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FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL 2008
Written by Jason Segel.
Directed by Nicholas Stoller.
Starring Jason Stegel, Kristin Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, Bill Hader, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Da’Vonne McDonald and Taylor Wily.
This is a funny movie about the cruelty of human relationships that succeeds by taking a very democratic approach to comedy.
Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) seems like a lucky guy. He’s got a great job creating the theme music for a TV show and is dating the ultra-hot star of that show, Sarah Marshall (Kristin Bell). The fact that Peter is a fat shlub who sits around his apartment wearing sweatpants and eating cereal out of big steel mixing bowl makes their romance all the more remarkable. That’s why it’s not that surprising when Sarah tells Peter she’s met someone else and it’s over. That sends Peter into a spiral of self-loathing and awkward sexual encounters, which the ineffectual advice of his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) does little to counteract.
Eventually, Peter decides he’s got to get away from it all and heads to Hawaii. Just as he’s trying to get a room at the hotel, Sarah shows up with her new boyfriend, rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). A pretty hotel employee named Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis) rescues Peter from dying of embarrassment by letting him stay in the hotel’s best suite. Rather than run home like any sane person would, Peter decides to say and be tortured by the sight and presence of Sarah. He barely gets through it with the help of some hotel employees and the terrible example of a newlywed couple who act like they barely know each other. Peter eventually asks Rachel out and discovers that there can be romance after Sarah Marshall only to finally realize that Sarah had good reasons to break up with him, reasons that might cost him any chance he has with Rachel.
As I said, this is a funny movie. However, a lot of movies try to be funny, many of them very similar to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in style and attitude. Most of them aren’t funny. The difference is that this film has an actual point and it’s not the one you’d expect. The point of this story isn’t that Peter has to realize what a horrible shrew Sarah is and learn that he deserves better in life. Sarah’s actually portrayed as a fairly decent girl in this film, if a bit self-centered. No, the real villain of this movie is…Peter. It’s his passivity, immaturity and refusal to act like a grown-up that’s the real problem and it’s one that would sabotage his relationship with Rachel as surely as it did with Sarah. The challenge that Peter has to overcome isn’t Sarah, it’s himself.
This script brings that level of sophistication to just about every thing. Sarah’s new boyfriend would have been nothing but a raging douchebag in a lesser film. Here, he has a personal integrity and genuine human emotions that make him likable. Aldous isn’t just an obstacle for Peter to overcome or a target for the audience to hate. He’s a person playing his own role in this interpersonal dynamic.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a sex comedy and it’s pretty raunchy. However, the sex humor is remarkably non-exploitative and it can even get a laugh out of something as simple a guy unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. Writer/star Jason Segel also deserves credit for not giving himself all the best lines. Peter is the butt of the joke more often than not. Segel also engages in some full frontal nudity, which I’m not sure he should get credit for.
It’s hard to describe a comedy by saying much more than “it’s funny”. So many comedies aren’t, though, that you don’t get to say it that often. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is funny. What more can I say?
THE FOUNTAIN (2006)
Written and Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
Starring Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weitz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Magoli, Stephen McHattie and Sean Patrick Thomas.
Watching this film is like taking a long, slow, scenic drive that ends with your car going over a cliff and plunging into a bottomless pit of stupid. Writer/director Darren Aronofsky takes the snippets of three primitive, baldly melodramatic stories and mushes them together to try and create something new and smart and deep. He fails on all three counts.
Tommy (Hugh Jackman) is a medical researcher trying to find a way to cure the brain tumor that is killing his wife Izzi (Rachel Weitz) when he happens to discover the secret of eternal life. Izzi is writing a novel about the embattled Queen of Spain (also Rachel Weitz) sending a brave and loyal conquistador (also Hugh Jackman) to find a mythical tree in South America that can grant eternal life. We’re also presented with a bald and pajama-clad Tommy, after some indeterminate eternity has passed, flying through space in what appears to be a giant, novelty bowling ball with a tree growing inside it. He’s taking the tree to a star that represented the Mayan afterlife where he expects Izzi to be reborn in some never explained way.
As a story that contrasts both the romantic and the practical pursuits of immortality with the end result of that pursuit, The Fountain isn’t that bad. The individual plot threads are simple but direct and affecting. Aronofsky also crafts some marvelous imagery through the movie. But it’s all fairly weak treacle that needs a big, mind-blowing ending to make it all worthwhile.
