Musings from Brian J. Noggle

You might remember hearing about this George Clooney football movie. I am not sure how many people saw it. When you come right down to it, you could say that about a lot of George Clooney movies: You’ve heard of it, but you’ve not seen it. He made some interesting selections at the peak of his movie bankability: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Men Who Stare At Goats, Syriana, Solaris–sometime after 2000, he decided his name alone could bring people in, and I guess it did, but not many. Although, to be honest, I guess I have seen a number of those in the theater, so perhaps I am speaking here without data to back it up (a blogger, abstracting incorrectly? Heaven forfend!).

At any rate, it’s probably best to not think of this as a football movie or a football comedy but more around the drama of the logistics of having a professional football team in the early part of the 20th century. Clooney plays Dodge, a player/coach for a fictional Duluth professional football team struggling to remain solvent as they barnstorm the Midwest to play other teams in similar situations. When the team goes under, Dodge convinces a college star and recently returned World War I hero (Carter Rutherford, played by John Krasinski) to play for his team to draw people into the stands–even though the team doesn’t really exist. As they start attracting crowds, a female reporter played by Renée Zellweger is investigating whether Carter’s war exploits were oversold.

So the focus is not on the playing of the football but rather the off-field antics as Dodge woos Lexie, the reporter, and tries to keep the plates of running the football team spinning.

So although it’s a comedy, like The Men Who Stare At Goats and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (I admit twice I added the appropriate second comma to that title, but that would be [sic]), it’s amusing in spots at best and that’s about it. Perhaps Clooney would indicate it’s too sophisticated for me. Perhaps he would be correct.

The war story, though, I recognize that as based on Sergeant York’s story, which was believed initially and then doubted for a time as more skeptical generations arose but has more recently been sort of verified. Although Carter’s story of his battle differs–he awakens from a drunken stupor to find he’s behind a German advance and captures a bunch of them from there–one can see the influence. I guess I’m not sophisticated enough to celebrate tearing down icons, even fictional ones. (As a reminder, I watched Sergeant York with Gary Cooper in 2020 and read Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary last year).

At any rate, I don’t know if I will rewatch this DVD, but I can if I want. Which is unlike football comedies like Necessary Roughness and The Waterboy which are more comedic and more focused on the football qua football.

As a closing thought, I have to wonder if George Clooney got the sense that he was a modern Cary Grant–I know some press compared him to the black-and-white star back in the day. But Grant’s comedies, such as His Girl Friday and even The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, are funny. Or maybe just funny to people steeped in the tropes of black-and-white. Who can laugh at the jokes at Shakespeare and Jonson without reading the footnotes first. By whom, I probably mean me. And, for the record, I have never considered going Clooney.

I popped in this film after I read somewhere–I forget where–I am sorry!–that they’re making a television series based on the A.J. Quinell book from which this movie is based. As I doubt modern movie makers actually read books, I assume they’re making it from the ideas expressed in this film. So I thought I would give it a watch. Which I can do now since it’s almost twenty years old and hence an old movie.

In it, Denzel Washington plays a disolute, dissipated mercenary with a drinking problem who travels to Mexico to visit a friend (played by Christopher Walken) and to interview for a position as a bodyguard for a wealthy family: the son who inherited the family business and an American woman. The bodyguard will mostly be responsible for keeping the daughter safe, as kidnapping wealthy children for ransom is a thriving business. When the girl is taken, he vows revenge on anyone involved and starts tracking the criminals and killing them.

So the plot moves along as Creasy, the mercenary, climbs up the ladder towards the mastermind behind it, the leader called The Voice because all he only communicates through the phone. The film has enough to keep you guessing, but relies a bit much on montages.

Not a bad action film. I’ve got the book around here somewhere, and maybe I’ll pick it up sometime.

This is an 1992 John Woo film from Hong Kong action genre. To be honest, I’m not that familiar with the genre, and I’m not enough of a poseur to get into it to impress others. I will pick them up here and there when I can find them for a buck or two, but as I mentioned when I bought this film in February, that’s becoming rare as DVD prices are starting to creep up.

