Archive for September, 2006
280 – Lucky Number Slevin
Posted by frothy in Lucky Number Slevin on September 28, 2006
Poor Slevin Kelevra (Josh Hartnett). He’s just lost his girlfriend and his job, and when he jets to New York to stay with a friend for a while, he finds himself mistaken for his now-missing friend by the heads of two crime syndicates, each of whom wants to use Slevin for their own nefarious purposes.
On the one hand, there’s The Boss (Morgan Freeman). Seems Nick, Slevin’s missing bud, owes The Boss a lot of money. The Boss knows Slevin’s not Nick, but what can he do? Slevin’s just in the wrong place (Nick’s apartment) at the wrong time (the present). The Boss also knows Slevin has no money, so he offers to forgive Nick’s debt to Slevin (i.e., not kill Slevin, which is important) if Slevin does a little favor for him. That favor, of course, is killing the son of The Boss’s biggest enemy, The Rabbi (Sir Ben Kingsley).
The Rabbi, meanwhile, tells Slevin that Nick owes him money, too, and he gives Slevin a short time to come up with the cash. So now Slevin has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars and kill someone. Good thing he’s not alone; Nick’s neighbor, the vivacious Lindsey (Lucy Liu), concerned about Nick’s absence, helps Slevin investigate and contemplate. Also thrown into the mix is a double-dealing hit man named Goodkat (Bruce Willis); no filme noirish movie would be complete without one.
The movie feels a little perplexing for the first three-quarters, but then all of a sudden Things Make Sense. And not in a contrived, force-fed sense, either; it all falls into place. That’s one of the debits of the movie, though; there aren’t loose ends, there aren’t endless possibilities, there aren’t nebulous motives, and so forth. It’s all too blunt, too black-and-white without even a hint of gray sneaking in from the side.
Hartnett’s not bad at all, though, which surprised me a great deal. I’ve always thought of him as a squinty-eyed dim bulb, frankly. He just seemed like a Big Dumb Guy, kind of like Ben Affleck. But Hartnett turns in a pretty amiable performance in the lead role, although the role was written as a little too glib for my tastes. (Slevin’s nonchalant, unserious attitude seems more off-putting and distracting than colorful, even if it’s partially explained later on.)
Praise should go to an able supporting cast, especially the adorable Liu and the trenchant Freeman. Stanley Tucci, who plays a detective trying to sort out the mess, is also superb as always, as is Kingsley. Even Willis, who by now can do these roles in his sleep, manages to inject some life into his rather low-key scenes.
All in all, the movie – despite its cumbersome title – is a bit better than I expected. The plot is fairly solid and believable, and the movie is well cast, even in the key role of the titular Slevin.
***
How well do you know these movies?
http://www.empireonline.com/features/howwelldoyouknow/
You have to register, but give ‘em fake address info and you’ll be set. There are miniquizzes for such films as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, and The Big Lebowski. But these aren’t run-of-the-mill trivia questions; to get ‘em all right, I think you have to be really steeped in the mystique, not just a casual fan. Which means, of course, that I plumb sucked at ‘em.
Zombie films
You know who you are, you zombifiles! You who like your characters lurching and with something oozing out of their half-open skulls.
279 – Silent Hill
Posted by frothy in Silent Hill on September 11, 2006
Before you even press play on your DVD, you have to realize that Silent Hill is based on a video game, and that’s usually a bad sign – note Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and last year’s Alone in the Dark. Bad movies come from even the best video games, so already Silent Hill has a strike against it.
But ultimately what does Silent Hill in is its incomprehensibility. Oh, the plot is fairly easy to figure out, and luckily enough there are a few moments of exposition in which everything is painstakingly explained to the faithful, luckless viewer. It’s just that the movie is so darkly filmed, it’s often impossible to discern what’s happening in any given scene.
Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean, who’s underused) have a young daughter named Sharon (ha, get it, Rose of Sharon? Nah, coincidence). Sharon sleepwalks and mutters about a place called Silent Hill so, against her husband’s wishes, Rose decides in the middle of the night (?) to take Sharon to this mysterious place. I mean, who wouldn’t? Surely the key lies there and not in, say, locking the door to the house so Sharon can’t sleepwalk her way off a cliff, as she almost does in the first scene? Nah, that would be too easy.
So Rose gets it in her head to take Sharon there in hopes that the town – a ghost town with a 40-year-old coal fire burning beneath it – will somehow trigger a cure in her daughter. A cop pulls her over on the way, but Rose panics and floors her SUV, and a high-speed chase – at night, in the rain – is underway. Yep, real Mommy of the Year material, she.
Inexplicably (meaning a combination of stupidity and rain), the vehicle crashes, and Rose finds herself in Silent Hill – and Sharon’s gone. So now she has to go find the little kid. Who she brought there in the first place. I kind of felt my sympathy for Rose ebbing at this point.
Meanwhile, Christopher is trying to find both Rose and Sharon. He doesn’t get to do much other than Fight the Man on the outside, but his actions provide some background to the whole mess (i.e., why is Sharon having these episodes, what is Silent Hill the town hiding, and so on), because he’s able to search records, or at least try to access them, leading to confrontations with The Man. Well, the sheriff, anyway.
If you’ve never played the game – which I suspect would be a lot of you – then you’ll likely find the whole thing to be a gobberslop of gore. (I’m thinking of trademarking “gobberslop,” because I like the way it sounds and I think I made it up.) It’s particularly gruesome near the end, but really the entire movie is a crimson cannonball.
The ending is a bit open ended, which might be the movie’s saving grace. It’s left up to the viewer’s interpretation. Overall, though, it’s not very tightly plotted or interesting – odd, since it was written by Roger Avary, who cowrote Pulp Fiction.
*1/2
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Posted by frothy in Mulholland Dr. (2001) on September 4, 2006
Mulholland Drive will appeal to aficionados of David Lynch, but for those who merely like his movies – or, worse, haven’t seen any of them (Elephant Man, Eraserhead, Dune, Lost Highway), it’ll be a thoroughly incomprehensible mess. I suspect it’s not, really, but figuring it out calls for mental powers the like of which I’ll never have. The movie does more than merely blur the line between reality and fantasy, it obliterates it.
For about two thirds of the film, everything sort of makes some kind of sense. It’s weird enough, sure, but it seems to follow some logic. Then Something happens, and the movie goes off the rails. Intentionally, I’m sure – it’s the kind of movie for which clues are very, very subtle, and it’s entirely up to the viewer to piece them together. Even so, different viewers will come up with different explanations for the events in Mulholland Drive.
The basic gist is this: Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), fresh off the plane from Canada, arrives in Hollywood to make her fortune as an actress, along with approximately 40,000 other ingenues each year (taken from the Great Book of Stats I’ve Made Up). She has it a little easier than most novices, though, in that she gets to stay in the nice apartment of her aunt, an actress who’s conveniently out of town and has permitted Betty to stay. Ah, but Betty quickly discovers that she’s not alone – there’s a naked woman in her shower, and it turns out she’s an amnesiac. The woman takes the name of Rita from a nearby movie poster, and Betty decides to help her find out who she is while keeping nosy neighbors out of the loop.
Now, the viewer knows that Rita was in a car accident on the titular road in the opening scene of the movie. She was being driven in a limo, and the driver pulled the car over and pulled a gun on her. Before he can shoot, though, two drag racing cars careen around the turn, and one smashes into Rita’s car, killing everyone except her. She subsequently wanders into Los Angeles itself and hides out at Betty’s aunt’s place.
