Change Your Image
sisyphus-12
Reviews
Salvador (1986)
Clumsy But Full of Honest Energy
You ought to see this movie if for no other reason than to watch James Woods' great performance. He plays a journalist who's days of glory and prestige have long begun to wane. His sidekick throughout the movie is Dr. Rock, a has-been DJ, drug-and-booze soaked, prone to whining and ill-health, but who provides much of the movie's comic relief. The spend most of the movie chasing stories that never get written, drinking, gobbling drugs, and dodging bullets....
Yes, this movie has a decidedly left-wing political message. And yes,it is bumptiously, clumsily delivered--with the grace and insight of an 18-year-old college radical a little too full of himself. The action speaks for itself--dead bodies everywhere, the American military hovering nearby constantly. But just in case we don't get it, the characters lecture us with familiar left vs. right themes, crow with indignation, and denounce the military characters, who are one-dimensional and disgusting. U.S. involvement is simplified far too much. To his credit, though, Stone does not try to sanitize the leftist guerillas, who we see are as brutal as the regime they are fighting. (And just in case we don't get THAT--despite seeing them shoot captured soldiers in the head, calmly and methodically--Woods starts screaming, "You're just as bad as they are!" Well, duh!)
Another problem is that we learn very little about El Salvador beyond the violence and pretty much constant whoring around of the American characters. Since setting is so important to this movie, a little more development in this area would have been useful...Since Woods' character had been there before, at least some of this could have been conveyed through flashback. But as things stand, we have very little idea of what sort of culture actually is at stake.
Still, the drama is compelling, the characters engaging (sordid, but engaging!), the performances great. If Stone handles the politics ham-handedly, he manages to introduce moments of comedy--very human comedy--in a story that is wrought with despair. Belushi is a riot as the kvetching Dr. Rock, who unwittingly comes along for the ride from San Francisco to El Salvador (he thinks they're going to Guatamala), and finds himself being brutalized by Salvadoran military, police, infected by the water (and prostitutes)...generally having a rought time of it. Woods is a scream, too, when he tries to rehabilitate himself for his love, a young mother half his age. His scene in the confessional is very funny.
Somehow, Wood's Boyle manages to find himself a part of the major Salvadoran revolutionary moments that are now familiar to us here in the U.S. Archbishop Romero, for instance, is assassinated right in front of him, just after Boyle has reveived Holy Communion from him. Also, Boyle is a close friend of the Catholic lay worker who was raped and killed with the nuns on the way back to San Salvador.
Despite some of the clumsiness, this movie has a great deal of energy, and anyone who REALLY wants to see James Woods act cannot miss this. Political dramas fail when it compells characters to act woodenly, or unbelieveably (see "The Contender" for an example of this). "Salvador" remains a human drama first, and political expostulation second...See it.
The Contender (2000)
Implausible--Falls Apart in the 2nd Half
This movie could have been great. The first half was dramatic, compelling, believeable, and character-driven. The 2nd half degenerated into the tawdriest and most unbelieveable sort of political propagandizing imagineable. It's hard to believe, in fact, that the person who wrote the first half of this movie also wrote the 2nd half.
The first half of this movie is very human...a story about people in politics, being tested by morally ambiguous circumstances. Their actual politics, while clearly laid out, are secondary. Moviemakers used to wisely recognize the folly of imposing their own political views on their audience, and made sure that political expressions were limited to those that were fairly universally accepted--truth, honesty, and so forth. Remember "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"? "The Contender," however, goes out of its way to do the exact opposite.
Near the beginning of the movie,Laine Hanson (an ubelieveably saintly Republican-turned-Democrat) is speaking to her father, a retired Republican Governor, whom the filmmakers gratuitously have chide his grandchild for his kindergarten teacher's having mentioned Jesus in the classroom. Teachers are there to "teach, not preach," and he denounces her remark about Jesus as "superstition"--quite beside anything remotely pertinent to the story. His remark, though, is pointed, his attitude is bizarrely sneering for what the writers clearly hope to pass off as an aside. The movie gets much worse, though. Later, during what is supposed to be a rousing and morally superior closing statement before the Senate Confirmation Committee that has been questioning her moral suitability, she proudly declares herself to be an atheist who worships in the "chapel of democracy." During the same speech, she declares that she wants to remove "every gun from every household," that she supports a woman's sacred right to choose, and so on and so forth. Standard political boilerplate. (Curiously, she states at one point that she left the Republican party when they moved away from the values she espouses. I wonder...when has the Republican party EVER espoused gun banning, abortion, abolition of the death penalty, or any of the causes for which Laine now so zealously crusades? Are the filmmakers trying to make her seem thoughtful and fairminded in her zeal? Come on!)
