The Lookout

Posted on March 28, 2007 at 2:13 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, some violence and sexual content.
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense and violent situations, some graphic, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2007
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000QFCD8Q

In this tense and twisty thriller, our narrator and central figure is Chris (the stunning Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a one-time high school hockey star and dreamboat who was brain-damaged in a car crash on prom night. Now, he works as the night janitor in a bank and goes to life skills classes to practice “sequencing” and tone down the “disinhibition” that allows him to make inappropriate comments to his pretty caseworker. At night, while he is at work, a friendly cop comes by to bring him donuts and sometimes he plays janitor hockey with his mop and thinks about how much he wants to be “who I was.” The hardest part of sequencing is finding a way to move his own story forward.

“I wake up,” he says. “I shower. With soap.” But is that before shaving or after? And “I cry sometimes” — is that supposed to be there? Chris has a little notebook for writing everything down to make sure he gets the sequences right.

But the sequences don’t seem to be right. He has the patient guidance of Lewis (Jeff Daniels), the blind roommate he met at the life skills center. And he has the confused affection of his wealthy family. They have kept his old room the way he left it, filled with trophies and the wheelchair from rehab folded up in the corner. His father still expects him to play chess. They seem to have more trouble than he does sequencing him into his future.

And then Chris meets Gary (Matthew Goode), who remembers him the way he was and doesn’t seem to think he’s changed much. Gary introduces him to Luvlee (Isla Fisher of The Wedding Crashers) and she seems to think he’s pretty great the way he is. They show him a heady glimpse of himself as powerful, wanted, friended by people who see no reason to feel sorry for him.

And capable of…something adventurous and dashing? Gary wants to rob a bank. The one where Chris and Barney Fife have donuts every night. Has Chris missed a step in his sequence and gotten himself into a situation he can’t sequence himself out of?

The genre of the “impaired narrator” provides instant interest for audiences, who must try to guess what is going on based on limited information from the character who is telling it. Of course, writers always dole out information in a highly controlled way. But this personification of narrative control creates a puzzle that immediately makes our involvement more intense and alert.

Gordon-Levitt is the real deal, a fascinating performer who creates the pre-crash Chris so compellingly in a few brief moments that we can miss him — and glimpse him under the slightly scrambled version he becomes. We’ve seen too many showboat-y performances by actors who love to play the look-at-me-act-with-one-hand-behind-my-back award-bait disabled roles. But Gordon-Levitt and Daniels give us characters who happen to have some disabilities, fascinating for who they are, not for what they can and cannot do. And Goode is…great. In the past relegated to playing the cute English guy with the cute English accent in movies like Match Point and Chasing Liberty, here he is as silky and menacing as a cougar. First-time director Scott Frank makes the most of his own tightly-written script, never neglecting character for action. He makes our hearts pound, but he also makes us care.

Parents should know that this movie has very mature material, including explicit and graphic peril and violence, with many characters injured or killed. Characters use very strong language, drink, smoke, and use drugs. Many of the characters are criminals who threaten, bully, cheat, and steal. There are sexual references and situations, including nudity. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of disabled characters who are capable and dedicated.

Families who see this movie should talk about “sequencing,” and why it is important for the characters and in storytelling. How does the structure of this movie help to make that point?

Audiences who enjoy this film will also enjoy Memento. They will also enjoy other outstanding tense thrillers like A Simple Plan, Shallow Grave, and Out of Sight, with a superb screenplay by this film’s writer-director.

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Hot Fuzz

Posted on March 16, 2007 at 3:23 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violent content including some graphic images, and language.
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	A lot of drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic but very graphic violence, including beheadings, impaling, stabbing, shooting
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	2007
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000RJO578

Those Shaun of the Dead guys are at it again. Having put a comedic stake through the heart of the zombie movie, they are now going after brainless cop films. Simon Pegg, the clueless Shaun in the last film, here plays crackerjack cop Sergeant Nicholas Angel, whose ruthless efficiency is so dispiriting to his colleagues that they send him off to a sleepy suburb to make sure he will stop making them look bad by comparison.

