Category: Movies

Full disclosure: This is a small independent film from a production company in St. Louis. I’ve worked with some members of the team on an Internet video that depicted me in bed with another man (I was young and needed the money). So take it for what it’s worth. I bought the film and did not receive it as a free gift. </fulldisclosure>

The film depicts some raw recruits trained in anti-armor as they’re thrown into combat and a mine squad at the tail end of World War II. There’s a young idealistic sort of n00b, a grizzled, disdainful sergeant, a world-weary lieutenant, and some other guys, and they get various infantry assignments as the army presses onto the Rhine.

Technically speaking, it’s a very adept film. They used a lot of vintage vehicles from World War II that they gathered from collectors in the St. Louis area, including a half-track that I saw driving around Old Trees once in a while. They rely on shaky cam a couple times for verite, which I could have done without. But you don’t think you’re watching some kids playing soldier in Illinois.

The story, though, is a little thin. The incidents and scenes run a bit long, the n00b changes into a veteran in a matter of moments, and even as the n00b is changing, the sergeant remains disdainful until the end.

So it’s a good looking piece of work that could have benefitted from a better story.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

This film is based on the book by Robert B. Parker which I read in 2005. Since I was to read the fourth book in the series, I ordered the DVD so I could watch it after I finished the last book.

And you know what? The film is better than the book.

The latter 2/3 of Parker’s books were heavily influenced by his years in Hollywood in the 1980s, so they translate very well to the screen. But Parker didn’t write the screenplay–Ed Harris, who plays Cole, did along with a co-writer. As such, he takes the ideal Parkerian hero, the fast draw dead shot who loves a fallen woman character and diminishes him compared to Hitch, the sidekick and narrator. Harris emphasizes that Cole is not book-learned like Hitch when he (Cole) struggles with words. The screenplay also contrasts Cole with Bragg, the bad guy, as being undereducated. He’s not so much an ideal man as a fast man who is simple.

Maybe that’s the way that Parker intended it. Maybe too much interior thinking on Hitch’s park shaped the narrative wrong for it to carry off. Maybe I too much read Parker’s biography into all of his books. But it’s a good enough Western film, and I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the recent Hitch and Cole books.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

I re-read the novelization of the film last month, but I hadn’t seen the actual film. So as part of the “One-for-you, one-for-me” gift buying protocol, I bought and watched the DVD.

I won’t rehash the plot here, since I did that in the book report. However, I will make a couple bullet points about how the film has aged vis-à-vis the novelization. Well, no, I won’t use bullet points because I know what bullet points do to the polarized glass of a mining base.

The film is far more dated than the book is. The visual elements of the film strike one more than they would in the book. For example, when the book might have mentioned that the character lit a cigarette in the workplace, the film has a warehouse scene blue with smoke as every employee has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. The book is dated enough with its video messages instead of text, but the film plays them on CRTs with green text. The look and feel of the film definitely evoke the time period of the film-making as much as that of the future.

The film also diminishes some of the minor characters in that their screen time is really truncated compared to their page time. That’ll come with any film, of course, since it has two hours and roughly one hundred or so pages of dialog and scene material versus page of text. It doesn’t make it better or worse; books (including books based on film) and film are two different media.

So, will I watch this again before 20 years have elapsed? Maybe. Movies are more replayable than most books because of the time committment involved. I buy movies more slowly than books, but I still buy them faster than I watch them, it seems. So it might just take my accidental repurchase of the film to trigger another viewing. But that’s not likely.

At any rate, a serviceable period piece of science fiction.

Books mentioned in this review:

Nothing says 1985 like a couple Uzis fired effectively from the hip. Except maybe some Chinese throwing stars killing people instantly. This film has plenty of the former, none of the latter.

As I have mentioned, this is one of my favorite Christmas movies. This also qualifies as one of those films that I watched over and over on Showtime in the middle 1980s, so it’s got a place of affection in my heart. How does it hold up?

Well, the bad guys are the Russians, and 25 years later, it’s not the Russians who provide a realistic cinematic foil for heroes. It’s the Nazis and the North Koreans, somehow. The protagonist is an American, called “cowboy” by the attractive-in-an-80s-way photojournalist who joins up with him. In short, it’s a film that was mainstream in the 1980s, but its themes seem dated by modern Hollywood mores. Which might account for continuing domestic box office decline.