Okay, so what's wrong with this? She's a politician expressing political ideals? First of all, the speech is hoaky as can be, with music clearly meant to raise us to a pitch of (left-wing) patriotism...the effect, though is embarrassing. I was uncomfortable for Joan Allen having to recite such awful lines. Second, she's is supposed to be a moderate Democrat...yet all the views she expresses extremely left-wing. Even Republicans in this movie espouse leftist ideology (like her father). The one person who expresses a conservative viewpoint is Gary Oldman's character, a political hardball player who during the confirmation hearings is given to snarling at this poor woman for supporting a "holocause" of "unborn babies." The cliches are fast and furious. To show, however, that Runyon (Oldman's character) is--or WAS-- a good man, the writers trot out his haggard wife and have her remind him of the time he stood for something good...the time he stood up for hate crime legislation! Amazing. Third, the filmmakers take all this silly rhetoric as seriously as Laine Hanson does! In fact, if this movie's failure can be summed up, it is probably that the moviemakers are as gravely serious about the protagonist's trenchant ideology as she is. The term for this is: Authorial Intrusion. The moviemakers committ is, big time.
The problem with this movie is not that it favors liberal ideology, of course. It's that it favors ANY ideology. You cannot promote any agenda as brazenly and aggressively as this movie does, and not have it throw the whole movie off kilter...like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. The ending of this movie--which I will not divulge--is improbably beyond belief. This movie has been billed as a political thriller. It isn't. It's a hybrid between a cheesy soap opera, and a propaganda film. Gary Oldman and Joan Allen deliver great performances, though, and if this movie is worth seeing at all, it is just to see two great actors practicing their craft.
Urbania (2000)
Utter Dreck
This is the worst serious movie I have seen in years. It's non-narrative exists on a continuum between boring and loathesome. Follow lonely Charlie as he goes from practicing the, uh, "solitary sin" while his noisy neighbors have sex, to picking up strange men for anonymous sex, to running into his noisy neighbors at a bar and insulting them, to searching for the homophobe who terrorized him in the past....
If you like homoerotic sex scenes, you MIGHT be able to withstand the long, talky, weepy scenes that separate them, scenes in which men talk sensitively with one another about their feelings, their relationships, their disappointments, about "us, what we had." This movie is Oprah with chest hair. The dialogue is not witty; it is persistently unclever, despite the attempts at spooky subtleties, and the corner-of-the-eye observations of urban legends (the point of which remains obscure).
Here's an example of the shamefully trite dialogue the filmmakers torment us with. Charlie and his anonymous pickup are lying in bed, and Charlie confides, "I'm afraid that if I stay in your space, you'll be in my dreams." Really! BARF! Soap opera pablum.
Charlie finds the "friend" he is looking for, a vicious homophobe who, OF COURSE, is really a gay who hasn't acknowledged this to himself yet...Yes, THAT old cliche. I really can't say more without giving the ending away...let me just say that when you think this movie can't get any more loathesome, it does. And then it goes back to boring.
This movie is a real dog. Do yourself a favor: Spend two hours watching roadkill rot instead.
American Beauty (1999)
Entertaining...but Not Much More
Perhaps I'm judging this movie a little unfairly--that is, against the hype and excessive accolades it received rather than against only its own successes and failures. It IS, after all, an entertaining, enjoyable film. But I would not call it a great film. Enough has been said about the great performances--yeah, they're great, but....
It is a message film about middle age, suburban American life, and base materialism. As a message film, though, it is very odd. Lester Burnham,
successful executive, burns out, blackmails his boss, quits his job, and develops the hots for his teenage daughter's best friend.
His shrewish wife, meantime, starts a romp with a local hot shot real estate agent, who turns her on not only to adultery, but to shooting, too, offering the cliched explanation that it makes him feel powerful.
Lester's daughter starts hanging out with the weird, pot-dealing son of the fascistic Marine (yes, THAT old cliche) next door. The boy's father beats the tar out of him routinely, and with particular violence when he suspects his boy might be gay. Not soon after, during a painful scene of misunderstanding that results from the boy assuring his father that he and Lester have been having sex (not true; he said it to hurt his father), the father makes a pass at Lester. Yes, ANOTHER cliche: the Nazi-like homophobe (who actually collects Nazi war relics!) who is really gay himself!
And what about the other messages? That the best way to deal with a difficult marriage, and life's disappointments is to quit your job, start smoking dope, and paw your daughter's friends? Seriously?
The only normal, well-adjusted people in this movie are Lester's gay neighbors (the other neighbors), whom we only briefly meet. I wonder...is this a message, too?
