JP's Reviews

BEAST

I think the key to figuring out this movie is an early scene in which one of the characters is wearing a Jurassic Park shirt. This must be the filmmakers winking their eye at the audience, letting us know that what we’re about to see is all in jest.

How else to explain a film where the protagonists arrive in South Africa and immediately start bitching about the heat, but they’re all wearing jackets, and sweaters, and hoodies? More importantly, how are we to interpret a movie that introduces the issues of poaching (people who kill lions) and anti-poaching (people who kill people who kill lions, or at least that’s what Beast thinks it is), only to have the antagonist be a maneater (a lion that kills people regardless of their stance on poaching).

This only perpetuates the myth that lions have never met a human they didn’t want to maul (while contributing nothing to the poaching debate). I’m not saying lions follow an animal version of the First Law of Robotics, but they do get a bad rap in the movies, as do sharks — and in that sense, Beast is closer to Jaws: The Revenge than Jaws. Actually, Beast is even worse than Jaws: The Revenge because the latter at least used a mechanical shark, as opposed to the former’s pitiful CGI lion.

All things considered, this is a film that makes you yearn for the simplicity of The Ghost and the Darkness, which made no pretense of being anything other than a Hemingway-lite story about male bonding over hunting big game (and which, though taking many liberties with the source material, had the decency to feature real lions).

Here, however, the hero tricks two other lions into killing the 'evil' lion, not only a gambit that could easily backfire, but also not very nature-friendly. Although coming to think about it, maybe these lions do comply with the second part of the First Law ("A robot [or in this case, lion] may not ... through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm").

IMAGINING ARGENTINA

Imagining Argentina could only be imagined by a perversely ignorant mind. Since its director/screenwriter is Christopher Hampton, who before and after has adapted the screenplays of Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, The Quiet American, and The Father, I can only blame Lawrence Thornton, whose novel inspired (though perhaps a better word would be instigated) this vile piece of crap.

The film takes place in 1977, in an Argentina where everyone speaks English with a wide range of Hispanic and Latin American accents, none of which sound remotely Argentinian. The exception is Emma Thompson, who uses her natural British accent even though her character's name is Cecilia Rueda.

She is a dissident journalist in Buenos Aires; after publishing an article denouncing the forced disappearance of students protesting bus fares, Cecilia is kidnapped by the secret police. Faced with the indifference, and almost certain complicity, of the authorities, her husband Carlos (Antonio Banderas) puts up posters with Cecilia's photo, but I doubt that these are of any use, considering that the information on them is printed in Spanish and here everyone, as I just noted, speaks English.

This linguistic dissonance, however, is not the most outrageous aspect the movie. Oh no; that dubious honor is reserved for the fact, and I swear I'm not making this up, that Carlos happens to be psychic. Really. Carlos is producing a play for a youth theater troupe, and one fine day, completely out of the blue, he tells one of the actors that his father, who was also kidnapped, will be released later that night. “It was as if I was remembering the future,” he explains to his friend and colleague Silvio (Rubén Blades, who that same year appeared in Once Upon a Time in Mexico; who would have imagined that the latter would be the more realistic of the two).

The whole thing is like a cross between Tell Me How I Die and the Saturday Night Live episode where Chris Walken is a "trivial psychic," except that there’s nothing trivial about state terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Carlos's prediction comes true, which could very well have been a coincidence; however, he never questions his new powers and soon summons the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to reveal the fate of their loved ones.

All of this is extremely insensitive, offensive, and disrespectful. Not only does it minimize an enormous tragedy, but on top of that, whether deliberately or not, effectively calls it into question. Let's say that Johnny Moviegoer does not know the full extent of the atrocities committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina, but he is fully aware that in real life no one can "remember the future"; now, if the movie indiscriminately exaggerates the latter, who could blame Johnny for assuming that the former is likewise pure hyperbole? As it is, the graphic scenes of rape and torture presented in the film are gratuitous because they do not take place in a medium that bears any resemblance to the real world.

Films like Night of the Pencils and The Official Story are vastly superior not only because they were written in Spanish and directed and acted by Argentines, but above all because they take their material very seriously. Imagining Argentina is, and this is the lesser of its evils, unnecessary, but since they felt compelled to do it, why not change Carlos from a real psychic to a charlatan who slowly changes his attitude as he becomes more familiar with the stories of the people he’s scamming? That way it wouldn’t be the filmmakers the ones who end up coming across as swindlers.

FLIGHT

The title Flight is a perfect illustration that brevity really is the soul of wit. Its six letters describe not only the protagonist's occupation (flying), but also what he spends most of the film doing (fleeing), and if we only added a seventh letter (-y), it would describe the character himself. The film itself could stand to be shorter, but overall it's no exception to the rule that no good movie is too long.

One can identify a compulsive smoker when he lights a cigarette with the butt of the previous one; Similarly, one can spot an alcoholic when he soothes his hangover with leftover beer from the day before — and that’s just the start of commercial pilot William 'Whip' Whitaker's (Denzel Washington) breakfast of champions.

Whip is still drinking in the cabin of Flight 227 bound for Atlanta, making himself a screwdriver, or several, before taking a nap. He wakes with a start when the plane begins to nosedive. Unable to regain control, Whip is forced to make a controlled crash landing in an open field, saving most of the "102 souls" on board.

