To be frankly honest I almost left off the review of sam mendes American beauty because it was not really my personality in my opinion. Although i worked very hard on it I also had a dude edit spelling errors, grammar etc. for me and looking back it is really not me, it is really not VERN. Too slick, mainstream and hollywood in my opinion. I had been gone from the newsgroup after an incident of hurting a man’s feelings and going in search of myself. I wanted to show that I had really improved as a Writer however this was not very honest to have another man’s help. So please don’t read this review in my opinion thanks.
AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)
Directed by Sam Mendes
Written by Alan Ball
AMERICAN BEAUTY deals with the ugly sins and denial carefully buried beneath the manicured green lawns of a typical suburban neighborhood. A failed marriage, a daughter’s distrust of her parents, a father’s crush on her daughter’s underaged friend. The new neighbor (Chris Cooper) beats his pot dealing voyeurist son and ignores his emotionally disfigured wife. A failing real estate agent played by Annette Bening philosophizes about projecting an image of total success, but an emotional breakdown leads to her husband Lester (Kevin Spacey) quitting his job, taking up pot and systematically tearing down the perfect image of suburban happiness that his wife has so carefully constructed. Soon all hell breaks loose and a nasty splooge of anger and violence surfaces from beneath the façade. This sort of subject matter has been tackled many times before – we’re not exactly blowing the lid off of suburbia here – but it’s well executed and draws you in almost immediately.
I think what really makes it work is its three dimensional set of characters. A crucial scene in the film is when Bening strips down to her skivvies and begins scrubbing and vacuuming a small, rundown house, chanting “I will sell this house TODAY.” She tries her damndest, pathetically bullshitting a series of unimpressed clients, trying to pass off a kitchen that would fit neatly into a jail cell as “any chef’s dream,” and suggesting to a young couple that they might think of adding a skylight. She projects a ridiculous, cartoonish optimism like a demented Avon lady, but no one’s buying it. Especially the lesbians who note that the filthy swimming pool isn’t exactly “lagoon-like” as described in the ad, and call her on it. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | No Comments »
You probaly haven’t heard of it but ALL THE REAL GIRLS is the new one from the young man who made GEORGE WASHINGTON. Maybe you never saw that one either, it was kinda weird because it wasn’t about President George Washington or peanut innovator George Washington Carver, it was about some kid. Maybe he grows up to be George Washington, I don’t know, I don’t get it. But it’s a unique and effective movie made by a young dude nobody ever heard of and somehow it got its own Criterion Collection dvd and many nominations for Independent Spirit Awards. Now the kid got the job of directing a movie of the book CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, which people have wanted to do for years and years. We’ll see how that turns out, I think the kid can pull it off but who knows I only read half of the book.
This one is a little more intimate than G-dub. It is basically about one short relationship and it is handled very realistically. Basically what this young man Gordon Green did, he took out all the movie bullshit and put in all the real life bullshit. So you don’t get no speeches about star wars or about how everybody feels deep down inside. You don’t get no oldies singalongs or elaborate romantic gestures. There are no cops or astronauts in this picture. The main dude is not a hitman. He just works on cars.
The people in the movie seem real because they talk real. They say things wrong and they don’t have clever quips. They don’t always know how to explain their feelings. That is why most people would hate this movie, but they would be in the other theater watching the one where Steve Martin dresses up as Bulworth. And the people in this theater will probaly love it. So it will all work out and afterwards they can meet in the lobby and still be friends. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | 1 Comment »
Here I am trying to better myself, trying to educated myself about the films of Cinema and I see that these two both get five star reviews from a lot of critics and hell they’re playing them back to back on AMC I’m thinking hey, the Eve series must be a pretty good series. And it is.
All about Eve is a very well made story about the New York theater type people – actors, producers, writers, columnists, wannabes. The Eve of the title is this young naive girl who’s a dedicated fan who goes to meet the famous actress Margot Channing. She doesn’t want to impose on her, she’s not some autograph seeker, but she’s seen every performance of this play so Margot’s best friend brings her backstage and before you know it she’s Margot’s assistant. And of course the movie depicts her rise from being this naive nobody to being an acclaimed but self centered actress like Margot. If you’ve seen Showgirls this is the same type of deal except without the swimming pool sex scene, otherwise it remains very faithful though.
