Reviews

I gave SUMMER JOB a 5 out of 10. An explanation is surely in order, because I happen to think this is a bad movie: a comedy without many jokes, written and directed on a level that would need more work to pass muster in a high-school film studies class.

Yet a 5 it gets. Why? Because SUMMER JOB was one of the first T&A comedies I ever rented at Blockbuster (I didn't rent all of the other ones, just some of them) and even though it was stupid, it was also harmless, had the "good people" winning out at the end over the jackasses and witches, and didn't have pretensions of being more than it was. In fact, the movie's stupidity made it more, not less, fun.

This video probably won't be available--to the extent it's really widely available--once video stores start following Blockbuster's lead and replacing VCR tapes with DVDs, so I wanted to say my peace on it before it disappears, for a movie that is bad yet not easy to forget, try as one might.

This is the kind of film that people will either love or hate, because it's relentless in the downward spiral of death and human ugliness that it portrays. I don't think many folks would want to watch something like this in the post-9/11 world, but then again, TRAINING DAY is just as nihilistic as this movie and it made over $24 million in its first weekend.

The key to VERY BAD THINGS are in the characters of Robert Boyd, played by Christian Slater, and Kyle Fisher, played by Jon Favreau. They're the opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil, except that Kyle isn't as purely good as Boyd is flat-out horrible. Boyd's the consummate supressed control/rage freak and it isn't an accident that he's not only not that bothered by the two deaths and one murder in Las Vegas, but relishes the opportunity to commit more of them. Kyle may be horrified at what's happened but he has the strange ability to internalize it, unlike the poor Berkow brothers and even Charles the mechanic. As played by the vastly underrated Leland Orser, Charles is great at showing us how a quiet, vacant fellow would react to this cavalcade of disaster (he reminded me of the Tobias Beecher character on OZ).

The best or worst thing about this film, from an honesty standpoint, is that it hates everyone it sees and isn't afraid to say it. VERY BAD THINGS has vile portrayals of women, Cameron Diaz as a harridan whose final fate was darkly amusing, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is simply pathetic. The characters in the movie are also racist and anti-Semitic, but it's unclear to what effect that is being presented. Would they have not killed the security guard if he'd been white? Is there any reason to point out that the Berkow brothers are Jewish and have at least some insight into Jewish law and customs, beyond setting up Boyd's cruel comments to them and the disastrous funeral reception? No one in the movie is that nice, but there is some sympathy for Kyle and Daniel Stern's character, because they might have had OK lives if this hadn't happened (or would have deluded themselves into thinking their lives were happy). Everyone else here was headed for hell on earth anyway, I thought, and the events here just accelerated that process.

Yet for all its nastiness and ugliness, this is also a very well-made film, the plotting is relentlessly ingenious, and it's one of the few films that plays better in an edited form without being neutered. I saw it on Comedy Central, where the most gruesome violence (like the chainsaw scene) was cut out and the language was dubbed (though you'd have to be clueless to not get what was REALLY being said). It worked on its chosen level, as a nihilistic and cruel comedy. I didn't much enjoy this film but I had to grade it on what it did, not how it did it. Like a great critic once said, not every good film is fun.

Well, Khan from TV's KING OF THE HILL never says that line in ASSASSINS, but he could have. This is a long, slow, boring film. Even sequences that are supposed to be exciting--such as a part where Stallone retrieves a briefcase from an elevated train in Seattle, then has to get rid of it in a hurry--are just there. There's no energy here. Sylvester Stallone does a very good job showing a hitman who's life energy has been destroyed by his career, but unfortunately his character's weariness mirrors the film's. We aren't any more enthused by what he's going through than he is.

What's interesting, and a little strange, is that this movie was written by the Wachowski Brothers, who went on to write and direct THE MATRIX. The strange part is that the structure of these two movies, this one and MATRIX, isn't all that different: several intense action sequences bracketed by a large amount of exposition. It's more what's done with it than what it is, though, so ASSASSINS has unexciting action with uninteresting dialogue compared to THE MATRIX.

