Review – Terminal Velocity

Here’s another generic action movie with a generic title. This time around it’s skydiving with Charlie Sheen and Nastassja Kinski. Somewhere in here there’s a bunch of stuff about a plot by ex-KGB agents to steal a large shipment of gold and use it to finance a coup in Russia. But naturally that isn’t the point. The point as usual is to move as quickly as possible between gun battles and plummets from airplanes and so on and so forth. Some of the skydiving is sort of impressive, but otherwise this isn’t much more entertaining than the average A-Team episode. Mildly amusing

Review – The Pianist

I confess at the outset that I’m more than a little bothered by the “desperate plea for an Oscar” aspect of this movie. It’s not that this is a bad movie. Far from it. This is an outstanding movie, an admirably frank portrayal of the horrible conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and how things go from bad to worse when Polish Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman escapes and must hide in various locations throughout Warsaw. It’s just that the whole thing seems to be custom designed to give lead actor Adrien Brody plenty of opportunities to show off his skills as a thespian. Then of course there’s the Academy’s inclination toward anything having to do with the Holocaust. Yet poor ol’ child-molesting Roman Polanski couldn’t come and claim his statue in person. Them’s the breaks, I guess. Oscar crap aside, the movie’s long and depressing as one might expect but still worth the time and the mood swing it’ll likely produce. Worth seeing

Review – The Cat's Meow

Finally Eddie Izzard gets a role he can sink his teeth into. If nothing else, he should get some kind of prize for being the first actor in history to portray Charlie Chaplin without doing the Little Fellow even once. Of course the story didn’t exactly call for it. Instead, here we have the infamous Hollywood tale of how producer Tom Ince managed to meet his end on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. The most widely-accepted version of Ince’s demise is that Hearst was pissed off at Chaplin for trying to seduce Marion Davies (capably played here by Kirsten Dunst) and ended up shooting Ince after mistaking him for Chaplin. Director Peter Bogdanovich deserves a big scoop of respect for making excellent use of his cast and portraying Tinseltown decadence and violent homicide with almost no on-screen sex or violence. I suppose you need to bring at least some affection for the Roaring Twenties into this experience, but if you like this sort of thing you’re in for a real treat here. Worth seeing

Review – Sling Blade

Normally I want to support low-budget indie film-making, but somehow I just never managed to find a way to get behind this one. For starters, I’m flat out not impressed by the whole actor-playing-a-mentally-atypical-character. I was also put off early on by the pace of the production, which can only charitably be described as laconic. But my biggest gripe was that I thought the whole show came across as a lower class soap opera. Carl (Billy Bob Thornton, who also wrote and directed) is occasionally likable in a mentally-challenged-person-who-may-be-a-psycho-killer sort of way despite his many cliché personality quirks. But for the rest of the drama, well, I’ve got several trailer parks within easy driving distance of my house. If I need to see this sort of meandering, drunken nonsense I can catch the live show anytime I want. That makes an art film version thereof more than a little superfluous. See if desperate

Review – Hart’s War

Just about the nicest thing I have to say here is that I didn’t hate this movie quite as bad as I thought I was going to. And in all fairness I should concede that it’s probably time for me to stop watching Bruce Willis movies, especially any production that calls upon him to play a macho military type (especially a macho military type who turns out to be one of the big heroes). Willis aside, I’ll admit there might have been at least a small bit of potential to the notion of combining Stalag 17 with the courtroom drama from To Kill a Mockingbird. Sadly, once the humor is removed from the former source and the genuine human emotion sapped from the latter, all that’s left appears to be a lot of boring pedantry. A few years back this might have scored a couple of points for the quality of the production – particularly the brief but effective use of special effects – but ever since Saving Private Ryan I think audiences have just come to expect this level of production values from war movies. See if desperate

Review – 4 Little Girls

Spike Lee proves that he’s as good at documentary filmmaking as he is with narrative features. Of course he’s not up against much of a challenge making his subject compelling. The four girls killed by Klan bombers while attending church back in 1963 left quite an impression on their relatives, friends, and activists in the civil rights movement. So all Lee has to do is point his cameras and let the people speak for themselves. Still, he does an excellent job putting the production together. Worth seeing

