chapter 9

Let me tell you man, I’m not trying to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this movie. There’s no celebration here at all. It’s just analysis, I swear.

I saw FINAL FANTASY in the theater when it came out, found it incredibly boring, and really didn’t want to ever watch it again. Here is my review from back then. But I thought it was important to revisit for this study because, despite being a huge financial and artistic failure this movie did break alot of new ground that has turned out to be relevant to the movies of the decade since.

If you don’t remember what this thing is, it was the first computer animated movie to attempt realistic humans. Back then I fixated on the creepiness of too-real-but-not-real-enough characters. Having seen more of that since then it didn’t bother me as much this time, but I couldn’t help still being distracted by the celebrity voices. The male lead looks like an idealized Ben Affleck, but his voice is clearly Alec Baldwin (what is this, a composite Jack Ryan?) and Steve Buscemi’s voice comes out of a good looking young man that I still think looks kind of like Jason Priestley. James Woods is the villain, who looks like a STARSHIP TROOPERS All Stars mix of Michael Ironside and Casper Van Dien. In one scene we learn that his family were killed and that’s why he does what he does, but that doesn’t explain why he had evil eyebrows the whole time. How are you supposed to feel bad for him when he’s always making a bad guy face?

When Robert Zemeckis did his trilogy of creepily-realistic computer animated human movies he increasingly found ways to make it work better. He still used celebrity voices, but visually modeled the characters after the actors. For example multiple characters in POLAR EXPRESS resemble Tom Hanks, so it’s not weird to recognize his voice coming out of them. Zemeckis also made the characters a little more stylized, especially by the time of movie #3, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, where they have exaggerated, cartoonish shapes but just happen to be ridiculously detailed in their textures and eyes.

Zemeckis’s movies are usually referred to as “mocap” for their use of “motion capture” technology, the thing where the actors’ movements are recorded and used to control the computery characters instead of frame-by-frame animation. People think they hate mocap, but I think FINAL FANTASY shows why it’s good if you’re using realistic characters like this. I believe this was mostly done with animation (although a small motion capture department is listed on the credits) and at times it’s noticeable that these people move more like animated characters than actual humans. So it makes them look even more like Real Dolls.

Zemeckis had the advantage of 3D, too. That was a good idea ’cause then it seems more like a ride or a diorama. So you feel like your riding Pirates of the Caribbean or something. FINAL FANTASY doesn’t feel like a ride or a movie.

Technologically speaking, FINAL FANTASY is still impressive. It looks real nice on the blu ray. But the story just isn’t involving at all. It’s all about these soldiers going around shooting ghostly alien monsters on a post-apocalyptic earth. Meanwhile the hero, Aki, is trying to prove that they need to go around and find 8 “spirits” that have something to do with “Gaea,” the soul of Mother Earth, and then they can heal the earth or whatever. It’s a very dull and repetitive set of goals, taking place in dull locations, with stakes that are difficult to care about. These creepy things don’t quite seem human enough to worry about their safety, the battles are mostly the same thing over and over, and since we never see any people besides these soldiers and a couple council members it’s not clear what they’re even trying to accomplish. If the ghosts go away then there will be, like, 10 soldiers on a wrecked planet and they won’t have anything to shoot at anymore. That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.

I complained about this in my original review, but it bears repeating: this movie is all about fighting transparent monsters that they call “phantoms” and “spirits,” then 52 minutes in everybody’s minds are blown when they figure out that these aren’t alien monsters, they’re actually ghosts. They’re surprised by the revelation that these things are ghosts and we’re surprised by the revelation that they didn’t realize before that these things were ghosts. For the most part though the storytelling isn’t that dumb. It’s just that it’s really lacking in excitement.

Maybe all it would need would be a great lead character. I can see some gung-ho appeal in the Alec Baldwin soldier guy, but the lead is Aki (voiced by Ming-Na, also Disney’s Mulan). From what I’ve read they went all out to try to make her look real, and planned to re-use her in other movies as different characters, as if she was an actress. They carefully tweaked her to not be overly sexualized, not giving her big boobs or exposed skin like Lara Croft, removing makeup from an earlier version so you’d believe her as a scientist. (But also they had her wearing a bikini in Maxim.)