And for the goofs section, the Nicolai character says he had to fake his death in 1980 because the Cold War was coming to an end. Whatever events were happening in 1980, the Cold War's imminent end wasn't one of them.

The SOUTH PARK was the best entry from the "summer of comedy" in 1999, when films like AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, BIG DADDY, AMERICAN PIE, NOTTING HILL, RUNAWAY BRIDE, even WILD WILD WEST all earned huge earnings. Some of those films are good, some are really bad (I'm not going to say which, guess if you want to) but none are in the class of SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT. For a lot of reasons, this is a remarkable movie.

One thing that impressed the hell out of me upon repeated viewing of this movie was the mammoth percentage of jokes that were hilarious. I'd guess-timate there were something like 400 jokes in this film over its short running time--dialogue, visual gags, the song numbers--and there were very few jokes were I wasn't laughing and (sometimes) smiling. Considering how much humor Trey Parker & Matt Stone jammed into this film, it's really amazing how much of it is side-splittingly funny and intelligent, as well.

That's another thing that I was quietly amazed at: this is a very smart, very perceptive film disguised as an all-time shock and obscenities comedy. It shows better than almost any drama I've ever seen how people can go from understandably reacting to a situation to completely overreacting and end up doing more harm than good. Take Kyle's mom, for example. Is what she does here wrong? By the end, yes, she's gone berserk. But is she wrong to be concerned about the way her child is behaving, about the influences on them? No, because those influences aren't going to be good for Kyle, Stan, or Cartman either. Kyle put it best when he asked his mom not to punish anyone but himself when he does something bad. The sense of self-responsibility for one's actions is a powerful message and it's awesome to see it embedded in an all-out comedy.

Add to that the musical numbers, which are raunchy, off-the-wall, and the funniest things in the movie. My favorites were "Uncle F---a", "What Would Brian Boitano Do?", and the "La Resistance" marathon number. The only song that isn't great is Satan's rendition of "Up There". It was funny but made points about his desires to be a regular, happy gay man that the film had already expressed. All the other songs were incredible, and if Trey Parker wants a career on Broadway, on the basis of the work here he'll have one.

It's said there are greater rewards for greater risks. This movie could have been a watered-down disappointment for loyal fans of the show (like myself) or it could have been an experiment in shock value that didn't keep the elements that make the show great and then didn't translate into a feature-length film, either. What ultimately came about was one of the funniest films ever made, and one of the smartest. It worked on every level it aimed at. 10/10.

Yes, BAD TASTE more than lives up to its title. The gore and the stomach-churning material, particularly the alien "share the spew" ritual that one poor commando has to participate in, is really disgusting. Well, the movie's about super-commandos fighting alien cannibals. What the freaking hell else could be expected?

But this movie is not just about the blood and guts (and brain matter). Essentially, this is Peter Jackson's first step at fusing comedy with ultra-violence and more horrible imagery than anything outside the cinematic ouvere of Romero and early Sam Raimi. In fact, BAD TASTE and EVIL DEAD II both came out in the same year (1987, I believe) and share this incredible mix. I winced a little at both movies, but I spent a lot more time laughing and even more time saying, "Whoever put this film together knew exactly what they were doing, from start to finish."

There's a scene here where the commandos come under attack from alien snipers, and one of them fires what seems like 50 shots and doesn't hit anyone. There's a pause, and the sight gag that follows, involving a tree, made me laugh so hard I had to rewind the scene 3 times before I could watch all of it. Just when I got myself under control, there was another scene involving aliens, ear-splittingly awful New Zealand rock music, a rocket launcher, and a sheep that brought tears to my eyes. For that matter, the choreography of the action scenes at the film's climax is flawless. Jackson, like Steven Soderbergh, edits and lights a film as well as he directs it.

