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02Oct

The Weekly Review: September 26 – October 2

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O’Keefe Boudreau

Times are tough at CNN, and the folks who work there aren’t getting any sympathy from the vultures at MSNBC and Fox News. Here’s a list of recent kerfuffles and shenanigans at the world’s first cable-news network:

1) CNN, all bubbly over the launch of its new Parker Spitzer talk show, suddenly must find a replacement for the volatile Rick Sanchez. Sanchez was canned for the sin of actually speaking his mind — something of high value at rivals MSNBC and Fox, but not so much at CNN.

2) Judging from the previews of the Parker Spitzer show, CNN might have another ratings disaster on its hands. Eliot Spitzer seems to be ego incarnate, and it’s embarrassing to watch Kathleen Parker try to get a word in edgewise when he’s yapping. Perhaps if the show does nightly segments on high-price hookers, Spitzer will be forced to clam up.

3) CNN went all out hyping news babe Abbie Boudreau’s “expose” of conservative muckraker James O’Keefe. O’Keefe was busted attempting to hoax Boudreau with a taped “seduction” aboard a boat stocked with “a condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs and a blindfold.” But Boudreau, whom O’Keefe referred to as a “bubble-headed bleach-blonde,” came off as a pissed-off woman intent on personal payback, and not exactly a serious journalist pursuing a story.

4) Meanwhile, Larry King keeps getting caught on camera slurping his false teeth, and earnest Anderson Cooper stutters and stammers in a series of bizarre, indignant interviews in which he tries too hard to toughen up his Boy Scout image.

This is all very sad to watch. It looks like the once-proud network is going down, which will leave us news junkies with only those howling jackals at Fox and MSNBC. Larry King and his false teeth must clatter at the thought.

*****

You Don’t Miss It Until It’s Gone

Speaking of sad tidings … it looks like Blockbuster is biting the dust. Yes, the late fees were outrageous, and yes, they failed to stock the right movies, and yes, they bulldozed a lot of mom-and-pop video stores. But who among us won’t get a little misty-eyed if and when the chain disappears? I, for one, will never forget the teenage, acne-ridden clerk who would examine my video at checkout and then loudly announce to everyone within earshot, “Bubble Headed Beach Babes will be due back on Tuesday, sir!”

*****

I know, it’s disrespectful and in poor taste to make light of the passing of a fellow human being, but dammit … this has to be the funniest headline of the week:

Segway company owner James ‘Jimi’ Heselden dies in England after riding a Segway off cliff

01Oct

The Social Network

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“This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie,” says The New Yorker’s David Denby, “… is a movie that is absolutely emblematic of its time and place.”

I guess I can agree with the last part of Denby’s appraisal. The Social Network is nothing if not timely. No one questions the impact of the Internet in general, and Facebook in particular, on the world as we know it. But does it necessarily follow that David Fincher’s movie about the rise of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is “brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching”?

The Social Network is never dull; it has that going for it. If you are 19, in college, and have big-time entrepreneurial dreams, you’ll probably love this movie. For the rest of us, the film is primarily a voyeuristic character study and an opportunity to judge a big shot. Who can resist having an opinion on the world’s youngest (26) billionaire?

A recent article in Entertainment Weekly portrays Social Network screenwriter extraordinaire Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) as almost apologetic for his script’s depiction of Zuckerberg. In the story, Sorkin says, “I feel bad. I – I wanna buy him [the real Zuckerberg] a beer.”

But despite all the media speculation about Zuckerberg’s reaction (or lack thereof) to his negative portrayal in Social Network, I think Sorkin’s beer money should to go to Zuckerberg antagonists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. As written by Sorkin, these two privileged WASPs are even less sympathetic than the arrogant-but-gutsy Zuckerberg. When the Winklevoss twins claim “theft of intellectual property,” I had two reactions: Do these pampered boys know how to spell “intellectual”? And, will someone please explain how any of these college kids could claim “rights” to a concept that was – wasn’t it? – basically a rip-off of two existing sites, MySpace and Friendster?

None of this power grabbing makes for particularly gripping cinema. It’s interesting, but no more than that. It’s natural to be curious about how such a young man became so rich so fast. And I’ll have to concede that the final shot, in which Zuckerberg the billionaire boy wonder is revealed as no different than the millions of lonely-hearts who frequent Facebook, is touching. It’s a nod to the finale of Citizen Kane, but a 26-year-old man-child pining for the girl who dumped him is no burning Rosebud. Grade: B

Director: David Fincher Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Dakota Johnson Release: 2010

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

01Oct

Track of the Cat

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by Nevada Barr

Writing a book (a real one – sorry, Snooki) is an incredibly difficult undertaking. I know this, because I did it once. So I don’t take a great deal of pleasure in trashing someone else’s novel (well, maybe yours, Snooki). But when a writer becomes wealthy and routinely appears on The New York Times Best Seller list by cranking out junk like Track of the Cat … well, I’m gonna bitch about it. Barr’s book is a bad one, and she is a bad writer. Here is a sample sentence from this so-called thriller: “Anna forced every spark of her concentration into her hearing until it felt as if her ears waved around her head on stalks.” That conjures a ridiculous image, and it’s crappy prose from an amateurish writer. Even Snooki might do better.