So, as I said, I watched it over and over in the olden days, but I didn’t remember much but for some of the scenes. The rewatching filled in many of the blanks for me, the biggest of which was why the doings of one man in Florida could impact a nationwide covert infiltration. The film does account for it with a sort of honeypot strategy in the climax. So the film held up in the plot better than I remembered.

Also, it should be noted, this is a Chuck Norris movie. If you don’t already own it, you must click one of the convenient links in this post and purchase it.

Books mentioned in this review:

As we entered the Christmas season, the “one-for-someone-else, one-for-me” buying protocol took effect. I was startled at how much streaming media and Blu-Ray have driven down the price of new mere DVDs. Under ten dollars for most, and like five bucks for many. Suddenly, I had Amazon-Primed myself a collection of remembered films to watch. And I did this last week, one at a time.

	Monday. The Last Starfighter Hey, you already can guess what I think about this.
	Tuesday. Krull I had never seen this film before, but it was a recommended purchase for The Last Starfighter, and I’d seen the pinball game at the National in Fenton, Missouri, in the era in question, and who could forget the Glaive? It was the Chinese star (a staple of 80s films) smart bomb. Well, it’s got a science fiction vibe, as the invaders have bladed weapons that shoot lasers out of the butts and whenever the good guys strike with their bladed weapons, red electricity tingles. But. I thought the film might be trying to capture some of the surreality of Legend, but Krull precedes it. I dunno. There’s a poorly seen Beast ruling the aliens who come down to defile the planet Krull and a damsel captured by it who wanders its surreal castle. Strange that Legend got this right, but this film did not. At any rate, the film has a lot of similar tropes from 80s films that just sort of miss. It also features an early appearance by Liam Neeson and a scene where the protagonists who have to capture some firemounts, horses that can travel 1000 leagues in a day, and they do so by driving them into a canyon–much like in the Western book I’m currently reading. So I appreciated that. If I had watched this film over and over in the 1980s on Showtime, I would have a greater affection for it, I think; however, even in this late date in the next century, I’m happy to know I have watched it. But it won’t be in regular, semi-decadical rotation.
	Wednesday. Conan the Barbarian On a recent time-killing trip to Barnes and Noble, I saw a volume of the Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, so I took a look at the films on Amazon, and I saw they proffered as a recommendation Red Sonja, so I told my wife she was lucky I didn’t order the films. She said something along the lines of that it would be okay, I hope, because I did. Which explains the latter bit of my week. I’d never seen Conan the Barbarian except for bits, and I’ve quoted parts of it, so I watched it (finally) to restore my credibility. And, wow. Where Krull had a story, it lacked the framework of epic. Conan the Barbarian has that, from the frame story to the score to the scenes of riding horses. Oh, yeah, it has James Earl Jones as the bad guy, and a lot of bastard swords being swung. I understand the remake is just gore poured into a template. I have to wonder if, as our culture becomes less literate in the sense of books and only whatever in the terms of films (a la Quentin Tarantino) we lose a depth that makes the splatter relevant.
	Thursday. Conan the Destroyer This film picks another Conan adventure, wherein he goes out to… Erm…. Excuse me, I’ve written this after the whole week, so it’s a bit swirled. Conan is promised by a queen that she’ll resurrect his love, Valeria, if he accompanies a virgin on a quest to get a mystical horn. Conan agrees and gathers his band together, and they retrieve the horn which the queen then uses to reanimate an evil god. It’s a pretty good piece of epic filmmaking.
	Friday. Red Sonja This film features Brigitte Nielsen as Red Sonja, a woman whose family are killed by an evil warrior queen. A priestess sister tasks Sonja with finding and destroying a talisman that might be powerful enough to destroy the world. The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the guy behind the Conan films, so it stars a number of the same people (Schwarzeneggar and Sandahl Bergman) and hits a lot of the same themes. Still, I liked it a lot, although it gets a lot of negative reviews on the Internet. Perhaps it’s because this was one of the films I watched over and over on Showtime. The film also features Ernie Reyes, Jr., the karate kid from the Gil Gerard television program Sidekicks. It seems like I’ve seen a number of things with him in it, but maybe I just saw commercials for Sidekicks and this film over and over to make him seem more ubiquitous in the 1980s than he really was. Also, he’s older than I am. That didn’t seem the way back in the day, but Ralph Macchio is 50, so I guess the time warp of older actors playing younger characters explains it.

