Category: Movies

As I thought Grosse Pointe Blank was a very 1990s movie–or at least one that captured if not the feeling of being in your twenties in the 90s, at least an archetypcial representation of the same, this film captures a 1980s New York upper class zeitgeist–if not a representation of the actual experience, at least a representation of how this particular situation was presented in the 1980s. Followed in the 1990s by Sex in the City and other stylized representation of glamorous life in the big city packaged for those who are not there.

Tom Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a bond trader, son of a bond trader, who is on top of the world. He’s making millions, he’s married to a socialite played by Kim Cattrall…. But it’s not enough, or something. His wife is more into being a socialite than in being a wife. So he has taken up with a married woman played by Melanie Griffith. He picks her up from the airport and is taking her to their love nest when they miss their exit to Manhattan and end up in the South Bronx. When Sherman leaves the car to move a tire in their way, a couple of black kids approach, probably with bad intent. Maria (Melanie) slides into the driver’s seat, and in the process of their getaway, hits one of the youths. Sherman wants to go to the police, but Maria talks him out of it.

When police don’t seem to be doing much to seek justice for the incident, an Al Sharpton-style self-aggrandizing preacher grabs onto the incident, as does a Jewish district attorney who is running for mayor–and a new assistant D.A. wants to make his mark (and maybe Maria). Bruce Willis plays Peter Fallow, a talented but often drunk journalist who gets hold of the story and helps to drum up the pursuit of the driver (but his paper just wanted the press of the injustice of it all, as the preacher and the struck boy’s mother just wanted a lawsuit payday). When they catch Sherman and look to hang it on him, Fallow looks deeper into it, and even though Sherman’s life falls apart, he is exonerated.

The film cuts between the different players and their individual storylines in the overarching story pretty well–I was kept interested through the film. I know it comes from a thick Tom Wolfe novel (which I have here somewhere), and I could see where the characters might have been better developed in a novel. I was kind of looking forward to trying the novel or another Tom Wolfe novel (I have several, of course), but my beautiful wife said she started the book but put it down. And, you know, I could see how none of the characters would be likeable. A film can move this along–and this one does–but if a writer feels contempt for his characters and doesn’t give the readers anyone to like…. Well, I don’t know that I’m going to go looking for the book, anyway.

But as a film, it’s not bad. It bombed at the box office, though, so perhaps it fell into a crevice between the 80s zeitgeist and the upcoming 90s zeitgeist. Or maybe I just am on a kick of using the word “Zeitgeist.”

You might be expecting a Kim Cattrall vs. Melanie Griffith battle tucked under the fold here, but to be honest, I am kind of a Kim Cattrall partisan even though I’ve learned her biography is a bit, erm, varied.

Instead, I’m thinking if, overall, I’m more of a Tom Hanks character or a Bruce Willis character guy. Even aside from the types of films they’re in (comedy then drama, comedy then action), I think I’m more of a Bruce Willis character guy. His characters have a working man vibe to them that Tom Hanks’ characters do not.

I guess it cannot be said that I’m on a John Cusack kick since the last film I watched of his was High Fidelity three months ago. Or maybe two movies in three months is a kick. Regardless, we mentioned Grosse Pointe, or something, at Nogglestead which prompted me to watch this film last weekend. Not this last weekend. The weekend before. Maybe a lost weekend, or maybe that’s all the weekends in the past.

Regardless, my oldest had a friend over for the night, and when they came downstairs at one point, my oldest said, “Is that Elvis?”

“No, get out of here,” I tenderly responded. Although maybe in his defense Cusack had a curl in the middle of his forehead in the scene, and also in his defense the variety of the qualities of transfers his father watches might have made Technicolor look like modern DVDs (or more likely, modernish movies on VHS looked worse than Technicolor).

At any rate, in this film, Cusack plays a hitman who might be losing his edge who is working with a therapist who feels threatened into keeping Cusack’s Martin Blank who has revealed that he knows where the doctor lives after he, Blank, has shared his profession. He’s trying to work something out, find some meaning to his life, and so he decides to return to his home town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, for his 10th class reunion since he has a job in the area. Meanwhile, Dan Ackroyd is another hitman trying to put together a guild–and when Blank won’t join, he launches a plot to eliminate him. While in Grosse Pointe, Blank reconnects with an old flame played by Minnie Driver and an old friend, now a real estate agent, played by Jeremy Piven. As Blank tries to work things out, a variety of unsavory types including a hit man whom Blank humiliated show up seeking revenge, justice, or whatnot.

