@Randem

If you ever wondered what you’d get if you take all the scenes from Scarface, the dialog from the Godfather, and the ending from Goodfellas, mixed them up, and spat them all out in a two-hour-and-forty-minute movie starring Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, the answer is American Gangster.

Crowe is decent but seems to struggle (understandably) with the difficulty of faking a New York accent. Washington’s acting is as flat as ever, but with age catching up to him he doesn’t have his looks to make up for it.

The cinematography is as stunning as anything I would expect from Ridley Scott, but sadly his directing really let me down. As with any movie running past the two hour mark, I felt this one could have been cut down significantly and yielded a more likable result. Plus, I expect acting faults to be corrected by a director. Of course Washington’s acting is really a fault that should have been corrected during casting.

To be frank, the best part of the movie was the trailer for Rambo. The sound of laughter and disbelief from an audience mocking a sixty-one year old man acting out a jungle fantasy was priceless.

Holy crap! If you’re in need of an abdominal workout, don’t go to the gym, go to the movie theater and watch Shoot ‘Em Up, starring Clive Owen.

When the opening scene involves delivering a baby in the middle of a shoot-out, and then shooting off the umbilical cord, you know exactly what you’re in for.

This movie makes no pretenses about what it is: an over-the-top action film with non-stop shooting and almost no discernible plot whatsoever. Just like snakes on a plane, the filmmakers didn’t waste any time or money trying to justify the movie… they simply made it and said “there it is, in your face.”

The stunts are impossible, the body count is immeasurable, the dialog is terrible, and the laughs are a mile a minute.

There haven’t been many films coming out this year that I’ve wanted to see, but apparently, they were just saving the best for last.

Aliens-versus-Predator Requiem looks to be much better than the first AVP. If I got the right impression from the trailers, this one promises to be more in a horror style rather than the straight action format of the first one. Can’t wait!

And coming the weekend before Halloween, the fourth installment of the Saw movies. The Saw movies always manage to raise the stakes, and I can’t wait to see how they’ve done that with both Jigsaw and Amanda dead. Who’ll be the next Saw? And how much more elaborate the games?

There hasn’t been a good horror franchise since the ’80s. Thank you Saw movies for changing that. Jigsaw’s puppet certainly brings a modern and timely presence to the list of horror icons that included no less than Michael Myers, Freddy Kreuger, Jason, the Phantasm balls, Chucky, and the Hellraiser box.

Sucked. Bad. I can’t remember the last time I saw that much over-acting. William Shatner and Charlton Heston could have co-starred and their combined rape of the screen would still pale in comparison to what Julia Stiles (Save the Last Dance) served up. Then, add a wooden Liev Schreiber (The Manchurian Candidate) — a guy so expressionless he makes John Kerry look downright animated — and you’re well on your way to pissing all over the box office.

Next, throw in every movie cliché ever used. You’ve got the underground passages of a subway system, conveniently filled with with candle lit by $DEITY-knows-who, and left burning for $DEITY-knows-how-long. You’ve got your classic meeting under a bridge on a rainy afternoon. You’ve got your spooky-looking bald priest in a cloak that must have been left over from The Matrix wardrobe. And just for good measure, we’ll toss in a boat ride on a fog-covered river, with a cloaked figure to pilot the ferry. Oh, and to make sure you’re paying attention, we’ve also got two minutes of Mary Poppins for your viewing enjoyment. Christ!

The kid who played Damien wasn’t scary at all. He looked more like he was going to cry. Every time he stared into the camera I could almost hear him say “Please get me out of this movie before I never get to act again.”

There was one redeeming scene in the movie, and that’s the part where the nanny is trying to stop Mr. Thorn from killing Damien. After he knocks her down, he rears back and kicks her square in the face. Thank $DEITY, because I wanted to if he didn’t.

