rhinocerosfive-1 Reviews

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

15 Bucks I Don't Want Back. I Love America.

[7/10 · 12 September 2010]

More K-Mart. More K-Mart. MORE K-MART!

I know: one model-slash-actress should be enough. Three female slashies plus four slashie guys verges on overkill. Watching skinny women (even adults) flip, flop and fly in leggings of their own design is great fun. But you throw in a teenager toward the end, and I get nostalgic for the days when Milla Jovovich wasn't quite so grown up. It's awful of me to say since, in her mid-thirties, she looks fabulous. Except she doesn't look twenty.

Should I hate myself for admitting my opinion? Hey, it cuts both ways. I don't look as good as I used to either. And I never looked as good as Milla. But I digress.

For what it is, a 4th-installment video-game spin-off 3D spectacle with less story, plot, or character than the slimmest of its forebears, it's a fine effort. Lots of shooting, stabbing, cutting, biting, crashing, yeah, yeah, yeah. "Afterlife" destroys Tokyo better than most Godzilla movies do. And while I think it's a mistake to top-load a Milla movie with multiple Millas and then spiral down to one, there are compensations. Watching people get blown apart with coin-loaded shotguns is better than, say, not watching that.

To be fair, these movies do have one character, and (usually; definitely in this case) one actor who deserves the title. Milla's better than any other single factor in these things, though this time she has fewer opportunities to act than in the previous three; but that's okay, because the combined presence of Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller is nearly enough to stop me from paying to see any slashie act again, ever.

Piranha 3D (2010)

For the Demographic Too Shy to Murder Its Own Girls

[5/10 · 22 August 2010]

In the minus column:

A hackneyed plot. Banal dialogue. Perfunctory characters. Action without consequence. Good actors in bad roles. Bad actors in bad roles, especially many annoying performers who do not die early enough, or who do not die at all, including two dull children whose only purpose in the film is to be eaten by piranha, and who are not. Plus a weak story as an excuse for various types of titillation.

The pluses:

Various types of titillation, including the violent deaths of Eli Roth and Jerry O'Connell. Come on. That's some big pluses.

This movie more or less performs its primary directive, which is to teach young boys how to masturbate to softcore sex while simultaneously enjoying hardcore violence. Or the other way around, maybe; does it matter? At least "Piranha 3D" is unpretentious in the structure department. It doesn't bother making its fish expert a scientist, but rather a guy played by a guy who used to play a scientist. On one level, that's lazy filmmaking. On another, though, it's pretty efficient shorthand.

However, the movie does make the strange choice of looking down upon a character whose job is to make pornography. Since this movie's job is to be pornography, I'm confused. Is that a metaphysical statement? Is this creation talking back to its maker? Or is it just unselfconscious enough not to notice that it contains all the dirty stuff its villain wants us to see?

Besides all that, the movie offers up several kinds of wish fulfillment: underdog heroism; blonde girls who would never sleep with you getting their hair caught in outboard motors; and the greatest gift of all, that it is soon over.

Winter's Bone (2010)

Hard, hard, hard

[9/10 · 31 July 2010]

This picture has a number of qualities that set it apart from most entertainments I've experienced recently. The writing is subtle and simple and quietly deep; the production design, musical choices and direction are effective because they are so extraordinarily straightforward, supporting that tight little script. The acting, much of it by non-actors, is persuasive and accurate. I'm not saying it's always easy to watch. There's grimness here, and pain, and a stark, textured shorthand that almost denies viewers the time to weep. But primarily, endearingly, "Winter's Bone" is notable for what it is not.

It's not a feel-good picture, even though its lead is a 17-year-old girl looking for her dad. It's not a brutal thriller, despite featuring teenagers wandering woods populated by armed, drug-addled rednecks. And it's not an ode to the simple life, though it presents likable ragamuffins in the bosom of Heartland countryside.

So what is it? Great independent filmmaking, the kind Miramax almost gave a bad name, the kind that tells a story absent of primary-color commentary, unlikely happy endings, unnecessary violence, false emotion, and the rest of the junk that keeps thoughtful moviegoers out of the multiplex in the summer.

I don't know when I've seen a less sentimental movie: the tragedies and horrors of the rural criminal life pervade the story, yet they are not the story, and they do not derail the story. "Winter's Bone" asks me to feel sorry for no one, to be outraged on no one's behalf, to write a letter to no congressman. I am witness, not participant. I'm not implicated or accused, and so I am not insulted.

Before this one, I can't remember a film about hillbillies that wasn't at least a little condescending, not since "Harlan County USA", and that was a documentary. Shockingly, this movie treats the uneducated as engaged citizens in command of their faculties with every chance to live a fulfilled life. Nobody in this story has more than a high school diploma, and our protagonist has less than that, yet there are no stupids here, no clowns. Most of the characters are frighteningly competent and capable. Some of them are wise.

And rare and precious is the movie about teenage girls that treats them as neither object nor subject of sexual action. How beautiful to avoid the whole oversaturated palette of pubescent angst! How thankful I am to Debra Granik for presenting a few days in the journey of a heroine who walks through fire, loses all, gains all, and feels no need to turn from the path to kiss a boy.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Love Minus Freakshow

[8/10 · 9 July 2010]

Simple, quiet, true, and lovely - really? A new American movie, not terribly stylized, with a mostly unobtrusive director and a primary cast over 45? And not boring, and just a bit sappy? Huh. I didn't see "High Art". I didn't finish "Laurel Canyon". But I didn't want "The Kids Are All Right" to end. After this one, Lisa Cholodenko is aces with me.

A story's a story as long as it feels like one. I watched this movie with tears in my wide eyes, cared about everybody, couldn't find a bad guy, didn't want one. Plot? Yes. Plot points? Not so much. It plays like life, which is less about notable moments of beat change than a subtle ebb and flow of regression and renewal. In fact this movie is least effective, strains credibility most, when it reaches for conventional action.

So, okay, the third act's a little facile; nobody gets in real trouble, nothing costs enough. I love it anyway. Beautiful performances in an intelligent, well-directed script: this is why more women should make movies: because they don't yell all the goddamn time. Real life contains violence, insanity, and inconsiderate behavior, but there are degrees, man. This movie reflects enough variety in its mirror-up-to-nature, as 'twere, to overwhelm the same old sturm und drang of the last few Jason Reitman, Rob Reiner or Sam Mendes bores. Nobody has to die, nobody has to crash a car or break a bottle or spit out bad jokes like sunflower seeds just to tell a story. Drama's where you find it. A family provides plenty; most people don't survive their own.

Not enough can be said about the five principals either. Performers like these can sell on-the-nose dialogue (it's often better than that) as if it's Shakespeare, and they do. As my buddy Dmitry's always said, Annette Bening is excellent as long as she doesn't have to play a sympathetic character. Mark Ruffalo doesn't make mistakes; Julianne Moore has forgotten the meaning of the word. And these kids are more like real kids than any I've seen in a movie since "Donnie Darko", which is my highest praise for teenage verisimilitude.