So it’s a bit of a black comedy/actionish film targeted right at the heart of Generation X as they were getting old in their mid-to-late twenties. Blank’s home has been replaced by a convenience store. His father died and his mother is in an asylum. He has been away for ten years when he’s been in the military, the CIA, and then a contract killer. So detached from home. I understand as I never really had anything I considered a home and not much of a family. So, yeah, when I first saw it when I was almost ten year reunion age, it rang bells. It still does, but more of a that’s what it felt like to be almost thirty twenty-five years ago thing.

Remember, gentle reader, I watched High Fidelity earlier this year. As Cusack is but a couple years older than I am, I’ve found his films from the middle 1990s to the early 2000s to track better with my personal zeitgeist (a concept for which the Germans have an adequate word without having to make a compound phrase out of an English and a German word) than things like Reality Bites or, certainly, the Brat Pack movies of the 1980s.

So it was good for a rewatch, but I’m not sure how younger audiences would like it as they did not live through that time, and I’m note sure how timeless the themes really and their presentation really are.

Also, this was the second film short succession that I saw which had Alan Arkin in it shortly after his passing (Glengarry Glen Ross being the other).

Enough about Alan Arkin. More about Minnie Driver, the local radio personality love interest.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)” →

Ah, gentle reader, it was but four years ago when I discovered the Bob Hope two-pack that included The Road to Bali was mislabeled at the factory and instead contained ten episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. As it and The Road to Rio fell out of copyright protection, so they’re pretty easily available in transfers of sometimes dubious quality from “nostalgia” houses which specialize in copyright-free fare. Somewhere along the line, I picked up this two DVD set. I watched The Road to Bali with my boys some time ago (back when they would watch movies with their old man–now the oldest prefers to watch Netflix alone in his room and the younger prefers an endless river of YouTube videos on a handheld device).

They’re part of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour series of “The Road to….” movies which are not really a series, per se, as they play different characters in each but all have a certain type: Hope and Crosby are vaudevillians/con men/performers on the run from (usually) woman trouble who end up going to an exotic location and encountering and trying to woo the Lamour character. They’re also very self-conscious and meta-movies, where they spoof film conventions and sometimes break down the fourth wall.

The Road to Bali from 1952 finds the two performers in Australia from which they must flee to avoid a couple of shotgun weddings. They go to Darwin where they sign up as deep sea divers on an expedition looking for lost treasure. Their employer is a prince whose sister, the princess (Lamour), the boys try to woo. They find treasure and try to escape and then end up shipwrecked on another island where the natives take them in, and instead of having to choose, the princess learns she can marry multiple husbands–so she wants to marry them both. But she ends up married to the chief, and Hope and Crosby end up married to each other. A volcanic eruption seems to indicate displeasure with this turn of events, and as often happens, Crosby ends up with Lamour. This film is the only one of the series in technicolor–and represents the penultimate entry in the series, which is a weird place to start, but they’re all stand alone films.

The Road to Rio finds the boys down on their luck when they sign up at a circus. After doing their vaudeville number, Crosby tells Hope he also has to perform a high wire act–which goes awry and burns down the circus. On the run from the circus owner, the boys stow away on a ship bound for Rio. There, they encounter an heiress (Lamour) scheduled to marry her “aunt”/caretaker’s cousin unseen. The caretaker is controlling the heiress and facilitating the marriage using hypnosis. They expose Hope and Crosby as stowaways, hijinks ensue, and when they reach Rio, the boys have to break the caretaker’s hold on the girl and get the “Papers,” a MacGuffin they later expose as nothing but a MacGuffin (remember the meta nature of the films).

I suppose if you’re of a certain age and probably a bit of an old soul even then to really appreciate the films, but then again, I am both, so I’d be happy to discover more in this series out in the wild, but given how 1995 or 1996 is the Year Zero of modern culture, I won’t hold my breath.

I got this DVD for a buck in Arkansas last month, and it was the first film I watched when I got back.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I reported on the printed play in 2007 (or as I like to say, a couple months ago–my goodness, that would be right after I left my job as the Director of Quality for the interactive marketing agency and was getting ready for what would be a couple of years of part-time contracts as I took care of my child and then children). I said then that I wondered how the play would get stretched into a 100 minute movie. And the answer, apparently, is not well.

The plot: Four men (played by Alan Arkin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and Jack Lemmon) work selling dubious real estate lots in Arizona and Florida. Their manager (played by Kevin Spacey) parcels out two leads to each every day, leads that come from people who filled out cards, perhaps in the supermarket to enter a contest (as was the fashion at the time). Each will apparently do or say anything to get someone to buy a lot. One day, they arrive at work in the afternoon or evening to find Alec Baldwin–well, the downtown sales manager guy–come to give them the famous speech (“Coffee is for closers.”) and to tell them they’re all fired except for the man who sells the most that month (current leader: the guy played by Pacino). Baldwin then taunts them with a set of premium leads for the Glengarry Glen Ross project, but gives them to the sales manager (Spacey) who locks them in his office.

