SULLY: Bracing For An Impact That Never Comes

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

SULLY (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2016)

The question that Clint Eastwood’s 35th film as director asks is whether Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made the right decision when landed his airplane, US Airways Flight 1549, in the Hudson River instead of trying to take it back to LaGuardia Airport like he was instructed by air traffic control on January 15th, 2009.

That a distinguished grey haired and mustached Tom Hanks, who topped the Reader’s Digest poll of the Most Trusted People in America a few years ago, is playing Sully, makes it hard to think the guy didn’t do the right thing, but there’s an effective darkness in the film’s first third in which the celebrated pilot has visions of his plane crashing into Manhattan skyscrapers.

Sully and his co-pilot, First Officer Jeffery Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) face off with the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigators portrayed by Mike O'Malley, Jamey Sheridan and Anna Gunn, who are very skeptical about the Captain’s actions as the flight computers show that the left engine was still operational.

To backtrack a bit, like the film does as we see the event dubbed by the media “The Miracle on the Hudson” in flashbacks from multiple angles, shortly after takeoff, the plane hit a flock of geese causing both jet engines to lose power. In the next 208 seconds (just under 4 minutes), Sully and Skiles are put to the extremely stressful test on how to safely land the plane. After determining that they can’t make it to any nearby runways, Sully tells the controllers “we’re going into the Husdon,” and tells the passengers to “brace for impact.”

Eastwood’s film is workmanlike as is his norm. It’s a solid, straight forward narrative that takes us through several perspectives, but even at its tidy 96 minute running time, it feels a bit padded as there’s only really a half hour, at the most, of story to work from.

This is largely because despite being based on the autobiography “Highest Duty” by Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow, in real life Sully and Skiles weren’t really put through the ringer by the NTSB. Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay makes the NTSB the villains of the piece which is transparent in that the antagonistic characters played by O’Malley, Sheridan, and Gunn don’t have any real life counterparts.

This element feels as forced as the river landing Sully is forced to make.

And as Sully’s spouse, Laura Linney is given the thankless concerned wife on the phone role in probably the most blatant use of the trope since Laila Robins in PLANE, TRAINS, & AUTOMOBILES.

So the fabricated conflict over whether Sully is a hero or a fraud (as Katie Couric puts it in a cameo) doesn’t serve up the tension it’s working for. It’s American treasure Tom Hanks! He saved Private Ryan! He helped get Apollo 13 down from space! He fought the forces of evil in those dang DA VINCI CODE movies. And, as my friend William Fonvielle, of Filmville, pointed out, he played the nicest record executive in history, so of course the guy is a hero who made the right decision which saved the lives of all of the airplane flight’s 155 crew and passengers! 

How could he not be? I mean, there's only been a few characters he's played that were untrustable (the guy in THE LADYKILLERS and the mobster in THE ROAD TO PERDITION are the ones that come to my mind at the moment).

So we just wait for the board hearing climax in which we watch several computer flight simulations, with the “human factor” the Sully fights to be accounted for, to get the inevitable feel good ending – complete with a quip by our hero taking us to the obligatory end credits accompanied by footage of the real Captain Sully.

Somehow Eastwood has made an entire film that’s anticlimactic. I kept waiting for him to build something on top of what really happened that fateful day 7 years ago, but beyond the basic facts of the event, he just artificially tries to tease extra drama out of the aftermath.

It’s a fine looking film with flawless visual effects and sturdy performances by its leads - Hanks is uniformly terrific, while Eckhart, though not given much of a persona apart from being a strong member of Team Sully, does a good job of holding up that massive mustache. 

It's unfortunate that it feels like an A-list version of a TV movie. Hanks, Eckhart, and Eastwood cue into a kind of cornball gravitas that makes it mildly likable, but its flimsy attempt to give the plot more pushback made me brace for an impact that never came.

More later...

Clint Eastwood's AMERICAN SNIPER: Decent But Not Very Deep

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

AMERICAN SNIPER (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014)

With several sequences dealing with a soldier having trouble adjusting to civilian life after intense tours in Iraq, this film often feels like Clint Eastwood’s THE HURT LOCKER.

