Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Ever wish you were three hours younger?

Ambitious and rambling, lacking in narrative theme, director David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button never lives up to its novel premise but collapses instead into a mass of style over substance, eventually becoming what might be the biggest major studio disappointment of the year. Expanded from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (part of a cluster of magical realism stories the Great Gatsby author wrote virtually on a lark) by Forrest Gump adapter Eric Roth and chick flick auteur Robin Swicord (The Jane Austen Book Club), the film seemingly wants to be a fairy tale about the ephemeral nature of youth and the privilege of life itself.  If only it could get out of its own myopic way to say something – anything – on those worthwhile subjects. In three glacier-paced hours, that never once happens.

The story’s basic conceit is promising enough: Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born on Armistice Day 1918, as his home city of New Orleans celebrates the end of the First World War. A wheezing, arthritic infant, after his mother dies in childbirth his father (Jason Flemyng) abandons him to an old-age home where he’s raised by the home’s kindly caretaker Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) and her Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali). But Benjamin is a special child, growing younger with each passing day. In time, he befriends the granddaughter of one of the other residents, a young woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett) who’s precocious and charming in the way that only fictitious Southern girls named Daisy ever are. As Benjamin reaches adulthood (though appearing to be in his late 60s), he signs on to work on a tugboat led by Captain Mike (Jared Harris), a slurring, tattooed braggart who takes the young/old Benjamin under his wing.

Much of the film’s second hour is devoted to showing Benjamin’s travels around the world, including a tragic clash with a German U-Boat during World War II and a love affair with the wife of a British diplomat (Tilda Swinton.) But despite the rich material for reflection, the rambling script never arrives at context for the formative events of Benjamin’s life. One thing happens and then another. Pitt never communicates anything to the audience – somewhat understandable, considering the strata of makeup on his face- but the events themselves are seldom shown as particularly consequential. He narrates the events in a serviceable if not completely authentic New Orleans drawl, but a last-minute reminiscence isn’t enough to put the previous marathon of scenes into complete perspective – nor should it have to do as much.

Where plot and story fail, the movie attempts to pack scenes with a broad assembly of characters – in fact that’s largely the reason so much of the film comes away feeling mannered and pretentious: the relentless parade of capital-C characters that never quite earn their worth in the story. Was Captain Mike a surrogate father figure? Who was the unnamed woman that taught Benjamin to love the piano? Why was Daisy so taken with the strange “old” man that roomed with her grandmother? Whereas some insight into their lives might have offered counterpoint to Benjamin’s own strange fate, there is simply a procession of oddballs wandering around as Pitt stares in wonder at their colorful personalities.

Pitt and Blanchett, as the time-crossed lovers who “meet in the middle” during their 40s, are appealing enough, often bringing dignity to scenes that otherwise would prove almost laughably implausible. The late-night, moodily lit scene at the concert pavilion, in which Daisy flings herself at Benjamin only to find rejection, is one such contrivance, the kind of preposterous episode commonly found in overheated romance novels and faux-literary historic fiction. Not a crucial flaw in and out itself (not every scene in three hours needs to be a winner), it’s nevertheless indicative of one of the film’s biggest problems: plot tediously triumphs over character time and again, so that each character’s own motivations remain doggedly opaque.

 The film was famously shot in New Orleans, and the framing sequence depicting a dying Daisy relating her life with Benjamin to their daughter (Julia Ormond) includes a subplot dramatizing Hurricane Katrina’s cataclysmic march towards the city. Unfortunately the filmmakers’ understanding of New Orleans’  history and culture is only four blocks wide and one half-inch deep. New Orleans to them, as so typically happens in Hollywood movies, consists only of the same musty street in the French Quarter and a few blocks close to the bend of the Mississippi River, the intersections of Carrolton and St. Charles Avenues seen in the city’s faintly desperate tourism commercials. That the film manages to set much of its action in the 1960s but avoids even a single mention of the Civil Rights Movement (or its aftermath of  ”white flight” and middle-class abandonment, slow-burning events which in their way devastated the city just as much as Katrina) despite Benjamin’s racially blended upbringing is also glaringly dubious, and possibly a little offensive.

Fincher has made a career of challenging himself with his films, especially 2006′s masterful Zodiac, so it’s doubly problematic to see such an unfocused and ultimately pointless exercise in star vehicling bear his name. Moreover, there are none of the themes of identity and the elusive nature of truth present here as exist in Zodiac as well as Fight Club and even The Game. Normally a meticulous craftsman, his work here is loose, unfocused, indifferent. Perhaps the subject material was too much to convey on film – Benjamin’s reverse-ageing prods many more questions then the film provides explanation – or the top-heavy dimensions of the script were too shaky to use as the foundations of a cohesive work. But for a story about time itself, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button doesn’t reward its audience for its investment of such. Unlike Benjamin, none of us walk out of the theatre younger than we were before.

-Michael Kabel
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Happy Holidays From SBR

Wishing you the best this Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmaskah, and Robonukkah season.

It’s holiday time already? Geez. Seems like just yesterday we were taking cheap shots at the country of Turkey for all their crazy-assed ripoffs. Whatever, we’ve already got our Christmas shopping done (We gave DVD’s!) so it’s almost time to kick back.