One of the men (Harris) tries to get another of the salesmen (Arkin) to help him break into the office to steal those leads, and the majority of the film is Harris trying to convince Arkin, Lemmon working the leads he’s given, and Pacino taking the long way to sell to the guy who played Seamus in Ronin (what was in the case? I don’t remember.).

That’s it. The movie has a handful of sets: The office, the Chinese restaurant across the street, the street, a phone booth, a car interior, and a sales prospect’s house. So it’s kind of a throwback of a film like one you get from the 30s or 40s where it’s clearly directly translated from the play.

A bit of an anachronism, although perhaps just a touch when it came out, as the land sales thing was not as big in the 1990s as it was in decades past. I did, however, buy it when I was on vacation using “points” that we bought as part of the modern timeshare that we’ve had for, what, almost a decade? It’s been worth it to us, but your mileage may vary. It was not lost on me, though, that I bought this DVD while on a vacation made possible by a sales pitch much like the ones depicted in the film. Many years later, I still have most of the balance on one of the gift cards given as a lure. Because it’s for Bass Pro Shops, and I am not muvh of an outdoorsman. The only thing I’ve used it for was a camouflage hat for my father’s grave.

At Rob K.’s recommendation, I watched this film. I am easily led, you see, so be careful with your comments, gentle reader, as they may spur me to action.

So, the plot: In an alternative reality, in 1939, an intrepid woman reporter, Polly (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) investigates the disappearance of several scientists. As she’s doing so, a number of giant robots attack the city to extract resources. The authorities call upon Sky Captain, played by Jude Law, who is the leader of a band of mercenary pilots. Sky Captain manages to save Polly and disable one of the robots, which he takes to his base in the mountains for his science-and-engineering genius, played by Giovanni Ribisi, to study. Sky Captain and Polly follow the trail of the missing scientists to a base in the Himalayas and then to an island lair where Dr. Totenkopf’s minions have been building a rocket to take select animals and people and robots to another planet to begin anew as man on earth is bad. Unfortunately, the rocket’s acceleration at about 100km above the earth’s surface will kill all life on the planet.

As mentioned in the previous post, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow features a lot of CGI animation–the film was one of the first to feature a completely green-screen backlot, where scenery behind the actors is completely penciled pixeled in. As Rob said, it has aged well, but that’s because the animation was supposed to look a bit like a comic book and not as real as they could make at the time. So it’s not a jarring anachronism.

An interesting film, an especial treat if you’re familiar with the comic books of the 1930s (such as Doc Savage) with their tropes.

Angelina Jolie appears in the film wearing an eyepatch which in the comic books of the 1930s would not disqualify one from being a pilot. Bai Ling also appears in this movie–it is the first film I’ve seen her in since posting her picture in 2017. I thought it might be the first film I’d seen with her, but I’ve seen The Crow and Red Corner, so this is not the case. I just didn’t know then to associate the name with the actress at the time.

I don’t know where I bought this collection, but it looks to be fifteen films from the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s. And, to be honest, they’re not the best of them–one bets you could sell Shaft, Across 110th Street, Foxy Brown, Superfly, and a handful of other films singly–heck, I bought Get Christie Love! on a dollar DVD close to twenty years ago. But, you know, as I got into them, I discovered that they’re not so much Blaxploitation films as films with black casts.

As I’m going to drop a couple lines on each of them, I will tuck them below the fold.

Continue reading “Movie Reports: Urban Action Cinema collection” →

This is the Adam Sandler remake of the Burt Reynolds film from 1974. Sandler plays a former professional quarterback, in disrepute due to allegations of point-shaving, who breaks up with his girlfriend by stealing her car and leading the police on a chase. Sentenced to prison for his transgressions, the warden encourages–nay, encourages in italics which means demands that Crewe (Sandler) lead a prisoner team against the guards’ amateur league team.

Well, that tracks with the original (which I have not seen). The bulk of the film deals with Crewe gathering up a team out of the prisoners, including having to earn the respect of the other racial groups, and then playing the big football game.

It was an amusing film, not the top of Sandler’s work, obviously. It includes Chris Rock, Nelly, and Burt Reynolds as a long-time inmate who agrees to coach. And, of course, we’ve got Rob Schneider saying, “You can do it!” Which is what Sandleristas like to see.

Amusing, not world-shattering or world-changing, but maybe world-encouraging.

The cover indicates many markdowns in price: Presumably full-ish price somewhere, $7.99 at Vintage Stock, marked down at Vintage Stock to $3.99, and a buck at an antique mall. Which says something about how people have felt about keeping it in their film libraries. Rest assured, little DVD, that you have a forever home. At least until my estate sale. Which is not this year, I hope.