So that’s how I spent my week: immersed in old timey films, and enjoying them for the most part. I’ve promised my wife this won’t become a regular occurrence, though: she loses me enough to football on Sundays.

I’m going to shock and offend a full 60% of the Internet, but I’ll say it loudly: The Last Starfighter is better than Star Wars.

 

In the interest of full disclosure, The Last Starfighter might have some additional resonance for me, since I was a precocious teenager living in a trailer park with a little brother with an extensive Playboy collection when I first saw it on videocassette. So now you know where I’m coming from.

Both stories follow a similar arc: a boy is called from a backwater to go into space, show off his skill at martial arts, and then save the worlds from an evil menace. However, the main character in The Last Starfighter comes from the common man and works with a highly democratic society on Rylos, whereas in Star Wars, the main characters (Luke and Leia) come from high birth and one even bears the title “Princess.”

Let’s just stack up the characters:

The Hero	Alex Rogan is a kid from the trailer park who loves his mother, dreams of going to far away places (the university, mainly). Rogan has useful skills as a handyman and electrician–too much so as he has to forego partying with his friends because someone needs a 30-year-old fuse box patched.	Luke Skywalker is special from birth because he’s the product of a lineage with lots of mito-pseudoscience-deusexmachinians in his blood. Sure, he’s a decent droid cleaner, but he’s a whiny little snit who would rather run off with his friends than tend to his duties.
The Love Interest	Mags, played by Mary Catherine Stewart. Her affection for Alex is constant, and she’s ready to leave the trailer park for the stars with him at the end. Also, she’s cuter than Carrie Fisher and has aged better.	Princess Leia, portrayed by Carrie Fisher, is a high maintenance princess who is an action hero, but vacillates among the available men.
The Mentor	Centauri, a universe-wise wily operator who invents a game, merchandises it, gets it into the stores before Christmas, and is unafraid to recruit Starfighters from planets not officially in the Star League. He’s doing it for the greater good, but it never hurts to be rich, my boy. Capitalism working for the betterment of all.	Obi Wan Kenobi, a Jedi whose last project turned out pretty poorly after his Padawan slaughtered and scattered the Jedi, including the younglings. Instead of working for his own profit, he serves some hokey, nebulous religious order and spouts off recursive and reflective “wisdom” like the Sphynx from Mystery Men (the latter is supposed to spoof Obi Wan, but come on, in retrospect it’s pretty straight up homage, ainna?)
The Alien Sidekick	Grigg, the lizard. He’s a good navigator, he can bypass electrical circuits to use power from the life support systems to start the engines in the nick of time, and he’s got a sense of humor. Oh, yeah, and everyone can understand him.	Chewbacca. He’s a good navigator, he can make ship repairs, but only Han Solo can understand him. He’s big and can handle a bowcaster, so those are positives. But he was in The Star Wars Christmas Special.

Now, then, what do we have? A democratic society with capitalist principles leading to personal growth, public gain, and whatnot versus a theocracy or at the very least some sort of aristocracy posited as the highest goal–although the Empire is somehow worse than a system relying on the Jedi to maintain order.

Also, in the 25th anniversary edition, they cleaned up and crisped up some special effects in The Last Starfighter, but left the movie intact. I don’t think Star Wars has gone a whole decade without George Lucas doing something to it to tamper with it, to throw in a Wall of Sight aesthetic into it, and to extract money from the dwindling number of die hard fans.

So the new DVD for Atlas Shrugged came out last night, so instead of watching the St. Louis Blues resoundingly defeat the Chicago Wolves (at least, I think they must have looked like a minor league team), I watched it. I was a little sad I missed it in the theaters, you know.

Some were disappointed, but I was not; I realize that the entirety of the book could not fit easily into a film, no matter how many parts they split it into. Galt’s speech alone runs three hours by itself. So if you’re that keen on absolute textual integrity, as so many OBJECTIVISTS probably are, yeah, you’re disappointed. Also, the characters won’t look exactly like you imagined them. Worse, they won’t look exactly like Ayn Rand (PBUH) incarnated them.