See this movie, take your children, your spouse, your potential other. If you don't recognize yourselves in there somewhere, check your pulse.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

The Movie with the Dragging Denouement

[6/10 · 22 March 2010]

"Dragon Tattoo" starts well, introducing its characters with depth and a measured pace not usually found in thrillers unless they were directed by Polanski before this century. Unfortunately, this stately poise never allows it to pick up the energy necessary to deliver real thrills, and somewhere in the second hour it loses the intelligence and grace of the first act. Then it becomes idiotic. Then it gets boring.

A procedural drama is fine. A procedural drama spiced with dynamic, interesting characters is better than that. But a serial killer working with biblical references? Really? At this late date? Add to that a tendency to shoot multiple scenes to deliver information that could be processed in a shot, plus falling action nearly as long as any one of the acts proper, and you're trying my patience.

And this movie's real plot begins with a howler: a smart guy and a smarter guy both fail to recognize that a girl who sends a very specific message once a year has probably not been dead for forty. Their even smarter assistant not only doesn't notice their stupidity, she abets it. After that kind of misstep, it's difficult to keep my feet in this languorous waltz with Queen Mab. Finally I had to put them up on the seat in front of me and wait for Noomi to take her clothes off again, which she didn't do nearly often enough.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

proof that we'll follow Robert Downey Jr anywhere

[3/10 · 27 December 2009]

Guy Ritchie doesn't make movies, he makes delivery systems for stupidity. Loud, empty, aggressively uninteresting, a Guy Ritchie movie is almost as ugly as Christmas in a dorm room and just as depressing. At least in your dorm, you could make phone calls home and maybe read a book. In a Guy Ritchie movie, all you can do is sleep. And you can't even do that unless you bring earplugs.

Ritchie diligently repeats every piece of information - vital, moderately important, irrelevant - as if convinced the audience shares his I.Q. deficit. Redundancy is a fond memory in his world: dead horses at least make a different noise when beaten in different locations. Shake a stick at Guy Ritchie and you get the same reaction every time, a hollow thud resonating in a void. A very loud hollow thud.

Downey is fine, but he's been better in better comic books. Jude Law is very good, but other than SLEUTH, when was he not? And the great wasteland of this SHERLOCK, and of any Guy Ritchie product, is populated by excellent supporting players brought to mediocrity. Ritchie has succeeded in failing to make Mark Strong an exciting screen presence, a feat even Ridley Scott couldn't accomplish; the lovely Rachel McAdams, who has proved her ability in drama and comedy, here can't even manifest the basic facial expressions of the pantomime: fear? Nope. Passion? Uh-uh. Boredom? Well, we're together on that one.

Yes, I've read every one of the Conan Doyle stories, and yes, there's ample support for Holmes as a pugilist, a narcissist, an adrenaline junkie. What I have failed to find any previous evidence of is Holmes as a soporific. Guy Ritchie has performed a sort of Christmas miracle by making one of the great dynamic intellectuals of literature into a dull, third rate professor of history.

If you're going to make a movie with more than five set pieces, you'd do well to realize you're making an action movie. And if you're making an action movie, it behooves you to ensure that the audience hasn't seen every one of the fights before, not only in countless other movies but in THIS one! What a breakthrough, Guy. Watching one of your movies is like regurgitating a piece of gristle. Madonna, mediocrity that she is, was as close as you ever got to significance.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Wes Anderson: A Hero's Journeyman

[10/10 · 27 November 2009]

In a movie year so vapid that I found myself debating the virtues of Michael Bay vs Roland Emmerich (two sickening panderers, the latter of whom is at least less a Hasbro salesman than a bad filmmaker), I just about gave up on going to the movies. Just about. Then Wes Anderson released the best filmed fairy tale since the invention of the zoetrope.

It may be argued that Anderson is not the most consistent director working. That attribute is better attached to Bay, who consistently insults my intelligence. But consistency, while a virtue, is not the mark an artist ought to hit. Excellence is a better target. Michael Bay thinks that excellence is measured by ticket sales, that transcendence is related to expenditure, that success is found in delivering the lowest common denominator of good time to the broadest possible spectrum of children. Every shot in a Michael Bay movie feels test-marketed. Which is why his movies tend to last exactly as long as their initial release.

So, yeah, I am a big Wes Anderson fan. I still don't like BOTTLE ROCKET all that much, but it is better than any movie I saw this year not directed by Wes Anderson. This guy is so defiantly not a populist that with every new release, I grow a little more afraid of his never getting funding again. His movies don't tend to make money. His audiences are necessarily educated, open-minded, analytical, patient, compassionate. Does this sound like your America? Anderson seems uninterested in selling a single ticket. He clearly has no desire to make a movie that will help him to make more movies. Any question remaining on this point after LIFE AQUATIC was answered by DARJEELING LIMITED. Here is a man who can only make art for himself. He will starve before he makes any other kind. So I worry, because he happens, tangentially, to be making it for me too.

And hey - this is a kids' movie. Anyway, I'm sure Fox thought so when it signed up. I mean, it's animated, it's from a kids' book, it's got talking animals. But the kids in the theater with me did not experience my ecstasy. They will not clamor for Mr Fox dolls on Black Friday. Mr Fox is in fact a scary, villainous, superficially charming ne'er-do-well. He is boorish, a dangerous egotist. A bad father. A bad husband. His excuse ("I'm a wild animal") sounds like a wifebeater's apology. The movie does not celebrate his deeds or personality. At the end of the picture, he has reduced his community to living in a sewer, eating synthetic versions of the real food they used to enjoy, with none of their former freedoms, listening to his speeches about how THIS is the good life while the rest of the world tries to kill them. (What kind of metaphor for suburban values is this? Mr Fox as Mr Bush? Am I reaching? I am not.) So this isn't a movie for kids. It isn't a movie for imperialists. It isn't a movie for 20th Century Fox, who would surely have preferred another STAR WARS-type toy delivery system.

It's a movie for me.

There's my G.I. Joe from 1975, blowing up the Fox home. There's Roald Dahl's repeated line about "little electric sparks" dancing in the characters' eyes, finally brought to life. There's the opossum that keeps invading my mother's house. What? Yes. It's a movie so god damn personal that it achieves the universal through minutiae. In doing so it achieves my dream of a fairy tale so much like a pre-Disney Grimm version that 80% of the characters behave with total self-interest and abuse everyone else.

It's a myth that performs the essential function of mythology: it reminds me of my responsibilities to my society, which are legion. I must be all I can be; I must not bring harm to my friends; I must not make bad art to buy another Lamborghini.

It's a movie from Wes Anderson, for Wes Anderson and me and you. And if Michael Bay sees it, perhaps it'll do us all some good.

The Passenger (1975)

A Langorous Panic

[9/10 · 26 July 2009]

If you're lost in your own life, you probably couldn't make your way through someone else's. So know thyself, enjoy what you've got, be careful what you pretend to be, and remember: wherever you go, there you are. But this movie manages to be more than a collection of truisms. Or does it? Maybe that's enough. Very little was always enough for Antonioni.

