Corrupt leaders & other runaway trains

I wanted to see me some Italian corrupt politics riddled with assassination but I got more than I needed in Il Divo. Rather than just tell the story straightforward, which would have been gripping enough, director Paolo Sorrentino goes gonzo and thinks he’s Kubrick meets Scorcese but is neither as proven by his pretentious over-direction. Lead actor Toni Servillo plays the main character of long-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti like a grotesque caricature, hunching around, an expressionless Dracula save for the stagey (but really it’s all so stagey) soliloquies where he rants rapidly like a madman. Much like 2006’s visually beautiful but hollow “The Fall” this director knows how to make beautiful pictures, he just doesn’t know when the say ‘basta’ and tell a story. Subtlety is not sin signore; see ‘La dolce vita’ instead.

The frustrating age of Bush resulted in a backlash that produced not just a satirical film in last years’ “W.”, but also a one-man show, before he had even left office. Will Ferrell’s “You’re Welcome America, A Final Night with George W. Bush” being the latter. Ferrell is as always absurd and funny, his political satire spot-on, but weighing in at almost an hour and a half the show does get tired. It seems like a drawn out SNL sketch not helped by a dancing secret service man between scenes played by Ferrells’ brother. Maybe it’s just too soon.

The remake of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” is a textbook example of how current Hollywood does thrillers bad with Tony “Top Gun” Scott pulling out all his tricks: The macho mustachioed men from Central ‘New Yawk’ casting, loud soundtrack booms with pulsating rock riffs, intermittent slow motion with over-saturated colors, super quick cuts and zooms, the overused helicopter shots and not one ounce of honest character development in the mix. Denzel Washington goes from a coffee spilling demoted MTA boss to a superhero chasing his nemesis on the Brooklyn Bridge with gun in hand. (I would say “Spoiler alert” but the tell-all trailer for this film already gives most of this film up). John Travolta is the brains of the subway-napping who eats up the scenery and all but gives his name and address to the dispatchers. In short this movie sucks. Scott constantly cuts to police officers and SWAT teams who do nothing with the exception of getting into three (Count em!) separate car crashes in one trip uptown. The filmmakers had unrestricted access to the NY subway system so it’s a shame this film pales in comparison to the original. That 70’s film directed by Joseph Sargent was shot with real grit and intelligence as it had the meticulous Robert Shaw matching wits with the great low-key Walter Matthau. Its classic ending was near perfect. They don’t make them like that anymore as this remake proves loudly.

Why I Loved "Land of the Lost"

Did you grow up watching "Land of the Lost" when it was a television series in the mid 1970s? If so, you will remember the Sleestak, Holly's braids, and the family's little ape-like pal, Cha-Ka.
Put those cheesy memories aside so you can enjoy the current theatrical remake of the series.

Though the film has taken a critical bashing from some, I disagree. It was fun and silly and captivating from start to finish. Will Farrell as 'Marshall' leads 'Holly' and 'Will' into a tachyon- chasing adventure that catapults them back to a very unusual, ancient time.

Here's what worked:
1. Changing the original father and two children into three adults (two scientists and a beer-bellied opportunist) creates greater humor without the forced drama of children in peril.
2. "Grumpy," the scheming and vengeful dinosaur (with a sense of humor, too) was a brilliant twist on the typical, blundering giant. One could argue that Grumpy nearly steals the show.
3. Matt Lauer's cameo. Seriously, the guy can act. I see him on "Mad Men," cohorting with Jon Hamm.
4. The wonderfully creative way in which our three-some end up in the Land of the Lost is through the mouth of The Cave, a desert tourist attraction that brings visitors on a boat ride into an underground, spooky theme-park-type cave. Chasing tachyon signals to this location, all three head in.
5. A Sleestak gone bad. Very bad. Taking-over-the-world type of bad.
6. Will Farrell's dependable, lovable, hilarious bumbling scientist.
7. Danny McBride is cast to perfection as the cave proprietor turned Land of the Lost survivor.
8. Cha-Ka's life of debauchery and glory.

