Willow Creek – 1 star

September 15, 2014
1 star, 2014, Scary
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The ingenious creators of The Blair Witch Project knew enough not to go back in the woods again with their follow up. But 15 years later, director Bobcat Goldthwait has picked up the torch, only this time, his unfortunate videographers are on the trail of Bigfoot, not ritual killers. After slumming with the locals, where absolutely no tension mounts and no character is developed, our couple (he, an overgrown kid obsessed with the Bigfoot sighting, she a supportive actress girlfriend, neither very interesting) go into the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Unlike their predecessors in the woods of Blair Witch’s Burkittsville, these geniuses receive three very clear early warnings to get the hell out of Dodge, but hey, what’s a camping trip without a sinister, threatening local, your clothing mysteriously hung from the trees and a wrecked campsite? We must sally forth to find, well, not even Bigfoot, but the place where this iconic picture was taken.

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This has all been done and much better at that (the scene where the couple realize they are lost is a criminal rip-off of Blair Witch). The characters are so culpable they repel sympathy, and the acting is woeful (Bryce Johnson, the Bigfoot enthusiast, conveys fear with a goofy face that I’m sure he assumes is grim determination but comes off as half concussed, half constipated).

There’s also not a scary moment in the film.

One star, though, for the kitschy Bigfoot locales and The Bigfoot burger.

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Locke – 5 stars

September 14, 2014
2014, 5 stars, Drama
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My first thought before watching Locke was of Hitchcock’s Rope, a film remembered more for the gimmick of no cuts than its merit. With an entire film consisting of hands free cell phone conversations from a car, I was primed to evaluate how the director handled such a limited visual scope. It’s a testament to the film that 10 minutes in, I never once gave another thought to that limitation. Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is a precise, obsessive construction manager, and on the eve of his greatest work triumph, his personal and professional lives implode, a disaster made worse by his determination to do one thing above all others. As he travels to his destination, he attempts to cobble together the fragments of his shattered life while figuratively sparring with the ghost of his deceased father in the backseat. Hardy, who seems to get every plum role these days, goes a good way to explaining why here. He is riveting and he expands his physical constrictions, evoking desperation, skill and even some gallows humor in the process. This is an audacious, confident second feature by writer director Stephen Knight, who I am pleased to report is writing the forthcoming World War Z 2.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball – 5 stars

September 11, 2014
2014, 5 stars, Documentary
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I’m not sure what is more surprising, this fascinating, Netflix-produced documentary chronicling the Portland Mavericks, an independent minor league baseball club run by baseball enthusiast and actor Bing Russell in the 1970s, or the fact that this story has not been made into a major motion picture. Russell capped off a lucrative career as a Hollywood “plumber actor” (according to his son, actor Kurt Russell, who also played on the Mavericks) by going to Portland and starting the only independent minor league baseball club in the country. The team is loaded with characters (including New York Yankee great and then baseball pariah Jim Bouton, who played for the Mavericks en route to a short MLB comeback), the story is utterly fascinating, and it has sweep, color, tragedy and vindication. Jesus, the damn thing writes itself.

This is available streaming on Netflix and I can’t recommend it enough, not only for the undiscovered gem of a story, but for the documentarians skillful restraint in reliance on interviewed remembrances and poignant found footage (a lot of which is 8mm). Not even close to schmaltzy, this output is yet another reason to get Netflix.

North Dallas Forty – 4.25 stars

September 7, 2014
Uncategorized
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What Jim Bouton did to/for baseball, Peter Gent did to/for the NFL, and the NFL responded. After this dark depiction of the seamy side of professional football was released in 1979, more than one of the players who participated in its production found their careers at an end. With its frank depiction of drug use, brutality, misogyny, racism and general lunacy, the crackdown is unsurprising. Nick Nolte is a sure-handed rebel WR, but he can’t get off the bench because he bucks coach G.D. Spradlin’s computer-efficient focus on “team” (bedding the fiancee’ of co-owner Dabney Coleman doesn’t help his cause either). Nolte is semi-protected by good ole’ boy QB Mac Davis, who enjoys all the excesses of the game but manages to stay on the right side of management, imploring Nolte to “play the game.” For NFL historians, Nolte is Gent, Spradlin Tom Landry and Davis Don Meredith. There are some moving scenes here, the best of which is former NFL lineman John Matuszak flipping out after a game.

Nolte’s plea to Spradlin as he is run off the team is also affecting. Amidst all the bullshit, you can see these two characters who, under it all, love the game, connect. This is an underrated film, but it is not without its faults. Director Ted Kotcheff (First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s) has some problems with tone, such that really dark material is often leavened with weirdly light, comic scenes. Nolte engages in a love interest with Dayle Haddon that is very thin and rushed, which I attribute to the denuding of Gent’s book.  The movie ends with Nolte quitting the team; the book ended with Nolte driving into the country to start anew with his love and finding her dead, murdered for living with a black man.  Kotcheff had lanced the NFL’s boil enough; there is no way that coda would fly.

