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