This includes a maneuver where Whip flies the plane upside down, and it's not just him but also Zemeckis who takes a huge risk and lives to reap the reward. The scene avoids becoming unintentionally funny because part of its purpose is precisely to provide some much-needed humor to ease the almost unbearable tension; at the same time, it manages to stretch the audience's suspension of disbelief without breaking it for two reasons: 1) it has real precedent, and 2) it's exactly the kind of thing someone flying under the influence would do.

There’s no doubt that Whip has the expertise to pull off this maneuver successfully; the question is whether he would have dared to execute it while sober. Moreover,, the cause of the accident is a mechanical failure completely unrelated to Whip's sorry physical state.

But Flight is not, like Druk, an apology for alcoholism. In an inferior film the vehicle, be it a plane or a car, would crash as a direct result of the driver/pilot's drunkenness, and the driver/pilot would be the only or one of the few survivors, making him feel even guiltier. Flight instead debunks the myth of invincibility that every alcoholic invokes by leading us to believe, practically to the end, that Whip might very well be literally invincible.

"Maybe I'm a fool," Whip muses, "because if I'd just told one more lie, I might have walked away from the whole mess." But he knows as well as we do that after that “one more lie” there would be another lie, and another, and another, and that eventually his lies would have caught up with him, because ultimately there is no escaping the negative effects of addiction.

Like the similar Clean and Sober, Flight loses momentum with a Romantic Subplot that a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film doesn't need; on the other hand, I really liked Washington’s and Zemeckis's attention to detail — for example, when in the middle of crash landing Whip has the presence of mind to make a flight attendant tell her son that she loves him so that the box black can record it (in case they don’t make it), or the way his facial language unequivocally expresses the world of difference, the passage from hell to paradise, that exists before that first line of cocaine — supplied by John Goodman in a pair of hilarious cameos, each one heralded by the presence of “Sympathy for the Devil” on the soundtrack — and after.

CAGED FURY

Caged Fury opens with a scantily clad inmate escaping from her cell through a tunnel whose entrance is concealed by a poster. This is not a reference to The Shawshank Redemption, though after watching this women-in-prison flick I can say, like Andy Dufresne, that I crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

The girl’s soon recaptured, although how, where, and when remains as big a mystery as the logistics of her escape — and it doesn't really matter either, because we're never going to see her again. The real heroine is Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels), a young aspiring actress on her way to Los Angeles from Utah.

Kat picks up Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide), and the two stay at Rhonda's on-and-off boyfriend Buck Lewis’s (Blake Bahner) apartment. The three go to a bar and watch The Zeros (a glam metal band so obscure they don't even appear in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years) play.

Also on site are Victor (Erik Estrada) and his friend Dirk Ramsey (Richie Barathy). Victor is stressed "because this ******* biker I've been trying to find has been shaking up a friend of mine." Dirk warns him that "you can't go around fighting everyone else's battles," only to, in a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do scenario, more or less spends the rest of the movie fighting Victor's battles for him.

That same night they rescue Kat from a gang of horny bikers. Barathy doles out a rather rigid brand of martial arts, but at least as far as I can discern it’s him doing it; conversely, Estrada's style is to throw punches at the camera, let his stunt double and the editor do the heavy lifting, and then take the credit.

Buck gets Kat and Rhonda an audition the following day, but when the girls realize it's for a role in a porn movie and try to leave, an altercation ensues; the two are arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison in record time.

Obviously there’s something fishy going on, but what’s really happening is so incredibly stupid that I'd better let one of the villains explain it: "Our international clients watch casting tapes and then make shopping lists. We frame girls from out of town. We send them to a prison movie set to break their spirits. But best of all, most girls think they've done something disgustingly painful [sic]. So the idiots tell their parents and their boyfriends that they are going to leave the country to work on a movie. It's ****ing beautiful, nobody's looking for them, there's no missing person report, and if some family in the Midwest decides to check her out, where would they look, Mexico? [What about the people, the courtroom, what about all those people?] Now Kathryn that's the part you should've guessed. You see the judge ... the district attorney and me, we are all actors."

So unnecessarily complicated, but we are in Hollywood after all. Literally. When the girls break out of “jail” — thanks solely to Dirk, who single-handedly defeats all the “guards” without the help of Victor, who in turn doesn't even have enough reflexes to dodge a bullet fired by Bill Gazzarri , aka “the godfather of Rock 'n' Roll,” who even then had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel —, they emerge right on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It's like the climax of Blazing Saddles except that the characters in Caged Fury aren’t lucky enough to escape the bounds of the movie itself.

Once again Victor, conveniently recovered from his injury, makes an appearance just in time to steal the credit. “I can't believe you're here,” Kat tells him; “I'm glad you cared”. He, in turn, shamelessly replies: "Hey, I care more than you think."

More than Kat thinks turns out not to be enough to follow her when she returns to the "prison" to rescue Rhonda, who has been left behind; the cynical coward waits for her outside — or, rather, doesn’t wait; when Kat is eventually taken away by ambulance, Victor is again conspicuous by his absence. And yet Caged Fury ends up with a shot of the two happily riding his motorcycle — well, at least he’s not a bigamist, like in Dos Mujeres, un Camino.

NIGHT TEETH

This movie’s vampires follow three rules: 1) don't let humans know of their existence, 2) don't feed on someone without their consent, and 3) never go to Boyle Heights without permission. The first rule makes sense, the second is a surefire way to starve, and the third is a sign that these vampires should consider turning into zombies, because eating someone's brain is the closest they'll ever get to having one.

