for Winter 2007
3:10 to Yuma - American Gangster - Event Horizon - The Forgotten - The Kingdom - McCabe and Mrs. Miller - Michael Clayton - Ratatouille - Shoot 'Em Up - Spider-man 3
The Forgotten (2004, 91 min, PG13) **1/2 – Directed by Joseph Ruben, starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, and Anthony Edwards. Julianne Moore is always losing her children: “Boogie Nights,” this movie, that one with Samuel L. Jackson, etc. “The Forgotten” is like a feature-length episode of “The X-Files” in which the mother (Moore) of a dead child wakes up one morning to discover that nobody remembers her son but her. With its government-collusion-with-abductions, chases through deserted warehouses, and the brevity of the final conversation, “The Forgotten” doesn’t exactly bring an enormous amount of originality to the potential of its setup. But it gets points for carrying its pro-life message without ramming it down our throats (there’s a pretty clear shot of the pregnant heroine declaring “I have a life inside me;” it doesn’t feel preachy because it feels, crazy as the movie is, scene-appropriate). “The Forgotten” has the clean blue feel of a movie directed by an imported European director (think “Gothika” and “Derailed”), slick but impersonal, and there are even points when I would be just as happy to hear a summary as watch it.
The Kingdom (2007, 110 min, R) **1/2 (Most of the movie), ***1/2 (Ending gunfight) – Directed by Peter Berg, starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Ashraf Barhom. Not so much a commentary on America’s shall-we-say “bumpy” recent relations with the Middle East as a summary. A bomb blows up, American citizens are killed, and heavily-armed Americans go where they are not welcomed, where they don’t understand things, and eventually blow a lot of stuff up, with questionable results. “The Kingdom” compresses things to a terrorist attack on an American compound in Saudi Arabia, with the armed response coming from an FBI team. Once in Saudi Arabia, “The Kingdom” is essentially “Red Heat” all over again, with two police forces from different backgrounds learning to work together, although “Red Heat” gets its point across with more clarity and efficiency. As the lead FBI guy, Jamie Foxx has the Jim Belushi role, and Ashraf Barhom has the Schwarzenegger role; first they don’t get along, then they do. Chris Cooper dispenses wisdom, Jennifer Garner emotes, and Jason Bateman cracks wise. The middle section, of mostly culture clashing, is a little long in the tooth. Still, the gunfight at the end is a thing of beauty, as the combo FBI / Saudi police team machineguns its way through an apartment building. If the FBI had been attacked while driving out of the Saudi airport – skipping the whole middle section – I’d be giving “The Kingdom” a clear recommendation. The only commentary comes at the very end (SPOILERS!) when Foxx reveals that he came to the Middle East to “kill them all;” his confession is mirrored by two Saudi children swearing the same oath.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1973, 121 min, R) **** – Directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonios, and William Devane. Altman has a way of making movies I intellectually recognize as great, yet I feel little personal connection to them. I don’t have anything bad to say about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and I could even argue that it’s Altman’s best movie, but it doesn’t hit me the way a “great” movie should. Maybe after I let it gestate a few years I’ll feel differently. Anyway, Altman’s sepia-tinted anti-Western has held up better than, say, “Little Big Man” because it’s filled with people and not just propaganda. Sure, it overturns Western conventions and myths by showing the frontier as being built by dirty alcoholics and whores instead of noble gunfighters, but the movie has affection for these swine and is a good movie besides that. I also like that the whores and the townsfolk are on equal moral footing throughout; holier-than-thou prostitutes are just as tiring as one-dimensional crack whores. McCabe (Beatty) is a gambler who turns a mining outpost into an actual town. He’s cleverer than everyone else there, but not as clever as Mrs. Miller (Beatty’s girl-of-the-moment Christie), who comes along to run the whorehouse. Eventually the West ends, the way the West always does in Westerns, and the robber barons want McCabe to die with it. But that’s not what interests Altman, as he openly admits in the DVD commentary; he’s more interested in building his own mining town from the ground up, filling it with actors, and making a documentary (practically) of what happens.
More Reviews in a Hurry for 2007.
American Gangster (2007, 157 min, R) *** - Directed by Ridley Scott, starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carla Gugino, and Josh Brolin. Ridley Scott at what he does best: a slick, professionally-made entertainment on a wide canvas, completely engaging, albeit a little shallow. “American Gangster” follows real-life drug kingpin Lucas (low-key Denzel) as he builds an empire and real-life cop-turned-prosecutor Roberts (Crowe) as he sets out to bring him down. The movie develops two distinct personalities and sets of values, and smashes them together. Denzel and Sir Ridley portray Lucas as being contained, hard-working, quiet, patient, and, perhaps, more than a little insane in his desire to put things back the way they were supposed to be. He takes “delayed gratification” to a kind of “Count of Monte Cristo” level, in which, after years of toil, he buys a mansion for his mother and has childhood furniture rebuilt from memory. It’s only because this isn’t directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp that the sequence doesn’t come across as obsessive and frightening. Crowe, in the meantime, may be a slob and womanizer, but he’s an emotional ascetic. In the course of the film he gives up the custody battle for his son, he puts the law ahead of his partner and boyhood friends, and finds himself an outcast among corrupt police. Giving up everything that Denzel strives to achieve and rebuild is the cost of justice. The movie’s highpoint, action-wise, comes in a Harlem drug bust in which – a la “Miami Vice” and “The Untouchables” – shotguns prove superior to automatic weapons in close urban quarters. At one point, a dealer tries shooting the police through a door, only to have the bullets bounce back into him.
Double Indemnity (1944, 107 min, NR) **** - Directed & co-written by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. Two hours of Fred MacMurray referring to Barbara Stanwyck as “baby” with varying degrees of contempt. One of the best movies ever made.
Event Horizon (1997, 96 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, and Sean Pertwee. One of those movies you don’t want to recommend but, after a while, you can’t figure a way out of it. Sure, “Event Horizon” is intellectually unsound, squanders a great set-up and first act, and has no denouement, but damned if it isn’t effective. There’s something haunting – as in, you can’t shake it even years later – about a lost spaceship coming out of a black hole possessed and making people gouge out their own eyeballs. Essentially a haunted house film transported to outer space, the crew of one spaceship is sent to investigate what happened to the crew of a long lost spaceship called Event Horizon. Things go bad. You expect a sci-fi explanation but you get a horror explanation instead (SPOILER: the ship went to Hell and brought back friends). “Event Horizon” is effective because stuff jumps out at the right time and damned if the message of “part of the universe is out to get you just to get you” is unsettling. Making you feel creeped out and unsettled is as good a goal for a movie to have as just about anything else. The atmosphere and production design are great – models more than CG, with a haunted spaceship based on Notre Dame cathedral – and the acting is solid, with dialogue that allows the characters to say realistically what they would say in improbable situations. When the captain watches a video of the previous crew’s fate, he announces, not unfairly, “Okay, we’re leaving.”