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Reviews
Boogie Nights (1997)
One of the more accessible PTA movies, but not the best.
A classically Paul-Thomas-Anderson movie, I nevertheless am not particularly enthusiastic about this movie, although I acknowledge its coolness on so many levels. It's just that the story didn't interest me enough to make me want to see it more than once. But I'm glad I saw it once and would recommend it to anybody else who likes PTA's stuff--Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love first and foremost. Be forewarned--like Magnolia, it's over three hours long; unlike Magnolia, it's less of a pure character study and has a bit of a plot, so those who were bored by Magnolia might find this a little more palatable.
Boogie Nights follows a young man's rise to porn stardom and subsequent fall. PTA acknowledges in the DVD commentary that the movie is heavily influenced by and borrows from the life of the real porn star John Holmes, although the story as a whole is not a John Holmes biography. In the first half of the movie, Marky Mark's character gets into porn and becomes a huge star. In the second half, he does too much coke, gets full of himself, falls dramatically from his throne, and returns to those he rejected for redemption. We follow the other characters in his little porn "family" through this story arc as they also peak and, to varying degrees, fall, and then come back together, their porn "family" ultimately intact. Like all families, this one's defining characteristic is that it sticks together in spite of rifts and occasional tragedy.
Like all of PTA's movies, this one is heavily character-oriented. The movie is about things happening to people instead of people acting out a plot, if you get the distinction.
Artistically, this movie is excellent. I am repeatedly impressed by PTA's camera direction. He loves to use long steadicam or handheld shots, and by long I mean maybe one to three minutes. I think they're beautiful, innovative, and creative. He also has a knack for making transitions through the use of the camera--a car containing one character drives down the road as the camera peels away to follow a car going the other way containing another character, for example. I love these little touches.
Overall, I give the movie a 3/5 even though I probably wouldn't see it again. I wouldn't be adverse to it, though... Well worth seeing once.
Miranda (2002)
A little confusing plot, but basically a good romantic thriller (with a little comedy)
--- A librarian begins a passionate affair with a mysterious woman who walks into his library. When she suddenly disappears he travels down to London to search for her only to discover that she has three identities - dancer, dominatrix and con-woman. But which one is the real Miranda? ---
When the pre-written plot summary says it better than I could, there's no shame in cutting-and-pasting. With those sentences, you've know basically all you need to know about Miranda. Fans of Christina Ricci and/or John Hurt should definitely give this one a spin. Others could do worse than to watch this movie, but could also probably do better.
Kudos to "Miranda" for trying to be a romantic thriller with comedic elements. I can't think of any movie that pulled off that melding of disparate genres as well as "Miranda" does. But in a way, that's like saying, "I've never met a chef who combined curry powder, peanut butter, and soy sauce as well as this!" On the one hand, it's a creative joining of ingredients; on the other hand, you have to wonder if the ingredients should have been together at all.
"Miranda" tries for a thriller's plot, starting off confusing and then revealing more and more as the movie progresses. At times, however, it felt too confusing and not coherent enough. It dragged a little in the middle and might could have been edited a just little more tightly. Also, the first ending was a little too climactic to then not have the movie end afterwards.
The acting was above average, especially by John Simm, who plays the the librarian. That his utter devotion to Miranda is completely believable is a testament to his skill as an actor. And I could watch John Hurt read the phone book, frankly. (But if you're looking for a good movie with John Hurt in it, I recommend Owning Mahowney instead. He's not the star of that movie, but I loved his performance.) Kyle MacLachlan is obviously having fun playing the bad guy: a perverted investor who seeks to dominate and be dominated by Miranda. There's a scene where he holds her at knife-point, then cuts off a button of her shirt, puts it into his mouth, savors it, and then swallows it. It could be corny and over-the-top, but he's just so into it.
As any regular reader of my reviews knows, I'm a big fan of creative camera work. This movie used cuts and focus-fades in creative ways. For example, as John Hurt is having a telephone dialog with Christina Ricci, the camera is on John Hurt's head as he talks into the phone. The camera pans away from him and then goes out of focus as if we're about to do a flashback or fade-out, but instead it cuts back to him, this time from a different angle. There were several scenes where this mechanic--of unnecessary cuts and fades--was used to high artistic effect. I thought it was very creative and novel. Bravo.
