Day 109: Swingers

"They're gonna give daddy the Rain Man suite, you dig that?"

Movies have always had the power to influence trends in fashion & music. A lot of my friends were heavily influenced by movies like Wayne's World & Clueless, but for me it was Swingers that changed the way I dressed, the music I listened to, and the way I talked. I got totally caught up in it, wearing a huge chain attached to my wallet & bowling shirts, listening to bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Squirrel Nut Zippers & Cherry Poppin' Daddies, and referring to things as "money." It seems obnoxious in retrospect, but I swear I wasn't the only one; Others were complicit in this behavior.

It's been the better part of a decade since I've actually sat down and watched the film from beginning to end, and I'm happy to say that in spite of a few nineties hallmarks like the gigantic cordless phones, the film holds up incredibly well. For those that have never seen it, Swingers tells the story of Mikey (Jon Favreau, who also wrote the script), a comedian & actor who has just moved to LA, having broken up with his girlfriend of six years. He relies on his friends like fellow NY transplant Rob (Ron Livingston) & Trent (Vince Vaughn) to help him soldier on and get back into the social scene and dating world. The film then chronicles several weeks in their lives as they attend various parties, nightclubs & the like, in search of women. That's basically it, plot-wise, there's obviously more going on in the subtext of it all, and the film is ultimately Mikey's quest to either get back with or get over his ex with the help of his friends.

Doug Liman directed & shot the film, and while there's nothing particularly revolutionary in its low-budget aesthetic, it does flow nicely, and a lot of his lo-fi techniques, such as using a wheelchair for a dolly shot through a casino, have been aped by no-less filmmakers than yours truly. The script is great, it has tons of truthful dialogue that sounds very real, but is also firmly rooted in fiction. In other words, you don't think that you're actually watching a documentary per se, but you know that the dialogue has the verisimilitude to sound like the way that people actually talk to one another.

The cast is great, top to bottom, with Favreau being another great character actor so dissatisfied with the role he was getting offered that he wrote himself a great starring role, and he truly shines in it. The supporting cast is full of great small parts like Alex Desert's Charles & Heather Graham's Lorraine (by the way, how hot was Heather Graham in the mid-90s, seriously). There are also tons of great bit players like the woman at the party in the hills that asks Mike what kind of car he drives, and the dealer and the $100 minimum Blackjack table. It's one of those cases where casting the best people in the smallest roles gives the entire world of the film a much better feel, and makes the film that much better as a result.

In spite of all the glowing things that I've said about the rest of the cast and the script, I would be remiss if I did not at least entertain the notion that this movie might in fact be a one-man show, and that one man would be Vince Vaughn. Vaughn skyrocketed to stardom after this film, and it's not hard to see why. He is a machine, firing off one-liners and radiating charisma, it's the kind of performance you can look back in retrospect and very clearly see why he became a star as a result. His ease on screen is almost preternatural, and while he doesn't have all of the best lines, he's got about 95% of them. It reminds me of Matthew McConaughey in Dazed & Confused or Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, this was the birth of a star, and while he's made questionable film choices since this film (actually the same can be applied to all three of these gentlemen), when you go back and watch their big debut, it's easy to see why they became who they became.

Swingers is just a great little movie. It's genuinely funny and sweet, and it can be enjoyed by just about everyone. While I personally like Favreau & Vaughn's second collaboration together, Made, much better, this is a much more accessible film for everyone. It's the kind of thing that you could watch with your mom and you'd both end up having a good time. Plus they use Heart's "Magic Man" on the soundtrack. Tell me that doesn't give it serious street cred. And no, I'm not joking.

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Day 108: Hunger

"You want me to argue about the morality of what I'm about to do, and whether it's really suicide or not?"

St. Patrick's Day is a time for every Irishman to get in touch with his heritage. For most of the people that live in Chicago, that means getting drunk in public while wearing green (and I vigorously question the Irishness of people who think that the Saturday closest to St. Patty's Day counts), but for me, it means watching movies about Ireland. And you know what that means... depressing shit. Whether it's anything by Neil Jordan, Ken Loach or Alan Parker, you know it's going to be some depressing shit. You can now add to the list director Steve McQueen's 2008 debut feature Hunger about Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and the 1981 Hunger Strike that claimed his and nine other's lives.

The storytelling style of this film is particularly unusual and unsettling, and I'm glad I waited almost a full 24 hours after watching the film to write my review because things that bothered me at the time are now coming into focus as being strokes of brilliance. For example, the film opens with a man getting ready for his day, eating breakfast, leaving his house, culminating in his checking the undercarriage of his car for a bomb. This man is Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), a guard at the Maze prison. We follow him for a bit, before bouncing over to the story of two prisoners Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon) & Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) who are sharing a cell, and have taken part in the so-called "blanket" & "no-wash" protests happening among some prisoners.