And so, instead of tracking down murderers and drug dealers, Angel is stuck in a relentlessly quaint little village, sort of a Masterpiece Theatre version of Mayberry, with a touch of Kinkade and a gloss from the British Tourism Bureau. Instead of high-speed chases with squealing breaks and kevlar vests, he finds himself carding teenagers in a pub and trying to find a wayward swan. Oh, he tries to keep up his record. Even before he officially starts work, he makes an arrest, a drunk who turns out to be not just the son of the local police chief but his new partner, Danny Butterman (fellow “Shaun” veteran Nick Frost).

The closest Danny has come to crime is his comprehensive DVD library of every single cop film ever made. He dreams of being like Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys II. He wants to go on a high-speed pursuit and fire two guns at once while jumping through the air. But he’s stuck in Sandford, which might as well be named Quicksandford from Angel’s point of view.

Is this one of those movies where the tough guy gets all cuddly and finds out what really matters, like Kindergarten Cop? I am relieved to say it is not. This is one of those movies where sleepy little Sandford turns out to have a crime rate that would terrify the Bad Boys and carnage that would horrify even the implacable Keanu Reeves of Point Break.

Wright and Pegg have a lot of fun transplanting the tropes of big Hollywood buddy cop explosion movies to a seemingly sleepy little village. As with “Shaun,” director Wright (whose work can also be glimpsed in the faux trailer for “Don’t” in the faux double feature “Grindhouse”) is very good at using quick-cut ironic juxtapositions, graphic images, and unexpected behavior — good and bad — from people we think we know to excellent comic effect.

Parents should know that this is a very grisly comedy with extremely graphic, blood-spurting violence. Heads are chopped off. A woman is stabbed in the chest with scissors and a man is stabbed in the hand. Many characters are shot. There are also images of dead and decomposing bodies and skeletons. The violence is comic but it is very explicit. Characters smoke and drink a great deal and get drunk (many scenes in a pub). They use very strong language. There are sexual references, including adultery.

Families who see this movie should talk about how the people who made it were inspired by the films they saw. They might also like to talk about some of the film techniques used to tell the story, including the quick cuts and sped-up footage.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Shaun of the Dead and some of the films referred to by the characters, including Point Break.

Zodiac

Posted on February 28, 2007 at 11:34 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, character abuses alcohol, marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and graphic murders by a serial killer
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	2007
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001HUHBAE

We still don’t know for sure who was — or is — the California serial killer known as the Zodiac, the name he used in a series of letters he sent to San Francisco newspapers in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This movie is not about some big payoff. There are no “eureka” WHO moments and we don’t get to see someone solve the puzzle and get a handshake from the mayor and the thanks of a victim’s family. We don’t get an “aha” WHY moment as we find out that it all began when Zodiac was a little boy and suffered some major trauma.

A puzzle is what it is. Zodiac sent not just taunting letters to the press; he sent four cryptograms, only one of which has ever been solved. While San Francisco’s investigation is inactive, the other jurisdictions’ files are still open.

This is not the story of the Zodiac, what he did and why. It is the story of what happened to three men whose lives were taken up with their efforts to answer those questions. A superb cast and an absorbing script make a frustratingly complex story accessible and keep even the nearly three-hour running time moving quickly.

Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) is the chain-smoking hard-drinking newspaper reporter who covered the story. Downey vibrates like a tuning fork, his offbeat rhythms responding to tones only he can hear. It is is heartbreaking to see the sensitivity that makes him a meticulous observer of the world he writes about begin to implode. The movie doesn’t ask or answer whether the stress of being a possible target of Zodiac is what finally causes him to unravel or whether working on the story kept his fragile spirit together with a sense of purpose. It just shows us the toll that the story took on the man who happened to have the crime beat when the first letter came in.