To his credit, Aronofsky tries to pull off a big, mind-blowing ending. But like a cross-eyed cliff diver, he hits the rocks and he hits them hard. The conclusion of The Fountain isn’t big, it’s overblown. It’s not mind-blowing, it’s nonsensical. Instead of making you appreciate all that’s come before, it makes you regret sitting through any of it. Aronofsky reaches out for meaning, but what he pulls back are two handfuls of hog manure.
I would have liked to have been there to see Aronofsky try and explain the conclusion of The Fountain to the actors, the producers, the marketing people at the studio and pretty much anyone at all. It would have been fun to see which of them pretended they understood what he was saying and which ones just let their eyes glaze over. It would have also been neat to see how many different BS explanations Aronofsky practiced in front of his mirror until he had one that he thought he could sell.
If you compressed The Fountain down into a half-hour, like it was an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, the cleverness of the premise itself would be enough to sustain the story. When you stretch it out to 96 minutes, however, it needs a lot more than that and Aronofsky doesn’t provide. The result is a crappy movie with extraordinary production values that’s will only captivate budding cinematographers.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD (or, Ayn Rand is One Socially Maladjusted Broad) 1949
Written by Ayn Rand. Directed by King Vidor.
Starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey and Robert Douglas.
I once read a book called The Iron Dream. It was written by Adolph Hitler. Well, of course it wasn’t really written by Adolph Hitler but the premise of the book was that Hitler had never gone into politics. Instead he had become a writer of crappy sci-fi and a story called Lords of the Swastika was his masterpiece, a tale of a chosen one who leads an Aryan master race in its struggle against a disgusting, hidden enemy that controls the whole world. The idea being that the writing displays all of the irrational, obsessive, childish, fetishistic and massively melodramatic hate and anger in Hitler’s heart, but poured into a book instead of splashed all over Europe. The Fountainhead is sort of like that, except Ayn Rand actually was a hugely screwed up woman who did become a crank writer and philosopher instead of trying to take over the world.
Rand thinks The Fountainhead is telling the heroic story of the superior individual struggling against the mediocre mob. Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) is a brilliant architect whose designs are too modern and too good for the masses. Unable to get any work while lesser men prosper and hounded out of his profession by a newspaper crusade, he goes to work in a stone quarry and encounters Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), a woman that even in 1949 had to look deeply, deeply disturbed to any reasonable audience. She hates the world, wishes to be completely divorced from it and fears the idea of love because it threatens her desperate clutch on her own individuality. She is instantly consumed by a massive, self-loathing attraction to Roark. But he leaves her and the quarry behind as Roark is suddenly able to get so much work that he become enormously successful and famous. He’s even hired to design a house by the very craven newspaper tycoon who crusaded against him. The movie casts Roark as so undeniably awesome that the tycoon can’t help but worship his greatness. Eventually, Roark agrees to design a housing project in secret and give the money and credit to a lesser mind. But when the people paying for the project make changes to Roark’s work, he blows it all up and goes on trial, where he ends up giving the least inspiring courtroom speech not just in the history of law, but in the history of the spoken word.
What you have to understand about The Fountainhead is that it is not a work of entertainment in any way. It is propaganda meant to advance the philosophy of Ayn Rand. That philosophy is, essentially, selfishness is good, there’s no problem in the world that can’t be fixed by people being more self-centered and that great individuals must constantly war against the mass of Humanity that seeks to pull them down. This film pounds those ideas into your brain over and over and over and over. There’s is nothing in this movie that exists except to advance that agenda. There is no dialog, only diatribes. There is no acting, only emotional and intellectual pantomime. There are no characters, only caricatures. There is no reality, only Ayn Rand’s pathetic vision.
One of the ways you can tell when someone is really, truly and gigantically messed up is when they can describe what’s wrong with them without ever realizing that’s what they’re doing. In one scene, the newspaper tycoon describes Roark as the dream of personal greatness the tycoon had when he was 16…but neither the tycoon nor the film understand that the fevered dreams of a 16 year old are completely ridiculous in the grown up light of day. The philosophy this movie screeches at you with every frame is something a bright but mentally frustrated, spiritually stunted, emotionally crippled teenager would come up with. It’s a world where everyone should be as selfish as they possibly can be…and absolutely nothing bad ever comes of it. In The Fountainhead, anyone who can’t abide that sort of world is just weak and stupid and corrupt.