But the themes are there. The main plot points, as I recall them (it’s been almost ten years since I read it, prolly). The plot moves along and the dialog is more punchy than what Ayn herself wrote. So if you’re an objectivist apostate, like me, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you’re not already an Ayn Rand fan, perhaps you’ll find something of a story where increased government intrusion into private industry results in disaster that leads to increased government intrusion into private industry (rinse, blather, repeat).

But because those are the main themes and the businesspeople are unapologetically the good guys, I wonder if this sort of story can resonate with audiences. The theatrical return were disappointing, if I recall. Maybe the DVD and online sales will prove lucrative. I expect so. It looks like Part II is a go. Good.

But here are a couple nitpicks I had:

• In one of the radio/television cuts in the “How Bad Things Are” montage, they mention gas is over $37.50 a gallon. And then Dagny Taggert, protagonist, and Hank Rearden, industrialist and hence protagonist, drive from Colorado to Wisconsin and back. Maybe that’s to show how rich they are, but the economics of it don’t add up.
• When Dagny and Rearden consummate their relationship, it’s a tender, PG-13 love scene. Come on, a tender love scene in an Ayn Rand novel means they use open hands. Admit it, when you read Ayn Rand depicting the mating ritual of homo sapiens, you imagine it something like this:

Still, a worthy way to spend an hour and a half. Makes me want to cue up my videocassette of The Fountainhead which trumps Atlas Shrugged because, well let me put it syllogistically:

1. Gary Cooper
2. Patricia Neal
3. QED

So I was reading this story about how film colors are going ka-bluey in modern films compared to Technicolor films, and the image at the top made me pause:

All right, the top image is Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, so it’s To Catch A Thief. But the bottom one…. That’s Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. What is that?

Turns out, it’s a 1966 film called Arabesque. The trailer:

One: The film deals with an Arab prime minister, but Sophia Loren’s character works Persian magic? How much more sophisticated those of us who are paying attention are fifty years later to know that Arabs and Persians are different, as the world might find out if the Israelis don’t “fix” the Persian nuclear problem and the Arabs rankle under that. Not all Mohammedans are the same.

Two, does anyone else think that the villain looks like Bono?

Bono	The Villain
Or vice versa, I can’t tell.

The story: Peck is an American professor of antiquities in London contacted by an evil Arab businessman, Bono, who wants him to decipher an inscription. Loren plays a beautiful woman who is caught between the businessman, a violent resistance movement in her native land, and the prime minister who is in danger. Peck endures a number of double crosses and overlapping lies until he discovers the truth which is….

Well, let’s not overthink the MacGuffin here. A day later, I realize it makes no sense. But the story is a 60s-paced suspense thriller. The cinematographers play with perceptions a little using mirrors, fish tanks, and special effects to emulate the experience of being drugged. So they had fun with it.

The film is also punctuated quite appropriately with lights falling on Sophia Loren’s eyes and face quite a bit. Also, between the foot massages (pronounced with the original French emphasis) and shoe gifts/shoe trying on sessions, I suspect this film might be the source of 37.98% of all foot fetishes in Baby Boomers.

It’s a good film of the genre, and I watched it in spite of Peck, whom I don’t rather like as a presence (based mostly on his work in The Keys of the Kingdom, Gentleman’s Agreement, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). I’ve always found his topic matter a bit too audience-enlightening, but this turn isn’t so message-oriented. Also, during the course of the film, I had a personal revelation: I tend to like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper more than Peck and want to emulate them, but maybe Peck rankles me because I’m more like him than them. Woe is me.

(Previous appreciation of Ms. Loren here, and by “here,” I mean “there, in July 2004.”)

As you can probably guess, I have two sets of shelving for my videocassettes and DVDs. Not based on format, but based on whether I’ve actually watched the videocassette or DVD. Not based on whether I’ve watched the film, mind you; based on whether I’d watched that particular copy of the film since I bought it for a quarter at a garage sale or book fair. Sometimes, too, I put a movie back on the to-watch shelves when I want to watch it again sometime soon, and sometimes that sometime soon stretches into years.