Now the problem with Eve is that she seems to be TOO nice. She apologizes for everything, takes the blame for everything, tries to always be humble to the point of being annoying as hell. I mean at first you can’t help but like her she’s so nice but a little of her goes a LONG fucking way to be frankly honest. It’s no wonder people in show business are insane if they have to deal with people like this. So it’s almost a relief when she turns out to be a phoney, she lied about her background and she’s just pretending to be humble and nice. By the end she’s pulling soap opera style backstabbing shenanigans and scheming like you wouldn’t believe. I mean she came in there like some evil alien or robot or alien robot programmed to become a star at any cost. This twist didn’t really surprise me though because I seem to remember this movie was released overseas under the alternate title Lying Ass Bitch. But I don’t know I could be wrong don’t quote me on that.
Margot, played by Bette Davis, is also a bitch, but in a good way. She always has some cold-hearted stab ready for somebody that gives her shit. She pretends to be nice and then says something like, “Don’t worry about your heart dear, you can just put this award where your heart’s supposed to be.” There are lots of good little quips like this, it’s a well written piece in my opinion, although there is a disturbing lack of violence in the confrontations, I would have liked to see a little kickboxing or something at some point. But what can you do man. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | No Comments »
Vanilla Sky is an american remake of OPEN YOUR EYES, the second picture by the young spanish gentleman Alejandro Amenabar, who also did THESIS and THE OTHERS. After the movie I was saying to a gal that the ending was kinda different on the original, and the guy next to me was saying the same thing to his friend. Except he was just getting out of OCEAN’S 11.
Everything is fucking remakes now, huh? The above took place in Seattle, Washington, where as we speak the Dreamworks company is hard at work on an unneccesary remake of (the) RING. History has not been kind to american remakes of foreign pictures. Even when you get the same guy to remake it – like with THE VANISHING or NIGHTWATCH – the movie will piss everybody off and the director will be forgotten forever.
Well I didn’t like VANILLA SKY as much as OPEN YOUR EYES (which, by the way, I didn’t like as much as THESIS) but it is surprisingly good for an americanization of a spanish picture. The director is Cameron Crowe, who always does the pictures about what music people listen to when they’re falling in love. It shows improvement in the filmatism in my opinion. It is a very good use of sound and music, and cinematographing. There are some subtle touches here and there and more emotion in the character that Cameron Diaz plays, the woman Tom Cruise casually dates who goes nuts on him and tries to kill him. In OPEN YOUR EYES she was more of a nut, here she makes a pretty good point about even if you make it clear you’re not serious about this woman, when you fuck her you gotta realize it means something to her. Come on, don’t be an asshole Tom Cruise. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | No Comments »
You wanna see a BADASS fuckin movie, you see RIFIFI. That’s what I wish somebody woulda told me a long time ago. Instead all they told me was how excellent it was. Now look, you know how much I care about excellence. But there’s alot of excellence in this world. I think Criterion is on number 300 or something now. How’m I supposed to watch every one of them? It won’t happen.
Unfortunately no matter how many movies a guy watches, there’s still ten thousand you’re never gonna get to watch in your lifetime. So you hear the name of these classic movies over and over again and sometimes you think “yeah yeah yeah, great movie, I know” but it doesn’t even occur to you maybe you should watch it. Look man, I don’t mind black and white, I don’t mind subtitles, I know this is Criterion Collection. But I need a hook. Nobody told me “it’s about four ex-cons planning a jewel heist.” That’s all you had to say, man.
If you’re wondering what in fuck’s name “Rififi” means, apparently it’s some french crime slang from the time that roughly translates as “rough and tumble.” They got a whole night club song and dance number explaining what it means but otherwise it’s not really relevant. Just a cool name that sets the tone, like DIE HARD or HARD BOILED, or if they made a movie called BOILED HARD, that would also be similar.