If you’ve ever been interested in Rand’s thoughts but didn’t want to slog through one of her books, this movie is a great option. Gary Cooper tries hard to turn Roark from an automaton into a real person and the film also gets points for having the World’s Greatest Combination of Writer and Director Names. Ayn Rand and King Vidor sound like something out of a Japanese monster movie. But if the cinematic equivalent of having a street corner crackpot lecture you for two hours on “how the world should be” isn’t appealing, definitely skip The Fountainhead.
FRACTURE 2007
Written by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers.
Directed by Gregory Hoblit.
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, Rosamund Pike, Billy Burke, Embeth Davidtz, David Strathairn, Cliff Curtis and Xander Berkeley.
This film has some of the worst screenwriting you’ll even encounter. Its striving for dour solemnity can’t disguise its laughably shallow characters, backasswards structure and arbitrarily unsatisfying ending. This courtroom drama also has a grand total of just two twists and each one is telegraphed a half hour before it happens. I don’t mean that if you watch Fracture closely you can pick up on little clues that let you know what the twists will be. I mean the movie literally tells you what the twists will be in such explicit fashion that when they actually occur, you barely notice it.
Be forewarned. This review will reveal most of the alleged surprises in this story. It’s necessary to make you understand just how terrible this thing is and the film does such an effective job spoiling its own surprises, I don’t feel bad about it.
Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) is a wealthy engineer whose much younger wife is cheating on him. After spying on Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz) and her lover at their hotel bungalo, Ted shoots Jennifer in the head when she gets home. The cops surround Ted’s house and the detective in charge of the situation, Rob Nunally (Billy Burke), turns out to be Jennifer’s lover. Ted provokes Rob into attacking him before being taken into custody.
Now after that beginning, you would probably expect Fracture to be a taught and complex cat-and-mouse game between Ted and Rob. It’s not. The movie now introduces its real main character, ambitious young assistant DA Willie Beachum (Ryan Gosling). On his way out of the prosecutor’s office to take a job with a high-priced law firm, a job he scammed his way into through nefarious means, Willie gets handed the Crawford case. Jennifer survived the shooting, so it seems like an open and shut case of attempted murder. They’ve got Crawford’s gun and they’ve got a confession from him. But then it turns out the gun police took from Crawford isn’t the murder weapon. And because Rob was involved in getting Ted’s confession, that gets thrown out of court when Ted reveals Rob and Jennifer’s affair in the middle of the trial.
And there’s the first twist, which I don’t understand in the least. Neither Willie nor anyone else in the story knows about Jennifer and Rob’s affair. But the audience knows about it and the audience knows that Ted knows about it. So, there’s absolutely no doubt in any viewer’s mind that at some point, Ted is going to spill the beans and destroy Willie’s case. Which means when it happens, there’s no emotional or dramatic impact to it at all. It’s like waiting half an hour for someone to tell you the punch line to a joke you already know. And what makes this an especially egregious example of bad screenwriting is that you can’t help but think that if the audience hadn’t already been shown the affair, if the motive for the shooting were left a mystery, it would have been a very effective and shocking development. It’s like writers Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers came up with a neat idea and then did everything in their power to destroy it.
After Ted’s “revelation”, Willie’s case goes in the crapper and Ted goes free. This sends Willie into a tailspin, which might have been interesting if the film had given the audience any reason to give a crap about Willie, and ends with him ready to leave town after Ted has the plug pulled on the comatose Jennifer. Willie’s DA boss shows up to lamely try and console him. When Willie asks how he can live with letting a man get away with murder, the DA corrects him that Ted was only tried for attempted murder.
And the second those words are out of the DA’s mouth, anyone with a functioning brain knows exactly what the second and final twist of Fracture will be. You know that Willie’s going to find the evidence of Ted’s guilt, Ted’s going to taunt him with double jeopardy and Willie’s going to tell him that only means Ted can’t be tried for attempted murder again, but he can be charged and convicted for murder. Yet even though the viewer figures all that out in a few seconds, this film grinds on for another half hour before getting to it. How screenwriters Pyne and Gers didn’t realize they blatantly spoiled their own twists is a question I can’t answer. Maybe they’re stupid. Maybe they were on drugs. Maybe they were trying to test how stupid other people were. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t good enough to justify this crap.
