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RED: Lesser known films. PURPLE: Lee's comments |
Radio (2003) Wants a little too much to be liked. Inspirational movies about mentally challenged people are tough to pull off, and this one fell short. IMDb.com
Raising Victor Vargas (France, 2002) A good story of love and romance and growing up in Latino New York. All the actors are first-time non-professionals, but several have already been cast in upcoming movies. Judy Marte is especially good, and so is Victor Rasuk. IMDb.com
Ransom (1996) Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in spite of being a millionaire. IMDb.com
Ratatouille (2007) Here is a movie that is exactly what I’ve come to expect from Pixar … and that’s a good thing. I wonder if ever, in the history of motion pictures, a studio has had a string of hits like this:
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Worldwide Gross (rounded off) |
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$362,000,000 |
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$363,000,000 |
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|
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$485,000,000 |
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$525,000,000 |
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|
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$865,000,000 |
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|
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$631,000,000 |
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$462,000,000 |
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Ratatouille |
$577,000,000 and counting |
That is 4.270 billion dollars, friends and neighbors. Pixar can do no wrong. They plan to release something called WALL-E, about a lonely robot—basically a silent film, if you can believe that—in the summer of 2008. In 2009 there will be something called Up, concerning an old man, which flies in the face of all conventional wisdom about animated films. After that, Toy Story 3, and … wait for it … John Carter of Mars, an animated/live action film that has a built-in audience of billions, and has been under development of one sort of another since 1931(!!!) with such names as Robert Clampett, Ray Harryhausen, John McTiernan, Tom Cruise, Robert Rodriguez, Frank Frazetta, and Kerry Conran attached at one time or another. I’m not an ERB fan, but if Disney/Pixar, John Lasseter, Brad Bird and/or Andrew Stanton make it, I will go, enthusiastically.
So what is the secret of Pixar’s success? Several things, I believe, but here are the three most important ones: Story, story, and story! At any other studio in the business, if a film grosses $100,000,000 the following phone call is made from the studio chief to the grunts who get the work done: “Hacks in Hollywood just earned a hundred big ones. Work starts on Hacks in Hollywood 2 this afternoon. Oh, and round up a couple of writers. We’ll need a story, or something, I guess. And get me Bruce Willis’s agent.” John Lasseter, the creative head of Pixar (and now Disney, too) has this to say about sequels: “If we have a great story, we'll do a sequel.” Story first, always.
And he admits it’s a formula, but it’s a formula that isn’t likely to ever feel stale, as it’s the basic coming-of-age story: “With the help of friends or family, a character ventures out into the real world and learns to appreciate his friends and family. At the core, it's gotta be about the growth of the main character, and how he changes.” Works for me. Worked for Nemo, and Woody, and Lightning McQueen, and now it’s worked for Remy the Rat. I’d bet good money it will work for WALL-E, too. IMDb.com
Ray (2004) It’s a formula biopic, okay? There are absolutely no surprises, and even though it’s all pretty much real, Ray Charles’ life was a success cliché: came from nowhere, struggled against his handicap with the help of a mother who wouldn’t let him be a cripple, has this musical genius, finds his sound, breaks out, turns on his early friends at Atlantic, makes a public moral stand, is almost brought down by heroin and womanizing, triumphs in the end. But it’s glorious. I was totally convinced by Jamie Foxx. And how can you not like a movie with all that wonderful music? Oh, and parts of it consist of montages that both reflect and improve on that old device we don’t see much of anymore. Very well done. IMDb.com
Real Women Have Curves (2002) Could be a good double feature with Raising Victor Vargas. A "traditionally built" (as Mma Precious Ramotswe from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books would put it) Latino teen in Los Angeles wants to go to college but is being pressured by her overweight mother to (1) lose weight, and (2) go to work in the family dress factory, where they are paid $18 to make dresses that will sell for $600 and are in constant danger of going bankrupt. Guess which thing she does? But it’s good. And the main character, played by America Ferrara, will soon be co-starring in a movie with Victor Rasuk. If you’re young and Hispanic, it would seem your roles are a bit limited. IMDb.com
Rear Window (1954) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) I know it's heresy, I know this was an incredibly influential movie, but, frankly, I thought it was pretty bad. I've never been a James Dean fan, I thought he was a haircut in search of a personality. His character here, Jim Stark, is a big crybaby. He don't get enough love and understanding from his parents for his totally inexplicable angst and alienation, which he mumbles inarticulately about when they ask him to share his agony. Boo-hoo. And he has contempt for his father because of his perception that the old man won't stand up to his mother. What is Dad's great sin? Helping out around the house when Mom is sick, apparently. (Jim Backus wears a cute little pinafore in this scene to emphasize his emasculation. Ludicrous.) Sal Mineo is fucked up beyond belief, from shooting puppies (I'm not kidding) to wanting Jim to be his lover and his father, somehow. He lives with his black mammy. I wouldn't want to be in the same county with him. Natalie Wood is one of those girls who gets her kicks when boys fight over her, or do incredibly stupid things to impress her. Her boyfriend drives off a cliff in a "chickie run," and a few hours later she's hooked up with Jim, smiling and laughing. I hated all these people.