29Sep

Devil

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The last time I was really fooled by a movie – by that I mean having my socks blown off, folded, and replaced in my bureau drawer – was in 1999, when writer-director M. Night Shyamalan gave us The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan followed that ingenious thriller with a string of duds and, although I should know better by now, I continue to hope that someday he will rediscover his old magic. That’s why I had (dwindling) hopes for Devil, the new horror film not directed by Shyamalan, but produced by him and based on his story.

I give up. Devil does have a few nice moments, but those come courtesy not of the script but of director John Erick Dowdle, who manages to deliver a few jolts in the movie’s interesting locale: a cramped office-building elevator in which five people are trapped. One of the five is the devil – or so we are told in a lame narrative device.

One by one, the members of this little group are bumped off. Whodunit? Which of them is the devil? This setup presents a storytelling challenge, because anyone who has ever read Agatha Christie, or seen more than a few films like this one, will probably anticipate Shyamalan’s obligatory “twist.”

What we are left with is yet another uninspired Shyamalan movie, a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode stretched out to feature-film length. That’s not good enough, not from the man who gave us The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan is either unwilling or unable to recapture that old magic, and so, like I said earlier, I give up. Grade: C

Director: John Erick Dowdle Cast: Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green, Jenny O’Hara, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, Geoffrey Arend, Jacob Vargas, Matt Craven, Joshua Peace, Caroline Dhavernas Release: 2010

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

27Sep

Free Flick of the Week: “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon”

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Robert Downey, Jr. is a great actor, no question in my mind. But Downey is not – I repeat, not – Sherlock Holmes. Not in my world. That cinematic honor goes to either Jeremy Brett, in the superb British TV series, or to Basil Rathbone, in the old Hollywood movies. And Jude Law versus Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson? Please. Watch Rathbone and Bruce in one of their better Universal entries, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, by clicking here.

26Sep

Never Let Me Go

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I don’t know about you, but when I see adjectives like “heartbreaking,” “poignant,” and “unforgettable” in the blurbs for art-house movies, I tend to move on to something else. Too often, those words are code for, “You might want to bring some Kleenex, and by the way, you can leave your brains in the lobby.”

Never Let Me Go, director Mark Romanek’s adaptation of the brilliant novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is all of those adjectives – but it is also an experience that will make you think.

When I found out they were filming Ishiguro’s book, my first thought was, “They’re going to screw it up.” I figured the producers would give Ishiguro’s layered story to some hack screenwriter who would butcher it into something unrecognizable. They would also probably miscast the film, handing key roles to an action star and a starlet of the month. The musical score would likely be wildly inappropriate.

So imagine my surprise when the film concluded, the end credits appeared and … I had no complaints. Romanek captured both the beauty and the unsettling atmosphere of the novel, which is great news for lovers of the book – but quite possibly box-office poison. There is not, last time I checked, a big market for movies that end like this one does.

It’s near impossible to describe the plot without ruining it. I’ll just say it focuses on three students at a rather mysterious English boarding school. Their fate is really all of our fates – just more poignant, heartbreaking and, most of all, unforgettable. Grade: A-

Director: Mark Romanek Cast: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Izzy Meikle-Small, Charlie Rowe, Ella Purnell, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins, Kate Bowes Renna, Hannah Sharp Release: 2010

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

25Sep

The Weekly Review: September 19 – 25

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A Cure for High Unemployment

There is a remedy for the nation’s unemployed: aggravating television commercials.

I propose that, in order to receive government benefits, citizens without jobs be required to have their TV sets tuned to regular broadcast or cable channels, 24 hours a day. No mute buttons, no recording devices.

I guarantee that within a week, unemployment will plummet to below 5 percent. Desperate to get out of the house and away from their television sets, these people will be escaping from:

1) Ellen Page and her Cisco ads. I will never again pay to see this actress in a theatrical film, because she already resides in my living room, thanks to these nauseating, non-stop commercials. 2) That Pierce Brosnan lookalike in the irritating Geico ads. 3) The fingernails-scratching-on-a-blackboard music in Progressive ads. 4) The cloying music that permeates Cialis commercials.

*****

Poor Randy Jackson. He is the Frank Gifford of our times. Gifford, you might recall, was part of the original trio of broadcasters on Monday Night Football, along with Howard Cosell and Don Meredith (I am not counting short-timer Keith Jackson). Gifford was the dull third wheel in this group. Meredith and Cosell left the show, but Gifford soldiered on, boring us to tears for decades.

Randy Jackson, third wheel on American Idol, will no doubt stay with the show until the fat lady sings.

*****

Good reason not to vote for Christine O’Donnell:

Good reason to vote for Christine O’Donnell:

To paraphrase George Sanders in All About Eve, “My dear, you have a point. An idiotic one, but still a point.”

