A purely escapist entertainme…

March 19th, 2010

A purely escapist entertainment, John Badham’s Another Stakeout, a upshot to his 1987 hit, is sillier and less misleading than the in the first place movie, but it’s also funnier.

Scripter Jim Kouf’s new comedy-adventure picks up Chris Lecce (Richard Dreyfuss) and Bill Reimers (Emilio Estevez), the two Seattle police detectives, six years later. Estevez is now married and the father of two. Dreyfuss, who is clean-shaven, lives with Maria (Madeleine Stowe, uncredited), the woman he was assigned to observe and fell in love with the first time out.

The eternally feuding cops are appointed to locate Lu Delano (Cathy Moriarty), a missing key witness in the trial of a Las Vegas mobster. This time around, their team also includes Gina Garrett (Rosie O’Donnell), an assertive, tough-talking assistant DA, who insists on bringing along her dog. Once they situate themselves in an elegant house in an upscale neighborhood, pretending to be one big happy family, the real movie and frolic - begins. Most of the humor revolves around comic exchanges between Dreyfuss as Dad, O’Donnell as Mom and Estevez as their grown son.

There’s one hilarious scene, a dinner party hosted by Dreyfuss and O’Donnell for their neighbours (Dennis Farina, Marcia Strassman). The fluency of wisecracks and sight gags in this sequence, which would do Blake Edwards proud, overshadows everything that follows.

Wheels on Meals review

March 17th, 2010

Jackie Chan is more than the assess = ‘pretty damned quick’ of his stunts: it’s his knack for comedy, as much as his martial arts virtuosity that makes him Asia’s top star. This delirious comedy, set in Barcelona, is one of his better efforts. He and Yuen Biao are wanton-food operators who by crook become entangled in a thread involving a prostitute, a lunatic and a missing heiress. The utter haphazardness of the happenings recalls Hollywood’s golden slapstick comedies.

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The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001)

March 14th, 2010

Chief among these movies are those with a political bent, or those of a
small, personal nature. In Showtime’s superb “The Day Reagan Was Shot,” what
we’re given on the surface is a simple retelling of what happened on March 30,
1981, when President Ronald Reagan, a mere 70 days into his presidency, was
nearly assassinated outside the Washington Hilton by the deranged John
Hinckley, who was trying to prove his love for actress Jodie Foster.

But this film is much more than a retelling, for most people simply don’t
know about the chaos that reigned both in the operating room with Reagan and
at the White House, where Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously forgot
the line of succession and essentially claimed to be running the government.

ABOUT 98 PERCENT RIGHT

“The Day Reagan Was Shot” is a small powder keg in that writer-director
Cyrus Nowrasteh pieced together the story from news coverage, books and
memoirs, but didn’t actually talk to any of the participants (essentially, the
entire Reagan White House team, which gets a good black eye for incompetence
on that stressful day). Those close to the film say Nowrasteh got everything
about 98 percent right.

The film even prompted former Reagan National Security Adviser Richard
Allen to tell Larry King in March that he would release audiotapes from the
“situation room” in anticipation of the movie. Allen later wrote of the events
and used the transcripts in an Atlantic Monthly piece.

This is just the kind of juicy history lesson that nobody would pay $8.50
to see in the holiday season but that makes for a riveting and sometimes
frightening and funny film for Showtime.

Richard Dreyfuss really digs into the role of Haig, the central force in
“The Day Reagan Was Shot,” because his seizing of power amid the chaos nearly
led to an inadvertent nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. Both Richard
Crenna as Ronald Reagan and Holland Taylor as Nancy Reagan do admirable jobs
of not making caricatures out of familiar public figures. Another standout
performance comes from Colm Feore as Caspar Weinberger, the object of Haig’s
disdain. Various representations of Reagan’s staff, from Michael Deaver to
James Baker and Ed Meese, are also quite good, although the real-life people
won’t think so, since being clueless is a key element in the portrayals.

“The Day Reagan Was Shot” covers a lot of bases, some familiar, some not —
all of them pretty unsettling given what might have happened. The FBI
apparently knew that Hinckley was a threat but never passed it on. Reagan’s
pass code for the nuclear launch buttons was tossed with his clothes, then
seized by the FBI, which wouldn’t turn it over to the Secret Service, even
though Haig and others mistakenly thought the Soviets were about to launch an
attack within three minutes (turns out there was a simulated missile attack in
the works, and no one from NORAD figured that out, which inadvertently led
Weinberger to increase DefCon readiness, alarming the world).