It's very slow, and I didn't buy into a single scene or idea in it, from the fatherly cop in the first scene to the miraculous arrival of the mammy—okay, she was a maid, but you get the reference—at the Griffith Park Observatory in the last scene, when her dear boy is in trouble. What, she happened to be driving by, miles from anywhere? What is that? Telepathy?
Nobody looks convincing. Yeah, I know, you have to make allowances, people dressed differently in that era ... but all these kids are so clean-cut it's impossible to believe them having a knife fight. Did the girls really wear petticoats to a chickie run? Maybe so, but most of them look too old to be high school students. Natalie Wood was actually 17 at the time, and Sal Mineo was 16, but James Dean was 24. That's a lot of holding back. Maybe he'd have graduated when he was 37, if he'd lived. Then there was Dennis Hopper, who seemed to have a minor role in everything around this time, and he has almost no lines but looks too old, even though he's 19.
There was really nothing here for me to like. Oh, I take it back. Lee said she liked the colors, and I had to agree. But I could have seen that in a series of stills. And it occurred to me that, if this had been in black and white, I might have tolerated it more easily. Melodrama plays better in B&W, for some reason, overacting isn't so glaring. And it was fun to see the observatory 50 years ago, having seen the newly renovated place just the day before ... which is the only reason we rented this turkey in the first place.
Trivial grumble: When Plato (Mineo) has gone berserk, shooting at people, and the cops have the observatory surrounded and Jim goes in to get him, Jim persuades Plato to give him the gun, promising to give it right back. He sneakily removes the ammo clip and hands it back. He does this quickly and easily, showing a familiarity with handguns. (It's something that would have taken me a while to figure out, as I've never done it before.) But even gun-ignorant me knows that with an automatic, if you've fired it, there's still a round in the chamber. Okay, it's a small point, but still. IMDb.com
The Reckoning (2003) A touring troupe of actors in 1380 come to a village where a deaf-mute woman is about to be hanged for murder. They begin to suspect she is innocent. The movie is well done, and reminds one a little of Hamlet (“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king!”), and a little like Agatha Christie where Poirot gets everybody together to explain the murder, and something like CSI: The Dark Ages. People are always saying things like “Aha! Rigor mortis has not yet set in!” and “Bite marks on the body!” and “A swelling under his arm! The plague! The plague!” Not that this is bad, but I kept expecting David Caruso to show up and start spraying everything with luminol. It got a little operatic at the end, but overall we enjoyed it. IMDb.com
Red Dragon (2002) A remake of Manhunter with the part of Lector brought up front to capitalize on Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar win. In spite of that, it’s not bad. IMDb.com
Red Eye (2005) Double feature with Wedding Crashers. IMDb.com
Reefer Madness (2005) Not the 1938 bit of cult idiocy—which, I learn, was actually titled Tell Your Children in its original release—but the 2005 Showtime version of the Broadway musical. It premiered last night, and will surely be released on DVD one of these days. It is loosely based on the movie ... at least, I think so, though I only suffered through that once, a long time ago, and all I remember is the scene with the guy at the piano toking and getting wilder and more insane by the second. The rest is a big bore, watchable only if you’re so zonked out you’d laugh at Adam Sandler.
They use the framing device of a PTA meeting in the 1930s where a guy from the government is showing a movie about the dangers of marijuana, worse than heroin, disguised as an innocent, healthy cigarette. Then the movie comes alive and we see the tragic story of degradation. It’s pretty well done, purposely acted just as bad as the original, with some really goofy musical numbers. My favorite was a vision of Jesus as a greasy nightclub entertainer. Some nice touches, including the name of the school: Harry J. Anslinger, the “Commissioner of Narcotics” that originally sold the idea of the dangers of demon weed, and thus wasted uncounted hundreds of billions of dollars and lives. IMDb.com
Rendition (2007)
“The United States of America does not torture.” George W Bush, November 29, 2005
LIAR!!!! LIAR!!! LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR BIG FAT STINKING LIAR!!!!
If you hire someone to murder, Monkey Boy, you are a murderer. If you hire someone to kidnap, you are a kidnapper. If you hire someone to torture, you are a torturer. This concept has been part of the Anglo-Saxon legal system for centuries. What part of it don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter if the blood, tears, and shit never touches your lily-white hands, it’s the same as if you had pulled out the fingernails yourself, applied the contacts to the genitals and turned the crank yourself. I despise you for more reasons than I can enumerate, but one of the chief reasons is that you have made my country into a torturer nation, and thus, though I never voted for you and will never acknowledge you as my president, you have made me into a torturer citizen. I hate you for that. All decent people hate you for that.
