Four Brothers

Posted on August 21, 2005 at 5:13 am

We start out on the side of the four adopted brothers who reunite to find the people who murdered their mother, but they lose us in this over-violent and under-sincere story that strays from justice past revenge and into mindless vigilantism.

Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) is a tough but warm-hearted woman who spent her life getting children out of foster care and into permanent homes. But there were four incorrigibles she could not place, and those were the ones she adopted herself. She made a family with impulse-control-impaired Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), captivated by a hot-tempered honey Angel (Tyrese Gibson), family man/play by the rules Jeremiah (Outkast‘s Andre Benjamin), and would-be rock star Jack (Garrett Hedlund).

At first, it looks like Evelyn was in the wrong place at the wrong time in a random gang-bang convenience store robbery. But then it appears to have been something more sinister, an orchestrated hit. Who would want to kill Evelyn Mercer?

Her sons do not want to wait for the police (Terrence Howard and Josh Charles) to answer that question. They go off on their own, asking questions and insisting on answers. Their preferred method of insisting involves pouring gasoline on the subject and lighting a match.

Director John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood, 2 Fast 2 Furious) knows how to film action scenes, but this time he seems to have forgotten how to make us care about the outcome. Without dramatic legitimacy, it all just seems noisy and gratuitous.

We begin as sympathetic to the brothers because of their loss. But they keep telling us how endearing and honorable and committed they are instead of showing us. Howard, the summer’s breakthrough actor following brilliant performances in Hustle and Flow and Crash shows more class and charisma in his brief appearance as a sympathetic policeman than all four of the brothers combined. A movie that has so little sense of how it comes across that it overestimates the appeal of its main characters is a struggle to sit through; one that underestimates the appeal of its other performers is a crime.

Parents should know that this is an extremely violent movie, not just in the portrayal of many violent confrontations with heavy artillery but in the almost nihilistically excessive nature of the damage. Characters drink and use drugs. They use strong and crude language, including homophobic insults. The bad guy is ruthless and enjoys humiliating other people. The movie has sexual references and situations and non-sexual nudity. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of strong inter-racial family and romantic relationships. But it is too bad that a movie that is so careful to avoid racial stereotypes in the good and bad guys descends to a cliched “spitfire” characterization of a Latina woman.

Families who see this movie should talk about how people like Evelyn Mercer can change the lives of people around them.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Singleton’s version of Shaft. And they might like to see the movie that inspired this one, The Sons of Katie Elder, a western starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. And they may enjoy seeing outstanding performances by Howard and Taraji P. Henson (who plays Jeremiah’s wife) in very different roles in Hustle and Flow (very mature material).

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War of the Worlds

Posted on June 26, 2005 at 1:50 pm

“Is it the terrorists?” a frightened child asks, because that is the scariest thing she knows. But what makes this thing scary is that it is something no one knows. It is beyond our knowledge, even beyond our imagination. Earth is under attack and no one knows by whom or what they want.

These are not the “let’s play musical notes together” aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Reese’s Pieces-loving, bicycle-flying botanist alien from E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. There’s no “Take me to your leader,” or Klaatu Barada Niktu. These aliens don’t even want to keep humans on as slave labor as in Battlefield Earth. They don’t want us to understand or negotiate with them. It does not seem to be about power or plunder. They just want to destroy us. As one character says, “This is not a war any more than there’s a war between men and maggots. It’s an extermination.”

Steven Spielberg knows two things better than anyone else who ever made a movie, and both are in top form here. First is his extraordinarily evocative sense of family life, the way every detail of home and connection (even, maybe especially the most frayed of connections) tell the story and make us care about it. A ribbon, a mirror, a boot, a box of family photographs, a Beach Boys song –- the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the unthinkable sustains a “golly” factor that grabs our throats and our hearts at the same time.

The special effects in the movie are dazzling. Just when we thought that we were so accustomed to the limitless wonders of CGI that we could never be stunned in a theater again, Spielberg just plain knocks our socks off. My husband counted eight spontaneous “Oh my Gods” coming from me during the movie. It isn’t just that it all looks real, seamlessly integrating the effects. It’s that what looks so real is so “Oh my God.”

The images are fresh and imaginative and yet perfectly believable, mixing the normal with the inconceivable, from the vast alien machines to the buckling of the earth and the apocalyptic landscapes. The most vivid images are when we see the trappings of everyday life transformed. In one moment of complete insanity, the bells at a railroad crossing start to clang, and the striped barriers come down as though it is a perfectly ordinary day and the commuter train is about to arrive on schedule. Everyone stops and takes a breath and then the train comes in, filled with flames.

Spielberg’s other great trick is his mastery of scale, and again, that use of context brings the story literally home. At least half of the “Oh my Gods” were responses to wow-style reveals of new threats, new invasions.

