(October 23)
——The Prestige (2006)——
This week I saw three movies at the theater in two days, and this one was by far my favorite. And that’s saying a lot, considering the company it keeps. The Prestige is that other 19th century magician movie that is not The Illusionist, which I reviewed back when it came out. [Note: Now that I’ve been thinking about it, I did review it, but I never posted it because I never completed all of my reviews for that week. So, uh, sorry.] Of the two, The Prestige is by far the more entertaining and worthwhile movie. If you see only one magic movie this year, make it The Prestige!
If you were able to read my review, which unfortunately you aren’t yet, you’d have seen that I thought it was a classy production, but something about it just didn’t sit with me right. It was classy, well done and all that, but it just wasn’t…great, you know? It was missing something. It felt more like a con man movie (which you know annoy me to no end) than a movie about magic. What was it missing? It turns out the answer was another magician. Amazingly, having two magicians trying to out do each other in showmanship, to almost homicidal means, is much more fun than watching just one magician do it. Christian Bale is the magician with more skill but less showmanship, who develops a trick called the Transporting Man that knocks everyone’s socks off, because no one can figure out how he does it. His rival is played by Hugh Jackman, who is the lesser magician but a much greater showman. With Michael Caine they develop their own version of the Transporting Man that is much more successful, but Jackman can’t get out of his head Bale’s version. He just can’t figure out how he did it and will go to any lengths to figure it out. Oh, and did I mention that Bale killed his wife? That might have something to do with the rivalry too.
Director and co-writer Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins) tells the story in a very interesting and effective manner. The chronology of the story bounces all over the place, as Bale reads Jackman’s diary, which in turn is all about reading Bale’s diary in an effort to learn the secrets to his illusions. Therefore there are three different time lines that all connect together. We learn the secrets to doing a lot of their tricks while still leaving enough mystery in the drama to keep you glued to the seat. Add to the mix David Bowie playing Tesla, who might have invented some real magic, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a fun movie.
(MUST SEE)
——Marie Antoinette (2006)——
I think the critics who trashed this film were kind of missing the point, because I found it to be an extremely wonderful, finely crafted edition to Sofia Coppola’s trilogy of lonely women. I really liked this movie. It’s told entirely from Marie’s perspective, so don’t expect too much about the French Revolution that took her head. It is only hinted at on the sidelines of the story, that is until the peasants actually storm Versailles. But that makes sense. Versailles is such an isolated place, why would they see it coming? They live in their own little world, completely alien to anything else out there.
Coppola gives you a great feeling of this in the opening act of the film, where Marie is immersed quite quickly into the absurd rituals of court life. She can only stand back, bemused by how weird the French nobility are. But she’s got to survive too, and makes the court her own, if only to survive the years of not being with child because her teenage husband is afraid to touch her. (He likes locks. That’s his thing. Seriously.)
A big deal was also made about the fact that there are a lot of contemporary songs in the soundtrack to the film. Well, not only is it a great soundtrack, but it is also completely overblown how prominent those songs are in the film. They actually fit in extremely well with the tone. A lot of the songs are even cut off before the vocals start, so that you get all of the mood of them without the contemporary images floating in your head.
What I really like though is that Marie Antoinette is a period piece that doesn’t feel like a period piece. And by that I mean, it doesn’t feel stuffy. You know what I’m talking about. Everyone acts like they know they are in a period piece. The people who really lived then didn’t act like they were in a period piece. They acted just like how we act, in the here and now. And that’s how everyone acts in this film. The contemporary music is not used to be some sort of jarring opposition to the image but to compliment it, giving us a way to identify with who someone different from us could be feeling just the way that we do. The film has a really fresh and immediate feeling to it. I definitely recommend picking it up.
(MUST SEE)
——New Jack City (1991)——
Ice T is a rough cop on a mission to bring down the new drug czar in town, played by Wesley Snipes, whose figured out the perfect business model for the sale of Crack cocaine. Take over a housing building. Forcibly evict anyone who is not on board for that. Get everyone else hooked on Crack while turning the building into a fortress to keep the cops out. Chris Rock is a Crack head who sobers up and tries to take Snipes down from the inside. From his point of view we see the really horrible side of Crack that you don’t get to see too often in film. His sections of the film are probably the best. Mario Van Peebles makes a pretty interesting, fun picture, but it doesn’t reach the level of great and definitely isn’t as polished as his later and greater tribute to his father, Baadasssss! It’s like Scarface-lite (which just happens to make a pretty large appearance in the film).