Now, just in case I’m accused of Bush-bashing (and of course I’m Bush-bashing, and will continue to do so as long as he’s around to bash), let me point out that this moral and ethical horror really got going during the Clinton administration. And ordinary rendition (kidnapping someone and bringing him to the US for trial) had been going on for some time, back to the Reagan and George “Big Turd” Bush era. The program really got going when Little Turd came into office, however, with the lovely excuse of 9/11 (if we don’t fight ‘em over there, we’ll have to fight ‘em over here!) there have been hundreds if not thousands of victims—we’ll probably never know how many died.
This movie shows how easily it can get started, and all go wrong. Of course, it helps if you are brown-skinned, Muslim, with an Arabic name, but don’t fool yourself, fellow citizens, one day they will come for you. We get to see waterboarding and worse, all apparently legal because they are carried out by a client state, a hell hole somewhere in the Arab world, a country that wants to kiss American ass because we give out all the goodies.
I suspect that a majority of my fellow Americans would not be too upset by this whole idea. Why? Because All-American Jack Bauer, the psychotic torturer-hero of “24” says it’s necessary, because we all know that every week there is a ticking time bomb to defuse. What I’d like to do, what I’d really like to do, is conduct a poll, and then another poll. The first would ask the simple question “Do you believe torture is morally acceptable?” Those who answered no would be through with this test. Those who said yes would be subjected to “enhanced interrogation.” Not torture. Definitely not torture. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest torturing anyone when I am opposed to it. However, our Attorney General refuses to say that waterboarding is torture, so it isn’t torture, right? So let’s subject all those pro-torture Americans to waterboarding. Say, eight to ten hours per day for, I dunno, a month or so. Then I’d like to conduct the second poll. Again, there would be only one question: “Do you still believe torture is morally acceptable?”
No one can know the outcome of a survey like that, but I am going to offer an estimate. I think there would be just five answers:
.0000000001%: Hell, yes, it’s acceptable. Bring it on! I can handle it! (That’s Senator McCain, showing off. All right, John, we know you’re tough, we know you survived five years of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, and our hats are off to you. Hell, you could do a month of waterboarding without even breathing, I’m sure. You are one hell of a macho man, no question. You’d be an even better man if you hadn’t abandoned your lonely stand within the Republican Party against torture when it became clear that the yahoos who will vote for you were in favor of it. Shame on you.)
5%: No, I am no longer in favor of torture. Excuse me, I’m going to throw up.
80%: I spit on the United States of America! I am solely responsible for the attacks of September 11th! I was on the grassy knoll that day in Dallas! I killed Tupac Shakur, and Jon-Benet Ramsey, and Nicole Simpson! Rape my wife! Bugger my mother! Kill my children! Only please, please, please don’t put me on that board again!
10%: No opinion. (Sitting in a corner in their own shitty diaper, drooling.)
5% Really no opinion, i.e., deceased.
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Okay, how about the film itself …?
Actually, this first comment is political again. About halfway through this movie I had a blinding revelation. If you had put all the actors playing government people … J. K. Simmons, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep (as someone I seriously wanted to kill), and others … into Nazi uniforms … you would not have needed to change one element of the plot or one line of dialogue! I’m completely serious here. Other than throwing in an occasional “Heil, Hitler!” you could play it as written, only with Meryl in a fetching black SS uniform with skulls on her lapels. It would work! No one would have any problem with Nazis doing the stuff that is done here.
Near the end, Lee asked me if I thought I’d ever feel safe again, if I’d gone through something like the Egyptian man in this movie went through. I said, hell, I don’t feel safe now, and I’m sitting on a couch in the nation once known as the Beacon of Liberty, the formerly great US of A. This is what 7 years of Little Turd and his Turdlets have wrought.
Now to the actual movie … which is damn good, for about 90 minutes. Then it goes haywire and can’t seem to remain true to itself. A sub-plot suddenly takes over, we find that things didn’t happen in the order we thought they did, and things are artificially ramped up with a race against time which isn’t actually a race at all … in short, it all unravels. Worst of all, in a effort to have a “happy” ending, the tortured man is returned to the United States, and safety. … You really think so? After all you’ve just seen? They can come for him again any time they want to, just like they can come for you. You had dinner with an Arab-American last year? Made a few phone calls to him? You live next door to one? They can take you in on “evidence” flimsier than that. Screw your happy ending. There will be no happy ending for America until the entire Bush Administration is in prison, convicted of high treason. And you know that ain’t gonna happen. IMDb.com
Rent (2005) This is the famous "AIDS Musical," and I was looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. I knew it was based on the Puccini opera La bohème, and I had heard a few songs from it on Sirius Broadway radio. None of them had particularly bowled me over. I knew that the author, Jonathan Larson, only 36 years old, keeled over dead right after the final dress rehearsal. (Not from AIDS, he had an "aortic dissection," which basically means his aorta blew up like an old radiator hose.) I had always kind of wondered if that wasn't at least partly the explanation for the show's phenomenal success. I mean, what a tragic story! Rent is the third-longest-running show currently on Broadway, after only Beauty and the Beast and The Phantom of the Opera.