As with most Lynch movies, though, nothing is what it seems. All Rita has in her purse is a mysterious, oddly shaped blue key – and stacks of money. When she and Betty visit a diner, Rita thinks she recognizes the waitress’s first name – Diane – and maybe even flashes on a full name, Diane Selwyn. Could Rita be Diane? The ladies figure out Selwyn’s phone number and call it, but they get a recording. Then they visit it, but when they find the woman’s apartment, they find Selwyn had switched with someone – and at THAT apartment, they find a dead body.
But that’s not where it gets weird. In the middle of the night, Rita wakes up with the word Silencio on her lips, and she brings Betty to a strange club with the same name. In what’s been described as the most moving sequence in the film, the women watch an interesting performance – first an emcee tells them that “There is no band” and that all is just a tape, and then a singer belts out a Spanish version of Rob Orbison’s “Crying,” which apparently has quite an effect on Rita (who cries) and Betty (who shakes). After the performance, Rita discovers she has a small blue box, and back at the apartment she opens it. And that’s about when the movie goes completely nutso.
What does it all mean? I do not know. Who are all of these people? I do not know. I don’t know much about this movie, and I just saw the thing. I fear it’s entirely beyond my comprehension, but I did find a good analysis of it here; it’s a fairly in-depth analysis, although naturally it doesn’t answer everything.
I like mysteries. I like having to figure things out, but I don’t particular enjoy movies that have a zillion possibilities, depending on how the viewer wishes to interpret things. Or, if that’s how the movie’s going to be, I kind of wish the clues made some sort of sense. Otherwise, it’s just a cacophony of white noise – nothing makes sense, so nothing is there.
I have to give this a fairly low score, but truthfully, if you’re a Lynch fan you should bump it up a star.
**1/2
Romper Stomper (1992)
Posted by frothy in Romper Stomper (1992) on September 3, 2006
Russell Crowe plays the leader of a gang of skinheads in Australia that strives for racial purity, harassing Asians whenever the opportunity presents itself, but finds itself on the defensive when a group of Vietnamese retaliates. Slowly, the bigots are reduced in number, owing partly to the counteroffensive from the Vietnamese and partly to their own inner turmoil, as an auburn-haired femme from a broken home lends a distracting hand, leading to tragic results.
The movie is a pretty rough look at the inner politics of hate gangs. Crowe and his crew have a single mission – the eradication of all nonwhites. In their neighborhood, more and more businesses are being bought or started by those of Asian descent. Hando (Crowe) is a neo-Nazi disciple; he has a copy of Mein Kampf, from which he takes lessons of leadership and purity, and he has a giant Nazi-swastika tapestry in his bedroom. The skinheads are utterly ruthless – they beat, maim, and kill for their cause.
But when they roust a Vietnamese nouveau hotelier, all hell breaks loose. Relatives of the victim come swarming after the skinheads at their hangout, waging an all-out war that looks far more realistic than the silly rumbles the Jets and the Sharks used to have. Bloodied and perhaps a little bowed, the racist slugs head for cover.
But their headaches are only beginning. Hando isn’t the most sensitive guy, after all, so it’s not long before his new love Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie) bears the brunt of his tirades. Meanwhile, she starts to have eyes for Hando’s best mate, Davey (Daniel Pollock), who’s a much quieter sort. Meanwhile, she seems even daffier than they are, no small accomplishment; she has more emotional issues than a Park Avenue newstand. But she’s pretty and different (the other women in the group are Goth goddesses, whereas she’s a redheaded vixen, you see, and an epileptic), so the advantage is hers, sort of.
A couple of things make this movie watchable: the fast pacing by director Geoffrey Wright and the nascent acting by Crowe. You can clearly see the greatness that would develop more fully a few years later. Crowe’s Hando is cool under pressure, but ultimately flawed. He’s never shown as weak, though, just morally unyielding. That is, when he shouts at Gabe, he doesn’t turn around in the next scene and take her back, admitting his error. He’s strong willed and misguided, and Crowe perfectly captures all of the character’s nuances, right up to the deadly finish.
Sad note: Pollock, who had a romantic relationship with McKenzie during filming, killed himself shortly after the film was completed.
***
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