Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #9: Snake Eyes

1998 movie

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 11/20)

Plot: Shady Atlantic City policeman Ricky Santoro gets involved in the assassination of the Secretary of Defense while watching a heavyweight prize fight. As the mysteries surrounding the killing unravel, he starts to see his dreams of somebody becoming the mayor slip away. He and his best friend try to hold it all together.

Nicolas Cage in charge of holding things together? Not in this movie, Cowboy! This is unhinged Cage, a Cage on speed, overblown and tacky. He's awesome, especially in the lengthy opening sequence where he's dressed in this flamboyantly sleazy outfit and interacting with people like nobody would ever interact with anybody. Nicolas Cage is the only actor I can think of who overacts on movie posters. But as you know by now, I mean this as a compliment. He gets a juicy dynamic character to chew on here, and it's fun to watch him make Santoro a "Cage" character. As a movie, Snake Eyes is really kind of a failure. It falls completely apart at the end, getting really unrealistic and stupid, and the story doesn't really have a lot of meat on it. But with Brian De Palma's flashy direction, it's at least a very interesting failure. I dug the camera choreography, most notably in the lengthy opening where you meet Santoro and some of the other notables and see the assassination from our main character's viewpoint. It's an extended shot, maybe fifteen minutes or so where the camera swims all over the place, and it's even more impressive when you think about how many people were involved. I'm a sucker for the whole same-story-from-different-angles storytelling, and this one does it with style and finesse. There's another neat shot where the camera moves over a series of hotel rooms. Nothing we see going on in those individual rooms is important to the story, but it adds some nice shading to the proceedings. I also really liked a very suspenseful scene where two characters are in a race to reach another character. The performances around Cage's could have been better (Gary Sinese has this smugness that always annoys me), and the last half of the movie doesn't live up to the potential of the first half, but this has a lively pizazz that definitely makes it worth watching. And that awesome Cage performance, of course.

Rock 'n' Roll High School

1979 high school musical

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Thanks to rock 'n' roll, the students at Vince Lombardi High School have no interest in obeying the rules or getting an education. After yet another principal has a nervous breakdown, the school board hires Ms. Togar to clean things up and make the school a place of learning. Her agenda conflicts with student Riff Randell, a big fan of punk rockers The Ramones.

This punksploitative teenage comedy's got less laughs than Fast Times at Ridgemont's High, but at least it's got Clint Howard and The Ramones. The Ramones, by the way, display some terrific acting chops. Dee Dee Ramone was so bad that his lines were reduced to "Alright! The pizza's here!" but I can't imagine he's much worse than Joey Ramone who mumbles unintelligibly during his scenes. They get their chance to perform a ton of songs though, so if you're a fan, this is worth checking out. A couple of the songs work like music videos, especially during their first appearance when they show up in their "tour bus," a convertible in which they sit like only punk rockers could. There's also quite a bit of concert footage, and you've got to love a band with a lead singer who needs subtitles for the lyrics. Despite the solid analogy comparing punk rock haters to Nazis with the calling of Principal Togar's plan the "Final Solution," this is really like cartoon punk, almost like Disney decided to make a punk rock movie. Other than The Ramones, the characters aren't especially memorable, and the humor falls completely flat in this low-budget flick. Roger Corman produced.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #4: Amos and Andrew

1993 semi-satirical comedy

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 14/20)

Plot: Successful playwright Andrew Sterling moves into his new vacation home on a ritzy New England island. His neighbors spot him trying to hook up his television and, since he's a black man, assume he's robbing the place. They call the police who show up and, since he's a black man, start shooting at him. It's an election year, so when the police chief realizes his mistake, he convinces a drifter/petty thief named Amos to pretend to be a kidnapper. The plan doesn't work as well as you'd think.

First off, is it just me or is Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" used in too many movies?

This isn't a bad little movie. The comedy works even if the satire is too sloppy to make any coherent points. Brad Dourif plays a ridiculous character, Dabney Coleman is really good as the police chief, and our stars do an adequate job. It's not Samuel L.'s typical role. He gets to hit one guy in the head and wrestles around in the grass with Nicolas Cage a little, but he spends most of the movie passively waiting for things to develop. Nicolas Cage is pretty subdued here. He's got a great monologue about sea monkeys ("I wanted my family to be more like a sea monkey family.") and demonstrates his acting prowess in a scene where he chugs a beer and does this weird exaggerated head circle thing. And I'm only four movies in with the Summer of Nicolas Cage, but I've already seen him doing hand-stand push-ups in a prison cell in two of them. I think I may have even seen him doing hand-stand push-ups in a prison cell while "Beyond the Sea" plays in the background in two movies. I'm having trouble deciding whether or not this movie should have had more of a satirical edge. On the one hand, it would have given the movie more substance, but it also could have made the movie preachy. As a comedy of errors, it was fun enough. I don't know if I'd call it "hysteriskt roligt" though. The above poster, by the way, is misleading. Some of you might check this movie out because you like the way Nicolas Cage's hair looks there, but that is not how he really looks in this thing. He's a lot scruffier.