According to the opening narration, “Things were much simpler in the old days. We hunted you and you hunted us. In Los Angeles, no one fought harder than a place called Boyle Heights. So, we made a truce to keep the peace between us and you.”

My question is why, having the whole world at their disposal, do vampires place so much importance on this particular neighborhood? Do you know how many neighborhoods there are in Los Angeles? Literally hundreds, all of them by definition offering less resistance.

Why Boyle Heights, with its population of less than 100,000 (and that’s before you subtract the people who wouldn’t consent to having their blood sucked, why I assume is the majority), and not Encino, or Sherman Oaks, or Reseda? Not to mention the rest of California, or the other 49 states of the Union, or Europe, Asia, Africa, etc., etc. Perhaps the vampires want Boyle Heights merely because they can’t have it, which supports my theory about their low IQs.

Always according to the narration, “We lived in secret and you convinced yourselves that you had never really believed. You forgot to be afraid. You made books and movies about us with most of the details wrong [a category Night Teeth definitely belongs in], while we became richer and more powerful than you could ever imagine."

This reminds me of From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, in which the villains try to rob a bank, and when asked why vampires would want to do such a thing, the hero shrugs and speculates that “ vampires need money like everyone else." Aside from robbing a bank, how exactly do you become a rich and powerful vampire? The answer to this question would make a much more interesting and entertaining movie than Night Teeth.

Q & A

Q & A is the third entry in Sidney Lumet’s loose trilogy about NYPD corruption, and by far the most pessimistic. While Al Pacino and Treat Williams are given an admittedly tough choice in Serpico and Prince of the City, here Timothy Hutton comes to learn that one man can’t make a difference after all.

The ending is as frustrating to the viewers as it is to he hero, because we find out that the character’s hands were tied all along; instead of going over people’s heads and behind their backs, assistant district attorney Al Reilly (Hutton) might as well have played ball from the get-go, which would have at least had the consolation that a low fewer people would have died in the process.

In Serpico and Prince of the City, Lumet addressed corruption as a problem that one had to have the balls to attack head-on; in Q & A he seems to have given up, as if saying: "this is the way things are and there is nothing anyone can do about it" — and you know what they say about being part of the problem if you’re not part of the solution.

The film is not without its pleasures, though; not surprising considering the people involved. Nick Nolte is the original Bad Lieutenant (he has two great back-to-back scenes in which he tells a scatological anecdote to the same people he is about to relate his official account of an incident wherein he shot a Puertorrican kid to death. In both instances he has the audience — his and the movie’s — eating out of the palm of his hand; needless to say, the shooting is ruled as self-defense), while Armand Assante is a precursor to Pacino’s Carlo Brigante (both Q & A and Carlito's Way are based on novels by former New York State Supreme Court Justice and author of Puerto Rican descent Edwin Torres).

VINCE CARTER: LEGACY

Vince Carter: Legacy comes across as the Antonio Salieri of pro basketball, except that while Salieri (the one in the movie, at least) made up for his mediocrity with malevolence, Carter always desperately lacked the killer instinct necessary to succeed in the NBA; as Charles Barkley puts it, “I'll tell you the biggest problem with Vince Carter. He's a nice guy ... [a great player] would slap his momma to get a rebound."

There are of course great players who never won a championship; the film mentions Karl Malone and Patrick Ewing, and I would add, among others, Shawn Kemp, Barkley himself, and even Allen Iverson, who appears in the documentary looking like Martin Lawrence's older brother.

What these players had that Vince Carter didn’t was consistency. It’s true that Carter had an unusually long career, but in his 24 years in the league he played for eight (8) different teams; that is, an average of three seasons per team — by no means long enough to establish a legacy.

It's worth noting that, unlike LeBron James, Carter rarely or never went looking for greener pastures, but was instead traded for other players, suggesting that his own teams didn't see him as someone to build a franchise around (there isn’t, by the way, the slightest mention in this doc of James or Kobe Bryant, the apex predators who dominated the NBA while Carter was content to be a deluxe sixth man).

Another big difference is that Ewing, Malone, Barkley, Kemp and Iverson at least got as close to lifting the Larry O'Brien Trophy as they possibly could. On the other hand, Carter wasn't even a conference champion, or regular-season MVP; his modest individual accomplishments include winning the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, the Twyman-Stokes Trophy for "NBA Teammate of the Year," and the "Sportsman of the NBA" award. These accolades are about as meaningful as an interim UFC championship, and only drive Barkley's point further home.

Having said all of the above, there’s no doubt that Carter considers himself very lucky and successful, and in many ways he is; nevertheless, the documentary gives the impression that everything came to him too easily, like manna from heaven, and this is precisely the bitter irony of which neither Carter nor the filmmakers seem to be aware — there’s no telling how much more he could have achieved if only he’d been more ruthless and cutthroat.

All things considered, Vince Carter's life story is as plain as a plateau, with no peaks to climb or valleys to descend; the highs are pretty much level with the lows, and therefore it fails to generate any interest. Both triumphs and failures become indistinguishable from each other because Carter did things for the long haul, but never on a large scale. His career and his documentary are pretty good, but you know the joke about how polite Canadians are; if something is terrible, they say it's "pretty good."

Really enjoyed your insights about this movie. I liked this movie a lot, definitely more than you, but I'm a little troubled by your comparison to Clean and Sober. I had a lot more sympathy for Daryl Pointer than I did for Whip Whitaker. Daryl never got behind the controls of an airliner and endangered the lives of hundreds of people.