(SEE)
(October 24)
——Flags of Our Fathers (2006)——
I have mixed feelings about Flags of Our Fathers. Now, I love war movies and great battle sequences, and Clint Eastwood really goes above and beyond with his depiction of Iwo Jima. You really get a good feeling for the size and the scope of this battle, from the battleships to the soldiers on the beach to the dug in Japanese and the planes flying overhead, you really see it all, and it’s quite impressive, on par with a lot of battle sequences I’ve seen post-Saving Private Ryan. The rest of the film left me feeling a little disappointed though. The story is of the men who raised the famous flag over Iwo Jima that helped America push on through the hard parts of the end of the war. Their tortured because they don’t really feel like they did enough to be called heroes, because that’s what they are now. But all they did was raise a flag. You can’t even see their faces in the picture. Why should they be special, when all of their buddies died on those volcanic beaches?
The movie does a good job of getting into their heads, but not good enough, I thought. The characters never feel like more than sketches. Ira Hayes, the Native American who took to drinking to cope, is the only one we get very close too. Most of the rest of it feels like The Greatest Generation recap, making us long for the immediacy of the beaches of Iwo Jima again. This never felt as “special” as it should have. It’s good and worth seeing, but not quite the classic it aims to be.
(SEE)
——Sleepaway Camp (1983)——
I was sold on buying Sleepaway Camp based on a review I read, calling it by far the best of the summer camp horror movies to come out after the success of Friday the 13th. And I can’t say I was disappointed by that review. Sleepaway Camp is every bit of the campy goodness that it promises. Just seeing the prologue, where a motorboat runs over a father and his two kids, and already you know you are in for something special. The movie plays off the normal and the surreal for its entire length. I think that that is its strength. It has this really natural sounding screenplay. The kids look and sound like real kids, not 20-something struggling actors. This is a real look at summer camp. Where there just happen to be a series of grisly killings. It can get a little over the top at times, which is really fun. And the ending…well, that has to be seen to be believed. I definitely recommend this one to horror fans because its not the same old, same old. This one has got a little life to it and constantly had me guessing who the real killer was (and why) until the very end. Plus, for some reason I cannot even begin to explain to myself, I love summer camp movies. And this is a great one. It almost reminded me of Wet Hot American Summer, except without all of the self-aware humor.
(MUST SEE)
(October 26)
——Feast (2006)——
You walk into a horror movie. The film starts and you are introduced to various characters in a bar. You know what’s going to happen to most of these folks. Which is why it is so funny when the action freeze-frames so that we can learn a little bit about each character, including their predicted life expectancy. For instance, Jason Mewes is in the movie (Jay of Jay and Silent Bob, for those unfamiliar) and when his card comes up his name is…Jason Mewes and his life expectancy is something like: We should be glad he’s still alive right now.
Every character in the movie gets something like this, but it doesn’t really mean much because this movie doesn’t pull the regular horror movie punches. For instance, when the man labeled “Hero” busts into the bar and explains how he is going to be the one to keep them all alive from the hungry monsters outside, his life expectancy is given as “pretty damn good” right before his head is bitten clean off. The screenplay for this is delightfully fucked up. There is a great knowledge of how horror movies work in this script, and whenever one of the characters does something you would normally think to do in a horror movie, chances are, they are soon to be eaten. It’s very funny and very disturbing (when they kill one of the baby monsters the parents eat the baby, have sex on the hood of a car and then make another one.)
This is a fantastic horror movie, flawed in only one way: It is nearly unwatchable. I don’t know what they were thinking, because otherwise this movie is amazingly fun. There are three big problems: 1) The aspect ratio is way too wide for the film. This is a 2.35:1 film when it should be 1.88:1. Why should it be smaller? Well, for one, the entire film takes place inside a small bar and the majority of shots are close-ups. There’s no need for all of that extra space. A smaller aspect ratio would have afforded the film more claustrophobia, which is great for any horror movie. The other problem is that a majority of the action happening above and below the frame is cut out, so it can be very confusing to figure out what is happening, which wouldn’t be so bad except for 2) the lighting is way too dark. They sucked all of the light out of the picture when they filmed this. I had to turn off the basement light and it was still too dark to really tell what was happening half of the time. Not cool. Finally, 3) any time something exciting happened the frame rate sped up and got all juttery. That combined with the above and some quick editing meant that whenever a monster would attack you would have no idea what the hell was actually going on. It’s a real shame, because otherwise this one was a winner.
