Starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric The Entertainer, Harvey Keitel, James Woods, etc.
Directed by F. Gary Gray
Rated: PG-13
Reviewed by Violet Howard
F. Gary Gray’s new starry celluloid Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty, is everything that Los Angeles is; delusional, shimmering, and irrevocably violent.
John Travolta resumes his role as shylock Chili Palmer, who after a brief meeting with a record label owner (James Woods) sets his sights on the music industry. Woods chews up about ten minutes of screen time until he is shot dead in the street by Russian mobsters. The Russian mobsters eventually get into it with homicidal gangsta thugs, but that’s later in the film. One hand washes the other in this movie, in order to push the flimsy plot from Point A to Point B.
After Chili pays a visit to James Woods’ widow, record label owner Edie Athens, the pair team up in search of a superstar. They find her in the form of Linda Moon, who performs a karaoke dance routine in a Sunset hot spot. She is managed by Raji (Vince Vaughn), a white man desperately seeking blackness. Chili spirits Linda away to Edie’s studio, usurping her contract and ultimately getting her a gig with Aerosmith. Linda Moon has that “something,” although it’s hard to know what that “something” is. Christina Milian lip syncs music that sounds like every other wailing Toni Braxton knock off. Things happen around this character, indirectly, and we watch Moon watching back, like a caged bird.
Travolta is suede smooth and disturbingly confident as he glides through scenes, and his character is charming if not predictable. The most hyped scene in the film is the dance floor sequel between Travolta and Thurman, yet there are so many excessive cuts in the sequence that it’s almost impossible to follow. It’s as if F. Gary Gray casts as many A-list stars as possible; that way he doesn’t have to worry about directing them.
Be Cool plays loose and free with characters and plot, throwing in celebrity cameos for fun. Characters that another director would have scrapped receive ample screen time here. The Rock, who plays Raji’s bodyguard Elliot, is a struggling actor with a taste for country music and a trademark eyebrow gesture that is his ticket to the big movies. Oh, and he’s supposedly a closet homosexual. F. Gary Gray subjects The Rock to a number of humiliating scenes such as one in a country western apparel store. The Rock slaps his buttocks in the mirror several times and I think this is supposed to be a lousy gay parody. It’s too bad because The Rock is a surprisingly good actor. He even earned applause by the audience when his character finally lands a role as a Polynesian dancer at the end of the film.
Other characters such as Sin LaSalle, played by Cedric the Entertainer, seem to be written in as a favor from the director. He surrounds himself with monstrous thugs, his top dog played by Andre 3000 of OutKast. Andre 3000 is a hugely popular musical personality with a strong comic presence onscreen, and has a future in film, but he needs smarter roles than this. To his credit, he managed to seek laughs from the audience from the silliest lines. Even veteran actors like Harvey Keitel are underemployed in this film. Keitel snaps and spits like an old toad and hops into scenes just in time to resolve a conflict. Plot lines flip and swish away like a deck of cards on a poker table. The movie is about deal making and breaking, but is constructed as a series of amusing scenarios.
There are some funny touches in the movie; Edie immediately begins wearing t-shirts that say “widow” and “mourning” on them, and Vince Vaughn’s gleeful take on the wannabe white guy even has him driving a hideous white stretch town car with the license plate INIT2WINIT or something like that. My favorite scenes in this film were at the very end, which show the actors dancing around as the credits roll. It was as if, freed from the chokehold of the film’s script, they could finally be funny.
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Bigger than the Sky MGM Studios
Starring Marcus Thomas, John Corbett, and Amy Smart
Directed by Al Corley
Rated: R
Reviewed by Casey Moore
For those waiting on the perfect double feature film to go with Waiting for Guffman, I present to you Bigger than the Sky.
Bigger than the Sky is the story of Peter Rooker (Marcus Thomas). Peter’s girlfriend just dumped him, and outside of work he seems to have no real life. One day, while walking to work, he sees that the Portland Community Theater is holding auditions for a presentation of Cyrano de Bergerac. On a lark Peter decides to try out for the play as a way to find himself and meet some new people.
Peter’s confession at the audition moves the director of the play to cast him in the role of Cyrano even though Peter’s audition is awful and he has never acted before.
Marcus Thomas is good as Rooker, but he is overshadowed by the rest of the cast, especially John Corbett and Amy Smart. Corbett plays Michael Degan, who is a legend in the troupe. Corbett is very good playing the actor with great talent who doesn’t want to leave where he is for greener pastures. Smart is Grace Hargrove and the object of affection for both Peter and Michael. Smart is very good in her role as the free spirit who helps to open up Peter. Smart is actually a surprise in the role and it is the first time I have really noticed her as an actor.