I picked this film up earlier this month after having watched Knocked Up late last month to see what I thought about other Jud Apatow movies.

This film stars Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as high school friends (well, mostly Cera and Hill’s characters are–they keep the geeky other guy around because he has a fake ID and can score alcohol). They’re coming to the end of their senior year in high school and will have to go to different colleges–the first time they’ll have been separated since they were really young. They get invited to a party thrown by their attractive classmate (Emma Stone), so they plot to get alcohol, lower their inhibitions, and have sex with their crushes. Their plan goes awry when Fogell, the one with the fake ID, witnesses a liquor store robbery and is befriended by two fun-loving cops played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen. Meanwhile, the other pair infiltrates a biker party to make off with some booze. Hijinks ensue, they make it to the party….

And although they could, they do not have drunken sex with their crushes.

So the film does have a bit of a mature, maybe even conservative cast as the kids learn that alcohol and sex are not really the ultimate ends of life. Which is nice.

However, the film is a little more crass and overt with a lot of the swearing and drinking that differentiate it from the youth party-centric movies of my youth (such as Weird Science which I saw over and over back in the day as it was on Showtime). And I got to thinking about how much of the youth party culture is fictional. I mean, I did not go to a lot of parties in high school (and only a handful in college). My boys haven’t seen it so far. I don’t think my wife was into it. But I do recollect that my West County girlfriend of the middle 1990s talked about her experience in high school, how on a Saturday night they would pile into cars and start following cars they recognized, eventually having a long train of cars because someone was going to a party, and all the rest would follow. Perhaps, then, the party-culture depicted in the films are more of an upper class thing, or perhaps I and my progeny are just oddballs who have been left out of it, probably to the better.

Oh, and shortly after watching this, I saw a headline in a British tab “‘I drew todgers as young Jonah Hill on Superbad – it earned me a fortune’. An interesting story about how small roles can lead to income years down the line. But hardly a fortune.

Gentle reader, over Memorial Day weekend (that long ago, sadly–I am far behind on my movie reports and not so much my book reports), I watched this single videocassette with three Cary Grant films which I bought in April. I’d had memories of the three-VHS set that I bought in 2008–and when I tried to watch it shortly thereafter, I encountered a problem with one of the videocassettes not tracking well at all, so I left it in my unwatched video cabinet for the last fifteen years.

So I was a little surprised that I had already seen the two first two movies. I bought Charade on a separate videocassette and watched it in 2015 (almost closer to 2008 than now). I’m not sure when I would have seen Penny Serenade unless either that videocassette of the 3-pack worked or I also bought and watched it independently in the interim. But I had never heard of the third film, Amazing Adventure also known as The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss.

They go in reverse chronological order: Charade is from 1963, the height of Grant’s older charmer era. The Penny Serenade comes from 1941, and Amazing Adventure is a British film from 1936 in a trimmed American release in 1937.

Charade finds an ex-pat American (Audrey Hepburn) planning to divorce her husband. But returning from holiday, she finds her Paris apartment bare and her husband has been murdered leaving the country. A helpful American, played by Cary Grant, lends support. Several old squad mates (including James Coburn and George Kennedy) of her husband’s show up looking for stolen war loot that they presume she has. A helpful American agent, played by Walter Matthau, tells her to look for the money and turn it over to him. And she learns that Mister Joshua (Grant’s character, not Gary Busey’s) is working with the squad mates. Maybe.

It has twists and turns, set pieces and a lot of early 60s Paris, including some scenes on the Seine filmed in the same locations as scenes from Frantic two decades later. And a happy ending between the older Grant and the younger Hepburn–whose age difference is a bit of a running joke through the film, as Grant is 59 and Hepburn is 33 in the film. To be honest, although she was the original manic pixie girlfriend archetype (well, original to those of us of a certain age who did not get into silent films until later), Hepburn really doesn’t do that much for me.

I have the soundtrack by Henry Mancini on LP, and although I have seen the film once before as I mentioned, I am more familiar with the music as I play the record more often than I’ve watched the movie.

Penny Serenade tells the story of a couple, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who marry when Grant’s journalist gets posted to Japan. They enjoy life in pre-World War II Japan (the film came out in April 1941, months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor), living a bit beyond their means, when the wife becomes pregnant. During the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, though, she loses the baby and through cinemagic cannot have another. When they return to the states, he buys a newspaper in California and with the help of Applejack, a friend from New York, they try to make a go of it. The core of the movie is their adoption of a little infant girl with the comic movements of their first time with a baby, challenges in bathing the baby, and so on. Applejack comes from a large family, and in addition to being able to diagnose and correct printing presses with a whack, he can show them how to handle a baby. As she grows, they enjoy moments with her, including her participation in a Christmas program.

