Review – Hollywoodland

George Reeves’ slightly suspicious death could have made an intriguing picture. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Instead we get a moody tale of a washed-up TV star intercut with the equally-uninteresting story of a private investigator hired by the star’s mother to investigate her son’s death. Adrien Brody is particularly poorly cast as the private eye; he delivers half his dialogue as if he can’t believe he’s actually saying such nonsense. Ben Affleck does a better job as Reeves, but that’s at least in part because it’s not all that big a stretch for him to play an actor who wishes he was better than he turned out to be. Overall what could have been a fun crime and conspiracy thriller instead turns out to be a sentimental dirge for a Hollywood that never was. See if desperate

Review – None Shall Escape

I just happened across this while scanning through the listings for movies that started around the time I turned the TV on. The description said it was about the war crimes trial of a former Nazi official, so I decided to check it out. My curiosity was well rewarded. This isn’t the most brilliant movie ever made about war crimes trials, but it is one of the few (if not in fact the only one) made in 1944, before the war was even over. The script was written by Lester Cole, who would later become one of the Hollywood Ten. Certainly there’s not much subtlety to be found here; the defendant is a bitter, homicidal child molester who has his own brother sent to a concentration camp. The end is never in doubt, but it’s accompanied by a speech by the judge that makes the whole thing (especially considering the title) seem like it’s designed not as much as propaganda for American audiences as a thinly-veiled threat directed straight at the German high command. Despite the ham-handed presentation, however, this is a fascinating little movie from an odd time in Hollywood history. Mildly amusing

Review – Open Season

I think we’ve officially reached the point where computer-animated animals aren’t impressive enough by themselves to make a movie worthwhile. We might have actually passed that point some time ago, but here and now I believe we can make it official. Martin Lawrence stars as the voice of a bear with a cushy deal living in the garage of a cute park ranger’s house. Then along comes a deer (Ashton Kutcher) who gets him in trouble, and it’s back to the wild with both of them. By the end our hero and his sidekick manage to acclimatize, but only after a considerable volume of high-jinks involving actual wild animals and a psychotic hunter determined to kill the lot of them. It isn’t actively offensive – certainly nowhere near as bad as The Barnyard – but then again I’ve seen better. Mildly amusing

Review – Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola seems to be at the end of her directorial talent in this peculiar blend of costume drama and John-Hughes-style teen angst movie. To be fair to Coppola, the approach might have seemed like it could work. The goal is to evoke sympathy for the title character, so why not use (more or less) contemporary elements to make a 18th century Queen of France into a 20th century teenager? Toss in some anachronous elements here and there (such as a pair of sneakers amid a pile of period footwear), flood the soundtrack with Bow Wow Wow (except – oddly enough – for the most obvious choice) and other music from the 80s, and get Kirsten Dunst to star. The gamble, however, is that rather than creating empathy the modern touches will end up trivializing the tale, turning the show into “My Super Louis 16.” The MTV-ization, along with a dull script, is what ultimately undermines the picture’s appeal. The DVD also includes – among other special features – an “MTV Cribs” parody in which Jason Schwartzman (remaining semi-in-character as the King of France) conducts a tour of Versailles. That packed about as much entertainment value as the feature presentation, with the added bonus of being a great deal shorter. Mildly amusing

Review – The Raven (2006)

This plot-less wonder turd plays like an episode of “The Real World” experienced under the influence of one of those drugs that cuts your attention span down to about two seconds, makes you see things that aren’t there, and gives you a whopping huge case of wide-eyed paranoia. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten bored with a movie and watched parts in fast-forward just to see if anything ever happens. In the past I’ve felt guilty about doing this, conceding at least the possibility that I might be missing something of worth in the small, sped-through details. But not here. The dialogue was so meaningless and all the sequences so badly over-extended that watching it at 4x was the same as watching it at regular speed, only faster. Even the particulars stunk. The guy they got to pop in and out as Poe looked like he would have been more comfortable grinning on the front of a pizza box than wandering night’s plutonian shore. But that’s small potatoes compared to his avian companion. Is it a magpie? Some kind of over-inflated mynah? Would an actual raven have been all that hard to come by? At least get a crow for cryin’ out loud. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Manos: Hands of Fate