To give some history (I had to look all this up, it's not really explained in the film) in the early 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher removed the status of "political prisoner" from certain men being held in prison who had committed political crimes. These prisoners are now being regarded in the same category as men who committed criminal activities, rather than ones that were politically motivated, and in protest of this, they had begun refusing to wear the prison-issued uniform, wearing nothing but blankets, and they stopped washing & even worse, had begun to pour their piss out the doors of their cells and smearing feces on the walls.

Meticulous detail is put into showing how these men tried to communicate with those on the outside & even amongst their fellow prisoners in the jail. It's painstaking, brutal and utterly realistic. It's one of the most intense movies I've ever seen. We're introduced to Sands after about twenty minutes of the film, but it's not until a scene begins at the forty-five minute mark that we get a real sense of who he is. There is a scene, smack dab in the middle of the film that is a single, sixteen minute stationary conversation between Sands and a Priest (Liam Cunningham) in which the two debate the morality of his protests. Simply put, the scene is unbelievable. There's not a direct correlation to it, but it reminded me of the centerpiece scene in The Graduate with Ben & Mrs. Robinson in the hotel arguing about whether or not what they're doing is wrong, culminating in her telling him he's not allowed to see Elaine.

In the scene, Sands tells the Priest that he is going to begin a hunger strike, and they argue about what it will actually accomplish. Sands tells an amazing story about his childhood, and Fassbender just owns it. The scene, his performance, everything about it is incredible. The film then becomes virtually wordless after this, as we follow Sands' slow journey to the grave. We see his body begin to deteriorate, and while it's hard to watch, it never feels exploitative. The thing that bothered me initially is that the film throughly shifts focus away from everyone else to just Sands at the end. It feels like the beginning of the film is now an afterthought, and we're only shown Sands' struggles.

What I've come to realize though is that the film is presenting multiple stories & multiple perspectives on the hunger strike, and it's not meant to be about any one person or thing from the event, it's about the overall experience. It works so much better in retrospect than it did at the time, and looking back on it, it makes me enjoy the film more. It is painful and difficult to watch. The brutality pulls no punches, and makes the film feel real, but it's necessary to paint a full picture of what these prisoners were fighting for. The film does a decent job of staying neutral at first, mainly by giving us an insight into the life of the prison guard, but it's very firmly on the side of the protestors. Maybe it doesn't agree with their tactics, and showing the violent deterioration of Sands' body is a clear indicator that he's doing it to himself, and almost forcing others to do it, but it's clear too that they were given no options to get their voices and demands heard.

Be warned, this is a tough film to watch, and don't even think about trying to eat something while it's on. It is incredibly powerful though, and Michael Fassbender gives one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen. If you're not already watching him, you will be after this, and he is an actor that demands your attention.

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Day 107: Scott Pilgrim vs The World

"Scott, if your life had a face, I'd punch it."

Easily the least deserving flop of the last ten years, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a fantastic movie that was horrendously mis-marketed in a summer full of films with brilliant marketing campaigns like Inception & Despicable Me. There are lots of brilliant films that bombed in theaters and then found a second life on home video, but most of them (Office Space, Fight Club, etc.) came out in the era of the video store, where word of mouth could spread through town and then drive people down to their local establishment to find out what the hype is all about.

The age of total internet domination may have killed the possibility of this happening ever again. By giving everyone a forum to voice their opinion on things, it's made it virtually impossible to sort through the people who's opinions don't actually matter. I know this sounds a bit egotistical of me, but I do know what I'm talking about. We may not always agree, but my opinion never consists of "that movie sux because it's gay."

I wonder, then, if Scott Pilgrim will ever become a cult hit on a par with the cult classics of old. Only time will tell, I guess, but there are so many awesome things about this movie, I kind of refuse to believe that it will fade into complete obscurity. As I said, the film's marketing campaign was horrendous. It even managed to keep me away, in spite of a strong desire to see the movie when I first heard about it, the trailers made it look like another wacky action comedy with the kid from Superbad, and that's about as far from the truth as you can get. There is a built-in audience for this film, and they went to see it in spite of the horrible marketing, but the average person could not be won over by hyperactive trailers and lukewarm reviews.

So what is Scott Pilgrim vs The World? It's based on a manga series by Bryan O'Malley about a twenty-something guy named Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who plays in a band called Sex Bob-omb (if you don't get the reference, this might not be the film for you) and is dating a high schooler named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). He begins having dreams about this mystery woman, and after running into her in his waking life one day, he becomes obsessed with finding out who she is. She is Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Scott makes it his duty to be with her. There are two problems with this however. The first is that Scott is a total wimp, and refuses to break up with Knives before pursuing Ramona, and second, and most importantly, Ramona has seven evil exes that Scott must defeat if he's serious about dating Ramona.