First, though, a copuple of quick holiday rants:

Going to the movies on Christmas is sort of a modern tradition, or at least it’s on its way to becoming one. If you’re going to your local cinema Thursday, or this weekend, remember that the people working in the theatre almost certainly aren’t getting paid one extra dime for giving up their holidays to schlepp jumbo soft drinks and cardboard popcorn buckets. Nor is there anything extra in it for them to pick up the audience’s crap once the film is over.

My point is, take the holiday spirit to the movies with you if you go. Spare the theatre workers that much more work as you leave – throw the jumbo cups and buckets into those giant trash cans they have at the bottom of the stairs. For that matter, take that “no worker left behind” strategy wherever you spend money through the holiday weekend. What’s it cost you except burning the extra calories you’ll pick up from all that holiday food, anyway?

Moving on… our Christmas wish is for better movies in 2009. This year films like The Dark Knight and Wall*E showed that it’s possible to make films better than anyone suspects, to mine new depths even while playing with some of the most familiar tropes available. Yet both films still manage to suprise their audiences. Getting surprised (in a good way) is one of the big reasons anyone goes to the movies, or watches TV, or seeks any kind of entertainment. So 2008 showed us movies can be better than they are now – they always can.

We’ll be back next Wednesday with a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Merry Christmas and everything else, be careful on the roads, and we’ll see you next week.

DVD Stocking Stuffers That Won’t Drain Your Wallet

Movie gift ideas under ten bucks.

The economy sucks, and if you haven’t realized it yet you probably will soon. (Sorry.) If you’re shopping for Christmas gifts but don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of money, DVD’s are just about the best gift to give: they’re easily wrapped, they’re sold almost everywhere now, and watching them kills time.

Presented below are ten movies – good ones – that are priced at th bigger retail chains for under ten dollars. They make great gifts for your second- and third-tier recipients (in-laws, office acquaintances, and so on.); or, if you need an extra something for someone to top off all the other stuff you’ve already got them, these also work really well for that, too.  Each one is worth watching at least once, so finally they’re also the gifts that keep on giving.

1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) A few years before returning to the top of Hollywood with last summer’s Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. played a petty thief  “discovered” by a casting agent and sent to Hollywood for his big break. Writer-director Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) piles on the dark humor and Raymond Chandler references, creating a smartassed romp through life in Los Angeles that’s both smart and wickedly droll. Val Kilmer co-stars as a gay private investigator, and Michelle Monaghan (Eagle Eye) appears as Downey, Jr.’s starlet sweetheart.

2. Tender Mercies (1983) A pristine music box of a film from a time when Hollywood didn’t mind producing smaller character studies, Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a washed up, alcoholic country singer who befriends a widow and her son while working off a motel bill in a small Texas town. Duvall, scoring something of a comeback after several creatively fallow years, won Best Actor for his performance. Tess Harper (Crimes of the Heart), Wilford Brimley and Ellen Barkin also guest star. Directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy).  

3. We Own The Night (2007) Speaking of Duvall, he co-starred in this overlooked neo-noir masterpiece as the father to two vastly different sons: the black sheep club owner (Joaquin Phoenix, never better) sinking into the Russian mob and the loyal police officer (Mark Wahlberg) who followed in his footsteps. Director James Gray (Little Odessa) constructs the film’s early-1980s drug wars setting with such visceral detail that you forget you’re watching a period piece. The car chase set piece halfway through is the best of its kind since William Friedkin’s heyday.

4. The Gift (2000) Cate Blanchett stars as a widowed mother and psychic in a small Southern town, dismissed and tolerated by police until she begins envisioning the murder of a spoiled debutante (Katie Holmes). Director Sam Raimi, working from a script co-written by Billy Bob Thornton, assembled a powerhouse ensemble cast including Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, Hillary Swank, and Gary Cole as the local town folk.  Though the impoverished, seamy look on beauties like Blanchett and Swank sometimes strains believability, the performances make up for the extra stretch of imagination.

5. Desperate Hours (1955) Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict holing up in the suburban home of a businessman (Fredric March, Seven Days In May) until he can make a clean getaway. Director William Wyler (Ben-Hur) pits his two leads – Bogart the movie star, March the craftsman character actor – against each other in a series of confrontations that build like a slow-boiling vat of tar. Based on a true story that eventually led to a Supreme Court decision regarding privacy and libel laws.

6. Enemy At The Gates (2001) Director Jean Jacques Annaud (Seven Years In Tibet) made World War II’s Eastern front look so crushingly violent and bloody that it’s no wonder Hollywood hasn’t really visited the subject before or since. Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes are Russian soldiers defending Stalingrad from the Nazi onslaught; Ed Harris is the German aristocrat sent into the devastated city to outmatch Law’s hero-of-the-people marksman. Brutal in a way that doesn’t wallow in its gore, but jarring nonetheless: you’ll feel every shot. Rachel Weisz and Ron Perlman also star, while Bob Hoskins steals all his scenes as a y0ung Nikita Khrushchev.

7. 61* (2001) One of the great sports legends, in 1961 New York Yankees teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle simultaneously raced to break Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season record. The made-for-HBO film precisely renders the pressures each player faced, especially the plain-spoken Maris’ (Barry Pepper, Seven Pounds) struggle to escape the negative image given him by the press. Thomas Jane (Boogie Nights) co-stars as the golden boy Mantle just sinking into the vices that would dog his career; lifelong Yankees fanatic Billy Crystal directs.

