2000 - BOILER ROOM, is Wall Street light

A fairly decent rehash of Oliver Stone's Wall Street with some plot points borrowed from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.  This is the usual "money corrupts" story line as a clever young stockbroker cheats and swindles his way to making a fortune.  Come to think of it this is also the plot of The Wolf of Wall Street although Boiler Room came first.

Giovanni Ribisi is the up and coming stock broker working for a firm which is in reality just a place to screw clients over by selling them worthless "penny stocks."  At first he is okay with this operation but gradually his conscience begins to get the better of him and he eventually becomes an informer for the FBI in order to bring the company down.

 

The film has a few interesting characters of note, Vin Diesel is a sort of crooked stock broker with a sort of guilty conscience. Ben Affleck shows up occasionally channeling the Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross.  Ron Rifkin is Ribisi's Federal Judge father who gets dragged into his son's schemes. Of course because there has to be a woman in a story like this, Nia Long is the office secretary who becomes involved with Ribisi and adds absolutely nothing to this story.

For all the plagiarizing from other films Boiler Room is fairly entertaining mainly due to the performances of Giovanni Ribisi and Ron Rifkin.  I'm not sure why Ben Affleck is in this film?  His over the top performance contributes nothing to the story, it's just a silly show off role which is in the film for no particular reason but gives Affleck a chance to mug his way through his few scenes.

The film was written by Ben Younger.  The running time is 120 minutes.

2000 - THE GIFT, southern gothic story from Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi who's film making style can at times can be considered over the top and frantic actually restrains himself for this film set in Georgia.  The film stars Cate Blanchett as a woman who is apparently endowed with a psychic ability to see into the future.  She gets involved in the murder investigation of a rich woman where her visions eventually lead her to understand what happened to the dead woman.

For a modestly budgeted film Raimi put together a seriously good cast.  Keenau Reeves is a very dangerous redneck, Hillary Swank is his white trash wife.  Greg Kinnear is the nice guy school principal with a tramp of a fiancee played by Katie Holmes.  Gary Cole and J. K. Simmons are the law enforcement officials trying to understand if Blanchett's visions are real or imaginary.

 

But this film is really all about Cate Blanchett who gives another flawless performance as a clairvoyant. Blanchett has the accent and more importantly the character down.  It's even more impressive when you remember she was raised in Australia not exactly a country loaded with American southerners.  Raimi must have realized he was dealing with an impressive performer because he focuses the entire film around her.

 

Raimi is still Raimi so when he needs to put in a scary scene he reverts to some of the tricks he has learned form directing his over the top horror films, however he is good at getting a lot of southern atmosphere into the film.  This is a very good southern gothic genre film.

Written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, the running time is 112 minutes.

2000 - STATE AND MAIN, Mamet's amusing film about the film business

David Mamet had spent enough time in Hollywood writing films.  He knew the score when it came to getting a movie made.  State and Main is his tale about a film company that descends on a small town to shot some kind of pretentious period drama. 

After getting kicked out of their New Hampshire location a film company shooting a picture called "The Old Mill," descends on a small Vermont town as an alternate location.  The trouble is that the town doesn't have an old mill.  It's up to the director and producer to browbeat the screenwriter into changing his screenplay by taking out all references to an old mill.  Meanwhile the actors are beginning to interact with the townspeople and not with the best results.

 

Most of the actors in Mamet's film in a  film are a collection of Hollywood monsters.  The leading man has a thing for seducing underage girls.  The leading lady has decided she will not do a nude scene unless she gets an additional $800,000 dollars.  The director is a manipulative bastard just trying to get the film made so he can make the final payment on his ranch in Montana and the producer is an abusive asshole to anyone who gets in his way. About the only pure person in the film company is unsurprisingly the writer.  Not much of a stretch there since Mamet is more a writer than a director.

 

This is a sly and funny film with the usual Mamet touches with dialog and a couple of clever plot twists.  I kind of suspect that overall Mamet seems to enjoy or at the very least be bemused by these horrible film people.  At the end of State and Main the production company begins to film their story and from the look of the scenes they are shooting the world will not be losing a cinematic masterpiece.

The running time is 105 minutes.

2000 - SPACE COWBOYS, entertaining old guy picture

A Russian space platform whose orbit is decaying is beginning to enter Earth's atmosphere.  It's an older satellite from the 1960's and it just happens to be carry a bunch of nuclear weapons.  We need Clint Eastwood and his gang of old guys to fly into space and deal with it since they are the only ones who can remember how this old equipment works. A rather far fetched plot line.