Anthony Hopkins does a fine job in Fracture, as he almost always does, but after giving Ted a big build up, the script reduces him to something between supporting character and walk-on cameo. Billy Burke is okay as Rob but again, starts out as a significant character and then turns into little more than a paper weight after Willie joins the story. The icily pretty Rosamund Pike does all she can with an awful role. She plays Nicky Gardner, Willie’s prospective boss at the high-priced law firm and Nicky is one of the most romantically moronic women in the history of cinema. After a 45 second conversation and one meaningful look, she falls so completely in love with Willie that she’s willing to risk her own career to help him out. There are dogs down at the animal shelter that are two days away from being euthanized that are more discriminating with their affection.
Fracture was obviously intended to be a star vehicle for Ryan Gosling, but it turns into a black hole because he has nothing to work with in the role of Willie. This guy is a void except for an inexplicable Southern accent. Since the story is set in Los Angeles, the first thing a hard charging striver like Willie would have done to get ahead in LA would have been to lose that damn accent. But since it’s the only depth or notable feature the character possesses, the audience is stuck listening to it for the whole movie.
Fracture is one of those films that is so flawed you wonder how the heck it ever got made. I will admit that the way they explain the missing murder weapon is fairly clever. It’s too bad that little trick couldn’t have found its way into a much better movie.
FRAILTY 2001
Written by Brent Hanley.
Directed by Bill Paxton.
Starring Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe, Matt O’Leary, Jeremy Sumpter, Luke Askew, Levi Kreis and Derk Cheetwood.
There have been a lot of coming-of-age films made. Some of them have been sweet, some sad and some wistful. Frailty is probably the most terrifying and unsettling coming-of-age movie of all time, a near brilliant perspective on just how jarring and awful the transition from child to adult can be…and how that journey doesn’t always end up in the place we want it to.
On a rainy night in Dallas, a man calling himself Fenton Meeks (Matthew McConaughey) walks into FBI headquarters and insists on seeing the agent in charge of the search for the God’s Hand killer. Fenton tells FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe) that the serial murderer is Fenton’s brother. Doyle is understandably dubious. In his law enforcement experience, people don’t just walk in and tell you who the killer is. So Fenton has to explain it to him. He tells Doyle the story of his childhood, how young Fenton (Matt O’Leary) and his three years younger brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) were happy living behind the public rose garden in Thurman, Texas with their mechanic father (Bill Paxton). At least they were happy, until their father walked into the boys’ room and told them he’d been visited by an angel and given a holy mission to destroy demons in the world.
Dad tells Fenton and Adam that God has given him a list of people who aren’t people and will command him to exterminate them using a metal pipe, a pair of work gloves and an ax with the name Otis carved into the handle. And it’s not just Dad’s job. Fenton and Adam are to help as well. At first, Fenton tries to deny what’s happened to his family. But when he sees his dad out by the shed in the middle of the night with a woman bound and gagged at his feet, Fenton can’t deny it any longer. Dad claims that when he touches these people their demonic nature is revealed and young Adam, seemingly caught up in his father’s madness, claims he sees that too. All Fenton sees is innocent people being butchered by his father. Adult Fenton tells Agent Doyle that he tried everything he could think of to stop the killings, but Agent Doyle knows there’s something Fenton isn’t telling him. Something shocking and unbelievable. Something Fenton has to show Agent Doyle so he can truly understand the story of the Meeks family.
Frailty is very smartly written, well acted and looks really good. The story cleverly blends a child’s loss of innocence with the more mature concept of falling away from God and ties it all up in chains of gothic horror. It eschews cheap scare tactics in favor of a pervasive sense of dread that flows under even the sunniest of circumstances. There’s a quiet strength to all of the performances, particularly Matt O’Leary. The fear and conflict he shows in Fenton when his father, the center of his existence, apparently transforms into a murderous lunatic feels deep and true. His struggle to escape this impossible, insane situation is as frightening as any of Dad’s ax murders. Bill Paxton also does some impressive work, letting the audience see just enough of the father’s humanity to make him relatable but still giving him a frightening unknowability. Paxton’s direction is just as impressive. He bestows upon the movie a leisurely pace, like a more normal coming-of-age story, which only emphasizes the creepiness and unease of this bizarre tale. Paxton demonstrates a fine visual sense as well, crafting scenes of such awful normality that they’re scarier than the blood-drenched slaughterfests of a thousand lesser films.