Maybe it works better on the stage because, rabid musical lover that I am, I just couldn't get into it. With the exception of a few numbers the music was rather insipid. The dancing was nothing to shout about. The two white guys were ciphers. One of them calls himself a filmmaker, and it is clear he barely knows which end of his 8mm Bolex to point at the action. Take it from me, I made movies with an identical Bolex in the late ‘60s, and you must look through it, you must constantly focus, or all you'll get is a fuzzy blur. (Of course, when we see the final results of his shooting, at the end of the movie, which is supposed to tug our heartstrings, a lot of it is blurry, but some is sharper than you could get with a 35mm and a Hollywood crew. Honest, the movies I made just farting around were tons better than his.)
Then there is the centerpiece, the "protest" against the landlord, mounted by Maureen, which takes the form of a performance art piece. These things are always stupid, self-indulgent, pretentious, and silly, like the people who create them, and this is no different. The only way this could possibly work would be if it were so bad we could laugh at it, but it's not even that. It's just bad.
I don't know La bohème (I'm more of a Carmen sort of guy), though I know some of the music and the most famous tune, "Musetta's Waltz," which is pasted into the final love song the talentless Mark (or was it Roger?) sings to Mimi at the end. But I do know two things about it: It's about a bunch of Bohemians trying to live and create art in a romantic garret, and Mimi dies in the end. Guess what? In Rent, it turns out she's just snoozing. Now, Mr. Larson, wherever you are, it takes a certain amount of balls to set yourself up where you invite comparisons between your music and Giacomo Puccini's (and I'm sorry, dude, but you didn't deliver), but I don't even know how to weigh the brass it takes to change the ending! And they say Hollywood fucks up the classics!
I was left with an abiding urge to evict the whole bunch of them, except Idina Menzel, who can sing, is quite a babe, and I'd love to have seen her as the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked. These are the sort of New Yorkers I've always felt don't deserve a city so wonderful as New York. The poseurs, the agonized creators who never have time to create between trendy happenings, the ones we're supposed to pity because they shared a needle and now they're dying. Phooey. IMDb.com
Repulsion (1965) I don’t think there is any film that takes you into madness as effectively as this one does. It was Roman Polanski’s first English-language film, and it is a perfect little gem. Catherine Deneuve is a manicurist who is losing her mind. She has deep sexual issues, we see her imagining being raped repeatedly, but is this the result of some incident in her past, or is it a chemical imbalance? We never know. We only see her go bonkers, in tiny steps. The movie takes its time, and some people had a problem with that, but I feel something is wrong with those people. Jeez, do you want buckets of gore in the first ten minutes? It is 45 minutes before anything dramatic happens ... but from the very first minute you know there is something wrong, wrong, wrong with this girl. It is done so carefully and so subtly that you almost feel yourself going crazy along with her. Polanski uses every trick in the book from high-contrast B&W with deep shadows, to actually making her apartment become the inside of her mind, with huge cracks appearing in the walls and ... well, I won’t give away the biggest scare if you haven’t seen it. By the end the apartment is littered with corpses and has grown, it is vast and echoing all the tiny sounds we’ve been hearing all along. The ticking of a clock, the ringing of a bell across the street, all these things become ominous. Deneuve gives an amazing performance, almost catatonic throughout, yet able to creep us out with just the twitch of an eyebrow. I can’t say enough good things about this film. IMDb.com
Rescue Dawn (2006) For Werner Herzog, this qualifies as an easy shoot, in Thailand, involving not much more than poisonous snakes, leeches, and one puny little waterfall. Herzog is a madman, mostly in a good way, who is fascinated by the extremes of human behavior and survival. Here he tells the story of Dieter Dengler (and I’m sorry, that name just sounds nasty, doesn’t it? “Hey, your deiter’s dengling, dude!”), who escaped from a prison in Laos back before we were even calling that little dustup in Southeast Asia a war. He was shot down on his very first combat mission, which was secret. This was not Stalag 17. It wasn’t even the Hanoi Hilton. It was just a little shithole in the jungle where the guards didn’t have much more food than the 6 prisoners. Herzog told some of the story before, in documentary form, in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Flucht aus Laos), and apparently Dieter’s ordeal was even worse than is portrayed here, and here it’s pretty bad. His are the only real heroics on display. Being imprisoned in a place like this is enough to break the spirit of 99% of men, I’d think. Like they say, the jungle is the prison. IMDb.com
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com
The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) (Russia, 2003) A father returns to his two young sons after a 12-year absence. He takes them on a fishing trip, but he’s actually up to something else. We don’t know what it is, and we never find out, because there is a rather stunning surprise. Lots of question are unanswered in this moody, dark film, and I wish I knew more than I know, but I liked it. This is the first movie for director Andrei Zvyagintsev, and a good one. IMDb.com
Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes) (France, 1955) This is a bona fide masterpiece. It would probably be on my Top 100 if I made one. Blacklisted director Jules Dassin (who appears here as the Italian safecracker) hadn't worked in 5 years, and took this job for the money. Then he took a novel which François Truffaut describes as the worst noir book he ever read and turned it into one of the best noir films ever made. It is the granddaddy of all heist films, and centers around a famous 28-minute scene with no dialogue and no music. The tension is fabulous. The photography is amazing. Everything about it works, on every level.
