Reviews

This is a textbook case of how to make a so-so movie with only a few worthwhile things, out of a good idea and a brilliant first act,by having a failure of nerve. If it had ended with the savagery with which it had begun, it would be a classic.

For those who don't know, the film is a satire about a movie director who tries to revive what is looking to be a huge flop by turning it into a semi-porn film. Unfortunately it turns chicken, and doesn't follow through on its nastiness.

Key to the plot is that the director, played by Richard Mulligan, intends to cast his wife, played by Julie Andrews, in an X-rated role, after she has spent her entire career in G-rated family movies.

The movie comes to be about Julie Andrews showing her tits. Unfortunately, it didn't really work as a comic payoff, albeit Julie Andrews has very nice breasts, and I did always have a crush on her. But does it cause a laugh? No.

What if, when the Julie Andrews character is drugged into letting go, it unleashes a sexual dynamo that brings to mind the great George S. Kaufman line that she'd by a nymphomaniac if only she'd calm down? What if she went nuts on the set, and had it off with all the extras, all the stagehands, and most of the props? What if, inside, she was a complete and total slut?

You would, of course, NOT show anything of it, just people's reaction to it. And that, I think, would make you laugh. Think Julie Christie under the table at the dinner party in "Shampoo." (Robert Towne, when once asked what was going on under that table, said, "At this point, about $40 million at the box office." Adjust, where necessary, for inflation.)

This is what I mean about "S.O.B." showing a failure of nerve. The joke, it seems to me, should be Julie Andrews getting down-and-dirty. And if you're going to have Julie Andrews get down-and-dirty---then go ahead and have her get down-and-dirty.

THEN you could have the director slowly turn from an obsessed nutcase trying desperately to hang on to his paltry Hollywood success---to a jealous husband who decides he would rather not have the rest of the world see his ex-wife like this. The last act of the film becomes much better motivated than the lame slapstick Edwards used, and gives a much greater opportunity for real comedy as Felix tries valiantly, but too late, to stop the juggernaut he has created, which rolls right along over him.

As with all such hypotheticals, there's no way to tell if that would have worked any better. But I smile more at my version of how it should have been done than at the way it ends now.

Everyone currently talking about how much better Part II is than Part I are going to experience a tremendous *POP* in a few months, as their heads come out of their asses and they realize how they've fooled themselves.

Cast your mind back to "Phantom Menace," and remember the wishy-washy way everyone was talking about the wonderful images and effects, and trying not to focus too much on Jar-Jar, Jake Lloyd, and the god-awful script. It took a few months before a consensus was suddenly achieved that hey, it really was bad. No one wanted to believe it.

Well, the same thing is happening again, with far less excuse.

Yes, it has some cool moments, particularly towards the end (and Christopher Lee, I'll give you, is awesome)--but this movie SUCKS. Sucks sucks sucks suck sucks. Sucks like a Hoover. Has high levels of ambient suckiosity. Stop trying to convince yourself it's good--you've been taken for your ticket price, and you might as well admit to it.

Yes, there is less Jar-Jar, but we have the Padme/Anakin love story to take it's place. Yes, we don't have an unconvincing child as the hero, but instead we get a whiny, self-pitying adolescent. (I'm undecided as to whether Hayden Christiansen is a terrible actor; he was given a part that Olivier couldn't have played.)

By the time you start get the big action scenes, towards the end, it is impossible to care about the characters. For the first hour and a half the movie is boring and forgettable, except for the few scenes that are so dire they become unintentionally funny, and memorable for all the wrong reasons.

When Anakin, in an overheated moment, tells Padme that he loves her so much he's "in agony," someone in the audience with me muttered, "So am I."

This is a film that cries out for two robots and an astronaut down in the right corner, making wisecracks as it spools out.

Sometimes two similar movies come out at the same time, and the contrast throws the strengths and weaknesses of each film into relief. "A Beautiful Mind" and "Monster's Ball" are such a pair, and the comparison leads me to believe that "Monster's Ball" will be remembered while "A Beautiful Mind" is forgotten.