Frailty is a dark and violent movie. However, there is very little gore and not even that much bad language. There’s virtually nothing about this movie that is exploitative or sensational, in the worst sense of that word. It’s not simply content to stoke the baser emotions, but aspires to provoke an intellectual uncertainty that’s much harder to shake. Most horror films are aimed at teenagers and relatively stupid teenagers at that. This is a horror movie for grown ups and I highly recommend it.
FRANKENSTEIN 1931
Written by Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh.
Directed by James Whale.
Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Boris Karloff, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr, Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore and Marilyn Harris.
In addition to being a true classic in every technical sense of the word, Frankenstein is also surprisingly entertaining for a film made about 8 decades ago. Yes, there are certain aspects to it that haven’t aged well, but you can say that about most everything that’s been around longer than 2 or 3 generations. There are also aspects to this movie as good or better than anything made today, earning Frankenstein its standing as one of the progenitors of the entire horror genre.
I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone much over the age of 6 to be unfamiliar with this story. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is the obsessed scientist seeking to usurp the place of God and bestow life onto unliving tissue. He and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) stitch together an awful creature (Boris Karloff) out of a collection of corpses and the abnormal brain of a criminal. But though Frankenstein succeeds in his experiment, his monster proves to be more than he can handle. It escapes into the countryside and arouses a mob of torch bearing villagers that traps both creator and creation in an old windmill, with terrible results.
Just about everyone who’s ever watched any film has probably seen part of the famous scene where Henry Frankenstein proclaims “It’s alive. It’s alive!”. That’s somewhat unfortunate, because taken out of context it likely strikes most as over-the-top histrionics. If you actually watch Frankenstein, you can recognize it as a definitely brilliant bit of acting that highlights an electrifying performance by Colin Clive. Few actors in the history of cinema have ever embodied obsession more powerfully than Clive does here, up to and including Frankenstein’s almost orgasmic sense of relief when his obsession is finally realized. Clive creates THE archetypal mad scientist; a man who is not evil but whose pursuit of discovery renders him insensate and incapable of appreciating any moral or ethical limitations.
It is Boris Karloff’s work as the creature that gets most of the popular praise instead of Clive, which I don’t think is fair, but Karloff is certainly remarkable on his own terms. He’s as much mime as thespian in this role and conveys a real mix of humanity and the unnatural. Those fundamental human dimensions are what distinguish the creature from the increasingly inhuman monsters that would follow him in horror films.
This is also a beautiful film to look at. Modern technology allows filmmakers to stick a camera anywhere and do anything with it. Director James Whale had much less sophisticated technology to work with, yet was inspired by the things he couldn’t do to produce some completely captivating images. With moving the camera being a challenge, Whale had huge, great looking sets created and filmed his actors largely in full figure as they went back and forth, up and down through those sets. It is a joy to watch Clive, Boris Karloff and Dwight Frye act with their whole bodies, not just their faces and parts of their torsos. If anything, the passage of time that had led to the relentless use of frenetic camera movement and extreme close ups makes Frankenstein look even better today than it did in 1931.
Whale brings an interesting take on mob violence to this movie as well. In the story, the mob of villagers represents the forces of law and society rising up to deal with the terrifying threat of Frankenstein’s monster. However, Whale doesn’t shy away from showing the ugly, irrational face of the mob. In Whale’s hands, their actions may be justified but he makes the audience very aware of the uncontrolled danger that’s ready to erupt from these men.
As I mentioned, some of this movie is quite dated. The profoundly non-Germanic nature of this cast of Germanic character is fairly ridiculous. Frederick Kerr as Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s father, is a rather bizarre character. He’s like a crotchety old man from a vaudeville routine and plays far too prominent a role in the story. Mae Clarke as Henry’s fiancee and John Boles as their friend are also fine examples of the somewhat mannered acting styles of their era. However, Edward Van Sloan as Henry’s mentor and Dwight Frye as his hunchbacked assistant are much livelier and more direct in their performances.
If Frankenstein were 2 hours long or more, the dated elements of the production might have overwhelmed it. At just about 70 minutes long, the outstanding components of the story and its presentation are still able to shine. Even though you’ve probably absorbed most of this movie through cultural osmosis, Frankenstein remains a must-see.
FREEZE FRAME 2004
Written and Directed by John Simpson.
Starring Lee Evans, Sean McGinley, Rachel Stirling, Ian McNeice and Colin Salmon.
I usually prefer the entertaining to the artistic in movies, but Freeze Frame is the first film that I think would have been better if it had been less commercial and more idiosyncratic.
