"W"

"W," I'm afraid in today's context refers to 'Waste of time.' I can't remember being so disappointed in a movie, although I honestly don't know what I was expecting. It is truly hard to believe that the combination of one of Hollywood's most controversial liberal directors and perhaps America's most controversial Republican President since Abe Lincoln would produce nearly two and half hours of utter boredom.

I remember Dennis Kucinich's famous words during the second Bailout vote: "Why, why, why !!!" This plea for sanity rang out in my mind as the movie trudged forward, lurching unevenly from one event in W's life to another:

• Why didn't Oliver Stone use the two hours to build W's character ?
• Why did Stone constantly show close-ups of W eating sandwiches and slurping down beers?
• Why did the actress playing Condi Rice pretend she was on Saturday Night Live?
• Why did they turn Dick Cheney into Darth Vader, at times I thought he was going to refer to W as Anakin?
  
• Why didn't someone write a script? The plot here seemed to be as hard to find as WMDs in Iraq.
• Why did the movie leave out the single defining moment in W's life - 9/11 (or even the 2000 election for that matter) ?
• Why did we have to watch a 40 year old Josh Brolin pretend he was an 18 year old fraternity pledge getting hazed?
• Why did we have to see W sitting on the pot (not part of the drug war, the bathroom)?
  

So many questions, so few answers, so many lost opportunities - it is a real shame on a number of levels. Making movies is not just about entertainment, it is also in many cases a way to document living history and I think this film missed out on both. At the end of the film I came out not much clearer on any aspects of President Bush's life and bored out of my mind.

More importantly though, I think Stone missed the character study entirely - despite spending all of that time, Bush's character seems just as vague and shallow at the end as it appeared at the beginning of the film. Perhaps that was the point Stone was trying to make, that W was a completely clueless, somewhat vulgar guy with really big sibling rivalry issues. But, as most of us realize, President Bush is not a mere stereotype, he is a much more complex guy than many have given him credit for and he did win the Presidency twice. This movie writes him off as a hopeless loss in 2004 before his reelection - if he was such a failure then, how come he won (swift boat didn't do all of it) ?

My point isn't to make a plea for a more compassionate portrayal of George W. Bush, but rather to note that a superficial examination of his life does not do history justice. Our recent history is almost trivialized in this movie, something that shouldn't be allowed to occur. What has happened over the past eight years has had a remarkable and long-lasting impact on this country. I for one, would like to know Mr. Bush better - I don't care whether he drank too much when he was younger, I want to understand the ambition and the drive that led him and us into our current world situation. George W. Bush is a study in ambition, a man who has comfortably worn his controversies and continued to move forward. W changed the world. His is an incredible story, and one that remains to be told properly.

Regardless of what your political beliefs are or your opinion of him may be, W is not the cartoon character this movie portrays him as. If Mr. Stone was trying to make some sort of point in this biopic, it got lost in his own personal cynicism.



Shock & Awe or Snore & Yawn?

Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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Iron Man

I never was much of a fan of comic books, but over the past two decades I've come to appreciate them more and more as a spectacular source of creative fodder for Hollywood. Some of my favorite films have oddly enough been based upon one comic book or another which I've never read or in many cases never even seen.

Such is the case with Iron Man, the blockbuster released this Summer based on a Marvel Comic of the same name. I first watched the film with my son in June while on vacation, he had already seen it once but did not seem the least bit bothered about watching it again within less than week - always an auspicious sign. I was not disappointed.

The film began with a quick pace and took what was a rather incredible set of premises and fit them snugly into a surprisingly realistic, contemporary setting, making the whole thing seem somehow plausible. The notion of the Defense Contractor seeking moral redemption was an interesting twist that I didn't quite anticipate, but I think the writers played it well with the exception perhaps of the Jeff Bridges character. If the film had focused primarily on the original group of villains in the near east, thematically I believe the movie would have been sharper. However, the director decided to explore the 'depth of responsibility' for the weapons lifecycle back to the source, Stark's company and to the super-villain of the story, Stark's partner Jeff Bridges.