BAD TASTE is a weird masterpiece. Those two words sum it up about as well as any could.

Have you ever felt cheated because you never got to see a movie before that includes X-ray POV footage of a person's spine being severed, a football game that turns into a Three Stooges episode, a part where a Chinese crime lord has his colleagues chained up in a refrigerated boxcar before they're murdered and dismembered with meat-cutting instruments (thankfully off-camera), and mentions that the Oakland Raiders moved again? Fear not, once you see ROMEO MUST DIE.

There isn't much else to say about how this movie's tone jumps all over the place. It's a predictable but decently engaging movie. What makes it worth renting is the presence of Aaliyah, Jet Li, and especially Delroy Lindo. There's little doubt this movie did well off the marquee value of those first two--and they're both good here, separately and together--but Lindo is a great actor and invests Isaak O'Day with a dramatic presence that insists we take him seriously.

It's a huge tragedy that Aaliyah died so young, and a great loss for the movies she would have been superb in; she saves her thin, poorly developed character from being useless and makes Trish interesting. Jet Li shows he can be tough or funny, whatever's needed at the moment, and it's nice to see an action star who seems to LIKE doing action film roles. Note: I have to agree with Roger Ebert that seeing Li doing FX-aided fight scenes was pathetic; Li's a fighting FX just by being himself, and we saw that in LETHAL WEAPON 4 and hopefully will again in the future.

For all that, this and GONE IN 60 SECONDS were the quintissential average films of 2000. As far from great as awful, both got 5 out of 10 from me.

The phrase "It's a great movie" is overused. A lot of times it's put on a film that is good, or even very good, but often gets overrated because of how bad other similar films of its ilk are (see BIG, a very good film given "great" status because of how awful the other late-80's body switching films were).

Well, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 is definitely several dozen cuts above the violent urban nightmare films of the 1970's. And you know what? IT'S STILL A GREAT MOVIE! This movie proves you don't need big name actors or much of a budget if you have an incredible story-point to establish tension and respect your material. In particular, this is the best use of a bad guy character-turned-completely plausible good guy in recent film history: Napoleon Wilson's the worst of guys, but he's not only a hero on his own merits here, but works perfectly with Lt. Bishop to fend off the gangs. I wonder if the idea for LETHAL WEAPON, in rough form, began while watching these two characters team up.

I gave it a 9 out of 10, only taking a point off because the last 20 minutes are a little hard to follow. This one's a classic.

10 out of 10. And it took about 5 seconds to decide on that. This is simply a brilliant film. It's so smart, it doesn't feel like it has to explain everything that happens over and over again. And the story here is so deep and well-structured that it's possible to find several alternate movies inside the main one that could all work almost as well as the final product.

There might not be perfect films, but THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR is as close to perfect as any film of the modern era.

3 DAYS OF THE CONDOR is, simply put, the best thriller ever made. That includes the films of Alfred Hitchcock too. It is brilliantly constructed and designed; each time I watch it, I notice things that were there all along and it feels like I'm seeing a new movie. This film couldn't be smarter or more subtle. And it has a great basic story that deals with a lot of themes that are revelant today (the nature of Intelligence work, personal morality vs. realism, trust and suspicion). I don't believe in perfect movies but in this case, I'd say it's as close to perfect as you can get. The only qualifier is that I could not watch this film right now because it has several scenes set around the World Trade Center, and it would be painful to see that.

IKIRU is a great film, and a universal one as well. It could translate to any society where there are individuals who live their lives in jobs that are meaningless, who have little personal joy, who don't really know how to enjoy the blessing of life that they have. They won't die homeless but they often die alone and unrecognized. The message of IKIRU is amazing in that it's about the difference one man can make without being preachy or contrived.