So she’s pretty but not ridiculous, capable but not awesome, heroic but not cool. She doesn’t have humor or weaknesses or quirks. If she has a personality I sure couldn’t describe it. I bet there weren’t many people who wanted to see her in another adventure or find out where she came from or dress up like her at a nerd convention.

Sometimes with these movies you gotta question why it should even be made with the realistic animation as opposed to live action. I don’t think I’d want to see a live action POLAR EXPRESS, BEOWFULF I can see working in live action but maybe not as well, A CHRISTMAS CAROL definitely used the technology in ways that made it distinct from the many great live action versions of the same story. This one I don’t feel like it takes advantage of being animated at all. They’re trying so hard to make it look real so there’s not much exaggeration or stylization. The characters don’t move in cool ways that humans couldn’t. There’s not much action. There’s pretty much nothing that couldn’t be done in live action with the humans and all the other stuff would be CGI effects in a live action movie anyway.

Yet I can’t imagine preferring a live action version of this either, I wouldn’t want to watch that. So I’m left with the conclusion that this is a movie that only exists for the novelty of being the first movie using this technology.

So that’s why nobody gave a shit. You gotta come up with a reason to make a movie before somebody has a reason to watch it.

* * *
datedness: this type of animation has been improved in the 10 years since and used for much better stories
would they make a movie like this now? No.
legacy: a film production wing of a video game company was created just to make this movie. Afterwards they did one short for The Animatrix and then closed up shop. But the movie itself does have a legacy because it made mistakes that other filmatists such as Zemeckis were able to learn from and build off of.

chapter 4

released May 25th, 2001

WARNING: contains spoilers for PEARL HARBOR and World War II

After three financially successful action movies in a row (BAD BOYS, THE ROCK, ARMAGEDDON), Michael Bay got a once-in-his-career itch to make An Important Movie. He probly had SAVING PRIVATE RYAN on the brain, and definitely TITANIC.

Ever since James Cameron’s movie broke all box office records studios had been threatening to make asses of themselves by blatantly trying to catch more lightning in that same melodramatic-love-story-during-historic-disaster bottle. Jan de Bont almost did a love-story-on-the-Hindenburg movie, for example. PEARL HARBOR wasn’t as obvious of a copycat as that because 1) it was a love story set against a war movie as much as a disaster and 2) the love song on the end credits was by Faith Hill instead of Celine Dion. Totally different.

Ben Affleck plays Rafe, a functionally illiterate pilot; Josh Hartnett plays Danny, his best friend since childhood and fellow pilot; Kate Beckinsale plays Evelyn, the nurse that Rafe falls in love with and then immediately abandons to fight with the RAF Eagle Squadron. Of course he crashes his plane, so he’s reported dead, Danny has to tell Evelyn the bad news, they spend some time together, a few months later they’re making beautifully-lit, camera-rotating love in the parachute hangar.

I mean obviously they have really conflicted feelings about this, they both feel guilty but also they really love each other and maybe it’s Danny’s duty to give his best friend’s girl the happiest life she can have after this tragedy. But they both resist and take time but it just kind of happens, and who is to say this is not what was meant to happen? Maybe a tragedy has opened the window for a small miracle. In fact, Evelyn has been vomiting in the morning.

So wouldn’t you know it turns out Rafe is still alive, and when he gets back he doesn’t take kindly to the new arrangement. This could get complicated. The truth is that nobody really is wrong or right here, they all just reacted honestly to their understanding of events and unfortunately what should be good news has opened up rifts in a life-long friendship and two love affairs, and covered them in layers of guilt, envy and resentment. Oh yeah, also there’s a subplot about how military intelligence (Dan Aykroyd) is noticing alot of odd data but not in time to figure out that the Japanese (Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) are planning and executing the attack on Pearl Harbor that took 2,350 lives and pulled the U.S. into WWII.

It follows the typical war movie formula. You got the young naive individuals and the reasons why they get into it, how they have fun together getting into mischief, going to the social events, falling for the girls. But meanwhile shit is getting real. Even if they knew it somewhere in their heads they didn’t fully comprehend that the war would happen and that they’d be there. And like any movie we follow this group of friends as they go through it all together. What’s not 100% believable in my opinion is that this group of friends all stays intact. This clique of soldiers are all together with a matching clique of nurses and when the day that still lives in infamy happens they get in a car together and drive to an airfield where they can find shotguns and planes to fight off the third wave.