Shane-movies trivia: I hurt myself a little trying to do a hand-stand push-up. I also broke a porcelain figurine. It was all very un-Cage.

Avatar

2009 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 12/20)

Plot: Gargamel and his crew of marines have found their way on Pandora, a planet that needed its name changed during the Avatar script's rewrite. They want to use their clunky robots and and hibernation tubes to harvest some fairy juice from the rhizoids of Pandora's foliage. Unfortunately, the blue bipeds, scantily-clad hippies, who inhabit the planet use that same fairy juice to get high, an activity that takes up the majority of their time. The Navajo of Pandora ain't giving up their fairy juice easily! Gargamel develops a plan involving the most expensive Halloween costumes in the history of the holiday, and a few marines, including one nondescript guy who is only on the mission because his twin brother died, dress up as Navajo in order to befriend the real Navajo and abscond with the fairy juice. "Shove it all down the front of your pants if you have to," Gargamel ordered. "Me and Chuck'll still smoke it!" When it seems that the Navajo has no interest in cooperation, the marines decide they're going to have to take over forcefully and even, if push comes to shove, knock down their giant tree and, just to show them who's boss, piss all over their fiberoptic weeping willow. But the Navajo, as feisty as Ewoks, have a few tricks up their blue sleeves, including holding a three-day music festival with Country Joe and the Fish, Sha Na Na, and Joan Baez. Brown acid is taken, hair is plugged into freaky-looking horse tails, and the Navajo reach a higher level of consciousness, unfortunately making us all a little bit dumber in the process. How's about an explosion? How's about one in 3D?

I enjoyed watching this for a couple reasons: 1) Dylan and I, along with a couple of our robot friends, found it fairly easy to make fun of with the predictable plot, the hamfisted political message, and especially the inane dialogue, and making fun of things is how my family feels better about themselves. 2) It was pretty. It's the type of movie that distracts me with thoughts about how much it costs to make something this big and sparkly and how many pairs of leather pants that would have bought me when I was a fourth grader. Because when I was a fourth grader, I wanted to be a movie like Avatar. I wanted be clad in leather pants and a Michael Jackson jacket and just be able to walk into my classroom, saunter up to the gal I happened to like that week, and point with both hands in an exaggerated way at my crotch. Maybe thrust a bit, possibly spin depending on my mood. The gal, I'd imagine, would have been understandably impressed, with or without the 3D glasses. And then I could have pointed in that cool way I always wanted to point (like a finger gun, thumb waggling) but couldn't because I didn't have the leather pants to do it. Would I have any substance? Possibly not, but that's not what fourth graders cared about anyway. Avatar is a movie that brazenly waggles its thumb in the air, thrusting its leathery hips willy-nilly, splashing hos with bucketfuls of colors that probably don't even really exist. It all looks pretty good, expensively good. My tiny screen (Dylan and I watched this on an Ipod touch that we propped up against a Sparky Anderson statue that we got at Great American Ballpark recently, by the way) was soaked in all these gorgeous colors, and I was impressed with the creativity that went into designing these lush surrealistic landscapes. Pandora's a lovely place to visit. I wasn't as impressed with the interaction between its characters/wildlife and the setting. Things in Pandora looked too shiny and plastic. But it's a quibble because I enjoyed nearly everything on the screen that wasn't terrible blue-screen acting or laughable dialogue. I thought the robot things that mimicked the movements of their drivers were really goofy. I'd like to have one though, just because I think it would be funny for people to see me and a robot in which I'm riding simultaneously point at their crotches with two hands. Unfortunately for the King of the World, cardboard cutout characters added to a story that feels derivative adds up to a pretty boring eight hours of movie if you take away all those pretty visuals. Which I'm sure is close to what all my love interests in fourth grade would have thought about me, too. "Yeah, he's got a pair of leather pants and can do a pretty mean centipede on the cardboard during recess, but I really can't stand the guy. And why's he point at his crotch so much?" To me, there's very little difference between this movie and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a movie I watched while wearing a welder's mask.

Deliver Us from Evil

2006 documentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Apparently, Catholic priests have been molesting children and the church has been covering it up for years. Who knew? Director Amy Berg finds herself a pedophile willing to speak on camera about his experiences with being shifted from parish to parish following molestation accusations.

