Little Miss Sunshine

Grade: B-

Too serious to be too funny.

So in the past eight months I’ve been to a movie theater twice. That’s a pretty steep dip in the theater attendance column for me, and I was afraid that I may have inflated my last new-ish movie review given the joy of being back in the theater. But then we get an unexpected trip to the theater and on several positive word of mouth reviews take in Little Miss Sunshine.

Inflation problem solved. This movie just doesn’t live up to its hype and except for one scene at the end, really isn’t all that funny. It’s slightly amusing and certainly has the potential and cast to deliver, but the movie takes itself far too seriously to ultimately be funny. In the end we’re not sure if we’re supposed to be laughing at the characters or their lives or the people around them–we find all equally repulsive and identifiable. So we have to settle for laughing at a broken down VW bus. Which is always good for a laugh or two, I guess.

In the end, shoulda gone to see Superman Returns.

The Benchwarmers

Grade: F

One of those movies that you wonder how it ever got made.

This movie is horrible. And not in a good way. The fact that this was the best available option on a flight from Dallas to Tokyo made it even worse. The old joke about the movie being so bad you walked out on it–even though it was being shown on a plane–went through my head many a time while watching.

So why did I watch it? Because it was so bad I kept staring at the screen, wondering how people got involved in the project. Wondering what morons wrote the script. Wondering what idiot executives approved the script. Wondering how the actors thought they were making anything resembling a decent movie. These are honest ruminations, not just idle speculation. They all must have known the movie was horrible. So I’m perplexed.

If you can avoid one movie this year, make that movie The Benchwarmers.

Mission: Impossible III

Grade: C-

Mindless summer entertainment meets cheap plot devices thanks to JJ Abrams.

This summer has been a pretty dry season for me, movie-wise. The reviews on the blog prove my point–most are older movies I’m reviewing thanks to Netflix or Blockbuster or HBO. This not-completely-old review comes thank to Japan Airlines who happend to show the flight while I’m doing an overseas work trip. So I’m glad I saw it, but even happier that it was free. For mindless distraction, it works for the most part. But where it fails, it really fails.

The Mission: Impossible series has always had its share of plot holes. This one is no exception. But while the big holes are always easy to criticize, I always find the greatest difficulty with the smallest ones.

Take, for example, the technological skills of the IMF team Tom Cruise leads. These are top notch super-secret spies that can use the latest technology courtest of Marshall…I mean, whatever the Marshall-guy’s name was in this show. They have magnetic bombs and eye-scanning cameras and computers with hydraulic keyboards. I’m not sure why they need any of this, but they’ve got it, baby! And they know how to use this tech, fitting it all into the seamless mechanics so that in the middle of a shootout they can call out to their partner, “Mag!” and that person will instantly know to give them a new magazine for their pistol–no matter what pistol they happen to be using at the time. They’re just that good.

Unfortunately, they don’t know how to use cell phones. This becomes clear during a pivotal scene where Tom Cruise must place a call in a few seconds or someone will die. But, wouldn’t you know it, while he’s being chased by security forces in Shanghai he just can’t get a signal. So he hands the phone off to the driver despite the fact that two other people in the car aren’t driving or shooting at the moment. This actually makes sense–everyone knows that drivers get better signals on their cell phones! And while Tom Cruise tries to convert the bad guys to Scientology, the driver proudly informs us all that he got a signal. So Tom yells at him to hit redial.

This, apparently, the driver did not know. Because that’s pretty advanced stuff, the redial button. Instead of saying something dramatic and tense like “Make the call!” or “Dial, dammit!” or “Can you hear me now?” he loudly informs the super-secret spy on a function my Luudite mother can perform. No wonder so many of these missions are impossible–the spies don’t know how to use cell phones!