The book series, and especially the film, are for people raised in and on video game culture. The opening  Universal logo is actually the perfect indicator as to whether or not you're going to "get" the film as it's rendered in 8-bit style, complete with 8-bit music. It's a stylistic flourish that perfectly sets the tone for the film. Edgar Wright is a brilliant director who's early work on the BBC series Spaced showed that he was a genre geek capable of seamlessly integrating pop culture references & genre embellishments into a straight narrative. His attention to detail here is mind blowing, as you can discover for yourself in this article (it's #5, but there's major spoilers, so only read after you've seen the movie).

So, taking all of that into consideration, how is it possible for the average person to even enjoy this movie? It seems like it's so full of video game references and hyper-kinetic editing and the like for anyone to make it all the way through. If you're cynical or unsure of this movie, there are a few things you need to know before jumping into it. First off, Michael Cera is not the stuttering, nebbishy dork he usually plays in this film. He actually manages to turn a lot of those expectations on their ear, and while there are shades of that side of Cera, he bucks most of them and ends up being pretty spot-on perfect. Secondly, the film is a bit repetitive. It's just the nature of what the film is.

Around the forty-five minute mark, it basically just turns into a series of battles, and while they're creative and unique, it does wear a bit and become repetitious. I think that even the film's most die hard defenders would be hard pressed to defend this, but the film is smart enough to know that this is its weakness, and the final fight (the "real" final fight) is a stroke of pure brilliance that almost completely makes up for all of the repetition.

The supporting cast is amazing. Chris Evans gives a performance that I didn't think he was capable of as Lucas Lee, evil ex #2. Jason Schwartzman is fantastic as always as Gideon Graves, Kieran Culkin is also great as Scott's roommate. Alison Pill, Anna Kendrick & Aubrey Plaza are all wonderful too, Pill in particular, her character Kim is probably my favorite. Even Tom Jane & Clifton Collins as the Vegan Police are awesome.

The movie's a hard sell, no matter how you slice it, but I think that the film has all the elements of a great movie, and more than anything else, that's how they should have marketed it. It's not just a movie for teenagers. In fact, I doubt the average American teenager would even like this movie unless they have a solid sense of irony, or really cool parents, or a combination of the two. If you're a fan of Edgar Wright's other work, and who isn't, you will enjoy this film. It's super cool and has more imagination than most other films being made today. So run, don't walk to your local... wherever the hell you get your movies from now, and pick up Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

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Day 106: Horrible Bosses

"What is deliberately undressed? You get accidentally undressed?"

Horrible Bosses is one of those movies that has got a ton of stuff going for it, but ultimately it's just not as good as it should have been. The core trio of Jason Bateman, Charlie Day & Jason Sudeikis is great, but like with so many comedy trios, there's an odd man out, and here, it's Sudeikis. He's a fantastically gifted comedic actor, but he's not the straight man that Bateman is & he's not the sublime clown that Day is, so he ends up getting short shrift. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

Bateman, Day & Sudeikis play Nick, Dale & Kurt, respectively, and in addition to being friends, they have something else in common, they all have... have you guessed it yet? Anyway, Nick's boss is the evil psychopathic businessman Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), Dale's boss is the sexually manipulative dentist Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) & Kurt's new boss is the coke-head douchebag Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell). After drunkenly discussing how much better their lives would be without their bosses around, they come up with a plan to hire someone to kill their bosses. The plan sort of backfires though when the guy they end up paying a lot of money to Motherfucker Jones (Jamie Foxx), accepts the money to act as a murder consultant, refusing to do any killing himself.

The trio of thoroughly incompetent friends then sets off to murder one another's boss, but as to be expected, nothing goes as planned, and the three are quickly set on the road to wackiness. There's a lot of funny scenes, and the back and forth between the three leads is almost always amusing (when you're not shaking you head at how ridiculously stupid they are), but overall, the film is not all it could have been. Colin Farrell ends up being the funniest of the three bosses. His performance is genuinely inspired and so far outside of what we've seen him do before, that it's genuinely revelatory.

Spacey is playing largely the same character he played in the vastly superior Swimming with Sharks, and with the exception of a few funny lines, he's not given much of anything to do here. That brings me to Aniston. She's an actress I've never been particularly fond of, and just because she says a bunch of dirty words and plays a total bitch, doesn't make her all that great in the film. A lot of praise was heaped on her, but I don't think she's very good in this film.

So why doesn't the film work as a whole? I think it has a lot to do with the sheer amount of shit they tried to cram into a ninety minute comedy. If it had just been two bosses and two sad-sacks, it would have been a much better film. Instead it's like ten pounds of sausage in a five pound casing, and while who doesn't love sausage, too much of a good thing is just that. If nothing else, I'm glad that the film was successful because the three leads deserve more exposure, especially Charlie Day. Those of us that watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have known for years how absurdly funny and talented he is, and now the rest of the world knows, which is great. I could watch an entire movie of him sitting in the car singing along to that Ting Tings song (arguably the funniest scene in the movie).