24Sep

Running on Empty (1988)

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You know me. I’m a tough guy – right? I’m the kind of macho jerk who cracks a smile when Leonardo DiCaprio sinks down to Davy Jones’s Locker at the end of Titanic. If someone mentions to me that Meryl Streep dies in a film, I’m thinking, “Good. Let’s go see it. I’m in the mood for a comedy.” And yet here is this 1988 drama called Running on Empty – about a piano-playing kid who prefers Beethoven to baseball, for crying out loud – and the damned thing gets to me. I mean, it really gets to me.

It’s hard to pinpoint what makes this movie so emotionally powerful. No major character dies. No one gets cancer. The dog doesn’t expire (although it does get abandoned) and, in one sense, the film has a happy ending.

Director Sidney Lumet’s film is about a family of four on the run from the FBI. Back in the ‘60s, mother and father (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) were radical anti-war protestors, and in one foolish escapade, they planted a bomb that went off and accidentally blinded a janitor. Since then, they have been on the lam, moving with their two sons (River Phoenix and Jonas Abry) from one small town to another, aided by an underground network of sympathizers. The story is reportedly inspired by recent newsmaker William Ayers and the Weather Underground, but politics is not at the heart of this film; family is.

Lumet is no ordinary director, and the Oscar-nominated script by Naomi Foner keeps it simple, with plenty of “small” moments. There aren’t many swelling-violin scenes, there are no car chases, just a series of touching vignettes. But damn, some of those scenes are wrenching. And the acting? Forget about it. There is one exchange between Lahti and Steven Hill, who plays her father, that had me … oh, never mind. I’m a tough guy, dammit. Grade: A

Director: Sidney Lumet Cast: Christine Lahti, River Phoenix, Judd Hirsch, Jonas Abry, Martha Plimpton, Ed Crowley, L.M. Kit Carson, Steven Hill, Augusta Dabney, David Margulies Release: 1988

Watch the Trailer (click here)

23Sep

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971)

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“Every American should see this movie to understand the horrors of slavery.” – comment on the Internet Movie Database.

“The most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary.” – film critic Roger Ebert, in his 1972 review of Goodbye Uncle Tom.

So is Goodbye Uncle Tom a must-see film, as the IMDB commenter insists, or was Ebert right to vilify the “shockumentary”? I tend to side with the IMDB commenter – although Ebert might have a point. Uncle Tom is an uncompromising look at slavery, and by that I mean it’s graphic, painful, and extremely unpleasant. But did it have to be so incendiary, if only to make its point? And what about the methods used by Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who might have callously exploited impoverished Haitians to depict 19th-century American slaves?

Jacopetti and Prosperi made their notorious movie utilizing news footage of racial unrest in the 1960s and combining it with dramatizations of actual people and events from early America. To play the slaves, real Haitians (many of them underage) were recruited, and they are filmed in degrading and humiliating scenarios, often completely naked. Exactly how Jacopetti and Prosperi convinced hundreds of Haitians to go along with this is debatable, but most of them were poor, uneducated, and living under the harsh regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. In other words, they were living under conditions not dissimilar to slavery itself.

You can accuse Jacopetti and Prosperi of exploitation, but certainly not of sugar-coating history. Southern whites generally come off as monsters in the film, but Europeans, Northerners, and even some blacks are also portrayed in a negative light. You probably won’t “like” Goodbye Uncle Tom, but you will be impressed by it. A haunting musical score by Riz Ortolani – bizarrely upbeat during otherwise horrific scenes – adds to the movie’s impact.

The problem for Jacopetti and Prosperi is that a lot of this stuff comes off as pure titillation. Young black men are stripped, poked, prodded and whipped. Young black women are stripped, poked, prodded and raped. The camera frequently lingers on their nudity in close-up detail.

Goodbye Uncle Tom’s sexual politics, graphic violence, and pessimistic outlook caused it to be banned or censored in some countries. But just as the Jews make certain that the Holocaust is not forgotten, that IMDB user is also correct: Every American should see this. Grade: A-

Directors: Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi Release: 1971

Note: There are at least two versions of the film on DVD, one of them with 13 minutes of footage excised.

Watch the Trailer (click here)

21Sep

The Grand Design

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by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

I miss Carl Sagan. Perhaps the late, great scientist-teacher was simplistic – even condescending – to laymen when he described scientific concepts, but at least Sagan’s message got through. The Grand Design, famed physicist Stephen Hawking’s latest attempt to dumb down physics for the general reader, has the same problems as did Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: dense mathematical formulas and language that only future Einsteins could love (and comprehend).

Hawking and his co-author seem to understand that multiverses and string theory are difficult to grasp, so they compensate in the worst possible manner. After particularly complex passages about numerical formulas or mind-bending worlds, they will toss in a lame pun, basically downgrading from doctorate lecture to show-and-tell time for the kiddies. It’s insulting and annoying. There are fascinating concepts at play in this book; it’s just too bad that the geniuses behind them aren’t skilled in basic communication. Sagan – whatever alternate universe you are in – please come back. Science needs you.