If only this movie didn't drag a little in the middle, and if only the writing were tight enough to make the plot just a little bit less enigmatic, it would easily get four stars. As is, it's only good enough for three.
Overall rating: 3 stars.
Bad Boys II (2003)
10/10 for stunts, 10/10 for visual effects, 6/10 for characters and plot (which is good enough for an action movie)
Awesome buddy-cop action movie. Compares favorably to the early "Lethal Weapon" movies, but with stunts and effects fifteen years more advanced. In a character switch, Will Smith plays the loose cannon and Martin Lawrence plays the stodgy, "I'm getting too old for this s***" cop. Their chemistry is spot on in most places, although I found the scenes where they were being all close and bonding harder to swallow than the scenes where they were butting heads. And don't even try to sell me that "bad boys forever" signature in the high school yearbook. There's no way these guys were friends in high school. I usually find Martin Lawrence so over-the-top whacky-black that I don't enjoy him, but he's toned down in this movie and I could actually tolerate his character. Will Smith is one of my favorite actors. He manages to make whatever role he's in funny and can deliver ridiculous lines ("John Elway should definitely buy this car. Well, not this car, 'cause I"m going to mess this one up, but John Elway should definitely buy a car like this one!") believably.
Kudos to Cadillac for getting their new car into both The Matrix: Revolutions and this movie. That car is probably the least sports-car, stunt-chase appropriate car on earth. Double-kudos to the marketing department.
The stunts in this movie are what some say the stunts in the Matrix should have been: completely over the top, awe-inspiring, death-defying, and without excessive or obvious CG. Michael Bay's insistence on shooting practicals means that the parts of the stunt that you're sure must be CG probably aren't, and his effects team's artistic talent means that the parts of the stunt that you never would think were CG probably are. All in all, exactly what CG ought to be. For example, in one stunt sequence, cars are being flipped off the back of a tractor trailer while our heroes, in their Ferrari, zip and zing between them. Ironically, the cars are real, and were really flipped off the back of the truck with a pneumatic ram. It's the $300,000 Ferrari that's CG. This reliance on practicals means that, throughout the movie, every over-the-top stunt sequence has a credibility that even the best CG hasn't figured out how to mimic. Cars bounce around, somersault, and crash into each other like real cars ought to--and like CG cars never could--because they are real cars! Even if you hate this movie's plot and characters, rent it and fast-forward to the stunt sequences. You will not be disappointed (unless you don't like stunt sequences either, in which case forget it).
Although I've already mentioned the CG a little bit, I should also say that the CG camera work, and visual effects in general, in this movie is excellent. Frankly, you don't normally see CG camera work like this except in movies by David Fincher (see the "camera drops through the floor to the vans with explosives" scene at the beginning of "Fight Club" or the "camera pushes through the cracked door" shot in "Panic Room"). Again, high marks to the visual effects team.
The DVD is excellent as well. A movie like this deserves a ton of behind-the-stunts featurettes, and this one doesn't disappoint, with an entire second DVD devoted to featurettes, storyboards, making-ofs, and so on. However, I was disappointed that there was no commentary track on the main DVD. Hearing Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, and the director riff off of each other would probably have been awesome. Hearing the stunt coordinator and visual effects supervisor talk about the scenes would have been equally awesome. Ah well... They can't all be Fight Club.
Overall Rating: 5 Stars
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001)
Deep, or just vague?
Don't believe the back of the box when it says this is a collection of separate stories that all tie together in a wonderful, meaningful way. This is nothing so coherent!
"Thirteen Conversations" consists of a series of vignettes following the lives of several main characters. The main characters do interact in some ways, but by the time the movie is over, nothing that you'd call a "plot" has occurred. That's okay, though, because the movie works without a plot. Although stuff happens to people, the movie is really more about the people than the stuff that happens to them. We get to see how different characters react to different stressful or painful situations and how their reaction affects their happiness.
Although I generally enjoyed this movie, I got the sense that there might be more to it than I got out of it on the first viewing. In retrospect, I don't think the movie actually has significant depth (although you can read depth into any movie if you try hard enough--e.g. "The Matrix"?). Rather, I think it is vague enough to give the sense of significant depth without actually possessing it. It's very worth a rental, but I wouldn't buy it.