8. Insomnia (2002) Hoo hah! Al Pacino is a cop with a troubled past and Robin Williams the killer he’s come to Alaska to hunt in director Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight) neo-noir in the land of the midnight sun. Watching Pacino go slowly out of his mind from sleep deprivation while not overacting (well, for him, anyway) is a wicked pleasure. Williams, working on his early-00′s sabbatical from playing doctors and teachers, is quietly terrifying as an arrogant killer. Nolan again raises what could have been a routine genre exercise into art, loosely remaking Norweigan director Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s 1997 original with the same name.

9. While You Were Sleeping (1995) Starring a busload of people we miss seeing, this romantic comedy has Sandra Bullock’s subway worker lying to the family of her comatose, unrequited love (Peter Gallagher) as a way of staying close to him – until she falls for the guy’s earthy brother (Bill Pullman). The late, much-missed Peter Boyle and Jack Warden co-star at their cantankerous best. It’s a little difficult to believe, in this week of Marley & Me and Bedtime Stories, that films just thirteen years ago were this lacking in cynicism. Warm-hearted, sugar-coated fun – the archetypal chick flick.

10. Three Days of the Condor (1975) A nebbishy CIA drone (Robert Redford) returns from lunch and finds all his co-workers murdered and himself the chief suspect. Desperately taking a woman (Faye Dunaway) hostage until he can contact his superiors, he soon finds the agency itself is trying to kill him. The centerpiece of Redford’s 70s partnership with director Sydney Pollack – the same collaboration that produced Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were - the film also wrote the playbook for a legion of imitators through the 80s and 90s. And there may be sexier film duos than Redford and Dunaway, but not many.

- Michael Kabel
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Previews: Seven Pounds, The Wrestler, Yes Man

The Will Smith movie behind the oblique marketing campaign; Mickey Rourke’s comeback; Jim Carrey returns to formula.

It’s difficult to say whether the fall/winter movie season is getting any better, but it’s at least getting more crowded. This week three films open on the heels of major hype, either from studio marketing machines or, in one case, mammoth Oscar buzz. One stars probably the most dependable box office draw in the world right now. Another stars an actor who can no longer lay claim to that title, while the third features a long-awaited comeback for an actor once expected to reach such heights who, for reasons mundane and strange alike, never managed to meet those expectations.

Finding three films with less in common would prove an interesting question, but they represent the last cluster of releases before the contestants in this year’s Best Picture horserace – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road, and Frost/Nixon – all hit theatres nationwide around Christmas.

Seven Pounds: The marketing campaign for this Gabriele Muccino-directed melodrama has run the gamut from “opaque” to “tight-lipped,” since  Columbia Pictures reportedly wants to build “mystery” leading up to its release. Or maybe they’re afraid the downer subject material will scare away audiences?  Ben Thomas (Will Smith) poses as an IRS agent to find seven individuals worth “saving.” Stricken with guilt after an act of selfishness caused the death of his fiance and seven others, Thomas plans to commit suicide and donate his body as an act of penance. Rosario Dawson, Barry Pepper, and Woody Harrelson play various people Thomas seeks out for evaluation.

Smith brought Italian director Muccino on to the production after the two collaborated on 2006′s The Pursuit of Happyness. TV sitcom writer Grant Nieporte wrote the original script.

The Wrestler: Hollywood loves a comeback. The seamy riches-to-rags-to-riches saga The Wrestler has Mickey Rourke, the actor once considered the heir apparent to James Dean, in a performance that early acclaim has all but guranteed an Oscar nomination. Rourke, older and bent with age but still with the crackling energy he displayed two decades ago, plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a former champion who gets a chance at a rematch with his longtime rival The Ayatollah (real-life wrestler Ernest “The Cat” Miller.) Robinson’s weak heart means the match will likely kill him. Marisa Tomei plays the stripper in his corner, while Evan Rachel Wood is his estranged daughter.

Substitute a brain aneurisym for the weak heart and boxing for wrestling, and Rourke has more or less made this film before : 1988′s Homeboy, a forgotten gem of a neo-noir that co-starred Christopher Walken as a petty crook and period femme fatale Debra Feuer as the weary soul Rourke’s boxer loves. The Wrestler also presents something of a comeback for director Darren Aronofsky, whose early promising work Pi (1998) and Requiem For A Dream (2000) were met with such hysterical over-praise that his next film, the beautiful but overreaching The Fountain (2006), fell victim to a vicious backlash. Aranofsky has never been accused of subtlety, nonetheless, and the trailer shows that earnestness in full force. The film opened in limited release Wednesday, and opens nationwide January 16.

Yes Man: Jim Carrey all but had a license to print money in the 1990s, thanks to a string of lowbrow screwball comedies like Dumb and Dumber and Liar, Liar that played well to his genial idiot screen persona. His bankability started to falter as he segued towards dramatic roles, starring in films both bland (Man On The Moon) and brilliant (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Recently his career has dropped into freefall, with rumors of major projects cancelled while films actually released – last year’s The Number 23, 2006′s Fun With Dick and Jane – die quick box office deaths or earn meager returns.