The movie also features Patti Duke playing twins, one of which is a cussing and smoking costume designer. Duke’s real-life son Sean Astin plays a rival to Corbett’s Michael in the Portland acting world.
Bigger than the Sky is one of those heartwarming tales with some very small bits of magic thrown into the mix. The movie is predictable, but in a fun way. There is nothing terrible about the film, but there seems to be a better film waiting to break out here. Anyone who has ever been involved in theater or had friends in theater will see shades of that life reflected within.
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Gunner Palace Palm Pictures
Directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker
Rated: PG-13
Reviewed by Malcolm Maclachlan
Gunner Palace turns the camera on the soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery (aka "The Gunners") in Baghdad and lets them tell their own stories. Which they do, often poignantly.
But rarely coherently. If the subtext of Black Hawk Down was how it is illogical to expect 19 year olds to understand the subtleties of foreign policy while they're being shot at, Gunner Palace is about how having a dramatic subject does not remove the need to tell a good story.
The film shows us raid after raid, often with little context or background. Perhaps this was meant to show what the soldiers are actually experiencing as part of a military machine that's lurching from goal to goal without any kind of grand strategy. This is hinted at throughout, with clips from Donald Rumsfeld speeches and in the utter distain many of the soldiers start to show for their civilian leaders. But rarely do we get any sense of how the decisions at the top affect the soldiers on the ground. One of the rare times this is accomplished is when a soldier shows off a Humvee they have wielded bits of metal to in a futile attempt to better protect their lightly-armored vehicle.
What Gunner Palace does accomplish is giving the viewer the feeling of being in Iraq: the boredom, the chaos, the isolation, the crowds. The trash on the battered streets, every bit of it a potential hiding place from an IED (i.e. bomb), almost starts to stink right off the screen after awhile. And it shows Iraqis as real people, with personalities and complex motivations of their own, which has been almost entirely lacking from the media's so-called "coverage" of the war.
Gunner Palace is also occasionally very funny. The undisputed star of the show is specialist Stuart Wilf, a 19 year-old high school dropout and a born comedian. He gains a growing amount of screen time as the film goes on, using pieces of a mop to do a mullah impression and playing a fair facsimile of Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" guitar solo from the back of a humvee.
Oddly, Wilf seems to understand his own cultural references better than filmmaker Michael Tucker, a man three times his age. Tucker seems to be stuck in an extended Apocalypse Now homage without realizing it. Either that or his voice just naturally sounds exactly like Martin Sheen's voiceovers from that film. This works at the beginning, he sarcastically says that major combat operations have been declared over and the gunfire we are now witnessing is just "minor combat."
But he doesn't keep it up. What Tucker fails to give us is characters to hold on to. By bouncing from person to person, scene to scene, the whole affair begins to take on a kind of dreamlike quality. There is more gore in the short Iraq segment of Fahrenheit 9/11 than in this whole film. Several of the major characters here do die, but off screen. I'm not saying I wanted more blood, but often found myself trying to connect the names of the dead with one of the many short, disconnected interviews I had seen.
Near the end, Tucker tries to draw everything together by asking the soldiers what they really think of the war itself. One of them replies that what we have accomplished there wasn't worth a single human life. If only the filmmaker had been so eloquent.
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The Jacket Warner Independent Pictures
Starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, etc.
Directed By John Maybury
Rated: R
Reviewed by Wolfgang Dios
The Jacket is a weird and wonderful psychological thriller, but giddily skips across genres like a rock across water, touching on suspense, romance and even a taste of sci-fi. It’s especially surprising coming along in the spring, which, as most movie-goers probably know, is usually the dumping ground for films in which the studios don’t believe or aren’t quite sure how to market.
Fortunately some companies have begun to counter-program during this season, meeting the endless litany of schlock horror (think Boogeyman, Afraid Of The Dark or Cursed) or what should have been straight-to-video fodder (The Wedding Date, Man Of The House), with a touch of class. Since there’s little competition, there’s much more room for a small but notable film to make an impact. Last year, it was Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. This year, it’s The Jacket, which shares a similar, delightful sense of intellectual playfulness and jumbled time-lines, though the film is more somber in tone.