Silly, great fun. Sign me up.

Woody Meets Larry and it 'Works'

Is it even necessary to start out by saying that I'm a huge Woody Allen fan? Is it even possible for someone to love film without being a huge Woody Allen fan? I say, no. The man is a genius. Yes, he's become a tad predictable in adhering to the New York-intellectuals-lament-love-with-age-diverse-pairings-and-ultimately-come-together-during-celebratory-party-while-vintage-clarinet-jazz-music-colors-the-scene formula. But there's still a little magic there.

To find Larry David inhabiting the lead (the Woody role, par usual) in "Whatever Works" is Woody's most brilliant casting to date. Larry David is so lovable and believable that we can even forgive the absurdity of the prerequisite, later years Woody standard: the nubile young beauty who falls in love with the cantankerous old man. We can also forgive the silliness of 'Boris Yellnikoff' (David) suddenly addressing the camera while his friends look on, wondering if he has lost his marbles. The typically semi-natural Woody dialogue becomes butter in David's mouth. Never a pause, never a falter, never a blip in how normal it all seems.

Yellnikoff is a bitter, self-proclaimed genius who lives alone in Manhattan. When he arrives home one night to find a needy young girl on his doorstep, he begrudgingly takes her in. 'Melodie' (Evan Rachel Wood) is the starry-eyed Southern girl who pours honey all over Yellnikoff's bile. When Patricia Clarkson, as her mother, 'Marietta,' enters the scene, we're in for a wild joy ride. From a repressed, religious Southern self-righteousness, to an expressive, uninhibited, threesome-living artist, Marietta makes a delicious transformation. 'John' (Ed Begley Jr.), Melodie's father, makes a less believable transformation.

Loaded with truisms about religion, politics, and the general state of things, burdened with a familiar plot, and sugar-coated with a formulaic ending...still. "Whatever Works" works, thanks to the wit and wisdom of Larry David.

The Threes of Fall

Since so many films are just average, neither outstanding nor particularly bad, I find them hard to write on. We only use 5 shakers to keep it simple- not the one to one-hundred exactness of Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. Some average threes are almost-fours- others almost-twos. Zzzzzzz... Sorry, anyway here’s a bunch of average Joes:

"Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" - Made during the writing strike this is basically a showcase for the singing and comic talents of Neil Patrick Harris who went on to take over the award show host circuit. A cute story of offbeat superheroes; it’s retro, kitschy and hip with catchy songs. Kind of like a fun college film. The creators are the Hollywood writing family behind “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and other hi-grade pop phenoms: Jed, Joss and Zack Whedon. These men have a cult army of followers and this was a big hit at Comic-Con. You get the picture, wants to be a mini-“Rocky Horror Picture Show” for geeks.

“O’ Horten” - I loved how director Brent Hamer adapted Charles Bukowski in 2005’s “Factotum”. Here he creates a Norwegian deadpan existentialist flick about a retiring train engineer so I counted myself in! Loneliness, old age, absurdity and non sequiturs are all represented in this offbeat tale. However, like Jim Jarmusch’s work (except “Mystery Train” which I loved) this was critically praised but didn't quite work for me.

“Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!” - This is a pretty comprehensive look at how the B-Movies of Australia from the sixties through the eighties helped to establish that countrys’ national film industry. A feast of clips intercut with the older and wiser filmmakers and one horribly pretentious film critic (I hate those guys), this film moves along briskly with sex, violence, Kung Fu and car crashes. Seeing how all of this gave birth to “Mad Max”, the “Godfather” of these films, is fascinating but like the exploitive films themselves it does get tired and repetitive.