The plot, for those who don't know, concerns a racist Southern prison guard who starts a releationship with the black wife of a man he oversees the execution of. But the plot is secondary to the character study, and the close observation of how and why these characters do things. This is the first major difference with "A Beautiful Mind," which instead is concerned with the mechanics of its plot--what happened next.

Howard Hawks once said that a good movie has one great scene in it and no bad ones, and that a great movie has two great scenes in it and no bad ones. Well, "A Beautiful Mind," has no bad ones--but it has no great scenes in it, either.

The aspect of "Beautiful Mind" that cripples it is that it's too decorous, too unwilling to confront the truly unpleasant details of John Nash's life. By avoiding these truths, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldman also avoided making the more deeply moving film that they wanted to. "Monster's Ball," on the other hand, embraces the messiness of life, and shows how moving a drama can be.

Both films are meant as tales, eventually, of redemption. But "A Beautiful Mind" is too easy about it, and I never lost the sense of watching Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly in a movie. With "Monster's Ball," you quickly stop thinking about Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry, and start thinking about the characters.

Because you are drawn into the story, as opposed to skimming its surface, "Monster's Ball" is far more moving, and, I believe, memorable, though that is something only time will tell.

But going back to the Howard Hawks definition, there are two truly great, memorable scenes in "Monster's Ball." I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

There's a certain realm of bad movie that will carry away juvenile fans because of the high level of craft that goes into them. They might have great images, great effects, great cinematography--but inside, nothing's there. This is one of *THOSE* movies.

"Blade 2" was designed to be wall-to-wall action scenes and a genuine comic-book movie, and at that it succeeds brilliantly. Unfortunately, that is *ALL* it succeeds at, and I was struck by how very little the makers of this film wanted to achieve. Why did they think so small?

The characters are not as interesting as in the first movie, since the director and writer so clearly don't care about them. The dialog is truly dreadful, though there is very little of it, so that it won't get in the way of the pumped-up action scenes.

Aside from the action scenes, which are eventually boring due to the lack of any variation in pace, there is a terrific monster/anatagonist, mutant vampires called "reapers," with a tripartite jaw that opens from a cleft in their chin. The technical staff who envisioned and executed these beasts deserve to be commended.

Unfortunately, while the technical staff did their job well, the writer and director did not. This is very disappointing, given what a jewel-in-the-mud the original "Blade" was, and that David Goyer wrote them both. And the director, Guillermo del Toro, has talent.

Basically, this movie doesn't have the heart the first one did, and the director has never heard that less can be more. Will appeal to teen-age boys and others of limited apprehension and taste.

I'm aware there is a large fanboy contingent that will think this a great movie, but I assure you, those feelings will fade as you grow up.

The anime "Metropolis" is the latest in a long string of movies with great images but incoherent or implausible scripts, which I've dubbed "HSLC" movies, for "High Style/Low Content."

Surface is easier to do than good storytelling, and there are lots of modern movies where that's all they try to do. Plop your money down for special effects and design, and you're there. And so we've seen "Planet of the Apes" and "Sleepy Hollow" and "The Fifth Element" and "Pearl Harbor" and "Godzilla" and "Star Wars: the Phantom Menace" and even the original cut of "Blade Runner."

Yes, the images are great--but is there anything in the films themselves you can't get from a coffee-table book about them? Yes, the craft that goes into them is impressive--but is there any character you remember or care for?

"Metropolis" is a bit better, because it has a thoughtful side, concerning whether a machine can love, or feel. And two of the characters, at least, make you care.

It's based on an old Japanese manga which was inspired by Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece, "Metropolis." It retains some of the images from that earlier film, and some of the same characters, but they're elaborated here in different ways, refracted through a Japanese perspective.

The director boldy steals from other sources in ways that make you consider it more than your average HSLC movie. The music is 1930's and 1940's swing, several images could have been traced out of Miyazaki's "Laputa," and the juxtaposition of Catastrophic Ending(tm) (you just *knew* a Japanese anime was going to end in Catastrophic Ending(tm), didn't you?) with an upbeat song seems designed to remind you of the bombs going off in "Dr. Strangelove" with Vera Lynn sing "We'll Meet Again."