But when the aforementioned beautiful wife travels for business, I relive some of my bachelor nights and pseudobachelor-but-before-children nights where I watch a couple of films to pass an evening. This week, I had the chance to do so and watched and rewatched a couple of videocassettes. Frankly, I like videocassettes because they present the film from start to finish, often with coming attractions that take you back in time (see also this recent post, wherein by “recent” I mean “almost two-year-old”). Also, if a videocassette fails, it fails spectacularly, whereas my recent viewing of Charles Bronson’s The Mechanic on DVD ‘failed’ by skipping 20 minutes of content, and given the pacing of the movie, we weren’t really sure whether it was just a 70s stylish jump cut.

But I digress.

This week, I watched:

	The Eiger Sanction starring Clint Eastwood, which is why I own it. It sounds like a Ludlum title, and it has some elements of the basic thriller, wherein an assassin is called out of retirement to ‘sanction’ assassins who ‘sanctioned’ one of our agents, and although he can get one guy with intelligence provided by the albino, former Nazi head of the agency employing Eastwood, who is a professor teaching art history and collecting smuggled art work with his fees. Very similar to the Chuck Norris character in Good Guys Wear Black and, for that matter, the original Jason Bourne.   The film then takes a big detour into mountain climbing training, as intelligence indicates only that the other assassin will be part of a team attempting to climb the Eiger’s north face in the Alps. So Clint Eastwood’s character teams up with an old covert agent buddy who’s the ‘ground’ man for the team and tries to climb the mountain with the team, uncover the assassin’s identity through intrigue, and carry out his assignment.   Definitely a product of its time and of Eastwood’s emerging film direction/production ego. It’s said he wanted to make this film because he wanted to climb mountains and whatnot. What, Where Eagles Dare was not enough seven years earlier? I guess not.   At any rate, it’s not a great bit of work, as you can tell by the fact that 40 years later, only die hard Eastwood fans watch it.
	Just Visiting starring Christina Applegate and Jean Reno. Friends, you can claim to be a Jean Reno fan, but unless you’ve seen this film more than once, you’re a piker. Sure, Ronin and The Professional are okay, but are they essentially a French comedy brought to the States and Americanned up by John Hughes? No, they are not.   It’s a funny enough bit about a medieval nobleman and his squire brought to modern (pre-September 11) New York when they seek to go back in time slightly to right a dastardly bit of courtly intrigue. Hey, I laughed at it a couple times. And this, after I saw it in the theater in 2001.
	Frankly, it’s only the proven depth of my Jean Reno and Clint Eastwood fandom that allows me to admit that I watched The Cutting Edge. Again. What can I say? I’m a fan of montages, and this film has them in spades. Figure skating montages, though.   If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a hockey player who’s hit by the West Germans in the Olympics and loses some sight and can’t play hockey again. It’s also the story of a figure skating princess whose father’s dream has been an Olympic gold metal since she was young, but she sabotages her performance on ice and her relationships with her skating partners. It’s his last chance and her last chance.   Hey, I can relate to a story of a hardscrabble guy from up north falling for a girl above his class. Also, this film taught me everything I know about skating: when I’m at the rink’s skate rental counter, remember to ask for hockey skates so I don’t trip over the toe pick. I discovered while researching this post that there were three sequels 26 years after the original came out: The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold (2006), The Cutting Edge: Chasing the Dream (2008), and The Cutting Edge: Fire and Ice (2010). I have no words to express how I feel in light of this new knowledge.
	Geri’s Game is a Pixar short, an early bit of computer animation that won the Oscar for short films in 1987. How short is it? It took me longer to rewind the wonky videocassette than it took to watch the whole thing. In it, an old man plays chess in a park against himself.   Not to be confused with Gerald’s Game.

So I’ve moved 4 videocassettes out of my cabinet of unwatched films to the wall of watched films. This will probably hold me until my wife’s next trip. But I did take a moment to rearrange the dozens of movies, documentaries, and television shows to bring things I wanted to watch this week closer to the front. Although whether that will hold true next time I get a hankering for cinema remains to be seen. If you can call the above films cinema,.

You know, in the 1982 film Poltergeist, at the very end, the whole You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? thing? That doesn’t make sense.