Based on a true story by British humorist Danny Wallace and directed by Peyton Reed (The Break-Up), Yes Man plays to the formula that made earlier films like Liar, Liar and Bruce Almighty blockbuster hits: stick Carrey in an improbable constraint that allows his too-much-is-never-enough shtick free room to react to routine situations. Rather than cursed to tell the truth or become saddled with omnipotence, this time Carrey’s white collar drone challenges himself to say “yes” to everything. Life lesson-producing antics and strange facial contortions ensue. Danny Masterson, Bradley Cooper, and Zooey Deschanel co-star.

As a suggestion for your moviegoing, consider visiting a theatre you don’t normally frequent. Many cities have movie theatres struggling to survive, and losing such venues to these harsh economic times will mean they’re still gone once conditions improve. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel
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Review: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Remake of Sci-fi Classic Doesn’t Quite Work All Day Long.

Remakes carry their own special kind of hubris, and remakes of beloved science fiction classics are liable to find an extra-strong dose of public and critical skepticism greeting their release. That’s certainly the case with director Scott Derrickson’s (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) update of The Day The Earth Stood Still, which for those who don’t mind its glum tone and slow-moving pace makes an entertaining enough diversion as its story unfolds. In fact, many parts of it are beautifully rendered in ways that haven’t been done thousands of times before. Unfortunately, a shallow script and too-quick conclusion that’s entirely reliant on special effects cripples its would-be social relevance, so that the film’s final worth is as murky and mysterious as the swirling balls of light so memorably rendered onscreen.

Between the original version and this remake’s relentless marketing campaign a story synopsis almost feels  unnecessary. Alien craft descend on Earth, represented by alien-in-human-form Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), with a dire warning. The human race should be extinguished, they believe, so that the Earth can be preserved to sustain other life. There are precious few worlds in the cosmos capable of such biological diversity, Klattuu tells human astrobiologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and the human race is screwing things up past the point of no return. As the government, represented by Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates) and advisor John Driscoll (Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights) attempts to overpower Klaatu’s spaceship and towering guardian GORT, Klaatu escapes their custody and journeys into the New Jersey highlands to visit one of the ark spheres that will safeguard Earth’s plant and animal species during the coming purge. Benson and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) escort Klaatu while Benson tries to reason for mankind’s survival.

Perhaps the film’s greatest visual strength lies in drawing distinctions between Earth technology and the vastly superior techno-organic gear used by Klaatu, GORT, and the sphere ships. While man’s tools are all flash and fire, alien tech is earth-toned and austere. Klaatu’s “spacesuit” exo-skeleton most closely resembles whale blubber or amniotic tissue (“The womb is a life support system,” Benson notes). The military, here a proxy for man’s savagery, seem to use fire as their only tool and recourse. It’s a recurrent image throughout the film, a not-quite-subtle jab at the first tool we mastered and a reminder of global warming, as well. Shot in depths-of-the- ocean blues and greens, the entire film has a look that’s not often used in modern sci-fi, and I have to admit it was refreshing to see science fiction that for once did not owe a greate debt to Blade Runner.

Past that intriguing look, however, the trouble begins. Connelly isn’t quite given enough to do with Benson’s character, and her performance is largely built around tears welling in her giant blue eyes. We joked earlier that Reeves was perhaps better suited to play the robotic GORT  than Klaatu, but he’s fine in a part that could also have used extra embellishment. With so much modernized from the original, not least of all the film’s central admonishment, would it have been difficult to give the alien visitor an idiosyncrasy or quirk that made him a little more… human? Jeff Bridges once mined a whole film worth of such embellishments in 1984′s Starman. If Klaatu is indeed inhabiting a human host, as the film’s rushed, ambiguous prologue suggests, there ought to be something more human inside Keanu’s stoic shell. The real distraction, however, is Jaden Smith’s performance as the angry pre-teen Jacob. His boisterous line delivery, always with an Oscar clip seemingly in mind, is a grating distraction from the subdued surroundings. Bates and Chandler are so perfunctory in their Official Government Asshole roles I don’t remember their characters getting called by name.

What does it take to remake a sci-fi masterpiece?

A lot of criticism has been levied against the film for failing to articulate the threats the Earth faces at the expense of man’s destructive nature. It probably wouldn’t have helped the film to catalog the many challenges facing the planet’s survival (and I’m not going to list them here, either). Most people, save for a few in Washington, D.C., are all too aware of the numerous crises already. On the other hand, some more strident argument on Klaatu’s part, listing the compelling evidence why mankind should be erased, wouldn’t have hurt his character or the film’s clarity.

None of these issues are insurmountable, however, if the film were able to muster the focus to compose a memorable or at least meaningful ending. But no such luck. The climax and conclusion involving the destructive cloud of devouring organisms (nannites?) laying waste to New York is over so quickly you might be tempted to think, in the moment between fadeout and credits, that there’s more movie to come: the ending is actually that inconclusive. Ambiguity is one thing, but after 100 minutes of build-up something more than a few hastily-rendered special effects are necessary. If this The Day The Earth Stood Still isn’t up to the classic level of its inspiration, it’s still not bad; but it could’ve been better, too.

-Michael Kabel
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Preview: Terminator Salvation

Christian Bale heads the sort of fourth, sort of first installment in the Terminator franchise -  and the first without Arnold.