PHONES OUT OF ORDER

While this was unfolding, phones were on the fritz in the situation room
and also on Air Force Two, which was carrying Vice President George Bush to
Texas, then was quickly rerouted to Washington.

Back at the hospital the doctors were unaware (because no one told them)
that the bullet lodged between Reagan’s heart and collapsed lung could explode,

and tight security didn’t stop a disgruntled medical student from sneaking
into the hospital and getting into the room with Reagan.

Chaos, ineptitude and fear. Meanwhile, we all went about our business in
the Me Decade, mostly unaware of how dangerous things became that fateful day.

There’s a lot of meat in this historical movie, and it’s probably more
entertaining and important than the latest overblown Hollywood offering at the
cineplex.

E-mail Tim Goodman at @cf,nel tgoodman@sfchronicle.com.

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Going Shopping review

March 12th, 2010

Holly G. (played by Victoria Foyt), is a rich clothing artist with her own boutique. In the no doubt of a tumultuous Mother’s Day weekend she is confronted with deceit, elation, distress, kleptomania, rebellion, addiction and passion, all the while under pressure to save her business and her blood in just three days! In into the bargain to a compelling alibi border, the comedy is peppered with sad testimonials from the women within the motion picture who ?acknowledge? the earnest and all too often unacknowledged character that shopping play’s in their lives. Henry Jaglom has created a comedy which deals with the phenomenon of women?s addiction -­ both good and bad ­ happy and troubled ­ to shopping. GOING SHOPPING is a sister murkiness to Jaglom’s critically acclaimed EATING and BABYFEVER which both depict suitable issues contemporary women face, and is some cases, obsess one more time. During Jaglom’s work (FESTIVAL IN CANNES, DEJA VU, LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS) it is clear that he has a strong kinship to women and this is translated onto the big screen. BOOMING SHOPPING portrays another complex aspect of women’s lives, one that is mostly overlooked or dismissed by mainstream Hollywood: shopping! GOING SHOPPING stars Victoria Foyt, Lee Supply Stick up Morrow and Bruce Davison, Mae Whitman and Jennifer Grant, Juliet Landau and Cynthia Sikes. Directed by Henry Jaglom; written by Henry Jaglom & Victoria Foyt; produced by Judith Wolinsky; motion design by John Mott; edited by Henry Jaglom.

Dark Blue (2003)

March 11th, 2010

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Few subjects are as bone-draining, banal and rancid as the corruption of American authority.

You couldn't field a bowling team with the honest police officers depicted in movies of recent decades. Occasionally, we get something brilliant such as "L.A. Confidential," which peers into the souls of the compromised, but more often we get "Training Day" and "Narc," trendy wallows with preposterous treatments.

For a while, it looks as though "Dark Blue" will fall into the bulging latter group - a taste of naivete, a ton of contamination and a bloody comeuppance that has less to do with justice than feeding audience expectations for a splashy finish.

Instead, it builds to a well-crafted trio of tiered climaxes that hold the audience transfixed.

It represents, by far, the most accomplished direction to date by Ron Shelton, who usually writes and directs ("Bull Durham," "Tin Cup") but who this time worked from a script that David Ayer ("Training Day") adapted from an unproduced James Ellroy screenplay.

It uses as a background events relating to Rodney King's beating by Los Angeles police officers and their trial a year later.

In the foreground, though, stands one of those standard cop teams - toxic veteran Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) and tainted rookie Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman).

They're enforcers for putrid unit leader Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson), who also leans on lunatic informants Gary Sidwell (Dash Minok) and Darryl Orchard (Karupt).

The one ranking officer who recognizes foul air is Deputy Chief Arthur Holland (a stolid Ving Rhames).

Never as insightful or compelling as it could be, "Deep Blue" nevertheless builds a mound of modestly truthful moments including the parallel disenchantment of Arthur's wife Janelle (Khandi Alexander) and Eldon's wife Sally (Lolita Davidovich, Shelton's wife).

A host of familiar elements coalesce better than expected, at least, with an ambush that is meticulously designed, a breathtaking re-creation of rioting in South Central and a final confrontation that strives for veracity and redemption where excess would be the norm.

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Casting an illuminated shaft on Eldon's bent ideals, Russell offers his first great performance, although it arrives too early in the year to build to the Oscar that Denzel Washington received for a comparable role and performance in "Training Day."

Russell's tour de force, especially at the finish, supports the belief in him long held by Shelton, who wrote "Bull Durham" for him (but who wound up with hotter prospect Kevin Costner).

The film's color scheme might be dark blue, but Russell wades deeply into a moral gray zone and finds in Eldon's fog the conviction of his courage.


