The Film Junkie

And just like that The Wood-man is back in the game.  ‘Match Point’ proved that he still had the chops to make a good thriller and ‘Scoop’ shows that he is able to make a modern comedy like it was the mid-70’s all over again…okay, so maybe it’s not that good, but it’s a start.

Scarlett Johansson plays a student journalist who is vacationing in London when she meets the ghost of a famous British journalist (Ian McShane) who has discovered the scoop of a lifetime while crossing over.  She then sets about trying to prove that a wealthy aristocrat (Hugh Jackman) is secretly a killer with the help of a neurotic magician (Woody Allen himself).

Johansson is a great actress, all those who think she is all looks should look at this film where she plays a dorky brainy nerd (albeit hot as hell) obsessed with proving herself to be a real journalist.  She is as believable here as she was as the sultry mistress in ‘Match Point’, she is the new Allen Muse for a new generation.

Allen himself has not been this funny in years.  He is still a hilarious writer and so many of his jokes here are classic to his sense of humour.  Also, he is not trying to be the playboy as he does in so many of his films, instead here he is appropriately the father figure and it suits him.

This film is a totally enjoyable ride that is not so much trying to be a mystery as it is just a good time Woody Allen comedy.

Grade: B+

Though this film is fun and visually stunning, it is terribly predictable from the first five minutes.  I really wanted a mystery here and I was hoping that they were somehow going to surprise me and that the outcome would not be exactly what I saw coming…alas it was.

Josh Hartnett has a lot of fun playing a sort of dark hero caught up in a modern film noir through a case of mistaken identity.  He revels in some great one-liners and I hope he will continue to get more roles that let him get kicked around like this rather than the romantic leads.

Lucy Liu is probably the highlight of the film as Hartnett’s love interest, a hyper coroner thirsty to solve every mystery.  It is a joy to watch her stretch her legs by playing other than the bitchy dominatrix type.

Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Stanley Tucci play the type of characters they always play and Ben Kingsley brings it with another creative characterization as The Rabbi.

A fun frolick of a film, but I saw it all coming a mile away.

Grade: B+

In 1936 Frank Capra directed Gary Cooper as an average fellow who gets a big break, falls for a scheming reporter and uses his new fame to help the common man, five years later they employ much the same formula in this story.  However unlike ‘Mr. Deeds Goes To Town’, ‘Meet John Doe’ is the story of a man who wins false fame and is forced to become the voice of the people. 

The morality of this film is a much trickier bag than ‘Deeds’, John Doe just wants to be a baseball player once again, he is a simple man, yes, but he gains the views of the idealistic Ann (Barbara Stanwyck) possibly more out of love for her than his own political motivations.

Yes, it is still a Capra film and thus the good old boy wins out over the political bigwigs, but this is more the story of a heroic woman who must masquerade as a man to get her voice heard.  Ann writes the John Doe letter as a protest to losing her job and is thus forced to create Doe due to the character’s popularity.  One could view this film as a pre-feminist (post-suffrage, of course) commentary on society’s inability to listen to a woman’s voice in the political arena.  Sure, Ann falls for John, but it is her words and her passion that win his heart and spark the nation to join in a sense of community.

Stanwyck is complex and brilliant as the conflicted Ann who is trying to provide for her family, have a voice as a journalist and love the man she has created.  Cooper is dopey and sweet as John, the man trying to please everyone but himself.  He has the most beautiful eyes in the history of black and white cinema, and his lanky frame allows him to stand apart from the many leading men of his era.  They work well together, not because they go toe-to-toe like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, but because he allows her to be the stronger persona.  A very modern take on love.

This is a great Capra film that should be recognized alongside his other classics ‘Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’ (1939) and ‘It Happened One Night’ (1934).

Grade: A

This movie has become a famed cult film because it stars a group of deformed and handicapped and disabled circus performers.  Yet this is no horror movie, it is a love story between those outside of our accepted society.

The acting is so-so, but the fact that people so outside of beautiful Hollywood were given a voice is something to behold.  This is a brave movie to not mock or pity, but to reveal.

A beautiful trapeze artist falls in ‘love’ with a vertically challenged man who leaves his similarly ‘different’ girlfriend for the dream woman.  Another lovely woman is abused by her boyfriend and the others rebel against him.  These are not easy stories to tell, but they hit you hard unlike so many movies of this era.