Tony Stark is of course Robert Downey Jr. and he most certainly carried this film single-handedly. Gwyneth Paltrow's role seemed unreasonably shallow and Bridges, well he went Opera on us. I actually like Jeff Bridges a lot, I think he perhaps our greatest unrecognized actor - but this role simply did not suit him well (no pun intended if you've seen the robot he ends up wearing). Terrence Howard makes an appearance but also seems hopelessly outclassed by Downey throughout the movie. I can't think of another movie offhand except perhaps Cool Hand Luke where the lead character so completely dominated his surroundings. I'm guessing, but it's hard to say, that Downey was in large part playing Downey - but whatever he did, it surely worked in this performance.

Aside from the soul searching about arms production and proliferation, there aren't too many deep themes in this movie. The special effects are however, completely awesome - enough to make a computer geek like me gush in sheer admiration of the technical effort put forth. Needless to say both myself and my son are looking forward to Iron Man II with great anticipation.



Who says metal isn't fashionable?

Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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What's Happening? Really?

I finally got around to renting "The Happening" from Blockbuster (it's not product placement if they don't pay me for saying that) last night. I was in the mood for something scary and horrific to distract me from the scary and horrific economic collapse occurring in the real world - don't worry if that doesn't make any sense, because the movie didn't either.

If I had actually invested $7 dollars a person to go see this thing, I'm sure I would have walked out and probably would have requested a refund (something I've only done once in my entire lifetime - for the Rob Schneider film, "The Animal"). I can't rate the movie unless I use a negative scale and it would probably end up somewhere near the top of that. So what's wrong with the movie you ask, let me count the ways - or better yet let's use it as a case study for how not to make a motion picture.

The Happening Really Sucked - BTW - don't pet the lions

Guide to Making a Really Horrible Movie:

• Step 1 - Come up with a concept that isn't very interesting, doesn't make much sense and that most people will find boring.

• Step 2 - Talk some idiot into funding the concept (by whatever means necessary).

• Step 3 - Hire the worst screenwriters that money can buy; either draft some hoodlums from your local Junior High or bring in a team of trained Chimps - you know the ones they used to do those 'movie tickets online' commercials (again not a product placement if I don't get paid) and ask them "to just be themselves" as they write the dialog.

• Step 4 - Completely disregard the need for fancy Hollywood special effects, (we've all seen them before anyway, right?) and get some monster make-up folks to help with hanging and falling bodies and sticking giant hairpins into peoples' necks. We all know that everyone loves going to a haunted hayride - something like that should be in every film that really stands out.

• Step 5 - Hire an ensemble cast of distracted and / or dysfunctional actors and tell them to study the great silent film stars to understand how many different ways facial expressions can be distorted in order to express the depth of emotion called for in the Chimps' script.

• Step 6 - Convince star # 1, John Leguizamo, to do a Bugs Bunny impression to give us the sense of authenticity needed to convince us that he lives somewhere in the northeast United States.

• Step 7 - Give star # 2, Mark Wahlberg large doses of Nyquil in order to help demonstrate frustration with his obviously demented wife, very accurately portrayed by Zooey Deschanel.

• Step 8 - Throw in some controversy by having Mark Walhberg try to pick up some 15 year boy in his class (by telling him how hot he is).

• Step 9 - Provide the leading lady with the proper motivation to understand her role by telling her to study Dustin Hoffman's roles in both Tootsie and Rain Man and combine those together.

• Step 10 - Pick utterly unimpressive location shots, and take long menacing shots of otherwise harmless clouds passing overhead to fill us with dread and terror.

• Step 11 - Ensure early on that the audience is rooting for the mysterious disease instead of all of the main characters, hoping that the plague will wipe them out soon and perhaps wipe out the crew as well.

• Step 12 - Have someone in the movie exclaim the dialog "Cheese & Crackers" to accentuate a sense of realism and horror.