Ewan Bremner plays a stuttering soldier from their group of friends. Instead of redoing his performance from JULIEN DONKEY-BOY he does it more like “Simple Jack” from TROPIC THUNDER. In the point-of-view of this movie one of the great tragedies of WWII is that a retarded guy landed a super-hot wife but then she got killed.

For racial diversity or something Cuba Gooding Jr. has a brief guest appearance as Dorie Miller, in real life the cook who performed bravely during the attack and therefore became the first black man awarded the Navy Cross. He’s introduced a good way into the movie in a boxing match against the guy who would play Leatherface in the shitty remake of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE if such a movie were to exist, which fortunately it does not, never did and never will. This scene has a weird feel because we see pretty much all the whites rooting for the white guy and all the blacks rooting for the black guy but going by the dialogue there’s no racial component to this at all, it’s because the sailors and cooks have animosity toward each other.

After the fight Dorie goes to be nursed by Evelyn, and luckily they have time to go for a quiet walk together so Dorie can tell her his life story and how sad he is that he signed up for his country and hasn’t even been allowed to fire a gun.

Finally we see him during the attack and he’s able to man a gun, shoot down a plane and yell a whole bunch. (in real life there’s no evidence he shot down a plane. Not sure if the yelling can be verified either.)

Obviously I skipped this at the time, but reading up on it it’s clear that it didn’t go over well. Alot of people seemed to agree there was something shitty about making a movie like this out of this particular historical event. It does so much to simplify, glamourize and sensationalize an event that is pretty sacred to Americans (and I’m sure Japanese) because of the huge ramifications it had for human lives, for our countries, for history. I know I found it ridiculously tacky when I saw Michael Bay go on the MTV Movie Awards and accept his popcorn shaped “Best Action Sequence” prize. That put “Japanese attack scene” in the books next to “Motorcycle chase” from M:I 2, “Truck drives through farm equipment” from TWISTER and “Mel Gibson’s motorcycle crash” from LETHAL WEAPON 3.

But I gotta admit, if it’s at all possible to set aside that huge matter of taste, PEARL HARBOR is technically better than most of the other Michael Bay movies, for two main reasons:

1. Not as much bad comedy, although there’s one wacky dog reaction shot in Alec Baldwin’s office at the beginning

2. The action scenes are pretty well staged for the most part

The whole thing is beautifully shot. I bet the clouds didn’t look quite that gorgeous during the real attack, but the vivid look of the movie makes it kind of feel like you’re really there. There are some excellent special effects, because most of them don’t look like special effects. I even think the show-offy stuff like following a bomb as it drops on a ship work pretty well. I think some people took exception to it, like it was making a rollercoaster ride out of the deaths of real people. True, but in a smarter movie it could probly work as an audacious way to shove your face into the horror of what’s going on.

This is the Bay movie that seems the most like an AT&T commercial. He delights in creating idyllic scenes to be interupted by the surreal sight of Japanese bombers. A little league kid’s baseball game, a woman hanging up her laundry, an astronaut eating a slice of applie pie off of a Bible.

In fairness to Bay, it should be noted that the battle is scored with TITANIC-y sad music, acknowledging that this is a horrible tragedy unfolding and not an awesome, award worthy action sequence like “Bus escape/Airplane explosion” from SPEED or “L.A. freeway scene” from T2. At one point I was thinking it was trying to be “TITANIC with flags,” and then sure enough there was a shot from underwater with a crowd of shipwreck victims struggling to stay afloat and an American flag floating in the middle of them. It really does look like a shot lifted from TITANIC with digitally added flag. My heart will go on, like a proud eagle.

The attack scenes are upsetting, even in the non-gory PG-13 version I watched. Seeing all the nurses running like hell and getting shot at is brutal. But it would be nice if everything that came before wasn’t so laughable. It has lines like “I’m not anxious to die, sir. Just anxious to matter!” And “We thought you were dead, Rafe, and it gutted us both.” I mean I kinda like Josh Hartnett, but there’s a limit to what he can pull off verbally, and it stops before “it gutted us both.”