TOUGH AND DEADLY

Tough and Deadly loses many tough points when we consider that Roddy Piper’s character’s name is Elmo Freech (doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Sam Hell or John Nada, does it), or that his co-star is Billy Blanks, whose last name accurately describes his personality — or lack thereof.

The movie itself doesn't leave a very lasting impression, because anything resembling a logical plot has been eschewed in favor of a string of fight scenes one after another. I mean, there’s both a bar fight and a pool hall fight, and when the heroes aren’t fighting the bad guys, they’re fighting each other.

Moreover, an inordinate number of people fall to their deaths in the course of these fights; they fall off ledges, over railings, and through windows. Remember how Scott Pilgrim said he once kicked a guy so hard he saw the curvature of the Earth? Something kinda like that is going on here; Elmo punches this one guy so hard that the dude not only lands quite a ways away, but then continues gaining yardage, so to speak, by rolling over on the ground.

Through events not worth recounting, Elmo takes in an amnesiac Billy Blanks, who chooses a new name by throwing a knife at a map; the knife lands on Portland, to which Billy adds the first name John. John Portland. Why not Cleveland Brown? It hadn’t been taken yet.

Elmo and John then proceed to prowl the city streets kicking asses and taking names — well, not so much taking names, but you get the idea. The random fighting scenes are only interrupted when the film cuts to a bunch of CIA agents (one of them played by Jackie Chiles), who have no problem identifying themselves as such and generally drawing attention — at one point even driving with a siren on — and behaving in manner uncharacteristic for an agency accustomed to operating covertly. On the other hand, they do like to meet in pitch-dark rooms; however, this is probably just to save money on sets.

Tough and Deadly is perfect for people who can’t get enough punching and kicking, which is so abundant here that it leaves no room for a Romantic Interest for either hero; then again, they have their little own bromance going; furthermore, methinks the filmmakers find violence itself erotic, and in that sense, this movie is a ****ing orgy.

EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE

Embrace of the Vampire is a teenage wet dream come true for anyone who first felt their loins stirring while watching Who's the Boss. The two stars of this “erotic horror story” (All Movie) are arguably Alyssa Milano's breasts which, like a pair of Norma Desmonds, were ready for their close-up.

If the plot, such as it is, of this movie seems awfully familiar, then let's just say that director Anne Goursaud is mostly known for her work editing Francis Ford Coppola films, including Bram Stoker's Dracula (hintity hint hint).

The nameless villain (a vampire played by Spandau Ballet’s bassist Martin Kemp... so, Kempire?), who apparently lives in the clock tower of an equally nameless university campus, has a small window to seduce Charlotte (Milano): "In three days I will fall into an eternal sleep."

Why three days? This is the number of days until Charlotte's eighteenth birthday, but a cause-and-effect relationship is never established between one event and the other. The eternal sleep thing isn't explained either, but clearly Kempire doesn't want Charlotte as much as he needs her to "survive" — which is not a bad thing per se, but then why does the movie invoke the Reincarnation Romance? Anyway, as well as having to remain "pure", Charlotte "must desire [Kempire] before he empt[ies] her life down [his] throat."

One possible reason for Kempire's urgency is Chris (Harold Pruett), Charlotte's horny boyfriend, but a bigger threat is Sarah (Charlotte Lewis), "the campus nympho." According to All Movie, "To weaken Charlotte's resolve, the vampire plans to introduce the lovely Sarah to the pleasures of lesbianism."

That’s dumb even for this movie’s standards. Regardless of whether or not Charlotte would remain pure, I thought the idea was for her to leave Chris for Kempire, not for some random bisexual photographer. Then again, the character of Sarah exists solely to provide some of what Eric Bischoff used to call Hot Lesbian Action.

Interestingly, Kempire is not averse, in order to lure him away from Charlotte, to seduce Chris himself — albeit in the tantalizing shape of Jennifer Tilly. Now, if only Kempire had approached Chris man-to-man, so to speak, that might have offset the gratuitous sapphism.

With all this is going on, Charlotte's grades suffer — for example, she gets a "D" in her "film noir" midterm (I like to think one of the questions was 'what is the Maltese Falcon made of?') —, which could just as easily be due to Kempire's distracting influence as to the fact that, up to this point, we haven't seen Charlotte (or, for that matter, any other character), attend any classes at all.

An argument in favor of the distraction theory is that Charlotte at some point wears a necklace with an ankh pendant Kempire gave her, an object which, apart from glowing in the dark, supposedly alters the behavior of the person who wears it — which, in Charlotte's case, means different hair, makeup, wearing revealing clothes (though this, ironically, means she’s actually overdressed in these scenes), and flirting with random guys.

All of this raises one question: If Kempire needs Charlotte to not only remain pure, but also give herself to him of her own free will, for what possible reason would he give her a behavior-altering artifact that makes her act like a slut? All things considered, there’s no horror here, nor is there much of a story, but at last they got the erotic part right.

BRAZEN

I’m sorry to report that Alyssa Milano does not forego her long-standing ‘no nudity clause’ in Brazen — and I’m more sorry for her than for me (after all, that’s what Embrace of the Vampire is for), because that’s about the only thing that could save this crap. Milano is Grace Miller, authoress of thriller novels. Here is an excerpt from her most recent masterpiece, titled Brazen Virtue:

"She did not expect to die that night. Sara Bowman was precise in everything, and dying was not on her agenda. She had no enemies that she knew of. In general, his life was quite ordinary. Yet there she was, lying in a pool of her own blood. The manner of her death violent, even deranged. Who would want to kill the ordinary Sara Bowman? And then it dawned on her. What if she wasn’t ordinary? What if she had a secret life?"