David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong were the cops assigned to the case in San Francisco. They coordinated with Jack Mulanax (Elias Koteas) and Ken Narlow (Donal Logue), the police officers in the other regions where there were killings tied to the Zodiac. With literally thousands of suspects and no certainty about which crimes were committed by the Zodiac and which by copy-cats or unrelated killers, they are looking for one deadly needle in a haystack that could fill what was then called Candlestick Park.

And then there is Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s the newspaper’s political cartoonist. It isn’t his job to write about the case and it isn’t his job to investigate it. And yet, there is something that draws him into it so deeply he will ruin his marriage to devote himself to a story that is twisted and terrible, with an evil genius of a bad guy who is, well, right out of the movies.

Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Panic Room) wisely makes this story not about the monster, but about our fascination with monsters. Like Avery, Toschi, and Graysmith, we are pulled into the puzzle, horrified, but tantalized, stimulated, drawn to the edge of what separates us from a human being who could commit such atrocities and then taunt the people who try to stop him. In his letters, Zodiac may have referred to the classic film The Most Dangerous Game, about a hunter who uses humans as his game — in both senses of the word. He sees them as the only quarry worthy of him because they can truly test his skill. In a deeper sense, it is Avery, Toschi, and Graysmith who devote their lives to their own most dangerous game, tracking the Zodiac, who continues to elude them, searching for clues and patterns and meaning in a world where kids on lovers lane are killed by a man who dares the world to find him.

Parents should know that this is the story of a serial killer and there are graphic portrayals of some of the murders. Characters drink and smoke and one has some marijuana. A chain-smoking character also abuses alcohol. Characters use strong language and there are brief glimpses of pornography and references to child molestation. Some audience members will be disturbed by the themes of the story, which include serial killing and the impact on the lives and families of those who are involved in investigating the murders.

Families who see this movie should talk about why the story was so important to Graysmith and what he sacrificed in order to be able to pursue it.

Viewers who appreciate this movie will also like the classic Call Northside 777 starring Jimmy Stewart, also based on a real-life case of a reporter’s investigation of a murder. And they will enjoy other movies about murders who communicate with journalists or policemen, including Dirty Harry (inspired by the Zodiac case and briefly glimpsed in this film), The Mean Season, and No Way to Treat a Lady. Viewers who would like to find out more about the Zodiac case (and perhaps try to solve some of the still-unsolved coded messages) should read Zodiac and “This Is the Zodiac Speaking”: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer. And they might like to take a look at the classic movie that allegedly influenced or inspired the Zodiac killer, The Most Dangerous Game.

Reno 911!: Miami

Posted on February 22, 2007 at 12:10 pm

C+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content, nudity, crude humor, language and drug use.
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language, n-word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use, drug overdose
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, characters and animals injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	2007
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000PISZ8Q

Silly cops have been a staple of comedy since Shakespeare created the character of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. They’ve been a staple of movie comedy from the Keystone Kops of the silent era through the Police Academy and The Naked Gun series and Super Troopers. There’s something enticing and reassuring about taking the police — the source of so many of our fears about powerlessness and shame — and making them into subjects for humor by exposing them as foolish, incompetent, and utterly humiliated.

And that brings us to the popular television series Reno 911, now a movie. True to form, it is the story of a group of bumbling, egotistical, petty, foolish, cowardly cops who triumph despite their own best — or worst — efforts.

The Reno sheriff’s department gets invited to a law enforcement convention in Miami, and when everyone there is quarantined due to a biohazard attack, they are assigned to handle 911 calls and other police responsibilities until an antidote is found. They have to deal with an alligator in a swimming pool and a beached whale on a topless beach, with the expected results. Bright spots include cameos from the Rock as a SWAT commander and Paul Rudd as a Scarface-style drug lord.