It's a pretty trip, without a lot of talking to spoil the scenery. And for all its seeming lack of pace, it fairly breezes by. It's all those landscapes changing every few minutes, I guess, plus I'm a sucker for a footloose American vagabond with mysterious cash and a big convertible and a little automatic. And Maria Schneider.

At the center of the vehicle is Nicholson, who plays confused and headstrong better than anybody since Belmondo. His edge-of-violence persona is on its permanent 70s high simmer throughout this story. He enjoys himself as much as a man can who knows he's on the down side of freedom, but there's a hopelessness to his existential quest: after awhile he doesn't even keep his appointments anymore. He keeps me engaged, even when the story doesn't, by getting progressively more resigned to another man's fate. It's hard to look away from a man about to walk in front of a truck he can see coming.

The Embalmer (2002)

Discomfort Motif

[8/10 · 24 July 2009]

Everybody wants to be adopted by a rich uncle. Everybody wants to pick up a girl who just cleaned out her boss's register. It's fairy godmothers and runaway princesses. But fairy tales are grim affairs. Remember the one about the maid who switches costumes with her mistress and gets stuck naked in a barrel riddled with nails and tossed in the river? Nobody wants to be the maid. There isn't much free in any life, heaven or hell or where we are. There are consequences to any act. Newton's third law applies to every tale, fairy or straight.

The action is a monster who can give you what you want. The opposite reaction of L'IMBALSAMATORE is that in return, Rumpelstiltskin wants more than your baby. He wants you. That's what he always wanted anyway, and there's not much in the world sadder than an aging troll. An aging troll is a desperate animal, like a junkie in his impossible obsession, but junkies can clean up. A troll is what God made him, and it doesn't end well for most of them. Peppino Profeta can maybe see the future, as his name implies, but also as his name implies he's a little short-sighted. Like most men he can't see past his erection. He gets in over his head and that's where people drown, but sometimes they take you with them. This little monster, pathetic as he is, could do a lot of damage. Matteo Garrone photographs this character from odd angles, relegating him to the corner of the frame much of the time to accentuate his marginalization.

Add to that the movie's grim look (the film is grainy and underexposed, packed with pore-opening closeups on the world's dirtiest beach) and its cringe-fetish situations (nearly every scene portrays an awkward or unpleasant social encounter) and you've got a prime downer of a story. It is creepy and nasty and willing to go places that horrify most people. I like it. When Valerio sleeps with his troll, the movie does not exploit his charity or contempt or self loathing, nor do we even know whether he feels any of these things. How often in life do we have complicated motivations to explain our acts? Much of the time, for me. People who are 100% sure about every choice they make live in an atmosphere immensely less textured than mine. Living in America I get very few straightforward portraits of weird worlds. North American directors who shoot ambiguous stories tend to be stylists like the magi David Lynch, Todd Solondz, or Todd Haynes. We get occasional fine entries by Gus Van Sant, again usually heavily personalized, and David Cronenberg keeps trying but only made me happy once. It's nice to see a 3-dimensional neo-realist take on the asymmetrical universe. Where better than Italy to find such a thing?

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

A Story as True as a Lie Can Be

[2/10 · 24 July 2009]

This movie begins on one cliché ("Why do good things happen to bad people?") and ends on another ("God works in mysterious ways"). It would be silly to expect much else in between. House on site of evil rites, child with health problems who won't admit he can see ghosts due to sanity-related obstacle, parents with substance abuse and money issues, mysterious locked room in basement, creepy attic, demonic spirits battled by angelic spirits expiating guilt, ludicrously over-informed religious father figure, failed exorcism, shadowy entities confined to mirrors and doorways for the first act culminating in disappointing full-body manifestations later on, editing instead of plotting. Stop me. Note to filmmakers: flash cuts to dead children have been passé since the day after THE SHINING left theaters.

Troubled family moves into haunted house; meets benevolent priest who raises Cain; family settles Abel. Sound familiar? Maybe because the same ghost hunters who foisted THE AMITYVILLE HORROR upon tabloid America also helped the Snedeker family spew up this pile of bile. The non-events in Amityville, NY at least provided fodder for one good movie (out of nine so far). Whatever didn't happen in Southington, CT was not destined to do the same, except for the lousy sequel part, which we can expect to come straight to video faster than you can say ka-ching.

This is my least favorite sort of genre picture: not quite shameless enough. This movie has the chutzpah to trade on the most familiar horror movie stock, but not the guts to exploit its most licentious elements. 13 GHOSTS defeats its hackneyed set-up with an ingenious gore factor. Not THE HAUNTING, whose most graphic violence is reserved for corpses. A teenage girl showers, with suggestive images of a bar of soap making its way up her knees, but nothing comes of it except a 5-second plastic sheet attack. At least in STEPFATHER, the shower scene includes nudity - gratuitous, yes. And necessary. It's a B movie. The real life Connecticut liars claim that several family members, including the father, were sodomized by demons. Some of the psychics who came to corroborate this bullshit say that the house was the former home of necrophilia. All of this, which while distasteful is at least interesting, is completely missing from the movie. Instead we get some piled chairs from POLTERGEIST and editing from SILENT HILL.

The actors do their best, but there's not much Elias Koteas can do with a character already played twice by Rod Steiger. And there's nothing Virginia Madsen or anyone can do with a scene where she cringes in a house obviously not really burning down, from which she could escape as easily as she just got in, and has to recite the god damn Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer? Are you kidding? In 2009? Has the art of screen writing progressed no further than this?

If you're not going to scare me, thrill me. If you're not going to intrigue me, titillate me. If you can't do that, stay out of genre pictures.

The Watcher (I) (2000)

"The Watcher" is the Writer

[4/10 · 21 July 2009]

It's nice to see cops and feds cooperating without a cliché pissing contest. It's nice to see a manhunt in which the good guys get progressively closer to the bad guy through credible, dogged police work, without any serendipitous clues or leaps of mystical cop/killer psychic-bond logic. It's nice to see a guy use a commode to steal a car.

It's nice to see James Spader in a leading role. It's nice to see Keanu Reeves not have to carry a whole movie. It's nice to see Marisa Tomei in anything.

It's less nice to see a burn-out detective hero with addiction issues and a dead lover. And her killer as a pen pal. And a god damned lady shrink.

And it's not at all nice to watch a police procedural written by someone whose entire idea of police procedure comes from watching police procedurals on TV. I mean, a cop calling in an APB on a "two-door sedan"? A better cop displaying his superior detective skills by pointing out the very, very obvious? A muted-palette FBI office decorated like an art gallery with expensive evidence blow-ups? Pseudo-hip music dropped in whenever possible? Where are we, CBS?

All you need to make a movie is a story and a camera. If you start adding stuff, like actors and dialog, that's fine as long as you don't display pandering or incompetence. This movie's not particularly insulting. It's not smart enough for that.

The Great Buck Howard (2008)

The Mediocre Sean McGinly

[3/10 · 21 July 2009]

This movie manages to cruelly belittle nearly every cliché it observes - a host of Gary Colemanesque has-beens, including Gary Coleman; the chitlin circuit and its yokel boosters; bimbo TV personalities; indifferent agents; callous journalists: yawn. The one hackneyed element this movie fails to casually insult is its own writing and directing, both of which consistently miss the opportunities in their premise, and both of which are the responsibility of a single incompetent.

