Even Halle Berry cannot save the ridiculously coiffed, barely interested Pierce Brosnan in the last of his four Bond films (her love scene with Brosnan makes you uncomfortable, like watching your father dance to a pop song at a wedding). Shockingly, even though Austin Powers had been released five years earlier, this Bond film amped up the cheese, provided a cartoonishly mwahahaaa villain (Toby Stephens), an ice fortress, Duran Duran video slow-motion, enough sexual double entendres to shame Roger Moore, Halle Berry uttering the line “read this bitch!” to baddie Rosamund Pike, and perhaps the most laughable stunt in the series.
Bond gains entrance to the villain’s lair because a guard takes a leak at an inopportune time. You can hear the toilet flushing. Hilarious.
Writer/director James Cameron’s blockbuster is lovingly grand and its atmospherics and visuals breathtaking. But a single scene exemplifies the failure of the picture.
The moment before the lookouts spot the iceberg that would seal their fates, they’re dicking around watching Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) smooching on the foredeck. As a result, a plausible argument can be made that the two leads sank both the ship as well as the film, because their insipid teen love affair is at the heart of this movie.
Rose is unhappily slotted for a marriage to a well-heeled snob (Billy Zane). She intends to fling herself off the ship, but she is saved by and falls for roustabout Jack. As the ship continues its doomed voyage, these two chuckleheads moon at each other, while blithely noticing things that are important:
Andrews leads the group back from the bridge along the boat deck.
ROSE Mr. Andrews, I did the sum in my head, and with the number of lifeboats times the capacity you mentioned… forgive me, but it seems that there are not enough for everyone aboard.
ANDREWS About half, actually. Rose, you miss nothing, do you? In fact, I put in these new type davits, which can take an extra row of boats here.
(he gestures along the eck)
But it was thought… by some… that the deck would look too cluttered. So I was overruled.
CAL (slapping the side of a boat) Waste of deck space as it is, on an unsinkable ship!
ANDREWS Sleep soundly, young Rose. I have built you a good ship, strong and true. She’s all the lifeboat you need.
Not enough lifeboats, you say?
Soon, Rose is posing nude for Jack (he is a portraitist) and shortly thereafter, they’re going at it hot and heavy. Zane is infuriated and sets his goon (David Warner) on Jack, leading to an implausible cat-and-mouse chase through the ship while it is going under (Warner is truly Employee of the Century).
There are many, many other problems. DiCaprio could not be more wrong for the part. He looks as if he just started shaving, so his turn as a man-of-the-world is laughable. It’s an Aidan Quinn role given to a near pre-pubescent.
Rose, did you see where I put my Bubble Yum?
Cameron’s script is also unbearably overt. He trusts his audience not, as early exposition demonstrates:
HAROLD BRIDE, the 21 year old Junior Wireless Operator, hustles in and skirts around Andrews’ tour group to hand a Marconigram to Captain Smith.
BRIDE Another ice warning, sir. This one from the “Baltic”.
SMITH Thank you, Sparks.
Smith glances at the message then nonchalantly puts it in his pocket. He nods reassuringly to Rose and the group.
SMITH Not to worry, it’s quite normal for this time of year. In fact, we’re speeding up. I’ve just ordered the last boilers lit.
Andrews scowls slightly before motioning the group toward the door. They exit just as SECOND OFFICER CHARLES HERBERT LIGHTOLLER comes out of the chartroom, stopping next to First Officer Murdoch.
LIGHTOLLER Did we ever find those binoculars for the lookouts?
FIRST OFFICER MURDOCH Haven’t seen them since Southampton.
Iceberg, speeding up, and no binoculars? Uh oh.
The film unravels at the end. The idiocy of Warner hunting Jack and Rose as the ship nears its final peril can no longer be ignored. Meanwhile, Cameron becomes enamored of what he can do on his broad canvas. Tragedy becomes an action caper as the director starts bouncing hapless victims off of fantails.