If there was some depth to this thing it would be praise-worthy that it follows the nurses a little bit. That’s not a story we’ve seen in much detail, or at least I haven’t. They spend the whole movie being pretty and then during the attack they use their lipstick to mark patients and their nylons to tie tourniquettes. Nice symbolism, but it would be better if they got characterization instead, or also.

The silliest thing about the movie in my opinion is the convenient way the love triangle works out. She falls in love with Rafe, then with Danny when she thinks Rafe is dead, then Danny really does die, so she gets to go back to Rafe, but with Danny’s child. The best of both worlds, no tough decisions required. (But maybe if there’s a part 2 it’ll turn out Danny’s alive and he’ll come back and the tables will re-turn.)

I have to say I was thankful to watch it on DVD and be able to take some breaks. At one point I was checking the timer on the player to see how much was left, I thought “Oh, this isn’t really that long, I’m not sure what everybody was complaining about.” Then at some point I realized there wasn’t enough time left for the end credits to fit. Sure enough I had fallen for the old “insert disc 2″ deal. Then there was another hour left.

For the purposes of this study (and my own sanity) I watched the theatrical version. But then my buddy convinced me I had to listen to Bay’s commentary track on the director’s cut. Bay starts out very serious because he was recording it “250 hours after” 9-11, but he almost immediately jumps into complaining about the “tight budget” he had to work on. It was greenlit at $135, the highest ever intentionally approved by a studio at that time, but Bay thinks that wasn’t enough money for the subject matter. To be fair it is true that nobody had ever made a movie about World War II, the Ten Commandments or even Cleopatra.

In conversation with his proud Wesleyan professor Jeanine Basinger, Bay also brags about singling out a kid in front of 500 other extras and chewing him out for screwing up a shot. He doesn’t tell the story like it’s funny or awkward, but like it’s something that we’ll be really impressed by. Good job millionaire director of Victoria’s Secret commercials. You really showed that kid who couldn’t keep a straight face in the background of your universally despised movie. I hope you made him cry.

* * *

Of all the movies that came out in the summer of 2001 this is the one where coming out shortly before 9-11 is most significant. Shortly after the World Trade Center was attacked a Pearl Harbor (the historical event, not the movie) comparison started to get thrown around very liberally in the media. Pearl Harbor was considered the last attack on American soil (previous terrorist attacks didn’t count) and both the conventional wisdom and the propaganda had it that 9-11 was the wake up call to pull America into a world war.

The movie shows Americans attacked, killed, wounded, running for cover. It shows the attempts to interpret data about an attack but failing to predict or prepare properly. It shows care free young people suddenly transformed and wanting to be sent off to war to get revenge or make things right. When PEARL HARBOR (the movie this time) came out it was trying to introduce these concepts to young people, but they’d all become familiar again a few months later.

I can’t help but wonder if this exact movie had come out one summer later if it would’ve been a massive hit. Of course then it would seem like shameless knee-jerk propaganda, but the country’s mood at the time might’ve led us to pay less attention to the characters, acting, etc. and more to the flags and the heroism. Around that time the miniature flags attached to every pickup truck in the country were beginning to rot, but they were still waving. People might’ve been inspired by the closing narration: “America suffered, but America grew stronger. It was not inevitable. The times tried our souls… and through the trial, we overcame.”

But maybe not. 2002 was a summer of fantasy and escape. Affleck actually starred in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, a Tom Clancy terrorism thriller, and that did pretty good but was overshadowed by SPIDER-MAN and ATTACK OF THE CLONES. And coincidentally (since it was filmed before 9-11) they had changed it from the Tom Clancy book so the terrorists weren’t Arabs anymore.

People enjoy Indiana Jones melting greedy Nazis, or Brad Pitt blowing up Hitler. Enough time has passed that you might even be able to do some kind of fictionalized thriller tying into the real historical events of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer making old timey TOP GUN and then presenting it as a representation of the real event… that’s not gonna go over well. So no, maybe there wasn’t a good time for PEARL HARBOR to come out. No matter when they did it it still would’ve been fucking PEARL HARBOR.