But the crusty but lovable filmmaker, who’s 34th film as director this is, obviously feels he has bigger fish to fry here than that film’s “war is a drug” theme.

AMERICAN SNIPER, Eastwood’s new biopic of Chris Kyle (1974-2013), the late Navy SEAL who from 1999 to 2009 racked up the most career sniper kills (over 160 confirmed enemy kills) in U.S. military history, wants to both pay tribute to the man as a modern war hero, and provide a platform for his redemption as a murderer.

It’s not entirely successful in those goals, but it’s Eastwood’s best film as director since 2008’s GRAN TORINO, proving that the man is much better at capturing combat than maneuvering through the tried and true tropes of musical biopics (see last year’s ultra trivial JERSEY BOYS).

In a performance that’s worthy of the Oscar nomination he scored this week, a beefed up Bradley Cooper plays Kyle, who we follow from being a good ole boy Texas ranch hand and rodeo cowboy to becoming a celebrated Army rifleman whose fellow Navy SEALS called “The Legend.”

Cooper’s Kyle, a vessel of extreme patriotism, spends four dangerous tours of duty in Iraq, where we see him mostly stationed on rooftops providing cover for the troops below. In one central scene, which the film opens on then comes back to later in the narrative, Kyle weighs whether or not to shoot an Iraqi woman and a young boy, after seeing in his site that they were about to lob a grenade at a group of Marines on the street.

This is an intense, defining scene, one that TV spots for the film use as a cliffhanger (will he/won't he shoot? - see the movie and find out), and it is effective, but like the movie itself, it doesn't plow that deep into Kyle's character.

Kyle, who constantly calls the Islamist insurgents “savages,” does appear, in fleeting bits of dialogue, to be strongly in favor of the Iraq war, but the film itself is fairly ambiguous about it.

Kyle’s camaraderie with his fellow SEAL team members, who include Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner, and Jake McDorman, is familiar feeling but still necessary material in the mix, possibly giving the most insight into what the film thinks the guy was like.

When Kyle is stateside between deployments with his wife Tara (Sienna Miller) and kids, he has the expected trouble adjusting to civilian life, but the aforementioned THE HURT LOCKER went through these motions much more effectively; here it’s way too spelled out.

There’s an action movie drive, which the film is really more about, to Kyle and his team’s hunt for an Al Qaeda terrorist named “The Butcher” (German-Egyptian actor Mido Hamada), and an enemy Syrian sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), in which we're simply watching a good guys vs. bad guys scenario with noisy shoot-outs and chases. All compellingly shot by Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer Tom Stern.

The big climatic battle, taking place on our lead’s fourth and final tour, has Kyle and his unit surrounded by terrorists as a sandstorm approaches. It’s truly exciting stuff, a sequence that proves how much pure machismo Eastwood can still muster at his late age.

Sure, the film hugely oversimplifies, making combat look like a video game at times, and it won't satisfy the folks who are complaining about its supposed pro-war stance, but it falls in line with what Eastwood has been saying cinematically his entire career. Consider that his iconic Dirty Harry character was considered by many to be “fascist” back in the day.

In a way Eastwood's film, via Jason Hall's screenplay adaptation of Kyle's 2012 autobiography, is like the protagonist's phone calls home to his wife; it’s tight-lipped about what’s really going down on in the guy’s mind.

It basically seems to come down to saying this guy believed in what he was doing for his country, but he was a little conflicted by it. That may anger folks who feel that the real-life Kyle had no remorse over his killings and cite passages that say as much in his book, but, for me, the movie version of Kyle never wrote a book.

That is, like all the other films that are based on true stories out there, especially the ones that are Oscar nominated, AMERICAN SNIPER shouldn’t be taken as fact. Moviegoers going in should just ignore all the pundits and think pieces, and just take it as an old fashioned war movie with a smidgen of new school conscience that features an invested, career best performance by Cooper carrying one of Eastwood’s most well constructed productions.

More later...

Clint Eastwood's JERSEY BOYS Has More Clichés Than It Does Classic Songs

Opening today at a multiplex near you...