There are a lot worse ways to spend ninety minutes than watching Horrible Bosses, but on the whole, it will leave you mourning it's wasted potential. It could have been great, but instead it's merely just a forgettably funny movie.

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show

"It's not easy having a good time. Even smiling makes my face ache."

It is generally accepted that the official death of The Rocky Horror Picture Show occurred on the day of it's fifteenth anniversary, when it was released on VHS. For me however, an eleven year-old from the suburbs, this was the birth of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I still remember that VHS, with the red flap, promising something unlike anything you'd experienced before. The purists will claim superiority over me and those of my ilk, who were denied the experience of seeing it for the first time on the big screen, at midnight, in a raucous theater filled with people in costume screaming and throwing shit at the screen. I've seen it four times in the theater since I first saw it on video, but for me, 

RHPS is a personal kind of experience and not the shared, communal experience it is for millions of others around the world. If, by some miracle, you haven't seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, there's no way to explain what it is exactly. It's a musical, based on a stage show, simply titled "The Rocky Horror Show," written by Richard O'Brien (who has since come to be known to my daughters as the voice of Ferb's dad on Phineas & Ferb). It features a white bread couple from Denton, the home of happiness, named Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon), who are traveling to meet with a professor of theirs, Dr. Scott (Jonathan Adams) in anticipation of being married. Their car gets a flat tire, and they go looking for help at the only house they can find, a large mansion populated by some pretty odd denizens like Riff-Raff (O'Brien), Magenta (Patricia Quinn) & Columbia (Little Nell).

Their leader is a self proclaimed sweet transvestite from transexual Transylvania, Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), and the young couple has arrived on a special night, as the good doctor is about to give life to his newest creation, Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). They couple are exposed to some pretty eye-opening behavior, and before the night is over, they and their lives are changed forever.

That's it in a nutshell, and re-watching the film for the first time in several years (on a pristine looking blu-ray put out two years ago), I was amazed by how iconic so much of the imagery in the film is. For being an unmitigated failure upon its first theatrical release, the film has now been mocked, imitated, & stolen from so often, it's hard to believe just how much of it originated here. Camp musicals had been done before, DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise is just one example of a film released just a year prior, but never before had something so original, yet oddly familiar been done before. The film takes pretty firm root in the B-movie monster films of the 50s, but it's also its own animal entirely.

It's interesting how tame a lot of the film is in retrospect. I'm sure that in its day it was pretty shocking, but the film is almost a sweet relic now. It's as quaint now as the films it was influenced by were when it was made. The performances are all pretty solid across the board. Several of the cast members were reprising their roles from the stage show, like O'Brien, Quinn, Nell, Meat Loaf, and others, but the true standout is Curry. He is phenomenal. It is the performance of a lifetime, and he has never equaled it or even come close. It's funny to me how much goodwill I continue to have towards him in spite of the fact that he hasn't done anything even remotely this good since.

Looking at Susan Sarandon in this film, it's hard to tell she would go on to be as successful and, frankly, great as she has become, but she and Bostwick both play their roles well, and they clearly understand the campiness at the heart of this thing. The one cast member not wholly successful here has got to be Peter Hinwood as Rocky. To say he's the screen equivalent of a wet sandwich is almost an insult to wet sandwiches. He was right to call it a day after this film as I don't think he would've gone far, but hey, stranger things have happened.

The music is fantastic, endlessly singable, and some of the most iconic music ever written for a Broadway show (or a film for that matter). Director Jim Sharman does a serviceable job behind the camera, creating some iconic imagery, but the film doesn't have a ton of momentum behind it, for which I would tend to lay the blame at his feet. He seems to be biding his time between set pieces, and a lot of the film just kind of sags, especially the interminable Criminologist asides. Part of what makes the audience participation at the theaters so great is the amount of funny lines that lay in these valleys, but at home you really feel the weight of the sags.

Overall, there's nothing I can say or do to convince you that you're going to like Rocky Horror if you don't already like it. Watching it again is not going to change your mind. Going to see it at a theater might be a fun outing, but it's not going to make you like the movie any more. You either love this movie or you don't, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's plenty of great movies that are totally polarizing, and I think that's part of what makes them great movies. Rocky Horror  is in no way, shape, or form a great movie, but it's one of my all-time favorites, and nothing that anyone can do or say can ever take that away from me.

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Day 104: World's Greatest Dad

"I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone."