A fascinating risk.

Grade: B+

Hedy Lamarr stars as a manipulative working class daughter of a drunk who works her way up from man to man to the life of leisure she always wanted only to find she has sacrificed too much along the way and doesn’t even recognize herself.  She falls for the son of her husband by convienience and then drops him for the fiance of her best friend while tricking everyone into thinking she is a decent person.

This film is melodramatic in the worst of ways, with its orchestrations too full of strings and Lamarr’s overactive eyebrows.  You are never given a chance to like any of the characters but you are supposed to sympathize?

Lamarr plays Jenny like Scarlett O’Hara with ADD.  She switches from each man while not dealing with her feelings about the last, she mourns for the children she cannot have without really wanting children at all, she tosses aside friendships too swiftly and then begs for them to return.  She is a confused and frustrating woman that you just want to go away.  Also, her homegrown American gal has a distinctly Austrian accent at times, as Lamarr was clearly unable to hide her heritage.  She leaves you constantly wishing they would have incorporated her obvious accent into the plot.

George Sanders is supposedly dashing and masculine, but he comes off as dull and robotic in comparison with Lamarr’s slinking shoulders and constantly shocked eye-acting.

The story is awkwardly constructed and no one ever makes a logical choice, instead they seem as though they are a bunch of puzzle pieces manipulated to fit one another despite the fact they are meant to fit entirely different pictures.

I couldn’t wait for it to end…and then it had one of the most maddening endings ever…

What were they thinking?

Grade: C-

What a lovely mess!  The ‘Pirates’ franchise, though certainly lucrative, has never been the most cohesive trilogy.  That is probably because it started as a single film based on a theme park ride that became quite popular and thus they had to justify more films. 

These films are entertaining crowd-pleasers, they are not meant to be artistic or moving, they are for the popcorn-loving set.  That is how I approached this film and from that perspective it was a lot of fun.

Captain Jack (Johnny Depp) died at the end of the last film, so the group must seek him out in Davy Jones’ locker for various reasons.  We don’t really need to understand those reasons, apparently, so we just accept that they are gonna go look for Jack despite the fact that they all hate him.  This part of the film lags, but once Depp is back in action the film finds its legs.

From then on the film has so many plots, morality plays and strange outcomes it is almost impossible to decifer, but we have fun while on the ride.  Keira Knightley is great as Elizabeth Swann; in the first two films Swann was building up the skills to become the woman she is in the this film and thank god they don’t dwell too much on her romance with Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), which I have always felt was the weakest part of the films.  I am not much one for Bloom’s charms, he always seems to weak and dull for me.

Geoffrey Rush and Bill Nighy return as Barbossa and Davy Jones, respectively.  They both relish their roles, Rush as the sort of prototype of all pirate stereotypes to come and Nighy, though hidden under a shitload of CGI, as that most evil of pirate leaders.

As the gang fall apart and reassemble, change their allegiances and make new bonds, they almost always manage to keep us wanting more, more action and amazing sights.  And what sights they are!  This film has the most amazing visuals of all the Pirates flicks, the best CGI and the best swordfight (that being the battle between Sparrow and Jones while the battle of Swann and Turner vs. various soldiers is occuring as they say their wedding vows). 

Whenever the film falls flat, it is usually because the plot focuses too much on Turner’s will to save his father, or his new friendship with Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander).  However the film always finds its way again when it turns to Sparrow, Swann or the deliciously strange Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), whose part is much more significant here than in the last film.

It is far too long, with far too many plots going on at once, but every now and then it finds its way.

To sum up, I liked this film more than ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ because they take much of focus away from Will and Elizabeth’s romance and concentrate more on the fun of pirating, the visuals are stunning and Johnny Depp brings new heights of strangeness to Captain Jack (the first scene we see him in is fantastically orgasmically Depp excellent).  Oooooohhh…and Keith Richards….the man was made for this tiny role, let me just say that.

Not great, but a hell of a lot of fun.

Grade: B

What the hell went wrong?  What went so horribly and terribly wrong to make this into a tedious cinematic experience?

You have Jared Hess at the helm, he who made ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ (2004), and as the co-writer; you have Jack Black, he of the gloriously insane humour…and yet this movie just totally sucks.