To be fair, the version I saw of this was the MST3K presentation, so I think it picked up an extra star it wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. The movie itself is strictly terrible but in an exceptionally mock-worthy way, a production so inept that it becomes entertaining despite itself. The disc also includes an old GM car salesman training video. Mildly amusing

Review – The Prestige

If this had been “Nicola Tesla: The Motion Picture” it would have been a much better production. Not to mention shorter. The parts that feature David Bowie playing the famous, eccentric scientist are actually entertaining. The rest of the movie is a dull flop about a couple of stage magicians striving to out-do each other or at least wreck each other’s acts and personal lives. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman muddle through their parts with the aplomb they previously brought to their roles as comic book characters. However, the bulk of the problem here appears to be the story itself. This is one of those shows that lives primarily for the final turn of its own screw, and such productions die a lingering death when that turn is so ham-handedly telegraphed in advance that the audience is left only with the futile hope that somehow it won’t turn out the way we all know it’s going to. The technical elements of this production (especially the art direction) are impressive, but they can’t do the job by themselves. Mildly amusing

Review – House of Dracula

This is a lot like House of Frankenstein – indeed, some of the cast is the same – only dumber. Doctor I’ve-Forgotten-His-Name is running quite a clinic. Dracula (John Carradine) comes by a couple of times a week to get treatment for the blood disorder that makes him a vampire. The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) is in-patient for a mold-based drug treatment program to reduce the brain swelling that makes him turn into a wolf once a month. A comatose Frankenstein’s monster is buried in a big pile of frozen sludge in a cave under the clinic. High jinks ensue. See if desperate

Review – The Reptile

Ah, if only the English had never ventured into Asia. If Hammer horror movies are any indication, the British obsession with empire appears to have netted them little beyond a lot of really weird curses on their kids. This time around, our gentleman’s daughter has been transformed into a were-snake. The Reptile make-up is kinda cool by 60s-era special effects standards. Unfortunately, the plot is slow-moving, the characters uninteresting, and key Hammer staples (specifically Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) are absent from this effort. I’ve seen worse movies about shape-shifting monsters, but I’ve seen better as well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Departed

C’mon and give Scorsese his Oscar for cryin’ out loud. Otherwise he’ll never stop making movies like this. And he needs to stop. The world just simply doesn’t need another two and a half hours of ultra-macho gangster crap. Matt Damon plays a cop working as a mole for Irish mob boss Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Damon’s opposite, a cop working undercover in Nicholson’s organization. Some of the violence was well-staged, which helped to offset the predictably heavy dose of homosexual panic that underlies almost everything in the whole picture. However, I was genuinely surprised by how terrible the script was. The macho posturing infects the dialogue so heavily that in places the characters don’t even seem to be talking to each other. Thus whatever potential this production might otherwise have had is swiftly undone by the terrible writing. Overall this comes across as Mean Streets slicked up and lobotomized for Hollywood consumption. Mildly amusing. [Note: they gave him his statue. Now let’s see if he stops.]

Review – Amelie

Normally I don’t care for movies as self-consciously quirky as this one, but for some reason this time around it sort of worked. The non-story swirls around a distracted young French woman whom fate inspires to perform secret good deeds for people. Thanks at least in part to some good camerawork, editing and effects, this doesn’t turn out to be anywhere near as tedious as a one-paragraph review no doubt makes it sound. Mildly amusing

Review – Flags of Our Fathers

Clint Eastwood bakes up a batch of Saving Private Ryan, the recipe that insists if you throw enough money at a World War Two picture that it will come out profound. Of course after several years of brainless boosterism in this country, it’s a step in the right direction to be able to state publicly that war might in fact be hell, that even a morally-unambiguous conflict can exact a high toll in lives and spirits. Screen time is shared between action sequences from the battle for Iwo Jima and the publicity tour later endured by the three flag-raisers who survived the fight. I applaud Eastwood for producing an honest picture; the story takes a more-or-less unflinching look at the consequences of war, neither romanticizing nor condemning the endeavor and its participants. Mildly amusing