* * *

legacy: Like almost all of Michael Bay’s movies it made some money, but if Bay was looking for respect he’s gonna have to keep snooping around for it. It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and its biggest mark on pop culture was in the song in TEAM AMERICA that compares the strength of a character’s love to the suckiness of PEARL HARBOR. Bay hasn’t tried for respectability since.

This was somewhere in the middle of Affleck’s process of burning through the public’s good will toward him as an actor (it was a couple years after PHANTOMS and a couple before GIGLI) but he has since become a respectable director.

datedness: Being a period piece and being well executed visually it doesn’t seem dated to 2001 at all.

2001-2011 connections: Ten summers ago Bay tried to graduate to more mature material. This summer he’s doing his third toy adaptation in a row (and in 3D this time). That’s probly a better idea for him.

THICK AS THIEVES is a little-known crime movie from 1998 that I learned about because of BLACK DYNAMITE. That’s the Michael Jai White blaxploitation homage that comes out in September (I’m hoping to see it a little early because it’s playing the film festival here). In my excitement for that one I looked up the director, Scott Sanders. Turns out he wrote for A DIFFERENT WORLD and ROC, and then he directed THICK AS THIEVES.

Alec Baldwin plays Mackin, a thief hired to steal food stamps from a printing plant. After the job some dirty cops pull him over and try to take his money. He handles it, but knows he had to have been set up by the guy who hired him, Pointy Williams (Michael Jai White) so he tries to get back at that asshole. Meanwhile “the Italians” aren’t gonna be happy about what Pointy did so his people keep trying to snuff out Mackin before things escalate and they get into deep shit.
It’s adapted from some book by a guy named Patrick Quinn, but definitely is gonna remind you of Elmore Leonard and that type of crime story where the characters have little funny quirks. Also like Leonard the plot is full of coincidence and mistakes, the characters are kind of dumb and talk about goofy things, but can also be seriously dangerous.

Mackin’s biggest passion is for his aging dog, Wally. He brushes the dog’s teeth, he brings it with him out of town (although it has to stay with a bartender when he’s doing the job), he refers to himself as “we” because he’s always including the dog. Part of the story is about him trying to prepare for Wally’s death. It kind of reminds me of something Charles Willeford’s character Hoke Moseley would do in one of his books. I bet they cast Baldwin because of MIAMI BLUES, where he played the guy who accidentally killed a hare krishna, then stole Hoke Moseley’s false teeth and badge.

Mackin is also a huge nerd for record collecting, which is a good excuse to put some old records on the soundtrack. Some of the jazz is good, balancing out a fairly cheesy score. I like the scene where he’s in a record store examining a record with flashlight, magnifying glass and white gloves – he actually puts more care into his record buying than his robberies. Which shows he has his priorities straight, come to think of it.

Andre Braugher from HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET plays Pointy’s #2, Dink. He’s probaly the most competent criminal in the movie, but he’s working with people with names like Sugar Bear and Hot Sauce so he gets frustrated with everybody. And good for White, who gets a much bigger and better character than he usually gets. Pointy tries to seem sophisticated and is very proud that he owns a French restaurant. But in one of my favorite moments he insults the chef by asking him to make a dish that’s actually Cuban, then scares him by “accidentally” “joking” that he’d murder him if he tried to switch restaurants.

There’s also a part where his mom implies he’s uppity because he asks for dijon mustard. I guess all those right-wingers pretending to be upset about Obama ordering dijon must be huge THICK AS THIEVES fans. Did you guys hear about that one? I know alot of you are from Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and European country (top 5 countries after U.S. according to my statistics page – hello also to everybody else including Chile and Angola) so I should explain this one. A couple weeks ago President Obama and Vice President Biden went to some burger restaurant as a photo op when they were visiting Arlington, Virginia. The right wing radio, TV and web were quick to point out that they were NOT just a couple regular guys eating burgers because Obama had slipped up and ordered “like a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that.”

Sean Hannity did a whole story on it that ended with him saying, “I hope you enjoyed that fancy burger, Mr. President,” which I hope will become an iconic Edward R. Murrow or NETWORK type statement of outrage. But if you google “Obama dijon” you’ll find way worse than that, including a whole bunch of nitwits claiming that MSNBC “went to great lengths to cover up” this shocking scandal by not including a full condiment audit in their fluff report of the president ordering a fucking burger.

