2008 - LEATHERHEADS, attempt at a Capra type comedy

George Clooney can't get a break particularly from this writer.  Leatherheads is yet another directing attempt that falls flat.   The film is about the early days of football before it became a recognized professional sport.  Clooney is one of the players and the captain of a team called the Bulldogs.  The story bounces between the rough and tumble go for it early games, a love story and a romantic triangle which as it turns out is an awful lot to shovel into one film.

Clooney is his usual amiable movie star presence.  The love interest is played by Renée Zellweger in a not so hot performance.  John Krasinski turns out to be Clooney's chief rival for Zellweger and a rival on another football team the Bulldogs play against in the big game at end of the film.  Seen all this stuff before.

 

As a director, Clooney is for the most part good with working with actors.  The film has a nice 1930's look to it even if the film is at times drenched in sepia, a favorite of directors and cinematographers who want to create a look of what the good old days looked like.  But you can be fairly certainly people weren't constantly bathed in sepia light during the 1930's.  

 

As with a lot of Clooney's films the script is the main issue as it sandwichs in football field slapstick action and a wisecracking 30's movie style romance.  Clooney appears to be going for a Capra type of film lots of frenzied action and romance.  However it’s all just to much as the film loses focus from the football games to the not very interesting romantic moments.

The film was written by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, the running time is 114 minutes.

2008 - GRAN TORINO, a good film from Clint Eastwood

I was expecting the worst on this film.   Clint Eastwood plays a retired automotive factory worker who's a big bigot.  When a family of Hmong immigrants moves in next door, Eastwood is slowly won over by them and helps their youngest son deal with a gang of Hmong toughs. 

I'm not really the biggest Eastwood fan when it comes to his film making style.  He has never seemed to bring a lot visual interest to the films he directs and it seems like his point and shoot technique of movie making is more suited to a bland 1970's made for TV movie style.

 

However I think this film works fairly well.  I would have to give most of the credit to the writer Nick Schenk who has actually managed to make Eastwood's character and the situations believable.  As a director,  Eastwood did a good job working with his young cast who for the most part had never been in a film before.

 

This film was a pleasant surprise, the running time is 116 minutes.

2008 - REDBELT, David Mamet's marital arts film

 Usually I enjoy Mamet's films.  They are plot twisty clever stories with entertaining tough guy dialog.  For some reason this is not really top Mamet.  He brings out his usual careful plotting but the film kind of telegraphs where it is going before we get to the end. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the owner and instructor of a martial arts academy.  He's struggling with money issues trying to keep his school open.  He gets involved with loan sharks and it all leads up in a big martial arts match at the end of the film.

I don't think you can find fault with the cast.  Besides Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Ricky Jay, Alicia Braga, Emily Mortimer and Joe Mantegna give good performances.  The fight scenes seem sort of decently staged but the emotion core of the film, a man struggling to keep his moral balance just doesn't seem to be completely convincing.

 

Well it's a Mamet film so if it's not exactly top tier for him, compared to a lot of other films it's certainly  heads above just about every other martial arts film.

 

Written by Mamet of course, the running time is 100 minutes.

1996 - ERASER, the last of Arnold's good action films

Arnold  Schwarzenegger was getting towards the end of his run as the preeminent action star of the 1990's.   Eraser is probably the last really entertaining Arnold action movie.

Whoever was responsible for hiring the actors for this film did a very good job.  Arnold plays a U. S. Marshall working in the Witness Relocation Program for the Department of Justice.  He gets involved with Vanessa Williams playing an employee of a crooked defense contractor who is ready to testify for the U.S. Government.  Eraser has a great supporting cast with James Coburn playing the head of the Witness Relocation Program, James Caan one of it's top agents and the actor Robert Pastorelli as one of Arnold's witnesses who is now in the relocation program.

 

The film has very entertaining action scenes and Arnold playing off of a strong group of actors certainly helps the film.  

  

Walon Green and Tony Puryear get screenplay credit, but apparently there were a lot of other uncredited writers involved in the film, the film runs 114 minutes.

2008 - TRANSSIBERIAN, a good mystery thriller

A very good mystery thriller reminiscent of a Hitchcock film particularly The Lady Vanishes, although Hitchcock generally stayed away from mystery stories.  Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson play American missionaries returning from a trip working in China at their church mission.  They choose to take the Transsiberian Railroad which is a seven day train ride that runs through the heart of frozen Siberia.  While on the train they meet another couple who they bond with.  Meanwhile a Russian police detective is on the trail of a killer that has stolen a supply of some illegal drugs.