And Spielberg makes invasion into a theme, from the very beginning, when with stunning economy he sets the stage for all that is to come.

Our hero-to-be, Ray (Tom Cruise) arrives home late. His ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), pregnant by her new husband, is standing there with a hand on her hip. The new husband is handsome, a little sleek-looking in a black turtleneck, but clearly so nice you can’t even bring yourself to hate him, though Ray has clearly tried. Even though the ex-wife is late, she decides to carry their daughter’s suitcase into Ray’s house. Ray is very uncomfortable as she opens his all-but-empty refrigerator and peeks into his messy bedroom. He feels invaded. His children seem alien. And yet, in one of the most understated but meaningful moments in the movie, a shared joke between Ray and Mary Ann shows us a glimpse of Ray’s asperity and resolve.

But all of that is under the surface. When we meet him, Ray has long been used to disappointing people. It is not clear which is worse, the sullen animosity of his son Robbie (Ray wears a Yankees baseball cap; Robbie pulls out one with a Red Sox logo) or the patient lack of expectations from his daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning). But when it becomes clear that something very, very bad is happening, Ray will do anything to keep his family safe. This will be his story more than it is the story of the battles. The movie is at heart, well, heart.

And Cruise does heart well. He and Fanning anchor the film with outstanding performances of conviction and charisma. Rachel’s protection of her “space” and Ray’s efforts to care for her memory and spirit all echo the invasion theme. The story moves well from the large scale destruction of a city to a small-scale intrusion into a shattered basement retreat occupied by three people. Throughout, the focus is on Spielberg’s favorite subject, the family as fortress. The government barely exists, the army is dedicated and honorable but overmatched.

And, as Ray points out, the humans are almost as dangerous as the aliens. Ray is not the only one who will do anything to keep his family alive and the ochlochratic chaos means that nowhere is safe.

The story is affecting, the action scenes are thrilling, the issues are resonant. Yet it is not ultimately as satisfying as less skillful movies like Independence Day. It may be wiser and it may have more artistic validity, but summer explosion movies call out for a more complete resolution than the Wells book allows. A valid but subtle point is lost, not for lack of respectful presentation, but perhaps because ot it.

Spoilers alert: Parents should know that this is an extremely tense and intense movie, with constant peril and violence. Many characters are killed. Many are neatly vaporized, but there are scenes with dead bodies, a brutal off-camera murder, a death by impalement, guns, grenades, lasers, and other weapons, and some grisly images. Characters use brief strong language. There are tense confrontations between family members. Some viewers will find the behavior of the humans more disturbing than that of the aliens.

Someone once said that the aliens in movies tell us more about what we are thinking about than about any likely real-life extraterrestrials. The UFO movies of the cold war era were, under this analysis, a reflection of our fears about communism and the atomic bomb — with the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still as examples, contrasted with the more benign aliens of Spielberg’s other movies. What does this movie tell us about our current fears?

Families who see this movie should talk about how the story has changed since it was originally written by H.G. Wells more than 100 years ago. How was that era’s interest in the relatively recent scientific discoveries reflected in the book and how has the current version used modern concerns to connect to a contemporary audience? What do you think about the balance of the story between the action and the personal drama as Ray’s character has to become more responsible and
find a way to communicate with his children. How did both parts of the story help each other? In a situation like this, who do you help? Who do you accept help from?

Families who appreciate this film may enjoy listening to the legendary Orson Welles broadcast. This version of the book has the radio script as well. The text is also available online at Project Gutenberg. The new version has a small tribute to the George Pal movie. They will also enjoy Independence Day, one of the all-time best alien invasion movies, and they might get a kick out of Battlefield Earth, one of the worst, and Signs, one that has a bit of both.

Crash

Posted on April 29, 2005 at 4:32 pm

Everyone is angry. Everyone is scared. They all feel that something that belongs to them has been taken away and they don’t know how to get it back.

And in this movie, they say so.

“Crash,” the winner of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar, is an ensemble film with several intersecting stories, all of them about people who can’t quite seem to understand how things turned out the way they did or how they themselves turned out the way they did. Most of them find out, in the course of the movie, that they are capable of more — or less — than they thought they were.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter for Million Dollar Baby has co-written and directed a devastating movie about people who are very much like us, with one important difference. It’s as though the drinking water in Los Angeles has been spiked with some mild de-inhibitor that makes people say what they are thinking. In this film, everyone says the most horrifyingly virulent things to everyone else: family members, people in business, employees, and strangers, reflecting a range of prejudice on the basis of class, gender, and, above all, race.