I was amazed to find that Dassin is still alive! As of today (2/9/07) he's 95, and living in Greece. He worked a lot before the HUAC insanity, but infrequently afterward, and not at all after 1980. I've only seen two of those later films, but both were classics: Pote tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday), and Topkapi, in which he topped the heist in Rififi, but this time just for fun. IMDb.com
Ripley’s Game (2002) We liked The Talented Mister Ripley, with Matt Damon, but this one is even better, starring John Malkovich as an older version of the amoral fellow. For some strange reason this went straight to video. I intend to read the novels soon. IMDb.com
Rivers and Tides (2001) RENT THIS DVD AT ONCE!!! Andy Goldsworthy is a weird Scotsman who is an “environmental sculptor.” And what the hell does that mean? Well, he’s not like Christo, who I love, whose works are all outdoors because they are so goddam big.
What he does is, he goes someplace, and he makes something. He uses no tools except what he finds there; for him, a rock or a thorn is hi-tech. His raw materials are ice, rock, moss, peat, leaves, sticks. No paint, no brushes, no hammers or chisels. Some of the things he builds leap out at you as made things, like his giant rock eggs made of flat sheets of rock, or his ice arches or spirals. Other things blend into the environment at first, then leap out at you as obviously made. He weaves leaves together and sets them floating down streams. He crushes little dull red rocks he finds and makes a natural red dye that is so brilliant it is shocking, and throws it into the air and water.
I know, it all sounds crazy and flakey. His rumination on the spirituality are a little bit high-flown, but they mean a lot to him; his sincerity shines through. He is a hard worker. His hands are a wreck. He freezes his butt off. He makes paintings by arranging autumn leaves or pins twigs together with thorns into patterns and spectra that are dazzling ... and any moment a wind can come up and blow away ten hours’ work. His ice spirals melt when the sun shines on them.
This isn’t “conceptual” bullshit. It is not the “idea” that he’s created these ephemeral things, though often he’s the only one around when he makes them, and when they fall apart. No, he photographs them, and this film was made, so they continue to exist. You can see a very small selection of his magic here and here. But you really need the motion of this film to really appreciate them. Even better, I’d like to watch him work some time. I’d even help. IMDb.com
Rize (2005) I guess I’m probably the last to hear about the clown dancers of South Central Los Angeles and Watts and Inglewood, places most white people never go. Also about “stripper dancing,” and “krumping.” My understanding is that this sort of dance is in a lot of music videos these days, but since I never see music videos ...
This movie was a revelation to me. Briefly, a guy who later named himself Tommy the Clown got out of prison with the idea of turning his life around. He started dressing up, painting his face, and performing at birthday parties with magic tricks blended with hip-hop dancing. And then it just took off. There were clowns all over the place.
And the dancing ... you run out of adjectives and images trying to describe it. Remember how stunned you were the first time you saw breakdancing? This is like that, only to the nth degree. It is so fast that the director chose to open the film with the assurance that no speed-up effects were used, otherwise you would have hardly believed what you were about to see. Then it evolved, as these things do. One guy says that the styles change every day; if you don’t dance for a week when you come back into the scene you find that all your best moves are old hat. There is now an offshoot called krumping, and it is less joyous and more violent ... but not real violent. I was reminded of pro wrestling. Lots of bluster, but none of the shouting. Guys and girls face off and go through in-your-face violent moves. You might think you’re seeing a fistfight ... only there are no punches. Shoving is allowed, but it never comes to blows. It’s all sheer exuberant and purgative display. You think of voodoo ceremonies, of tent revival meetings when people are seized by the spirit. And that’s a big part of it, getting into a zone where your body can do things it couldn’t do before. It goes even deeper than that. At one point the movie cuts between these street kids and tribes in Africa, painting their faces and dancing wildly.
You know, I don’t like rap, I seldom care for hip-hop ... and yet I just sat through 80 minutes of it [without a smoke break even] and enjoyed every second. Part of it is context. I’d never listen to rap on the radio or buy a rap tape, but it is the only possible music for this kind of dancing. And the music they are dancing to is not the offensive stuff about offing pigs and beating up your ho, either. It’s angry, but why shouldn’t it be? These kids have nothing but dancing. So far as I can see, krumping, battle dancing without fists, knives, or guns is the only family many of these kids will ever know, unless it’s a regular street gang. And the Crips and Bloods don’t bother them, either. They respect what they’re doing, even as the clowns provide an exciting alternative to the banger insanity.