And that's it, this is all you have to do to create an all time stinker. I think it's lights out for M. Night, it must be hard to have started your career with a great movie and then followed it with a string of mediocre movies each worse than the last eventually dropping into the ditch that is 'The Happening.' So, in response to the original question, What's Happening? the answer is, we really don't care and definitely don't want to know.


Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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A Confused Political Thriller

With the backdrop of the current presidential election and economic turmoil, an action-packed political thriller is just the sort of thing that should play well at the Box Office, and thusfar Eagle Eye has done quite well. The film, produced by Mr. Spielberg and starring Shia LaBeouf while scoring quite high in terms of vehicles destroyed, scored few points in regards to common sense and originality.

The beginning of the film was remarkably similar to the opening sequences of The Matrix, with some mysterious female voice leading our hero out of custody after initially being caught for something he really wasn't involved with. In some ways, the most notable feature of the movie was Shia LaBeouf's post Miami Vice facial hair - present on the main character as a sign of his general lack of proper socialization, and absent on his identical twin who of course is a prodigy and role model. This is not too far removed from the unbelievably tired Evil Twin cliche and dragged down credibility for the story from the moment it was introduced. It is fairly safe to say that we could predict our hero's redemption within the first ten minutes of the beginning of the picture.

And unfortunately, that's the pattern followed throughout most of the film - unoriginal cliches, both in dialog and in action. The nemesis of the film, Eagle Eye, can only be described as the love child of HAL and Skynet, but with a political agenda. Worse than though, I'm fairly certain that they used the exact same set for the sinister "Eagle Eye" computer room from Minority Report, the one where Tom Cruise did his touchscreen analysis while be able to look out the window down to where the "precogs" were floating around in a giant jacuzzi. (the fact both films were produced by Mr. Spielberg adds more credence to this possibility). So, we're not only getting the same worn themes, we have to view them on the same sets as well!

The most distressing part of the movie is its complete lack of common sense though. One would expect a super-intelligence, even one that is slightly deranged, to understand the basics of the political system it is so intently trying to manipulate. Late in the movie, Shia determines that the unseen force driving him through one car chase after another is a rogue computer (while watching clips on HD TVs at the local Circuit City). He makes the leap after the computer starts quoting from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with a focus on "We the People," so naturally we assume that this populist message is coming from a computer?

To make a long and illogical story short, Shia figures out that the computer is a Hollywood Liberal type who thinks that the executive branch has overstepped its authority and has decided to eliminate the whole branch. But wait, the computer flip-flops (Eagle Eye ought to be one of our presidential candidates) and decides to blow up the executive branch while they are sitting with the entire legislative branch in Congress during the State of the Union Address. And then, get this, the liberal anti-establishment computer decides to designate the Secretary of Defense as the new president. Does anyone else find this a bit odd, the computer in its efforts to protect the people, blows up their legislature, keeps the office of the president and places the military in control?

I think we ought to have a requirement for anyone attempting to write political thrillers to attend at least one semester of a Junior High School level civics class so they have at least a rudimentary understanding of our political system.






Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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Swing Vote

This election cycle has had its share of movies dedicated to political themes - last week we reviewed the HBO special "Recount," in a month the Oliver Stone film "W" is coming out and last month a movie titled "Swing Vote" was released.

Swing Vote stars Kevin Costner and is a comedy which takes the Florida recount debacle and condenses it all into a fictional one man, one vote decides the entire election scenario. The first half of the movie was extremely entertaining and reminded me of the first movie that I had seen Costner star in, Bull Durham. Although Kevin Costner has been in a number of serious films I've always thought he was a better comedic actor. That comes through clearly as he vies with comedic talents like Kelsey Grammer and Nathan Lane. The movie does best as it presents a rough satire not only of the political system but also of the lost generation of non-voters or independents who seem clueless as to what's happening around them (and I say that having perhaps been in that position more than once myself).

I asked my 11 year old son what he thought the key theme in the movie was and how effectively they handled it. On the third try he got it right - the theme which was lighthearted at first and then pretty darn heavy-handed was "in today's politics people will sell their soul and do anything to win (i.e. the Karl Rove playbook)."

