Change Your Image
DrTBob
Reviews
The Life of David Gale (2003)
Disappointing
The performances are great; the pacing is nice; the production values, excellent; the intentions, quite admirable.
However, if you don't figure out who dunnit and why halfway into the film, you're just not paying attention.
SPOILER: as soon as the journalist sees the first tape, the real nature of the death, and how easily the victim could have avoided it, are just obvious.
From that, worse flaws follow. (SPOILERS to follow.)
Pro-death people are not so stupid that they wouldn't figure out, in the course of weeks, months, and years between the death, the arrest, the trial, the appeals, and the denouement, what I figured out in less than ten seconds. Unless you believe that pro-death people are fools, you will not be able to believe that they would fall for this.
I am adamantly against the death penalty. This movie does nothing for that cause. It just treats the opposition like idiots so blinded by blood lust that they would fall for a very dirty stunt. That stunt, by the way,is the epitome of being so self-righteous that you stoop to fraud and manipulating others to defraud on your behalf against their will, which is probably not a good image for anti-death penalty people to paint on ourselves.
Sordid Lives (2000)
Excellent though not well crafted
Roger Ebert once--probably more than once, but I only read it once--drew a distinction between good movies and well-crafted ones, "The Rookie" being an example of a well-crafted movie that isn't even a good movie. "Sordid Lives" is not particularly well crafted. But it's very good.
Its origins as a play show through much too much--altogether too talky. A good bit of it depends less on wit than scenery-chewing, over-the-top reliance on the crudest of Southern stereotypes. The pacing is odd, the shape is lumpy, and the ending is, of course, what it had to be according to formula.
All that said, this is a deeply touching, insightful piece. In the gentlest, even loving way, the movie draws the horrific, stark contrast between judgmental Baptist-style moralism and the gracious, tender Gospel it betrays. Olivia-Newton-John's character--and her performance--embody the Christian ideal of grace, while Bonnie Bedelia embodies the Upright Citizen who, in spite of her own deepest feelings, cannot but destroy those she loves because of her sense of rectitude.
It is nice to find a movie (or play) that manages to embody, rather than betray, its own sense of right behavior as it condemns those who fail to live by it. Movies criticizing religious hypocrisy tend toward the same inhumane self-righteous as those they lambast. Not "Sordid Lives." If you want a good example of what writing teachers mean when they say, "Show, don't tell," you could do worse than this script.
Some parts of the movie are devilishly original, in spite of the stereotypical Southern Schtick in which the originality is camouflaged. Delta Burke gives a fine performance in a role that underplays its (unannounced but displayed) moral and religious meaning as much as it overplays its caricature of white trash. The take-off on/imitation-of "Thelma and Louise" is really quite good. The unstated but sharp contrast between the therapists in the movie is quite well done--as is the subtle and effective, powerful change that the L.A. actor-character goes through with his altogether non-directive therapist.
I found myself wishing I could send this movie to the many good Southern baptists among whom I grew up. It is just so beautiful. Unfortunately, the movie is also true--which is not a small virtue. The truth of this movie is that those Good Moral Folks would be too scandalized even to get the touching point of the piece, if they finished watchig it at all.
Ali (2001)
Inaccurate, among other faults
Since this movie was just fictitious on so many things I do know about, I did not believe anything it said about things I didn't know about. Mann has taken rather severe liberties with plain, empirical, historical facts--for instance, the simple and egregious matter of putting Howard Cossell into the commentator role in the Liston fight (Steve Ellis, in fact, was the broadcaster), or inserting into the Liston fight an incident (Ali's being unable to see temporarily)from a much, much later fight--one of the Frazier fights, I think.
And Will Smith is much less charismatic and entertaining than Ali. This is a joyless film, in which Ali's natural wit, and his world-class mastery of the role of raconteur, hardly appear.
Skip it. You will only like it if you know no real history about the subject, and then you'll come away thinking you know things that just aren't true.
Stepmom (1998)
Good acting, but badly overdrawn, psychologically inept writing
In this maudlin, melodramatic fantasy, we have five main characters: The stepmom Julia Roberts), the mom (Susan Sarandon), the dad (Ed Harris), and two kids. The stepmother's role is the only one of the male roles to emerge faintly from one dimension, to resemble a live person. The mom is a controlling, spiteful, know-it-all, who also somehow manages to muster immense, flawless tenderness with her kids. The dad is just good. The daughter resembles a person; the son, some narcissist's self-image of himself in childhood, remarkably charming and good-natured. As I watched it, I figured, "This was written by someone with a godawful, but dead, obsessive-compulsive mother to whom he was overly close in childhood, whom he feels bad about hating now, especially since he likes his stepmom so much." The performances are excellent, but the characters are so incredible that this is more cartoon than drama. Some parts were so predictable and mawkish I just fastforwarded through them.