JERSEY BOYS (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014)

Jake Kasdan's 2007 spoof WALK HARD was supposed to have killed off all those cheesy music biopic tropes, but, dammit, here there all are again in full force in Clint Eastwood's new Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons film, JERSEY BOYS, based on the hit Tony winning Broadway musical.

There's also that tale of how Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio, and Nick Massi came together from humble beginnings to become one of the biggest selling bands of the 20th century is told to us by each of the quartet, one by one, directly to the camera, in a manner that recalls Scorsese (from GOODFELLAS to WOLF OF WALL STREET), just nowhere as stylish.

John Lloyd Young, who won a Tony for the part on Broadway, portrays front man Frankie Valli, a singer whose falsetto can make a mafioso cry. Christopher Walken is that friendly made man that cries when hearing Young sing, and is here to lend the film its only instance of big name star power.

Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire) plays slick fast-talking lead guitarist Tommy DeVito, who gets the band in heavy debt to the mob, while the other members, Bob Gaudio, and Nick Massi (Erich Bergen and Michael Lomenda, who played the roles on the original show's first national tour) barely register, even when it's their turns to narrate.

The screenplay by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (based on their Broadway book) does a poor job of putting the Four Seasons into the context of the times. The narrative starts in the mid-'50s, but by the time the band has a bunch of hits to its name, we're not sure when many scenes are supposed to take place. 

There's nothing to tell us that Valli's solo hit “Can't Take My Eyes Off You,” which they, of course, make a big production number out of, was recorded and released in 1967, the Summer of Love. No mention of the Beatles, or hippies, or Vietnam, or who the President was, or whatever.

The fashions simply go from Mad Men-era duds into '70s Disco-era threads, with no reference to anything else going in the world outside of the Four Seasons bubble.

The well stocked soundtrack, chocked full of the band's hit songs such as “Big Girls Don't Cry,” “Sherry,” and “Rag Doll” (very convincingly sung by Young) keep the film bopping along, but the overwhelming amount of clichés in this by-the-numbers biopic outnumbers even the wealth of classic tracks that are crammed into its bloated 134 minute running time.

And for a film that comes on like a modeled mixture of THAT THING YOU DO and GOODFELLAS, it sure has a clunky flow.

But beyond all the thick Italian-American accents, depictions of street crime, and fourth wall breakage, JERSEY BOYS has a legit connection to Scorsese's 1990 gangster classic. Joe Pesci was a friend to the guys, especially DeVito, and is played here by Joey Russo, who does a passable impersonation. They really didn't have to have him say “Funny, how?” as if to show us the origin of his classic scene in GOODFELLAS though. They really didn't.

This just calls attention to the fact that, try as he might, Eastwood just doesn't have the Scorsesean swagger needed to make this material anything special above the music biopic average.

Eastwood's bland approach here - it's like he's never seen WALK THE LINE, RAY, THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY, COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER, LA BAMBA, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!, THE DOORS, et al (Hell, it's like he's never even watched his own Charlie Parker biopic BIRD!) - just renders this into another TV movie that will be forever rerun on VH1 Classic.

Eastwood is far from one of my favorite directors, but he's shown a solid sense of storytelling in many of his directorial efforts. But JERSEY BOYS is a story that's been told so many times before that it would take something more inspired than just a close approximation of the music, and a rote run-through of the artists' rise and fall, to make it really sing.

Whether its the recycled chart toppers, or the regurgitated plot points, there's not a single original note that this mediocre musical plays.

More later...

New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 3/4/14

It what might seem like a piece of finely tuned timing, but what's more likely a bit of luck, Steve McQueen's 12 YEARS A SLAVE hits home video today fresh from winning the Academy Award for Best Picture Sunday night. The acclaimed historical drama, which also won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) just like I predicted, is now available in 1-disc Blu ray and DVD editions. Special Features: a over 40 minute Making Of mini-doc entitled “12 YEARS A SLAVE: A Historical Portrait,” a 7 minute behind-the-scenes featurette (“The Team”), and a 4 minute bit about the music of Hans Zimmer in the film (“The Score”). Read my review from when the film first came out last year here.