She finds him and takes him to a park to interview him. A park just crawling with sexy little children. It's difficult for me to figure out why exactly. I guess she was more concerned with getting a nice shot of Father O'Grady leering at a little boy than just letting his words speak for themselves. Getting it all directly from the pedophile's mouth is really the only novel part about Deliver Us from Evil. This is all old news, right? This is just Amy Berg jumping at the chance to shock and awe with a documentary subject, finding herself a bad bad priest and a composer who isn't afraid to pour it on pretty thick and then pretty much letting the documentary make itself. Because there's not exactly anything new here. There's nothing about this that will help anybody heal or help solve the problem. It's shooting priests in a barrel, and although finding parents willing to cry their eyes out on camera makes for some pretty good documentary footage, it's all pretty pointless in the end. And speaking of parents, you get just as upset at the parents in the stories of these molested children as you do the criminal priests and the higher-ups who help cover it all up. Father O'Grady, by the way, seems mentally ill. I'm not real sure why he agreed to appear on camera anyway, but there seems to be something wrong with the guy's mind. Other than the insatiable urge to touch children, I mean. There's just something missing, and you can see it in his eyes. Don't get me wrong--the information in this documentary is important. I just really didn't like the film's style, organization, or length. It felt like a television expose that was twice the length, one that wasn't exactly organized in a way that enhanced the experience. It's like a color-by-numbers documentary that didn't quite know when to quit. I guess I can be happy after watching this that my mother quit being a Catholic before I was born and that I'm smart enough not to put my children in situations that are dangerous to them. Other than that, I'm not sure why I needed to watch this.

Jackass 3

2010 high art

Rating: 13/20

Plot: More comic mischief from the Jackasses. This time, they utilize 3-D technology so that it looks like the fecal matter is coming right into your living room! Huzzah!

Well, I felt like showering after watching this one, so that's something. I didn't watch this in 3-D, of course, but I can see where that would have been kind of fun. The colorful and gimmicky opening scene has the boys being pelted with paintball pellets, kicked in the face, and abused with little booby traps that might have been borrowed from Wily E. Coyote's attic. And they're wearing funny costumes. And some times it all happens in this slow motion. Now I don't possess a high-def television, but the images in this were impressively crisp anyway, fantastic news if you want to see every detail of a fat guy wearing some transparent plastic suit designed to make him ooze sweat. Or vomit. Or poop. Or urine. Or hair glued to somebody's palms right after it's been yanked from some other guy's chest. You get the idea. This is definitely not the movie I'd pick to watch with my grandmother if, following some miracle, she was resurrected and really wanted to watch a movie with me. Unless she picked it, of course. I'm not going to deny the dead the right to select a movie for movie night. There's something nice about seeing the jackasses willing to do all this gross or dangerous or gross and dangerous stuff despite their advancing ages. You get the sense that some are doing these things reluctantly though. And the stunts in Jackass 3(D) aren't as consistently hilarious as the ones in part two, the Empire Strikes Back of Jackass movies. I think they peaked (Wait a second. There's no way peaked is the right word here.) with number two. But I had more than a few chuckles, and as with the other stuff, I'm glad I watched it. I laughed most heartily at a scene involving a score or more of little people, one of their set-up/written gags. I'm a grade school kid in a thirty-seven year old's body though, so I, of course, enjoyed the slapstick as well. After all, if you can't appreciate video footage of a guy getting hit in the balls, you're just not a real American. There are people who could argue that the world would be a better place without these movies. I'm not sure I could successfully argue with those people actually, but I'm happy the movies do exist. Long live the Jackasses!

Sherlock Holmes

2009 action movie/bastardized lit

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 11/20)

Plot: Slobbish detective Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson attempt to solve the mystery of who is trying to terrorize Londoners. Turns out that it's a dead guy! Oh, snap!

The more this went on (and on and on), the more I actually ended up liking it. Unfortunately, it was never enough to completely save the movie. This is one of those movies that seems like it was written by eight different people. They all started out in same conference room around a massive oval table, a picture of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in front of an empty chair to give them inspiration. Maybe they all smoked opium, listened to violin music, and wore deerstalker hats to get in the right mood. In fact, I'm sure they all must have been smoking opium. They had trouble agreeing on much, just as you'd expect from a gaggle of writers, and decided to split up, write portions of the plot on their own, and reassemble later to paste it all together. So Guy #1 ran off with his head full of all these supernatural elements because he digs vampire movies; Guy #2, the traditionalist of the bunch, left with his convoluted explanations to show off Holmes' deductive knack and powers of observation; Guy #3, lover of action movies that he was, decided to storyboard a few ultra-modern fight scenes; Guy #4, lover of romantic comedies that he was, figured a little romance on the side wouldn't hurt anything; Guy #5 figured it was about time to put all that research he'd done on Masonry back in graduate school to use, also remembering the popularity of that Da Vinci Code movie; Guy #6, awakened from yet another terrorism-fueled nightmare, decided to put his irrational fears to use and include biological weapons; Guy #7 had writer's block and failed to contribute anything at all; and Guy #8, a chemist without any friends at all, decided to Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy is up and add a bunch of stuff that nobody but he and the friends he would have had if he had had any would understand. They reconvened and threw all their ideas on that big oval table. But some dastardly foe, likely from a rival movie studio although that's yet to be proven, set the table on fire! The writers panicked, rapidly assembling the most coherent story they possibly can before their hard work perished in the flames. Sure the final result was a complete mess, but they decided that modern audiences won't mind if there's some nifty special effects to go along with it. I was a little annoyed by the slow-mo modern fisticuffs and Guy Ritchie's flashy direction. It's all stylistically interesting but very distracting. The story was also frustratingly complex, and after a while, I was so confused that I just gave up trying to figure out what was going on. Yes, it does all come together in the end, but it wasn't enough to make up for the previous 110 minutes of frustration. I don't easily forgive when something or somebody makes me feel so stupid for so long. The special effects team did create some cool settings (love moody London here), and as readers of my blog know, I always like Robert Downey Jr. He and Jude Law have fine chemistry. Rachel McAdams also provides some eye candy. I suppose there are enough nods to the original source material to appease some Holmes-aphiles while the purists will likely turn up their noses and pooh-pooh the whole thing. I'm somewhat in the middle. I'm not in a hurry to see this again even though it's the type of thing that repeated viewing could help, but I wouldn't mind renting the sequel when it comes out.