It would have to be a very secret secret life indeed if not even “Sarah” herself was aware of it. It turns out that Brazen is based on a novel also called Brazen Virtue by Nora Roberts; I’m not familiar with her work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her books opened with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” or some variation thereof.

In addition to a purveyor of purple prose, Grace is a dispenser of clumsy exposition, like when she tells her sister Kathleen (Emilie Ullerup) that “Last I heard you were addicted to pills and you abandoned your son.” Something tells me this is not news to Kathleen, who is an English teacher at an upper-class boys’ high school: “Next week’s essay will be on Hamlet. How would Hamlet feel in our digital age?

I’m pretty sure Ethan Hawke already answered this question, and the answer wasn’t very compelling (besides, a better question would be how would Romeo feel in the digital age, considering that a simple SMS would have saved him a lot of trouble).

Would you believe that Kathleen herself just happens to have a double life of her own? Well, she does; her alter ego is Desiree, a web cam dominatrix. Wait, what? I guess all her customers must be naughty little boys, because for a fetish based on discipline, this is incredibly lazy.

Anyway, Kathleen soon gets sent to web cam heaven, and Grace hijacks her sister’s homicide investigation, which is nominally led by Detective Ed Jennings (Sam Page) — who conveniently lives next-door to Kathleen — and his partner, Detective Ben Parker (Malachi Weier), who may be named after Spiderman’s uncle, but looks like the lead singer in a Melvins cover band.

Grace talks Ed and Ben’s boss, Captain Rivera (Alison Araya) into appointing her a “consultant” on the case (someone’s been watching too much Lucifer). Grace justifies this claiming that “I have an instinct for motive. I mean, that’s why my books are so successful. I can enter the mind of a murderer, especially those who attack women.”

Ed, who is present and opposes the idea, fails to point out that Grace would be a pretty lousy writer (well, lousier) if she couldn’t freely enter the mind of a killer that she made up in the first place.
Unchecked, Grace adds, “Do you know how long it took the NYPD to find the Times Square Rapist? Eight months. And I went in, studied the case, and they caught the guy three days later.” Again, it doesn’t cross Ed’s mind to call this a coincidence or suggest that the guy was caught thanks to those eight months of police work, and not Grace’s three days.

The Captain, who must have found her badge in a cereal box, is sold, however; “Grace, I read your books from cover to cover as soon as I can get my hands on them. You truly are one of the most cunning profilers out there.” Thankfully, the scene ends before the brownosing becomes literal.

What I don’t understand is why director Monika Mitchell — and that a woman directed this, as it were, brazen display of pseudo-feminism is most baffling — goes to such lengths to promote Grace as a prodigious detective mind when she never even comes close to determining the killer’s identity or motive (despite having “lots of ideas” about it), or why screenwriters Edithe Swensen and Donald Martin force Milano to say, with all the sincerity she can muster, that Grace’s novels are “about the exploitation of women and misogyny and patriarchy and how we do very little to protect the most vulnerable”, only to have her catch the villain by literally using her body as bait.

FALL

I can’t help having a soft spot for a movie that name-drops several pro wrestlers as a means to convey a nice bit of subtle foreshadowing, and plays Warrants «Cherry Pie» on its soundtrack like every five minutes. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to empathize with the characters in this film; anyone who climbs a rusty, super creaky 2,000 foot TV tower (a choice so inane that under normal circumstances it’s known as the Fallacy of the Climbing Villain) in the middle of bum**** nowhere just for shits and giggles deserves whatever’s coming to them.



The rationale, such as it is, behind the protagonists’ actions is that life is «too short» and "you gotta do something that makes you feel alive." Methinks they’re confusing joie de vivre with having a ****ing death wish. According to these people’s logic, Bobby De Niro and Chris Walken were really sucking the marrow out of life in those Russian roulette scenes from The Deer Hunter.

Now, that climbing artificial structures (known as buildering as well as several other names) is a reckless (not to mention illegal) thing to do doesn’t necessarily mean that those who do it take it lightly. I’m sure a lot of planning and prepping and getting in shape mentally and physically (even the relatively simple act of climbing a ladder becomes a Herculean labor when the ladder is twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower) precedes the actual deed.

We don’t see any of that here; not even a training montage. For Hunter (Virginia Gardner) and Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) it’s an overnight decision; sure, Hunter says she’s has «planned» it, and she’s some sort of daredevil You Tuber, but Becky is an out-of-practice rock climber who has ostensibly become a drunken slob in the year since her husband’s Disney Villain Death.

All of the above notwithstanding, the film certainly makes the most of its chosen setting. The landscape around the top of the tower (consisting of a "pizza-size platform") betrays a green screen quality to it, but this is a rare occasion in which this actually works in the movie’s favor; at such dizzying heights, wouldn’t the world and everything in it look surreal? Or, to put it more bluntly, wouldn’t your perception get all screwed up?

Moreover, the stunts don’t flat-out take your breath away, but they do kind of borrow it for a little while, which is better than nothing; also, there’s a modicum of suspense regarding whether or not help is on the way — and while this is the only movie that I can think of where the audience is left literally waiting for the other shoe to drop, this aspect of the plot actually involves a pretty neat shot of, well, a shoe dropping.

