. Mick Jagger still dances like a spring lamb trying out its new legs; Keith Richards and Ron Wood look stringy, gristly, and relaxed; Charlie Watts, well, he looks a little winded, but he's unflappably calm.
Two of the dominant thematic threads of Scorsese's film work come together in *Shine A Light*. His narrative films frequently focus on men, often behaving badly, while his docs tend to be epic love poems to his twin passions for music and movies. *Shine A Light* is his fourth rockumentary, (after *The Last Waltz*, *The Band: Feel Like Going Home*, and *No Direction Home*). *Shine A Light* is jittery and jumpy, taking its cue from Jagger, who prances all over the stage, and from Richards' rhythmic, catchy, instantly recognizable chords. With cameras that swoop and soar, and hop from one musician to another, *Shine A Light* is energetic and hyperactive, like Scorsese and Jagger, but also calm and focused and in the zone at its center, like Richards, Wood, and Watts. If there's a secret to their endurance -- the filmmaker's and the rock stars' -- it's in their love of their work, which is in evidence all over *Shine A Light*.
The concert, filmed at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2006, was a benefit for the Clinton Foundation. The ex-POTUS chuckles that "people in their sixties" were begging him for tickets -- forgetting, it seems, that he's in that crowd himself. Multigenerational guest performers turn up: Jack White looks like an utterly starstruck stripling crooning "Loving Cup" with Mick; Christina Aguilera, for all her gyrating and vocal theatrics, is no match for Mick's booty-shaking (and her singing style is a mismatch). But it's septuagenarian bluesman Buddy Guy who burns down the house with "Champagne and Reefer" -- now it's the Stones' turn to look like the luckiest kids in New York. In the end, the band had more stamina than I did in a concert full of greatest hits and favorite songs that went on just a few licks too long.
*Shine A Light* starts as a funny, crisis-packed, mini making-of movie, with Scorsese and the Stones discussing and negotiating. Mick is worried that the swooping cameras will annoy the audience; Scorsese asks, and asks, and asks, for a set list, which he finally gets minutes before the show starts. The director is informed that the lights on stage will burn Mick Jagger... literally. Watts drily observes "I love movies. Lookin' at 'em." From the carefully chosen archival interviews interspersed throughout the film, it's clear that Watts was always the Harpo Marx of the bunch. The Stones have been around long enough that it's easy, now, to forget how young they once were, and the archival footage provides perspective and a dash of history, as the rock tyros with time on their side (who knew then how true that was?) morph into well-seasoned, timeworn, hard-travelin' rock legends.
Scorsese's in his sixties too, and *Shine A Light* is, among other things, a meditation on age and aging, and doing it -- and it sounds a little weird to say it about old rock geezers -- gracefully. Sure, Watts is the only Stone with white hair, but none of them look botoxed, or show the telltale signs of desperate cosmetic surgical alteration. They look like real people, and that is worth noting in a time when our pop culture icons show us mostly a fun-house mirror reflection of stretched and impassive faces, tucked tummies, snow-white teeth, and bowling ball implants. Ya gotta love the British for knowing how to let themselves go. If this is what the sixties look like, I hope I don't die before I get old.
14Apr2008
Leatherheads (2008)
*Leatherheads* has a few things in common with the other two movies (*Confessions of a Dangerous Mind* and *Good Night and Good Luck*) George Clooney has directed: Clooney is in it, the story is a retro affair set in the early to mid-20th century, and it is concerned, at least in part, with matters of journalistic ethics. It's notably different from the other two movies in this: it isn't very good.
*Leatherheads*, set in 1925, is about the early days of professional football, when the sport was a rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred game that, if the movie is to be believed, was a whole lot more fun when there were no rules and players were free to cheat to win. Shockingly, the game didn't draw big crowds. The fans all went for college football, where the likes of war hero-turned-Princeton QB Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) played the game and won all the Burma Shave endorsements.
Dodge Connelly (Clooney) plays for the Duluth Bulldogs, until the team goes bankrupt and all the players are sent back to their day jobs in the mines. When the down on his luck Dodge hears that Carter and his Princeton jocks draw crowds in the tens of thousands to their games, he recruits Carter for the Bulldogs. Carter comes with accessories in the form of C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce), his sleazy sports agent, and a dame. There has to be a fast-talking dame -- and it's better if she's a ruthless reporter in a cloche hat -- in any movie that strives to be a thirties-style screwball comedy, as *Leatherheads* does. Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) fills that slot here. Lexie's been dispatched by the *Chicago Tribune* to write an expose of Carter. The boy's apparently not a genuine war hero, although he did fight in the Great War, and did get a medal for it.