The other heavy hitter out this week is Francis Lawrence's sci-fi sequel smash starring Jennifer Lawrence, THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, in 2-disc Blu ray and single disc DVD editions. Special Features include an Audio Commentary with Director Francis Lawrence and Producer Nina Jacobson, a 2 hour and 24 minute doc made up of 9 Making Of featurettes, a little over 4 minutes of Deleted Scenes, and, for some reason, a almost 7 minute Sneak Peak into the upcoming Neil Burger movie DIVERGENT.

Spike Lee's remake of Chan-wook Park's 2003 cult classic OLDBOY also drops today. I was among many that missed the film that starred Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, and Samuel L. Jackson, as it flopped when it was released theatrically last Thanksgiving, but now we can all catch up with the release that's packaged with over 10 minutes of Extended & Alternate Scenes, The Making of Oldboy (17 min.), Talking Heads (2 minutes and 43 seconds of Cast and crew sound bites), something called Transformation (2:11), and a Workout Video (0:49).

Having never seen any of the FAST AND FURIOUS films, and being oblivious to him in anything else, Eric Heisserer's HOURS, also out today on Blu ray and DVD, was my first time seeing a performance by the late Paul Walker (I did see FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but don't remember him in it). Walker puts in some admirable acting in this thriller set in a hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, but the film strains unsuccessfully for whatever suspense it can think to wring out of its spare premise concerning a man trying to protect his just born baby. Special Features: “All I Feel Is You” music video by Safran and a PSA for Paul Walker's charity Reach Out.

Another B-movie available this week is Ruairi Robinson's sci-fi thriller THE LAST DAYS ON MARS, starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, and Olivia Williams. It's no great shakes, as most movies set on Mars usually go, but at least it's a watchable retread of tropes from classics like ALIEN, and THE THING. Special Features: “The Making of THE LAST DAYS ON MARS” (15 min.), “Analyzing the Visual Effects” (6 min.), Behind the Scenes Comparisons (4 min.), and AXIS TV: A Look at The Last Days on Mars (3 min.).

Other notable releases today include Richard E. Robbins' documentary GIRL RISING (only on DVD), concerning the global campaign for girls' education; Wong Kar Wai's Hong Kong-Chinese martial arts drama THE GRANDMASTER, Tze Chun's crime thriller COLD COMES THE NIGHT, starring Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston;  

Giulio Paradisi's 1979 psychological thriller THE VISITOR, and Jamie Payne's Doctor Who TV event THE TIME OF THE DOCTOR, which was the 800th episode of the long running British series, and the last to feature Matt Smith as the iconic character.

Also on the TV front there's Venture Bros: Complete Season Five, Oliver Stone's 2012 10-episode Showtime series Untold History of the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Murder Series 1, Agatha Christie's Poirot: Series 11, Ancient Aliens Season 5 Volume 2 and the seventh season of the classic '60s Clint Eastwood Western series Rawhide gets released in 2 separate multi-disc volumes (DVD only).

More later...

The Cornball Charm Of TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE 

(Dir. Robert Lorenz, 2012)

Sure, every critic will mention it, but Clint Eastwood’s embarrassing crazy-old-man-yells-at-chair speech at the RNC a few weeks back doesn’t at all get in the way of his new film being a good old-fashioned cornball crowd-pleaser.

Eastwood, with his crotchetiness played to greater comic effect than say in GRAN TORINO, plays a baseball scout for the Altlanta Braves who is going blind, so he may be in his final season on the job. As his daughter, Amy Adams (also in THE MASTER opening today) joins him on the trip against his wishes, to help out.

Meanwhile, back at the home office, Matt Lillard, as obviously a jerk for the audience to hate, wants Eastwood out of the game, and his boss, a grimacing Robert Patrick, might agree. But luckily Eastwood has a friend in the Braves’ organization in the form of John Goodman pulling for him.

Another friend, Justin Timberlake as a retired pitcher now doing the scouting thing too, runs into Eastwood at a game, and immediately has eyes for Adams.