At any rate, the film deals with a police inspector, “Tequila,” played by Chow Yun-fat, who is working to take down a big gangster and arms dealer in the city. He encounters an up-and-coming hardman who is manipulated into killing his boss and joining up with another up-and-coming mob boss. This fellow, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, turns out to be an undercover agent, and they work together to take down the arms dealer who hides his weapon cache in a hospital. Which leads to numerous almost cartoonish action sequences, although they were filmed with practical effects and not green-screened and then CGIed to death.

So it was an alright film, something I would expect to have seen on cable, and not a spectacle that it would have been in 1992 in Hong Kong, perhaps.

Speaking of spectacles, the film features a brief appearance by Hoi Shan-Lai as a librarian at the scene of a hit:

I am not sure of the actual translation, but I believe that is Mandarin for Velma.

She did not appear in many films, so I didn’t see many pictures of her on the Internet to make this a full beneath-the-fold feature.

ADDENDUM: I did not draw into stark relief something that I wanted to point out with this review: This film was produced in a free Hong Kong, and that might account for some of the thematic difference between this film and mainland Chinese and Hong Kong films after the handover–Kung Fu Yoga, Shanghai Knights, Hero, and Legend of the Fist come to mind. In this film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal Chinese artifacts or treasure. This film has less propaganda in it and more universal themes where the protagonists and antagonists happen to be Chinese in extraction. I wonder if those kinds of films get made in China or Hong Kong today. They certainly haven’t hit the dollar DVD market in Springfield, Missouri, if they have.

Unfortunately, my beautiful wife was put off on watching films with me after The Green Hornet, so she missed the chance to see a superhero movie based on a DC property.

This film stars Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex, a former member of the Confederate army who has become a bounty hunter who can talk to the dead. After defying his commander (John Malkovich) who wanted Hex to kill a church full of innocents, he is forced to kill the commander’s son, his personal friend. In revenge, the commander kills Hex’s wife and son and forces Hex to watch them die. Years later, Hex is still protecting the innocent in his rough manner when he’s engaged by President Grant to find the commander, presumed dead, and to prevent him from assembling a super weapon that can re-ignite the Civil War–or perhaps win it quickly for the South.

Ya know, it’s not a bad film. The main character is sympathetic. The story is fanciful, but it’s a decent action film. The CGI effects are cartoonish, and the color palette is pretty dark. But I liked it okay.

I don’t have the DVD on the desk because I passed it onto my son, who has played a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2. I think he would like it. So I recommended it to my boy, and I’ll recommend it to you if you can find it on DVD for a couple of bucks. It’s the kind of film I would have watched over and over again in the trailer back in the day were the day not 25 years before this film was made.

This might be the first Seth Rogen film I’ve seen. But, no. Apparently, I saw him in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, You, Me, and Dupree, Donnie Darko, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the video for Lonely Island’s “Like a Boss”. In most of those, he only had a small role, though, so technically, this is the first Seth Rogen above the title film I’ve seen. And I’m pleased to say between this and my recent viewing of The Hangover, I have cemented the difference between Rogen and Zach Galifanakis in my own mind. For what that’s worth.

I watched the film with my beautiful wife who joined me because the one kind of film she will watch with me is superhero films, but I’m afraid she mistakenly thought the Green Hornet was a DC property (it’s not–the character got a start in radio serials and films originally and has appeared in comics by Harvey, Dell Comics, NOW, and most recently Dynamite). Perhaps she thought I was popping in The Green Lantern which we have in the video cabinet as well. But it was an inadvertant bit of trickery that roped her into watching a film that wasn’t very good.

It’s an origin story, of course, which puts its own spin on the character. Seth Rogen plays a playboy wastrel whose father runs the big local paper in the city. When the father is killed, he inherits the paper. A family friend is the DA, and he wants favorable coverage from the paper. Meanwhile, the heir befriends the chauffeur Kato, and whilst decapitating the statue of the father, they foil a robbery/rape attempt and decide to fight crime. Later they decide to pose as criminals themselves who are taking over the city from an old school European mobster whose mobbery lacks flash. So you get the basics of the story with a modern comedy twist.

Which, unfortunately, doesn’t work. Rogen’s Reid is unlikeable–perhaps that was his goal, but one does not identify or empathize with him. The story itself is kind of stock, without much fresh in it.

So I did not like it much, and, unfortunately, the experience will lead my wife to think twice about sitting down to watch a movie with me again anytime in the near future.