Almost 10 years ago, Sean Veil (Lee Evans) was accused of a horrible triple murder he didn’t commit. The case against him was thrown out of court because of the media grandstanding by lead detective Louis Emoric (Sean McGinley) and forensic psychologist Saul Seger (Ian McNeice). Since that day, Sean has been consumed by paranoia, fearful of the authorities framing him for another murder. His response to his fear is as obvious as it is disturbing. For nearly a decade, Sean has been videotaping every single second of his life. He has multiple cameras stationed throughout his dungeon-like home. When he goes outside, he straps a camera to his chest. Sean has created a visual record of every step, every meal, every night’s sleep, every bowel movement, everything in his life for 9 years, 11 months and 28 days and stores all of those videotapes in a vault to provide him with the perfect alibi if he’s ever wrongly accused again.
Sean might have gone on with his fearful and compulsive existence forever, but then a TV crime reporter named Katie Carter (Rachel Stirling) tells Sean she thinks he’s innocent. That’s what Sean has wanted more than anything in the world but he barely has time to enjoy it when the police burst in and accuse him of killing a woman 5 years ago. When Sean goes to get the tapes proving his innocence…they’re gone. In a panic, Sean flees from the cops and tries to come up with another way to deflect this unjust charge but in doing so, he sets in motion a chain of events that not only reveal who’s framing him now, but who framed him for the massacre of the Jasper family 10 years ago.
This is a nice little film that’s quite visually interesting. Some of it is shot like a normal film and some of it is footage from the many cameras Sean uses to record his life. It’s a very good effort at utilizing the emotional and personal realism of the “handheld video” genre while freeing the story from the limitations of that style.
Lee Evans does a fine job portraying a man whose obsession for control and protection has warped his personality. Sean McGinley gives the right air of desperation to a cop who is fighting off his own death long enough to catch Sean Veil and make him pay for something. Ian McNiece is also perfectly self-righteous as the psychologist who catapulted himself to fame on the Jasper murder case. Rachel Stirling’s character is more of a plot device than a real person, but she handles well everything the plot needs Katie Carter to do.
Freeze Frame, however, doesn’t do enough with its own concept. The idea of a man so paranoid that he voluntarily lives under perpetual video surveillance of his own design suggests an awful lot of emotional and logistical ground to cover, but almost all of those details or possibilities are shoved aside because the film is more about being a clever mystery caper. The story only touches on Sean Veil’s elaborate construction of his observation system in the most basic and shallow way. We also never get a sense of what kind of man Sean was before his initial arrest and the following years of obsessive personal vigilance, so there’s nothing to compare to his present paranoid state. It limits the ability to sympathize with Sean because you don’t really know how screwed up he is compared to his original self. I think the story would have been more effective if it had chucked most of the mystery and instead concentrated more on the way Sean lives his life and how it’s changed him as a person.
There are also a couple of significant twists in the story that don’t add up. There’s one element that couldn’t exist in the American media and justice system, but this is an Irish film and I’m not sure if Irish laws on crime reporting are different enough to make the twist plausible. The climax is also too pat and neat and requires a character’s behavior and mental state to flip 180 degrees for absolutely no reason.
You won’t be disappointed if you watch Freeze Frame, but you may feel like you’ve just seen a good idea that went largely unexplored.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1971
Written by Ernest Tidyman.
Directed by William Friedkin.
Starring Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco, Marcel Bozuffi, Eddie Egan, Harold Gray, Frederic De Pasquale and Sonny Grosso.
If you only look at The French Connection as an ordinary cops-n-robbers drama from the early 1970s, it’s okay with some startling violence and one really good chase scene. When you consider that it won a Best Picture Oscar, you’re forced to wonder what the Academy voters were smoking that year and whether you can get any of it for your self.
Here’s the rather skimpy plot of the movie. Loud mouthed, bullying narcotics detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) drags his coat rack of a partner “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) to a night club. They spot a table full of criminals with one guy they don’t recognize. “Popeye” and “Cloudy” start following that guy, which leads to them following other guys, which leads to even more following of various sorts until all the crooks and all the cops end up at the same huge heroin deal. And that’s…pretty much it. Throw in a lively performance by Hackman as the sort of flawed anti-hero that still seemed fresh and new in the early 70s, an outstanding car vs. subway chase and an ending that strives for social commentary and you’ve got a film that’s still a decent piece of entertainment all these decades later. But is this something worthy of an Academy Award for Best Picture? Not unless every other movie out that year was made by Ed Wood.