(SEE)
(October 27)
——Hoosiers (1986)——
While at times Hoosiers can dip its toes into hokey sentimentality (especially when it comes to Jerry Goldsmith’s score), overall this is an extremely well made sports movie. Credit for its success has to be given to Gene Hackman and the script’s portrayal of his character, which avoids all cliché in developing a very well rounded, flawed character.
This movie is the very definition of an underdog sports movie. In the 50’s a small farm town school in the middle of nowhere Indiana battled extreme odds to come out of nowhere and win the state championship. Not only that, but they also got a new coach that year who no one liked because he dared to try and do things differently from the way they’d always been done. The team barely has enough players to do substitutions and starts of the season with a losing streak. What Hackman’s character brings to their story is discipline. He knows that they can put the ball through the hoop. What he wants to see is them working as a team to do so.
He’s not a popular guy either. Upon arriving in the town he gets one of the chilliest receptions one could ever expect to get in a small town. He’s not perfect either. His previous job coaching was at the college level, where he lost his job for hitting a player. He gets so passionate in games that he’s often thrown out by the ref. But finally the team starts to jell, and then they start to win, and finally they are going beyond anyone’s greatest expectations for what they could achieve. It’s a great story, and a fun movie.
(SEE)
——Tucker: A Man and His Dream (1988)——
Surprisingly as timely now as when it was made, Tucker is a movie about everything that is wrong with this country, told through the perspective of a kid high on sugar. You’d have to be a fool to still believe in what we know as “the American Dream,” and this movie shows you exactly why that is the case.
Tucker is a character larger than life that it seems is constantly bursting with energy (this is where the whole high on sugar thing comes in) and ideas. During World War II he develops an extremely fast armored car that the War Department doesn’t end up wanting because it is just too fast. After the War he comes up with an idea for a car that is so revolutionary that it would put the Big Three of Detroit out of business. This is a car that turned out to be years ahead of its time, much better and safer than anything currently available, with plenty of new features that you’d find on today’s cars. The Big Three thus did what any sane corporation would try to do when someone comes out with a spectacularly better product: They tried to bury it. The bottom line doesn’t exactly encourage innovation. They throw every hurdle they can think of in front of Tucker. This would crush any normal man. But Tucker isn’t an ordinary man, overcoming impossible odds to actually make his dream car.
Washington, under pressure from the Big Three, isn’t going to have any of that though. They put him on trial, similar to Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose case (he tells Tucker of his own troubles), saying that Tucker was given money to make a car he had no intention of delivering. And they’ve got a point, except for the whole fact that HE MADE THE DAMN CAR! And not just one, but all fifty that he agreed to deliver in year’s time. Tucker wins his court case but the Big Three win the war and Tucker is put out of business. One can’t look at our current Congress or at our problems with outsourcing and not see direct parallels with Tucker. At one point in the movie he tells everyone in the courtroom that without innovation, America will watch its enemies make the electronics and cars that we once proudly made, and they’ll make them better. Everyone laughs, especially those representing the Big Three. With GM now in serious financial trouble and the top car companies now located in Japan, Tucker’s prediction has become true. We’ve screwed ourselves and we’re too stupid to even notice.
I liked the movie, but it didn’t quite feel real enough for me. Tucker is too much of a cartoon. Every time real life drama tries to insist itself on the action, the camera takes a step back to the enthusiastic and optimistic tone of the fifties. Every once and a while you think that Tucker might be pushing things too far, that he might alienate one of his faithful workers with the nonstop effort or scare his happy family that he’s gone off the deep end. But that scene never comes. Tucker’s relentless optimism always comes back to save the day. Maybe that’s how it really happened. It just didn’t feel real to me, though.