Still, Kotcheff is a man who knows his limitations and the picture wisely keeps on-field action to a minimum (what he does show seems realistic and terrifying) and instead, focuses on the schizophrenic world of the professional athlete off-the-field. It also eschews all that jock-sniffing hokum ladled out by Oliver Stone in Any Given Sunday.

Here is a highly recommended article on the movie from Deadspin.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – 0 stars

September 1, 2014
0 stars, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery
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Who's who in 'Sin City: A Dame to Kill For'

This movie is more than bad. It’s an affront to genre, consistency and common sense. It also represents the end of film as art, the shape of things to come. Just as novels will soon give way to comics, movies will give way to . . . . comics.

The sequel pretends at noir but it has no kinship with it save for a string of laugh-out-loud, hard-bitten lines. The worst of the bunch: “I was born at night. Not last night.” Every single line is like that, played deadly straight, as if writers Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller concluded, “You know! The same idiots who have substituted, you know, books for serialized comics are, like, the ones coming to this stupid movie, so why would we try and, you know, make the dialogue anything more than the drivel in the picture book?”

There are three story lines, each more boring than the last. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a hot shot gambler who crosses mean Senator Powers Boothe. Jessica Alba is a stripper who crosses mean Senator Powers Boothe. In between, Josh Brolin (taking over for Clive Owen, who screwed the pooch turning down James Bond but made the right call here) gets double-crossed by his ex-wife, Eva Green. Gordon-Levitt beats 4 Kings with 4 Aces and then, ah, who cares? Alba and Brolin enlist madman Mickey Rourke to get them out of jams. That’s the whole of it, except Lady Gaga pops up as a clichéd waitress, following in Madonna’s footsteps yet again. Blood spatters, bodies are dismembered, the ominous score thuds along, and yawns are stifled.

Nothing makes sense. While Rourke blows up an estate, the guards remain unalerted, the easier to chop their heads off. Green seduces a cop (Christopher Meloni) and enlists a crime boss (Stacey Keach, made to look like an ambulatory Jabba the Hut) to invade the part of Sin City run by armed whores clad in Frederick’s of Hollywood because the girls are hiding Brolin. Both entreaties are awkwardly dropped shortly after their introduction. Brolin, healed by the whores, comes back with a newly reconstructed face to exact revenge, except he looks just like he did before, only with a sprightly toupee.

It’s a nasty, stupid, senseless movie. It’s also a little frightening. The first Sin City was a modest success, grossing $70 million domestic on a $40 million budget. It had the benefits of being unique and a little humor. Almost ten years later, they churn this dour turd out, and the budget is $70 million.

Maybe there is hope in the fact that it is getting killed at the box office ($11 million and trickling) but something tells me the Chinese will bail it out.

Death is just like life in Sin City. It always wins.

Actual line.

Apollo 13 – 5 stars

September 1, 2014
5 stars, 90s, Drama, Historical
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A thrilling and engaging piece of Americana and an homage to national ingenuity and purpose, this is the kind of film you hope your children watch (jocks and geeks and in-between alike, for they are all celebrated and shown as peers) and thereafter, become inspired.  I was surprised at how white-knuckle the re-creation of the near-doomed mission felt given I knew the outcome (Spoiler – the crew of Apollo 13 survived), but this is really edge-of-your-seat fare.

The performances are all excellent. Tom Hanks as mission commander Jim Lovell is hitting right in his sweet spot, the decent, measured everyman of Saving Private Ryan, Castaway and Philadelphia, and he is ably supported by Bill Paxton (a likeable but ever weakening Fred Haise) and Kevin Bacon (as Jack Swigert, added to the mission at the last minute, both defensive and independent). On the ground at home, Kathleen Quinlan is steely and vulnerable as Lovell’s wife, she underplays a role that is stock and often butchered by over drama (see Madeline Stowe as the suffering wife in We Were Soldiers), and she was deservedly nominated for Best Supporting Actress.  In Houston, it is a cast of seemingly thousands, led by Ed Harris as NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, who work tirelessly to bring the crew back home to earth safely. At every moment, you recognize another character and/or commercial actor and say, “oh, yeah, he was in . . . .”

A year after the stunning visuals of Gravity, I expected the 20 year old Apollo 13 to feel dated. It does not.  But this is not a picture featuring aesthetics, but rather, the resourcefulness of all types of individuals engaged in a grand effort during a harrowing rescue mission, told without schmaltz or thick reverence.  The immediacy of the film comes in part from the fact that the dialogue between Houston and the astronauts is near verbatim from transcripts and recordings, and Hanks, Paxton and Bacon were all trained at NASA’s space camp in Huntsville, AL.  It’s Ron Howard’s best picture.