I suggest Sean McGinly think very hard about pots and kettles before the next time he makes fun of a hack. The running gags are unfunny the first time. The romance is so uninspired that I felt embarrassed for the actors. The plot is so predictable that I might as well not have watched this film at all, but any number of bittersweet lovable-loser romps in the ROCKY meets JUNIOR BONNER vein instead.

The underwhelming presence of Colin Hanks does nothing to aid this centerless jelly of a story, but I suspect he would be capable of more with a little help from a real director. Not a moment of this film is supported by anyone behind the camera except Tak Fujimoto, who is a very good photographer. But pictures of Sean McGinly's stool, no matter how well-lighted, are just gonna be pictures of crap.

The actors, those capable of working without aid of good writing or any sort of directing, are fine. John Malkovich hasn't needed a director since he found his way onto his first set. Steve Zahn could do this part in his sleep, and has the work ethic not to. Emily Blunt uses the time to perfect her American accent. And Griffin Dunne is always welcome in my DVD player.

But a movie about a magician, with Ricky Jay in it, in which Ricky Jay performs no trick other than keeping a straight face, is a movie that should never, ever be made.

Tentacles (1977)

"But all octopi, large or small, have a sense of foresight!"

[3/10 · 12 July 2009]

I sometimes play this game with my friends: "A movie came out in 1977. It stars John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda. What genre is it?" If I'm feeling ornery I throw in Bo Hopkins, and to be especially cruel I'll mention Claude Akins as the sheriff. People guess disaster, they guess Western, they guess wrong.

Everybody knows the 70s were a renaissance for American film-making, and we all like to impress our friends with our unknown niche discoveries in Blaxploitation, muscle-car flicks, or my favorite, the Jack Nicholson-looking-for-America genre. But hardly anyone mentions the secret weapon of the period, a formula known as "get classic Hollywood stars to make embarrassing appearances in schlock monster movies". Extra points if the monster was a natural phenomenon made horrific by human interference - killer bees, giant spiders, big smart fish. It's a strange development, these old duffers staggering around with freakish fauna. Ray Milland started the ball by producing his own weird little genre pictures in the 60s, then sliding right into THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES etc. The granddaddy of them all came in '78, THE SWARM (Fonda, Richard Widmark, half of the Warner stock company), which conflates the monster premise with the disaster genre. But there's also a bunch of lesser-budgeted fare distributed by the great Sam Z. Arkoff. Boy, did I love to see that name come up when I was five... and not really since. American International Pictures had entries like FOOD OF THE GODS (Ida Lupino, Ralph Meeker) and ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (Burt Lancaster), and this bullshit JAWS rip-off.

I don't know. Maybe I'm asking too much of a giant octopus movie when I insist that the octopus not make human breathing and growling noises while it's underwater. Or that the movie not be named after appendages octopuses don't possess. Or that informed experts take along more than a spear gun when they go hunting a cephalopod big enough to sink a yacht. But what I really don't like about this movie is its near-competence.

To be truly enjoyable, a bad movie has to try really hard and fail really big. TENTACLES opens with a bold move in this direction: an establishing shot of the seashore filmed through a taxi window, with the camera housing reflected in the glass. There's a nice touch to the radio dispatcher's patter laid over the whole sequence, as if that's gonna bring home the realism of a movie about an octopus that climbs into parks to eat babies. Even better, the taxi disembarks a man with a wooden leg, whose face we don't get to see, whose limp and funny shoes are established so firmly that one would never expect that neither those shoes nor that leg will come up again.

Unfortunately, the movie veers sharply from here into dull, mildly credible mundanity for much of its running time. There are wonderful elements, like the casting of Bo Hopkins as a marine biologist. Or the time when this character, in the course of investigating mysterious aquatic deaths, blithely advises his wife to go boating. Or his tender 3-minute monologue to his pet orcas. Mostly though the movie consists of Shelley Winters as the brunt of fat jokes, Claude Akins looking constipated, and John Huston smoking his cigar in every available location. Occasionally Henry Fonda makes a phone call from his single set, or interacts with the only other human being in his part of the movie.

The human carnage is extremely mild, a choice more likely related to the director's limited imagination than to any considerations of taste. Ovidio Assonitis has made movies about deformed psycho slashers, airborne transvestite nymphomaniacs, and women raped by devils, plus he ends this movie with the torture/mutilation of a real live octopus by hand puppets painted like killer whales. I call that pretty bad taste.

Pineapple Express (2008)

Judd Apatow + Seth Rogen: A Recipe for Laughlessness

[1/10 · 21 June 2009]

Rule: if you have to be stoned to enjoy a given movie, then the movie is not a good movie. It is a bad movie.

Rule: if either Judd Apatow or Seth Rogen has anything to do with a movie, then the movie is not a good movie. It is a bad movie.

Rule: if Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow are both involved with a movie, you will need more than drugs to enjoy the movie. You will have to be in prison, or mentally disabled, or never have seen a movie before and simply be enamored with the novelty of the medium, to enjoy the movie. Because it is a bad movie.

Rule: if I ever again intentionally watch a movie with which Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, or any combination or permutation of the above are associated, up to and including any movie in which Leslie Mann appears, I will give up my right to a valid opinion about anything. Because I will be stupid.

(Addendum: this last rule does not extend to movies featuring Paul Rudd or Kirsten Wiig and not otherwise associated with Judd Apatow. Because they are good, while he is evil. A nice guy, maybe, but still destroying an entire culture's ability to tell funny from idiotic. Which is bad.)

Taken (I) (2008)

better than it oughtta be

[7/10 · 12 June 2009]

The first half hour is not auspicious. By the numbers dialog and easy cheese plot points. Leland Orser as the oversympathetic friend (again), Xander Berkeley wasted in a nothing role (again), and why does that X-man chick with the exotic name keep getting work? Not a very interesting performer, except in MADE. I feel for Neeson, losing his pretty, talented wife and his viable career in the same decade, but maybe this one's some solace for him. Pretty good box office, doing good on video... but he SUCKS in it, again, wooden and not credible. I've never believed him except in that Woody Allen movie. Minute 30-something and I'm about to turn it off.

Then he gets to Paris. Suddenly this is a good movie. Good fights, especially Qui-Gon getting pulled out of a cab by the heels and conking his head on the curb. When he smacks his face on that sidewalk, I sit up. I'm interested. Not out of blood lust, but because something's happening. The movie is moving for the first time. The situations are now not quite as stock. I decide to give it another five minutes.

Which turns into the next hour. Nonstop violence in the b-movie mode, exciting and cheap and nasty and occasionally surprising just in the depths it's willing to go in investing its hero's need. Yes, it's silly: this guy is the Terminator, for no reason that's well enough explained in the story. He's the guy the phrase "one man army" was invented for. But this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and for a solid hour it's a very persuasive one.

