Review – The Last King of Scotland

Sorry, but after Hotel Rwanda and Catch a Fire I’ve gotten used to black actors cast as protagonists in movies about Africa. I’m not ready to go back to the traditional Hollywood formulation that it always has to be about the white folks. Here the Caucasian protagonist is even more contrived than usual, a Scotsman who graduates from med school and ends up – by random choice – working at a clinic in Uganda. After a chance encounter with the newly-minted dictator, our hero ends up as Idi Amin’s personal physician. At first the job’s pretty cushy, but eventually it turns into a “heart of darkness” experience as the world starts to collapse around Amin and his hangers-on. Forest Whitaker does an award-winning job as Amin despite not really looking all that much like him. Though this isn’t a terrible movie, I think something much better could have been made out of this time and place in African history. At the very least I’m still waiting for someone to do something about Amin acknowledging that – as terrible as he was – he was reviled in the West less because of his psychotic leadership style (he wasn’t any more cruel than leaders in many other countries across the globe before, during or since the 1970s) and more because he seized assets from white-owned businesses. Mildly amusing

Review – Behind the Red Door

A photographer (Kyra Sedgwick) gets roped into caring for her estranged brother (Kiefer Sutherland) as AIDS slowly claims his life. He’s an arrogant jerk, a personality trait that supplies most of the plot points, particularly when he starts to mellow as he nears death. Just about the only story beyond that is a half-baked domestic violence murder mystery involving the siblings’ estranged father (there’s a lot of estrangement in this). Though the direction is terrible and the performances mostly mailed in, the real champ of terribleness is the script. Most of the dialogue is so awful it sounds like it was written by a high school student trying desperately to pass a theatre class (and probably not succeeding). Overall this is a pointless tear-jerker arriving a decade or two too late to say anything profound about AIDS. See if desperate

Review – All The King's Men

This would make a good double feature with Citizen Kane. To be sure, this production isn’t as slick as the Wells classic. For starters, the editing is pretty rough in spots; I don’t know much about the history of the production, but from just a casual viewing I’d guess that it had been intended to be a longer movie and that big chunks were sliced out sometime late in post-production. The characters and plot developments are equally awkward, frequently coming across as ham-handed clichés rather than the subtle nuances of Kane. On the other hand, this approach is appropriate to the subject. Huey Long wasn’t exactly the sophisticated head of a vast publishing empire, so it’s only natural that his roman a clef counterpart would be more at home in a story full of simple-minded morality. The production also features some fun faces in the supporting cast, including a very young John Derek and a pre-gravelly-voiced-demon Mercedes McCambridge. Overall this is an enjoyable movie despite some stiffness around the joints. Worth seeing

Review – Flag Wars

I confess I was expecting this to be a bit less cut-and-dried than it turned out to be. Put the basic conflict here behind the “veil of ignorance,” and you get an economically-privileged class using its power to deprive poor, vulnerable people of their property. Lift the veil in this case and you find two historically-oppressed groups: homosexual men and black people. However, that doesn’t really seem to change the morality of the situation much. We get a scene or two of pseudo-Christian fanatics hurling insults during what looks like a gay pride march. While this is a good reminder that gay people suffer the effects of bigotry, it doesn’t lend a lot of justification to the gentrification of a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. The saddest part of the movie (aside from the death of one of the residents) is how the barrage of real estate agents and code enforcement harassment seems to be stirring up anti-gay prejudice where it didn’t exist (or at least existed in a less virulent form). Mildly amusing

Review – Catch a Fire

For some reason 2006 seems to have been a great year for terrific yet largely-ignored pictures. In this example, Derek Luke plays Patrick Chamusso, a black man trying to make an honest living in Apartheid South Africa. After he and his wife are brutalized by the police, he decides to seek revenge by joining the ANC. The result is a touching tale more than a little evocative of the Bob Marley lyrics that provide the title. Tim Robbins also does a solid job as the anti-terrorism officer responsible for the torture that transforms Chamusso from peaceful worker to revolutionary. The reality of the “true story” is brought home by the appearance of Chamusso himself at the end. Though the monstrous regime that spawned these events is no more, this is still a valuable lesson in a well-assembled package. Worth seeing

Review – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)

Though this movie suffers from many of the production oddities endemic to the early days of talking pictures, it’s still one of the best cinematic versions of the Stephenson classic. Fredric March won a well-deserved Oscar – one of very few ever to go to an actor in a horror movie – for his portrayal of the protagonist / antagonist. However, a big part of the credit for this production’s success belongs to the technical tricks. Jekyll becomes Hyde rapidly thanks to twists of lighting and filters as well as makeup. The results are impressive, an excellent accent to March’s appropriately over-the-top personality shifts. And though not graphically sexual or violent by 21st century standards, the pre-Hays-Code production is also sometimes a bit shocking. Overall, of all the versions of this story I’ve seen so far, this one is the best. Mildly amusing

