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pheyrman
Reviews
End Game (2006)
just another stiff
Some guy gets whacked. Right out in plain sight this other guy shoots him. He's got some bodyguards and they whack the killer, but a reporter gets interested. She goes to the hospital where they took the guy who got whacked. She walks in, and corners one bodyguard, but he doesn't feel like talking. I can't figure out why. It's not like anyone else is interested. She's the only reporter there. Anyway, her editor discourages her from working on this lame story. But hey, she does anyway. She goes to see the killer's sister & mom. A few minutes after she leaves they get whacked big time-- somebody blows up their trailer-- huge ball of fire. Then she searches out the bodyguard from the hospital. She finds him hungover on his boat, but a minute later they're both underwater sucking on a scuba tank 'cause three guys are trying to whack them (and have blown up the boat big time-- huge ball of fire). The reporter and the bodyguard whack two of the guys who are trying to whack them.
In the course of the next hour another guy gets whacked crossing the street, there's a shootout with several stiffs in a warehouse, some car chases with wreckage & death, a fake suicide, etc. etc. Lotsa stiffs, all kindsa carnage.
Great stuff, but what the reporter and the bodyguard can't figure is: why in hell the original guy got whacked. What's the motivation? Of course, it might help us to figure out why the reporter's even interested. Through almost all of this she's the only reporter on the story. Nobody else in the media cares. Not even with all the big fireballs and dead bodies. True, the original guy who got whacked wasn't exactly a celebrity. His job was a little bit dull. He was just the President. Yeah, the one who lives in the White House. Oh, and the bodyguard is a Secret Service agent.
Is that the spoiler?
It should be. After all there are no TV cameras, no other print reporters, no bloggers... just another one of those police blotter crimes...
So what's the spoiler?
Lemme think...
No! Wait! The spoiler is that his wife did it! Yeah... the First Lady. She was p---ed because the President was fooling around. And she gets away with it. She's really sharp, huh? But how the hell could anybody ever figure that out? Why would anyone bother? After all, only one reporter is even interested.
I give this move a "1". It was so dumb I just had to keep watching. And it only got dumber! That's the real spoiler! But even though I've told you, you've got to see it to believe it!
Replay (2003)
A unique crime movie that works.
I saw "Replay" on video at a friend's house. I hadn't been planning to watch a movie, but I came in just as it was beginning, and didn't leave my seat until the film was over.
I was watching it on a TV screen, just like the cops were. The people who saw it in the theatre liked it, and I'd love to see it that way, but it certainly works well on the small screen. I found myself talking back to the cops as they made assumptions, interpreted movements, gathering and discarding as they groped toward a solution.
I didn't find myself being as detached as one previous reviewer, though I can see the detachment theme. Surveillance films are distant by nature, but they are only a starting point here, as are the cops. What this film is about is how observers try to separate themselves from what's observed, and the successes and failures inherent in that. Through the whole film I was more and more drawn in, and the magnet was the human beings on the screen. The mundane nature of the presentation of violence only accented the human price of the crime.
Erin Brockovich (2000)
deep
With this, "Traffic" and "Ocean's Eleven" we can finally say: here is a director creating a complete canon of films. The philosophical depths absolutely tickle the spinal cord when poor little Erin... well, those of you who've seen it know what I mean. There is such a Dickensian flavor to this, as if you'd ripped those poor wretches right out of nineteenth century England and plopped them down in the polluted hardscrabble of corporate USA. And, as with that master storyteller of the last empire, Mr. Soderbergh gives the rich detail, layering pattern upon pattern, until we finally come face to face with greed, avarice, and profit. Yet, this film lifts the spirits, giving us a new understanding of what heroism and altruism are all about in Social Deconstructionist America.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)
Positively subversive.
This film is positively subversive. Director Joel Zwick and star-writer Nia Vardalos have taken a line from earlier innovators in the Cinema of Radicalism, and carefully disguised this movie's revolutionary agenda in traditional forms. Here we have a film that dresses itself in the feel-good qualities of "Leave it to Beaver", and in the reassuring tones of screwball comedy. Its locale glides effortlessly from suburbia, to the cosmopolitan settings of urban Chicago. All is subtly immersed in a Midwestern, "heartland" ethos.
Yet, as the film progresses, we find ourselves swept into a theme of radicalism. One must admire the sheer nerve of Zwick and Vardalos, suggesting that Greek Orthodox theology might be wedded to the Protestant canons. Martin Luther would spin in his grave. Why, if America were to adopt the radical line of thought promoted here, a Shinto-Quaker Alliance groom might take a bride from an Islamic Unitarian background without anyone raising an eyebrow.
And the women! No doubt Ms. Vardalos was the main perpetrator here. In the innocent realms of a storefront travel agency the heroine is depicted as transforming from a meek woman-trampled-on-the-pedestal into an aggressive sexual predator. That this feminist standard is raised by a woman whose roots lie perilously close to the woman-hating, reactionary Fundamentalist Judao-Islamic regimes of the Middle East is all the more telling.
While one must admire the artistic courage displayed by Zwick and Vardalos, one must also question the Marxian Fundamentalist attitude as shown in the scenes depicting ritual immersion, and the spiritual surrender to ouzo. Also, the movie ends without answering that primal question: What of the children? Even great films can go too far.
But these are minor flaws. The film's makers have taken the form of the Hollywood screwball comedy, and infused it with political and societal connotations too deep to mention.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
close, but no cigar
Though Scorsese showed the he can handle comic themes in "The King of Comedy," he fails in "The Last Temptation of Christ." Despite a Judas from Brooklyn, and a Christ who looks like a reject from a DeMille crowd scene, this film never finds its comic heart. Admittedly, it has its moments. Satan is a riot, and Verna Bloom's Mary plays the virgin mother bit for every pratfall. But great comedy relies on great timing. We don't find it here. Lenny Bruce did far better with the same material.
The Fountainhead (1949)
One of the Great Comedies of Social Realism
Of all Ayn Rand's uproarious satirical novels, "The Fountainhead" is the best. The book targets every political stripe, leaving its readers breathless from laughter. In the movie script, where she condenses the novel's first half into a few seconds of windblown calendar pages, she concentrates on right-wing architects, suicidal media moguls, and foolish rich girls who think they've discovered philosophy. Revealing her bizarre characters as cardboard cutouts who would fit right into any of Woody Allen's crowd scenes, Rand paints a vivid portrait of the emptiness of riches. In a script packed with double entendres, she quickly gets her audience rolling in the aisles, while skillfully propagating her singular message of Objectionable Social Nihilism.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
so much from so little
Any young filmmaker who wants to see what can be done with a minimum of money and effects should see "Carnival of Souls". It's a combination of horror, psychology, and wit made on the barest thread of a budget. I never saw any of Herk Harvey's institutional movies, but in this, his one attempt at a full-length feature, he succeeds in giving a surface of classic suspense, stirred by the rich undercurrents of the human soul's hell. He weaves all this into a production that could easily be done for a price in five figures even now.
Listen to what he does with sound-- or the lack of it. Watch how he lights a Utah plain. See how he creates a crazy, Midwestern Hades with simple lighting and make-up. He found sets that could be had for next-to-nothing, took advantage of(and perhaps encouraged) the stiffness of amateur actors, and created a sense of distance so real that four decades later it still probes your innards for every empty spot.
This should be an inspiration to anyone working on a low-budget indie: find the vision, get the most from everyone's talent, and you can make a shining gem.