Is this the solution to the hopelessness and drugs and poverty of the ghetto? No, but it’s a small step in the right direction. IMDb.com
The Road to Guantanamo (2006) I really hated this film. It's about four guys from Tipton, England, of Pakistani descent, who go to Pakistan for the arranged wedding of one of them. (That's insane, in my opinion, and a good illustration of how very far many Muslims have to go to attain civilization, but it's their business.) Trouble is, it's October of 2001. While there, they get the idea to go to Afghanistan. They say it's to render humanitarian aid to the people there, as urged by a local Imam. Trouble is, we only have their word for everything in this story. The technique here is to have the actual three guys (Oops! One of them vanished in Afghanistan and was never seen again) talk to the camera and tell their tale, and "dramatize" it with actors. Hated it, hated it. But that's only the beginning of where this film went wrong.
Friends and neighbors, I've thought and thought, and I can only think of four reasons why anyone would go to Afghanistan in October, 2001:
1. You're driving a B-52. But you won't be landing.
2. You're way, way, way beyond stupid.
3. You're a member of the news media. (Come to think of it, Reason 2 covers this, too.)
4. You're going to aid and/or fight for the Taliban. (See Reason 2 again.)
My sympathy for Taliban supporters, whether with "aid" or arms, is way, way, way below zero. So right off the bat I hated these assholes. Before long they're in over their heads. This ain't like Tipton. There's fuckin' bombs falling! Like all the rest of the Taliban, they run for their fucking lives. (The Taliban proved to be a lot better at shooting women in the head in public soccer stadiums than at fighting.) Somehow, the Three Stooges end up in the last stronghold of the T. Accidentally. Just climbed on this here truck, see, and next thing we knew they were shooting the shit out of us! We are told about and shown a lot of mangled corpses, with sad music playing in the background. All I could think about was that, two months before, the T banned the playing of all music, and mercilessly beat women whose burkas got caught in a gust of wind and thus showed a bare ankle. (I saw footage of that actual thing.) So fuck you mangled corpses, every last one of you.
The jolly lads are rounded up, nearly killed by the harsh conditions of imprisonment under the Northern Alliance (who showed remarkable forbearance, for Afghans, by not simply machine gunning the lot of them), and eventually handed over to the American forces for interrogation at Guantanamo. They spent the next three years there, protesting their innocence, bravely enduring very harsh conditions.
That's their story, and they're stickin' to it.
IMHO, I think they went to Kabul to celebrate 9/11, and help repel the NATO forces who were expected to invade at any moment. But I can't prove it. Neither can they prove a single moment of their tale of woe in Afghanistan, or at Guantanamo.
Now let me be perfectly clear. I do believe their stories about Gitmo. There has been plenty of corroborating testimony, and the fascists running the place, right up to the Oval Office, have admitted most of it, even bragged about it. Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta are disgraces to America, wrong in just about every way it's possible to be wrong. They should be dismantled right now, the inmates brought to America and put on trial. It will take us a long time to live it all down, if we ever can. But even here the movie fails. The chief indignity at Guantanamo is sensory isolation, inducing mind-numbing boredom. The movie achieved that, all right. I was bored almost to sleep. This part was a lot longer than Varley remembers because he actually did nod off. A better director might have found a way to make it all not only horrifying, but of cinematic interest, too. But Michael Winterbottom (normally a pretty righteous dude) is so wrapped up in his advocacy for these jerks that he apparently forgot to make an interesting movie. This is biased leftist sob-story crap of a type I haven't seen since Bowling for Columbine. IMDb.com
The Road Warrior (1981) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Robot Stories (2003) This is a no-budget collection of four stories by Greg Pak, all involved with robots in some way. The best I can say for it is it seems the work of a talented film-school guy and has some competent acting. I’d look at his next feature, but I can’t recommend this one. IMDb.com
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another double feature at the drive in Robots ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪♪ Let’s all go to the lobby! ♪ ♫ ♪♪ ♫ ♫♫ Because of Winn-Dixie |
FIRST FEATURE:
Robots (2005) This is a sly political allegory, something not mentioned in the reviews I’ve read. But it quickly becomes obvious that something more is going on here than just a lot of funny robots being knocked about in a weird mechanical city. But as soon as Ratchet, the shiny new CEO of Bigweld Industries, came on the scene I knew he was supposed to be George W. Bush. It became clearer and clearer as things developed. Down in the depths of Robot City was Ratchet’s “mother,” the evil Madame Gasket, a thinly-disguised Dick Cheney. They even had Bush’s father, a pathetic, useless old man, hanging helplessly by as Gasket and Ratchet made their evil plans. See, Robot City used to be run by Mister Bigweld, who encouraged innovation and free-thinking. Ratchet had Bigweld locked away, and devoted all his energy to selling useless “upgrades” to all the robots in the city. They no longer manufactured spare parts, so the old, the obsolete, the tired, the quirky, the rust-begotten masses (the poor, in other words), were sent to the scrap heap to be melted down. “Mechanical Darwinism,” obviously. Enter Rodney Copperbottom, who represents freedom and the American Dream. He begins fixing the social ills of Robot City. This will not do, and Bush ... sorry, “Ratchet,” (wink, wink) declares pre-emptive war on Rodney’s small band of liberals. In the end, Ratchet and Gasket and all their neo-con henchmen are defeated and melted down, and Bigweld is freed. It’s all so obvious that I’m surprised Rush Limbaugh hasn’t picked up on it yet.... or, alternatively ... it could just be an incredibly visually imaginative slapstick lark, full of Rube Goldberg machines and incredible vistas and color and energy, but a bit lacking in character development and plot. Certainly no Finding Nemo, but fun, nonetheless.