Mr. Watanabe isn't a great man, nor is he a bad man. He is an ordinary man, undoubtedly drawn from real-life examples of Japanese government workers in the post-WWII era. The thing about his life is that everyone is comfortable with his state of being, until he finds out he's dying and sets out to fulfill a nearly-impossible building task. After that, no one, including him, is comfortable, and that splits between the people who think he's out of his mind and the people who realize that he is driven to make a positive difference before he dies.

The most remarkable facet of IKIRU is that we get a sense of this division without seeing any truly evil characters. Mr. Watanabe's son is not likable, but we sense he's got more of a backstory with his often-absent father than we could suspect and don't just hate him (though he's most outspoken about refusing to try and understand what his father was thinking). And the transformation of this man, from a catatonic civil servant to a dynamo obsessed with change, does include an element of madness, albeit in a focused and positive form. And that made me have more respect for Mr. Watanabe than I ever could for someone who was the classic white knight figure. He fought through the barriers that had delineated his spare, safe life and really accomplished something. That's the lesson here, one that Akira Kurosawa presents without jumping up and down about it, and that makes IKIRU a timeless masterpiece.

The comparison between THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and HANNIBAL, beyond the obvious original-vs.-sequel debate, isn't a fair one when focusing on the level of horror and fear attained. HANNIBAL didn't really scare me at all when I watching it, and not much afterwards either. I don't think it even qualifies as a horror film, the high level of graphic violence notwithstanding.

Where HANNIBAL works at a high level, as high as any film I've seen this year, is a psychological drama that moves like a thriller and takes time to explore all of the major characters. It's a manipulation that Hannibal Lecter is not as "bad" a man as the stories major villains--Mason Verger, Paul Krendler, even Pazzi--but the movie pulls it off. Once again, we don't much mind when Lecter kills and, um, does other stuff with his victims because they're jerks. They certainly treat Clarice Starling like crap, and Julianne Moore does a brilliant job at showing an older Clarice, someone who knows she's great at what she does, knows the powers that be (especially Krendler) hate her for just not going away, and knows that she'll never be accepted. One sly notion floated in the film is that Clarice does fear and hate Lecter, but at least respects him for not lying about what he is. The ending reflects this paradox nicely.

Above everything else, the film looks beautiful and moves like lighting. Ridley Scott simply has the right touch to propel a film's narrative through the ennui or lengthy exposition that has torpedoed many a dramatic thriller. In a lesser film, the material with Pazzi and Lecter in Italy would feel like a waste of time, but here it's good enough to make a movie in itself.

And HANNIBAL is not as gory or violent as most people think. There are several scenes where incredible violence or torture are IMPLIED (Pazzi's exit, the massacre at Verger's, the fate of the petty thief who gets Lecter's ID at a huge cost), but the film does not linger on the blood. It sure does so at the climax, granted. It's certainly a very hard R, but an NC-17? I would say no.

The best situation in the movie comes when Hannibal uses a single line of dialogue to solve two problems at once at Verger's, before he exits the stage. You'll see what I mean.

RAN is a classic film and a classic example of what I like to call "train wreck" movies. In a "train wreck" film, the situation is obviously headed straight into disaster and the audience wants to scream to the characters to get off the tracks (whatever happens to serve as the metaphorical tracks in their situations) and prevent a catastrophe. A "train wreck" film is not like Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot example, where the film would be over and all problems solved if everyone involved wasn't an idiot. The characters in RAN are not idiots. They make bad decisions, and decisions that seemed good but are subverted and manipulated by malicious men and women, and when things go to hell they do become crazed and non-lucid. But the Lord had good intentions, forgetting what sort of travel route good intentions are used to construct.

RAN understands also that film characters, like most real human beings, are a mix of good and evil. The three sons make bad decisions and end up destroying each other, but they also realize how horrible their actions are and regret them (only not enough to stop the train wreck from happening). Lady Kaede is as close to 100% evil as I've seen at the movies, yet even she is acting not as a stereotypical harridan, but as a subtle manipulator whose avenue for creating destruction is opened up by other forces. Metaphors could be drawn from RAN to a lot of modern-day situations where different factions battle for a lot of reasons, and paramount among them is the inability to see a word where they're NOT battling.