Sweet Movie

1974 sweet movie

Rating: 13(?)/20

Plot: Spoilers abound! It's also disturbing, so you probably shouldn't even read it. It's the juxtaposed tales of a pair of women--Miss Canada, the winner of a virginity beauty pageant who, as a grand prize, marries a rich Texan, is urinated on by his golden phallus, attempts to leave, is taken to the inside of a water (milk?) tower by a muscular black man, watches him skipping rope while naked, has intercourse, is shoved in a suitcase, meets a Latino pop singer, has intercourse with him on the Eiffel Tower, flees to a commune where the participants of a vulgar banquet show off an array of bodily functions, and eventually writhes around in a tub of chocolate. The other woman pilots a candy-stuffed boat with a giant Karl Marx head on the front. She picks up a young man, has sex with him, seduces a bunch of children, and then kills them all. The end!

Finally, the movie I've been looking for--something a little bit more disturbing than Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. This is Dusan Makavejev, the same dude who directed Man Is Not a Bird, a pretty dull movie that went over my head during the notorious "man" movie streak. I'm not sure why I keep watching these Eastern European films from the 60s since I'm missing so much of the political context. I was born in a later decade and in another hemisphere and all. But hey, I almost got this one, seeing one of the woman as a representation of capitalism and the other as a symbol of revolution. It's a superficial reading, sure, and I don't know exactly what all the pooping and lip synching Spanish pop singers and Nazi documentary footage of a Russian massacre and grown men acting like babies and the blood/sugar/sex/magic and Battleship Potemkin allusions are all about. Unlike Man Is Not a Bird, this is anything but dull. It's wild and wildly unpredictable, not always in a positive way. It's challenging viewing, and, being the type of film that was banned pretty much everywhere, guaranteed to offend anybody who is even halfway decent. To me, the coprophilia, sexual depravities, and seduction of children is more shocking in this than in Salo because in this, it's all sugar-coated. This, much more than Pasolini's film, looks more like a movie packaged for the masses, more pop art than moody European drama, and your brain is just trained to expect a certain kind of images with colors that bright. It's also called Sweet Movie. I don't know if it was Makavejev's intent or what, but the bombardment of shocking imagery, after a while, started to feel a bit more comfortable. One early golden shower from a golden penis will bring out a "What the hell?" but the blow is lessened by the time you get to a scene where one man urinates into another man's mouth. Oh, who am I kidding? No, it isn't. That banquet stuff with avant-gardist Otto Muehl near the end is just disturbing in any context. But does it have artistic merit? I did like some of the set design, especially that funky boat and the collage work (the revolutionaries and pop icons pasted on the inner walls) inside. But yeah, I just don't know. I'm sure this movie is either a trashy masterpiece and much better than I think or just plain trashy and not nearly as good. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, but it did make me think. About my movie choices.

And I kind of hope you didn't even bother reading this.

8 Mile

2002 Perry Como biopic

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Li'l Bunny Man (or something) lives in a mobile home with his mother and a little girl who is either his sister or his daughter. He works a tedious job in a factory but has big dreams of somebody making it big as a lounge singer. He goes to his friend's club to participate in rap battles since that's apparently the only there anybody has to do in Detroit, but once on stage, he chokes every single time. Meanwhile, there's a mom's boyfriend, there's a girl, and there's a rival rap-battlin' gang who are up to no good. Where's the Insane Clown Posse when you need them?

This would be a better movie if they gave me some reason to care a little more. They almost got there. I felt for Eminem's character, ostensibly based on the real Eminem. He's set up as the underdog nicely enough, but I never really bought in to that conflict with the New World Order or whatever they were called, and his other girl problems, work problems, and mobile home problems just seemed too much like movie problems. When things really start to go downhill for Bunny Rabbit Boy, it's such a quick succession of troubles. Bam bam bam. Hardships hit the guy faster than his lyrical flow. Eminem the actor is fine, but (and keep in mind that I'm not a rap battlin' aficionado or anything) I really couldn't see how he was any better at the contest thingy than the other guys. Kim Basinger plays his mother like she's unsure about the character, and the late Brittany Murphy might as well have been made out of cardboard. The music's completely appropriate, and I'll let you decide for yourself whether or not I mean that as a positive or negative. I enjoyed watching 8 Mile despite its bordering on either a vanity project or either a rip-off or update of Saturday Night Fever. It almost felt inappropriate to watch this without my b-b-b-boogie shoes near the end. So there were lots of things I enjoyed about this movie, enough to make me glad I watched it, but there was also so much that just caused me to throw my hands in the air and wave them like I just don't care. And by the way, would you call that an indeterminate ending? Unless a sequel planned, it seems that this just leaves Li'l Foo Foo in a situation where he's going to get the crap beaten out of him again, right? I mean, he called them gay and all.