JCVD (2008)

Van Damme Day Afternoon

[7/10 · 12 June 2009]

Incompetent thugs force a fallen idol to be the media-circus face of their crime, in a sort of metaphor for the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Everybody's favorite gymnastic drug addict plays his meta-self in this mildly outrageous, reasonably entertaining flicker that's better in the first 10 minutes than most JCVD entries of the last 20 years. Which is to say not much more than that it is watchable. How watchable? Well, it's not got Dolph Lundgren in it, and it even makes fun of Seagal, so that's something.

The picture uses a veneer of pseudo-verity to trace VD's custody battles, straight-to-video film deals, and tribulations with a fickle public, all with a knowing sneer, before, during and after a fictional hostage crisis not very far removed from a bad movie plot. Wait - it is a bad movie plot. No, no, wait again: it's most of the plot of DOG DAY AFTERNOON, an actual good movie. Hmmm. Does all this reality-warping have a payoff? Good question. The conceit places him in position to offer a 5 minute apologia for misdemeanors public and private to, and maybe through, the fourth wall. Does the message carry so far? Those of us who, like me, grew up enjoying BLOODSPORT and CYBORG may be interested to hear such a confession.

Then again, we may not. I'm the kind of idiot who owns 1000 dvds, not all of them good, many of them just bought for nostalgia's sake, and I don't own one Van Damme movie. I like to see people make fun of themselves as much as anybody. But after all, in the age of reality TV, one doesn't have to go very far to see the heroes of his youth vomiting into camera 1. At least this venue has a sense of humor.

Valkyrie (2008)

Bad History Makes Bad Movie. Again.

[4/10 · 7 June 2009]

The British stage raped of its finest performers for a by-the-numbers American film: nothing new, and nothing particularly wrong with it either. It's nice to see Tom Wilkinson or Tom Hollander or Terence Stamp or Kenneth Cranham or Bill Nighy do anything, and I don't see as much London theater as I'd like. And you can't even say that Tom Cruise is bad in this thing, exactly, since he wisely does absolutely nothing except put on a uniform. While I suspect that he did this because he thought wearing jackboots might make him look taller (the scuttlebutt that he was attracted to the role because he thought he looked like Stauffenberg is amusing, in the sense that one devoted monomaniac would probably recognize himself in another), it is not a self-indulgent or incompetent performance that is the problem this time.

It's that the movie has no point. To entertain, a story must must must be about something more than its plot. Event has to illustrate theme. I have to learn something. JAWS isn't about a shark eating people, it's about people taking responsibility for their lives. VALKYRIE is about some Hollywood bigshots hearing a story about people facing responsibility, then turning it into an episode of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. In this movie I learn nothing except a lesson I already learned several movies ago: don't let Chris McQuarrie write your movie, and if you do, don't let Bryan Singer direct it. Because you'll end up with, at best, a twisty-turny thrill ride with clever dialog that winds up as empty as a bottle of Bud at a tractor pull; at worst, a straight-ahead snoozeathon just as meaningless.

If I told you the story of Claus von Stauffenberg going from idealistic patriot to disillusioned warrior to outraged mutineer, you would have a chance at seeing a grown-up's vision of the German experience of World War II, a people coming to grips with its own capacity for evil. If you saw a thriller about a man who tried to assassinate Hitler and failed, losing his life in the process, you would have a chance at being entertained. But if you see this movie, all you'll get is a series of opportunities for very good actors to wring their hands and shout, in scenes whose only connection is that they may have happened in real life in more or less this order. There's nothing new here, no revelation, no greater truth: it's just a thrill machine that never starts because the finger that should be pushing the buttons is busy dialing room service. I've seen more drama in an hour at the laundromat.

Besides all that is the central bullshit factor. The movie presents its protagonist as an anti-barbarian, pro-Semitic, gentleman superpatriot whose outspoken criticism of Third Reich policies got him relegated to Tunisia. The record suggests otherwise. Claus von Stauffenberg had no problem annexing the Sudetenland and crushing Poland, and his attachment to the 10th Panzer division was in fact a promotion. He seems to have believed in Hitler as a positive force for Germany until Germany began to lose the war, and was repeatedly asked to take part in coup attempts and refused, until his own career was derailed by injuries.

Not that I'm saying the inclusion of any of this would have made a better movie. That would have required certain directors of comic book movies to hire writers who weren't their buddies, and for everybody to face his responsibilities in the manner that Stauffenberg finally did.

Hallam Foe (2007)

Would Sophocles approve? Would Powell?

[7/10 · 7 June 2009]

HALLAM FOE is a good name for a story about being the enemy of your own peace. I wish the movie were as good.

In the pantheon of coming of age fairy tales, there is no more common theme than the Oedipal; it's easy, and easy to screw up. David Mackenzie doesn't completely screw this one up until the end, but he does take a lot of convenient outs along the way, some handed him by Peter Jinks and others invented with Ed Whitmore.

Start with a boy whose dead mother obsession turns his anger on, yes, a wicked stepmother, whom he sleeps with at the first opportunity, which is I suppose one way to revenge himself. But the deed only sends him careening off to find a better mother figure, this time a dead ringer - which brings us to another really easy choice: Mom's doppelganger is an HR chief who immediately and not very credibly hires him so that he can have less trouble stalking her. When she finds out that he spends most of his time glued to her windows with binoculars, she's more willing than most victimized girls to give him second and third chances to explain himself.

So Oedipus gets to sleep with two surrogate mothers, but in attacking his surrogate and real fathers, he inflicts only minor wounds that are not very satisfying to him nor to me. The whole movie is like that. There are many missed opportunities (like a real consequence for anybody's actions), red herrings (like a maybe suspicious/maybe not pair of third act crutches) and dead ends (whatever happened to his voyeurism? and where did it come from, for that matter?).

Oh well. As David Mackenzie movies go, at least it's no YOUNG ADAM. It is enormously less repellent and makes slightly more sense than that, and there are compensations: Claire Forlani, looking more severe than usual, and Sophia Myles, bringing some reality to a ridiculous role, and Ciaran Hinds and Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, who are never less than perfect. Plus a resourceful and occasionally charming Oedipus, well played by the increasingly interesting Jaime Bell. And within its limitations the movie is intermittently, almost consistently engaging and enjoyable... until it winds up down by the loch, in a graceless calm-after-the-sturm und drang revelation that patly solves everyone's problems except mine.

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

"Illusions of course are by their nature sweet."

[10/10 · 21 May 2009]

Stephen Frears. If you'd only shown me THE HIT and THE GRIFTERS, I'd have said he was one of the best crime directors around. If I'd only seen SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID and MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, I'd admit that he was a fine chronicler of Thatcher Britain, a Mike Leigh without pretensions, Ken Loach without the dullness. Add HIGH FIDELITY and PRICK UP YOUR EARS: none of these would have prepared me for THE HI-LO COUNTRY, an elegantly brutal Peckinpah-inspired Western elegy. I don't believe even then I'd have thought him capable of making DANGEROUS LIAISONS into my favorite costume romance: less precious than AMADEUS, immensely more human than BARRY LYNDON, far greater in impact and emotional scope than THE DUELISTS, and altogether more grown-up than any Golden Age tights-and-rapier entry it has been my pleasure to watch.