These comments are sometimes made angrily, sometimes carelessly or thoughtlessly, but often, and more unsettlingly, matter-of-factly. As vicious as the insults are, the part that hurts the most is that people don’t care enough, don’t pay attention closely enough, to know the people they are insulting. “When did Persians become Arab?” asks an Iranian, who cannot understand how people can hate him without taking the time to know who he is. A Hispanic woman explains to a man she is sleeping with that she is not Mexican. Her parents are from El Salvador and Puerto Rico. He tells her that it doesn’t matter because they all leave cars on their lawns anyway.

The movie is intricately constructed, going back and forth between the characters and back and forth in time. There are small moments that create a mosaic in which we see the pattern before the characters do. The movie has big shocks but it also has small glimpses and moments of great subtlety. A black woman looks at her white boss while he talks to his wife on a cell phone and we can tell there is more to their relationship than we have seen. The daughter of immigrants we have only seen in one context shows up in another and we see that her professional life is very different from what we might have imagined, reminding us that racism may be inextricably intertwined with America, but so is opportunity.

Every character is three-dimensional, utterly real and heartbreakingly sympathetic. The characters keep surprising themselves and each other, for better and for worse.

A white upper class couple gets carjacked. He’s a politician (Brendan Fraser) concerned about how it will look. She (Sandra Bullock) is terrified and angry. She doesn’t trust the man who has come to change their locks because he looks like a gang member. A black detective (co-producer Don Cheadle) tells his Latina partner and sometimes girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) that “in LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

A black actress (Thandie Newton) tells her black television director husband (Terrence Howard) that “The closest you ever came to being black was watching ‘The Cosby Show.'” The white producer of a television sit-com (Tony Danza) tells that same director to re-shoot a scene because “Jamal is talking a little less black.” A character in an overturned car is caught in a safety belt, hanging upside down. A pair of black carjackers believe that what they do is acceptable because they are not robbing black people. One of the tenderest father-daughter scenes in years is the set-up for an explosive emotional pay-off later on.

The brilliance of the movie is the way it makes each character both symbol and individual. As a whole, the cast is neatly aligned along a continuum of prejudice, and yet each character is complete and complex and real. Just when we think we know who they are, they surprise us. We find ourselves sympathetic to those we thought we hated and disturbed by those we thought we understood. Just when we think we know what bigotry is, it, too, surprises us by being more about fear and loss and feeling powerless than about hatred and ignorance. The characters confront their assumptions about each other and they make us confront our own about them and about ourselves.

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XXX: State of the Union

Posted on April 25, 2005 at 7:38 pm

C+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Brief strong language, one f-word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant action-style violence, shooting, explosions, fighting, many characters killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2005

Can we ever see Ice Cube as a gangsta again after Barbershop and Are We There Yet?

Do we want to?

Ice Cube is a fine actor who can do a lot with a strong script (Boyz n The Hood and Three Kings). But he seems to be phoning this performance in between development deals. Since the writer and director appear to be on automatic pilot, too, even a movie that has no aspirations beyond generic guns and explosions multiplex fodder manages to disappoint.

The original XXX, starring Vin Diesel, was a sort of James Bond movie on crack, with an extreme sports nut brought in on a spy mission for “deep cover agents with special skills.” It had some cool stunts and got the job done.

In this sequel, as soon as Agent Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, returning from the first film) explains that the first Triple X is dead so they need to go off the grid again to find someone even tougher, it’s clear that this is less script than set-up. When Willem Dafoe turns up as the Secretary of Defense to give a report to the President (Peter Strauss), it’s clear that he’s not in the movie to be a second-tier good guy. I’d say it was less a movie than a cross between a rap song and a computer game, but it is not nearly as well-written as either. There’s no wit or imagination, just the thump thump thump of exposition and explosions.

Yes, there are barked orders about breaching the perimeter and guys in serious-looking black hoods with fancy guns and other toys, a handy nerdish hacker, and big shots asking each other “Who the hell is this guy?” The new Triple X is a former Navy Seal serving a 20-year prison sentence who gets sprung for a top-secret mission. The good guys have become the bad guys, so we need some bad guys to be the good guys.

There are competently filmed stunts and explosions at a variety of Washington DC locations, including a non-existent bullet train. There are a couple of good lines, including quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Tupac, and it is fun to see Ice Cube go undercover as two characters that play off of white expectations. But the movie has an unpleasantly sour tone that is too far off the grid to give the stunts any narrative or emotional heft. When Triple X is explaining to a friend why he should help save the day, the best he can do is tell him that they are fighting for the right to keep stealing cars. And the movie’s treatment of a standard-issue rich blonde ice queen in a slinky suit and a fast car is so rap-style misogynistic that it takes you out of the story. Nona Gaye (Ali) tries to channel Pam Grier as the woman Triple X can’t forget, and her scenes with Ice Cube have enough warmth and sparkle to remind you how much the rest of the film is lacking. Even with all the pounding music and ear-splitting explosions, this XXX should be rated zzzzzzz.