Don’t waste your money seeing this in the cinema. Don’t even waste your money renting it next month on DVD. In fact, if this movie should find its way to cable, you should call your cable provider and ask to have your service cancelled.

…pretty much sucked. I didn’t read the book, but in a way I’m glad I didn’t. Everyone loved that book, and at least now I can read it and see it for being much better than the film, unlike my friends who read it and could only be disappointed in the movie.

Furthermore, I’m ready to swear off of Ron Howard completely. He’s the perennial cock-tease of the film industry — always giving you something that’s almost good but not quite, and then leaving you to finish the job yourself. He did it with Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Backdraft… all the way back to Willow, Cocoon, and Splash.

In fact, it’s interesting to me as I look over Ron Howard’s credits as a director to see how often he’s worked with another perennial loser: Tom Hanks. Some actors, when surrounded by talent like Jean Reno and Ian McKellan, step it up and bring their “A” game. However, while I’d hate to think that what I saw from Da Vinci Code was Hanks’s “A” game, I can’t help believing that Philadelphia was a fluke, outside of which this loser has never done anything to impress me.

Bottom line? The movie was far too contrived and the story too spoon-fed. Subtlety is sacrificed completely, almost as if they don’t think we could keep up. The “surprises” and “twists”, if you can call them that, were easy to see coming from miles away. And the whole experience is capped off by a painfully long ending that reminded me of Return of the King and my 45-minute ass-ache.

My friends who read the book have informed me that this is not the way it was written. Now I suppose I’ll have to read it, and get the taste of this travesty out of my mouth.

Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance

by Godfrey Reggio

I woke up at 5:30 this morning, the same as every other day, and went down to the gym to work out. When I came back, Koyaanisqatsi was on my tv. I had no idea what I was watching, but I was quite interested in it. This is art unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I was so impressed by it that I went to the local underground movie and music store to buy a copy as soon as I was done at work.

I don’t know how I could describe this movie to someone who hasn’t seen it, except to say that it’s like photography in motion. I highly recommend this film to anyone capable of enjoying art.

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I don’t bother covering up for spoilers, so if you haven’t seen The Devil’s Rejects and you plan to see it, do yourself a favor and stop reading this right now. I mean it. Furthermore, it seems Rob Zombie could take a shit, package it up in shrinkwrap and sell it, and millions of teenagers with black eyeliner and combat boots would fork over huge money… and if you’re one of those Rob Zombie-worshiping goth kids, you should probably find something else to read, because Rob Zombie is not a god and I’m not going to suck his ass.

Speaking of sucking ass, that’s exactly what this movie did. It sucked ass. Let me reiterate that point one more time for the search engines to really get the point: Rob Zombie’s new movie, The Devil’s Rejects, sucked more ass than R. Kelly in a room full of teenaged girls.

It’s a shame, because The House of 1000 Corpses was brilliant and innovative. In spite of Zombie’s obvious lack of polish as a film maker, his debut film was exciting, fast-paced, riveting, and original. The follow up, however, was slow, contrived, and formulaic.

William Forsythe plays the role of Sheriff Wydel, and that name should sound familiar. You see, Sheriff Wydel is the cop who was killed in H1kC. This Sheriff Wydel is the dead Sheriff Wydel’s brother. Confused yet? Wydel wants to avenge his brother, and his brother even returns as a ghost to drive this point home for those who missed it in the 100 or so lines of redundant dialogue.

Sheriff Wydel and his “posse” come to the House of 1000 Corpses to exorcise the demons who live there. Tiny stays away. Rufus dies. Grandpa never appears in this film and nobody mentions him. Mother Firefly is arrested. Otis and Baby make it out alive and go on the run with Captain Spaulding. The three are dubbed “The Devil’s Rejects”.

These rejects don’t get very far, though. After an interesting but drawn out story at a motel, the three head to a whorehouse run by Spaulding’s brother Charlie. Charlie rolls over on them and Wydel captures the gang and takes them back to their House where he plans to torture and execute them. They are brutally tortured, but Tiny shows up (as the entire audience expected) at the last minute to save them. Then they get into the car to go make a new home but a fleet of sheriff’s deputies cut them off along the highway and the gang is all gunned down. The end.