You decide.
IMDb.com
SECOND FEATURE:
Because of Winn-Dixie
(2005)
What a crock! It’s the damn
neo-cons again, out to get us! You think you’re going to see a movie
about a dog. Maybe Benji, or Lassie. But no, this is another
thinly-disguised metaphor, this time in favor of the Bush administration’s
“faith-based” bullshit. There’s this preacher and his little daughter. The
mother has run away (worthless welfare cheat, probably), so God sends a
scruffy hound to wreck their house and crap all over the landlord’s flowers
and be loveably out of control, and at the same time restore the minister’s
faith and catch a mouse that looks a lot like a rat. Then ...
... Wait. I’ve got to stop this, I’m getting obsessed. Okay, this is actually a very bad movie made from what I’m told is a very good book. I’m a dog lover, but I hated this dog from the git-go. He is far, far too much to believe in his ability to guide the little girl to interesting adventures. Dogs aren’t like that ... unless ... unless ... maybe the mother died and was reincarnated into this dog?
I can’t tell you, because after about 45 minutes I asked Lee if she was enjoying this, and she said “NO! Are YOU?” And we left. (A neat thing about going to the drive-in: as you’re leaving a bad movie you can still hear the sound playing over your car radio, still being as bad as it was when you were watching, for blocks and blocks, validating your decision.)
We got home in time to see Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on Showtime, which is quickly becoming my favorite television show. IMDb.com
Roger & Me (1989) A great little film, from those long-ago days when Michael Moore had some nodding acquaintance with the truth. IMDb.com
Romance & Cigarettes (2005) I love musicals, and I love experimentation. I loved Pennies From Heaven, where the performers lip-synched to old recordings, and the dancing was really swell! I thought Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You mostly worked, except for the part where Woody sang. I liked the things Tim Burton did with Sweeney Todd. So I was quite interested when I heard, some years ago now, that John Turturro (who always plays someone at least a little bit weird) had written and was directing a “working man’s” musical with actors not known for singing and dancing.
The film has an extremely checkered history. It never really got a theatrical release, and is only now appearing on DVD. And what a cast! James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Elaine Stritch, Eddie Izzard, Kate Winslet, Mary-Louise Parker, Steve Buscemi …
… and what a goddam mess. I think Turturro should stick to acting, because he can’t write a coherent script. The musical numbers seem arbitrary, and the quality is like what you or I might produce (assuming you’re not a professional singer) in the shower with the radio on. They are singing with the music, which only gets in the way of the only good thing about this film, which is the source music, much of which is great stuff. But who wants to hear it with James Gandolfini mumbling along and drowning it out? The only person here who can dance is Walken, and he’s not given much to do; he should have had a show-stopper. The only professional singer here is Stritch, and she has one scene, and no singing. The only person who has a good voice is Winslet … and in fact hers is the only really good performance here, almost unrecognizable in thick make-up and a flaming red wig. (And I have to apologize to her, because when I saw her in Titanic I was distinctly unimpressed. Well, how are you going to compete with a 1000-foot sinking ship? I had forgotten about Heavenly Creatures, and since then she has shown herself to be an excellent actress, willing to take all sorts of risks. Five Academy Award nominations so far; there is an Oscar in her future.) (But not for this.) Susan Sarandon comes across okay, mostly because she has the brass and utter self-confidence to project an only so-so singing voice. And anyway, who cares? It’s Susan Sarandon! Eddie Izzard and Mary-Louise Parker are completely wasted.
The casting is distinctly odd. Sarandon was 59 and Gandolfini 44 when this was made … but if anything, she looks a little young for him! She definitely doesn’t look right as the mother of Aida Turturro, though she could have been, since Aida was 43 … one year younger than her supposed father, and she looks it! Plus, we all remember her as Tony Soprano’s little sister. Here, she’s his daughter? Doesn’t work. And Mary-Louise Parker, who was actually 41, is pretty much convincing as a 20-something daughter. Of course, the only thing that matters is what it looks like on the screen, so who cares what ages the actors really are … but most of this casting works very badly.
And what was the deal with naming Gandolfini’s character “Nick Murder?” Some symbolism I’m missing? He was just an ordinary working stiff. This movie is a terrible mess. Avoid it. IMDb.com
Rosenstrasse (Germany, 2003) Making a tearjerker with the Holocaust as the background ought to be as easy as making a comedy in a banana cream pie factory. So why aren’t I crying?
For one thing, it’s too long. Needlessly long, with lingering shots that could have been cut by half. For another, it can’t decide which story it wants to tell. It keeps jumping back and forth between present day and the past, and even in the past the story is confusing.