But you do have the two central characters who make an impression, a young couple thrown together by circumstance who come to care for each other. Despite how cliched the idea is, it is done subtly and well here, and you believe it.

One of the couple is a boy, Kenichi, who seems at first to be the comic relief, but turns out to be the hero. His great strength is his complete guilelessness, and complete emotional honesty. The other is Tima, a half-human android designed to run a complex weapon system, who is split between her machine and human sides.

Unfortunately, the interesting story about Tima and Kenichi is never really emotionally resolved--the great images and the Catastrophic Ending(tm) overtake them.

It is beautiful and worth a look, particularly on a big screen, but its maker could have made a greater film if he'd paid less attention to the images, and more to Tima and Kenichi.

The script!

Lucas was never a great scriptwriter, and always a superb imagist. Well, his strength is here at its greatest, but so is his weakness. The images of this movie make it a must-see, but the genuninely lousy script make it painful in repeated viewings. It's worth noting that he borrowed a plot for the first film--the only other screenplay he has sole credit on--from Akira Kurasawa's "The Hidden Fortress."

Two examples, one minor and one major, illustrate this perfectly.

The major problem is Anakin's age. I can believe a gifted 12-year-old boy could do the things Anakin does in this film. But Anakin is supposedly EIGHT YEARS OLD. At that age, the character is simply unbelievable. Jake Lloyd isn't a bad actor (for his age!), he's just been given things to do which that young a boy could NOT do, no matter how gifted by magical powers, or which look silly (think of him in the fighter in the final battle sequence, for all the world like a kid playing in his father's car.) Any sensible writer would know this. The extreme youth of Anakin makes the ENTIRE subplot concerning him a failure, and all the inspired CGI you throw at it isn't going to change that.

The minor example concerns the battle droids. They come across as no threat, because they are so easily destroyed by two Jedi. A good writer would have first shown two or three battle droids easily defeating 40 or 50 ordinary soldiers, establishing that they are a real threat. THEN, the Jedi's easy victory over them doesn't make them look silly--it establishes how much more powerful the Jedi are.

These are only two examples, but unfortunately, there are many more: the trade dispute which no one who's ever watched the film understands, the unnecessary subplot about the Princess changing places with her twin handmaid (which is also not done well), the podrace which seems grafted on to the rest of the movie (though it is done well), and, of course, Jar-Jar Binks.

Lucas has put a high gloss on this with an overwhelming amount of inspired images, but the general dissatisfaction with the film shows it was not enough.

It's funny--photograph a film well, do a good set design and images, hire good actors, but have nothing to say, no story to tell--and a lot of people will be fooled into thinking they've seen something worthwhile. Look at every positive or even vaguely positive review for this film.

Despite what anyone says, this is a long, annoying, silly film, with nothing to say. Yes, Sofia Coppola wasn't up to playing the lead role, but Al Pacino was just as uninteresting, due to his character's poor conception.

Hell, even the boys at the Bada Bing club in "The Sopranos" know that part III is crap. Discount thoroughly the deluded movie geeks that write otherwise.

I've come to use "The Big Chill" as a litmus test over the years. Hollywood, in the person of Kasdan, made this Hollywoodized version of "Return of the Secaucus Seven," and made it fake and false where Sayle's film was low-key, well-observed and believable. Anyone who tells me they prefer it has different tastes than mine.

Yes, it has a great cast, great production values, and a great soundtrack--all that money can buy. Unfortunately, its writing and conception are Hollywood conceits, shallow and silly. Not only are the characters less interesting than in Sayles's work, albeit better played, growing up in "The Big Chill" means giving up ANY AND ALL your idealism, as opposed to finding ways to live up to them, which is what real people try to do.

Fortunately, the whining Baby Boomer characters that Kasdan so likes are becoming unfashionable, and modern audiences seem to be seeing through this piece of tripe.