“Every Little Step” – When choreographer Michael Bennett held an interview/workshop with a bunch of dancers in New York City in 1974 and turned it into “A Chorus Line”, it became a classic Broadway success story. Winning a Pulitzer and nine Tony Awards it ran on Broadway for fifteen years closing in 1990. Fifteen more years later some of the members of the original creative team reassemble to stage a revival and this doc follows the dancers that audition for this show in a clever, life-imitating-fiction-which imitates-life loop. Yet just as the original writing team feared that too many stories would overwhelm the audience this film spreads itself too thin. I would say this is for hardcore fans only, but watching actor Jason Tam nail an audition so convincingly that it renders the production team into a bunch of crying schoolgirls, is to watch an actors’ dream. I wanted more of these breakthrough moments but as they say it’s like lightening in a bottle. “ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway” was much more fun.

“Lymelife” - Directed by Derick Martini and co written with his brother Steven (what’s with all the family teams popping up?), this film felt like the serious older cousin to Greg Mottola’s excellent “Adventureland”. I guess I should have reviewed that one. A coming-of-age film set in the late seventies on Long Island, this film would fall into the suburban angst genre I talked about earlier this year. Long-faced Rory and Kieran Culkin do their best as two siblings trapped in a disintegrating family. The adult stars Alec Baldwin, Cynthia Nixon, Timothy Hutton and Jill Hennessy almost save this film from its own over-seriousness. Almost doesn’t count.

“Coraline” - Speaking of depressing? Jeez Louise who is this film aimed at? Too creepy for children and a little too weird for adults, “Coraline” is Henry Selicks’ version of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” without the fun. The stop-animation is clever and all, but an alternative universe where a young girl must replace her eyes with buttons freaks me out much more than when the Abominable Snowman terrorized Rudolph. Children will go all Goth or Emo soon enough without entertaining them with this kind of horror and loneliness; as Joker asked: “Why so serious? “

Demonic Ambitions

Fall is upon us and Halloween approaches! I rented the Blu-Ray of the original “Halloween” and several other scary flicks to get in the mood and will cap off the month seeing the original “Psycho” accompanied by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra- good times!

In ‘Audience of One ‘ director Mike Jacobs shows us something pretty scary- real-life religious fanaticism which is growing by leaps and bounds in this country. In uncertain times it’s comforting to have religion, however when it stops being a personal expression of spirituality and goes all cultish it is downright dangerous. Folks who believe that they are on a “mission from God” ala the “Blues Brothers” will have no problem causing all sorts of mayhem since anyone against them must be “the devil”. Working Jim Jones’ old hood, Pastor Richard Gazowsky is introduced to us as a charismatic leader who seems harmless at first as he preaches the word to his San Francisco congregation. We are told that he didn’t see his first film “The Lion King” until he was 40, but that God then told him to make a film (“Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments”) and lo the misadventures begin!

A delusional man pressing his family and parishioners to make a film that he says has 200 million in financing for is fascinating but also a little sad. Church collections don’t go to help the unfortunate but instead fund massive film expenses such as creating unnecessarily elaborate costumes. Volunteers are pressed into crew and talent positions putting in long workdays where safety precautions are non-existent. This is kind of like the doc “Burden of Dreams” about the madness of director Werner Herzog while making “Fitzcarraldo'” with the important exception that Herzog is a great filmmaker, Gazowksy is just a fool. Even late in the film as we see that his fiasco has no funding and he is forcing his studio landlord (the city of San Franciso) to sue him for his back rent, he attends a filmmakers trade show promising vendors that he is planning on buying their high end equipment. In short he has no conscience. Why should he? God talks directly to him. Kind of like “Bowfinger” meets “Jesus Camp”.

As I’ve said before here, I hate the cinema of sadism that passes as horror. Splatter and gore has hardcore followers but I can’t help to think that it’s just not a good thing to get such pleasure watching people get tortured and killed. It reminds me too much of how Rome fell with its residents using death as entertainment in the Coliseum (Though I did like “Gladiator” which makes me a bit of a hypocrite).