It’s a comfortable ole baseball glove of a commercial movie, where everything falls exactly in the place you’d expect. With only a few current topical references, its script, by first time screenwriter Randy Brown, feels like it was written in the ‘90s when old people were first becoming troubled by the idea of a computer run world. Clint’s line about the “interwebs” attests to that.

In that way it’s like a gruff counterpoint to last year’s MONEYBALL, in which old school on the spot skills are favored over statistical analysis. So much so that I expected Clint to take a baseball bat to a laptop OFFICE SPACE-style.

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, throws no curves story-wise, is full of cheesy clichés, and was completely filmed in Georgia, despite being mostly set in my home-state North Carolina, yet I still found it highly likable.

Eastwood’s growling and grunting through his part is amusingly affecting, and Adams, along with Timberlake both put in warm and fuzzy performances. And if you want your film to be more likable, casting Goodman is always a good idea.

Robert Lorenz, whose first film as director this is after many assistant directing duties, provides Eastwood and co. with a sturdy vehicle that has plenty of cornball charm, and isn’t too sappy. It’s not a home run, but it’s a perfectly pleasant stroll around the bases.

More later...

INVICTUS: The Film Babble Blog Review

INVICTUS (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2009)

Like a huge signpost that announces: "It's now officially Oscar season", a new Clint Eastwood directed movie has opened at this time almost every year this last decade.

Eastwood makes the kind of film that Academy voters love - event films with A-list actors about important issues; movies that make movie goers feel guilty if they try not to pay attention to them.

For they're noble works with an old school sentimentality, but ultimately they're to be admired more than enjoyed. Such is the case with INVICTUS, a historical sports drama centering on Nelson Mandela's rugby obsessed first term as President of South Africa.

Oddly, Morgan Freeman as Mandela is an almost too obvious piece of casting. It never quite works, it's like Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce - the images of both are too well known separately for them to blend into a natural personification.

We're always aware that it's Freeman doing his wizened Freeman thing; except for a tint of an accent, it's the same basic performance as a President that he did in DEEP IMPACT. Mandela faces an intimidating workload upon taking office in 1994, with long brewing racial tensions, poverty, and crime filling the streets. He comes to believes that a World Cup win by the Springboks, the country's rugby team, will unite the nation and lead them into a new era.

Mandela meets with the team Captain (a reserved and in a "respect your elders" mode Matt Damon) to fan the flames of inspiration. He shares a poem with Damon that helped him through years of inprisonment - "Invictus" written by William Earnest Henley. This, of course, is the film's title so I was a bit taken aback to find out that in reality Mandela actually gave the Captain a copy of a Theodore Roosevelt speech.

That's just one of many details many fact checkers will have problems with here. Eastwood undoubtedly subscribes to John Ford's infamous stance: "Print the legend" and that's an honorable tact to take but this strained un-involving film does little but to pile on the platitudes.

By the time we get to the big climatic game filled with all the sports movie clichés you can think of (slow motion, strained close-ups, crowd elation manipulation, etc.) it didn't matter to me whether or not the outcome will bring the country together or have any spiritual impact at all - my eyes were too glazed over to care.

Whatever the historical relevance, INVICTUS is an admirable exercise with pure intentions, fine performances, and seasoned craftmanship, but sadly a very dull film.

More later...

Growling Against The Dying Of The Light: GRAN TORINO - The Film Babble Blog Review

GRAN TORINO (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2008)

78-year old Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is recently widowed and just wants to be left alone. He growls, grunts, and snarls at everyone around him, especially wet behind the ears Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) who had promised Walt’s wife he would look after him.

As one of the only white residents in his working class Detroit neighborhood he sits on his front porch drinking PBRs and growling at everybody in his sight, and life itself it seems. Against his will he falls in with a Hmong family next door when teenage son Thao (Bee Vang) attempts to steal Walt’s prized 1972 Ford Gran Torino as a gang initiation. 