Turns out although this is a French movie, the director Jules Dassin is American. Chased out of the country by the blacklist, he was having trouble even getting movies made overseas, people not able to work with him without closing doors in America. Somebody offered him this book, he couldn’t even read it because the french street slang was so thick, then when he had somebody read it to him he thought it was racist and repulsive (apparently there was some kind of corpse fucking involved – don’t ask me). But he needed the work so he took it anyway and loosely adapted it. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | 2 Comments »
You talk about striving for excellence – to a guy like me, Sergio Leone is just about the highest level of excellence any director could aspire to. He took the western genre, which had grown stale and conservative, and injected it full of his Leone brand cinematic steroid and turned it into an unstoppable super soldier version of the old beast, one so powerful it became its own genre that is still worshipped and studied by cult movie watchers to this day. All he did was five westerns bookended by a gladiator picture and a gangster epic. But those westerns contributed so much to the Badass Cinema I worship to this day that they might as well be considered its legal guardians.
Think about it: the stoic Clint Eastwood persona of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, which he parlayed into an entire brilliant career and which spun off into a hundred bastard sons in the action genre, from Steven Seagal to Daniel Craig. The epic cinemascope wide shots showing the vastness of the desert, cutting to the extreme closeups on some ugly bastard’s squinty eyes, surrounded by wrinkles and lines of sweat. The ingenious use of sound – buzzing flies, some piece of metal somewhere clanging in the wind, the clicking of guns, and of course the legendary Ennio Morricone scores that are forever glued to any memory anybody ever had of these movies. Leone’s style is like a drug, it heightens all your senses. You feel like a blind man whose hearing becomes more powerful to balance out the loss of the eye sight, but then you get the eye sight back for some reason and the super-hearing stays so you go watch some westerns.
To me it seems like Leone must’ve had film spooling through his veins. He’s the definition of a guy who mastered the idea of camera angles, of sound, of music, of pacing. When I talk about what I love in movies, what I think is too often missing from movies these days, this is it – this CINEMATIC (all caps) feel, this god-like mastery of visual storytelling. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | 1 Comment »
I don’t know what the deal is with this movie but I gotta admit I kinda liked it. Basically it is your formula movie about young kids competing in something, like LOVE AND BASKETBALL or KARATE KID or WORLD’S BIGGEST GANG BANG or that kind of thing. But in this case instead of sports they are competing at marching band.
The main kid is Nick Cannon who I just looked up on IMDb. I guess he was on the “nickelodeon” kids channel and even had a show named after him. So basically he is an unknown. He is real good as a prodigy on the drum. Not the drums, just one drum that you carry around. This kid is real good, especially good at memorizing and picking things up fast, but you find out later that he can’t read music. Still, he gets a scholarship to this college and goes to this marching band and finds out it’s alot more strict than he expected. They got a curfew, they got a drum major that hates him, etc.
One thing I like is they don’t try to convince you that marching band is cool. They just kind of assume that you already think so. And you kind of feel like there must be some mistake, I guess I never knew marching band was cool. This kid is a superstar, like Ray Allen in HE GOT GAME, there is even an instructor from a rival marching band talking him up trying to get him to switch over.
Another thing I like is that it takes itself seriously. It is basically a drama, there’s not alot of bad comic relief type crap. There is a little bit about one white guy who tries to compete in this all black band, but nothing embarassing. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | No Comments »
If you want a good picture about junkies this is it. This is not a western like you may think it is the story of Matt Dillon, his lady and another couple who travel the Pacific Northwest region knocking down drugstores to score various pharmaceuticals. As someone who has known these type of people I can GUARANTEE you they do not have prescriptions for these items. They are addicts.
What I like about this one in my opinion is that it is an anti drug movie that doesn’t stack the deck. It makes it clear that drugs are fun when you are doing them, they make the world happy and the cowboy lifestyle as they call it is exciting. So then after being honest it goes on to deal with the negative side.