Sam Raimi on the other hand, gave us the “Evil Dead” trilogy back in the eighties and early nineties, films that mixed the spookiness of folklore with rollercoaster thrills shot like great slapstick ala “An American Werewolf in London”. These films were scary fun and became better as the budgets went up. Raimi went on to do a respectable indie, “A Simple Plan” before moving on up to the big budget “Spiderman” series. Obviously his brother and he had an old spooky script that they never made and Raimi decided to dust it off and give his fans a little bit of retro horror. I’m glad he did.

In “Drag Me to Hell” he shows his ability to take all of the scariness of that original haunted wooded cabin and bring it to a normal suburban home in Southern California transforming ordinary objects into instruments of fear: a stapler, a handkerchief, a coin, a button, a ruler even a piece of cake. Yes a piece of cake – did you ever eye up a delicious pastry when dieting? Raimi and the demons at his disposal know of these inner conflicts.

Our heroine, bank loan officer Christine (Alison Lohman), is a former obese farm girl from a broken home who wrestles these inner demons as she reinvents herself in LA. When her relationship and career seem troubled, the evil spirits channel her fear of eating; the arm of a demonic woman, a fly, embalming liquid, maggots and blood all make their way into her mouth at some point in this flick. It all begins with her fixation on an old gypsy womans’ dirty dentures that she observes as she is trying to decide whether to give her another extension on her home loan. Being exploited by her boss (David Paymer) as she vies for a promotion (he has her bring him and her rival food of course) she is forced into deciding to evict this old woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), which sets off the action as she is then attacked, cursed and terrorized.

Raimi gives us plenty of shout-outs to the ‘Evil Dead’ films including using his trademark 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, a visual reference to the original poster art, cartoon violence in an old shed and Christine’s boyfriend (Justin Long, the Mac pitchman seen using Mac products) making a passing reference that he has a cabin in the woods. The film even opens with an 80’s era logo for Universal. A drawback is the flat acting by the young actors in the leads; old-timers Raver and Paymer fare much better. Lohman, Long and Dileep Rao (as the worlds' most knowledgeable spiritualist) all seem to play the film straight rather than give it the subtle twist of camp that it needed. Lohman especially seems more of a dullard than an ambitious and then horrified woman. A Bruce Campbell cameo also would have rocked it. This is nitpicky of course – this film as I witnessed makes men swear in disbelief and women scream in fright and that’s a lot of fun in the serious world of mass marketed torture porn. A definition of Irish blarney is when you can tell someone to go to hell and have them anticipate the trip. Raimi still has the charm.

Lose your Illusion

There have been many documentaries about the war in Iraq but Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss's “Full Battle Rattle” captures the motivation and policies of our military better than most. Ironically it was filmed in the US, in a mock Iraqi city in the Mojave Desert of California. The “city” is a battle training ground that seems to be a cross between a video game simulation and the town featured in “The Truman Show”. The make-believe hamlet is populated by Iraqi-Americans and other soldiers portraying the locals. There are meetings with the city council, confrontations at check points and even photo opportunities as building contracts and cash are handed out to buy good faith. Insurgents and assassinations also sneak in as programmed by the war game officials. A soldier and the man portraying the deputy mayor refer to their script as they discuss how to play a scene in one of the many surreal moments in this interesting film. When the same deputy mayor proudly shows video of his mock execution to his real family, his wife breaks into tears and we are reminded that this role playing is mirroring the real life violence effecting actual families. As the military personnel are shipped off after their training exercise you can really sense the anxiety as they leave a place where the dead were just actors or medical dummies to enter the very real chaos of war. I found this to be an interesting dissection of the logistics of modern war with the implied violence eerily foreshadowing the reality that awaits them.

