Review – Freeway (1996)

I’m almost impressed by how stubbornly this picture rejects all possible opportunities to be clever or entertaining in any way. Reese Witherspoon (back when she wasn’t too big for roles like this) stars as a skanky teenager who falls into the clutches of a serial killer (Kiefer Sutherland). The tables turn back and forth several times as the plot unfolds, but the driving force is always brutish violence. The resulting tale is stupid, predictable (once you abandon any hope that it’s going to take an unpredictable twist) and dull. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Helvetica

Here’s a documentary in search of an audience. The only folks this is likely to appeal to are typography nerds willing to sit through an hour and a half about one type family. On the other hand, they’ll also have to be type nerds who don’t already know the history of the Helvetica fonts. Here and there we get a sprinkling of the circumstances surrounding the fonts’ historical development, particularly what they were a rebellion against and what in turn developed as a rebellion against them. But most of the interviews are self-indulgent babbling from artists who spend all their lives thinking about the tiny details that make one typeface different from another. Mildly amusing

Review – The Bridge on the River Kwai

For a war movie, this is an exceptionally morally ambiguous production. On the one hand we have an English officer (Alec Guiness) who seems like a decent, upstanding sort of guy. Yet he gets so deeply into cooperating with his Japanese captors that he actually ends up improving their chances of building a bridge that will carry troops and munitions to the front lines of the fight against the British. On the other hand we have William Holden as an American POW with distinct similarities to the character he played in Stalag 17. So who’s the hero, the noble traitor trying to build the bridge or the selfish commando trying to blow it up? The end helps resolve matters somewhat, but it’s still a strange journey getting there. It’s also a trip that could have been a bit shorter; the picture includes a lot of long, drawn-out sequences that don’t really contribute all that much to the plot. Overall, however, it’s an interesting relic from a time when war was more vague. Mildly amusing

The Macy’s Day Parade

Ah, once again the holidays are upon us. I don’t exactly let all my anti-social skepticism suddenly drop just because the first flakes of snow start to fall and I end up eating more turkey than anyone with sense would ever consume. Indeed, if anything the holidays make me even grumpier than usual.

Take the annual festival of avarice known in the halls of commerce as Black Friday, touted on the airwaves as After-Thanksgiving Sales, and celebrated in the Lens household as Buy Nothing Day. It could just be all the turkey I ate, but I actually get a little ill every year when the local news calls upon me to witness the spectacle of morons camped out in below-freezing conditions for two nights in a row (thus missing Thanksgiving dinner with their families) just so they can be first in line for sale prices at Best Buy.

That said, however, I must concede that I too have some masochistic holiday traditions that I observe religiously every year. Chief among these is my irrational addiction to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, also known as our annual reminder that for some reason Up With People still exists. I have a dim childhood memory of being taken to the parade when I was a wee toddler, but of course the tradition now centers not on the live, in-person experience but on TV coverage thereof.

This year, as ever, the televised versions sucked. I surfed back and forth between NBC and CBS, switching whenever one went to a commercial, dwelled on a marching band rather than the floats and balloons, or turned the broadcast over entirely to idle chatter between the co-hosts. I admit that a sane, detached person would never endure any of this. Indeed, Mrs. Lens usually sleeps through it or beats a hasty retreat to another room. The only way I can preserve my cherished childhood custom is to turn off the critical faculties upon which this column depends.

Every once in awhile something shows up that stirs me temporarily from my stupor. For example, the sight of The Crocodile Hunter’s widow and orphan doing a jump-up-and-down dance on a float that looked as if it might collapse at any moment suggested the possibility of a show-spoiling bit of grim coincidence. I was also disturbed by the Sesame Street float, which sported the desiccated corpse of Bob – the only cast member left from when I watched the show as a kid – still bravely lip-syncing away. Otherwise, however, I was content to turn my critical thinker off and just accept the spectacle at face value.

With one exception: the musical numbers. Before the parade itself gets within camera range, the networks (particularly NBC, though CBS did a little of it as well) kill time by airing performances from the Broadway stage. Or to be more precise, Broadway production numbers performed in front of Macy’s. Normally I try not to object to the practice too much, though of course I’d rather look at the parade itself.

But this year something about the numbers caught my eye. The acts I saw came from five musicals: Spamalot, Legally Blonde, Young Frankenstein, Xanadu and Mary Poppins. One immediately notices something about this set: they’re all musicals that were originally movies. The last two were musical movies, so I can only assume that translating them for the stage was a relatively harmless act. Likewise Legally Blonde was already sufficiently terrible that I don’t expect Broadway could damage it much.

The other two, on the other hand, did make my stomach lurch a bit (and no, it wasn’t the turkey, because the uncooked bird was still in the fridge at that point). I liked the movie version of Young Frankenstein, and the number they did from it was sufficiently dreadful to make me shudder at the thought of what the whole musical must be like. Perhaps I should just take comfort in the fact that Mel Brooks hasn’t turned Spaceballs into a musical. Yet.

But the one that really bugged me was Spamalot. The number they did was “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Monty Python fans of course know that this song comes not from Monty Python and the Holy Grail but from Life of Brian. In its original context, the chipper lyrics are completely ironic; the song is performed by a group of people who are dying of crucifixion. But now it seems to be an earnest reminder that “if life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten” belted out by gaily-cavorting knights and women in skimpy raincoats.

Perhaps it’s doubly ironic to take an ironically-sunny number and turn it into a genuinely-sunny number. But then again, perhaps not.

Review – American Assassin

This starts out to be a mildly amusing bit of low-budget documentary film-making about Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and brief career in a radio factory in Minsk. Almost immediately we start getting bad reenactments of events in Oswald’s life (featuring an actor who bears little or no resemblance to the man he’s playing). But eventually – as all such productions apparently must – it departs from the facts and veers into speculation. And again following the usual Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist pattern, speculation becomes evidence that in turn becomes a one-sided account of events. Even that would have been okay if this had added anything new or even interesting to the discussion, but it didn’t. See if desperate

Review - Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

I think I actually liked this one a bit better than the first one. It seems like just about every super hero movie I’ve seen lately has devoted an excessive amount of screen time to character development. I don’t want to hear about Spider-man’s relationship woes. Just let him fight the bad guys. The first FF movie suffered a bit too much from this problem as well. Though it’s not completely absent from this go-around, it seems like they’ve finally figured out that audiences come for the flashy effects, scary villains and dramatic fights. I think I would have done things a bit differently (for example, less Von Doom and more Surfer back-story), but overall this was fun to watch. Mildly amusing

Review – Miss Potter

I don’t care how deeply fictionalized this Beatrix Potter biography is. I’m just so damn grateful to finally see a biopic that doesn’t spend the whole time dwelling on sex or drug abuse that I’ll take just about anything as an alternative. To be sure, parts of this are a bit cutesy, and if you don’t like Potter’s books then you’re probably going to really hate this movie. But for the most part it’s simple, happy in the right places, sad for the right reasons, and overall just a charming experience. Worth seeing