It’s not that farfetched to think that the original Terminator film did more in the long run for HBO than The Sopranos, Entourage, and Deadwood put together. Way back in the 1980s, at the dawn of cable television’s real arrival in suburban America, the low-budget sci-fi thriller was a mainstay of the fledgling network’s programming. HBO was still struggling to distinguish itself from other channels – this before its original series had really come into its own - and The Terminator, along with other low-budget sci-fi/fantasy fare like Beastmaster ( HBO: “Hey, Beastmaster‘s On”) and The Road Warrior, got kids forever used to the cable channel as their movie destination. Trust me when I say that in the summer of 1985 HBO ran the living shit out of Terminator. I know because I watched it most of the times it came on.

Naturally, there were sequels, though only after years of speculation and abandoned story ideas. 1991′s T2: Judgment Day, with its groundbreaking digital effects and hip Guns N Roses theme song, was the box office smash of the year, and its basic structure of escalating special effects and stunt sequences, lightning quick editing, and relentless chase structure largely defined the “summer blockbuster” model through the decade. Endless derivations followed as well.

His love is real. But he is not.

The franchise languished for more than a decade, and then in 2003 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines arrived in Post-9/111 America, looking a bit aimless and more than a little dated. The female terminator (Kristanna Loken) came off a lot more contrived than the film’s creators probably anticipated, as well. As a final ignominy, now Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles series has yet to really connect with mainstream audiences, despite its talented cast.

Now a new group of creators, including director McG (Charlie’s Angels) and co-screenwriter Paul Haggis (Quantum of Solace) are taking a stab at the franchise again, with the first of a planned new trilogy that’s both sequel and prequel to the original three films. The new series reveals John Connor’s rise to leadership of the human resistance against the tyrannical computer SkyNet and its army of cybernetic Terminators. In this first/fourth installment, set in 2018, Connor meets a mysterious loner named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who may himself have travelled either from the future or the past. Wright is actually a decommissioned Terminator himself, but the two nonetheless journey into SkyNet’s headquarters in a desperate attempt to end the war that’s already annihilated most of the human race.

Face the future: Bale, Worthington

The film wisely co-opts the Batman Begins tactic of casting a bevy of good actors: Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) plays a young Kyle Reese (the time-travelling soldier played by Michael Biehn in the first film) while Bryce Dallas Howard (Lady In The Water) plays Connor’s wife.  Helena Bonham Carter (Fight Club), Common (American Gangster), and Moon Bloodgood (Journeyman) also appear in various roles, while Arnold Scharzenegger lookalike Roland Kickinger (See Arnold Run) will play a T-800 model Terminator (the same as Arnie in the original. Scharzenegger has given his blessing to the new trilogy.) Finally, in what might be meant as simultaneous tribute to half the B-science fiction films of the 1980s, Michael Ironside (Total Recall) will appear as a human general. I’m sort of hoping, for old time’s sake, that his character loses an arm.  

Terminator Salvation, accompanied by the kind of merchandising deluge you’d expect from any self-respecting blockbuster, arrives in theatres May 22.

We’ll have several actual movie reviews, including our take on The Day The Earth Stood Still, starting Monday. Have a good weekend.

-Michael Kabel

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Five Movies That Ought To Be On DVD (But Aren’t)

We are all over the place with this one.

Yet there is no Blu-Ray release scheduled for Citizen Kane

This being the Christmas of Blu-Ray and all, we were thinking of how the movie industry backburnered the release of older and more obscure films to the DVD format, most often for the sake of releasing more commercially popular – and by which we mean far, far worse -  films. For example Dude, Where’s My Car? got to DVD a hell of a long time before Serpico, though probably everyone in the world except Ashton Kutcher and Stifler can agree Serpico is the better film. Lowest common denominator doesn’t always apply to taste in film, but the simple rules of mass production economics means it’s harder to stock a Target with films apealing to discriminating tastes. In other words, you’ll more likely find There Will Be Blood than Throne of Blood on the shelves of any given big-box’s electronics department. 

And now Hollywood, the movie industry, studios, or whoever figures out how to market films to the home entertainment market looks pretty stoked about repeating that approach to DVD. Yet there are thousands of good films that haven’t made it so far as the DVD level yet, while at the same time their out-of-print VHS copies slowly deteriorate with age. There’s a big chunk of movie history getting left to wither on the vine.

The five films below are either critical, personal, or sentimental favorites we hope and wish make it to the more or less permanence of a major, professional grade DVD release. Some are long overdue for their time in the DVD key light; one or two routinely make wish lists at more reputable film journals than this one. But they’re our pet wishes anyway, the ones we’d like to preserve for antiquity.

The Electric Grandmother (1982) Three children mourning the loss of their mother are brought to a fantastiscal factory and given a robot caretaker (Maureen Stapleton) who will care for them, until one of the children rejects her synthetic affection. Ray Bradbury adapted his own story to the small screen, a version of which also became the famous “I Sing The Body Electric” episode of The Twilight Zone. Though the made-for-TV film won a Peabody award and numerous educator’s recognitions, it’s made only hazy bootleg and foreign DVD appearances. But with children’s and intelligent science fiction making a big comeback - look at Wall*E racking up Best Picture awards already – there’s surely a market for a work such as this.