Walt easily scares him off with a rifle, one of many guns in the Korean War vet’s collection. When the gang appears and causes a late night ruckus in the yards in front of Walt ’s and his neighbors house. Again Walt’s rifle appears and he emits his greatest growl yet: “Get off of my lawn! ”

Though it’s hardly an unfamiliar character for Eastwood, GRAN TORINO proves there’s a lot of fight left in the iconic actor. Walt uses a lot of racist expressions - “Dragon lady,” “gooks,” and even tells off color jokes like: “A Mexican, a Jew, and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “ ‘Get the fuck out of here!’” Yet, you just know he’s got a heart of gold hiding behind a shield of sneers. 

Walt becomes a gravely hesitant hero on his street and forms an unlikely friendship with Thao and his sister Sue Lor (Ahney Her) as the threat of gang violence looms large. Walt slowly begins to feel more of a sense of family with his neighbors than with his own offspring - his 2 glib sons played in perfectly passive manner by Brian Howe and Brian Haley.

This is one Helluva movie; it does for Clint Eastwood what THE APOSTLE (1997) did for actor/director Robert Duvall, that is provide a powerful platform for a mighty myth maker late in the game. It plays to every strength that Eastwood possesses while it consistently shines like the bodywork on his crusty character’s classic car. DIRTY HARRY (1970), my personal favorite of Eastwood’s films, has come up quite a bit in the hype and reaction to this film but I believe Walt Kowalski would probably not get along very well with Inspector Harry Callahan. 

Sure, they’re both crusty uncompromising hard asses who growl gruffly and carry big guns but Callahan was a signpost of a different era (despite that the series went well into the 80’s), it’s doubtful he would age into the curmudgeon that Kowalski embodies.

Both a well crafted character study and a witty window into communal relations (albeit a surface one), GRAN TORINO is a movie with a fire in its belly. As the #1 movie in the country right now It is already taking its place among the spaghetti westerns and gritty cop dramas that made Eastwood famous. It won’t be at all surprising if it takes its place among his many award wins * soon as well.

* It is surprising that Eastwood has won 5 Oscars but none of them were for acting - maybe this year will be different.

So will GRAN TORINO make The Film Babble Blog Top Ten Movies Of 2008 list? Stay tuned to find out. 

More later...

DVD Babble Blurb Bash-tacular!

I have seen a lot of recent DVDs over the last few months that I haven't been blogged about so I thought it would be good to take a break from the summer sequel season and round up a handful and square them off. I tried to keep it in a brief blurb format but since this is film BABBLE the reviews of course wind on and on. Let's start with -

New Release DVD Recommendations :

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2006) Word was that this was vastly superior to FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS but this politically correct companion piece is roughly the same quality in my estimation. Told from the Japanese point of view entirely in their language with sub-titles LETTERS has the same sense of earnest honor and the same grey overcast tint. The standout characters are General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) the young Saigo (Kazunari Ninomira) who run into each other more than once in the tunnels between Mount Saribachi and the north side of the island as bombing and ground attacks by the American troops rage above. The melodrama involving the sympathy that emerges is handled deftly by Eastwood while the sentiment - such as the sunny Speilbergisms that sadly have defined the modern era war-film is kept in check. It may be too much to watch both FLAGS and LETTERS in one sitting or some double feature setting but both even with their glorified old-school faults (most likely from the screenplay written by CRASH * director Paul Hack-ish, oh - I mean Haggis) should not be missed.

* Incidentely my least favorite Best Picture Academy Award winning film ever!



49 UP (Dir. Michael Apted, 2005) The 7th in the excellent documentary series that began in 1964 with the bold statement - "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man" and followed 14 British children catching up with them every (yep) 7 years. Since most people I know haven't seen any of these movies I'd highly recommend the Up Series box-set which has the previous 6 films but honestly that's not absolutely necessary to enjoy this movie. Plenty of clips from all the films inform and enhance the new material and don't come off as redundant for those who have kept up. It would be too much for me to recount all the names, stories, and economic backgrounds so check out this Wikipedia entry if you are curious. Seeing this group of real people at the various stages of their lives through turmoil and peace makes for extremely satisfying viewing. Bring on 56 UP!