That probably doesn’t sound like much of a story to you, and trust me it doesn’t look like much of a story on screen, either. That’s all the meat in the whole story. The rest is rather graphic violence, excessive arguing, choppy camera work, and a brief appearance by Diamond Dallas Page. I missed the flow of H1kC. Notably missing this time were the vignettes between scenes, where we learned how the killers’ minds worked.

Once scene near the end of H1kC silenced the film and simply played an old song while brutal action sequences played out in slow motion. It was very powerful. In Rejects, the film was silenced in this manner a handful of times — too many — and only at the end was it used in such a grave situation… but Free Bird just doesn’t have the same impact that I Remember You had the first time around.

Sid Haig is eminently likeable, but I missed the clown makeup: Captain Spaulding was to House what Darth Vader was to Star Wars and without the clown makeup he’s just another character in the story. Bill Moseley could have been replaced by Billy Bob Thornton and you’d have never known the difference. Sheri Moon Zombie IS Baby, and she owns that character. The real gem, however, was William Forsythe. Nevermind that it was a lousy role. Nevermind that Rob Zombie needed to leave a lot more of it on the cutting room floor. Nevermind that stuff, Forsythe was as powerful in this role as anyone could have possibly been. He wasn’t the just the best actor in this film, he was the best actor in spite of this film.

It’s obvious that he wanted to make a more serious movie this time around, what with the lack of artsy cut-scenes and cheap camera tricks. This time he actually rented a decent hydraulic crane for some impressive overhead sweeps and pans. The cameras spent lots of quality time in dramatic close-ups on the actors. The sets were bigger and cleaner. Oh, and did I mention the movie sucked?

I’m left to believe that Zombie envisions himself becoming a famous filmmaker one day, and thus made a conscious effort to suckify this movie and kill off the Rejects to guarantee that he’d never be stuck in a career of making sequels to this story… and that he wanted to show more legitimate directing talent in the process. If that’s the case, he succeeded, because at anything else this movie was a complete failure and to say anything else would be turning a blind eye to the fimmaking failures of a popular rock-n-roll musician.

I have no doubt that the release of episode 3 of the Star Wars prequel trilogy must be the most blogged about topic on the Internet this week. And I’m also not sure that I could possibly be adding to anything that hasn’t been said before, but nevertheless I want to share my own opinion(s) with the world.

Before I go any further, let me give a spoiler warning now. I’m not going to pussyfoot around the topics I saw on the screen. Some may be spoilers, some may seem irrelevant. Either way, if you haven’t seen the film yet and you want to be surprised you might be better off by stopping here and redirecting your attention to another web site.

Okay, so I saw the film on opening weekend, which means I was relatively early but not among the costume-wearing crowd. I have seen each of the other five in theater so I guess you could say I’m a big Star Wars fan, and it stands to reason that I had high hopes for this film. After all, this was supposed to bridge the gap.

Episode three was the perfect opportunity to fill in all those details that true Star Wars fans know, and that everyone else is lost on. If not here, there would never be another opportunity to put on screen some timeline events like:

• the Millenium Falcon making the Kessel Run
• Han Solo saving Chewbacca’s life
• Han Solo dumping the shipment he was smuggling for Jabba
• Boba Fett’s involvement in the Han Solo-Jabba The Hut story
• Lando Calrissian’s place in the story
• why Yoda chose Dagobah and what’s in that cave
• the origin of the name “Ben” Kenobi
• how Leia came to be a Princess

Indeed, what better place for all of these elements? Except that they weren’t there. None.