I mean, look at it: it’s a completed subdivision with fire hydrants, roads, and basements. There would have been a lot of construction, digging by a lot of different groups of people, from the water company to the electric company, not to mention the people putting in the houses and the swimming pools and whatnot.

You’re not going to cover up leaving the graves. Seriously, they would have plowed up a lot of people.

29 years after the film comes out, I’m suddenly bothered by this.

UPDATE: So I’ve heard that it makes perfect sense in California, where due to homes on slabs, corrupt contractors, and lack of a frost danger meaning they leave the utilities lying on the ground instead of burying them deeply, that Poltergeist is accurate.

I’ll broaden my point: That state where this 30-year-old movie was set doesn’t make sense.

They turned the game Battleship into a full length feature film, so I’m hard at work on a screenplay of my own.

Called Solitaire, it will feature one man’s struggle with the elements as he tries to reach a camp during the Yukon gold rush of the 19th century.

Also, zombies. Or something. Does it matter? Not in 21st century Hollywood.

As I said on Facebook the other night:

Brian J. Noggle snivels, slinkers, and mutters, “Our two dollarssess, we wantses it.”

You see, I thought I would be the only guy in the world who could successfully mash-up Johnny from Better Off Dead:

With Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

Yeah, I thought I could possibly be the only one who could pull that off.

But, wait, there is another:

That’s Demian Slade, who actually played Johnny in Better Off Dead 26 years ago.

In a slug leading to a review of the film Battle: Los Angeles, someone talks about a film he or she has not seen:

Remember ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ‘District 9,’ Independence Day,’ and ‘Cloverfield?’ The war against aliens went better in those movies.

The Somali are from another planet? Really?

The review itself, written by someone who has presumably seen Black Hawk Down, does not make the mistake the slug does.

Actors from the film Predator (Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzeneggar) go onto become governors; Actors from the film Predator 2 (Gary Busey, Danny Glover) go on to make Turkish anti-American films (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Five Minarets in New York).

Actually, since Predator 2 also starred Robert Davi and Adam Baldwin, it cannot have been something on the catering truck.

I shudder because Busey and Glover also starred in the holiday classic Lethal Weapon. I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy it unequivocally again.

My wife and I attended the cinema this week, and we saw the action film Red.

Because it’s almost the same thing, really, someone with the theater chain or studios determined it would be a good idea to run the trailer for the Valerie Plame fiction (inspired by true events, where the “events” are emotional outbursts of the left).

I booed it, of course.

Here is Kyle Smith’s review, which is also a boo of sorts.

Anyone want to guess the Box Office on this one? I go with $7 million total. Unexpectedly, the American people won’t understand the message and genius of the film that’s for their own good.

(Link seen on Big Hollywood.)

So I watched To Kill A Mockingbird last night for the first time, and when we got to the courthouse scene, the defense’s closing argument delivered by Gregory Peck:

I couldn’t help but think that the speech would have been far cooler if it had been written by Ayn Rand and/or delivered by Gary Cooper:

Of course, I’m enough of a fanboy of Objectivism to think that speech was cool and prefer Gary Cooper over Gregory Peck. It was the best performance of Peck I’ve seen so far, but that just meant that it was a performance where I didn’t think the main character was a complete wuss.

Author Andrew Klavan has a thoughtful piece on Mel Gibson’s potty mouth that reflects on the nature of arts, artists, and wisdom. Also, he quotes Socrates.

Klavan does. Not Gibson. Although it’s interesting in imagining Gibson quoting Socrates: “You enclothe yourself like a perfumed porcine, and if you’re despoiled by a group of Sophists, your intellect will not have prevented such an ordeal.”

As you remember, gentle reader, I read the book in 2005. When I discovered that the Demi Moore film was based upon the book, I bought it and had to watch it.

As I did, I had the following thoughts:

• Maybe Ashton Kutcher isn’t as dumb as I thought.
• I must buy some Annie Lennox albums. I wonder how much she spent for product placement here.
• Robert Patrick could not have made this film and then go on to play a Terminator. Good thing he did the opposite.
• It’s hard to capture a Carl Hiaasen book and its characters and plot in a two hour movie. The filmmakers decided to abandon most of it to fit in more Demi Moore strip routines. A good second choice.