Celluloid Heroes

There’s still some juice in these legs, and I can still take a few. Baby, please. Just let me take ‘em in the ring. At least I know who’s hitting me.

Ron Howard has a reputation for excessive sentimentality in his films. I’ll reserve judgment on whether this is deserved for another time, but if it is true, Howard was the perfect director for Cinderella Man. This mostly accurate story of real life boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) needs a filmmaker willing to yank on the heartstrings like a team of Clydesdales. This film is so consciously old fashioned that it really ought to have been filmed in black and white in the old 4:3 Academy aspect ratio.

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That’s no sacrifice. That’s revenge.

The suicide bomber has to be the most impenetrable enigma to the western mind. I don’t think we can even comprehend the idea of a young person, presumably healthy in body and mind, purposely throwing away his or her life just to kill a few people who are often not even a party to the conflict in which the bomber is engaged. We can wrap our brains around the concept of a soldier sacrificing himself as he runs up Omaha Beach into the teeth of a German machine gun nest, but there are two key differences. One, his death is not the goal but just a consequence and, two, the people getting killed on the other side are soldiers as well.

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It’s not very funny, but at 30,000 feet you can’t just get up and walk out of the theater.

It’s not so unusual to find that Jodie Foster is the smartest thing about one of her own movies. Even when she’s slumming for a paycheck like she is here, she projects a level of intelligence that often makes the film seem better than it really is. Thus, it’s no surprise that Ms. Foster is the smartest thing about Flightplan. Sadly, that’s really no accomplishment, since the seat cushions on the airplane set are smarter than this simple, linear but mind-blowingly illogical rift on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. If a person had the same level of brain activity found in this script, they would be harvested for organs before the doctors pulled the plug.

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So let it be written, so let it be done.

There has to be some degree of irony to a film called The Ten Commandments, since one of those commandments says “make no graven images,” and this film does sort of count as one long graven image. Or am I completely off base?

Either way, this is one of those completely “review-proof” films, where any attempt to analyze or criticize it as you would a normal film. For people who love this film, the basic standards of filmmaking are utterly without relevance to their enjoyment of it. Sure, by our definition of what constitutes a good movie, impresario Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epic is an overacted, overwrought potboiler, but saying so leaves you feeling like a spoilsport, if not a bloody heathen.

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Never open on a ballad. Never end on one, either.

The good news is that, even if De-Lovely’s narrative were completely missing in action, it would still be worth a viewing for its first-class productions of Cole Porter’s music, featuring performances by several contemporary artists like Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, Elvis Costello and Natalie Cole. The even better news is that the story of De-Lovely, tracking the last fifty years of Cole Porter’s life, is also worth your attention.

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Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head.

I was sorely tempted to let my imaginary twin brother, Larry, write this review, but he was partaking of one of his many philanthropic pursuits, leading a deer hunting trip for a group of kids from the Braille Institute, and hasn’t been seen since.

Adaptation has a great deal in common with the other Charlie Kaufman films, mainly in how it plays with reality like your cat played with that gopher it caught in the back yard. While it’s “officially” based on the non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), the movie is actually about Charlie Kaufman’s unsuccessful effort to write a usable script from the book, as well as about the author’s relationship with the subject of the story, a self-styled botanist named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The other storyline revolves around Charlie’s fictitious twin Donald and his attempt to become a screenwriter like his brother.

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Remember how I told you that tennis was a gentleman’s game? Bollocks.

Wimbledon starts with the premise of what could be an interesting sports movie, but wastes that potential on a by-the-numbers story that draws its many clichés from two separate genres that abound with them, the romantic comedy as well as the sports movie.

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I can’t believe you’re not really retarded.

Garden State is a charming, if imperfect, film that at least proves that, when not saddled with George Lucas’s leaden dialogue, Natalie Portman can acquit herself quite admirably as an actress. This movie has an interesting point of view, sharply written characters but a story that somewhat loses its way during its meandering final third.

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We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

I posted my original review of Good Night, And Good Luck when it was in the theaters last year. Now that it’s out on DVD, I hoped you might permit me to climb on to my creaky old soap box for a moment.

It’s a bit of a fashion among some conservatives to attempt to rehabilitate the image of Senator Joseph McCarthy, to portray him as a misunderstood patriot brought low by the left wing media elite. To them, KGB files that confirm the not unsurprising fact that, yes, there were actually communists in America during the fifties somehow vindicate the Senator’s methods.

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I should have killed you back in Philly…

I wonder if David Cronenberg was ever voted “Most Likely to Totally Creep People Out” back in high school. Certainly, as a director, the pressure-relief valve leading to the darkest, squirmiest parts of his brain seems to be stuck in the full-open position. His Dead Ringers did for trips to the gynecologist what Jaws did for swimming in the ocean.A History of Violence both is and isn’t a departure for Cronenberg. While it does have its share of blood and human viscera on display, it’s relatively restrained (for Cronenberg) and there are no televisions turning into body parts. It’s his most mainstream movie since The Dead Zone (and it really says something about your career when your most mainstream work is a Stephen King adaptation).

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God is a luxury I cannot afford.

It’s no accident that the moral center of this movie, a kindly rabbi named Ben (Sam Waterston), is in the process of going blind. Woody Allen’s bleak comedy takes a piercingly cynical look at the notion that punishment for the guilty is any kind of a certainty. In the world of this film, power, privilege and luck have more to do with justice than any kind of moral virtue. The main character, a wealthy and prominent ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), speaks of his childhood teaching that God was ever vigilantly watching everything we do, ready to mete out punishment for the slightest transgression. Rabbi Ben, the man of God, is slowly losing his power of sight and by the end of the film, it’s seems as if God’s perception of innocent and guilty is severely impaired. (more…)

You’re a very special little girl.

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan shifts gears a bit with this evocative potboiler based on the novel by Rupert Holmes. His best known prior works, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, were notable for their somber tone and pacing that made glaciation seem downright snappy. You could probably criticize Where the Truth Lies for being conspicuously melodramatic, but I think you would be missing the point. This movie is sort of a thinking person’s Wild Things, only without the “full monty” from co-star Kevin Bacon.

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