The story is told in flashback as the wife spins various records triggering these memories–it turns out that after the Christmas program sometime, the child took sick and died suddenly–this is revealed in a handwritten letter to the woman at the adoption organization, and important points should not be rendered in handwriting, Hollywood, as when viewed eighty years later a cheap, copyright-free transfer to a videocassette watched 35 years later, viewers will not be able to read the letter blurring upward on the screen. At any rate, the wife is leaving the husband who has become depressed and detached, but as Applejack readies to take her to the station, the woman at the adoption agency calls with another child for adoption, and the couple reconciles as the credits roll.

The ending of it was rather tacked-on, but I guess that was the whole reason for the frame story and perhaps the promotion of the records featured. But it ultimately was unsatisfying. Grant got one of his Academy Award nominations for the role, but I am not so sold on it.

Amazing Adventure finds Cary Grant playing a well-to-do bachelor who is challenged to live life as a commoner for a year without touching his money. He meets a young commoner, played by Mary Brian, and falls in love, holds a number of jobs, and learns some life lessons. It was not a particularly compelling film, but I’ve seen it now.

Now that I am getting into the older Cary Grant stage of my life, I should perhaps re-channel my inner Cary Grant. I have been dressing in jeans and t-shirts a pile lately (but collared shirts when leaving the house) because I’ve not been going many places these days. Perhaps I should spring for a couple more dress slacks and get back to dressing dapper even in my own home. Because that’s how men, at least men in the cinema in the first half of the last century, did it.

I bought this film at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April, but the real trigger to watching it comes from having later bought Lanie Kazan’s record. And she plays Nia Vardalos’s mother in the film–third billed after Nia Vardalos and John Corbett, that guy from Northern Exposure who was briefly the It-Guy for (over-)educated hunks at the turn of the century, so of course I picked it up right away. Not because of John Corbett, although I would have felt more like him seven or eight years earlier when I was the over-educated one with the mullet.

I did not see this film in the theatre, but I saw this film with…. Originally, I thought it might be before my beautiful wife, but the timing is not right. Unlike Get Shorty, this film clearly came out (and by clearly, I mean by checking its date) after we were together married. Apparently, she had seen it with the ladies at work (back in the day when we went to work and not to our separate home offices–oh, so long ago), and she then wanted to watch it with me. And we did.

So this was Nia Vardalos’s big shot. She wrote it, and she stars as Toula, an ugly duckling daughter of a Greek restaurant owner in Chicago who wants more than to be the dutiful daughter all her life. So she–with the help of her mother, played by Lanie Kazan as I mentioned, gets her father to allow her (Toula) to attend college to learn computers. She does and gets some work with a cousin’s travel agency. Along the way, she meets Ian (John Corbett), an English professor who is the only child of WASPy white-bread parents. They fall in love, and the cultures clash as she has a big, boisterous family compared with his mother and father as sole representatives of his family.

The humor comes from that culture clash as they prepare to wed with their (mostly hers) family’s help. She pokes fun at Greek heritage, and Ian’s parents, well, they’re stereotypes (archetypes?) of the sort who name their child Ian.

But, you know what? As a pretty white-bread whitey who grew up in the ghetto and in the trailer park instead of any side that could be called “upper,” I’m not offended because:

• I can laugh at myself and those who look like me.
• There’s no money for me in faking outrage.

At any rate, a pleasant and amusing way to spend a couple of hours.

Apparently, it proved lucrative for Nia Vardalos. She had a hit film that spawned a franchise (a couple of sequels over the decades including one that’s forthcoming) and a television show based on the movie. She’s also had a career with television appearances and small movie roles over the years, but she did not replicate the success of this film into leading role success in the cinema.

I would draw a parallel to my own creative career, gentle reader, but you’re here on this blog, and this blog is pretty much it.

I kind of remember the Pink Panther movies from my younger years. I’d like to say that I saw one of them at the drive-in with my parents. We went a couple of times when I was younger, sometimes my parents, my brother, and I, and at least once with my mother and her friend the country singer and her two boys. Enough to think we went all the time, kind of like how a handful of Christmases and holidays from my very younger years set the pattern. But going to the drive-in in the late 1970s was already trending toward an anachronism. I’ve thought about taking my boys down to Aurora for the drive-in there (and mentioned it to my beautiful wife while talking about this film, triggering Facebook ads for that very drive-in). But I am sure my boys would find the experience underwhelming. I also think that I saw parts of a Pink Panther film when we later at the home of the country singer, her husband the wedding singer, and their two boys, either on a sleepover or in the interim month between exiting the projects and decamping for Missouri at the end of the school year–I remember the bit about Inspector Clouseau’s butler attacking him. I also remember that Inspector Clouseau was a bit of a, what, trope? when I was younger. You’d say someone was a Clouseau who was stating the obvious or was making a bad deduction. And look at his attire on the cover: He was the inspiration for Inspector Gadget, ainna?