This is a rare thriller that spends time supplying backgrounds to the characters in the film which helps create a lot more realism and tension when they  begin to fall into danger. The film is also helped by some excellent photography of the cold snowy landscape and the action highlights are nicely judged.

 

For the most part the actors give excellent performances with British actress Emily Mortimer a standout  playing an American wife with a complicated past.  Woody Harrelson not really one of my favorite actors actually does a good job as her hayseed hardware store manager husband.  Ben Kinglsey is the Russian detective who at first seems like a decent guy but is a hardened cop underneath his likable persona.

 

The film was a disappointment at the box office for some reason and lost money, the victim of poor marketing perhaps, who knows.  It's still a very good film in a time when it's hard to put together a decent thriller.

The film was written by the directer Brad Anderson and Will Conroy.  The running time is 111 minutes.

2008 - COMMANCHE MOON, a big disappointment from Larry McMurtry

 The prequel to the great television series Lonesome Dove, this followup is just a complete train wreck of a film.

The film appears to cover the early lives of Larry McCurtry's characters, Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae and their time as Texas Rangers.  But the script gives them next to nothing to work with. 

 For a western miniseries there is surprising little action and the film spends most of it's running time on the personal lives of the two central characters.  Unfortunately their personal lives are really not very interesting.  The whole miniseries is just a serious waste of time.

 

Larry McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Ossana adapted McMurtry's book and also have producer credits on this show, so I believe they probably have to carry a lot of the blame for it's complete failure.

The running time is a very long 284 minutes.

2008 - BURN AFTER READING, a black comedy from the Coen Brothers

This is what I would call a typical Coen Brothers comedy.  The characters are very stupid and the humor is very black.  George Clooney plays a US Marshall who is definitely not the smartest guy in the room.  He is having an affair with the wife of a fired CIA analyst played by John Malkovich.  Malkovich's wife is played by Tilda Swinton in another one of her typically cold performances.

The plot has something to do with some trainers at a local Washington DC gym getting a hold of a computer disc which contains a tell all book about the CIA that Malkovich is writing. Hoping to make money from it the trainers peddle it around Washington DC looking for a buyer.  From there the plot gets more complicated as the actors move through the Coen Brothers complex and very cynical plot turns.

 

Since this is a Coen Brothers film, the level of film making is at their usual highly skilled level.  I believe the problem here is that every character is just incredibly unlikable.  The audience has literally no one to sympathize with.  The film kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth after it ends.

The Burn After Reading is certainly entertaining enough.  But I think I have come to expect a little more from the Coens.

Written as usual by Joel and Ethan Coen, the running time is 96 minutes.

2008 - BE KIND REWIND, a real quirky film

A real oddball of a film from an oddball of a film director Michel Gondry.  The film is really a time capsule of a different world.  Danny Gover owns a VHS tape rental store in Passaic, New Jersey.  He employs rapper Mos Def and Jack Black as employees.  One night Jack Black gets struck by lighting which causes his body to become magnetized.   He walks into the video store and erases all of the VHS tapes.  

 

Now he and Mos Def have to rerecord the tapes by re staging the erased films with somekind of a film process they call "sweded."  Essentially they reenact  the films Black erased using goofy costumes and sets and rent the films to the store's customers.  Unsurprisingly they become a big hit with Black becoming the star of the sweded films.  Throw in a tribute to jazz pianist "Fats" Waller for some reason and you have the the makings of a very strange film.

 

The director Michel Gondry has certainly not played it safe with his career and this is hardly the kind of film that gets you more offers to direct in Hollywood.  The very strangeness of the film kept me watching.  The recreations of films such as Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy and Rush Hour 2 are funny.

 

The cast seems to be having a good time.  Written by Michel Gondry.  The running time is 98 minutes.

2008 - ME AND ORSON WELLES, a tribute to the theater

 To bad this very good film about a young man's first experience in the theater didn't find an audience.  The director Richard Linklater and his team did an excellent job recreating the New York theater scene of the late 1930's. This is a considerable achievement considering a lot of the film was shot at Pinewood studios in England.

The cast is very good particularly Christian McKay as the brilliant and flamboyant Orson Welles, trying to pull off a modern interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar while juggling a wife, lovers,  jittery actors and a career in radio.  McKay also plays Welles as a man not lacking in an ego to put it mildly.