The plot is far too simple: Ignacio/Nacho (Black) works in an orphanage as a priest and cook, he dreams of becoming a wrestler and then he does.

The acting is atrocious.  Sure loud comedies often welcome over-the-top performances, but here Black is trying to mix his JB Tenacious D personality with a Mexican/Italian accent with a touch of God.  It doesn’t work.

Oh, and the object of his affection is a woman who basically just stands there looking pretty for an hour and a half.  Ana de la Reguera is lovely, like the love-child of Penelope Cruz and Winona Ryder, but she holds one emotion upon her lovely face for the whole movie…and I’m not even sure if it is calmness, peace, judgement or something entirely different.

There are a few, very few, good slapstick moments here, and Black does get a few, very few, laughs, but for the most part this was one of the more aggravating movie-watching experiences I have had in my life. 

Please let them do better next time.

Grade: C-

I just don’t get the appeal of W.C. Fields.  He is brutish, offensive and ignorant, and not in the charming or ironic ways of Al Bundy, no Fields is just a straight up asshole.  Yet he is considered a comedy legend, when all he seems to do is drink, make mistakes and pretend to do physical comedy when it is obviously special effects.

In this film Fields plays Egbert Souse, and that last name is easily the funniest part of the film.  He makes ignorant, racist and sexist comments while looking pickled and half dead.  Certainly Fields was 60 at this point and nearing the end of his life (this was his second to last film), but he doesn’t even seem to be trying.  He can’t sell any of his lines, but stumbles over them and mumbles.

The circumstances of the plot are supposed to be funny and kooky, but they are little more than ridiculous. The women are either harpies, stiff tight asses, or overly sexualized from too young an age.  The acting from everyone is terrible, but Fields’ lameness only highlights how mediocre everyone else is.  The final car chase scene improved by rating a little, however the stuntman doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to look like Fields, the shot goes from a slender stuntman to the bloated and huge Fields which takes you right out of the story, if you were ever there to begin with.

I just don’t get it.

Grade: D

This is a story told as a story by a group of comics trading tales about Danny Rose (Woody Allen), a nutty talent agent, over dinner at a deli in New York.  We start out with a few tidbits about Rose, the kind of deluded clients he represented, how he used to be a comic himself, and then he are prepared for “the greatest of all Danny Rose stories”.

Most of the film is the telling of this story of how Rose gets involved with Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow playing utterly against type), a mob princess who is sleeping with his biggest client.  Tina and Danny must escape various mobsters who are convinced that she left their brother for Danny, though he is only a ‘beard’.

Something I have always felt strange about when watching Allen with women on screen is the creepy way he hits on them, thankfully we are saved that here.  Instead he brings smarmy to a whole new level and constantly calls everyone “darling”.

The film is all right, however considering it is being narrated by comics, it isn’t all that funny.  It is a delight to watch Farrow play the sort of character that would be one of Carmela’s friends on ‘The Sopranos’, but Allen gets aggravating very early on.

The resolution is fine, if predictable, but I was left with the feeling that this would have been a nice short film as it lacks the staying power of a feature.

Grade: B

I have recently been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman comic books and graphic novels, thus with this his feature film writing debut I expected a lot of pretension and stunning visuals.  However this film is far less pretentious than, say, ‘The Sandman’, instead it is a sort of mix of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ if they were directed by Marilyn Manson’s art director.

The story is of Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), the daughter of a circus owner and a juggler in the show, who is transported to an alternate reality on the night her mother is to have a serious operation.  Helena must save the alternate world and stop her anti-Helena self from destroying her life.  If that makes any sense…

The alternate world is interesting, constructed out of Helena’s drawings, but the CGI looks quite cheap in comparison with what Peter Jackson has gotten us all used to.  In fact, it is a bit frustrating to see such CGI, no matter what their budgetary constraints were, as it takes one right out of the moment.  They would have been better off using mechanical constructions.

The film is a cool idea, however the filmmakers certainly didn’t have the means to fully realize it.  They do their best and the pseudo-circus/goth world is an interesting, if not fascinating, experience.  There is a really great scene where Helena becomes dressed as the anti-Helena while robotic jack-in-the-boxes are singing ‘Close To You’ that made me really like this movie, however that was soon lost in the muddle.

It is a cool movie, but not great.

Grade: B+