At any rate, with the title The Return of the Pink Panther, I thought it would be the sequel to the first film. But, no: This is the fourth in the original series of 11 films (with two 21st century rebooted movies starring Steve Martin instead of Peter Sellers). It came out in 1975, eleven years after the first. So I have no idea of whether I’ve seen bits of this film before–probably what was showing in the drive-in or on HBO at the time would have been later entries in the series.

So: Someone has stolen The Pink Panther, a large diamond with a flaw in it that looks like a leaping pink panther (not like the Owen Corning pitch cartoon character–the cartoon character originated in the titles for the film series) is stolen (again), and Clouseau is tasked with investigating (over the wishes of his commander, who has finally succeeded in getting Clouseau off of the force). His old nemesis The Phantom (Christopher Plummer) is suspected of the crime, but he did not do it–so he sets out also to find out who did. A number of humorous set pieces later (my oldest passed through while I was watching it and guffawed at a bit), and Clouseau is there when the culprit is revealed: the Phantom’s lover, who did it to spice up the retired Phantom’s life.

Uh, retroactive spoiler alert, but it is a 48-year-old movie that isn’t about the whodunit it but the cartoonish comic pieces, like when Clouseau enters the suspect’s hotel room and destroys it with a vacuum cleaner.

I don’t know that I have seen any of the other films or reboots in the wild, but I might pick them up in the future if they’re a buck or so (as this was when I bought it in April).

I saw this film in the theater, without Mike as I just mentioned, although in this case “just” is three years ago as befits my work-from-home-addled memory.

In it, Brendan Fraser plays an obnoxious dweeb customer tech support worker at a tech company in San Francisco who tries too hard to relate to his co-workers and earns their disdain and mockery for his efforts. On an uninvited outing to a bar where his co-workers have gathered without him, he runs into a co-worker upon whom he has a crush but who dismisses his clumsy attempts at conversation. When he says he’d do anything to be with her, the Devil, played by Elizabeth Hurley, hears him and offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul. He reluctantly accepts, and the bulk of the movie depicts the situations where he wishes to be rich, to be erudite, to be strong and athletic, and so on, and how the Devil thwarts him. He wants to be rich and married to Alison (his crush), and he ends up as a drug lord whose wife despises him (the scenes in the trailer of this piece prompted my call to Mike in el español), or a giant dumb athlete with a small, erm, you know, Johnson, and so on. Amusing and even funny at times (can I say that as a snoorky blogger, wherein I blend snooty and snarky into the portmanteau).

The film also has Gabriel Casseus as “Elliot’s Cellmate” but a stand-in for an angel or God. I’d remembered this role as played by Don Cheedle, but no. And at the time of my original viewing, I thought It’s that guy from… but looking at his IMDB entry, I can’t think of what it would have been. I saw him in Blackhawk Down and Black Dog) not an actual movie review, but a posting of when I bought the film which I watched shortly thereafter).

Theologically, the film gets a little muddy on the Devil/God thing, showing them at the end playing chess when Brendan Fraser’s character walks by with his ultimate earthly reward (a relationship with a pretty girl), and the Devil tries to cheat after pointing out the lovebirds and drawing the cellmate’s attention away. It does not mention Jesus, et cetera, but if you need to, you can kind of, sort of, recast it a bit as the book of Job, but not really. Although I’m not sure how one should recast the book of Job anyway.

But enough about theology. What of Elizabeth Hurley?
Continue reading “Movie Report: Bedazzled (2000)” →

Ah, gentle reader, this film provided a bit of mental relief for me in the real world. When I proposed watching this film, my beautiful wife said to me, “We saw that in the theater.” To which I responded that I had never seen the movie. Given that the film came out two years before we met, we did not see it in the theater. I was pleased to see that she, too, pencils me into some of her memories from that brief interlude between childhood and marriage. I myself have on several occasions said something like, “Remember when we…” only to discover she was not a part of the we I was thinking of. I thought perhaps I alone was muddy on that brief interlude between summer 1994 and early 1997, the interregnum between college and being a couple, which were very busy and whose memories I sometimes retcon my wife into.

At any rate, this film is based on an Elmore Leonard book. A small time loan shark, Chili (played by John Travolta) has a run-in with a henchman of a major Miami player (the henchman played by Dennis Farina) and humiliates the henchman but cannot be retailiated against because of his powerful boss. Chili goes looking for someone who has run out on a debt and whose $10,000 skimming has blossomed with an insurance settlement for a plane crash that the drycleaner/welsher (played by David Paymer, hello, hello–did I see Crazy People with my wife or before?). Chili goes to Vegas, braces the drycleaner, and is asked by the Las Vegas mob to collect on a debt from a horror movie producer, Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman). When Chili breaks into the house where Zimm is staying, he tells Zimm about the adventure he’s on, pitching it as a movie, and Zimm is interested–if Chili can help get the rights to a screenplay held by the writer’s widow (Bette Midler).