Note: I have informed my principal that I will not be returning next year because I'm going to try to start my career as a battle rapper. 8 Mile inspired me, but a fortune cookie confirmed that the decision was a good one. Wish me luck.

Hard Candy

2005 drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: 14-year-old Juno MacGuff, prior to getting knocked up by that menace-to-society Jesse Eisenberg, chats online with a 32-year-old photographer named Jeff for three weeks before suggesting they meet in a coffeehouse. They go back to his bitchin' pad for some screwdrivers, one which she spikes. Jeff passes out, waking up later to find out that he's been tied to a chair with a bag on his head. It's not what he had in mind. Juno turns out to be neither naive or innocent as she proceeds to torture Jeff mentally and ransack his apartment in an effort to expose him as the pedophile she thinks he is.

This is the second Cory recommendation I've watched this month that has both Patrick Wilson and a pedophile being mistreated. I think this means that Patrick Wilson is Cory's new favorite actor, but I'm not sure.

Probably the less you know about Hard Candy, the better chance you'll end up enjoying it if this sort of psychological thriller is your bag. This will likely have spoilers. I went in knowing nothing, and although I wasn't caught completely off guard when it transforms into a very dark tale of revenge, there were still lots and lots of surprises. When a movie's really got only two performers, their story is only going to work if both of them are good. With Hard Candy, that's the case for the most part, although both are kind of a mixed bag thanks to a sloppy script. Ellen Page plays naive and vulnerable and innocently flirtatious really well, and I was really impressed with the job she did during the first twenty minutes of the movie. When she turns into a complete psychopath, I thought her character was a bit too snarky and sneering. She ended up really annoying. Cory's new favorite actor was excellent in a role that must have been physically and mentally exhausting. He's good as both sneaky predator and victim. The problems I had with the characters wasn't with the acting; it was that I didn't really feel like I could root for either of them. You can't root for a pedophile in a movie no matter how many times he cries out, "I'm not a pedophile." And Page's character was, as I said, a bratty psychopath. The dialogue became less and less realistic as the story went along, and I didn't end up believing either character. A lot of the problem was the script. "C'mon, Jeff...shoot me. C'mon, Jeff...shoot me." Oh, boy. And the "I'm every little girl..." line was really heavyhanded. This is also one of these modern stories that tries to shock and then shock you again with more twists than a story this size can possibly contain. The best example of how these twists do nothing more than mess up the story is when a third character, Sandra Oh as a neighbor, pops up and Ellen Page's character suddenly turns into a complete moron. The tortuous complications in Hard Candy end up seeming more like distractions than anything else. I didn't care much for the style of this movie either. The scene with the characters driving from coffee place to Jeff's home actually made me laugh. There are alternating shots of Jeff and Juno exchanging this glances that lasts for at least fifteen minutes. No exaggeration. And the "stylish" close-up of Juno's lips saying "Juicy" was a little too much. Hard Candy is a movie that definitely took some chances, and the two leads gave some brave, demanding, and mostly-good performances. Unfortunately, any messages writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade might have wanted to deliver seem either conflicting or drowning in the entanglements of the psychological thrills, and I didn't end up liking it very much. I will say this--the lengthy operation scene at the heart of this film was really intense.

Brick

2005 neo-noir

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Brenden finds his ex-girlfriend murdered a couple days after a cryptic phone conversation with her. With the help of a buddy, he tries to find her killer, uncovering a high school drug ring and getting beaten up numerous times.

Not a bad idea. Nor is it poorly acted. I like that Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and there's not really a weak link amongst his supporting cast. The dialogue's thick with noirish cliche, maybe too thick. I don't mind the dialogue of a movie wiping away any chance at realism, but since there was nothing unrealistic about the look or feel of the story, it almost clashed. Neither the story nor its characters were really all that interesting, and after half the movie had ended, the novelty of the dialogue wore off and I was left wondering how many times I'd get to see Gordon-Levitt punched, probably because he has too many names. This is the type of movie that I'll see on the blog at the end of the year and not really remember.

$9.99

2008 stop-animated feature

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A bunch of clay people living in an apartment building in Sydney contemplate their lives.

I suppose I wanted to like this more than I actually did. The characters and their experiences scratch the surface of philosophical ideas but refuse to penetrate, and I demand penetration in my animated movies. Speaking of penetration, there is a clay figure sex scene and some nudity if that's your bag. Who we kidding? We both know it is! This flashes from character to character pretty rapidly, too quickly for me to really connect with or care about what's going on with any of them. The animation's really good although the characters are at times so unattractive that they don't even look human. They also move funny. But there are some nifty effects with bottlecaps, water, and other movements that make this visually interesting. Some quirky imaginative moments including the angel on the cover and some very tiny people as well as a couple surprises at the end make this narratively interesting as well, but it's not really enough to make me completely thrilled that I spent about ninety minutes with these characters. The philosophical jabs failed to knock me out.