 

I suppose the subject matter was just a little to inside for the general movie going public.  Still, a very good film from a director who usually takes on interesting projects.

 The screenplay was by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, Jr., the running time is 113 minutes.

2008 - HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, season 4

Season 4 on the long running series starts to have some issues with a number of it's early episodes. Our main protagonist  Ted Mosley gets engaged and is left at the altar.  So we have a number of episodes where we put up with the romance of Ted and his fiancee Stella Zinman which really slows down the action  

Once the series is done with this tiresome plot line, the episodes actually start getting funny again.

 

The show's actors in this season are now very comfortable with their characters.  Worth viewing after you get through the first five episodes.

 

The main writers are the series producers, Carter Bays & Craig Thomas.

513 minutes

2008 - NO SUBTITLES NECESSARY: LASZLO & VILMOS

Another documentary for me on cinematographers.  Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond a couple of Hungarian film students fled Hungry during the Soviet invasion of the 1950's.  They ended up in Hollywood eventually shooting about any low budget job they could get while working their way up.  They hooked up with Roger Corman and finally hit the big time working for directors like Spielberg, De Palma and Bogdanovich.  They come off as middle aged teddy bears at time this documentary was made but I suspect that they were a couple of pretty tough characters to survive in the film business.

This is the usual interview type format for these kind of documentaries.  The list of people they have worked with is pulled out, everyone sits for a few minutes and sings their praises, there are lots of film clips of their work, etc.

Probably the most interesting stuff is Zsigmond's time working with Steven Spielberg.  Zsigmond had shot Spielberg's first film The Sugarland Express and later Spielberg used him on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There are references to Spielberg and studio firing him five times during the making of that film but the reason for their conflict is never explained.  Zsigmond makes a cryptic remark that he wanted Spielberg to film it like a movie but it is never explained what that meant.  Kovacs shot Peter Bogdanovich's better films and probably was a major influence on him.  He also has a cinematographer credit on Ghostbusters of all things.  This guy worked in about every genre in the film business. 

This is a film more for movie buffs than the general public but it is a lesson in "paying your dues."

104 Minutes.

2008 - WANTED, garbage

A put upon accountant finds out he is the son of the world's greatest assassin.  He is trained by a mysterious organization of killers to also become an assassin in this very crappy film. 

Wanted is based on a comic book by extreme hack Mark Miller author of Kick-Ass, Superman: Red Son, Robo Hunter and Maniac 5 among lots of other stuff.  Of course they couldn't use Miller's original plot since it involved a secret society of killers eliminating all the super heroes in the world and hypnotizing the entire population of the planet to forget there ever were super heroes, how stupid can you get.

The director was Timur Bekmambetov, thank god for cut and past on that name.  The spastic action scenes are reminiscent of his Russian fantasy films Night Watch and Day Watch with over the top action effects scenes that are computer enhanced to a point that goes beyond extreme incoherence.

The acting is probably not worth commenting on.  The ridiculously thin Angelina Jolie is supposed to be a big time assassin and it looks like she can barely hold her big gun in her hands.  James McAvoy is the real star of the film and probably does as well as he can with the silly role of the assassin in training accountant.

No Sale on this one.

110 minutes screenplay by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan.

2008 - INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL not good not bad not anything

Expectations were so high for this film it was bound to disappoint.  Watching the latest Indiana Jones film three years after the film was released it looks more like an over produced B movie from Universal studios than an adventure epic.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a letdown mostly because it just replays stuff from the previous films.  Almost every scene in the film is a direct quote from the first and second films.  You get the icky bug stuff, the big fight with a real tough guy stuff, the mystical stuff, the face melting stuff etc.  Even the space aliens at the end look like the outer space visitors from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Frankly all this quoting from the old films gets kind of tiresome.  Sean Connery passed on this film so they killed his character off.  Denholm Elliot who played Professor Marcus had passed away so there is a reference to his dying.  At least the Bond series waiting until their 20th film to pat themselves on the back with this kind of self styled ass kissing.

The action scenes are in the usual Spielberg style which is looking pretty dated these days especially when you overlay a typical John Williams score on top of them.  

The main problem with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that it looks old fashioned and kind of out of it.  It's  been close to 30 years since the first film came out.  Movie audiences have moved on from this kind of film.  Indiana Jones needed to reinvent itself like the James Bond and Batman films have. 

The film is also way too long.