Parents should know that the movie has non-stop PG-13-style violence, with a lot of explosions and shoot-em-ups. Many characters are killed. Characters use brief bad language (one f-word, a few b-words) and there are some mild sexual references, including a prison rape joke.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Darius did not follow orders and how he decided what mattered to him. Characters use different arguments to try to persuade each other in this movie. Which are the strongest? Why?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the original, with Vin Diesel as the first Triple X and the classic The Dirty Dozen.

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Son of the Mask

Posted on December 28, 2004 at 7:51 pm

The Mask had a clever and inventive director, striking design, wildly imaginative special effects, and Jim Carrey, who is something of a wildly imaginative special effect all by himself. ,P>

“Son of the Mask” is both watered down and jazzed up, like a kid who’s had way too much sugary bug juice. This semi-sequel (all new characters except for a cameo from Ben Stein) is directed at a younger audience, and despite some questionable material, it is more mild than wild. There’s not much by way of imagination and few of the effects qualify as “special.”

Jamie Kennedy (Malibu’s Most Wanted) may be many notches down the star pole from Jim Carrey, but he is a likeable and funny guy. For some reason, though, this film fails to make the best use of the talents he does have, making him the straight man. To a baby and a dog.

In the first film, a shy bank employee finds a Norse mask with magical powers. When he puts it on, it unleashes his hidden desires and removes all inhibitions, turning him into an infinitely malleable cartoon character transformed by every impulse. Whether he was performing in a nightclub or standing up to a gangster, he was always fearless.

At the end of the movie, the mask is once again thrown away.

In this sequel, Kennedy plays Tim Avery, awould-be animator who lives with his wife Tonya (Traylor Howard) in a cartoony-looking little house. She wants a baby, but he does not feel ready. One night, on his way to the office Halloween party, he finds the mask. Everyone at the party is impressed with his “costume” and the outrageous behavior just seems natural at an animator’s office party -– everyone assumes he is just trying out a new cartoon character. When he gets home, his wife is in bed. Perhaps it is because his inhibitions have been removed by the mask, or perhaps he is just feeling proud of himself for being asked to develop a character for a possible cartoon series. But he is willing to have a baby.

Nine months later, the baby is born. And because his father was wearing the mask when he was conceived, he has some of the mask’s powers. This comes to the attention of Loki (Alan Cummings), the Norse god of mischief and the original owner of the mask. His father, one-eyed Odin, king of the gods, orders him to get it back, so Loki begins checking out every baby born on Tim’s baby’s birthday.

Tim is looking for the mask, too, but it has been hidden by his dog, who is experiencing something like sibling rivalry. Tim has no idea of his baby’s unusual abilities; he just wants the mask back so that he can finish creating that cartoon character his boss is asking about.

As Loki gets closer and closer, Tonya leaves town on a business trip, with Tim on full-time daddy duty, just as the baby’s transformational powers really start to take over and Loki finds what he was looking for. The movie then gets turned over to the special effects department for some cartoon-ish fun.

Kids will enjoy the silly humor, but parents may question the appropriateness of some of the material in the movie, especially for younger children, who may be disturbed by the idea that some children may not be wanted. While there is nothing explicit in the film, some families will find it inappropriate that the baby’s powers were the result of his father’s wearing the mask when he was conceived.

The movie is dumb and loud, which some children will confuse with entertaining but others will just find overwhelming. It is a shame not to make better use of Kennedy’s talents; he is mostly limited to reaction shots. It’s a bigger shame to waste this technology and the goodwill left over from the first film on a dull story with forgettable characters.

Parents should know that this movie has strong language for a PG (“Hell, no” “The crappiest piece of crap in crap-town”). There is a lot of comic violence, including hits to the crotch that are supposed to be funny. There is some mild sexual material, including discussion of wanting (or not wanting) to have a baby, and the central plot point is based on Tonya getting pregnant while Tim is wearing the mask. Tonya jokes that she is going to make a baby with the neighbor. There is some vulgar humor, including potty jokes.

Families who see this movie should talk about how parents decide when they are ready to have a baby. Why was it so important to Tim that he be someone his child would be proud of? Why did Tim say that the baby helped him grow up? What is “positive reinforcement” and why is it important? Why are there stories about a god of mischief? What other characters in stories and myths like to cause trouble?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Spy Kids, also featuring Cummings, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequel Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, which, like this film, also features a game of Twister. Tim’s last name is a tribute to animator great Tex Avery, and families will enjoy some of his classic cartoons as well. And all families should learn about some of the great Norse myths, featuring Loki, Odin, and Thor.

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