One of the first movies I reviewed, oddly enough exactly 100 days ago, was Bobcat Goldthwait's Sleeping Dogs Lie, an unconventional love story to say the least. Today I'm looking at his follow-up, a film that gives Robin Williams his best role since The Fisher King (which coincidentally came out the same year as Williams shot a cameo in Goldthwait's directorial debut Shakes the Clown). 18 years later, Goldthwait has given Williams a gift of a role, the kind of thing that plays right into Williams' strengths as an actor. I find it equally strange that this film came out in the same year as Williams' worst movie ever Old Dogs.

World's Greatest Dad tells the story of Lance Clayton (Williams), a failed writer who now works as a high school poetry teacher. His son Kyle (Daryl Sabara, the younger brother from Spy Kids) is a pretty awful dude: he's disgustingly obsessed with sex in only the way a 15 year old social outcast can be; he calls everyone, including his father, a fag; and he's just a generally unpleasant individual with only one real friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), a kid from a hyper-dysfunctional family. Lance has very tentatively begun a covert relationship with Claire (Alexie Gilmore) a fellow teacher at the school, but she only seems very fleetingly interested in him. His classes are on the verge of being cancelled due to low enrollment, and his son isn't making life easy for Lance by constantly causing trouble at school.

After taking Claire out on a date one night, Lance comes home to find Kyle dead from autoerotic asphyxiation. Williams plays the scene so well, his grief is real and genuine and the kind of thing that makes your heart break for someone who wasn't even that likable. In an attempt to make the best of a horrible situation, Lance stages his son hanging from a clothes rod in a closet, and he types a suicide note that he places in Kyle's pocket. Soon after, the suicide note is published in the school paper, and Kyle inexplicably becomes an inspiration to everyone from the teachers to the students.

In a desperate attempt to rewrite history, Lance begins playing along, offering up more "diaries" and other writings that people are desperate to get their hands on. It becomes clear that, more than anything else, Lance doesn't want people to remember who Kyle actually was, and that this revisionist version of his son is preferable to who he actually was. Andrew is the only person suspicious of any of these writings because he's the only other person that really knew Kyle. When he confronts Lance, it's an especially hilarious scene, particularly when Lance agrees that Kyle's journal entries are "a little light on felching."

Since not a lot of people have actually seen the film, I won't spoil the last third, except to say that it worked perfectly for me. A theme that runs through Goldthwait's movies is a brutal honesty about the human condition. Granted, the inciting incidents in his films tend to be dark, nihilistic & far-fetched, but he has a keen eye for the true nature of the average human being. In this film, he paints a society full of people who so desperately long for a real connection to others that they're willing to rewrite history in their own heads to fit the emotional void in their lives. None of these people except Lance and Andrew actually gave a shit about Kyle, yet they all want to create a world where they were the only ones who gave a shit about him.

I think it's a spot-on representation of how hypocritical people can be. This sort of thing reared its ugly head, albeit on a much larger scale, when people like Michael Jackson & Whitney Houston died. These were undeniable superstars at one point in time, but virtually everyone had turned their back on them when their personal problems began to outweigh their success. However, when they died, millions of people came out of the woodwork claiming to have always been huge supporters & devoted fans, despite this being a revisionist version of events at best.

This sort of hypocritical behavior isn't uniquely American, but it certainly is rampant throughout American culture. Polarizing tragic events like Columbine and 9/11 don't actually unite us. They point out how hypocritical we actually are as a society. That's the reason the goodwill we all feel towards one another in the immediate aftermath of these tragedies quickly dissipates, because it's not genuine. I'm glad that at least one filmmaker out there is willing to call people out on this aberrant behavior. Granted he presents it in miniature, but it's a fantastic commentary on humanity.

Like I said, I loved this movie, particularly the ending. Once you've seen it, and I recommend that you do, let's talk about it, because I'd love to hear what people thought of it. As I've said, this is not a film for everyone, but the people who do connect with it, get it, and I can only hope that it opens a few eyes. It's the least people can do.

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Day 103: Marathon Man

"Is it safe?"

Three of the most maddening words in cinema history. I think that what makes them so effectively terrifying and what makes Marathon Man work for most of its running time is the fact that the audience is kept in the dark along with the main character. For an iconic scene such as that to work, the suspense comes from the viewer having no clue what anyone's talking about, and the scene preceding the way that it does with no answers coming. It's a masterful scene, smack dab in the middle of a movie that works really well for about an hour and a half, and then becomes a tad ridiculous, but I'll get to that.

Dustin Hoffman plays Babe Levy, a graduate student at Columbia writing a dissertation that aims to clear his father's name from its tarnished reputation received during the Joseph McCarthy era. Babe's story is juxtaposed with that of his brother Doc (Roy Scheider, a guy who's career in the 70s is probably second only to John Cazale's) who is involved in some nefarious dealings overseas. As I mentioned earlier, the most effective thing about the way the story is told is that the film very deliberately withholds crucial information from you. It manages to build suspense out of the unknown, which is a pretty rare commodity in a thriller. Bits of information trickle out involving diamonds, covert government agencies & Nazis, but the pieces to the puzzle don't come together until the second half of the film.