In the final scene, an aged Rose (Gloria Fisher) looks longingly into the icy waters that took her Jack, and throws a massive jewel in. Leaving your last thought as, “That damned thing could have fed Sub-Saharan Africa for a few months. What a selfish old hag!”
Roman Polanski’s film version of the Broadway play God of Carnage pits affluent parents Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly against Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz after their sons get into a fight at a Brooklyn park. What starts as an awkward meeting at the apartment of Reilly and Foster (their son had two teeth knocked out in the fight), with Winslet and Waltz contrite and beleaguered, ends up a full-blown donnybrook as the couples engage in a long, silly serial judgment of each other. When liquor is introduced, for a time, the men gang up on the women, and, inevitably, the fractured marriages are exposed.
As a stage play, this might have been better (the original cast included Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden and all four actors were nominated for a Tony). But as a film, Polanski puts us right up close on the actors, and for the most part, they are not up to the task. Reilly, as the slightly hip and groovy peacemaker, has suffered from his idiot roles in broad Will Ferrell comedies. Gandolfini would have communicated the hidden rage of a man’s man living in the p.c. world created by his wife. Reilly just seems goofy.
As an over-protective, liberal, Cry-for-Darfur, “your son must take some responsibility” mother, Foster gives a performance so brittle and unreal it’s Razzie-worthy, playing her character at an 11 (I was reminded of Annette Bening’s cartoonishly gruesome turn in American Beauty). She contorts her face, has nears-convulsions, and so tightens and clenches her jaw, she appears to be in perpetual physical pain. Her character is so one-dimensional and unyieldingly p.c., any good jabs taken at the archetype come off as cheap and unkind.
Foster is awful, but Winslet is not much better. Her role requires she be drunk, and she is not a very convincing drunk. She is, however, a very convincing vomitor (she pukes all over the coffee table, a contrivance that forces the couples to stay in proximity as she recuperates and they clean up).
Waltz comes off the strongest, but he plays a sarcastic, droll, high-powered NYC lawyer, so his contributions are less histrionic, making him more bearable.
The script has some sharp exchanges and points up certain base impulses bottled up by modern convention as well as the conceits of the urban affluent, but a few well-written rejoinders do not make up for the overall assault on your senses.
Me and my boy are scheduled to see The Who playing Quadrophenia from beginning to end next week, so we prepared by watching Franc Roddam’s directorial debut, a story of a miserable 1960s London “Mod” (Phil Daniels) eternally at war with his parents, his job, the girl he fancies, rival “Rockers” and all that bourgeois b.s.
Daniels is a punk, through and through, and increasingly, it appears he is mentally disturbed. He either laughs goofily or snarls, and at no point do we feel empathy for his not particularly difficult plight. He has a job, a super cool Vespa, a gang of friends who are pleasant and tepid, and a fondness for readily available pills. His life is also soundtracked to The Who, fer crissakes (poorly, though – it’s clear the director didn’t know how to fit the music into the film and with the exception of the final scene, the musical contribution of band is distracting rather than evocative).
There are some charms to the movie. It was filmed on location in London and Brighton and the final scene (where Daniels either kills himself or he doesn’t) is a pretty impressive (though overlong) helicopter shot of a precarious ride along the Brighton cliffs.
If you look close, you’ll also see a boatload of very young Brit actors who went on to solid careers, including Tim Spall, Ray Winstone, and Phillip Davis. It’s a shame one of them didn’t get the lead, because Daniels appears to have been chosen solely for his likeness to Pete Townsend.
Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts out with a crisp recap covering how Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), the scion of a Maine fishery and lord of the manor at Collinsport, was laid low by a spurned scullery maid witch (Eva Green) and cursed to a life buried in the ground as a vampire. 200 years later, he is unearthed by a construction crew building a McDonalds. Very thirsty, he slaughters them all, and heads on down the road to his manor to reestablish the family’s supremacy. So far, so good. Burton’s economical use of flashback harkens to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and this looks to be a lot of fun.