'Dark Blue'


Director:

Ron Shelton


Stars:

Kurt Russell, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson


MPAA Rating:

R, for violence, language and succinct sexuality

stars

The Return review

March 10th, 2010

Inexplicably rated 15 by the BBFC, this mild but involving paranormal thriller from British director Asif Kapadia (‘The Warrior’) majors in creeping unease and ritual shocks to some extent than violent horror. ‘Buffy’ name Sarah Michelle Gellar is typically anodyne as Joanna Mills, a moneymaking trucking company sales rep who lives faulty of hotel rooms, operates on affective autopilot and is estranged from her ageing priest (Sam Shepard). Joanna’s unstable instability and self-harming tendencies are exacerbated by troubling memory flashes of buildings, bars and rooms in places to which she has not in the least been. On a role trip to Texas, she is tired to the town of La Salle, where informed of images, weird vibes and vivid visions advice at a good old days connection with brooding, widowed cowpoke Terry (Peter O’Brien). Or perhaps an adolescent sexual trauma involving sleazy, lurking redneck Griff (JC MacKenzie).

Kapadia’s fluid storytelling and Roman Osin’s charming cinematography create subtle, unnerving commination gone from of flat vistas, decaying industrial architecture, claustrophobic interiors and hoary-fashioned in-camera effects. Sadly, Adam Sussman’s plan is so thin you can about pure in all respects it.

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Funny pic about a brooding wr…

March 7th, 2010

Funny pic about a brooding wrestler reincarnated as a giant squid is a kind of “Waiting for Godzilla” aimed at the midnight confines. F/x, amounting to men in rubber suits, is proudly of the Ed Wood Lyceum, but tasty tale is served up with a redeeming wink. Astute sketch of Japanese pro wrestling ancient history, couched in terms of island’s postwar congruence problems, give extra context to the tentacle-in-cheek sports spoof. Cult suction should ensue, but it won’t see much overwrought ink.

Koji Taguchi’s (Osamu Nishimura) hard-won wrestling belt is soon snatched away by what looks like a scowling penis with 10 arms (Akira). Koji does his worst to the slimy interloper, by it’s not enough. “Joint holds don’t work on invertebrates,” an unflappable judge explains to breathless reporters. Strangely, the critter reminds Koji’s fiancee (Kana Ishida) of her ex-b.f., who came to a nasty end. Calimari’s revival occasions teeth-gnashing about giant creatures attacking an insecure Japan. But social symbolism doesn’t help when he faces off against yet more cephalopodan contenders.

I haven't read the origi…

March 6th, 2010

I haven't read the original novel by A.S. Byatt, considered her masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of modern British literature, so I can't comment on how faithful an adaptation it is. I've heard from multiple fans of the novel that this is a really terrible adaptation, which dumbs down the source material unforgiveably. That's not the point, anyway, or at least it shouldn't be. Film and literature are different art forms; an attempt to do a "faithful" adaptation of any novel is doomed to failure, since there are things that work on paper that don't work visually. One is often better off attempting to bring forth the spirit and mood of the original novel and streamline the source material, translating it into a visual form. All of this, and I haven't read the book. I want to now, though, which I suppose is an endorsement of the film.

From what I have read, the filmmakers took the liberty of changing some details and dropping others. The novel has been described to me as "sprawling," while the film is compact. One of the main characters, Roland Michell, has been changed from an Irishman into an American, basically because

Neil LaBute

probably wanted to get his favorite actor,

Aaron Eckhart

, into the film. Eckhart plays a lowly research assistant, a budding expert on invented Victorian poet Randolph Ash, who stumbles upon two letters hidden in a book that lead him to suspect that Ash, who was reknowned for his faithfulness to his wife, might have had an affair with a fellow poet, Christabel Lamotte. He approaches the resident expert on Christabel, Maude Bailey (

Gwyneth Paltrow

), with his theories, which she rejects, but she's intrigued nonetheless, especially after tiny clues build up, strengthening Eckhart's case. This new find threatens to overturn over a century of knowledge about both poets, and they set off into the English countryside, tracking the movements of the two poets through letters and diaries left behind. Meanwhile, they haltingly fall in love with each other, although both of them have serious hangups about relationships.

The story of the present-day investigation is interspersed by the story of the lover-poets, played by

Jeremy Northam

and

Jennifer Ehle

. Northam can be very good or simply adequate; he is good here. I don't know Ehle from anything else, but she worked as the waifish protofeminist poet. There is little dialog in these scenes, since the filmmakers decided to illustrate them with Paltrow and Eckhart reading segments of a cache of letters they discover hidden in Christabel's house. This has been done before, but it works really well here. I liked the transitions LaBute used between the present-day and the 1860s; again, they have been used before, but reusing an effective technique is never a cinematic crime.