Well, I have finally seen the "Redux" version, and it was interesting.

The original cut of the film survives in the memory as a great failure, filled with searing images and sequences, but with NO cohesion between the set-pieces, and leading up the river to the Waterloo of Coppolla's artistry, the Kurtz sequence, which never worked for a minute, then or now. And, if anything, the film was overlong. If you were to ask me for a list of films that emphatically did NOT need to be any longer, "Apocalypse Now" would be at the very top.

But what was particularly interesting at the time was that lack of cohesiveness in the first half of the movie. Coppolla had made his name in his earlier films from his ability to sketch in characters economically and well, and that was completely missing here. You gained no feeling for Willard or the characters on the boat, and it didn't flow, it jerked from image to scene to whatever, each piece in itself memorable, but not building any dramatic arc or impression.

Well, "Redux" changes that. With some small additions and re-structuring, the first half to two-thirds of this really are the great movie Coppolla so desperately wanted it to be, which feels and moves infinitely better than its original cut. The feeling of traveling up the river to a more grimly primordial world is palpable, and almost wholly lacking earlier.

For example, the stealing of Kilgore's surfboard gives a greater sense of Willard's character, because it's a reaction to Kilgore. In the original cut, it's all passive. You never see Willard reacting to what he's experiencing, he just observes, and the portentous narration tells us what he's thinking.

Unfortunately, it's still a grand failure. The film skids to a stop in the famous French plantation scene, and the utter dramatic failure of Brando as Kurtz makes the end of this cut as unmoving, embarrassing, and boring now as it was 20 years ago. The tremendous improvement of the first two acts of the film throw into high relief how badly the last act doesn't work.

I suspect Coppolla knows this, in his heart. He did lots of subtle restructuring and re-editing of the first two-thirds of the film, but virtually none in the last third. There, he just threw in the French plantation scene and an extra scene with Kurtz, and called it good.

Maybe what we need is a Phantom Edit version. Maybe Willard should get up the river to a vast anti-climax, with Kurtz already dead ("Mistah Kurtz, he dead"), and nothing to show for the journey. That would leave a version of the film with the good bits kept and the bad bits discarded, and an ending that would work, as opposed to the one it's got, which still doesn't, and which detracts from the parts that are worthwhile.

What a waste of the work of Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter. Both of them are superb in their parts, plugged into this blatant "copycat" of "Silence of the Lambs." This was the last, and probably the least, of the serial-killer-as-performance-artist movies which "Silence" inspired. It lacks the pretentiousness of "Seven," but against that it has Harry Connick, Jr., proving he is NO Anthony Hopkins. What DOES work, and works well, is the interplay of Weaver as a woman who's had a breakdown, and Hunter as the tough-as-nails cop who works with her to solve a crime. I wish whoever had written the good stuff that is involved in that relationship had replaced the silly serial killer nonsense that afflicts this movie! As it is, it's worth watching once--but I kept wishing Hollywood would give these fine actresses something better to do!

And this is sure one of them! I got into a free preview of the film, and I wanted my time back. The audience was actively hooting it, despite seeing it for free. Great sets and special effects and decent actors, CANNOT make up for script and direction so totally clueless. As bad as the worst film you've ever seen.

Popular artists tend to be snidely dismissed from serious consideration, particularly if they consider serious issues within what is meant to be popular work. George Romero does this routinely. So, yes, the Living Dead films are popular horror movies, just out for a scare---but they also are an interesting portrait of the cracks in our social life. In "Knightriders," underneath the trappings of an adventure movie with lots of action (I'm still wondering how some of their stunt-riders survived) is a serious film about people trying to find an alternative to modern life. It is his finest film, I think, and sticks with you. I didn't always think so highly of the film--I liked it, but didn't consider it anything special, when I first saw it. Over the years since it's release, I've found it remains in my thoughts, and, having seen it several times since, I've noticed more in it every time. Beyond that, it is exciting, well-made, and Ed Harris is superb, though everyone has come to expect that of him.