Fans of the television series will feel right at home, but the movie does not make much of an effort to introduce newcomers to the characters and situations. The movie derives much of its plot, energy, and humor from casual references to outrageous events and behavior (“Reno’s just like Mayberry on TV except for the crystal meth and prostitution”), from unrequited (and occasionally but briefly and awkwardly requited) romantic and sexual feelings between and among the cast, from a combination of preening self-regard, utter cluelessness, and insecure anxiety of its characters, and good old-fashioned slapstick. And it just manages to get by on its unpretentious silliness and, most important, its speedy running time.

Parents should know that this is a very raunchy and intentionally offensive comedy with extremely crude humor. Characters use strong and vulgar language, including the n-word, and there are explicit and graphic sexual references and situations, including nudity. There is drug humor, including an overdose, and comic violence with humans and animals injured and killed. Although the television series was given an award by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, some viewers may find the jokes about homosexuality to be offensive.

Families who see this movie should talk about how the portrayal of comic cops has changed over the centuries and what has stayed the same.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the (uncensored) series, Police Squad! The Complete Series, Police Academy, and The Naked Gun.

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Comedy Crime Movies -- format

Smokin’ Aces

Posted on January 23, 2007 at 11:37 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some nudity and drug use.
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Extreme, graphic, and intense peril and violence, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	2007
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002VEJKQI

This is a flashy, nasty, hyper-violent story about a lot of people who are very, very interested in a snitch, magician and five time entertainer-of-the-year Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven).

He’s about to turn state’s evidence against his long-time cronies in the mob. The FBI is particularly interested in mob boss Primo Sparazza (Joseph Ruskin), and Buddy is the only evidence they have.

So, that means a lot of people are very, very interested in Buddy, now holed up in a penthouse suite in Lake Tahoe after jumping bail, waiting to hear from his lawyer about an immunity deal. Interested parties include the FBI, the bail bondsman, who hires three former cops to get Buddy back, Buddy’s own entourage, who suspect he may be giving them up to protect himself, those mobsters mentioned earlier, and several different paid assassins, some in teams and some alone, who are competing for the very generous price the bad guys are offering.

The assorted hitmen (and women) include the trigger-happy punkish Tremor brothers, a master of disguise, a mysterious guy known only as “the Swede,” an emotionless assassin who once chewed off his own fingertips so he could not be identified by fingerprints, and a ambitious black lesbian couple very happy about the chance to show what they can do with their first big-time opportunity.

The interactions between each and all of these characters create the opportunity for some stylish set-pieces, dynamically shot (in both senses of the word) and energetically acted by big stars having fun in small roles. Ben Affleck (cop turned bounty hunter), Chris Pine (most coherent of the growling Tremors, especially when he’s speaking lines of forgiveness from someone he just killed), Jason Bateman (as a lawyer so scuzzy you’ll want to take a bath in antibiotics after watching him), rap star Common (Buddy’s straight-talking sidekick), Mathew Fox (unrecognizable as head of hotel security), and especially multi-Grammy-award winner Alicia Keyes and Hustle and Flow star Taraji P. Henson (the all-woman team) all have fun with their brief showy moments, shooting off colorful dialogue and very big guns.

But the twists of plot and piles of bodies go way over the top. People have just got to stop trying to be Tarantino. I know he makes it look easy, but being audacious and understated at the same time in the middle of balletic bloodbaths is not enough.

Parents should know that this is an exceptionally violent film, with extreme, intense, and especially graphic violence and injuries and many, many injuries and deaths. Characters use extremely strong language, drink, smoke, and use drugs. Most of the characters are criminals, including mobsters and hired killers. There are extremely explicit sexual references and non-explicit situations with some nudity and references to prostitutes, orgies, and homosexuality. The characters are a veritable Benneton ad of diversity, so to the extent that it is a positive sign that the killers include women, minorities, and gay characters, it is worth mentioning.

Families who see this film should talk about Messner’s final decision. Was he right? What were some of his alternatives? Who is this movie designed for? How can you tell?

Audiences who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Layer Cake, Pulp Fiction, and Lucky Number Slevin (all very violent and explicit).