In “Anvil! The Story of Anvil”, director Sacha Gervasi first introduces the Canadian rockers via old footage of the 1984 Japanese Super Rock Festival that they appeared at with The Scorpions, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi and other top bands. Members of Metallica, Motorhead, Guns N Roses and others are seen telling of their influence. We then cut to 2007 Toronto to see the band members working middle-class jobs while still holding onto the dream of making it big. Lead guitar/singer “Lips” (Steve Kudlow) and his long suffering best friend/drummer, Robb Reiner are mellow but often prone to explosive arguments like an old married couple. This is one of the many parallels of this film with the famed mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap”: We see the band making its’ way to the stage saying “Hello Cleveland!’, the silly album covers, an audio knob going to “11”, the foreign road manager girlfriend, the series of humiliating gigs, Stonehenge and the redeeming call from Japan. Yet somehow this flick does not mock its subjects, in fact the optimism of “Lips” in the face of all odds is actually inspiring and touching. Their families are still trying to support them and you can’t help but to pull for (or head bang for) this group as well.

Steven Soderbergh follows his dense but unmoving “Che (Parts One & Two)” with a small film about a high-end escort in Manhattan just prior to the election of 2008. “The Girlfriend Experience” uses real-life porn star Sasha Grey to portray Chelsea, a call girl just trying to make it in the world of the wealthy. Captured in a series of high-end restaurants and stores we see what may be a collapsing gilded era as Chelsea acts as ‘the girlfriend” of several nervous movers and shakers, which mostly means listening to them talk about finances. Her live-in boyfriend is a personal trainer also trying to leverage his relationship with his rich clients to get ahead. Their parallel realities comment about the materialism and superficiality of life. Sex, looks and money is all important, but this soullessness is also the death of real love. The film even has a trip to Vegas in it, the ultimate metaphor for the illusions of wealth and the American dream of success. However, again Soderbergh just doesn’t pull it off. This is yet another arty film that moves slowly and seems plot less. To mix it up a bit, it is edited in a confusingly deliberate non-chronological order which is reminiscent of “Memento”. The biggest problem is the monosyllabic, boring performance by Grey in the lead. I suspect a high end call girl would be intelligent and an excellent conversationalist. Grey seems more like a bored teenager here and that’s a GF experience that no one would pay for.

Quick review: “Watchmen” a sadistic abomination, torture porn and fanboys still ruling Hollywood!

No Doubt

This film was another one of those instances of not remembering how it ended up in the Netflix queue but thankful it did.

"The History Boys" is initially a loving, gentle, pre-college educational romp. But as things progress, the truth is revealed in an easy-going, British style. In an all-boys prep school, the various characters have all nearly aced their preliminary college exams. But their headmaster wants more, and brings in a young consultant to bring more polish to the students, in the hopes of not just getting into Oxford or Cambridge, but getting in with scholarships.

A gifted ensemble cast delivers great performances. Esteemed English actor, Richard Griffiths (you know him from "Harry Potter"), as "Hector," is the teddy bear of a professor whose under-appreciated teaching style eventually gives way to a more serious charge, when he is seen fondling one of his male students while they ride his motorcycle. The students are all old enough to know what's going on with old Hector, and even have a standard retort to give when they feel his reaching hand. Nothing is done beyond this. There is a certain amount of acceptance and calm here that keeps things from developing beyond a simple, acknowledged fondle. Hector himself seems to truly care for the boys and encourages their success. We get the impression that he is controlling his urges so that he would never go beyond a roving hand. But when a crossing guard takes notice of this, the headmaster of the school steps in and "requests" that Hector retire immediately. Hector is so loveable, it's hard to come to terms with the realization that he truly is a pedophile. But, as in life, there are many shades of grey.

The struggles and coercion and maneuvering that the boys all partake in is what gets at the heart of the story. Learning the less-than-admirable manipulations that adults engage in is as much a part of their education as essays worthy of acceptance into Oxford.

Like "Doubt," "The History Boys" was also a play before it became a film. And both films tackle sexual child abuse in different ways. In Doubt, there is the ruination and damnation of an esteemed clergyman, and the tragedy of his young victim. In The History Boys, there is the more subtle realism of a gentle yet lecherous old man. Here, not only are the students older, but they are wiser, and know that these subtle advances are a part of the adult world, as it is about to unfold before them.