Doc pays a visit to his brother after a pretty serious attempt on his life in France, and his behavior during the visit is every ounce that of a paranoid individual. He goes to meet with a shady character by the name of Szell (Laurence Olivier) who's brother gave Doc a canister full of diamonds in the beginning of the film before being blown up in a car accident. Szell stabs Doc, who manages to make his way back to Babe's apartment before dying, which now places Babe in the precarious position of a man who may have information, but as we saw, wasn't explicitly given any.

Nevertheless, Babe is paid a visit by a man named Janeway (William Devane) who tells Babe that Doc was working for a secret government agency called The Division, and Janeway wants Babe's permission to use him as bait when the men who killed his brother inevitably come looking for him. Needless to say, not everyone is who they seem, and the seeds of this conspiracy to get to Babe were sown before he was ever even aware that something was amiss.

William Goldman wrote the book on which the film is based, and also scripted the film, although the ending is markedly different from the ending to his novel, as the notoriously difficult Hoffman demanded it be changed, and even worked with Robert Towne to craft the new ending, along with producer Robert Evans. I haven't read the book, but I've read how the book ends, and I don't know that it's that much of an improvement over what transpires in the film.

What I guess I'm getting at is that if you look at another Dustin Hoffman film, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, that was a film that was all about what a peaceful man was capable of doing if pushed to his breaking point. This film treads much of that same ground in its climax, and totally cops out on the ending. Peckinpah had the common sense to know that once you cross the line, there's no going back, but this new ending for the film leaves a lot of loose ends that are going to be interestingly tied together by whomever ends up with the job of investigating the various murders that occur in the last ten minutes of this film.

John Schlesinger didn't make a lot of very good movies after this one. The Falcon & The Snowman and Yanks are decent movies, but nothing really compares to the run he went on from Midnight Cowboy to Sunday Bloody Sunday to Day of the Locust and then this film. I didn't love this movie, even though I really wanted to, but I can't dismiss it either because three-fourths of it is brilliant. The cinematography by Conrad Hall is fantastic (what else would you expect from probably the greatest cameraman that ever lived), particularly the flashback sequences, and the way those are framed and cut into the film.

My one other grievance that I feel the need to air, lands with the marketing team that put together the dvd for this film. The cover is a big, bold image of Dustin Hoffman pointing a gun right at you. I've brought this up before, not here necessarily, but it's like the old French Connection poster that had Popeye Doyle shooting Nicoli at the top of the steps, or the Planet of the Apes dvd cover with Taylor kneeling in front of the Statue of Liberty. Don't these marketing people give a shit about the content of the films they're marketing? I guess not, it's just something that gets my goat. Anyway, Marathon Man is pretty decent. You should watch it.

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Day 102: Mr. Popper's Penguins

"It's an infestation!"

Jim Carrey has one of the more baffling careers in Hollywood. After languishing in bad movie supporting actor hell for most of the 80s, he got his big break on Fox's In Living Color. He rocketed to movie superstardom in 1994 when he starred in a trio of blockbusters: Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb & Dumber. Like all comedy superstars, he decided he wanted to be taken seriously, so starting in 1998, he began balancing his comedies with more serious fare like The Truman Show, Man on the Moon & Simon Birch. Some of these choices paid off, but some were woefully misguided like The Majestic & The Number 23. Lately he's been balancing his work with daring independent films like I Love You Phillip Morris & sanitized family fare like Mr. Popper's Penguins.

Very loosely based on the award winning children's book from 1939, Mr. Popper's Penguins had one of the more unusual roads to a film adaptation. Originally it was to be adapted & directed by Noah Baumbach and star Ben Stiller, but when Baumbach fled the project, so did his star. It passed through several more hands before landing in Carrey's, and the film ultimately ended up being directed by Mean Girls director Mark Waters.

Carrey plays Mr. Popper, an investment banker or something or other, who's current mission is to convince the current owner (Angela Lansbury) of Tavern on the Green to sell the restaurant to his bosses (which include Uncle Junior and Jimmy Gator). His absentee father passes away and leaves him with a gift, six gentoo penguins, which his kids become immediately enamored with, prompting him to decide to care for the penguins himself. He decides to use this as leverage to win back his kids' love & maybe help him get back with his ex-wife (Carla Gugino), but he also runs afoul of a local zookeeper (Clark Gregg) who wants to take the penguins to the zoo where they can be cared for properly.