Academy Award winner Adrien Brody (Best Actor for The Pianist) plays Jack Stark, a Gulf War veteran who returns to his native Vermont suffering from amnesia. On a desolate roadside he encounters a drunken mother, Jean (Kelly Lynch), and her eight- year old daughter, Jackie. Their car has broken down. He helps them, and is thanked by a torrent of abuse from the mother, whose addled mind makes her suspicious of his motives. Things quickly get worse. He hitches a ride and when the car is stopped by the police, the driver shoots the officer in cold blood. Stark is left unconscious, accused of the cop’s murder and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, Alpine Grove. It is there that he comes under the tender care of Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), whose treatment involves heavy doses of drugs and physical restraints in order to reshape the behavior and character of his patients (shades of the 1982 film Frances, a biopic about 1950s actress Frances Farmer, similarly and brutally institutionalized).
Stark is left for hours, strapped into a claustrophobic corpse drawer in the asylum’s basement morgue. Oddly, the lack of external stimulation frees Stark’s mind and he begins to explore what happened to him mentally, a cascade of bizarre and disjointed images that only gradually begin to make sense. It turns out to be a refuge rather than punishment, particularly when he discovers his incarceration allows him to travel briefly into the near future (2007). He again meets Jackie (Keira Knightley), the young girl he helped, and who is now a waitress with a life in free-fall. She seems to be following in the dissolute footsteps of her mother, who passed away years earlier, burned to death when she drunkenly fell asleep smoking.
Stark can only visit the future briefly, but discovers he possesses the ability to change minor events. Falling in love with Jackie, he decides to try to save her, which also means escaping from the hospital. Here he is aided by Dr. Becker’s colleague, Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who deplores Dr. Lorenson’s horrific treatments.
It’s a complex plot, but the film glides smoothly from one incident to the next, anchored by note-perfect performances from Brody and Knightley. Chemistry may be an abused word, but there’s no denying its presence here. Whenever the two are together on screen together, you simply can’t take your eyes off them. The Jacket is littered with touching, expressive moments, often instigated by little more than a carefully nuanced glance or gesture. As a couple, Brody and Knightley are reminiscent of the legendary pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. They give The Jacket a quiet and quite genuine emotional intensity that grows increasingly gripping as the story develops. And it’s not only them. There isn’t a bad or mediocre performance in this film, which is astutely directed by John Maybury (whose previous film about the artist Francis Bacon, Love Is The Devil, is also well worth a look). Though best known as an experimental film-maker, his restraint delivers a compelling, focused and emotionally vibrant story.
Thankfully, little in the film is painted with ethical or moral certainty. No cardboard caricatures of good or evil here. Even Dr. Becker, with his out-of-date and dangerous methods, no matter how deluded, is a failed idealist who desperately believes he is actually helping his patients and is himself crumbling emotionally. At one point, when accused of changing Stark’s temperament through drugs, he laments “And who wouldn’t be nervous if they looked at their own life? Whose life is that good?” Conversely, his assistant, Lorenson, though superficially sympathetic, is ambitious and deceitful. This makes for a complex and layered film.
One constantly recurring theme concerns how relatively simple it is to make a difference in the lives of others by offering help, no matter how apparently insignificant, even by merely asking ‘are you ok?’. The adult Jackie does exactly that when, upon first meeting a desolate Stark at a gas station on Christmas Eve (whom she does not recognize from the childhood incident), she invites him to spend the night in her small apartment because he has nowhere else to go. It’s a defining moment in what is easily the best film so far this year. Given Brody’s lean and haunting presence coupled with Knightley’s warm delineation of a troubled soul, we can only hope to see these two united again in a future project. A thoroughly riveting, unforgettable piece of entertainment.
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The Upside of Anger New Line Cinema
Starring Kevin Costner, Joan Allen, Alicia Witt, Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, and Evan Rachel Wod.
Written and Directed by Mike Binder
Rated: R
Reviewed by Natasha Jackson
When a movie starts out with a middle-aged woman who has been abandoned by a husband who had been cheating with his Swedish secretary, you automatically get ready for a movie-of-the-week feeling in the pit of your stomach. Although I was eager to see The Upside of Anger based on the trailers, this premise had me cautious from the start. But director Mike Binder’s comedic take on compassion and self-loathing makes this movie a stand out. When Terry (Joan Allen) is left by her husband, she finds solace at the bottom of a bottle, leaving her four teenage daughters to run the house in her absence.
Allen is great playing a woman who is either drunk or angry, mostly both, throughout the course of the movie. Her eldest daughter (Alicia Witt) can avoid the lethal household by leaving for college soon after daddy leaves. Meanwhile, the middle daughters (Erika Christensen and Keri Russell) take over the kitchen while Terry gets plastered. The youngest (Evan Rachel Wood) finds solace in her room while exploring the nature of anger and violence.