It’s funny because I know some of these people genuinely have philosophical disagreements with Obama, but this is still what they come up with to spend time talking about. Bush had the worst attack in our country’s history on his watch, badly fought two wars (one started based on obvious lies), dumped our economy into the shitter, made torture legal, wiretapped innocent civilians, used a terrorist attack to force a drastic rewrite of our basic civil rights, shockingly botched the response to a national disaster, etc. etc. etc. And these people weren’t upset about any of that shit, in fact they spent the whole time trying to justify it.

But Obama orders “spicy mustard” and they go on TV, on the radio, on websights, with straight faces, pretending to be intelligent adults, and openly claiming to be upset about it. Pretending to make serious arguments for why it is an actual issue. Adults. Who speak in sentences, and know how to put on their own clothes. They don’t even wear bibs, and they think they can get away with pretending they actually believe dijon mustard proves Obama is an elitist. They say that out loud and then they look at themselves in the mirror and presumably do not hate themselves. Actual human beings, hundreds of them. Can you believe this shit? I can’t. But I didn’t make it up.

Their argument is based on a 25 year old ad campaign for Grey Poupon brand dijon mustard, which showed British guys in limos loaning each other Grey Poupon. So Sean Hannity and other adults pretend to believe that that was a documentary expose about the truth behind who uses spicy mustard.

Hey, you stupid motherfuckers, have you ever noticed that they don’t advertise caviar on TV? You know why? Because TV is for advertising cheap, mass produced products like fucking mustard. Even at the time those commercials existed, when you were still young up-and-coming date rapists aspiring to ruin television, people watched and understood that it was not real, it was a joke about how this cheap ass product at Albertson’s supposedly tastes real fancy like something a cartoon rich person might eat.

You are insulting yourself, your country, and especially the people who listen to you by saying this kind of baby shit out loud. And by the way what is this bullshit where you pretend to speak for the working man? You’re fucking telling me you never had dijon on your burgers back before you ran a media empire? I don’t believe you. You’re a terrible liar. Sorry to break it to you Sean Hannity, but your staff is lying to you if they’re telling you that’s secret rich people mustard.  Normal working class people have been able to afford that shit for decades. It is available in little packets. Hey, what’s this I just found on walmart.com?

I don’t have a TV show, I don’t even own a house or a car, but I prefer spicy mustard on my hot dogs. It costs about the same and can be found in any grocery store or 7-11.  It has a cartoon beaver on the bottle. To be fair I guess he is a pretty classy cartoon beaver though. Probaly well bred.

By the way, am I gonna get in trouble for liking sauerkraut on hot dogs too? Or are you guys just policing burgers? I’m a little concerned because the cartoon pickle on the label wears a crown, that’s pretty elitist.

There’s something else I really wonder about. There are millions of people who watch Fox news and listen to these radio shows and what not. People who really believe this stuff. You cannot tell me that there aren’t at least 500,000 people in this country who both follow Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or some of those guys, and enjoy dijon mustard. How do they feel listening to this? Do they feel ashamed? Do they feel they have to hide their taste in condiments? If past patterns of Republican bigotry have taught us anything it’s that the loudest critics of spicy mustard are the ones secretly enjoying it in airport bathrooms and at rest stops. I bet it is widely known in DC that many Republican senators take their mustard both ways. But nobody’s talking.

Sorry for the tangent, sometimes I gotta vent about these things. But man, can you believe Obama? The Republicans blew it so bad they went from controlling the government, the supreme court and the media to being the guy who shit his pants at the party and nobody will admit they invited him. And still, all Obama has to do to alienate them even further from the mainstream is order a cheeseburger. That’s power.

So, uh, THICK AS THIEVES. The style is not too slick, but not real gritty either. It’s decent but not stand-out filmatism, somewhat typical of a low budget independent like this. And it does feel a little formulaic in its quirk, a little self-conscious in the way all these criminals have a funny little thing they do, like the mafia guy is trying to set up his VCR during an important conversation, or Pointy is eating waffles or whatever. And the way everybody always refers to Mackin as “the thief” when Mackin is a perfectly good name. The tone is nicely balanced though – funny, but not at the expense of the story, not turning it into a comedy. There are some funny lines, and all the actors are good. You can see why this director would want to cast White as a larger-than-life character like Black Dynamite. His voice is so cartoonishly deep, it gives his lines a weird combination of gravitas and comedy.