The combat scenes in this movie are stunning, and have been well-described elsewhere; suffice it to say that BRAVEHEART and GLADIATOR owe their Best Picture Oscars to the choreography of costuming, editing, cinematography, and fake blood (lots of it) here, to say nothing of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. RAN is an incredible film, and it's not always fun to watch, but it's unforgettable in its poetry of a great family reduced to savagery.

ED WOOD is the best overall film Tim Burton has ever directed, in my opinion.

What's the greatest thing about it? The acting from all corners, the pacing in the directing and editing choices, the beautiful black-and-white photography, and the story setting are all superb. But the very best feature of this film is its tone. It's hard to combine the comedy of the hilarious/ridiculous scenarios that Ed Wood found himself in while embarking on a career as the Worst Director of All Time, while also showing the failure and tragedy of that career where that label was richly deserved. There are moments in ED WOOD, like Ed's explanation of why he doesn't want to re-do a shot where Tor visibly shakes the soundstage's formation and his efforts to get Bunny to not over-camp his PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE role, that are as funny as anything I've seen at the movies. And then there's genuine drama and sadness, in the relationship between Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi, that's a perfect 10 on the dramatic side of the scale.

The fact that this movie is ensconced on the IMDB Top 250 is sort of poetic justice. When it came out in 1994, it was quickly eclipsed by THE SPECIALIST and STARGATE, both of which made scores more at the box office than this film did. The only film of that period to get both critical and commercial super-status was PULP FICTION. After about seven years, it's great to see this film, along with THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and QUIZ SHOW, getting the recognition it deserves. This is a movie where history has given the right verdict.

I don't know what compelling reason there was to make this movie in the first place. If it was trying to cash in on the success of the 1984 original (and the 1987 sequel, to a lesser extent), Fox would have put it in theatres. Then again, maybe that was the original idea. This wouldn't be the first film to simply go direct to TV and video when they studio decided not to waste time with a theatrical release.

The movie itself just isn't very funny. It's a rehash of the events in the first movie, but doesn't have the raunchy edge of that film, nor does it have the peculiar but undeniable heart that actually gave the original some emotional punch. Comparing the scene at the pep rally there and the finale here in court is kind of comparing a small diamond to a big piece of broken glass.

The new nerds also aren't very interesting, and Gregg Binkley tries hard but doesn't have the weird watchable quality that Robert Carradine does. If you'll look closely the credits list "Chi" in the cast; that's Chi McBride, playing Malcolm Pennington III, and giving almost no indication that he'd emerge as a terrific actor (and certainly none that he'd be the breakthrough star on BOSTON PUBLIC, playing Steven Harper).

One thing that sort of caught my attention was the way the nerds here kept making implicit references to other minority groups. When Lewis refuses to help his cousin and other persecuted nerds, he's labeled "a self-hating nerd." Another character says they need "as many nerds in power as they can get." And when a character admits at the film's end that he's a secret nerd, he says "It feels great to come out of the closet!" The point seems to be that being a nerd is like being black, gay, Jewish, female, from another country, what have you. It's a strange point.

The film has another actor play Gilbert near the end, as Anthony Edwards followed up on his very brief role in the 2nd movie by not appearing here at all. He didn't appear in part 4 either, and III came out a few years before he broke through on ER. Didn't like seeing someone else play his role, but it fit this misshapen, boring film.

There is one great line here. When Lewis and wife Betty ask the local college DJ to broadcast in the name of nerd freedom, the DJ stands up and says, "There's no greater friend to the nerd, than the American DJ. If we weren't all nerds ourselves, we'd all be on television." It's such a good line that it overlooks that most college radio stations have so little listening range that the DJ might be the only person who gets the message.