Freeway (1996)
Fun, Violent
"Freeway" is both gruesome and--to the right audience--hilarious. Reese Witherspoon gives a powerhouse performance as Vanessa Lutz, a sort-of sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who, on a dime, can become a ruthless killer when necessity presents itself. Kiefer Sutherland is equally good, giving as greasy a performance as ever was of a smooth, unctuous predator. Witherspoon is Cassandra-like; sure, she tries to execute Sutherland, shooting him in the neck and face, and twice in the back...but no one listens to her when she tells them he's the serial killer they're all looking for. And she doesn't particularly care. Captured, accused, she lashes out at everyone. She is prosecuted, while Sutherland is presented in the media as a victim. Witherspoon taunts the now terribly-disfigured Sutherland hilariously in court--"Hey chipmunk-face!"--convincing everyone that she is an unpenitent sociopath.
Violence becomes Witherspoon's means of survival, and she isn't squeamish. In jail, she fashions a makeshift "knife" by melting plastic wrap around a toothbrush, melting it, and then sharpening the plastic. With this, she slashes a guard during an outing. The guard cries, "You didn't have to kill me!"
Vanessa snarls, "I didn't!" and off she goes.
If you can't stomach extreme violence, skip this one.
Killers (1996)
One of the Worst Movies Made in a Long, Long Time
Imagine this: You want to make a movie, so you: 1) find the worst actors you can; 2)write the most juvenile script you can, and pepper it with more "f**ks" than even Brian DePalma's "Scarface" contained (at least there they weren't gratuitous); and 3)insert some really silly sex and predictable violence for marketability. What you've just imagined is probably very close to what "Real Killers" is--one of the worst movies made in a long, long time.
I groaned as soon as the actors opened their mouths...I knew I had rented a slickly-packaged, grade-C movie made by undertalented film students. You wouldn't believe what these filmmakers are willing to put you through. The characters in this movie give INTERMINABLE speeches, commenting on human character, society, and so forth, in what the writer clearly thought were clever turns of phrase. They aren't the least bit clever, though, and the audience is routinely assaulted by the scriptwriters' utter disrespect for brevity, and their mistaken belief that they have something insightful to say. Very little of the characters' ultra-cool, gassy expository journeys furthers the narrative one bit. Indeed, they are brick walls that the train of the narrative crashes into.
The last 15 minutes of the movie is a non-stop gunfight. I like movie gunfights as much as the next guy...this one is stupid, at best, adolescent and sadistic at worst. People are shot repeatedly without flinching, and without losing their supercool grimace of determination. In one particularly gratuitous and unwholesome scene, a woman is shot, from below, in the groin, and the bullet exits her mouth. Nice, huh?
Will this movie find an audience? Sure. Disenfranchised adolescent boys (of the Dylan and Kleebold caliber) might cozy up to this prolix gunfest.
There's a reason this 1996 movie wasn't released for so many years: It is embarrassingly awful. This movie is filmmaking at its worst.
Waking the Dead (2000)
A Frustrating Blech-fest of Overwrought Emotion
This movie is the kind of garbage you might find on the Lifetime channel. I was embarrassed for the actors who appeared in this gut-wrenching, slobbering, emotion-fest. Both Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connolly are fine actors, and anyone offended by mawkish sentimentality will wince at some of the lines they are made to speak in this in this awful, maudlin, frustrating movie.
Billy Crudup plays a super-decent, super-caring, super-sensitive Democratic (of course--just one of this movie's many cliches) Congressional contender. Jennifer Connolly is his lover from some 10 years ago, who he believes has been killed in Chile rescuing people from a despotic regime. Their affair is told through flashbacks. They have long senstive conversations. When they fight, they don't really fight--they are both too decent to yell at the other. They just look hurt, and we *know* that this is a very meaningful non-fight. Naturally, he is a gentle lover; she weeps during sex. Everyone in this movie is terribly earnest, and LOVES to talk about what they're feeling. In other words: This is the Über Chick Movie!
But then, when Crudup's character is running for office, he begins seeing Connolly...around, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, sometimes everywhere, a flock of her coming at him. It seems likely...likely that she's alive...or is it his imagination? We're never given a convincing reason why, if Connolly is still alive, she has been in hiding all these years, or how such a sensitive, decent person could justify doing what she did to him. If she isn't alive...then ole Fielding is hallucinating and is, therefore, a psychopath, and the whole idea that he could sustain a campaign, let alone get elected, is laughable.