ROCKY BALBOA
(Dir. Sylvester Stallone, 2006)

It's hard for me to believe this is making my recommendations list. I mean as a kid I hated the ROCKY movies, ridiculed them with other snotty pimpled faced friends, and grew up to believe them to be populist Narcissistic America at its most lame brained epic-wannabes. At some point when I got older I caught the original Best Picture winning ROCKY and found myself liking it. It came from my favorite era of cinema (the 70's dummy!) and it was grittily touching in its portrayal of the boxing underdog making a name for himself. Then sequel-itis set in and the character became a machine who could never lose in glitzy gimmicky match-ups with Mr. T (III) and that evil Russian powerhouse played by Dolph Lundgren (IV) - yes that's right - Rocky was going to win the Cold War! I never even saw ROCKY V (1990) - so why do I like and recommend ROCKY BALBOA? Because we have Stallone at his most likable - an aging humble simpleton running a restaurant named after his deceased wife Adrian (Talia Shire - who is not deceased; she just didn't return to the series), telling the same fight stories, and brushing off daily indignities. It seems oddly necessary for Stallone to return to his Rocky roots - this is his best and most definable character and even with the contrived 'inspired by a video game simulation Rocky gets an exhibition match with the current troubled champ Mason 'The Line Dixon' (Antonio Tarver)' scenario, I hate to admit it but it works. Bring on JOHN RAMBO! Okay, no wait - that's a bit much.

And now :

New Release DVD Disses :

BOBBY (Dir. Emilio Estevez, 2006) I had heard the news upon its theatrical release that this was a NASHVILLE remake - relocated to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with the RFK assassination the backdrop to a convoluted mishmash of over 20 cliched '60s stereotypes. I held out 'til it came in that red Netflix envelope because of my love for political period pieces but damn was that description right on the money! The Altman derived framework doesn't disguise the awful screenplay with ham-fisted base dialogue like Nick Cannon playing an insufferably idealistic Kennedy staffer emoting "now that Dr. King is gone - no one left but Bobby. No one." Cannon joins an ace cast including Anthony Hopkins, Lawrence Fishborne, William H. Macy, Harry Belfonte, Christian Slater (one of the few non-idealist characters - he plays a base racist), and Estevez's Daddy Martin Sheen. Not so ace actors here include Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore and Estevez himself. The cringe inducing cliches pile up - Ashton Kutcher does his worst acting ever (can't believe that was possible) as a hippy that would look phony on Dragnet 1967- during a horrifyingly stupid acid trip sequence actually sits staring at an orange in his hand saying "no, you shut up!", every TV set has a perfect quality picture of carefully chosen clips of RFK speeches and there's even a MAGNOLIA-esque montage going from strained close-up shots actor to actor. Can't deny the heart that went into this movie but all we have here is an A-list cast, B-list production values, C-list cliches, D-list overused soundtrack standards, and an F-list script. Somebody revoke Estevez's cinematic license! He should be exiled to the TV movie circuit after this film felony.

SMOKIN' ACES (Dir. Joe Carnahan, 2007) Another better than average cast slumming it through derivative drivel. Flashy Vegas gangster caper in which every one in the cast is after sleazy magician soon to be snitch Buddy Aces (Jeremy Piven - pictured on the left). Some are trying to protect him - (lawyer Curtis Armstrong, FBI agents Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta under the supervision of chief Andy Garcia) but everybody else is trying to kill him including Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, and rapper Common - okay yeah so it's not A-list but most of them are still better than the material in this worn entry into the PULP FICTION-GET SHORTY-LOCK STOCK-GO sweepstakes that expired over a decade ago. Kind of like Shane Black's also post-dated glib witless KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005) SMOKIN' ACES is a lesson in how quick cutting and hip-hopisms don't ensure a clever crafty meta-movie. Just say Tarenti-NO to this piece of pop-nonsense.

This post (especially the disses) is dedicated to Good Morning America critic Joel Siegel (1943-2007). He became a film babble hero when he walked out of a screening of CLERKS II last summer. Knowing his days were numbered he figured he didn't want to waste his last hours on that crap. The fact that it pissed off Kevin Smith was the icing on the cake! Check out Roger Ebert's heartfelt tribute.


More later...