Before the journey Clint and his gang have to deal with old ageism in the space program and an evil project manager that Clint locked horns with in the past so the team can save the world.

 

I will give credit to Clint Eastwood or whoever cast this film, Space Cowboys has an enjoyable cast of old  guy actors.  Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner and Donald Sutherland are his team from the good old days.  At NASA, William Devane, Marcia Gay Harden, Blair Brown and James Cromwell as the hissable villain make up Clint's ground support.

 

The film has special effects by ILM the George Lucas company and the whole film is photographed and directed in Clint's usual non showy style.  This is what I would call a "comfort food" movie.  The actors do a good enough job to make this rather obvious story entertaining.   The special effects are also good enough to satisfy the space nerds watching the film.  Overall the film has a nice nostalgic feel to it

Written by Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner, the running time is a rather longish 130 minutes.

2000 - SMALL TIME CROOKS, minor but enjoyable Woody Allen film

Apparently taking his inspiration from the Italian caper film Big Deal On Madonna Street, Woody Allen wrote and directed this amusing crime comedy about a group of rather minor crooks who plan to rob a bank by tunneling into it from a shop than makes cookies. Naturally things don't go exactly to plan.

 

Allen put together his usual fine cast for this film.  Tracey Ullman plays his wife an ex stripper who finds out she has a real knack for baking gourmet cookies. Elaine May is her rather clueless cookie baking associate.  Hugh Grant is an art dealer who Ullman uses to gain access to the socially elite of New York City.

 

Woody Allen brings his usual film making skills to tell this story.  The film isn't laugh out loud funny but it does have it's moments and Ullman and Allen play off of each other very well.

 

This is the type of material Allen did early in his career before he moved onto what I guess would be  films with more substance.  In some ways it's almost a relief to see Allen do some that is not so pretentious and not shot in black and white.

The running time is 95 minutes. 

2000 - U 571 it's a World War II movie it's got subs.

U-571 is a very very tall tale of a movie.  The premise,  American sailors on a submarine have to take over a German submarine in the middle of the Atlantic after their submarine is sunk.  This leads to a preposterous mission where the Americans in the German sub have to steal the Enigma coding device, oh whatever.

This is just a real contrived war movie to put it mildly.  The characters are the usual bunch of World War II stereotypes.  You have the old salt crew chief.  The captain who doubts himself but pulls it together in the end to complete the mission.  The green sailor on his first mission, etc.

The film had a big budget so it looks good and the action stuff is decent.  I guess you can classify this film as a typical "time killer."

As ridiculous as this film is, incredibly enough this story is based on a true incident that occurred during World War II.

116 minutes.

2000 - My review of THE PATRIOT" while mostly sleeping through it

My son had the day off from school yet again and was looking for a movie to watch that night, we went through the pile and found The Patriot the Mel Gibson epic based on Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion aka "The Swamp Fox."

Since we were starting the movie at 10:30 at night it was looking pretty grim for my staying awake for the next 2 hours and 44 minutes. However, I can comment on the following: This is a Mel Gibson ego fest flick if ever there was one. It's all about Mel,  widower, father, fighter, deep thinker, you name it he's got it.

Mel's son, played by the finally deceased Heath Ledger gets kidnapped by the redcoats. It's Mel to the rescue shooting and tomahawking the British into a thousand pieces to free his son. He's very bloody after the attack but the blood is very artistically placed on him to make his hair and skin glimmer in the golden sun. Mel's a widower with a lot of kids (in real life Mel has a lot of kids) he takes them to visit his dead wife's sister who wears bosom enhancing wardrobes whenever she's around him and clearly has the hots for him, how could she not.

Mel forms a band of guerrilla fighters to fight the redcoats in the swamps of South Carolina, we have a somewhat ridiculous scene where Mel bluffs his way into the British fort to mess with General Cornwallis and his pet dogs, the dogs end up running away with Mel because he is so Mel. Mel has an evil bad guy he must fight who is much like the Wez from The Road Warrior except he's British instead of Australian.

The movie ends with Mel helping General Washington to win the Revolutionary War, the last shot is of Mel returning to his plantation with his new bride and the family, after all how could it not.

The director of this epic was Roland Emmerich who had previously made two Revolutionary War films, Independence Day and Stargate.

 164 minutes, written by Robert Rodat.