Review – The Thirsty Dead

Women in the Philippines are kidnapped by men in Black Sabbath robes. They’re dragged off to the secret jungle lair of a bizarre religious cult that dresses in smocks left over from one of those episodes of the original Star Trek in which the Enterprise journeys to The Planet of the Dumbasses Who Have Invented Bright Fabric Dyes But Not Much Else. This particular set of dumbasses worships a head in a red plastic cube, which tells them that one of the kidnapped women (white of course, though of the four women the Head had a 75% chance of coming up Caucasian) will alter their society forever. Then it turns out that the cultists all stay eternally young by drinking the blood of … oh, who cares? On and on this stinker goes, using dreadful dialogue and stiff acting to drag every bit of action out to four or five times its natural length. Honestly, I left the room to take a call when one of the main characters started croaking, and when I came back several minutes later the guy still wasn’t dead. The only thing this crap-fest left me thirsty for was a tall, icy cold mug of nepenthe. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Wow, does this one ever sport a lot of actors who will become more prominent later. And it’s funny how many of them got typecast into playing crazy people (no doubt at least in part as a result of doing this movie). Jack Nicholson methodically chews through the scenery as a sane (if somewhat rebellious) man wrongly committed to an insane asylum. His attempts to better the lives of his fellow patients are mid-70s edgy but taste of treacle at the same time. Aside from the “hey, isn’t that …” nature of the casting, this production shines only when supplying an honest view of the treatment of the mentally ill. And even on that front you get more from five minutes’ worth of Titticut Follies than you do from this whole production. Overall I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t regard it as the breathtaking work of staggering genius the Academy apparently thought it was. Mildly amusing

Review – Jesus Camp

These folks might seem shocking and scary to people in the big city, but those of us who grew up around this kind of thing soon realize that the film-makers have actually latched onto some of the tamer members of the radical Christian right. Quick indicator: anyone who will listen to Christian rock and rap (without believing that the rhythms are putting demons in their bodies) isn’t truly part of the hard-core fanatical wing of the Republican Party’s power base. Does it really come as a documentary-worthy surprise that some Pentecostals teach their kids to speak in tongues and embrace creationism? To the extent that such people are dangerous at all, it isn’t their hatred of Harry Potter that makes them menaces to rational civilization. Ask these kids and their parents what they think about their gay, Catholic and Jewish neighbors (their love-hate relationship with Jewish people is especially interesting, yet completely absent from this picture). Ask them what they’d do if they ever actually got control of society. Then you’ll get a much better picture of the true challenge their ilk poses. This documentary does a little with these thorny issues, but for the most part it takes a hee-hee-look-at-the-rubes approach to the home lives of suburban, Midwestern, conservative Christians. If you think this is interesting, you need to get in your car, drive until you’re at least a hundred miles away from any body of water you can’t see across, and just spend a little time getting to know the strange, new world known as “the rest of the country.” Mildly amusing

Review – Night of the Ghoul

Imagine Texas Chainsaw Massacre redone as a Merchant-Ivory-style English chamber drama (with Hammer aesthetics), and you’ve got some idea of just what kind of boring crap is in store for you here. Aside from Peter Cushing’s umpteenth under-casting, the highlight here is a supporting role played by a young John Hurt, who amazingly enough looked just as much like a leprous corpse back then as he does now. And speaking of leprous corpses, the murderous thing in the attic doesn’t even put in an appearance until midway through. Before that (and for a good piece after as well) this one’s pretty much 100% what-is-it-Sebastian-I’m-arranging-matches. There’s a minor sprinkling of social commentary about the idle rich here and there, not to mention some guilt over the Raj. But whatever point the movie-makers were trying to get across swiftly gets lost in a swamp of lethargy as thick and deadly as the quicksand-ridden moors surrounding the creepy estate where most of the “action” takes place. See if desperate

Review – C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

Ever since I read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle in high school, I’ve been a big fan of alternate history. This “mocumentary” is an excellent case for the importance of playing what-if games with history. Relating the post-Civil-War history of the Confederate States beginning with the premise that the South won the “War of Northern Aggression.” In the process, the audience is brought mindful of the eerie similarities between a fantasy society based on de jure racism and reality where de facto racism still thrives. For example, I was tempted to scoff at the broadly ridiculous scene from a movie “made by D.W. Griffith” about the post-war capture of a crudely-caricatured Lincoln (in blackface, no less) until I remembered that Birth of a Nation was no more racially sensitive than the parody. Overall I was surprised to find myself more impressed with the fake ads sprinkled throughout the production than by the alternate history itself. Somehow the simple, everyday aspects of American culture recast in an apartheid light – such as “Cops” redone as a show about capturing runaway slaves – struck me as more profound than the broader speculation about how a Confederate victory would have turned the tide of history in other directions. Worth seeing