It doesn't take long before Carter and Dodge have both fallen for the charmless Lexie, and wind up punching each other in the face repeatedly. Being mere football players, they don't do much damage to said faces, which is fortunate because it would be a shame to mess up the handsome mugs of Clooney and Krasinski in a movie that has little else going for it.
Randy Newman has composed a distracting retro score for *Leatherheads*. Undoubtedly, he was commissioned to write distracting music because the movie needs something distracting to draw attention away from the fact that what passes for snappy, hard-boiled banter in the script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly (former *Sports Illustrated* scribes) ain't all that snappy or hard-boiled. It ain't much fun either. Clooney does an awful lot of eyebrow lifting and mugging for the camera, and a brawl seems to break out every 20 minutes or so, in between raids on speak-easies. *Leatherheads* is the kind of movie where all the right ingredients seem to be there, but the whole thing gets overcooked. The screwball comedies of the thirties made it all look effortless -- people talked fast and said clever things, crazy situations just happened, and in the battle of the sexes, everybody won. In the hands of the likes of Howard Hawks or Frank Capra, the screwball comedy had rhythm and bounce, it sizzled, it sang, it danced. *Leatherheads* makes it all look hard, and the results are not commensurate with the effort. No bounce, no sizzle, no dance, no fun.
Even the final gridiron showdown -- the moment of transcendent, against-the-odds triumph is the *de rigueur* capper to any sports movie -- is too little, and far too late. It *has* to come at the end of the movie, of course, and it does, but this movie pulled over with a flat tire about 20 minutes earlier, and no old timey football game can get it rolling again.
7Apr2008
Stop-Loss (2008)
Writer-director Kimberly Peirce made her first and last movie nine years ago. That was *Boys Don't Cry*, a terrific debut that was timely, issue-driven, nervy, and the kind of movie that sticks with you. Time will tell if Peirce's *Stop-Loss*, which is also poignantly timely and issue-driven, will stick in the national consciousness in the same way. It might, and it might not -- moviegoers have not been beating down the doors for movies about the Iraq War. Maybe our weariness about the seemingly unending war -- now in its fifth year -- or the grim
complexity of our emotional engagement with it, makes sitting through a movie about it just too, too much.
*Stop-Loss* is about the war in Iraq, and also about the war at home, about what happens to soldiers when they return from war. It's a subject much in the news of late, with Iraq vets suffering strikingly high levels of post traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic injury, and encountering a dishearteningly inadequate and mean-spirited government response. PTSD is never explicitly mentioned in *Stop-Loss*, but it's there in the shadows, a spectre that darkens every scene.
The movie starts with faux home videos of a group of soldiers in Tikrit, Iraq. They're boisterous and profane young lads who sing patriotic pop songs that promise to whup the enemy. Their bravado is soon tested when they are caught in a deadly firefight, ambushed in an alley. The battle scenes are staged with gripping and panicky realism, with an acute sense of how, in a war zone, the ordinary quickly goes all to hell. Some soldiers are killed in that fight, others badly wounded. The survivors are shaken, too, by the deaths of civilians, of children and mothers and grandparents who died in homes that became urban battlefields.
For Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his buddy Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), it's the last battle of their last tour in Iraq. They are relieved to arrive home in Brazos, Texas, where the most dangerous thing they have to shoot at is an empty beer bottle. Their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is on leave -- he lost his best friend in Iraq, and he's going back, filled with anger and a desire for vengeance that gives him a sense of purpose in war, but leaves him adrift and unable to function back home.
Brandon's relief at being home is short-lived. His friends start to fall apart immediately, unable to keep their war experience adequately compartmentalized. Then Brandon finds out that he's been stop-lossed -- his contract is involuntarily extended, and he's being sent back to Iraq. His sense of indignation results in an immediate political awakening of sorts, and in short order he chews out his commanding officer (Timothy Olyphant) and insults the president, gets arrested, escapes, goes AWOL, and hits the road in a beat up car with Michelle (Abbie Cornish), his pal Steve's fiancee, heading for Washington where he hopes to get a little help from his senator.