But this is a beautiful movie, including the DVD. Colors were obviously important in the overall design of this movie. Different themes restate themselves in characters' clothing, the sets, everywhere. This is one of the prettiest movies, from beginning to end, that I've watched in a while.
If you haven't seen, "Magnolia," invest your time in that movie instead.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Blood, blood, and more blood. Plot?
- Literally obscene amount of be-heading and de-limbing. - A water-park of gore. Blood fountaining frequently. In some scenes, it is presented more stylistically. In other scenes, it is presented more realistically, with more disturbing effect. - Fewer fight scenes than I expected, but it would've been hard to cram more in without sacrificing the movie's balance. So this isn't really a criticism, just a comment. - Little plot, but you should've been warned not to expect that out of this movie.
An action movie makes up for its rudimentary plot with amazing fight sequences, colorful characters, and occasional comedy. This movie hits in spots, but falls a little short overall. The fight sequences are okay, but nothing that hasn't been done before, and better, in a thousand Hong Kong Kung Fu movies twenty years ago. Uma's wire work is particularly sketchy, although it's a shame that I have to say that because I've seen what somebody looks like the first time on a wire, and to even get to the point she did must have required a lot of practice. She's also much sloppier with a sword than a super-assassin ought to be.
"Kill Bill" is supposed to be Tarantino's homage to the kung-fu flicks he loved as a kid, and homage it is--with all the good and bad that the word implies. There are times in the movie when it's obvious that a particular element was thrown in just because it's expected by the genre. An example is when, in the middle of a fight scene, Uma leaps/flies onto a second-floor balcony, a la Crouching Tiger. Using wires to "float" a character is a classic Hong Kong effect, but for some reason, in "Kill Bill", it feels like it was stuck in just for that reason: it's a classic Hong Kong effect, this is an homage, so it has to be in there somewhere. It's kind of cool to see Uma Thurman doing these effects instead of Michelle Yao or some other Asian actress that we've never heard of, but it's obvious that she's out of her element in some of the stunts.
"Kill Bill" has a lot of gore. It has more gore than it needs to. Tarantino is obviously trying to create some effect in his audience. I was a little turned off by it, frankly. You can take excessive gore a number of ways. You can do it cartooney, like "Friday the 13th," in which case it loses some of its impact. You can do it ultra-realistic, like "Natural Born Killers," or "Saving Private Ryan," in which case it has a strong impact that hopefully ties into a plot or some point that the film maker is trying to make that justifies the violence. But in "Kill Bill", Tarantino presents in-your-face, over-the-top, fountains-of-blood violence without a strong plot or point to back it up. It seemed juvenile to me.
There are a few good scenes in "Kill Bill". The fight between Uma and Lucy Liu's bodyguard (the female with the spiked ball on a chain) is pretty well-choreographed and executed. The fight between Uma and Lucy Liu is less physical and more psychological and mental, but still strong--right up until the end when *SPOILER DELETED*. Eww. There's another great moment when, after killing hundreds of his co-henchmen, Uma hacks sections off of the last henchman's sword while he cowers. He drops the decapitated hilt and holds up his hands, upon which she puts him over her knee, then spanks him with the flat of her blade, saying, "This is what you get for playing with Yakuza! Now go home to your mother!" The sheriff who refers to his deputy as, "Son Number One" (presumably it's really his son) and who has a row of spare sunglasses on his dash board is a great character even though he's only on-screen for five minutes in the whole movie.
"Kill Bill" is punctuated with clever or entertaining moments, but overall, I'd say it's a rental. Definitely not a must-see.
Owning Mahowny (2003)
Artistically excellent
I rented this movie based solely on the fact that Philip Seymour Hoffman was on the cover. Hoffman's characters never disappoint me: the smiling and sniveling "Brant" in "The Big Lebowski", the "male nurse" in "Magnolia", the bombastic trust-fund playboy "Freddie Miles" in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", and the sleazy "phone-sex-line manager/mattress salesman" in "Punch Drunk Love". Hoffman has a knack for shining in these types of movies. His range as an actor is also worth mentioning. Every one of these characters is different. Hoffman is the anti-Keanu. (Every one of Keanu's characters is played as "Ted" from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure".)
Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny, a bank manager with a gambling problem. And with that, you pretty much have the whole plot of the movie. The plot gains some credibility in that it's based on actual events, but "Mahowny" isn't a plot-based movie, it's a character study. It's a snapshot of an addict, reaching the end of the line. Movies about addicts are a dime a dozen and we all know how the story is going to go. But a few things make Mahowney stand out.
First, Hoffman's acting. I can't decide if it's brilliant or pathetic. His character is so understated. He spends the entire movie with his head buried in his chest. He speaks in a murmur and it seems like it's an effort for him even to keep breathing. This could have just been bad acting, given Hoffman's talents in other movies, I'm going to assume that this was intentional. That's impressive, because it's just as hard for a good actor to play a bad one as it is to go the other way.
Second, the photography. Most of the photography in the film is pretty textbook, but scattered throughout the movie are some really beautiful shots. Shots in which the composition really shines or shots in which the camera placement subtly accents what's happening in the plot.
Third, the writing. While the plot as a whole isn't very original, the screenwriters have punctuated the movie with little symbolic touches that stand out. For example, throughout the movie, characters comment on how poorly-dressed Mahowney is, how he should "get himself a good suit one of these days," and "you still driving that old car?" Towards the end of the movie, his girlfriend gives him a nice jacket to wear over his suit and a character comments on how good it looks just as Mahowney flies to Atlantic City for a gambling binge (ultimately his last). When he is arrested, the police pat him down and then strip the jacket off of him. The jacket comes to symbolize everything he should be doing, everything he's losing due to his addiction. In another scene, towards the end, Mahowney is escorted into the casino under guard (as a V.I.P.), mirroring a scene at the beginning where he is waiting to enter the casino while a V.I.P. is whisked past.
"Mahowney" is a slow, gentle, almost balletic movie, punctuated with small moments that would be swallowed up if the rest of the movie were any more emphatic. I really enjoyed those small moments, but I probably wouldn't watch the film again. Unlike "Punch Drunk Love," where I felt that the artistic value of the movie as a whole made up for the crazy plot, "Mahowney" falls short. It's slow at times, even painful to watch as Mahowney steals money from his bank again and again, and we in the audience know eventually it'll catch up with him. The movie brilliantly sucks the audience into the experience of gambling addiction, but it's a warning that I've heard so many times before that there's not much value in going there again.
That being said, I would like to emphasize that, purely as an expression of the filmmaking art, this movie is brilliant. What it sets out to do, it does so well that it's astounding. It is full of talent, both in front of and behind the camera. In the end, I just didn't like what it set out to do enough to give the movie a higher rating.
Overall rating: 3 stars. Glad I rented it, glad I watched it, probably wouldn't watch it again.
The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996)
Garofalo shines in sold romantic comedy
Synopsis: Janeane plays Abby, the host of a radio talk show on pets and pet care. One day Brian calls in with a problem with a dog. Brian is cute and charming, Abby helps him out of his jam. Brian calls to thank her, invites her to meet him. Abby says yes then gets self-conscious about her appearance and stands him up. Abby's magazine-model neighbor, Noelle (Thurman) visits her at the station just as Brian drops by. Abby convinces Noelle to stand in for her while Abby plays Noelle's assistant. Romantic comedy, of the mistaken-identity variety, ensues.
The only problem I've got with this movie is the obvious suspension of disbelief required to accept Abby's ridiculous behavior in the beginning of the movie. Asking Noelle to sit in might have been acceptable, but once she met Brian and decided she liked him, it's just ridiculous that she didn't tell him the truth. Sure, the movie contrives a series of circumstances to get in the way of her telling him until she's in too deep to get out easily (and thus, has to propagate the lie), but I didn't find them entirely believable. Whatever--the movie as a whole was worth overlooking this small fault.
It's fun to watch the relationship develop between Brian, Abby, and Noelle. Garofalo, Thurman, and whoever that guy is who plays Brian all put in a good performance. There are several funny or cute moments (Abby (crying): "Guys don't have to go through this appearance stuff. If I were a guy, I'd be so perfect. I've got a job, I'm smart." Noelle: "I'd f**k you, honey."). Good date movie, but I'm the kind of sap who puts it in when he's home alone just for fun :-)