The film ends up being a mixed bag at best, balancing family drama with corporate takeovers and animal poop jokes. Ultimately it's not a failure, but it's no rousing success either, and more than anything, I am not the film's target demographic, and I think that's key when evaluating a film like this. The movie plays like gangbusters with my kids, and that's the real measure of the film's success.

I was mildly amused by the film, Carrey tends to be at his best when he's not endlessly mugging like 2005's horrendous Fun with Dick & Jane. And I'm not insinuating that this is some of his best work, far from it, but he is a reliable comedian, and can often make the most out of weak material. And this is some pretty weak material, particularly when stretched to feature length. Overall, it's fairly harmless family fun, not great, but certainly not as bad as a film like Zookeeper.

I think that my real problem with the film is the relationship between Popper and his ex. One of the best things about Mrs. Doubtfire was the way it brought things back down to earth at the end when the main characters borderline psychotic behavior almost ensured that he and his ex wife were never going to get back together. In this film, the main character's borderline psychotic behavior actually endears him to his ex, and ends up winning her back in the end. I'm not going to call it dangerous wish fulfillment, but it does send the wrong message to kids, especially those who may come from broken homes. While I'm sure there are a percentage of parents who end up getting back together after an extended estrangement, this is not the norm, especially in modern American society.

I know, I know, I'm reading too much into things. The movie's just about the guy from The Grinch playing with a bunch of penguins, but kids look to the movies as a reflection of the magic that can happen in real life. I know I did when I was a kid. More than anything, I think it's important for parents to talk to kids about the messages in the movies they watch. Too often we just let our kids watch a movie and then ask them very surface questions about their favorite part and what not. If you watch this movie with your kids, and I don't think that's such a terrible idea, talk to them afterwards about it, and get their perspective on it. It couldn't hurt, and it might give you a real idea about what they see happening.

Or don't, it is after all just a movie about cute penguins. Right?

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Day 101: Jack & Jill

"What do you think people are thinking here, that I'm sitting with my rabbi?"

Fuck Adam Sandler. Fuck him. I used to be a fan. I used to overlook his laziness and rampant, almost psychopathic, product placement in his films. It now reminds me of that scene at the beginning of Stripes when Bill Murray's girlfriend tells him that it's just not cute anymore. I'm not even really sure why he makes movies these days. He's definitely got enough money, why continue to subject audiences to this torture? It's not like he's just doing it for his buddies, he's given each of them their own starring vehicles. What is his motivation for doing these fucking movies? I just want to know. I don't think anyone can tell me though.

I went through this litany of reasons why Sandler sucks now in my review of Bucky Larson, so instead I'm going to focus my review of this particular film on the way it humiliates several people I like and respect. First up there's Norm MacDonald. When he showed up, a smile actually came across my face. I love Norm MacDonald, he's one of the very few people that I think is unfairly maligned, and I enjoy him both as a stand-up and as an actor. They gave him nothing to do here. I wonder if they reigned him in because he looks thoroughly disconnected, and while that's usually his schtick, he actually looks like a dead man in this film.

Then there's Dana Carvey. I would be hard pressed to say that I still love Dana Carvey, especially after his turn as Pistachio Disguisey in Master of Disguise, a film I plan on getting around to on here, but again, he's in the movie for thirty seconds. It could have been anyone, why have Carvey come in and play a hippie puppeteer with two lines of dialogue? I would like to clarify here that these are all hypothetical questions. I don't think there are actual answers to any of these questions, so I'm just going to continue doing this in the hopes that someone can prove me wrong.

Johnny Depp? He has one of the only two funny lines of dialogue in the entire movie, it's up at the top, and it's only funny in context, said by Depp. Johnny Depp has done enough great movies that he gets a pass from me on whatever nonsense him and his hetero-lifemate Tim Burton want to get up to, but this movie? Why is he there? Again, it can't be for money. It's a cameo, so I just can't figure out why it's him.

This brings me to the big dog in the film: Academy Award winner (for perhaps his worst nominated role) Al Pacino. Pacino is like the second lead in this thing. He's not just in one or two scenes, he's in pretty much the whole god damned movie. I'm going to say this again, in case you were confused, he's in most of the movie. Like more than half of it. A large majority of the film's running time. I would love to say he's playing a "comedically amped up" version of himself, but I don't think such a thing exists, I think this is probably what he's really like. This is probably an intimate glimpse into the mind of a maniac, and everyone thought it was going to be funny, but it's more scary than anything else.

Let's talk about Al Pacino for a moment. The verdict's out on the man, he used to be a genius, now he's insane. His film choices for the better part of a decade have been questionable at best and dizzyingly deranged at worst. He's done some good stuff like Angels in America & Insomnia, but he's also done the following: Gigli, Two for the Money, 88 Minutes, Righteous Kill, & Simone. The guy's out of his mind. I'd say his friends should stage an intervention, but his friends are presumably people like Robert DeNiro & Robert Duvall, and don't get me started on their nonsense. The film geek in me got excited about the reunion of the stars of Donnie Brasco, but that quickly dissipated when I saw that they weren't going to be given anything remotely entertaining to do.