Peirce and cowriter Mark Richard quickly get bogged down trying to cram a whole lot of ideas and incidents into what ends up being a fairly conventional and predictable road trip movie. Brandon and Michelle are on the road to nowhere, but along the way they drift through episodes of random violence, stay in rundown motels, and encounter other stop-lossed vets on the lam and living in limbo. Brandon wrestles with his war experience, and with an acute dilemma: should he cross over into Canada, and a fugitive's oblivion, or go back to Iraq?
That Brandon remains ideologically confused about the war and his role in it gives his character, and the movie, a measure of authenticity that helps things along when the narrative gets pinched by its compressed timeline. An awful lot -- emphasis on the awful -- happens in just a few days, allowing no time for simmering or slow boiling. The war at home, it seems, is just as explosive and requires the same level of on-the-fly decision-making as the war in Iraq. Or maybe the point is that it just seems that way to the people who experience it on both fronts.
Peirce has a good eye and ear for the raucous rhythm and earthy feel of rural small-town life, and also for the messy confusion of young adulthood. *Stop-Loss* presses home the point that these are very young people lost in the fog of war. They're rash, they're idealistic, they drink too much, they brawl too much, and they lack the breadth and depth of experience with which to make sense -- if there's any sense to be made -- of their situation. It's a recipe for melodrama, and *Stop-Loss* has turbulent melodrama in spades. It's an unsteady, disorderly movie, and every bit as messy, I suppose, as the inner lives of its characters, who must contend with fear, anger, and loss, and sort through a complex welter of conflicting values: love, honor, loyalty, patriotism, friendship, and duty. *Stop-Loss* is an imperfect, compassionate, heartfelt movie about imperfect people stuck in impossible situations, with no good options. The movie isn't polemical, nor does it offer bromides or uplift or feel-good solutions. The message, such as it is, is that we all -- those of us here and those of us over there -- have no choice but to get used to being in a situation that's impossible to get used to.
31Mar2008
Shutter (2008)
Ah spring, a time of rebirth and renewal, of fresh starts... everywhere except at the autumnal multiplexes, where moldering cinematic afterthoughts go to die, dropping into theatres like so many dead leaves. Spring is the between season for movie releases, a span of time sandwiched between the winter, when Oscar contenders roll out, and the summer megablockbuster season. It is a time of movies like *Shutter*, a remake of a 2004 Thai film also called *Shutter*. A mediocre movie, and yet another remake dredged up from the apparently bottomless pit of barely distinguishable Asian horror films, *Shutter* is the kind of movie that doesn't justify the effort of putting on my glasses.
*Shutter*, by Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai, features the standard J-Horror tropes -- a dark-haired, dark-eyed female spectre haunts people, walking slowly, appearing mysteriously, and alarming her victims with her disheveled hair and unfashionable clothing. The unflattering frock is especially disturbing to Jane Shaw (Rachael Taylor) who, after running over a woman with her car, wonders what she was doing there, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, and more importantly, "why was she dressed like that?" Jane's husband Ben (Joshua Jackson), who was looking at a map at the time of the accident, didn't see the woman in question, and remains skeptical that his newlywed wife saw anything at all.
Ben's a photographer who apparently specializes in obsolete photo technology. He's got an assignment in Japan, where he and Jane settle into an apartment where things go bump in the night. Really. You might think the things going bump in the night routine would be so used up at this point that nobody would dare use it in a non-parody context. But there it is. *Shutter* also prominently features mysteriously flickering lights and that whooshing-whirring-moaning sound that the weary, ticked off, evil undead make. *Shutter* makes use of so many familiar plot devices and even more familiar scare tactics that it practically parodies itself, except that it isn't funny.
When all of Ben's film is ruined by blurry streaks of light, well, that's the last straw. Ben has apparently never heard of Photoshop. Jane quickly discovers that "spirit photography" is to blame for the blurry pictures, and that she and Ben are being haunted by the Kodak moment-ruining, unfashionably dressed woman in the road. The only remaining questions are: Who is she? What does she want? And, who really cares? Jane learns from a spirit photography magazine editor that Polaroids can't be faked, so she takes to carrying around a Polaroid camera hoping to spot the ghost. I wonder if Polaroid considered the implications of the loss of this invaluable ghostbusting tool when they decided last month to stop producing instant film.
*Shutter* is so blandly by-the-numbers that it's difficult to conceive why anyone even bothered to make it. As Jane says, in a moment of insight about the ghost's intentions, "Why all that effort if you don't have something to say?" My thoughts exactly.
24Mar2008
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