The Mill and the Cross

The Mill and the Cross is one of the best biopics about a painter — or, for that matter, any artist — because it concerns itself less with the painter and more with his work; that is, it knows that the 'what' and 'how' matter more than the 'who.' That’s not to say that the creator doesn’t count for anything; what I mean is that the every artist’s autobiography is recorded in their work (and that’s is why, as I always say, we can learn more about Elton John or Freddie Mercury by listening to Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody than by watching Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody).

This film co-written and directed by Lech Majewski is admirably faithful to the aesthetics of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, but it does not co-opt the artist's vision to put forth a crackpot, 'secret history' plot that has more to do with the filmmaker’s fevered imagination than with any real, historical fact; for example Nightwatching, Loving Vincent, or At Eternity's Gate, which all look great and contain great performances, but end up as nothing more than vehicles for their respective filmmakers' outlandish conspiracy theories — they talk a lot but say little or nothing.

In contrast, The Mill and the Cross talks little but speaks volumes. Of the dozens of characters, only three have significant dialogue, especially Brueghel (Ruther Hauer) himself; his monologues provide a convincing, reasonable, and direct explanation of the structure and symbolism of The Procession to Calvary. Meanwhile, Michael York's rich baritone provides the political and social context for the painting.

The Many Saints of Newark

The Many Saints of Newark is The Sopranos meets The Godfather Part II, and the result is so much less than the sum of its parts. Do we really need to know that Tony Soprano was once a chubby brat? Moreover, do we really want to know that that chubby brat grew up to be Michael Gandolfini? Michael would certainly be a chip off the old block, if his father had been Oswald Cobblepot instead of Jim Gandolfini. This is truly a case of the apple falling a million miles away from the tree, but then pretty much everyone here falls short of the original actors/characters (I was never really a fan of the TV show, and even I would rather watch that instead).

Livia, Junior, Janice, Paulie Walnuts, Silvio Dante, Big Pussy; Soprano diehards will recognize all of these and several other names , but not much else. The only connection to the HBO series is Michael Imperioli, and even then it's just his voice used as little more than en excuse for some lame retrospective dramatic irony.

When he sees Tony for the first time, baby Christopher starts crying his eyes out; someone takes the opportunity to randomly comment that “Some babies, when they come into the world, know all kinds of things from the other side”.

So baby Chris could somehow sense that uncle Tony was going to eventually murder him in cold blood? And if so, a fat lot of good that prescience did him. As for the audience, we (even casual viewers like myself) remember very well that Tony Soprano strangled Christopher Moltisanti (which means 'many saints', hence the title of the film), because it’s practically the first thing that Imperioli tells us in the opening narration (to paraphrase Borges, saying something too much is almost as bad as not saying it).

Writers David Chase and Lawrence Konner and director Alan Taylor even manage to ruin the only good thing about this piece of crap movie; i.e., the late, great Ray Liotta, who must have been paid very good money — and completely deserved it for appearing in this debacle — because the filmmakers kill off his character half an hour into the movie, just to introduce his identical twin (and I mean identical to a ****ing T; how many pairs of twins are still getting exactly the same haircuts in their late 60s?). Someone at New Line must have thought that Liotta was overpaid and demanded that the actor pulled double duty; how else to explain this farcical turn of events?

Bullet

Bullet is a shot in the dark; a stray bullet that almost hits its mark. Almost. It's hard to screw up a film with Mickey Rourke, Tupac Shakur, Adrien Brody, and Ted Levine – hard, but not impossible. One of the most disappointing aspects of Bullet is that Shakur, the rare musician with a truly solid screen presence, only appears in a handful of scenes – which is still more than enough for him to steal the movie –, and only shares a couple of them with Rourke. One can only wonder if his death that same year had something to do with this.

Butch 'Bullet' Stein (Rourke) is out on parole after serving an eight-year sentence. On his first day out, Bullet stabs Flaco (Manny Perez), who works for drug dealer Tank (Shakur), in the eye. Apparently, stabbing people in the eye is Bullet's trademark, and Tank is one of his previous victims. So why is his nickname Bullet, then? And why does Tank wear an eye patch? Under it, he either has a glass eye, or a glassy eye, but an eye nonetheless.

It’s symptomatic of this script, in which Rourke had a hand, that the consequences fall very short of the magnitude of the actions that provoke them. In addition to Tank's eye, we have Butch's younger brother Ruby’s (Brody) hand. Ruby is an aspiring graffiti artist whose “drawing hand” is impaled with a knife, for which Butch is indirectly to blame.

This incident not only does not result in friction between the brothers, but it doesn’t prevent Ruby from painting a huge mural of his hand with a blade going through it, of all things. Basically, this event belongs in a first draft, not in the finished movie.

All things considered, I have mixed feelings about this film. Tupac is easily the best thing in it; when he's not there we expect him to show up, and when he shows up, all eyes are on him (you’ll excuse the obvious reference). The filmmakers should have given us a lot more of Shakur, or a lot less.

Rourke, on the other hand, gives a deliberately lethargic and morose performance, befitting the unmotivated Butch – who is only jolted out of his drug-induced stupor to commit petty crimes to get money to buy more drugs –, and in keeping with the scattered, disjointed, and episodic nature of much of the film. The highlight of Rourke's performance is a great scene in which Butch warns two young men he mugged earlier in the story of the dangers of ending up like him.