Truth be told, I'm not such a fan of Frears' most recent decade, but this man made some of the best movies produced between 1984 and 2000, in a breadth of idiom perhaps unique among present English-language directors. How many directors versed in urban comedy have ever succeeded at wig pieces? And Westerns? And gangster epics? And intimate relationship dramas? Hawks comes to mind, and Curtiz. Wyler. Wellman, maybe, and Ford, though I don't think they're much as comedians. Stevens, but his sandal pieces are a yawn. Powell and Pressburger never made a Western, though they could have, and Welles like Kubrick never got to, and Mankiewicz's sucked. And today? Who is there? Weir maybe, Boorman maybe, Forman maybe, and Hilcoat and Dominik show promise, but they're none of them funny. Ridley Scott? James Mangold? Please. You have to go back to the old studio system to find artists this versatile.

And that's just the director.

This is the movie that introduced filmgoers to the leading-man potential of the decidedly un-pretty eccentric John Malkovich, and to the surprising comic talent of a fashion model named Uma Thurman. It also features top turns from Mildred Natwick, Peter Capaldi, and Swoosie Kurtz. Michelle Pfeiffer has never been better, and Keanu Reeves may never have been good again. Glenn Close is terrifying in her power. But it's Malkovich who leaves the indelible impression: this idiosyncratic performance, in manner both modern and timeless, is more than entertaining. It is astonishing. It is a man naked, aided of course by a perfectly written character demanding a range of feeling and nuance. But the performer is the delivery system for three and four emotions at once, in some scenes offering a display so rare as to make me forget that I like other actors.

And that's just the cast.

Christopher Hampton's script (from his own play) retains much of the dialog and all of the wit of Choderlos de Laclos's original novel, without the ponderous moralizing. Hampton teaches not with a sermon but with banter. Very infrequently have I been so consistently charmed by language, though the words are only decoration to this world. We are enveloped by cruel pleasures, corrupt glamor, all the decadence we can eat and all the horror we can witness without dying of shock. There is real danger here, not just the nip-out-the-window bedroom farce variety but the peril of violent spiritual and physical destruction. It's an operatically tragic story that manages to inspire catharsis by exploring cynicism. How many of those have you seen lately?

And how gorgeous it is to see! The genius Philippe Rousselot has been responsible for some really unbelievable footage. L'OURS alone would place him in the pantheon of photographer gods; then remember HENRY AND JUNE and A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT and DIVA and THE GREAT DEBATERS (not great movies, though you can't blame how they look), and you have to wonder why he is not a household name. The least that one can say of his work on this piece is that it makes Miroslav Ondricek's on VALMONT look like British television. Rousselot illuminates the weave of every fabric in James Acheson's wonderful costumes, and records all the murky or sunny detail of Stuart Craig's sets, yet keeps enough distance to make Malkovich's missing-link face an almost heroic object. That's beyond talent into grace.

When Valmont instructs Cecile in "one or two Latin terms", the joke is funny; then Frears cuts to a priest offering a Latin benediction, and we feel the bond between flesh and spirit. A peacock calls periodically during Valmont's country seductions -- you can barely hear it, and you never see it, but there it is, that fragile, prideful bird quietly alerting you that what is happening is deeper than genre or style. This is art: that thing telling you what you might have known of life if only you'd been able to think with the mind of God.

All this plus a swordfight both dramatic and dramatically significant, illustrating theme, character and story. Top that, Ang Lee.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Lawrence Ad Nauseam

[4/10 · 28 April 2009]

Paul Theroux and Jorge Luis Borges once discussed T.E. Lawrence's book SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM. Theroux, in response to Borges' praise of it, said a clever thing: "How can a book about Arabs not be funny?" True. SEVEN PILLARS, while wonderful in many respects, is a relentlessly grim chronicle of disillusionment. In this respect, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is true to its source material. But this does not deserve reverence. To repeat a mistake is to commit an even greater folly.

Grandiose does not equal grand, and spectacle is not of itself spectacular. Yes, this movie looks great, and it is one of the most auspicious and audacious entrances an actor has ever made onto the world stage. But man, is it dull. Anyone not bored by multiple offerings of five minutes' empty pageantry - a thousand camels marching off to battle (which never is satisfactorily joined) - is more easily amused than I.

I liked this movie when I was a kid. Now I do not like this movie. It is too long, for one thing, not that long is bad per se, but long and incoherent is very bad. I've finally noticed that what's really wrong with this picture, aside from being directed by the most overrated A-lister in the history of the tenth art, is its inability to tell a story. What is going on at any given point after the first couple of hours - in the campaign, in T.E.'s head, in the battle - is obviously of inferior importance to how it looks.

Now, this is a major achievement. To be incoherent in a travelogue-depth 4-hour yawnathon of pedantic phrasemaking is not only to defeat the purpose of a travelogue (which is to make clear for adults what was possibly too confusing for children), it is to complicate the logic of simplicity by means cunning and nefarious, for no apparent gain or purpose. I am amazed that it could be done. But then David Lean is the thinking man's Roland Emmerich - if the thinking man doesn't mind being made to think the same thing over and over. Other giants of the epic travelogue - John Sturges, Lawrence Kasdan, Richard Attenborough, Mel Gibson, Ridley Scott, Peter Jackson - while boring and/or insulting me much of the time, at least usually manage to get the ideas across in a shot or two, abetted by dialog best presented on T-shirts. If Noel Coward had been the director, instead of just a third unit helpmate to his old partner, it would have made sense and it would have been two hours shorter and it would have been better. In fact it would have been good.

I have to admit that while no less bad, most of Lean's other gigantic pieces of shite, like BRIDGE ON THE RIVER WHY? and DOCTOR ZZZZZZ, do not confuse me. They are good traditional travelogues in the Old Hollywood vein: say it early, say it often, say it again if in doubt. Funny, 'cause I kind of like his GREAT EXPECTATIONS, a much more watchable film (and certainly not small in scope) than the book is readable. But going back that far I believe he was still under the influence of his benign Svengali, Coward.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Crouching Story, Hidden Vacuum

[4/10 · 22 April 2009]

So I watched this movie again the other day, and as ever I felt a little dirty afterward. Gorgeous to look at, and all those lovely Ang Lee touches making the relationships throb with life. But there's something sore here I can never put my finger on. Dmitry called later on and I asked him what was wrong with this movie, and as usual he had exactly the answer:

"Nothing matters," he said.

And that's it.