Wait until Dark

1967 Helen Keller biopic

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 12/20)

Plot: The Three Stooges look for a doll stuffed with packets of heroin in a blind woman's apartment.
They concoct a really complex plan

Other than a couple nifty suspense scenes, including a suffocating and intense climax which has the second best use of a refrigerator I've seen in a movie during the last couple weeks, there's not much to see here. The story's ludicrous, that aforementioned plan involving numerous telephone calls, costumes (seriously, why are costumes necessary to fool a blind woman?), signals, and a van making no sense for a criminal who apparently doesn't have problems resorting to brute violence. And why do they need to mess with the blinds in the apartment to signal to their cohorts in the van? Wouldn't a flick of the lights (you know, since the woman is blind) work well enough? Plot holes galore, plot holes big enough that Audrey Hepburn's blind character could probably see them. Speaking of Audrey, I really didn't think she was right for this role. The cutesiness didn't seem to fit her right here, and she was really awkward when interacting with the terrible child actor. Alan Arkin's character is more interesting, but there's just something unnatural about the performance, like he's working too hard at being cold and calculating. There's entertainment value here, but most of what happens here is stuff that can only happen in a movie, like it had it's very own Wait until Dark logic. It really hurt my chances to completely enjoy the movie although the suspenseful moments were really well done.

Recommended by Cory.

Man of a Thousand Faces

1957 biopic

Rating: 13/20

Plot: The life of silent film legend Lon Chaney, father of talkie film legend Lon Chaney Jr., from his childhood growing up with deaf parents to his career as a make-up maestro in Hollywood.

I can't say I ever really bought this one. Cagney does an admirable job, and I liked the behind-the-scenes reconstructions of Chaney playing some of his most famous roles. But this never really feels like an accurate portrayal of the man, and so much of the film seems incomplete and boring because the director breezes over so much. The fact that I was far more interested in finding out more about the life and work of Lon Chaney before I started the movie than I was halfway through Man of a Thousand Faces is telling. Also telling--halfway through this, I started wishing I was watching a Lon Chaney Jr. movie instead, maybe Hillbillys [sic] in a Haunted House or Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told. This is melodrama that never grips, and storytelling that rarely moves.

The Minus Man

1999 serial killer movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Vann drives a brown pickup truck, not particularly with a destination in mind but just going wherever he goes. He stops occasionally to poison people and bury them in shallow graves, but other than that, he doesn't have much to do. He stops for a while in an oceanside town, staying in a room once occupied by the estranged daughter of his landlords. He gets a temporary job with the post office, is gifted a pair of tennis shoes, and poisons some more people. Merry Christmas!

There's some intriguing bits and pieces to The Minus Man, but it really never gets anywhere. Like Vann, it just drifts. As a troubling glimpse into the quietly disturbing mind of the typical "He always kept to himself" and "Seemed like a normal guy" type serial killer, this is fairly effective, and it's fun watching Owen Wilson take on this kind of role. Owen's good here, but it's the type of character everybody's seen many, many times before. I do like the focus on the subtleties, the psychological aspects of this sort of thing that are sometimes drowned in a sea of contrived suspense sequences, chase scenes, and ugly violence in other movies like this. The plot takes a goofy twist near the end, and I didn't feel full afterward. Not that I wanted to follow these characters around longer, but I just wish there was more depth here. Still, it's much more adept than Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer at showing the inner monologue of a screw-up and calmly violent soul.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

1956 movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Meet Tom Rath--WWII veteran, businessman, father, titular man, generally nondescript guy. He's got a nice home in Connecticut, a nice job in New York, a loving wife, some loud children. But Tom Rath isn't without his problems. He's haunted by things that happened in the war, and money's tight. So when a fellow commuter shows him an open door leading into the chromium jungle, Rath decides to enter.

I like the general ideas here, the character study of a guy who superficially is as mundane as the gray suit he wears to the job but who, like most people, has so much bubbling subcutaneously. The color gray's important, too, as Rath is a character who you really can't define in blacks and whites. The almost alarming thing about The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is the lack of depth, especially given how long this movie is. Overlong even. This is technicolor melodrama wading in the shallow end of a swimming pool filled with squirmy things. It skims along the story's surfaces like a stone, bouncing across issues like war trauma, infidelity, career changes, the importance of money, the importance of family, honesty, and a man's moral obligations. But you only get ripples, not anything to really reflect upon or digest. I also didn't like Gregory Peck. I've liked him before, and I wish I sounded like him when I talked because I think it would be funny to say things like "Oh, man. My underpants are bunched up again!" in a Gregory Peck voice. Or, "I'd give top dollar for a nipple-softening machine." But here, Gregory Peck is cardboard, and cardboard, when you put it in water of any depth, just gets soggy and useless. I'm fairly positive this is the longest movie I've ever seen.