This Butch material, which could have been the American answer to Trainspotting, is set against the more straightforward Tank subplot, so that we are left with two different stories running perpendicular, rather than parallel, to each other, and when they intersect is more of a train wreck than a junction.

CHINESE COFFEE

In Carlito's Way, Al Pacino warns us that “a favor’s gonna kill you faster than a bullet.” In Chinese Coffee (2000) we see what he meant by that. Harry Levine (Pacino) and Jake Manheim (Jerry Orbach), whose friendship seems to illustrate that misery loves company, have exchanged favors; Harry loaned Jake $500 to buy photographic equipment, and Jake said he would read Harry's manuscript.

Jake, however, has no money to pay the strapped-for-cash Harry back (both are starving artists at an age when this lifestyle has long since ceased to be a voluntary choice and has become "nothing but a long history of failure."), and claims to have not read Harry’s manuscript; in fact, he has stashed the pages in the freezer like a piece of raw meat – there is something in them he finds hard to swallow, let alone digest, because to him it would be not unlike to anthropophagy.

The subject of an artist cannibalizing the experiences of someone close to them is common; in the last couple of years alone we’ve had, with varying degrees of success, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk and Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie. This material, that essentially comes down to verbal fencing, behooves from a spare setting and cast – which is why Malcolm & Marie succeeded where Let Them All Talk failed; the former is an original screenplay by Levinson, but it would easily feel at home on Broadway.

Chinese Coffee, adapted by Ira Lewis from his one-act play of the same name, is even more austere, taking place mostly in an apartment described as “stifling”, “thick” and “dense”, and whose windows are bolted shut. Pacino – who starred in the original stage production and directed the film adaptation – and Lewis know their stuff inside and out, and the result is lean and tight; at the same time, they wisely take advantage of the freedom afforded them by the medium of film to relieve the claustrophobia of the main set, which they leave from time to time, to visit, usually in flashback, more open spaces – unlike the play, where all the action takes place in a small apartment in Greenwich Village (at other times, however, the film simply swaps one cubbyhole for another; specifically, the basement Harry shared with his ex Joanna (Susa Floyd).

THE FATHER

Anthony Hopkins's performance in The Father is bulletproof. This is fortunate, because he encounters what the military calls 'friendly fire' resulting from a baffling decision by co-writer/director Florian Zeller, who has a couple of characters played each by two different sets of actors.

Thus Anne, Hopkins’s character’s (also named Anthony) daughter is played by Olivia Williams and Olivia Colman (who at least share some physical resemblance), while Anne's (ex)husband Paul is played by Rufus Sewell and Mark Gattis (who are like day and night). No wonder Anthony is so confused – as are we.

There are certainly precedents for this type of casting, the most famous of which is That Obscure Object of Desire, in which Luis Buñuel alternates the role of Conchita between Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina – but then Buñuel was a prankster, whereas The Father's theme of senile dementia is very serious and deserves to be treated accordingly.

Now, I’m aware that it’s only natural for Anthony to think that his nurse is also his daughter, but the source of his confusion should be that the person he believes to be his daughter behaves like a nurse, and not the other way around. It would make more sense, comparatively, for Colman to play Anne and the nurse, and for Williams to only play the nurse, but not Anne.

On the other hand, it doesn't make sense that the first time Anthony fails to recognize Anne we can't recognize her either, because then we think there’s something fishy going on. It would be far more dramatically effective if the actress Anthony doesn't recognize as his daughter is the one and only whom we identify as Anne. The protagonists turmoil is internal, and it’s Hopkins's duty to externalize it – of which the actor does a flawless job.

The film's mise-en-scène works better to convey Anthony's cognitive impairment but, again, it is the character's mental feng shui, or lack thereof, that interests us, and which Hopkins expresses unequivocally through a masterful combination of oral and body language. It’s not that he's the best part of the movie; he is the movie.

Hopkins puts on the proverbial clinic; his is a heartbreakingly beautiful performance, a veritable emotional roller coaster with sudden highs and unexpected lows. The Briton’s acting is all the more impressive because he makes it look easy – I mean, like Brando easy.

And yet, it's as if Zeller doesn't quite trust Hopkins to make his vision a reality, hence all the visual gimmickry that hurts more than it helps (to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, saying something too much is as bad as not saying it). This is most unfortunate because Hopkins's talent for storytelling remains as powerful as ever – perhaps even more so.

I Dream in Another Language

I Dream in Another Language is ambitious but uneven. It has good ideas, but struggles with the execution. It’s visually flawless, which is a good thing if we subscribe to the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it can also be seen as a triumph of style over substance, especially in a film that’s supposed to be about words – both said and unsaid.

And yet, I can’t help liking it, because director Ernesto Contreras and screenwriter Carlos Contreras show a sincere love of language and communication, even if they, somewhat ironically, don’t know quite how to express it. It’s almost as if something was lost in the translation from dream to reality.

The movie revolves around a fictitious indigenous language called Zikril. There are other plot points, but this is the most interesting one, though in the end it doesn’t amount to much more than a missed opportunity. I caught exactly two words of Zikril; the rest is nothing but a lot of mumbling – and the problem is not the sound or the actors; as a native speaker, I can assure that the Spanish dialogue comes through loud and clear.