It is not. Barnabas in 1972 is rather a bore, and Burton does just about everything you’d expect Dennis Dugan to do as a director. Barnabas marvels at electricity, commands the demons in the TV to show themselves, reads and quotes from Eric Segal’s Love Story and watches Scooby Doo and observes that it is a very bad play. None of it is funny.
Nor is any of it engrossing. Green now runs the town as the executive of a lead cannery, low ambition indeed for such a powerful woman, and Barnabas challenges her – by opening a competing cannery. In the meantime, Barnabas has a series of lame encounters with the surviving Collins’s, who include a droll Michelle Pfeiffer as the matriarch, a wasted Jonny Lee Miller as her brother, a couple of pointless kids (Chloe Grace Moretz and Gulliver McGrath), Burton’s wife Helena Bonham Carter as a live-in psychiatrist, and Jackie Earle Haley as groundskeeper Willie.
There is also a love interest (Bella Heathcote), the boy’s nanny, for whom we have to suffer a second, less interesting flashback showing that she was institutionalized when she was a child because she commiserated with ghosts.
One gets the sense Burton knew this was a hopeless mess and found himself desperately piling on more and more visual wonder and absurdity in the hopes of saving the picture. Hence, Barnabas has a ball for the town and arranges for Alice Cooper to perform (allowing him to say that she is the ugliest woman he has ever seen); Carter tries to transfuse the vampire blood out of Barnabas and then just decides to give him a blowjob; Barnabas and Green have a hate mating and fly about the room and up and down the walls, destroying everything, but at least breaking the tedium; and inexplicably, Moretz turns out to be werewolf. There are also two musical sequences, the tactic of the lazy.
We eventually limp to a lengthy showdown between Collins and Green that is all Robert Zemeckis. Statues come to life, ghosts intercede, and millions are spent wowing us with spectral visions. All wasted, making you nostalgiac for the one-take, live-to-tape format of the original soap opera.
There is a hint at the end a sequel may be forthcoming, though with a production budget of $150 million and a domestic take of about half that, we may be spared.
I’ve had the misfortune of watching this movie twice (I endured it because I remembered a better film). Mel Gibson had his own cut, which was better than that of director Brian Helgeland (screenwriter for LA Confidential), though still pretty bad. The picture is a loose remake of John Boorman’s 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle Point Blank. The story is uncomplicated. A crook (Gibson) pulls of a heist, is double-crossed by his girlfriend and partner and left for dead. He does not die, but returns, to collect his share of the money. It turns out his partner used that share to buy his way back into “the Syndicate,” so Gibson works his way up the chain, killing folks up a higher level of authority until he gets to the top. The original was arty, tough and noir, and Marvin’s anger convincingly propelled the simplistic plot, which culminated in a cool shoot-out in then-abandoned Alcatraz.
Gibson’s version exchanges San Francisco for Chicago, tough for brutal, and noir for ostensibly hip (which, as defined by Gibson, is taking every opportunity to smack women and crunch bones). While Gibson throws in a touch of humor in the plot, his performance is leaden. He emulates Robocop and The Terminator, not Marvin.
Gibson’s version ends better (he uses a kidnap of the top Syndicate man’s son to get at him, while Helgeland settles for a lame shoot-out on a Chicago train platform), but it’s a pointless endeavor. The only redeeming qualities are some wry performances as criminal lowlifes by Gregg Henry, James Coburn, William Devane, John Glover, David Paymer and Lucy Liu.
Like Any Given Sunday, a bad movie that is occasionally engaging but makes you feel guilty for being engaged, Oliver Stone’s The Doors is indulgent, dizzying and vapid. The caricature of James Morrison invades Val Kilmer, who gives an embarrassing, showy performance. Kilmer’s idea of Morrison is little more than a faraway stare and a lycanthropic lope. So perpetual is Kilmer’s saunter that he presents less Lizard King, more inebriated catwalk model.