Most movies would depict these folks as scum but here they are real people, and this is how they live. They are a family and the picture even starts with clips from their home movies. This is also a Mary Poppins type deal where the head of the household is a bit too into his job. He is so dependant on medicinal pleasure that he loses all sense of priorities – he doesn’t even want to get laid. His lady is taking her top off and he gets nervous and starts rattling on about a hospital he wants to rob. And that’s when you know this guy is a fucking addict.
They aren’t only addicted to the drugs, but also to the hunt. And the robbery scenes are thrilling to watch. This dude also plays some clever tricks, and it’s real funny when he gets the cops that have him on surveillance to think his neighbor is an accomplice, and gets his neighbor to think the cops are peeping toms. The cops watch the neighbor with binoculars and they have typical hot-shit-movie-cop dialogue: “I wonder what’s in the bag?” “The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not his god damned lunch.”
But it is. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | No Comments »
From the same director, producer and cast as Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds comes another exciting pile of disparate elements squooshed together into the same basic shape as an action movie. It’s really more of a booger sculpture than a movie, but for a booger sculpture, it’s not that bad, I guess.
Joel Silver originally announced this as Untitled DMX Project, supposedly a remake of Fritz Lang’s M. If that was the case, then I guess Tom Arnold (our generation’s Peter Lorre) would’ve been playing a perverted child killer whose killing spree had caused the police to clamp down so hard that organized crime would be pretty much put out of business. So the leaders of rival gangs (DMX, Jet Li, Mark Dacascos) would pool their resources to catch Tom Arnold so everything could go back to normal.
I knew Silver was trying to put one over on us though ’cause I remembered when Romeo Must Die was supposed to be a “hip hop/kung fu adaptation of Romeo and Juliet” and when Exit Wounds was supposed to be an adaptation of John Westermann’s novel Exit Wounds. It’s all hype. When people hear something like “they’re doing a remake of M starring DMX,” they get riled up, and this guarantees that they will later see the movie when it comes out as Cradle 2 the Grave and turns out to be about diamond thieves who steal diamonds that are actually magic plutonium weapons and their daughter gets kidnapped so they have to team up with a Taiwanese intelligence agent to do various stunts and kung fu to save the daughter.
(?)
No, I guess actually come to think of it I’m not sure what they were thinking comparing this to a movie it has no relation to in any way. Or calling it Cradle 2 the Grave, which only relates to the plot in the same way that “Grape Nuts” describes that nasty cereal that doesn’t have grapes or nuts in it at all. But these guys are professionals, they must know what they’re doing. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | 1 Comment »
This is a lesser known but completely fucking badass Walter Hill picture about a getaway driver. Ryan O’Neal plays the driver character (called “The Driver”) who is pursued by a semi-crazy cop with no name (”The Detective” on the credits) played by Bruce Dern.
The movie starts out with a robbery sort of like the dog race robbery Hill wrote for the remake of THE GETAWAY, except that the movie rushes through the robbery part and focuses on the escape. Right away you know you are in for a treat with this movie, because it’s some of the most intense car chases I’ve ever seen. Lots of car’s–eye-view shots as the driver swerves through oncoming traffic, red lights, parking garages, narrow alleys… he’s got 2 or 3 cops right on his ass everywhere he goes but he keeps managing to run them off the road or fake them out and leave them in the dust.
When the POV is not on the hood of the car, most of the time it’s inside the car, with the Driver staring ahead emotionlessly and the two gunmen sitting in the backseat, watching the cops through the rear window. You really feel like you’re inside the car, not sure you’re gonna get away with this, but hoping you will. I love when he cuts through parking garages and you hear the sirens echoing all over the place.
It occurred to me while watching this that alot of the time in movies when there’s a car chase, you are with the cop car that is trying to catch the other car. This one puts you firmly in the getaway car and you’re definitely rooting for them to get away. And they do. (read the rest of this shit…)
January 1st, 2005 | 3 Comments »