Furthermore, we don't learn a lot about the culture that originally gave rise to Zikril, apart from some mythology about how it came into being, as well as learning about the afterlife where its speakers go when they die: a physical place on the mountain called “El Encanto”, to which they apparently ascend, like the Virgin into the heavens, bodily and not just in spirit (the movie is firmly planted in the tradition of magical realism, and is in particular reminiscent of Alejo Carpentier’s novel Los Pasos Perdidos, which it emulates but does not equal).

What the film, shot deep in the Veracruzan jungle, does very well, however, is what Werner Herzog calls the ‘voodoo of location.’ All things considered, I Dream in Another Language is intriguing enough to hold the viewer's interest throughout its 103-minute running time, but perhaps the filmmakers should have resorted to some already existing, but still obscure, language, instead of half-assing an entirely new one.

Death of a Salesman

The age of social media would be a double-edged sword for Willy Loman (Dustin Hoffman) and his prophetic obsession with what we now know as 'likes.' One of his mantras is “Be liked and you will never want.” Today this would mean getting likes, and not just by the hundreds; if possible, by the thousands.

“One day I will have my own business and I will never have to leave the house,” says Willy. “Like Uncle Charley [Charles Durning]?” asks his youngest son Hap (Stephen Lang). “Bigger than Uncle Charley. Charley is not liked. He's liked but he's not well liked.”

Ironically, Charley is much more successful than Willy — as is Charley’s son Bernard (David S. Chandler) compared to Hap and his older brother Biff (John Malkovich) — despite, or perhaps because of his indifference to whether or not he is liked (“Why must everybody like you? Who liked JP Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he looked like a butcher. With his pockets on he was very well-liked.”).

Willy drew inspiration from Dave Singleman; “Old Dave would go up to his room, put on his green velvet slippers, pick up the phone and call the buyers. Without ever leaving his room at the age of 84, he made his living. When I saw that, I realised that selling was the greatest career a man could want because what could be more satisfying than to be able to go at the age of 84 into 20 or 30 different cities and pick up a phone and be remembered and loved and helped by many different people?”

This could be thought of as the old fashioned way of sending friend requests, and if one wants those requests to turn into contacts — because, after all, “It's not what you do; it's who you know” — it's better to have, so to speak , a good profile picture; this is the sort of lesson that Willy instills in Biff and Hap since they were in high school (“I thank Almighty God you're both built like Adonises. The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead”).

In Willy's world, a man's life's worth is judged by the number of people who attend his funeral; for example, “When [old Dave] died, hundreds of sellers and buyers were at his funeral. Things were sad on many trains for months after that." As for his own funeral, Willy dreams of a “massive” one: “Oh, they'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire. All the old-timers with the strange licence plates. [Biff] will be thunderstruck ... because he never realised I am known. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, I am known!” All of this is as illusory as a Facebook profile, as are the 'memories' that Willy 'shares' with us, which represent an idealized view not only of the past but also, thanks to Willy's incipient senility, of the present.

The greatest irony of this film, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and adapted from the play of the same name by Arthur Miller, is Willy's inability to see that if people don't like him, it's not because he’s "very foolish to look at", but due to the simple fact that he’s just not a likeable person: he yells at his wife Linda (Kate Reid), whom he used to two-time on his business trips — when Biff catches him red-handed with another woman and loses his considerable respect and admiration for him, Willy accuses him of throwing his life away to spite Willy, who had placed high hopes on Biff's athletic prowess (Biff, however, never tells his mother what he saw, at the cost of having her resent him for his coldness towards his father) —; he constantly hurls insults at Charley, and even questions his manhood, ("A man who can't handle tools isn't a man"), but has no problem taking Charley's money (but not a job that would most likely be a sinecure when Charley offers him one after Willy has been fired); etc.

All things considered, Willy is the kind of 'friend' who is shocked when you block him, but then sends you a request from a different profile.

RESIDUE

I like that Residue is a protest film that dothn’t protest too much. Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu) is a young filmmaker who returns home after many years away to write a screenplay about his childhood, only to find his neighborhood unrecognizable.

By the same token, he’s practically a stranger to his former friends and possibly even his parents. Jay’s lost childhood is symbolized by his former best friend Demetrius, whom he keeps asking about throughout the film only to receive evasive, hostile answers. The editing, fragmented but not disjointed, contributes to Jay’s sense of disorientation.

Writer/director Merawi Gerima is firmly against gentrification, but Residue is not arousing call to arms so much as a purely subjective, individualistic record of his displeasure. As a twofold document of Gerima’s personal opinion and filmmaking prowess, the movie is flawless — as viscerally artistic as it is cerebrally technical.

It’s worth noting that Jay claims that his film will give a voice to the voiceless, something that Gerima’s fails to do (it’s safe to say that, if Jay is a fictionalized Gerima, Residue is pretty much what Jay’s film would look like).Whoever has been displaced isn’t around to complain, and those who remain don’t seem to share Jay’s outrage — quite the contrary; they see Jay as a defector, and Jay himself is conscious that he isn’t back to stay. Ironically, the least affected by the phenomenon is the only one makes a big deal about it (whether he has a right into is another matter entirely).

All things considered, it’s possible that Jay’s restlessness has a much deeper, metaphysical source (Nwachukwu plays him, quite rightly, as a surly, bitter, malcontent young man; the kind who can’t wait to get out of the ghetto, but is disappointed when the ghetto isn’t there waiting for him). Residue may not turn the tide against gentrification, but one hopes it was good for exorcising a few personal demons