The film is two parts romance and one part mystery. The "mystery" is really no mystery to us, since we know from the beginning that the film is about the discovery of the affair. The pleasure is in the process by which the modern-day researchers track down the clues. Perhaps I liked this because it appealed to the academic in me. We learn that Ash's devoted wife knew of the affair but did nothing; however, Christabel's lover Blanche (

Lena Headey

), a female painter, did not accept it, to tragic ends.

There were sections of the dialog that I didn't like, especially ones when Eckhart and Paltrow were talking about their relationship difficulties. The old adage "show, don't tell" would have been good advice to the screenwriters. There wasn't a heck of a lot of chemistry between the two of them, but the lushly romantic scenes involving the historical pair make up for it. While it moved a little slowly at first, I enjoyed the deliberate pace, appreciating a film that let the story unfold instead of rushing to predetermined dramatic points in the plot. The last half was simply superb. This is a dramatic change of pace for LaBute, who is best known for his vicious and nihilistic looks at modern relationships. Perhaps this is a sign that he's not so angry anymore; maybe the earlier films were primal scream therapy. This film is proof that, unlike many directors, he can do whatever kind of film he wants.

A day in the life of one branc…

March 4th, 2010

A day in the biography of one branch of chain restaurant Shenanigans sees several of the mostly immature club members facade dear problems. Cocky ladies’ man Monty (Ryan Reynolds) has hopes of seducing the underage Natasha (Vanessa Lengies). Dean (Justin Long) wonders whether to accept a rise to Associated Boss. And Calvin (Robert Patrick Benedict) has problems using the urinal which may be fundamental in deeper frustration. Still, everyone has previously for the purpose the “penis-showing game” …

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Rounders review

March 2nd, 2010

The film was directed by John Dahl, who has made some of the
most irresistible pictures of the past decade. Unlike Dahl’s previous
output (“The Last Seduction,” “Unforgettable”), “Rounders”
isn’t a thriller. It’s a coming-of-age film about a young guy who
finds his true calling as a gambler.

It represents the first effort of screenwriters David Levien
and Brian Koppelman. Like a lot of new writers, they have trouble
finding the drama. They steer the action away from conflict and make
their hero bland. Though the stakes are always high at the gambling
table, they’re pretty low when the film is away from it.

Dahl struggles with the weak script. But he also fails to
capitalize on the one real gift the screenwriters have given him: The
notion that there’s such a thing as a born gambler, a man so gifted
at poker he has no business doing anything else. That’s a big concept
and would seem to call for an equally big approach to the character.
But Dahl has Matt Damon give a laid-back performance.
Damon plays Mike, a law student trying to repress his gambling itch.
As the locus of the movie, Damon is more than fine. He’s a natural
good guy, with an intrinsic integrity. Caring about what happens to
Mike is easy.

But Mike should supply the drive the film otherwise lacks,
and Damon doesn’t. We might believe he can play cards, but we don’t
believe he needs to do it, in the way, say, that the 12-year-old
Mozart needed to write symphonies. He’s not consumed with genius.
He’s a nice guy with a skill.

Even worse, Damon looks more at home in the law school
interludes than he does at the card table. That’s why, in a crucial
scene, when Mike’s law professor (Martin Landau) suggests that his
real metier may be as a gambler, the suggestion seems demented.

Though world-champion poker player Johnny Chan makes a cameo,
“Rounders” isn’t a young hustler versus pro movie. Instead it
reveals itself early on as a kind of “Mean Streets Lite” when
Mike’s best friend, Worm (Edward Norton), gets released from prison
and starts getting into scrapes that Mike has to help him out of.

As Worm, Norton shows what “Mean Streets” might have been
like with Harvey Keitel in the Robert De Niro role. Norton seems to
be imitating Keitel, smiling and wincing, nodding his head and
sounding reasonable while saying the most bizarre things. Norton’s
restless-loser act is technically im
pressive and fun to watch, yet comes off as contrived.

Gretchen Mol holds up the female principle as Mike’s
law-student girlfriend. She might have embodied the rewards of
playing it straight, but the character is a
sanctimonious nag. Mike, instead of being torn by two very different
paths, each with its discrete allure, must instead lumber from one
bland existence to another.

This isn’t to say “Rounders” doesn’t have its moments. The
card games are entertaining in a sports-movie sort of way. Whenever
things get dull, John Malkovich shows up, as a Russian mobster.
Imagine the danger to the scenery with Malkovich turned loose with a
Russian accent.