There is one remarkably inept scene in which Crudup's character Fielding is eating with Connolly, her church coworkers (two priests), and 4 Chilean nationals they have just rescued. One of the Chilean women confronts Fielding on his desire to become a politician, condemning him specifically for becoming an American politician, and we--like Fielding--feel the others in the room silently agreeing with her. Fielding explodes (but decently!), pointing out their hypocrisy, and how, despite the world's finger-pointing at Americans, it is OUR shores they so often wash up on when fleeing the terror of their homelands. Finally, he declares that he is "choking on the collective superiority in this room!" It is a good line, and he delivers a great tirade...but everyone (except, perhaps, the Chileans) in this movie is so darn nice, and good and wholesome, that we can't believe for a minute that they can't see Fielding's goodness, too. So their collective superiority...it just doesn't ring true.
In fact, very, very little in this movie rings true. This is the sort of movie a 14-year-old girl wanting an adult love story might like; it displays precisely that sort of idealized emotional maturity. Few discerning adults will be able to stomach it. Even my wife (who is the reason I sat through it) disliked it.
Philadelphia (1993)
Propaganda Posing as Art
You really can't make a movie about "being gay," or, more pointedly, "being-gay-and-discriminated-against" and not have the movie judged primarily as an agenda-flick, especially when the characters are as two-dimensional as they are in this story. Tom Hanks plays a gay man who for a brief, sad time in his life was sexually promiscuous. He caught AIDS.
His character doesn't work--he is a stereotype, or, rather, what the filmmakers would *like* to be a stereotype, I think: the sensitive, intelligent, put-upon Gay Man. His employers, who fire him immediately upon finding out he is gay and has AIDS, are stereotypical Villains. They seem to have very little to talk about (particularly around poor Tom Hanks!) other than gays, which of course they do in a coarse and insensitive manner. They are the Cold-Hearted Homophobes.
Denzel Washington is Hanks' lawyer, the Homophobe-Who-Becomes-More-Human by knowing the Gay Man.
Sound puerile? It is. What the filmmakers have failed to realize is that if you REALLY want to present a human drama, you can't keep the characters as two-dimensional as they are in Philadelphia. Hanks needs to be more than a Sensitive Gay Man. Jason Robards needs to be more than the Cruel Homophobe. And so on. In real life, people aren't that simple. This kind of b&w morality works in Hollywood adventure movies, but it doesn't work in art.
In addition to ignoring the complexities of human character, this movie totally ignores the complexites of the AIDS issue, and gay rights, simplifying them into a thin gruel of unthinking, maudlin, propaganda. This movie is a tearjerker if all you want is to have your position on the AIDS/Gay issue confirmed, but sorry mistake if you expect something with aesthetic merit, or thought-provoking content.
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
A Fascinating, Multi-layered Documentary
What a peculiar and compelling documentary! Throughout the first part of this movie, Leuchter talks about his improvements upon various execution devices, and not with a little pride. He *says* he designs these things because the older devices are inhumane, that the electric chairs, for example, "cook" people, torture them, and that he wants to make executions as painless and quick as possible...and, you know, I believe him. He comes off as weird, but sincere.
His underground notoriety as an execution expert motivates holocaust revisionist "historian" Ernst Zündel to hire him to prove to a judge and jury that Nazis did not, in fact, exterminate Jews. So Leuchter goes to Auschwitz and--illegally--gathers samples from the "alleged" gas chambers, crematoriums, and so on. He smuggles these samples back to Canada, and a lab determines that they contain no traces of cyanide gas. Based on this--and this alone, apparently--Leuchter (an engineer, but by no means a research scientist) concludes that the gas chambers were never used to gas inmates, and that the holocaust did not happen.
Leuchter's evidence is easily refuted. It isn't the filmmaker's purpose to prove him wrong, and the refutation is quickly and easily accomplished without belaboring it. What is perhaps most interesting about this film is the manner in which it portrays Leuchter: He comes off as something of a stooge, a naive and terribly misguided participant in perhaps the most politically incorrect of all historical revisionism. As a result of this, he is mercilessly persecuted by people who will not tolerate the existence--let alone promulgation--of opposing points of view. Disagreement is decried as "hate," and in our current social environment, once you have successfully identified someone as a hatemonger, it's open season on him, In this sense, the film becomes a critical examination of a freedom we Americans claim to hold dear: the freedom of expression. It is a freedom that comes with a price, and that is that unpopular, often wacky, ideas will be promulgated by people we may not like. The fact is, though, that Leuchter is not an anti-semite. Morris does not show a man with an ounce of hatred in him, or malice, and so far as we can tell, there is no ideology behind Leuchter's belief that the holocaust did not occur. That Morris manages to show Leuchter in a reasonably sympathetic light forces us to examine the alactrity with which we so often attack and attempt to destroy the speaker of unpopular ideas, when perhaps all we really ought to do is attack the ideas that are being spoken. What makes us uncomfortable as viewers, I think, is that we feel sympathy for this guy. Clearly, he is the victim, more than the persecutor.