——Kiss Me Deadly——

(B+)

I’m not really sure what to make of this odd film noir. Do I not like it or am I a cult fanatic of it like so many others are? It definitely has its strong points and lots of things to love about it, but then again it also has its points where it’s not so great. What to make of Kiss Me Deadly?

First, the good. This film has some of my favorite noir elements: a dark mysterious plot, unusual cruelty, an out of left-field ending and some shot compositions that are amazingly beautiful, like using an archway to create a new frame around the main character changing the field of view from a horizontal rectangle to a vertical one. In many ways this film was way ahead of its time. The beginning sequence is quite excellent, moving from the mysterious woman walking down the middle of a road in the middle of the night, to pleading with the man who picks her up to help her, to the two of them getting captured by the bad guys only to suffer unspeakable tortures (mainly because it all takes place off-screen and in our imagination). The ending (as absurd as it seems today) is also pretty engaging. The mysterious box no doubt had a big influence on Pulp Fiction, and I imagine most people watching it for the first time probably had as much fun trying to figure out what the hell was in there as I did. Also the characters are pretty interesting, the main character a private investigator who pretty much pimps out himself and his sometime girlfriend/partner to get information for their bread and butter infidelity investigations.

However it is not all good. A lot of the dialog feels like stereotypical private eye talk. Some of the performances are pretty one-dimensional. The movie is actually kind of boring after the opening sequence until when the bad guys finally reveal themselves as nothing really happens, and our P.I. hero has absolutely no clues to go on leaving us with a rather bland Law & Order type wild goose chase. The movie really picks up in the last third, but the middle third I found kind of dull. The only thing keeping me awake was the beautiful compositions.

That said, the ending was pretty fantastic, if extremely odd. The film really does add a lot to the genre, but whether or not it adds anything to itself I can’t figure out yet.

——Shanghai Knights——

(C)

What a paint by numbers Hollywood blockbuster. Just about everything about this movie felt stale and uninspired. The soundtrack blew, either trying to sound like period music (with the inexplicable electronic sound thrown in every once and a while) that was just plain bad, or by suddenly throwing in modern songs halfway through the film (using the lazy method of uninspired track selection). The plot is barely there and the dialog sucks. Most of the action is horribly directed (do modern action directors even watch Hong Kong action movies?) and again, uninspired.

That said, there is some saving grace in the two main stars. Only Owen Wilson could make some of those lines funny, and he succeeds most of the time brilliantly in pulling laughs out of lines that would normally make you roll your eyes. It’s a shame most of the time he was making predictable jokes about the British or making really obvious jokes about how Sherlock Holmes was a stupid detective name. The intelligence level of the movie is right around that of a twelve-year-old, and it never tries to be smarter than that. Still, Owen Wilson is able to turn coal into diamonds in this movie. If only a better writer tried his hand at this movie it could have been a real classic.

Also, when Jackie Chan is really let loose he can do some amazing things. The fight in the library and especially the great Singin’ in the Rain sequence gave some brief glimpses into how great this movie could have been. As it is, it is just a mediocre buddy action movie that you’ve seen a million times before.

——The Kid Stays in the Picture——

(A-)

Robert Evans tells us all about how he turned Paramount from a ready to collapse last place studio into the number one studio in Hollywood with films like Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story and a little movie called the Godfather, only to lose it all personally. His story is pretty interesting and he makes for a great narrator of it. Evans isn’t shy about saying what he really thinks about his first marriage or about the pain in the ass working environment he had with Francis Ford Coppola. He also isn’t apologetic over how cocaine ruined his life, which I found very interesting.

This is an extremely entertaining and engrossing documentary missing just one thing, the opinion of someone other than Evans. Evans is the only one who tells his story, and you can just tell that sometimes he is over exaggerating something or omitting something that could potentially be very interesting. This is a minor quibble, but the film could have been so much more rich and complete if there had been some interviews with the major characters from Evans life about Evans. As it is we are just going to have to take his word on things.

——Anything Else——

(A-)

Having seen only one other Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall; don’t worry, I went to the video store and rented some more so that hopefully by the end of the week I won’t be so ignorant) makes it hard for me to review this film, mainly because Anything Else is so much like Annie Hall updated for a new generation. I think that last phrase I used “updated for a new generation” is where Anything Else falls flat. This doesn’t feel at all like it speaks for our generation, but simply for a re-imagining of the 70’s Woody. Jason Biggs’ and Woody Allen’s characters in the movie get along together so well because they are pretty much the same person, and that makes the film feel like Woody is slightly out of touch with what’s going on in the new millennium. Besides the fact that there is a laptop that Biggs works on, I don’t think there is a single other nod to the fact that this film takes place in modern New York. This could pretty much be another 70’s Woody movie, and all of the film’s weaknesses come from that fact.

I could go into everything that doesn’t work but I feel like Lisa Schwarzbaum does a much better job in the new Entertainment Weekly than I ever could, so go read that. However I would like to talk about the one thing that Lisa does omit, which is the fact that the movie is still really funny and well made. Sure a lot of things seem out of date, but at the same time the film has a sort of timeless quality to it since these 70’s values are still funny as hell today. The sequence where Woody gets Biggs the surplus Russian rifle to protect himself is hilarious. I like too the theme of the film, that all of the neuroses don’t distract from the fact that at one point or another in your life you have to move along and not be held back by all of your comfort zones. You can’t be afraid to do what’s best for yourself, which is a message that comes through great I think through the line, “Eh, it’s just like anything else.”