(SEE)
(October 28)
—–Funny Face (1956)——
Although I usually don’t go out of my way to pick up musicals, but this one just kept throwing itself at me, after recent inclusions in a Gap commercial and an episode of Gilmore Girls, where it got quite a bit of, pardon the pun, face time. And let’s face it, after watching the movie I have to say that so far Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire have yet to do me wrong. Funny Face is just bubbling up with excited energy and fun. Everyone just seems to be having a great time making the movie, which is always important when making a musical. Hepburn in particular is magnificent, throwing herself completely into her role as the homely book clerk philosopher with a “funny face” that is transformed in a fashion model. Has anyone else, before or since, looked so excited to be in a musical number? I can’t think of anyone.
Fred Astaire is a fashion photographer who meets Hepburn’s character when a photo shoot, led by his always moving forward fashion magazine editor boss, invades itself upon her small philosophy bookstore. The rest of the fashion people completely disregard her frumpy mess but Astaire notices that, DUH, that is Audrey FRAKIN’ Hepburn in the sack dress. He convinces his boss that she’s the new “It” girl she’s been looking for, while at the same time convincing Hepburn to become a model so that she can go to Paris to hear a philosopher she loves speak. They of course fall in love, although neither one, in true Musical fashion, is willing to just come out and admit that. There is lots of dancing and singing mingled in with the standard Musical misunderstandings until finally they realize that they are both crazy for each other and dance off into the sunset. Only the most cynical heart will refused to be warmed by this movie.
(MUST SEE)
——A Shock to the System (1990)——
A Shock to the System is one of those small, lost in the shuffle movies with no flashy premise to fall back on, but nevertheless is still so good and compelling that you can’t help but wonder why you’ve never heard of it before. It’s a delightfully dark black comedy about a guy who used to have it all, but now only has a nagging, unloving wife after getting passed over for the promotion he’s worked so hard for. Michael Caine (as great as ever) is Graham, a man who used to be known as Merlin to his wife because he could just wave his finger and things would happen for him. He’s older now, though, and living in a young man’s world. The dog-eat-dog mentality of 80’s corporate culture catches up with him, and he loses the promotion everyone knows he deserves to a younger, more conniving executive trying to make a name for himself. Meanwhile at home he’s living in a loveless marriage (his wife is much more worried about his not getting a raise than she is his feelings about getting passed over) in a house that blows a fuse every time his wife decides to use her Stairmaster.
Graham isn’t one to just take and accept the fact that life is crapping all over him. This is a guy for whom everything used to come naturally to. It’s time Merlin broke out some “black” magic. A shock that he gets fixing the fuse box in the basement gives him an idea about how to deal with his wife. After that getting the girl of his dreams and the job he feels he rightfully deserves are only small obstacles for him to overcome. A little thing like murder never hurt anyone…
There are a lot of similarities here in theme to Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, except that I’d have to say that Graham feels a lot less remorse about what he’s done in this film than Martin Landau did in Allen’s film. In both films, once the main character has discovered that they could get away with murder without the cops arresting them or God striking them down with a bolt of lightning, he feels a sense of relief and exhilaration instead of a dooming guilt found in most other films of this sort. Graham just takes things a step further. The genius of the film is that Graham does some horrible things and yet does them in a way that leaves things rather ambiguous as to whether or not we should be cheering or condemning him. This is Michael Caine in full on charming Michael Caine mode. The film is really well crafted and quite funny. I really liked this movie, and recommend that you pick it up.
(MUST SEE)
(October 29)
——Masters of Horror: Pick Me Up (2005)——
Larry Cohen’s contribution to the Masters of Horror series is, unfortunately, a very bland missed opportunity. The concept is actually pretty cool: A serial killer hitchhiker who kills anyone who is dumb enough to pick him up meets a serial killer truck driver who kills anyone dumb enough to get into his cab. A girl, forced to hitchhike after her bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, is caught in between. A great set-up, and the three leads aren’t that bad either. What hurts the movie is everything else. Larry Cohen’s direction feels lifeless and workman-like. In the documentary it looks almost like he spent more time impersonating famous directors than he did actual direction. While the leads are pretty good, almost every other supporting actor is a horrible actor. And the script feels lazy and rushed, with a total cop-out ending. Yeah, it’s a surprise, but it is also extremely anti-climatic, destroying everything that the story built up and ripping from our hands a compelling resolution to the story. This is definitely one of the weaker additions to the series.
(MISS)
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