Start with the Macguffin: a sword is stolen... that the owner just threw away. Bang. Doesn't matter. Everybody gets all excited about it, runs around getting into spectacular fights over it, when in fact the people who are acting like they care said right at the start that they didn't care. The sword is recovered, and, yes, stolen again. And again everybody acts like that matters. If it didn't matter at the top, it can't matter later, unless new information is introduced. It's not: when Chow Yun-Fat turned his back on his fighting ways, he already knew the bad guy was still out there. Which brings us to:

The oldest, dumbest motif in Shaolin filmdom: the bad guy killed my master. This was a tired excuse back before Bruce Li used it 30 times. A revenge story always sucks because there are only two ways for it to be explored thematically: (1) the vengeance trail is an empty path, which is not news to anybody who's seen a Western or gone on a vengeance trail; (2) the vengeance trail is an honorable pursuit, which is idiotic to anybody who's ever studied Buddhism, or gone on a vengeance trail. This movie chooses to combine the two, which is only slightly less stupid than either one alone. First, we're forced to spend time with a hero who can't see the lack of wisdom in his decisions. Second, we know what he ought to be doing, which is having kids with the Michelle Yeoh. That's a little tragic, and the only part of this story that works dramatically. Too little too late, because for the whole middle of the movie we're not thinking about Chow and Yeoh, we're looking at:

The intrusive ingénue love story, which breaks its own rules by failing to be a love story. The pretty girl is supposed to be in love with the pretty boy. She is supposed to be so in love with him that their love is presented in epic, sweeping visual terms. We in fact spend a good half hour derailing the central (admittedly ridiculous) plot line for a diversion in romantic desert locations, purportedly setting up the great timeless love of these renegade children. Then, when the boyfriend shows up demanding his old flame's affection, she is iffy and pouty. Turns out she'd rather be a Quentin Tarantino heroine, kicking ass and posing. After all that heavy breathing in the desert, she gives him the kiss-off without even a farewell roll in the sand. And when the grown-ups tell him to go wait in the corner, he goes. Along with any credibility the love story might have had.

Which segues into the traditional storyteller's dilemma: what to do with the ingénue. Zhang Ziyi is no problem to look at. The trouble is the script's abuse of her character as a story device. The conceit of a talented but recalcitrant student is an old one, tried and true and moldy and blue. That's not even the problem. It's that the movie can't decide how to use her. Is she a lover? That part's convincing. Is she a warrior? I buy it. Is she a wandering spark, looking for a haystack? Is she a wild horse in need of a rider? Is she ever going to take her shirt off? These are the questions that, even if answered (not all are), are answered erroneously. That she kills her potential master is, again, mildly interesting from a dramatic standing, but, again, it's too little too late. She never took her clothes off, she never really loved the boy, she never really reached her potential. So when she kills herself, the sacrifice is for nothing: there's nobody to save but herself. And now she's dead.

Just like the chances of my ever watching these beautiful, empty fight scenes again. After all, this movie's through-line is that one shouldn't waste the time he's given.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

"That's not funny, 007."

[3/10 · 28 March 2009]

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY has got to be an all-time topper for absolute stupidity, with foolishness that quite over-arches the usual Bondian idiocies.

For starters, you got some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of dumb bad guys. Among the highlights:

* attempted assassination not only by hockey brawl (wow) but also by dune buggy - does nobody have a radon pellet blow gun umbrella?;

* not one but two death-by-methods-slow-and-unlikely-enough-to-allow-Bond-to-escape - one is enough for most supervillains, but after all this time there are not one but two of those;

* multiple other opportunities to kill Bond in which he is instead either taken captive or kicked or knocked out, always by people who want him dead and are holding guns;

* okay, this is just another example of the last, but it's the HEAD OF THE KGB telling his own guy not to shoot the most effective member of the opposition;

* a fistfight with a guy who can throw motorcycles, in which the strongman insists on picking up things heavy enough for him to throw inaccurately (like for instance motorcycles) instead of crushing Bond's head in his hands;

* and a mountaintop fortress/lair guarded by about, oh, maybe four guys, some of whom are apparently armed only with old WW2-surplus handguns.

But wait - there's more.

You got a cute Bond girl Bond inexplicably refuses to sleep with although she's present for no other purpose; in fact this Bond is remarkably sexless, bonking only the future Mrs Remington Steel until the end, when he finally gets around to the Chanel chick;

you got Bond doing a Jon Voight impression up the back of a mountain just so he can lower a basket (to pick up his team) on a noisy winch that alerts the guards, because he wanted "the element of surprise" - this of course during the great Mediterranean helicopter shortage of 1980 - then he ruins the surprise for that portion of the guards who were asleep by engaging in noisy brawls and throwing people through windows;

best of all, you got a macguffin sunk at the bottom of the Ionian sea for about two weeks, a macguffin everybody says is really really important, the recovery of which somehow requires a drive through Spain and a skiing tour of Italy followed by a couple of boat trips to Albania, before anybody dives for this incredibly valuable and time-sensitive thing, a salvage operation so simple, by the way, that it can be accomplished by a girl with a mini-sub. A girl who had a mini-sub the whole time. And knew where the wreck was. And was ostensibly working for MI6. And was already diving nearby. But just didn't get around to it. Good thing the Russians weren't looking for it - oh, wait...

To be fair, there's some good second unit stuff, better than usual for an Eon production actually, especially the skiing. The underwater stuff, featuring a diving girl who wouldn't go underwater, had to be shot in slow motion sans water, and I must say that the process shots with bubbles fooled me. Good stuff. That stuntman who gets sharkbit in the jewels should have got extra pay. And Topol's a great prop for Moore's sagging charisma.

But overall, ehhhhh.

Caught (1996)

"Postman" without the delivery

[4/10 · 25 March 2009]

Robert M Young likes to do less with more. He's not bad at a sort of pale realism - his movies always feel like they could really happen, as if his scenes are less orchestrated than, well, caught. It's just that the worlds he captures, often in spite of their component elements, aren't very interesting ones. I am rarely compelled to finish one of his movies, and I rarely do. This, though he works all the time with one of the best actors in the business, who is also one of my very favorites: Edward James Olmos.

CAUGHT is a credible, competent, thoroughly boring film composed of really exciting ingredients. Aside from a centerpiece of dueling Oedipal tragedies, it features forbidden love, a suitcase full of money, a mysterious drifter, a murderous stand-up comic, Olmos with a knife in his hand, and Maria Conchita Alonso naked. How could this possibly be less than entertaining?

Well, set it in a fish market, for one thing; then have your mysterious drifter - who turns out to be not only not mysterious but not even very unusual - act the whole movie with a single look on his face. Then make none of the elements matter any more than any of the others, so instead of packed with thrills it's just a tired mess. Stir weakly and serve tepid.

Gettysburg (1993)

And Yet They Made Another

[4/10 · 20 March 2009]

What great scenery, and what big teeth to chew it with!

Now, yes, Jeff Daniels is great as always, quiet and true. Martin Sheen's Lee is majestic, visionary, awesome in the original sense. And Tom Berenger is at his most restrained and earnest.

But for every solid, believable performance, there are two or three outrageous characterizations so large they seem not designed to fit the biggest of big screens. Rather, in the inverse ratio of acting size, a performance as large as Sam Elliott's Buford could only seem appropriate if watched on a cell phone. Stephen Lang's Pickett is so big he threatens to explode my television. And the late Richard Jordan's Armistead, while obviously heartfelt and impressively teary, very nearly blew the windows out of my house. Here's the thing: these are good actors. Sam Elliott's never this bad. C. Thomas Howell and Kevin Conway are never exactly naturalistic, not to say credible, but Richard Jordan's never been so damn unrestrained.