Minor detail, I know, but these kinds of things are what keep the whole series from ever being a great movie. Instead they’re just all a series of stunts with some kind of plot strung between the action sequences. This one has less plot than others, which is good. But it also has less action than others, which is very bad. And the best action sequence of the movie is never shown. Seriously. Tom has to break into an ultra-secure building and steal a McGuffin and he only has 2 hours to figure out how to get in and do it. That’s good stuff for a MI movie, like the first movie’s CIA break-in becoming an instant classic. Here, they show Tom getting into the building, then nothing. We literally sit in the car with the other team members until the theft is over. Really?

[Edited Comment: So I just found out I may have seen a censored version of the movie that cut out the break-in because the Chinese government didn't like it and the airline flies into China. Interesting--has someone else seen the movie and recall if it shows Tom inside the building to steal the Rabbit's Foot?]

This, I think, falls squarely on the shoulder of the writers. The main one being the director, JJ Abrams, of Alias and Lost fame. I’ve been writing about why Lost sucks for quite a while now. One of the main reasons I think it sucks is because it uses artificial tension–showing the most tense moment in a story, then flashing back to the beginning and building up to that event. That’s cheap storytelling–you can literally do it with any story out there that has any kind of tension. The true challenge is to build a story from the ground up–make the audience actually feel interested so that when you reach the tense moments they’re feeling the same tension you are. JJ Abrams just can’t do it. Couldn’t do it with Alias. Couldn’t do it with Lost. Couldn’t do it with Mission: Impossible. And it’s really, really annoying.

This movie ends up just being a big-budget Alias. There’s the Marshall guy I mentioned above–the tech from Alias reproduced as a UK national with the exact same speech patterns as Marshall. There’s the chick spy, played by one of JJ’s favorite actresses (that chick from Felicity). Even Greg from Alias (and the pilot from Lost) makes an appearance. This is exactly what a big-screen Alias version would look like, but with a lead who doesn’t believe in psychiatry.

And ultimately he makes the movie worse for it. All three of the series have been forgettable. But at least the first two had some memorable action sequences. This has none. And it doesn’t even show all the action, which is unforgivable. Please, let the JJ Abrams love-fest come to an end before he strikes again!

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

Grade: B+

Logic is so homo sapien.

*** WARNING MINOR SPOILERS WITHIN BUT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS ALREADY THEN WHAT DO YOU CARE? ***

So Mrs Hose surprised me this weekend by getting a babysitter and taking me to the best movie theater in the country (aka the Alamo Drafthouse) to see X-Men 3. This was beyond cool, as it has been nearly 7 months since we’ve seen a movie (King Kong…also at the Drafthouse). Plus it was a surprise, plus she saw the movie with me. Too many cool items to mention. But enough of that, on to the movie.

This was perfect summer fare movie that I only ding because I’m left scratching my head afterwards. First, the good: lots and lots of explosions; lots and lots of mutants; lots and lots of Wolverine and almost no Cyclops. True to comic book form, dead people return, powers are taken away and ultimately return and giant symbols are destroyed.

I liked that there was some actual issue and character development from the prior movies. We don’t see the development take place–they leave that for the hidden moments between movies–like how Beast was apparently an X-Men team member in the few months between X-Men 2 and X-Men 3, then got appointed to a newly created Executive Department. Now that’s climbing the ladder! But we did have plastic armor and guns to take on Magneto–which all came just one scene too late to prevent Magento’s main squeeze from being freed. I guess they forgot all about that plastic prison they had for him earlier.

But on the Magneto front came the biggest head-scratcher of the movie. The climactic battle takes place on Alcatraz. Magneto, who has a whole mutant army to take out Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, walks onto the Golden Gate bridge and uses his powers to rip the bridge up into the sky and plop it down so now it connects Alcatraz to San Francisco. Then his mutants just run/leap/fly onto the island for the big fight.

Now, Magneto is a chess player. We know this from X-Men 2 and the scene at the end brings that home (he’s playing chess in a park). He even makes several mentions of how the mutant army are pawns to test the regular army and X-Men. Fine, understood. What doesn’t make sense is why you would connect Alcatraz to San Francisco with a bridge when all of your forces are this one army. Alcatraz is isolated, so the regular army can’t get reinforcements through simple means–but with a bridge you just gave them one (not that they had time to use it, but still). Why couldn’t he have loaded the army into some buses and flown the buses to Alcatraz instead? Just doesn’t make sense.