Oh, yes, it gets complicated. But it has a movie-within-a-movie that a medieval drama enthusiast would enjoy. It’s chock full of stars, and it has clever twists that you would expect from an Elmore Leonard book-turned-movie (see also Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, neither of which I’ve actually reported on… yet). I said to my wife after having seen the film that it’s a shame that they don’t make movies from Elmore Leonard books any more, but they’re still making them. Get Shorty had its sequel Be Cool and a television series; 3:10 to Yuma had a remake; Justified was based on a series of books by Leonard, and it’s getting a revival.

Probably a better question, with a worse answer, is why we don’t make writers like Elmore Leonard any more. Or why Hollywood would not adapt their works if we did.

I saw this film in the theatre with my beautiful wife probably on a date night–I mean, 2009 was a busy year for us, what with my sainted mother passing away, my brother returning to the St. Louis area, and our decamping Old Trees for Nogglestead. Still, a year is full of individual days that fit around the big events or the not-events of less consequential years. So we undoubtedly deployed our then-teenaged and by now nearly thirty babysitter and went to see this movie.

You know, I said about Jet Li’s Fearless:

But it’s an interesting film once you peel away the layer of Chinese propaganda film that hovers over all.

* * * *
So, well, yeah, a good story wrapped in Chinese anti-Western propoganda.

You could make a similar statement about a bunch of George Clooney films: A good story if you ignore the anti-American, anti-military, and especially anti-Iraq War message wrapped around it (see also Three Kings et al.).

A journalist, portrayed by Ewan MacGregor, loses his wife to an editor and makes his way to the Middle East to report on the war there and re-establish his manhood. He hooks up with a former (?) military man who participated in a paranormal research program who has a mission in the Iraq War, although he is not sure what it is. Through a series of flashbacks, the military operator, played by George Clooney, tells of the origins of the unit when Jeff Bridges, playing the Dude character, becomes a flower child and soaks up New Age stuff like a sponge and runs the military research unit like a commune, but it comes crashing down when a more military-minded and potentially inferior “gifted” officer, played by Kevin Spacey, fouls it up.

So it’s got some wryly amusing moments in it. It doesn’t really acknowledge the paranormal, leaving it a little ambiguous but certainly nobody here is a superhero at best.

But, yeah, a mocking tone that questions the military and its involvement in the Iraq War. While the Iraq War was still sort of going on. But more intelligent than anything that would come later with The Message.

And I have it on DVD in case I want to watch it again in another fifteen years.

Well, gentle reader, you know what you’re getting with a modern Chinese film. You’ve got some star power in Jet Li (whose other films I’ve enjoyed, including Kiss of the Dragon, Hero, The Black Mask, Lethal Weapon 4, and most recently The Expendables). Okay, an older Jet Li, kind of like you get an older Jackie Chan in similar films, but still interesting and exciting to watch. But it’s an interesting film once you peel away the layer of Chinese propaganda film that hovers over all.

Jet Li plays the adult son of a martial arts teacher whose father lost a public bout with honor and tried to instill that honor into his son, but did not. Eventually, Jet Li becomes the leader of a washu school of martial arts that his father began, and he becomes successful in drawing students. He starts to live a bit of the high life with it, but when a rival school’s leader beats one of his students, for no reason (he is told by the student), he fights that leader in his (Jet Li’s character’s) friend’s restaurant, leading to its (the restaurant’s) destruction and the loss of the friend. Worse, he kills the other school’s leader, and then he learns his student embelished the story and the whole thing was unnecessary. He ends up wandering, falls in with a family and a blind girl (played by Li Sun) and learns to love and live again. So he returns home to fight again, this time for China against the forces of the West plotting against China.

So, well, yeah, a good story wrapped in Chinese anti-Western propoganda. Although, strangely, the Japanese champion comes off humanized, or at least lives up to the Chinese ideal.

So all right. Perhaps in a couple of decades the Chinese propoganda element will be lessened or merely a historical note. And then we can look upon it as a story of redemption, and not preparing to paste it to my children who are coming into draft age.

But enough about us. About Li Sun.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)” →

After watching The Green Hornet, I picked up this film which might have been the movie that launched Seth Rogen’s career, to see if his characters always annoyed me. Which is a little less than rage-watching, but he had a big moment about a decade and a half ago, and I wanted to maybe catch a little of his career in case it ever comes up in a trivia night. After all, the things I thought were trivia–pop culture details from the 1940s-1970s–is now ancient history and the lost wisdom of the Ancestors.