Once the movie took this too seriously of course it became less of a comedy and more of a morality play with serious character transformations occurring all across the board. I think it might have been more interesting if we would have let Costner continue his nearly Forrest Gump like character all the way through. Anyway, it is worth seeing in this political season as it does touch upon a real life theme that seems to be playing out on both campaigns. The other thing I'd mention is that if there was a Swing Vote scenario in this election, it would be more likely to occur here in Ohio.





Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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Recount

I watched a very interesting DVD this week, picked it up at Blockbuster since I don't have HBO. The show was titled "Recount" and it was about the controversy surrounding the 2008 Presidential Election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Regardless of what political views you may have had then or what your politics are now, you should find this show is absolutely fascinating. It is a mostly unbiased view (many might disagree) of the history of that incident although it is presented as a drama rather than a documentary.



A detour on the highway of Democracy, you decide?

The program is both a historical record and interesting character study of some of the key players involved (not Bush or Gore, but the actual people who 'fought the battle'). If you haven't seen it go rent it, this provides an excellent reminder of the things can go wrong in an election and keep in mind that none of the core issues regarding election standards have been corrected yet - so this could all happen again. I almost felt a little sorry for how Katherine Harris was portrayed in the show, it was easier to poke fun her at I suppose - I think her story is more complex and has more depth than the show presented (after the 2000 election she went on to become a Congress-woman for Florida's 13th district but then lost the seat in the 2006 election as she was reaching for the US Senate - without the Bush's support), but then again maybe not.

The controversy in 2008 was never really about hanging chads (or as they point out in the show, the plural of 'Chad' is supposed to be 'Chad') or punch-card dimples, it was and is about how voting standards and technology interact and are interpreted in times of crisis. I'd have to rate 'Recount' as one of the top 3 best shows about politics ever produced.


Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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No Country for Old Men - Review

Never before in the history of popular entertainment has a haircut been this dangerous. Now, Javier Bardem is kind of creepy looking even when he visits his normal stylist, but there is something positively mystical about the combination of that hulking face and his irrepressible hairdo in No Country for Old Men.

The film which has already won a slew of awards including the Academy Award for Best Picture no less, was released last week to DVD. we approached this viewing experience thoroughly ignorant of those impressive achievements - we had only glimpsed part of a trailer and heard a few jokes about the show on late-night TV. In short, we had no idea what the movie was about. Most of the time that doesn't make that much of difference, but somehow that ignorance helped to set the stage for a sort of armchair epiphany.

We honestly can't recall ever having been so pleasantly surprised by a movie in my life. We was already acquainted with most of the movies produced by the Coen brothers and while many of those were interesting and few quite enjoyable, none of them to date had been truly remarkable. Perhaps the characteristics that I had associated with the Coens were the very things missing from this film - the dark humor, the not so realistic personas.

As goofy as Bardem appeared in the movie, he seemed frighteningly real. Josh Brolin seemed like someone I had met before, just couldn't place him and Tommy Lee Jones, a great actor in search of the ability to not mimic his prior performances, wow - this was his most realistic character to date, bar none. Even Woody Harrelson's somewhat under-defined role seemed vivid and sympathetic.

As the DVD progressed, we found ourselves transfixed, getting knotted up with suspense in places during the plot. This isn't some sort thrill a minute, twist & turn till you throw up action nightmare like National Treasure 2, this is in many places a very slow moving picture - but it works. The story creates its own sense of time outside of time, the kind of thing we hope every movie does for us, building that virtual hideaway where our minds are transported into the director's dimension for 90 minutes or so.

When you try to deconstruct a film like this where do you start - it isn't following a standard movie-making formula - at least not in an obvious fashion. The story is rich, the landscape is bleak and forbidding, the characters play it small but come over big and like life - we find no real parables or easy cliches to help us cope with reality. In our mind, we saw Bardim with his sinister coin toss as a sort of Anti-Gump, throwing his actions into the hands of unfathomable destiny.

We loved every minute of it - a classic in every sense of the word.

Trailer for No Country for Old Men

Copyright 2008, Raving Reviews™

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