On the X-Men side, they fly to Alcatraz to supposedly save the kid being guarded there because Magneto wants to kill him. Okay, but then why not make that your goal instead of just defending the entire island with the regular army? Sure, it sets up a much bigger battle, but it’s wasted efforts.

Still, the last battle had some great moments. Pyro was used well, even though the fight with Iceman was fairly lame. Seeing a lot of different mutants all together was cool too, even though you had one of the lamest guys ever. The Human Porcupine who can only kill you if he can hug you really, really tight and then spring out his little needles. Yawn. What’s next, the Human Gerbil (one guess how he kills you)?

But it was fun, it was loud, and best of all it was a movie in an actual movie theater. Turns out they’re as cool as I remember.

Munich

Grade: B

A compelling story is unnecessarily slowed down with a shallow question.

Spielberg’s story of the assassination plot Israel enacted for revenge against the planners of the 1972 Munich Olympics incident is a great story filled with a number of intellectual musings designed to make the movie appear deep. But the conflict here isn’t deep at all, and the musings are shallow at best. Ultimately, it brings the movie down and that’s a shame.

First, the actual incident here is incredibly fascinating. But to really get a flavor of it you have to see One Day In September, the riveting documentary that covers the incident and the aftermath. Where it stops, Munich picks up in Israel’s plot to go after those responsible for the terrorist attack. That’s a good story, no matter how you cut it.

But you can certainly try and bring it down, and Speilberg does in two important ways. First, he spaces out the telling of Munich in various Spielberg-esque flashbacks/dream sequences. If you’ve seen any 2 of Spielberg’s movies in the past 10 years you know exactly what I’m talking about: scenes shot in a mix of slow-motion and real-time action without any dialogue but an incredibly loud John Williams score and perhaps the occasional sound effect for emphasis. Very dramatic. Or at least the first 10 times we see it. But the problem here is that he uses these sequences to tell the story of the 72 Olympics–the incident the rest of the movie is focusing on seeking revenge for. So if you don’t know the incident itself, you just know it’s really bad until the end of the movie when you see how the incident finished. Not necessary. And actually bad storytelling, since these flashbacks all come through the main hero’s memory, yet by the end of the movie he’s supposed to have changed into a paranoid skeptic–certainly his new perception would have clouded those memories.

The second thing that slowed the movie down is the shallow question Spielberg inserts into the movie–and hammers home with a narrative opening on the DVD. The issue he sees is that nations must think prior to taking action because there will be ramifications. The implication in the movie is that as these Munich plotters were killed they were replaced by more violent terrorists. But that is the wrong question. The correct question is how would killing the Munich plotters have made this different?

It’s the central point of Freakonomics: just because two things appear correlated doesn’t mean one caused the other. I have been buying Diet Coke for over 10 years. And over those 10 years, the price has slowly gone up. But it would be a mistake for me to say that my buying Diet Coke caused this price increase. Now, if that’s the case, I would like to apologize to everyone else out there who buys Diet Coke.

But that’s not the case. And although Diet Coke isn’t often compared with terrorists, the comparison fits here. Terrorists work by inspiring terror, not by winning actual battles or defeating armies. Terror must be unexpected, unanticipated. The first airport bombing was a big shock. The second one showed a pattern. The third one was more the fault of bad security. Terrorists must come up with more violent and increasingly shocking actions–but Munich doesn’t address that point. It may be that killing the Munich plotters brought these more violent people into power sooner, or maybe it didn’t. Thinking that acting or not-acting will really impact the internal politics of terrorist networks is ludicrous: terrorists operate on a different mindset than rational nations. Not to say this isn’t a consideration, but it also shouldn’t be the only discussion point.