122 minutes

2008 - MAMMA MIA, I give up or why don't we all just give up

From TBS this weekend a horror film marathon.  Mamma Mia the musical was run three times over three nights, it couldn't be avoided.  The film stars would be musical comedy sensation Meryl Streep chewing more scenery than is available on the Greek island they shot the film on. 

The idea is to put together a film that's good campy fun.  Well they got the campy part right.  Middle aged Meryl and her equally middle aged friends and ex boyfriends sing a lot of ABBA songs.   24 to be exact, I didn't realize that Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson had been so prolific.

Since the filmmakers have hired a cast of non singers and dancers to perform the songs, lots of frenzied editing is used to cover up their inability to sing and dance.  Everyone is encouraged to run or skip or jump around like preschoolers at recess.  This lets the audience know how much fun they are having.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire would spend months perfecting dance routines for their films, Meryl and her cast of merry music makers probably gave it 5 or 10 minutes of thought during the after filming happy hours they must have been having.

A lot has been made of John Wayne's ridiculous performance as Genghis Khan in the Conqueror, but 16 time Academy Award nominee Meryl can certainly give him a run for his money.  She runs around acting like a hysterical nutcase for most of the film.

When she isn't acting like a hysterical nutcase she's singing like a hysterical nutcase the rest of the time. Meryl's idea of performing ranges from her subtle interpretation of a raging psychotic to her method actorory singing performances which channel an epileptic having continuous grand mal seizures.

Mamma Mia made a lot of money but artistically the film is a complete failure.  It's hard to believe that there could be a musical worse than, Hello Dolly, Star or On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, but this could be the nadir for film musicals.  Mamma Mia makes At Long Last Love look like a masterpiece.

110 minutes

2008 - SON OF RAMBOW, nice kid film misses the mark

The Son of Rambow had so many good things in it Unfortunately it ran out steam by the end and took some lazy shortcuts in its characters to get to a happy ending.

 This is your basic story about two boys who are very different but form an unlikely friendship when they bond over a common purpose.  In this case that purpose is a shared love for the Rambo film First Blood, which they use as an inspiration for a home movie, that gradually escalates until almost their entire school gets involved. 

The film has some some funny stuff and some not so funny stuff.  The elaborate amateur stunts they put each other through are amusing in a slapstick kind of way.  The film gets in trouble with its serious turn towards the end when it focuses on the kids family lives.

The filmmakers seem kind of desperate to bring their story to a happy ending with all of the loose ends tied up and the fractured family relationships fixed and resolved.  This tidiness really hurts the film.

A decent film for half of its running time, The Son Of Rambow finally falls apart when the sentimentality kicks in toward the last half of the film.

2008 - NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, documentary on Australian exploitation films.

A pretty decent documentary about Australian exploitation films that were simultaneously being made at the same time as the more "quality" product coming out of Australia was making the rounds at film festivals.  Not Quite Hollywood is a quick history of these films that has a sense of humor about this subject. 

The documentary interviews the actors and filmmakers in front and behind the camera and they seem to have a fondness for their time spent working in this genre.  Quentin Tarantino also shows up running his mouth as usual with his list of favorite Ozpoloitation films.  Say what you want about Tarantino but the guy has seen a lot of films.

I have somewhat of a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the films were probably pretty terrible.  The people making this documentary did have the ability to select film clips that are probably the best scenes from the various genre films.

The section on American actors is pretty interesting, Jamie Lee Curtis ended up in a pretty decent film called Road Games, and Dennis Hopper talks about his very out of control behavior on the set of Mad Dog Morgan, with accompanying films clips to support the stories of his wild behavior.  Hopper seems like a pretty scary guy.  

 The documentary isn't going to have me race out to find the Jaws ripoff about giant wild pigs called Razorback, but it's still pretty fun stuff to watch the various and at time outrageous clips from these junky films.

Besides any film that argues that the pretentious Australian film Picnic At Hanging Rock needed more vomit scenes in it can't be all bad.

2008, CITY OF EMBER not too bad family movie

I have no idea why this interesting family film failed. Maybe the combination of science fiction and the focus on young people didn't attract the stupid adolescent boy market Hollywood likes to service. Maybe the lack of hard core violence or sleazy teenage sex scenes didn't give the studio they wanted to sell.

   

 The City Of Ember had a good cast and fairly decent pacing. The film is essentially a treasure hunt type of story with the two young leads looking for the way out of an underground city that has been established after a post apocalyptic catastrophe.

 

Some films just don't catch on with audiences. 

 

 

 

Written by Caroline Thompson, the running time is  95 minutes.