So we must point the finger at this film's writer and director Ronald Maxwell, a finger aimed in persecution of his terrible mishandling not only of some fine performers, but of nearly every element of this godawful production. This pompous dolt has made an embarrassing habit of attacking the work of better men. His idiotic snipings at Luc Besson's Joan of Arc picture - not that I'm defending it - are among the least accurate and most self-serving in the history of sour-grapes hack hyperbole. With GETTYSBURG he leaves himself wide open to broadsides of the same sort of derision, only this time the criticism has some basis in reality.

Maxwell takes Michael Shaara's classic novel and keeps all its philosophizing - the stuff a novel can get away with because of the depth of investigation of which only a novel is capable - while abandoning most of the simple human action that makes the book readable. What remains is three hours of hopes-and-dreams speechmaking, followed by 90 minutes of bad second-unit photography: men running uncertainly up toward the enemy, then performing pantomime stage combat exercises. The battle's most tragic and hideous example of the horrors of war (about which this movie mouths many words), Pickett's Charge, doesn't seem to be in the movie. At least, it is indistinguishable from the other bland scenes of men trotting with muskets that serve only as background to Randy Edelman's obsession with his string section.

Another bizarre mistake, just absolutely unaccountable in a movie this god damn long, is the abandonment of the central character IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MOVIE. Maxwell follows Daniels' Chamberlain from forced march to bayonet charge, and this is in fact the most compelling portion of the picture, featuring the only characters created not just by actors but in the script as well. So when the 20th Maine is moved to the center, where Lee has just announced he will concentrate his attack, the audience is led to believe that they will get to experience the further tribulations of the single unit with whom they have been allowed any intimacy.

Nah. We pick up with Daniels and his brother after the battle, just long enough to see them fade to black.

True, the earlier defense of Little Round Top has moments of tension and suspense. Good work, Ron. So, that's about ten minutes out of, what, two hundred and fifty? Nice. I think Luc Besson, pretentious Frenchman that he is, was quite cowed when he heard that the director of PARENT TRAP 2 had criticized his work. Sorry? You say your prequel, GODS AND GENERALS, was the biggest selling DVD the week it came out? Good, good. Did it make back any of the $50 million it lost on theatrical rentals?

No, I don't think the quality of a movie is measured in receipts. But neither is it measured in the number of minutes your picture runs. Nor in the number of times good actors were clearly told to "go for it! pretend you're on stage in the Astrodome!" I have great respect for the theater, having spent half my life in it. I also know that film is not quite the same medium, not for directors, not for writers, definitely not for actors.

Ron Maxwell doesn't seem to know anything about movies. Given his inefficiencies in this regard, I kinda doubt he's much of a stage hand either. But I bet he talks a good game.

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

"How could any of this be possible?"

[3/10 · 13 March 2009]

This is one of those movies in which people keep saying "That's a great idea!" about the worst ideas you've ever heard. Then they act on them. I like it. This picture's funnier than any 3 dozen Seth Rogen projects. Well, so is SHOAH.

Gojira movies have been cannibalizing their own origin-stories since the 60s, but this one goes further. What can you say about a culture willing to rape its own sacred cultural icons for a quick buck? This travesty presents a WW2 suicide brigade on "the last of the Marshall Islands" presenting arms to a dinosaur who chased the US Marines away. Then the Japanese inexplicably decide not to fight to the last man, and instead abandon the territory annexed on their behalf by this giant lizard. They retreat to the mainland, where one of them becomes a business tycoon.

Then it gets complicated.

Blonde men from the future, irritable over not yet curing male pattern baldness, come back in time in a sort of flying saucer to ask a failed writer and a celebrity psychic for their help in eliminating Godzilla before he destroys Japan. The "help" is questionable, as all these 1992 citizens do is go back to 1944 to watch some closed-circuit TV, but, hey, they shot the script. You would think that by the 90s the Japanese would know better than to trust people in spaceships. Fortunately for Nippon, the white guys - you can tell they're American because they say "nucyaler" - erred by bringing back in time the one Japanese girl left in the future. In a touching display of ancestor worship, she outs their duplicity after donning a flying suit made from ductwork taped to a Sailor Moon backpack. Turns out these time-traveling, fashion-disabled Caucasians are just jealous of Japan's impending economic imperialist takeover of the known world (in the 22d century Japan's going to buy Africa, which sounds more like a liability than an asset). These blondes in padded chintz suits with nonfunctioning straps and redundant zippers want to replace Godzilla with King Ghidorah, who will destroy all of Japan except Tokyo. A strange choice, but Toho's been known to go out of its way not to have to build that Tokyo skyline set again.

Sure enough, we are given the alternate spectacle of Fukuoka ("my garden city") and some other heretofore unscathed-by-rubber-monster metropolitan areas being laid waste by a flying gold metalflake 1/3 of a hydra. In a surprise revelation, we are informed that King Ghidorah was created from some hand puppets left too long in the microwave. Godzilla also does his share of demolition as the movie winds down. Wait - didn't the spaceship blondes already destroy Godzilla? Yeah, they killed him in the third reel. But nobody expected that the Japanese of 1992 had a secret submarine filled with nuclear missiles - "Ha ha, don't worry. We don't keep it in Japanese waters" - with which to jumpstart a new Godzilla from the bones of an old dinosaur. Only they don't have to, because a leaky old nuclear shipwreck has already made Godzilla whole again. Oh, and Godzilla finally gets to Tokyo, reuniting with his old army buddy in a heartwarming moment of tearful recognition. They look into each other's eyes, and Godzilla nods as if to say, "Gotta do it, man." The tycoon nods in understanding. Then Godzilla blows him up.

I should also mention here that, in order to prevent Godzilla's revamped angry self from fulfilling his destiny and destroying Japan, the Japanese girl from the future goes BACK to the future to ask for help from - yes - a balding white man. Probably because he pities her as the sole Asian character from the 23d century, he agrees to build a Mecha-Ghidora and send it back to the 1990s, so that together, these two giant monsters can, uh, fulfill Godzilla's destiny and destroy Japan. In a wonderful nod to those notoriously self-willed whipping heads, the girl piloting Mecha-Ghidora has trouble controlling the joystick.

This Godzilla suit design owes much to the Sumo - his thighs are flabby enough to double for Rush Limbaugh's, and his belly and chest are thick and ponderous. But there's more exploding masonry in this picture than in most of his adventures, which makes up for a lot. Also features a man with a passing resemblance to Robert Patrick playing a killer robot. Yes, in the future even the robots will have bald spots. Plus Megumi Odaka, reprising her role as Micki, the only Japanese girl ever born with ears larger than her Disney namesake and an acting style even bigger than that. It's not her fault: many Japanese directors seem to feel that a seventy-foot screen isn't quite large enough to display the emotion of a human face. I did some acting for Japanese television, and I can tell you, they push you to go for it. They apparently urge their writers in the same way. Thank God.