Now to be fair, there were a number things that were explained, such as: the end of the Republic and birth of the Empire; how the Emperor got to look so disgusting and evil; how Anakin became Darth Vader and why he’s more machine than man; why Luke and Leia didn’t know each other and why Vader didn’t know either of them; C3P0’s lack of memory and R2D2’s claims of belonging to Obi-Wan; and why Yoda and Obi-Wan were in hiding. Those details are appreciated, but if they weren’t there, you wouldn’t have a movie at all. It needed more.

As it is, I feel like I’m watching a cartoon for two hours. I would have said “video game”, but I honestly feel like modern video games have better graphics. All of the magic Lucas created for Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi has been tragically missing from the prequel trilogy and that was never more evident than in the dark final chapter here.

For twenty years, I’ve reminisced fondly about the haunting choir of male voices in their almost Gregorian chant as Luke Skywalker beats relentlessly upon Darth Vader in their final duel. I’ve loved the dramatic genious of the heavy shadows on Lukes face as he hid beneath the catwalk while Vader searched for him. I’ve appreciated the use of mixed lighting from the original trilogy where warm lights came from interior and cool lights were used from exterior locations to create a realistic mixed lighting feeling as characters walked in front of the windows on their ships.

But these things were all missing in Revenge of the Sith. Instead of a dark, foreboding chorus when Obi-Wan fought Vader, we were blasted with trumpet staccatos and fanfares. With all the overuse of rendered scenery and green-screens, mixed lighting was apparently not an option. And the thing I continue to hate about digitally rendered video is the excessive shadow detail that just doesn’t look dramatic — too much visual information reduces the impact of a scene.

Then there’s the acting. Hayden Christensen irritated me in Clones but while he’s still annoying, he actually seems to have improved a bit for this film. His counterpart, Natalie Portman, wasn’t too bad in Episode One but I can’t help feeling that her talents have declined over the course of these three movies. Ian McDiarmid was excellent as the Emperor in Empire and Jedi, and good as the Senator/Chancellor in the prequel trilogy, but his acting in Sith was spotty — superb as the Chancellor in the beginning, but lousy in the scene where Mace Windu comes to kill him as well as in the battle with Yoda.

Over the course of these three movies, the acting talent has been sparse. Samuel Jackson is a great actor whose on-screen presence is just too brief in each case to be appreciated. Jimmy Smits is just as talented and had even less screen time. Liam Neeson has possibly had the best Star Wars screen presence since Harrison Ford, and was rewarded by having his character killed off.

Thus, the only true bright spot has been Ewan McGregor. With each episode of the trilogy, McGregor has grown more and more indistinguishable from Sir Alec Guiness. His accent seems to echo that of the old Obi-Wan. And his mannerisms are a perfect reenactment of Guiness. If Han Solo carried the original trilogy, Obi-Wan carried the recent trilogy.

With the wealth of experienced actors surrounding him this time around (unlike the original films) it’s hard to imagine so many uninteresting portrayals. Much of the blame has to be cast at the directing. A director should be demanding of his cast, but it really just felt like Lucas too readily accepted the first take rather than reshooting until it was right.

But his failures as a director don’t stop there. Revenge of the Sith is bloated, just as Menace and Clones were. There are too many irrelevant scenes left in that slow the story. I hate to admit that after all the anticipation and excitement, I almost fell asleep during this movie. That should not happen.

Just like the Matrix and Lord of the Rings sequels, I felt like this movie was nothing but jump cuts from action scene to action scene. Hollywood has become too dependant on action and effects, at the cost of good storytelling.

Ultimately, watching Revenge of the Sith felt like watching someone play with a new toy. It didn’t feel like watching the culmination of a filmmakers dream after a quarter of a century. Lucas started in the middle, and filmed A New Hope first, because it was important to him to give the audience a good story. Conversely, I can’t help feeling like Revenge of the Sith was made just to show off his new computers. It’s a huge disappointment, making it the fitting end to a disappointing trilogy that turned a filmmaking God into just another Hollywood chump.