The film almost stops dead in its tracks a third in with a ridiculous overlong band “trip” to the desert for some peyote and pretentious native American b.s. The Doors emerge from this interminable detour performing a live version of a song as silly and overlong as the movie, “The End.” All time taken away from the only story you want to see about a marginal rock talent: rise to fame, drugs, booze, chicks, and then, crash and burn.
Stone is so enamored of his subject he not only photographs him lovingly, he actually takes the singer’s poetry seriously. Morrison is such an obvious talent Stone felt he could dispense with any back story for him. We don’t know much about his early life (except he once saw a dead Indian by the road during a family trip) because Stone is in such a hurry to show us this avant garde pioneer, a guy who riffed “mother, I want to f### you” right into the director’s heart.
We get a few fun moments, snapshots of nostalgia from the 60s, like the Ed Sullivan performance. But even that has to be gussied up and romanticized. The Doors were asked to forego the line “girl we couldn’t get much higher” from their hit, “Light my Fire.” They happily did so in rehearsal, but during a lethargic live performance, Morrison forgot and sang it. Not good enough for Stone. In the film, Kilmer lectures the band on kowtowing to “the Man” and then belts it out as a taunt just to show those suits what for. Then he starts hip swiveling, sending lily-livered execs into apoplexy.
As Morrison descends into the fat, bloated bore he would become, visions of a dour Indian pop up. In the desert. During gigs. Even before meeting Andy Warhol (portrayed by Marty McFly’s father). When unintentionally funny imagery isn’t on screen, the picture is a crashing bore. Morrison always was a pompous dick and a medium talent at best. He never really merited the Stone treatment. Or maybe that is exactly what he deserved.
Clint Eastwood’s biopic is lovingly photographed. Washington, D.C., and other venues, from the teens through the 1970s, are regal, warm and classic. Unfortunately, Eastwood has populated his pretty film with a dull collection of historical figures, none of whom have much to offer. Eastwood also mostly punts on the nature of Hoover, and as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the character is little more than a one-note old windbag, constantly going on and on about the same thing – the enemy within. Eastwood’s vehicle for Hoover’s reminisces – Hoover is dictating his memoirs to an ever-changing number of aides- does not help. As one is replaced, you can almost hear the jettisoned aide saying, “Thank God! What a snooze!” Oliver Stone’s Nixon gave us a ridiculously lustful and evil Hoover, played by Bob Hoskins, but at least he wasn’t tedious.
Naomi Watts is wholly wasted as Hoover’s long loyal secretary. Armie Hammer, as Hoover’s long loyal number 2 Clyde Tolson, does a poor version of a young Brendan Fraser (Hammer was last seen in The Social Network playing the Winkelvosses). Judi Dench’s turn as Hoover’s overdoting mother is predictable. Josh Lucas’s take on Charles Lindbergh is foggy. In fact, the only decent performance is a brief appearance by Jeffrey Donovan as a trumped Bobby Kennedy. Donovan thankfully avoids the standard “Haaaaaaaaahvaaaaaads” and “Baaaaaaahstons” endemic to the role.
Eastwood portrays Hoover as a repressed homosexual, no question. Which makes Mom upset and Tolson bitter. And Hoover seems most bothered by Martin Luther King because he overheard King having sex on a wiretap. Not much of a motivation. Eastwood even gives in to the dubious cross dressing story, but ennobles it because Hoover gets gussied up in Mom’s clothes after she dies. Another punt.
Another problem. DiCaprio’s makeup as an older Hoover is very good. Hammer and Watts, however, look ridiculous, very similar to the characters in “Star Trek” when they age decades in hours.
Dustin Lance Black’s (Milk) script ends in treacle and nonsense. Out out of nowhere, Hoover turns moralistic, the man who would stop . . . Nixon! This prefaces a melodramatic conversation between an old Hoover and Tolson that is straight up “One Life to Live.” When Tolson, doddering in his ridiculous makeup, finds the dead Hoover, it comes close to bringing laughter.
At one point, DiCaprio asks Watts, “Did I kill everything I love?”