And because it’s so slow, I have time to mull over some odd things.
It concerns a bit of history I didn’t know about, which is that Jewish spouses of Aryans were not rounded up in Germany with the rest. They were harassed and used as slave labor, but not sent to the camps. Then, in 1943, they were rounded up. The spouses mounted what was probably the only successful civil protest in the Nazi era, and eventually the spouses were released. So what we see is a lot of Aryan women standing silently outside the prison, and I wonder, Why should I care? I mean, I care about any injustice, but what about the 6 million others who weren’t so lucky as to have married an Aryan?
Then I begin to notice that all the Germans I see except those actually in uniform—and quite a few of those, come to think of it—are not really Nazis, not in their hearts. The worst you can say for most of them is that they’re going along. Where are the millions and millions of German civilians who loved Hitler, who were bone-deep Nazis and Jew-haters? They hardly make an appearance.
The worst thing that happens in this film is that the heroine is forced to fuck Joe Goebbels, which is certainly distasteful but hardly even ranks among the things other people had to do to get by. Think of the Jews whose job it was to cart the corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens. Shit, I’d fuck Goebbels to avoid that duty. IMDb.com
Rumor Has It... (2005) The reviews really sucked, but the idea was so good we had to see for ourselves ... to our sorrow.
Premise: A woman begins to suspect that her family is the Robinsons from the movie The Graduate. She's right. The places you could go from there are almost endless, and this movie manages to pick only the stupid ones. Elaine is dead. Wrong! Dumb idea! Was Katherine Ross not available ... or did she read the script? The original idea was to have Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft reprise their roles, but she died and he was unavailable (maybe a white lie?), so they cast Shirley MacLaine as Mrs. Robinson (the only smart thing they did) and Kevin Costner as Benjamin. Then they proceeded to screw it up completely. Jennifer Anniston was all wrong. Why couldn't she have been Benjamin's age in the original, and a bit more like him? Clueless, earnest, wondering what she was going to do with her life? Then we could get a reprise of that famous shot under Mrs. Robinson's leg, only it's the girl under Benjamin's leg: "Mr. Braddock, you're trying to seduce me. ... aren't you?" Here, we have Ben as a billionaire who made his bucks in the new Internet. Wrong! Why couldn't he have made his money in ... plastic! (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should see The Graduate again.)
Rob Reiner is beginning to look like a sad case. Maybe even a has-been. He had a wonderful streak there in the late '80s and early '90s, with Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men. Then he made North, a movie so bad that critics were almost frothing at the mouth. (I haven't seen it; not even the previews looked funny.) It's like that movie cursed him. He hasn't made a decent movie since. Whatever he may be, Rob Reiner is no Mike Nichols, and Ted Griffin, who wrote this piece of shit, is no Buck Henry.
I'll tell you the movie I'd like to have seen. In Robert Altman's masterpiece The Player, Buck Henry is pitching a movie called The Graduate II. It's 25 years later and Benjamin and Elaine have moved in with Mrs. Robinson. And she has a fatal disease ... IMDb.com
Runaway Jury (2003) Runaway dreck. IMDb.com
Running on Empty (1988) For me and Lee, this is one of the best films of all time. It's not on my Top 25 list, but it easily could be. It tells of a family perpetually on the run from the FBI. Mom and Dad bombed a supposedly empty building during their crazy political days, and a man inside was blinded. Their youngest son was 2 at the time; they've since had another boy. They remain radical lefties, but all they really care about now is keeping the family together until the boys can make it on their own. They can't contact their larger family, they have to be ready at all times to leave everything at a moment's notice and start over again. They're good at it, but it's taking its toll, and they have not really thought it all through, in the sense that they have ignored the obvious fact that, when children grow up, they leave. But if the oldest boy (River Phoenix) leaves, he won't be able to come back even to visit. The dramatic tensions are unbelievably high, the script is honed to perfection, and all parts are perfectly played. Maybe it means more to an ex-hippie baby-boomer like me, though I was never involved in political action—in fact loathed people like the Weathermen—but I think it will deeply affect anyone but the most right-wing fanatic. IMDb.com
Russian Ark (Russia, 2002) One of the most amazing films I have ever seen. It is about 90 minutes long, and consists of one continuous shot, winding all over the corridors and vast rooms of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. This is done with high-definition video and a steadicam weighing about 80 pounds; just carrying the damn thing is an heroic achievement. Then consider that about half a dozen people, director and crew, have to follow along, always staying out of sight, and that literally thousands of actors and extras, all in period costumes, must hit each and every mark without fail, never go up on their lines, in a location where they have not been able to rehearse ... and they have the Hermitage for only one day ... They had one false start, had to begin again, and then got it right, though the cameraman said at about the 70th minute he was ready to collapse. Okay, that’s the technical achievement. The film itself is a tour through the history of Russia, with a guide who, from time to time, irritated me a bit. But the grandeur of the place, the stunning ceremonies, dances, and shows within the show left me totally in awe at the end. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. IMDb.com
RV (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com