Also I really like the way the story is resolved. It’s much more novelistic than movie-istic. It’s not some shocking twist or anything, it’s just not how these sorts of movies are supposed to end to be exciting, which makes it perfect. So it’s enjoyable.

Unless you’re a Michael Jai White completist I guess there’s no reason to send out a search party for this one. It’s more like one of those things you would catch on cable sometime for a nice surprise. I hope I didn’t give it away.

[ratings]

From the cover you’d assume this is just some boring cop movie, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s something completely unique. Or don’t take my word for it. Let me explain to you a little bit about the plot, and see if that waxes your mustache.

See, Alec Baldwin (back when he was young and skinny, and made the gals swoon) gets off a plane in Miami, steals somebody’s luggage, and heads for the exit. At the bottom of an escalator he is approached by a hare krishna, who asks him what his name is. He says, “Trouble,” breaks the guy’s finger, and leaves.

So far he’s a petty crook, and kind of an asshole. Or maybe hare krishnas killed his father, I don’t know. The point is, breaking a guy’s finger for trying to push his religious beliefs on you is not usually a big enough crime to be the center of a movie plot. But we find out later that being a sensitive peace loving religious dude, the hare krishna went into shock after the attack and died. Of a broken finger. And maybe a broken heart. So that’s where Fred Ward, the homicide detective, comes in. He’s gotta find the perp, and even he doesn’t take it that seriously (him and the other cops laugh about the murder) but it’s a job, you know.

He doesn’t have much trouble tracking down Baldwin, but soon after he does he gets beaten up and wakes up without his teeth, gun or badge. And Alec Baldwin starts going around using the badge, pretending he’s cop. Committing crimes mostly against other criminals. But he’s not exactly Robin Hood. First of all, as he explains, he doesn’t give the money to the poor. He keeps it. And second of all, he does things like stop a guy from stealing a woman’s purse, then run off with the purse himself. Or stop an armed robbery, then take the money himself. In one of the best scenes he happens to be in a convenience store as it’s robbed, and he scares off the nervous gunman by threatening to throw a jar of spaghetti sauce at him. It makes no logical sense at all, and that’s why it’s convincing. I could see it really happening. You know that kid went through that robbery a thousand times in his head, thinking of all the possible outcomes, but one he never considered was some weirdo throwing Prego at him. So it threw him off.

So you know, this Alec Baldwin isn’t all bad, he’s a semi-likeable dude. But he’s using Fred Ward’s identity, and he has his teeth, so that makes it personal.

The goofy tone of the movie reminds me alot of Elmore Leonard, but the book it’s based on is actually by somebody named Charles Willeford. (Apparently there are 3 other novels about Fred Ward’s character, Hoke Moseley.) It is not a traditional thriller at all – it’s more about the personalities of the characters than some sort of serious plot, and everything comes out of the stupid or weird choices they make. The overall feel is lighthearted but it is punctuated by some brutal violence – in a fun way. Alec Baldwin receives some pretty horrible/hilarious injuries and deals with them more the way you or I would than the indestructible super heroes we get used to seeing in movies.

The lead actors are all great. Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t even realize that was Jennifer Jason Leigh as the naive Florida girl studying at Miami-Dade College. And it’s good to see Alec Baldwin getting a chance to play stupid and funny, something he usually only does when he hosts the Saturday Night Live show. My only real complaint is that it’s not believable how many crimes this guy happens to be in the vicinity of. It’s not like he’s out looking for crimes, but somehow he just happens upon purse snatchings and armed robberies everywhere he goes. If only Batman was that lucky.

The director is George Armitage, who is best known for Grosse Pointe Blank. He also did the second, supposedly not as bad (but still bad) version of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce. He seems like a pretty interesting director, but most of his other stuff isn’t on video. The one I’d really like to see Vigilante Force with Kris Kristofferson.

So anyway point is Miami Blues is a good one, a different one, a one you should see.

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