Heartbreakers (1984) - Not to be confused with the toothless 2001 Sigourney Weaver farce, this character study of two lifelong buddies (Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso) getting their asses kicked by middle-aged regret in 1980s L.A was the first movie I saw that demonstrated film could be about more than lightsabers and robots and, well, shit getting blown up. Coyote especially is compelling as a failed artist refusing to quite sell out and/or cash in, while supporting performances by Kathryn Harrold and Max Gail, among others, keep the story moving. A brazenly honest film with genuine character-driven twists and turns, writer-director Bobby Roth’s script doesn’t shy from making his two man-child protagonists sometimes unlikeable – truly unlikeable, which is far different from the “they’re nasty but cuddly just below the surface” tripe of modern screen curmudgeons-in-crisis. In other words, it’s a rare film in that you feel something is actually at stake for the characters involved.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) – There’s no such thing as too much 70s crime drama on DVD, and this notable omission just begs for DVD release; Amazon.com’s online offering isn’t the same thing. Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum, not getting older here so much as wearier) is a low-level Boston gunrunner compelled to snitch on his associates (including Peter Boyle, Joe Santos and Steven Keats) or risk a dangerous jail sentence, even while they in turn betray each other – and him, too. Mitchum’s work through the 70s is usually overshadowed by his earlier performances, but there’s no denying the perfection he brings to Coyle’s dogged, exhausted strength. For that matter, Boyle deserves to be remembered for the pit bull he was in this, Joe, The Candidate, and his other period work, as well. Finally, director Peter Yates also made such semi-classic fare as Bullitt, Breaking Away, and Year of the Comet. Update: The film is now available on Criterion DVD.

The Breaking Point (1950) Nothing against the 1944 Bogart and Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, but this 1950 version, closer to Ernest Hemingway’s original novel and starring John Garfield (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and Patricia Neal (The Day The Earth Stood Still) is too much of a film curiosity not to be included in any classic film fan’s library. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), reportedly in a manner much closer to the novel’s mean and gritty tone, and with greater respect for the author’s bleak worldview. Garfield’s downed-power-line screen persona was best used playing desperate characters, and the role of broke-but-not-broken Gulf of Mexico charter boat captain Harry Morgan suits his energies to a perfect fit. Neal is a fine early example of what we call “the Nancy Travis Paradox,” and she’s always rewarding to watch for just that reason.

Long Gone (1987) Years before CSI, William Petersen headed this HBO original about minor league baseball in Florida during the 1950s, a time when racism and corruption largely controlled minor league sports everywhere but especially in the South. Petersen plays Studs Cantrell, a swaggering jackass manager/pitcher for the floundering Tampico Stogies who uses a hot young recruit (Dermot Mulroney) and a black player posing as a Venezuelan (Larry Riley) to keep his team going one hard-living game at a time. Along the way he romances a free spirit with a name that could make Tennessee Williams blush: Dixie Lee Boxx (Virginia Madsen, at her loveliest), who he falls for despite his own sexist bravado. Watching the film is as much fun as a 4th of July pickup softball match, thanks in no small part to Martin Davidson’s laid back, sun-drenched direction.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Long-awaited, promising remake of 50s sci-fi classic opens in just four days.

Intelligent science fiction, actors who are good at their jobs, and social relevance are three of our favorite movie things here at SBR, and this Friday we get the rare chance to see all three happen in the same film. The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the classic 1951 Cold War cautionary thriller, arrives in theatres after months of speculation and a relentless and painstakingly teasing advertising campaign. If you haven’t seen an ad for this film yet… I don’t know, you probably don’t own a TV.

The original version, just last week voted one of the five best science fiction films of all time (after Blade Runner, Star Wars Episodes IV and V, and Aliens),  combined a mature look at alien visitors, Cold War era politics, and an emotional story about grief and humankind’s chance at growth, all while making pointed but not didactic comments about post-World War II American paranoia and hubris. Beloved by film and sci-fischolars with equal affection, it remains a watershed moment for mid-20th Century cinema and an important milestone in the science fiction genre. The movie’s setup is ingeniously simple: an alien from another world, Klaatu(Michael Rennie), parks his UFO in the middle of Washington, D.C.’s President’s Park  and makes a simple announcement. It seems other civilizations have noticed that Earth’s nations have gained nuclear weapons, and they’ve sent him here to warn us to embrace peace instead of war. Knock it off with the killing, Klaatu warns world leaders, or face your destruction.

After befriending a war widow (Patricia Neal) and her son, as a sign of his ability Klaatu causes all electrical power in the world to malfunction, stopping all machinery and making the world “stand still” for the entire day.  Later, he’s shot dead by soldiers while attempting to re-board his craft but, with the help of his robot bodyguard Gort, quickly recovers. As he boards the craft to leave he warns the Earth again to abandon war or face an army of indestructible killing machines like Gort.

This time around, Klaatu has come to apprise Earthlings’ fitness to continue occupying the planet, after his own people’s world was drastically altered by environmental abuse. After getting denied permission to address the United Nations, he decides the human race must be destroyed so the world can survive. This, presumably, leads to the huge spheres and disintegrating dust storms shown so prominently in the trailer.