Oh if she’d said, “No Edgar. That was Michael Corleone. You just bored them to death.”
David Mamet-speak is one thing. There is nothing quite like the staccato of the pitiable salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, and Alec Baldwin’s thunderous sermon to those below him has become so ubiquitous that a generation of frat boys can now recite it – or parts (“coffee is for closers!”) – verbatim.
But Mamet-speak has it limits and when coupled with Mamet’s macho honor philosophy, the results can be toxic. And thus, we have Redbelt, a bizarre modern moral tale about a martial arts enthusiast (Chiwetal Ejiofor) who spouts a lot of Kung Fu b.s. while negotiating through a plot so byzantine and ridiculous that were I to attempt to encapsulate it, I’d have a stroke.
So, I’ll let Wikipedia do it for me:
While closing his Jiu-jitsu studio one evening, Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is approached by attorney Laura Black (Emily Mortimer), who is seeking the owner of the vehicle she accidentally sideswiped. Off-duty police officer Joe Collins (Max Martini), who was receiving a private lesson from Mike, sees that Laura is distressed and tries to take her coat. Startled, Laura grabs Joe’s gun and fires it; shattering the studio’s front window. To avoid having Laura charged with attempted murder, Mike and Joe agree to conceal the event.
Mike’s insurance, however, will not cover his act of God claim that the window was broken by a strong wind. Mike’s wife Sondra (Alice Braga), whose fashion business profits are the only thing keeping the struggling studio afloat, requests that Mike ask for a loan from her brother Ricardo (John Machado), a mixed martial arts champion. At Ricardo’s nightclub, Mike meets with Sondra’s other brother, Bruno (Rodrigo Santoro), and learns that Joe quit as the club’s bouncer because Bruno never paid him. Mike confronts Bruno about the situation but is rebuffed. Mike then declines Bruno’s offer to fight on the undercard of an upcoming match between Ricardo and Japanese legend, Morisaki (Enson Inoue), which could potentially pay out $50,000. Mike believes competitions with money as the incentive are not honorable and weaken the fighter.
Meanwhile, aging Hollywood action star Chet Frank (Tim Allen) enters the nightclub without security and is accosted by a man with a broken bottle. Mike intervenes and subdues three men in the process. The following day, Mike receives an expensive watch and an invitation to dinner from Chet. Mike gives the watch to Joe to pawn in lieu of his unpaid salary at the nightclub. At the dinner party, Chet’s wife Zena (Rebecca Pidgeon) arranges an informal business deal to buy a large amount of dresses from Sondra’s company. Chet, impressed by Mike, invites him to the set of his current film. As Mike and Sondra leave the dinner, Mike explains his unique training method to Chet’s business associate Jerry Weiss (Joe Mantegna). Before a sparring match, each fighter must draw one of three marbles, two white and one black; whoever draws a black marble has to fight with a handicap.
Mike uses his military experience to answer a few technical questions for Chet on the film set and is offered the role of co-producer. That evening, Mike faxes the details of his training methods to Jerry so they can be used in the film. Joe arrives at the studio and informs Mike that he was suspended from duty for pawning the watch, which turned out to be stolen. During their dinner that evening, Mike relays the information to Jerry who excuses himself to handle the matter, but never returns. At home, Mike learns that the phone numbers that Zena gave Sondra have been disconnected. Sondra is panicky, having borrowed $30,000 from a loan shark to order the fabric for the dresses. As he meets with the loan shark to discuss an extension, Mike notices Bruno and Marty Brown (Ricky Jay) on television using Mike’s marble-drawing method as a promotional gimmick for the undercard fights of Ricardo’s match.
Mike hires Laura to sue, but Marty’s lawyer threatens that if they do not drop the lawsuit, he will give the police an empty shell casing with Laura’s fingerprints, as proof that she attempted to kill an off-duty cop. He also threatens Mike as a witness who covered up the crime by bribing the cop with a stolen watch. When told of the situation, Joe feels responsible and kills himself. Mike feels obligated to help Joe’s financially struggling wife and, in desperate need of money himself, decides to compete as an undercard fighter in the upcoming competition.