Spielberg falls all over himself trying to make this point, but he ultimately lands face-first in the mud and grins because that’s where he thought he wanted to be. The point he tries to make isn’t as important as he thinks it is, but the story itself is an amazing one. So he ends up making a good movie, despite all attempts otherwise.

Rumor Has It…

Grade: B-

One thing saves this movie from being a disaster: Shirley MacLaine.

I’m not a Shirley MacLaine fan. Normally I could take her or leave her. And she’s certainly done her fair share of horrible movies (Guarding Tess, anyone?). But if she wasn’t in this movie it would have been absolutely horrible. Jennifer Aniston plays Rachel, I mean Sarah, who in a moment of profound crisis discovers her family was the real life inspiration behind The Graduate. Meaning her mom slept with a guy before she got married, and so did her grandma.

The concept is interesting for exactly one nano-second. Then you realize that they’re not just recycling an old movie story–they’re ADMITTING they don’t have an original story and dare you to have a problem with it. The spin being “Oh, this was real, so now we have to deal with it!” is boring. Aniston plays the same character she portrayed in Friends (she can act, everyone keeps saying…I have yet to see proof of this). Kevin Costner plays the guy two women up the family tree hung from the branches with, and Mark Ruffalo plays the perpetually hanging-on boyfriend/fiance to Aniston. You know this tired movie character–the guy who gets a real backbone when he needs to drive the plot but then abruptly caves in order to provide a happy ending.

The trailers and commercials all revealed that Aniston sleeps with Costner, so I’m not giving anything away. How it happens is ludicrous, the consequences are all cartoon-ish and fake, and the most important issue (like why would Aniston sleep with this guy when ten seconds before she kisses him she thought he might have been her father) are completely ignored.

But MacLaine makes it worthwhile. The character is great, her performance is fantastic, and the only way I’d recommend watching this movie is to watch the into, then fast forward through every scene that doesn’t involve MacLaine.

Last Holiday

Grade: F

I want my time back!

The making of featurette for this movie tells about how it took 23 years for the film to be made. Yes, 23 years. After watching it, I was very curious. Not why it took 23 years, but why somebody actually caved after 23 years and greenlit the project. Clearly this movie was in development hell, where it should have lingered, burning and festering with oozing, infected sores covering its entire hole-ridden plot and pitiful excuses for character development.

Sadly, I will never get any answers. The closest I can come is this: in the brilliant comedy Three Amigos, the three stars insist on doing a movie in Hawaii because they’re tired of working in the desert. So they get fired. This is funny because that’s not how it works–if the star is big enough, they get to make a movie wherever they want. Which must be how this was made–Queen Latifah must have said she wanted to spend a few weeks in the Czech Republic, so Last Holiday was greenlit.

Yes, it’s a bad theory. But it’s actually more consistent than the movie’s story. Otherwise, are we really supposed to believe a woman convinced she’s dying decides to spend her last few weeks in Prague? Seriously, Prague. Oh, did I mention that she is a gourmet chef? Yes, she is. So she doesn’t go to Paris. Nope–Prague. Because, you know, all good food comes from Prague. So she leaves the ghetto and checks into the Presidential Suite at a five-star luxury resort.

But, Hose, you say, how can she afford to go to Prague and check into a $5,000 a night suite if she lives in the ghetto? That’s easy–she cashed in her savings and the bonds her mom left her. Duh! So the $100,000 or so she spends was clearly just being saved for a rainy day. Or, you know, when you get a horrible brain disease that you don’t get a second opinion to see if it’s true or not that you’ll die in 3 weeks. Because, you know, second opinions are expensive! Why, so is the surgery to save your life! Better to just take that small fortune and blow it all on the bestest vacation ever for a ghetto-living gourmet chef: Prague. In winter.

Seriously, I hope everyone who made this movie looks back in a few years and is shamed.

Kingdom of Heaven

Grade: C-

Finally, a film that shows why Gladiator was so good.