Keanu, barada, nikto: Reeves

We admit we were sort of hoping Keanu Reeves would play the role not of extraterrestrial bitchslapper Klaatu but of the fearsome-despite-being-barely-ambulatory Gort. Still, from what we can tell his part in this re-envisioning is only a piece of a much larger cast.  Jon Hamm (Mad Men) plays the leader of the NASA team studying Klaatu, while Jennifer Connelly (House of Sand and Fog) plays an astrobiologist brought to the team to study Klaatu up close. (Her job is an upgrade from the original, in which Neal played a lowly government secretary.) Kathy Bates (Misery) appears as the Secretary of Defense, while  John Cleese, of all people, is cast against type as the physicist who tries to teach Klaatu the human race’s positive qualities. Jaden Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness), James Hong (Chinatown), and Kyle Richmond (Friday Night Lights) also appear.

The film is directed by Scott Derrickson (The Haunting of Emily Rose) while David Scarpa (The Last Castle) updates the script. The film opens nationwide in theatres and IMAX, if you like your wholesale destruction to fill up your peripheral vision.

-Michael Kabel

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Preview: Cadillac Records

Chess Records gets the Hollywood treatment, for better or for worse.

Continuing the trend of 1950s and 60s music biogrpahies, this weekend’s Cadillac Records has the distinction of covering a time and place in music history that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. Though most modern music fans perhaps don’t realize it, Chicago and its Chess Records label made indelible contributions to the development of rock, pop and soul music that continues to the present day. The jury’s out whether this new film will prove worthy of its subject material, and God knows it’s got “VH1 Classics weekend movie” written all over it, but there’s enough talent in the cast to make it worth ticket-buying consideration.

Chess Records was the Chicago-based recording company that, in the 1950s, produced some of the best blues, soul, and R&B of its time, numbering such luminaries as Etta James, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry among its eclectic stable of artists. Founded in 1950 by Leonard and Phil Chess, the children of Polish immigrants, the label released such classics as James’ “At Last,” Waters’ “I’m A Man,” and dozens of hits by Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, and many others. Their work inspired a generation of rock musicians – particularly in Britain, as the film (and its trailer below) succinctly point out.

Hoochie coochie man: Wright as Waters

Written and directed by frequent television director Darnell Martin, teh film features Adrian Brody as Leonard Chess, Beyonce Knowles as James, Jeffrey Wright as Waters, and Mos Def as Chuck Berry. That’s a good ensemble cast for a work whose early reviews have been less than promising. Given such rich story material, it wil be a shame if it’s in fact as routine as those reviews have claimed. And there are causes for hesitation even among the cast. The Pianist notwithstanding, we’re not convinced Brody has ever really lived up to the potential he showed in early work in The Thin Red Line  and Summer of Sam, and we’re unsure Knowles can actually, you know, act. We’re also less excited about having the film’s stars (yes, especially Bee-Yonce) perform their own cover versions of their characters’ hits. Such a conceit has the air of hubris at best, and of cynical soundtrack marketing possibilities at worst.

In the film’s defense, Wright is biologically incapable of giving a bad performance, and Def is almost always fun to watch for his inspired screen energy. There’s also reportedly another, far more indie Chess Records film, entitled Who Do You Love, that might do the subject matter justice if Cadillac Records does indeed disappoint. Still and all, we’ll probably check it out anyway if only to encourage the market for films based on 60s record labels. We want to see the story of Memphis’ own STAX Records (Dijimon Hounsou as Isaac Hayes, anybody?) put up on the screen in the worst kind of way.

- Michael Kabel
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I Don’t Need Your Civil War

Why are so many films set around the Civil War so terrible?

At least the poster was cool.

A late holiday weekend viewing of Ang Lee’s barely-released 1999 effort Ride With the Devil got me thinking about movies set during the War Between The States (or, depending on where you live in the South, the “War of Northern Agression.”) For as many very good or great films have been made about Vietnam, and of course World War II, there’s actually precious little good fimmaking about the war that:

1. retains the highest number of American casualties;
2. gave birth to the Gettysburg Address, probably as important a document to American notions of identity as the Declaration of Independence;
3. inflicted wounds on the sense of America as a unified place that in many ways have never healed.

With such fertile material for filmmaking – to say nothing of the tragic, almost mythical characters that led and served in the war – it’s a bit confusing why Hollywood hasn’t returned to this particular well more often than it has. Is it because studios market films to northern and southern states alike, and it’s hard to depict the Civil War without choosing a side? It can’t possibly be lack of interest – Ken Burns’ 1990 The Civil War miniseries not only drew viewers in record numbers but redefined American public broadcasting’s very programming shape and texture.

Once upon a time in the Midwest: Ulrich, Kilcher, Maguire

Ride With the Devil manages to deal with the war without actually getting into its main theatres, focusing instead on the bloody guerrilla warfare between the Union Army and Confederate-sympathizing “bushwhackers” that ravaged parts of Missouri and Kansas. A little-known pocket of American history, the fighting was as savage – and as cruel – as any modern conflict, yet perhaps because of its irregular structure these brush fire wars get short-changed in the history texts. Working from Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Lee focuses the film on the insurgent efforts of several bushwhackers, played by Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, and Jeffrey Wright, to harry and disrupt the Union’s presence in the region. Muddying an already difficult and unfamiliar premise, McGuire’s “Dutchie” Roedel is from a Union-sympathizing family, while Wright’s Daniel Holt is an emancipated slave fighting for the Southern cause out of loyalty to his emancipator (Simon Baker). Taking place over several years – an epic scope, if not scale – the film eventually orients on Roedel’s efforts to escape the fighting while caring for his dead friend Jack Bull’s (Ulrich) lover (Jewel Kilcher) and child, following a well-staged but historically  ineffective raid on the Union colony of Lawrenceville, Kansas.