Review – All the Queen's Men

Okay, here’s the plot. The Allies are trying to steal an Enigma decoder. They can get male agents into the factory that makes the things, but the workers there are all women. So guess what? Our intrepid heroes must learn to dress convincingly in drag. Eddie Izzard obviously has no trouble pulling it off as a transvestite forced into service to train the other three guys in a squad headed by ultra-macho Matt LeBlanc. The result ranges from genuine entertainment along the lines of the classic British black comedies to amusing farce to just plain silly. Even so, it’s one of the better movies of 2003 and might have been better still if they’d given Izzard a larger role. Worth seeing

Review – Radio Days

Though it would probably be hard to make an objective case for this movie as Woody Allen’s greatest contribution to the cinematic arts, subjectively I have to admit that it’s one of my favorite pieces of the director’s work. Sure, a lot of it’s just as silly as the old radio shows to which it pays tribute. But there’s something genuine about it, too. Perhaps it’s just that childhoods enjoy a certain number of common elements, making the characters and situations easy to appreciate regardless of where and when one grew up. Mildly amusing

Review – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

I’ve never read any of Patrick O’Brien’s novels, so I can’t say for sure how faithful the movie is to the book. However, I have seen enough “heart of oak” dramas to be able to place this somewhere in the middle of the pack. The attention to detail was impressive, but it was offset more than a little by the King-and-Country brand of machismo that pervades the production. Further, not since John Carpenter’s The Thing has a movie featured so few women. That’s appropriate enough to a drama that takes place entirely aboard a Nelsonian British Navy vessel, but aside from Russell Crowe shirtless in a scene or two that doesn’t leave much for the average female audience member. That notwithstanding, anyone who likes stories about the age of sail and battles on the high seas will get at least something of a kick out of this. Mildly amusing

Review – Hedwig and the Angry Inch

If nothing else, this one’s a shoe-in for the palme d’or at this year’s Working It Way Too Hard Film Festival. And to be fair, I ended up liking this more than I thought I would. A rock opera about a transsexual’s journey from youth in East Germany to brief life as a military wife in Junction City, Kan., and from there on to success as a glam rock minor leaguer wouldn’t normally draw me into the audience. Plot aside, I found some of the music off-putting as well. Most of the score comes across as awkward blends of glam and pop, with one song sounding like a blend of the Velvet Underground and Brian Adams followed by another tune blending Freddie Mercury with Billy Joel. And I’m yet to see a rock opera – this one included – that doesn’t end with a big, over-wrought, go-nowhere nonsense number. However, parts of the movie actually manage to be cute and/or funny in a self-conscious but nonetheless genuine sort of way. Mildly amusing

Review – Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary

Here’s a documentary made compelling solely by the identity of its subject. The movie is two or three videotaped interviews with Traudl Junge – one of Hitler’s personal secretaries from 1942 until his death – spliced together into an awkward production that nonetheless remains fairly fascinating throughout. I know I’ve probably complained about the excessive use of this sort of thing elsewhere, but here it actually would have been nice for the talking heads to have been intercut with historical footage or at least some old stills showing some of the people and places being discussed. But even the minimalist approach chosen by the director does a solid job conveying the chilling normalcy of life inside the Third Reich’s high command, particularly in its final days buried in a bunker in Berlin. Mildly amusing

Review – Blood Simple

This early effort by the Coen brothers does an astonishingly good job of playing out the theme suggested by its title. What starts out with a sleazy bar owner mad at his wife for running off with a bartender ends up as an impressive parade of scummy characters doing the dumbest things imaginable thanks to a simple inability to cope with their own culpability in a domino line of crimes. If nothing else, it’s fun just to watch the number of obvious finger print specimens everyone keeps leaving everywhere. The humor here isn’t as broad as it is in some of the Coens’ later work, and there’s pluses and minuses to that. Overall this is a delightful little white trash thriller of murder so stupid you’d almost swear it had to be a true story. Worth seeing

Review – Phone Booth

Of all the movies that take place almost entirely inside a phone booth, this is probably the best. Colin Ferrell plays a small-time hustler who gets pinned in the title location by a sniper who keeps him on the phone, ordering him to confess his various shortcomings to the cops, his wife, and just about anyone else who happens to be standing around. Overall the story is entertaining enough, but at several points throughout the picture the drama switches from tense to downright annoying. And our hero’s being punished only for fairly venial sins (sure he’s a creep, but it’s not like he killed anyone), I suppose in part to make him more sympathetic and in part to make the sniper seem more crazy and evil. However, somehow the relatively trivial nature of the protagonist’s “crimes” makes him seem silly and pathetic, scarcely worth the time of a skilled psychopath. Mildly amusing