I’ll admit it–I loved Gladiator. Apparently this is an uncool movie to love, as it is regarded by many a movie fan to be one of the worst films to win the Best Movie Oscar. I didn’t understand the complaints–yes, I it was a bit long but I thought every part was important and you had a great character in Maximus with a fantastic performance by Russell Crowe. I thought it all worked, that you cared about the characters and the conflict. It felt real while still being dramatic, not too cartoony. Plus the visuals were amazing–it felt real, genuine.

Kingdom of Heaven tries to be Gladiator and it fails. Orlando Bloom may be one of the hot young actors, but he lacks the depth to pull off a tortured soul. He looks pouty and whiny when he’s supposed to be struggling with his faith and the will to live. While I’m sure this makes ‘tween and teen girls swoon, it made me wince.

The story too is sadly lacking. We’re barely given a reason to care about the main character before he’s thrust into his Grand Adventure. We’re barely given a reason to understand why he takes up the struggles he does or why he becomes the character he becomes at the end. And we’re given almost no reason at all for his final decision that the movie turns around. Sure, there’s an attempt to explain this all, but it all feels forced in, like when you pound that one jigsaw puzzle piece onto another because you’re sure that’s where it goes.

The visuals are a mixed bag. For most of the movie they’re horrible, and for a movie that tries to be epic it feels more like a low-budget film. The end is all that saves this movie from an even lower grade–the long battle sequence at the end is very impressive. Ridley Scott handles these sequences with expertise, but the editing was a little choppy at times.

The link here is for the extended Director’s Cut, which I admit I didn’t see. But perhaps this one is better than what made it to theaters and HBO. However, given the normal versions 2.5 hour running time, I doubt I’ll be watching any extended versions anytime soon.

But after seeing this movie, there can be little doubt why Gladiator won the Oscar and will forever be remembered as a much better film. Where Gladiator succeeded, Kingdom of Heaven failed. Where Kingdom of Heaven somewhat succeeded, Gladiator excelled. And if Maximus ever mat Balian on the field of battle, Maximus would totally kick Balian’s butt.

A History of Violence

Grade: B

A compelling look at violence on par with Unforgiven, but not as profound.

Unforgiven broke ground when it took a hard look at the violence inherent in the western genre. Clint Eastwood’s character was both inside the trappings of a cowboy and outside the role as a family man forced back into the world. What made the movie so brilliant was how it perfectly captured both sides of the equation–the horror of the violence and the brutal necessity of it within that world.

A History of Violence follows this path but doesn’t live up Unforgiven’s legacy. Partly because it’s already been done, but mostly because both sides of the equation aren’t dealt with here. We have the horror of violence as seen from a complete outsiders perspective. That’s the point of the movie, but it doesn’t work as well since it doesn’t handle the flip side.

Still, we do get a fascinating look at the violence inside us all. As Viggo Mortensen deals with his own nature, his own history, we catch brief glimpses of his family also dealing with the violence that has been a part of their lives all along. The fact that it went unacknowledged or unperformed simply makes it that much more brutal and shocking when it does, and the question of how it can be integrated into their final lives is never addressed. That may be the kind of vaguery that critics love, but as a story it fails to meet the expectation set by Unforgiven.

Two for the Money

Grade: B

Interesting look at sports gambling, but some casting choices make this unbelievable.

Al Pacino is great, as usual, and even McConaughey does well. But Rene Russo as a former junkie who’s so hot that McConaughey hits on her despite her having a 6-year old and his attempting to bang every professional model that crosses the screen? Nope.

Sadly, this isn’t a sub-plot–this is a crucial element of the main personal storyline that drives the movie. Sure, there’s the whole sports betting thing and the rise and fall of a guy who picks winners, but you see that coming a mile away. What sets this movie apart is the personal aspect, and this casting choice really, really gets in the way.

I was expecting Boiler Room meets Rounders. Instead I got The Replacements meets Golden Girls. Entertaining, but not quite fully satisfying.