Review – This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Make a movie about how bad the MPAA ratings system is and then submit it for an MPAA rating? How post-modern. Oddly enough, for the most part this isn’t too bad. The interviews with directors who have run up against ratings problems are interesting without being especially informative. The extended stunt of hiring private investigators to uncover the secret identities of ratings board members is Michael Moore clever without being Michael Moore annoying. But the best part is the actual descriptions of how the board does business, particularly when its often-capricious decisions are illustrated with examples from the movies to which they were applied. Though overall this was a fun experience, it might have been a bit better with less squabbling with the MPAA and a little more careful examination of the ratings system in an ever-more-post-theatrical movie industry. Mildly amusing

Review – The Vanishing

I wonder if the French original was this terrible. A woman (Sandra Bullock in one of her earlier appearances) vanishes from a highway rest stop, leaving her boyfriend (Kiefer Sutherland) stuck on an endless quest to discover what happened to her. Even years later he can’t rebuild his life with a new woman because he remains obsessed with the mysterious fate of the old one. Eventually his search leads to an odd chemistry teacher (Jeff Bridges, sporting one of the worst accents in movie history) who has apparently spent a little too much time reading Crime and Punishment. The result is one of those productions that seem to serve no purpose other than to be as annoying as possible. See if desperate

Review – The Good Shepherd

What a disappointment. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently re-watched Our Man in Havana (a movie that does just about everything right that this effort does wrong) I might have been able to muster a bit more charity. Or then again, maybe not. The subject here is the birth of the CIA, from its origins at the beginning of the Cold War to its great failure at the Bay of Pigs. Or at least that should have been the subject. Instead we get Matt Damon as a nerdy little poetry student at Yale who – via Skull and Bones – gets caught up in the high-stakes world of international espionage. Rather than focusing on what The Company was up to in these crucial years, most of this movie is devoted to the hero’s ever-deepening paranoia and its impact on his family life. So what on the surface looks like a top-notch spy thriller turns out to be a mediocre soap opera. Actor / director Robert DeNiro should have known better than this. Mildly amusing

Review – Children of Men

Several critics compared this grim bit of science fiction to Blade Runner. That’s apt to the extent that both movies had better visuals than scripts. However, this round of dystopia is both more and less sophisticated than the Ridley Scott classic. This isn’t a startling departure from the real world; none of the technology would seem terribly out of place in 2006. But the subtle shifts in cars, televisions, and many of the other trappings of everyday life underscore the dramatic change in the world’s politics. Something has rendered the entire human race infertile. The resulting social chaos and fascist backlash serves at the backdrop for the story of an average guy who gets dragged into a desperate attempt to rescue a miraculously-pregnant woman from the government and various rebel / criminal elements. The story is plenty depressing, so this made a vaguely inappropriate choice for Sunday evening viewing. But if you can stand a bit of a bummer, the art direction and cinematography alone are worth the rental price. Mildly amusing

Review – The 300 Spartans

Doctors should prescribe this movie to patients who suffer from low testosterone levels. The macho here flows like Niagara Falls, as of course one would expect from a telling of the tale of Thermopylae. Overall this isn’t a bad movie. It’s very much a creature of its time, a typical example of the 60’s-era, medium-budget, Hollywood historical epic. It didn’t exactly fill me with a desire to go fight the Red Menace in Southeast Asia, but it kept me entertained for a couple of hours. Mildly amusing

Review – Our Man in Havana

Carol Reed and Alec Guinness team up to produce one of the great dark comedies of the Cold War. Guinness stars as a British vacuum cleaner salesman who runs a small shop in Havana. One of England’s Caribbean-based spymasters recruits our reluctant hero into the intelligence service, a job he takes on because he needs the money. However, he has no luck at all recruiting agents for the spy network he’s expected to create. On the advice of a friend, he begins making up contacts and intelligence, including drawings of a military project hidden in the Cuban hills and a device that bears a suspicious resemblance to a vacuum cleaner. When things inevitably go horribly wrong, the movie appears to be playing out as a stylish but simple comedy of errors. Then people start dying, and the production takes a turn for the grim. Overall the blend of comedy and drama is brilliant, emphasizing the simultaneous dead seriousness and inherent absurdity of international espionage. Worth seeing

Review – Murder, My Sweet

Rare indeed is the movie that’s so completely murdered by one actor. It took some guts for RKO to give in to Dick Powell’s pleas for a role in something besides a stage-door musical. Sometimes a wild gamble like this pays off. Not this time. Powell is just as stiff and goofy here as he ever was in the candy corn roles that made him famous, and in a hard-boiled detective story the guy works about as well as ice cream and liverwurst. Some of the dialogue is pretty wretched stuff as well, though it’s hard to say if it would have been better if Humphrey Bogart or some other film noir veteran had played the role. Otherwise this is a good movie. The supporting cast is solid and the technical quality is good, sometimes even innovative by 1944 standards. If not for the bad casting decision, this might well have been worth seeing. Mildly amusing

Review – The Funhouse

Imagine Halloween with everything done exactly wrong and you’ve got some idea what’s in store for you here. The plot is a meandering mish-mash about a quartet of teens who – eventually – get trapped in a carnival funhouse with a psychotic, physically-differently-abled carny. The production is cheap and poorly-paced; indeed, in spots it’s downright boring. The cast is bad; in particular, Elizabeth Berridge’s witless mugging is a poor substitute for Jamie Lee Curtis. Even the sets fail to work. The main setting is one of those trailer-style funhouses, but for some reason it has a second floor and a basement. See if desperate