The only person that Terry can seem to find some sense of normalcy with is their next door neighbor, an ex-professional baseball player and equally drunk Denny, played by Kevin Costner. Denny makes his living as a radio deejay and the occasional paid appearance to sign autographs. Denny all too easily makes himself comfortable in Terry’s home and bedroom. Eventually the girls warm to him, and he even gets Andy (Christensen) a job at his radio station.
Binder does a fantastic job of illustrating the ups and downs of the interaction between Denny and Terry. Terry is somewhat of a loose cannon, and you never quite know if that’s the real Terry or the one created by the betrayal of her husband. Who knows why Denny drinks, but he’s an ex-pro athlete so the explanation can’t be that big of a mystery. Although Binder does a magnificent job portraying life after divorce, the surprise ending destroys his point about the pointlessness of blind rage.
The actors all do a fantastic job, especially Kevin Costner who’s been away for awhile, but this film is all about Joan Allen. She’s generally great in every role, but she really shines in this one. The chemistry between Allen and Costner is fantastic and it gives the story the added oomph that it needs. This story needed to have the initial tension between these characters for believability, and let’s face it that’s how most couples are born anyway. This is a great movie that will surprise fans of Allen and enrapture fans of Costner who is great as a drunken ex-pro baseball player.
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Walk On Water Samuel Goldwyn Films
Starring Lior Ashkenazi, Gideon Shemar, Knut Berger, and Caroline Peters
Directed by Eytan Fox
Reviewed by Gary Goldstein
The new Israeli import Walk on Water is an affecting, if odd hybrid of movie genres. It begins as an action-thriller, becomes a mystery of sorts, morphs into a weird buddy picture, and then returns to Bourne Supremacy territory, before concluding as a love story. With that said, the film has characters you root for, an absorbing historical and political perspective, and a climax that’s as satisfying as it is preposterous.
Lior Ashkenazi stars as Eyal, a rugged, emotionally-detached Mossad special agent sent on a mission to find a ninetysomething Nazi war criminal and kill him, as Eyal’s superior Menachem (Gideon Shemer) says, “before God does.” To accomplish this, the begrudging agent must get next to the Nazi’s grandchildren - a German émigré named Pia (Caroline Peters) who lives on a kibbutz, and her gay brother Axel (Knut Berger), who’s visiting from Berlin. Eyal, who poses as a private tour guide to show Axel the sights, half-heartedly works his way into Axel and Pia’s lives in order to find out more about their grandfather, who is believed to be holed away in Argentina. We’re not told much about the old Nazi’s monstrous acts; just enough to know that he deserves whatever retribution he gets--times, like, a billion.
There’s a slight, not very believable flirtation between recent widower Eyal (his wife committed suicide) and the kindly, uber-liberal Pia. However, there’s a more covert, if one-sided, spark between Axel and the hunky Eyal, though Eyal’s in the dark about Axel’s sexuality a lot longer than logic dictates (you’d think a hired killer would be a little more, uh, observant). And, once Eyal does discover that Axel bats for the other team (Axel drags him and Pia to a gay dance club--tada!), Eyal goes all hot-straight-guy homophobe and asks Menachem to take him off the case. Forget the fact that he still hasn’t learned much about Grandpa Mengele; this, for Eyal, has officially become “mission impossible.”
There’s really not much reason for Axel to be gay, as far as the film’s teetering plot goes, unless maybe director Eytan Fox (who also helmed 2002’s gays-in-the-Israeli-military love story Yossi and Jagger) wanted to broaden the persecution subtext a bit. Nonetheless, Eyal’s hat-in-hand reconciliation with Axel in Berlin, where Eyal is later sent to finish the assignment, leads to a more level, entertaining playing field for the film’s third act. A couple of 11th-hour twists finally cause the conflicted Eyal to make a critical life decision (no--he’s not really gay) and for even-keeled party boy Axel to go a little whacko...but in a useful way.
There’s a sappy, inevitable coda that I could’ve lived without, but Walk on Water attempts some major insights about life and death--both past and present--that are thoughtful and persuasive without feeling heavy-handed. The scenic movie is also well shot by Tobias Hochstein, with plenty of eye-filling moments in Israel and Germany, as well as in the film’s Istanbul-set opening.
Ashkenazi (who was also seen, to more upbeat effect, in the Israeli comedy Late Marriage) is a deep, compelling presence as the stalwart Eyal, while Knut Berger (think: a lankier, less-hip Ashton Kutcher) gives Axel an easy, forthright charm. Caroline Peters, however, makes for a bland, uninspired Pia; when she flashes Eyal one of her awkward “come hither” looks, you long for a truly incandescent actress to crank up the potential heat.
Ultimately, though, Walk on Water has a sneaky power and memorable quality that makes you forgive its occasional missteps.
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