Readers, what words do you think would sound funny if spoken by Gregory Peck?

Batman

1989 superhero movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: All of Gotham's criminals are talking about a mysterious crime fighter who dresses as a bat and can't be killed. Batman! One night, Batman throws one particular criminal in a giant pot of soup. He emerges disfigured and annoyed and decides to take out his frustrations on the people of Gotham.

I'm not sure I actually ever saw this movie all the way through. I was 16-ish, watching this in a theater with Krissy. There was fondling involved, lots of it as a matter of fact, and Krissy was a lot prettier than anything in the movie. And I'm including that scene where Jack Nicholson's over-the-top Joker is dancing purple-suited in an art musuem with his henchmen, one who has a boom box on his shoulder. There's not a movie critic alive (or in the case of Gene Siskel, dead) who doesn't realize giving a henchman a boom box is like pumping an action scene full of steroids, automatically increasing the level of bitchin' by 27%. Other than that, one of three scenes that date this movie with weird, out-of-place Prince (was he Prince in 1989 or was he a symbol?) funk tunes, there's not much going on in this overlong movie. For an action movie, it sure is boring. The action sequences are dull and often hard to see through this murkiness or, in several scenes, wryneck-inducing lightning strike editing makes it hard to figure out what's even going on. As with the most recent Batman movie, the performance of the guy playing the bad guy gives the film almost all of its energy. Nicholson's Jokering is off-kilter and deranged, although the script calls for far too much demented laughter and lame puns. Regardless of a thrilling score and piles of explosions, there's just something stiff about this whole thing. Of course, there was always something stiff when Krissy was around. Wacka-wacka-wacka!

The Man of the Year

2003 Brazilian movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: An unemployed 20-something with nothing exciting whatsoever on the horizon loses a soccer bet and has to dye his hair blond. His new hairdo adds some unanticipated pizazz to his life, and with a new confidence, he's able to ask out that pretty hairdresser and he's able to shoot the guy who called him a fag. That murder makes him a popular guy with local entrepreneurs and inspires his dentist to recruit him as security for businessmen willing to pay him.

This has cool covered. The Man of the Year is stylish, and the premise is as nifty as it is improbable. It sure is a jumpy movie, both visually with some quick cuts and handheld camera work and with a oft-disjointed plot. The jumpy plot isn't really a criticism. The story skims along, touches the high points, and focuses more on the causes and their effects. In a way, it lacks depth, but it's usually entertaining. My main criticism is that I had trouble feeling anything for the main character. I wanted (and I'm guessing the director wanted me) to like him, but there are a few moments when he does some reprehensible things and is guilty the entire movie of selfishness. In a voiceover at the beginning of the movie, the protagonist tells us that God has messed up his life in ingenuous ways, but I failed to see it. He was sort of driven by forces he couldn't control, but I wasn't sure these forces were driving him into a negative place exactly. So thematically, I thought this was pretty uneven. I'm not sure what the makers of this were trying to say about life in Brazilian slums or if there was any social commentary at all, but the poor urban backdrop did seem to add a little more than just texture to story.

Man Is Not a Bird

1965 movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: An older man arrives in an industrial town to oversee work at a copper factory. While in town, he starts sleeping with a hairdresser who also happens to be his landlady. A guy with a moustache, the Yugoslavan Burt Reynolds, also constantly comes to the barber shop for groin thrusting and mild fondling. Meanwhile, a worker at the factory has troubles at home resulting from his adulterous ways.

This, Dusan Makavejev's first movie, is not an entertaining movie at all, and it doesn't make me want to rush out and find any of Dusan Makavejev's other movies like Dusan Makavejev's second movie, or Dusan Makavejev's third movie, or Dusan Makavejev's fourth movie. The dvd box set me up, convincing me that I was about to watch something "antic" and although there were some free-form elements and an almost pseudo-documentary approach that gave the film a different and almost exciting feel, I was kind of bored. I think part of the problem is that I couldn't connect with the politics, the social issues, or the Yugoslavia historical importance. There was a hypnotist in a few scenes with a hypnotist, the truck driver with the moustache (the Burt Reynolds of Yugoslavia), the people working at the mill, a circus, a performance of Beethoven's Ninth right at the factory, but I couldn't figure out how it all connected or what it all added up to. So while the acting and some individual scenes are fine and the gritty style promising, this sub-eighty minute movie almost seemed longer than The Music Man. And there was no Buddy Hackett!

Superman II

1980 sequel

Rating: 14/20 (one point lower than the first one; I had to change the first one to a 15/20 to make that happen)

Plot: After a lengthy recap of the first movie (Superman: The Movie), it's revealed that the nuclear bomb Superman hurled into space exploded and made the three leather-clad villains from Krypton 3-D again. They come to the first planet with one sun, conveniently the same planet that Superman is on, in order to rule. Meanwhile, Superman is keeping very busy with his goal of trying to get into Lois Lane's pants. (SPOILER ALERT!) It works, and she understands exactly what all that Man of Steel stuff is all about if you know what I mean. You're a mature reader, so I'm pretty sure you do! Lex Luther escapes from prison and tries to hook up with the visitors, each with Superman's powers, while Superman himself actually makes the decision to give up his powers, presumably because of the sex.