There's nothing original, inspired, funny or worthwhile happening on screen in Jack & Jill. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen. I wouldn't even call it one of the worst movies of the last year, but it is a monumental failure of a film because I can't think of a single reason for it to exist. It can't even get the concept of twins right (opposite sex twins cannot be identical). That fact alone should have been an indication to anyone with a brain as to what this thing was going to end up being, but I guess it takes all kinds. Just like I have The Royal Tenenbaums, somebody out there now has Jack & Jill.

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Day 100: The Royal Tenenbaums

"This illness, this closeness to death, it's had a profound effect on me. I feel like a different person, I really do."
"Dad, you were never dying."
"But I'm gonna live!"

"Why would a reviewer make a point of saying someone's not a genius? Do you especially think I'm not a genius?"

"I'm sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman."

"How long have you been a smoker?"
"22 years."
"Well, I think you should quit."

"That's a hell of a damn grave. I wish it were mine."

I could literally write an entire review of just quotes of this film. For my 100th review, I've decided to take a look at one of the absolute best films ever made, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. There's an odd phenomenon that's not exclusive to Wes Anderson, but it's certainly prevalent throughout his career, and that is that his films are best appreciated only after multiple viewings. I covered this phenomenon in my review of Bottle Rocket, but as I said there, I've come to love his films more after watching them again, but The Royal Tenenbaums is the only one that I loved right away. From about 30 seconds into the film, I was hooked, and while I've come to basically have the entire film memorized, I've been enamored with this film since my first viewing.

It doesn't hurt that it features probably my favorite actor, Gene Hackman, in what is arguably his best performance. Hackman plays the eponymous patriarch of an eccentric family of geniuses that peaked when the children were young, and the parents divorced. Twenty-five years later, the family is now spread out across New York City, but wind up living together in the house they were raised in for various reasons. The plot is intricate and almost impossible to explain (I've tried twice now, and deleted my synopsis both times), and I figure if you're reading this, you've probably seen it already. Actually, if we're friends, I would hope you've seen it.

Let's start with the script. It's incredible. It's one of the best scripts ever written, and if you get a chance to read the script, I would recommend it (a copy can be found here). Anderson is an incredible director (whether you like his style or not, you have to admit that the guy knows how to direct a movie), but his work as a writer is as detailed as his visual style. His subsequent partnerships with writers like Noah Baumbach have been good, but nothing has equaled his work with Owen Wilson both on this film and Rushmore. The eccentricities of the characters seems to be honestly scaled back by the work that Wilson does, as the characters in his other films seem almost unwieldy in their quirks.

The cast of this film is phenomenal. I have no reservations in saying that it's the best work of almost everyone's career: Ben Stiller, Gwenyth Paltrow, Luke & Owen Wilson, and Danny Glover all give career best performances. Bill Murray & Anjelica Houston have been better in other films (Rushmore & Prizzi's Honor respectively) but they're no less fantastic here than they are anywhere else. Even the smaller characters are great, like the kids that play Ari & Uzi and Dudley, Seymour Cassel and of course, my favorite, Kumar Pallana as Pagoda. The relationship between Royal & Pagoda is the sweetest relationship in the entire film. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fantastic narration by Alec Baldwin.

Believe it or not, there are people that don't like this film. I was working at Blockbuster when this film was released on video, and I stopped recommending it to people because it's not a film for everyone. Most people don't like to think of their families as dysfunctional, and these people don't want to see themselves reflected on screen. Now granted, these are some pretty extreme examples of dysfunction, but all of these characters are highly relatable. I imagine that Richie ends up being the most relatable character for most people, although, oddly enough, I've always connected the most with Margot, but everyone who's honest with themselves will see a little bit of all of these characters in their own families.

Royal's journey to save his family from "the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship" is an incredible one. The journeys of all of these characters, their growth as people and as a family, is some of the best that's ever been put on film. This film is a masterpiece of microcosm. People who get hung up on the stylistic flourishes are missing the forest for the trees. This is a beautiful film that ages like a fine wine, becoming more poignant and hysterical with each subsequent viewing. If you didn't get it, or didn't like it the first time you saw it, I would strongly urge you to watch it again.

Don't concern yourself with the busyness of the art direction and costume design, just let the film wash over you and drink in the incredible dialogue. I guarantee you'll find yourself quoting the film the next day, and before you know it, you'll want to watch it again, and then, and only then, have you finally given yourself over to the true genius of Wes Anderson. You just need to give yourself time to catch up to him.

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