The film’s pacing is turgid and uneven, and details from James Schamus’s script often come across undernourished: events happen that beg for context or further elaboration but get dropped in favor of action sequences that in their turn are never fully utilized. The lack of focus in a film dependent on geography makes the effort as a whole feel rootless and restive with the scenes it chooses to present. Maguire’s soporific performance doesn’t help ground the film, either, and potentially intriguing performances by Ulrich, Kilcher, and the always proficient Wright become neglected as the plot unfolds. The end result is something like a collection of scenes starring the same actors that never adds up to a film, or even a narrative statement.

Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will.

For as poorly realized as Ride With the Devil was, it at least didn’t suffer from the embarrassment of disingenuous excess that 2003′s Cold Mountain wore like a pyrite crown. Arguably the purest example ever of Oscar-baiting style over substance, Charles Frazier’s story of a wounded Confederate soldier’s (Jude Law) odyssey to his North Carolina home and true love (Nicole Kidman) was so bogged down by Anthony Minghella’s graceless script and direction, as well as an A-list cast dead set against expanding their established screen personae, that in many ways any sense of story or emotional texture never stood a chance.

Rather than explain an important chapter in American history or translate a well-written (if overrated) historical novel, the film instead reduces the war into a struggle between the beautiful and virtuous and the less beautiful but amorally vicious. Such conflict is possibly accurate, but likely not with the emotional and political simplicity the film chooses to display. Like the recent Kidman-led bomb Australia, Cold Mountain would rather dazzle than get its facts in a row or take the time to show why they are important. That’s fine for weightless entertainment, but when dealing with important history some kind of respect for the truth ought to be a necessary component of narrative integrity.

Kidman in one of her many pristine gowns worn during the film's wartime setting

A film starring an Englishman and an Australian and directed by an Englishman, shot in Romania, perhaps stood little chance of historical veracity. But the truncheon, one-dimensional depiction of most of the supporting characters combined with egregious geographical errors – Law’s protagonist manages to find the Atlantic Ocean by traveling west from Raleigh, North Carolina – undermine its attempts at dramatic weight. If a film gets so many basic truths wrong, why trust its insight into the esoteric? The film ultimately has little answer to whatever routine genre questions (Can love triumph over war? What is the point of conflict? etc) it raises anyway. The ending of the novel, meant as comment on the inevitability of violence, gets reduced by Minghella’s simplistic narrative understanding into another in an interminable parade of brutal acts presumably meant to give pathos but that serve instead only to further numb the audience.

On top of everything else, it's a remake.

Finally, though it’s not explicitly about the Civil War, 2007′s 3:10 To Yuma is enough like the two films discussed above, including reels of stylized violence and centering on a war veteran (Christian Bale), not to invite attention. A would-be Hollywood blockbuster with a heart of pyrotechnics and nothing but money on its mind, the film is neither plausible nor particularly well-crafted. And thanks to at least one spectacularly awful performance, it’s often difficult to watch on even the most superficial action-flick level.

Following a string of plot contrivances, Union Army veteran and hardscrabble farmer Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is given the task of taking roguish, Russell Crowe-like outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the government train that will ferry him to prison. But Wade’s gang, led by his protege Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) conspires to stop the delivery, leading to a final shootout that defies the laws of physics and human anatomy. It’s the kind of film where, in a weird inversion of the great Westerns of the 1970s, all the bad guys are bulletproof and all the good guys can’t shoot straight, if only for the purpose of prolonging the gunfire.

It was suggested elsewhere that Crowe and Bale might have challenged themselves by switching parts. That’s a good idea, but all their natural charisma can’t help director James Mangold’s (Walk The Line) distracted storytelling or to alleviate a screenplay crippled by a shapeless second act. Meanwhile Foster, in a part ostensibly created in studio focus meetings solely for the purpose of courting teen moviegoers, is beyond awful as the sadistic Prince. The term “restraint” is apparently not in the man’s acting vocabulary.

The emotional impact of a hotel courtesy phone to the head: Crowe

Hollywood’s love affair with the costume drama knows no bounds, and some of its earliest milestones – Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation - dealt with the Civil War at a time when many filmgoers had heard stories of its horror from parents and older siblings. Maybe nearness to the actual events inspires filmmakers to greater attempts at accuracy, as their audiences can readily cry foul if they take too many liberties: there are still World War II veterans around to gauge veracity, and plenty of Vietnam vets as well. Or maybe it’s the lingering presence of the wars’ unreconciled memories that guides writers and directors to create films that do more than favor violence and dogmatc characterization over accuracy and depth. It’s hard to write in a vacuum, and wars are nothing if not loud.

Maybe it’s both. But for as important as the Civil War was to our history, for all the lessons it still has to teach us about America’s purpose and how our differences of culture and values repeatedly tear us apart, it seems the films made about that terrible conflict ought to be better- or at least well-made.

- Michael Kabel
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