1) What the hell? My memory must be terrible because I do not remember that Superman FLIES AROUND THE WORLD REALLY FAST TO REVERSE TIME in this sequel just like he did in the first movie. Come on! They thought that was a good enough idea to use twice?

2) I completely forgot to mention this in my review of Warning from Space, but there's an idea from that movie that had to have been stolen by the Superman people for both of these Superman movies. You know the hula hoops that are used to imprison the leather-clad bad guys on Krypton? That identical image is used in Warning from Space!

3) Speaking of the leather-clad bad guys, they're the antagonists in this one. They're cool. Marlon Brando alludes to Irsa's perversions within a minute and a half of this one. What a tease! I really like Terence Stamp (The Collector and Phantom Menace, the best of the Star Wars movies) as General Zod, especially at the end of one scene where he seems to have forgotten the rest of his line and just decides to yell his name. "Zod!" Irsa's cool, too. The thug with the menacing beard doesn't say anything, but the other two have some great lines. I especially like the scenes involving their acclimation with their new home. And Zod's response to Perry Mason's warning that there's a man who'll never kneel ("Who is this imbecile?") is really great.

4) The special effects are good. I especially like the scene that takes place on the moon. There are two scenes as embarrassing as the scene with rubber-legged Clark racing the train though. Both involve somebody falling, the first Lois Lane after she stupidly leaps from the window to test her theory that Clark is Superman (Why didn't she just toss Jimmy out?) and the second when a boy falls at Niagara. Is that even possible by the way?

5) Speaking of Lois-jumping-from-the-window scene: Wouldn't she have suffered some awful injuries bouncing off a canopy onto a vegetable stand?

6) One more thing about that scene: I love Clark Kent's answer to his boss's question about where Lois Lane went. "She just stepped out." There are a lot of really funny lines in this movie, and a lot of humor that just falls completely flat. The NASA guy's line about somebody turning on a hair dryer after the tragedy on the moon was really bad. I expected a second NASA guy to turn to him and say, "Too early, NASA guy. Too early."

7) There's a "flying date" reprise, or at least the threat of one, but it's sans the bad poetry so that's ok. There's also a scene where the bearded guy flies with Lex Luther which is likely the hottest scene in the history of superhero movies.

8) As I said earlier, some of the comic relief in this works great. I still love the stuff with Otis and Lex and later with Ms. Teschmacher and Lex, but both of those characters (the ones not named Lex) aren't in the movie very long. Ms. Teschmacher flushing a toilet at Superman's ice house is pretty funny though.

9) Once Zod(!), perverse Irsa, and Beardo arrive on earth, they run into a couple cops who get some great lines. "Hey, hippies, get off the road!" is my favorite line in the movie. What the hell would make that guy think they're hippies? And then his partner used the exclamation "Holy skunk sweat!" which almost made me want to attack my neighbor with hedge clippers.

10) The scene where Clark Kent gets beat up is hard to watch. These truck drivers had to think that Clark Kent was the biggest pansy in the world. "M-m-my blood. My blood." At least he wasn't wearing the tights.

11) Oh, my favorite line in this or any other movie that has ever been made: Lex Luther's "Funny is a person trying to smile without any teeth."

12) This is a thinly-veiled propaganda piece about the evils of premarital sex or, to put it less controversially, a commercial for abstinence.

13) Everything Marlon Brando or his giant head says or does in this movie is goofy. When he's combining Kryptonean philosophy with Beach Boys lyrics, things just get ridiculous.

14) Favorite scene: The top of the Empire State Building has been laser-eyed off and is falling to the street below! What's a guy standing below do in response? Turn his back and cover up his head, of course! That'll save him!

15) I love the product placement in this. I'm not sure why Marlboro and Coca Cola thought that people would want to rush out and buy their products just from watching a superhero or super villain fly through one of their signs. And when Superman ludicrously flies around the earth really fast and repairs the Coca Cola sign? I'm sure there's a pro-capitalism subtext there to go along with the abstinence message.

16) This movie ends with a bang like all good superhero action movies should--Clark Kent back in the restaurant taking care of a truck driver who mistreated him earlier in the movie. Reeve's delivery of a line about how he's never seen "garbage eating garbage before" is delivered with such gusto that the man should win some kind of posthumous lifetime achievement award where the audience at the awards event is forced to watch a loop of him saying that line for at least two hours. I'm not even kidding.

17) This isn't as good as the first Superman movie. Some of the whimsy and novelty is gone, and although the big fight scene with the bad guys is pretty exciting, it's almost numbed by some of the goofiness that takes place afterward.

18) Oh, one more question: How did Lex Luther know about the relationship between Lois and Superman?

19) Marlon Brando's chest "S" still bugs me.