At the arena, Mike discovers the fights are being fixed via a magician (Cyril Takayama) using sleight of hand to surreptitiously switch the white and black marbles. Disgusted by this revelation, Mike confronts the conspirators: Marty, Jerry and Bruno who confirm that unknown to the competitors, the fights are handicapped by the fight promoters so as to ensure winning bets. They also reveal that Ricardo is intentionally losing the fight to Morisaki so they can make money on the rematch. Jerry tells Mike that Sondra is the one who told them about Laura shooting the window and Bruno justifies her betrayal by explaining that his sister is too smart to stay with someone who cannot provide for her.
As Mike is exiting the arena, he meets Laura. Their conversation is not audible, but it ends with Laura slapping Mike. Mike then re-enters the arena. He incapacitates several security guards trying to stop him and is ultimately engaged by Ricardo. The audience and camera crews take notice as Mike and Ricardo face off in the arena’s corridors. Inspired by the Professor, an elderly martial arts master attending the match, Mike manages to slip a difficult choke hold and defeats Ricardo. He is approached by Morisaki, who awards Mike with his ivory-studded belt, previously referred to as a Japanese national treasure. Mike is then approached by the Professor himself, who awards Mike the coveted Redbelt.
As my Mom might say, “Jeez-o-flip!”
I am not a Mamet hater. Oleanna, Glengarry, Homicide, State and Main, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, these are all very good films, and Mamet displays an authentic American voice in their telling. His work on films he did not direct, or which did not come from one of his stage plays, such as The Verdict, The Untouchables, The Edge, Hoffa and Ronin, is vivid and accomplished.
Redbelt, however, came out in 2008, about the time someone needed to tell Mamet that his mystical machismo and rat-a-tat dialogue had not only reached their expiration date, but had become as embarrassing as a driver’s hat and leather gloves on a newly divorced man.
Since Redbelt’s release, and critical failure, Mamet has written a few shorts, and episodes for his TV show “The Unit.” He also wrote a very interesting book explaining his “conversion” from Hollywood liberal to a member of the right, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” as fine a read as you’ll get if you want to understand the nuts-and-bolts philosophy and precepts of a modern conservative (beyond the human sacrifices of panhandlers and the ritual rape of the land). Perhaps he’s done with film writing, but if so, Redbelt is both Mamet’s pathetic coda and a testament to his loss of the gift.
Steve McQueen’s Shame offers the story of Michael Fassbender, a New York City something or other, who is a sex addict. We learn this because he flirts with women on the subway, engages prostitutes, and masturbates/watches porn morning, noon and night. When his unbalanced sister, Carey Mulligan, comes to visit, his equilibrium is shattered, either because she is nude in his apartment, she sleeps with his boss, or she references their childhood. No matter. This is the kind of film that is destined to have as a penultimate scene Fassbender on his knees, in the rain, with a “will he or won’t he crawl back into sex addiction?” finale.
Why is Fassbender this way? As Mulligan says, “we’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.” However, that place is actually identified in the script as either Ireland or New Jersey. And that is the sum and substance of motivation, backstory or reason.
In place of exposition, McQueen provides pointless, overly showy scenes, including a long, several block Fassbender jog through the streets of NYC; a preposterous nightclub song by Mulligan (she sings “New York, New York” and sports a Marilynesque “Happy birthday, Mr. President” skintight dress); and, a ridiculous threesome with Fassbender and two women that is half Obsession by Calvin Klein, half Showtime soft core.
“I know how you feel, pal.”
My wife summed it up beautifully: “I don’t even think he was a sex addict.” Her comment is akin to watching Raging Bull and declaring, “I don’t even think he was a boxer.”
Also, Hans Zimmer should sue the composer, Harry Escott, who ripped his work off on The Thin Red Line damn near note for note.
The 1.5 stars are awarded because our good friend’s sister is in the picture and the movie looks great.
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