So.

In the film, Rogen plays a frattish bro living with a bunch of friends who are hoping to make it rich off of an Internet site (coming sometime) that tells you when you can see boobies in the movies. Katherine Heigl plays an up-and-coming broadcast talent who finally gets her break in front of the camera. The frattish boys are out at the club because that’s what they do, and Heigl’s Alison is celebrating her promotion, and after many, many drinks, Rogen’s Ben and Alison hook up. The coitus they barely remember results in Alison becoming pregnant, and against the advice of her family and at risk of her career, she decides to keep the baby. When she tells Ben, he decides to help, and they get to know each other as they prepare for the baby’s birth.

So the manboy in this film does undergo some character growth–the woman too–but I attribute this more to it being a Judd Apatow film more than a Seth Rogen film. some of Apatow’s other works also have those bits of growth and depth to them–This Is 40, The 40-Year-Old Virgin maybe–but some are just straight ahead comedies (Anchorman, Superbad, Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, et al). Looking over Apatow’s ouevre, I have seen a lot of his films, and although I note that many of the same actors appear in them–his family, Leslie Mann, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, and so on–I don’t think of the Apatowverse like I think of the Stillerverse or the Sandlerverse. Probably because he’s behind the camera–far behind it as a producer and writer not always the director.

So the film was not as bad as I had feared it would be. Like most 21st century R-rated comedies, it has a lot of swearing and requires drugs or blackout drinking for major plot points–I need some Cary Grant films as a palate cleanser–but it is easily the best Seth Rogen film I’ve seen. Of which the sample size is small (although he has smaller parts in other movies in the Apatowverse, he stars in but a few).

I mentioned when talking about Judge Dredd that it felt like a throwback to the movies of the 1980s. The first Bad Boys came out the same year, and it seems like a far newer film. Will Smith when he was cool and Martin Lawrence chew up the scenery as two detectives hunting for heroin stolen from the police evidence room. A witness to a shootout (Téa Leoni) has been told to only trust Will Smith’s Lowery, a ladies man, but when she calls looking for help, she gets family man Burnett (Lawrence) who pretends to be Lowery. Which leads to some comedy as the detectives have to pretend to be each other to keep the ruse going. A couple of chases, gunfights, and explosions later, and finis.

C’mon, man, you’re not here for insight into the human condition. You’re here to see Smith and Lawrence chew the scenery and banter. Apparently, it works, since there have been two widely spaced sequels (2003 and 2020(!)). So an amusing couple of hours and a way for me to bring my pop culture knowledge all the way up to 1995.

And this might be the first film where Téa Leoni’s character did not annoy me. The list of those films includes Deep Impact, The Family Man, and Spanglish. I guess I did not specifically mention being annoyed with her in Fun with Dick and Jane, so maybe not.

I bought this videocassette at the Friends of the Library Book sale this spring, and it was only after I’d spent my quarter on it and I popped it into the videocassette player that I wondered if it was part of the four-movie Stallone set that I bought that has Demolition Man on it. I was pleased to learn it is not. Before I watched the film, I was not sure if I’d seen it before, but I think I had. To be honest, over the years, Stallone actioners and post-apocalyptic films didn’t stick with me after my younger years.

This film, based on a comic book, has Stallone as the title character, a sort of super-policeman in a crowded Mega-City One who serves not only as the person who arrests people, but can sentence and even execute them on the spot. A super-villain escapes prison and returns to the city, aided by powerful politicians who want to use the chaos to bring about a better world–wait a minute, am I watching Demolition Man? Apparently not, as this film also has Rob Schneider as comic relief in a hacker freshly released from prison. Dredd is framed for the murder of an investigative reporter and sent to a penal colony along with the hacker, and their transport is ambushed by marauders of the wasteland outside the city. They are rescued by Dredd’s old mentor, banished himself when he spared Dredd’s life on his conviction. The mentor reveals that Dredd and his friend, whom Dredd put into prison, are actually brothers, experiments in building the perfect judges. So Dredd and Rob Schneider return to Mega-City One to stop the chaos and to bring his brother to justice.

So you can see a lot of thematic material that was probably better presented in other films mashed up into this one. But it’s not a bad film–it’s just one that does not stand out. And when I watch it again–it’s the kind of thing I’m likely to watch again (and probably remember that I’ve seen it before next time)–I will enjoy it for what it is. A mid-1990s actioner that was already a bit of a throwback to the 1980s when it was released.

The film also featured Diane Lane, who played Judge Hershey, a trainee who becomes Dredd’s ally.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Judge Dredd (1995)” →