Review – James Elroy’s Feast of Death

Fun fact to know and tell: Elroy knows a genuinely astounding number of meat-related slang phrases for sex. He also appears to have some lingering issues related to the murder of his mother decades ago. The grief isn’t surprising, but the Freudian elements … well, let’s just say they’re sort of unwelcome. As are the random camera contortions, hideous ECUs of Elroy’s mouth, and other witless video tricks the director apparently thought he had to build in to the movie just to keep it going. Instead, the camerawork and cuts merely intrude upon what would otherwise have been interesting (albeit often bizarre and/or disgusting) conversations between Elroy and cops, true crime authors, and – for no readily apparent reason – Nick Nolte. At the end of the experience I walked away with little more than a vague wish that I’d just stuck with Elroy’s books rather than learning anything about him as a person. See if desperate

Review – Black Widow

Wealthy single men beware! There’s a beautiful serial killer (Teresa Russell) out there looking to worm her way into your life, marry you, bump you off and walk away with all your money. Unfortunately for her, crypto-lesbian tendencies leave her vulnerable to a sassy little stalker (Debra Winger) who figures out her game. If only the stalker wasn’t a federal agent, things might have gone more smoothly for our sultry anti-heroine. As it turned out … well, as with all mystery thrillers you should probably watch the movie if you want to know how it turns out. Aside from the empty-headed Hollywood take on lesbians, this is a reasonably good example of the mystery genre. Mildly amusing

Review – The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer

Here’s the back-story from Stephen King’s Rose Red expanded and recut as its own little production. As isolated incidents intercut into the King miniseries it kinda worked, but here it plays like a silly soap opera with supernatural hocus-pocus thrown in. Without the tie-in to the bigger show, I doubt if this would ever have been made. Even if it existed, I probably wouldn’t have gone out of my way to rent it. And perhaps that would have been for the best, because to be blunt this is one of the most boring horror movies I’ve ever seen. Even an undercurrent of kinky sex isn’t enough to stir any interest. See if desperate

Review – The Perfect Storm

This movie proves a rather interesting point: apparently it’s actually possible to make a low-key epic. The vast seascapes – especially the towering waves of the storm sequences – alone clearly indicate that the studio dumped millions into special effects. And the cast is plenty expensive, too. But the Hollywood A-list has been hired here not to play secret agents, super heroes or glamour girls but rather working class commercial fishing workers and their families. To be sure, the tale is more than its share of depressing (and I’ve got a big gripe about the end that I can’t share without spoiling the movie for those who haven’t seen it yet). Yet it ends up being a little uplifting as well. I kinda liked the idea that people who aren’t born with vast wealth or super powers can nonetheless even in failure attain a certain nobility of effort. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it and should just take it for its surface value as a fairly entertaining action yarn about man versus nature. Worth seeing

Review – Twisted

This foursome of shorts from Down Under comes across as a weak-witted grandchild of The Twilight Zone. If you happen to find it on DVD, use the “chapter select” feature to watch the first story last. It’s not great – certainly not a younger Geoffrey Rush’s finest hour – but it’s the best of the four. With all four about the only entertainment to be had is pre-guessing the surprise twist at the end of each episode (a difficult task only in the one that actually bothers with red herrings). See if desperate

Review – I Spy

Believe it or not, this is even worse than you’d expect an Eddie Murphy / Owen Wilson action comedy to be. Wilson plays a mediocre secret agent saddled with an egotistical boxer (Murphy) who’s supplying the cover story to get him close to an international arms dealer. Somewhere in here there’s a stealth jet, silly gadgets, double-agents, and the like. I guess maybe there’s a snicker or two in here someplace, but for the most part the flick wavers between mildly boring and downright annoying. See if desperate

Review – Coven

If you’ve seen American Movie then you already know that the title of this unique little picture is pronounced with a long “o” because otherwise it would sound too much like “oven.” Normally I don’t review movies this short (only 40 minutes or so, thank God), but it makes such a natural combination with the documentary about its creation. To be completely fair to Mark Borchardt, this production isn’t anywhere near as bad as I expected. It’s plenty bad, coming in around midway between Begotten and an especially uninteresting episode of The Twilight Zone about an AA meeting that turns out to be run by a coven of evildoers. But aside from the technical quality (and the script and the acting) I guess I’ve seen worse. See if desperate