Saving Mr. Banks – 3.25 stars

August 25, 2014
2013, 3 stars, Comedy, Drama, Historical
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The writer of the Mary Poppins books, P.L. Travers, was apparently such a pain in the ass that, according to her grandchildren, she “died loving no one and with no one loving her.” As played by Emma Thompson, Travers more than fits this bill as she is whisked to Hollywood against her better instincts to be wooed by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) in an effort to adapt her stories to the screen. Travers’ prickliness and exactitude with Disney and his team (Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzmann and B.J. Novak, all very good here) is the best part of the film. Unfortunately, director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) keeps interrupting the best part with flashbacks to Travers’ childhood, and in particular, her relationship with her whimsical, alcoholic father (Colin Farrell).

I understand the juxtaposition. The audience is supposed to learn what has embittered this awful woman. But you really don’t care (she’s such a witch that motivation is irrelevant), and you also begin to resent the interruption of the more interesting creation of a film.

Worse, the technique is cloying, leading to a sugary-sweet ending that has Disney melting the ice encasing Travers’ heart. In reality, Disney and Travers ended their relationship in acrimonious fashion, with Disney fed up with her stubborn nature, and Travers so offended she refused any further association between the company and her books. The disharmony is alluded to in the film, but it is near-blotted out by Travers’ copious tears as she undergoes a sort of catharsis at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Those were actually tears of fury.  From Travers herself:  “As chalk is to cheese, so is the film to the book. Tears ran down my cheeks because it was all so distorted. I was so shocked I felt that I would never write—let alone smile—again!”

Noah – 1 star

August 19, 2014
1 star, 2014, Action/Disaster, Drama
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Noah (2014) - Rotten Tomatoes
Noah is a modern day environmentalist/pacifist who is also a vegetarian, fights the rape of the land, and communes with Transformer-like monsters/fallen angels (it was quite a shock to learn that Optimus Prime was so critical to the Old Testament). God tells him to save the innocent; the animals. He complies.

Unfortunately for us, neither God or Noah cannot save this dreary and ponderous story nor can they remedy Darren Aronofsky’s leaden direction. I was surprised by James Gunn’s ability to handle a broad and sweeping epic in Guardians of the Galaxy given his prior experience with smaller films. In Noah, Aronofsky, who also has little experience with big films, does not surprise. He is completely lost visually, primarily relying on a slow backward tracking shot to say BIG! Some of the CGI, and there is a lot of it, looks as silly as Harry Hamlin-age Clash of the Titans.  The script, which Aronofsky co-wrote, is a repetitive mix of New Age blather (birds arrive and Crowe intones, “it begins”) and mundane domestic drama. The performances are rote, good actors intuiting “this is biblical” which they apparently perceive as solemn.

On the plus side, the making of this film means at least one less Aronofsky ode to masochism and sadism (although Aronofsky does let Russell Crowe sing again).

You also get the sense Aronofsky feels the film is getting away from him, so he relies more on Noah’s trippy dreams and his story of creation (a psychedelic light show and some stop-action photography), and indeed, they are welcome respites from the numbing dialogue.

And the flood is pretty damn cool.

Barton Fink – 2.75 stars

August 18, 2014
2 stars, 90s, Comedy, Crime/Mystery
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There’s not a scene in this Coen Brothers film I don’t like, and the story of a Clifford Odets-esque playwright’s (John Turtorro) introduction to the oily world of Hollywood is both visually striking and thematically ambitious.  But no matter the film’s look or intriguing interpretations (the mind of the writer, the dangers of solitude, the corruption of money), by the end, you feel trifled with, as if you watched a parlor trick perpetrated by a cast of broad, comic actors (John Goodman, John Mahoney, Michael Lerner) for no greater purpose than the goof.  Like The Hudsucker Proxy and Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink has its joys, but the feel is sterile and your investment unrewarded.

After Hours – 4.5 stars

August 15, 2014
4 stars, 80s, Comedy
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Martin Scorsese’s surreal nightmare of one man’s (Griffin Dunne) ill-advised late-night trip into lower Manhattan is painfully funny and, at times, genuinely unsettling. Dunne is beset by a quintent of quirky, if not outright dangerous females (Roseanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara and Verna Bloom), a fact that will one day be Exhibit X in his anticipated trial for misogyny.  His torture is lovingly photographed by Michael Ballhaus, giving SoHo’s grimy exterior a dream-like quality (and there is no greater horror than being hunted by a mob that has commandeered a Mister Softee truck).

Dunne is very good and much like Steve Carell, except he’s not burdened at all by the imprint of a long-running character, and where Carell is childlike and vulnerable, Dunne is sympathetic, but sexually opportunistic.

Bonus: if anyone asks you, “What movie casts the parents from Home Alone, one of whom went to filmvetter’s high school?”, now you know.