Since The French Connection first hit theaters the year I was born, it’s almost impossible for me to appreciate what affect it had on people back then. Whatever it was that the audience and the critics responded to, however, it hasn’t aged all that well. The plot is almost painfully simple. The only characters that get to do more than mouth expository dialog are “Popeye” Doyle and French drug dealer Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). The movie is filled with long, slow sequences where somebody is following somebody else. These aren’t chase scenes. I mean one guy walking and another guy walking behind him or one guy driving and another guy driving behind him. These multiple following scenes go on forever, have no dialog and nothing happens expect ordinary movement. Even the mystery involving the hidden heroin shipment and the big drug deal is more explained to the viewer than solved.
Which isn’t to say The French Connection is a bad or unentertaining movie. It’s focus on the unglamorous and tedious legwork of investigation is unusual enough to keep your attention at first blush, though I think I’d be bored out of my mind if I watched the film again. Hackman is engaging as a cop who thinks his badge gives him license to do whatever he wants out on the street. And that car vs. subway chase is very impressive by modern standards, which means it had to have been astonishing in its own era.
If you’re looking for a classic crime drama, I don’t think I can recommend this film. It’s too much a candidate for “Long Attention Span Theater” and most folks under the age of 40 won’t be able to discern what made The French Connection so noteworthy in its day. But if all you want is some decent cops-and-robbers storytelling or you’re doing a scholarly thesis on cinema of the 1970s, this movie will fit the bill.
(2009) FRIDAY THE 13TH
Written by Damian Shannan and Mark Swift.
Directed by Marcus Nispel.
Starring Jared Padelecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti, Travis Von Winkle, Aaron Yoo, Derek Mears, Jonathan Sadowski, Julianna Guill, Julianna Guill’s stupendous breasts, Ben Feldman, Arlen Escarpeta, Ryan Hansen, Willa Ford, Nick Hennell, America Olivo, Kyle Davis and Richard Burgi.
Essentially a Cliffs Notes version of the first three Friday the 13th movies, this remake is less of a story and more of a conveyor belt. It hums along, bringing graphic violence and bare boobs to the screen with soulless efficiency. It’s all so mechanical that you can’t feel anything for the killer or his victims, though the knockers are impressive enough to rouse some interest.
The film starts with a 60 second version of the first Friday the 13th flick, the next 20 minutes is essentially the 2nd film which introduces Jason (Derek Mears) slaughtering a bunch of horny, ganja-seeking young people and then the movie introduces yet another gaggle of youth for Jason to slaughter. That’s pretty much it. These filmmakers try to tie it all together by having the brother of one of the first group of doomed kids join up with the second group while searching for his missing sister, but that’s about as thin as a dime that’s been run over by a train. This movie isn’t really anything more than people getting killed and chicks getting naked. Each is done with a certain technical skill, but it’s all as dry and lifeless as a shrunken head.
The Rob Zombie remakes of Halloween were just awful. I mean…oh my goodness, they were just awful. To his credit, though, Zombie did try and do something different with the story. He tried to add things or explore the ideas underlying the films. Now, pretty much all of the things he added were stupid and unwanted and his intellectual explorations were as fumbling as a teenage boy trying to unhook his first bra. But at least he made the effort to make Halloween films that were different in some way than what was made before.
There’s nothing different about this Friday the 13th remake. Nothing’s really been added. Nothing’s really been changed. There’s no attempt to rethink Jason or Camp Crystal Lake or his victims or how he kills them or anything else. This movie is almost like a primer, teaching the audience the basics of Jason Voorhees and his rampages so that a later film can come along and actually do something interesting with the concept with the viewers already brought up to speed.
I do have to give director Marcus Nispel some credit. The outbursts of violence in this film are quite dynamic and well done. However, they’re not at all frightening. They’re like very brutal action scenes from a Mel Gibson or Sylvester Stallone flick. In fact, the whole film is remarkably unscary. There’s a lot of stabbing and screaming but no dread or terror or apprehension about what might come next.
I must also salute Julianna Guill for showing off her very impressive rack for an extended period of time. She appears to be a decent actress, given her small and simplistic role as “hot chick who has sex and gets killed”, but her bosom belongs in the Movie Mammary Hall of Fame.
This Friday the 13th isn’t a shot-for-shot remake like Gus Van Sant’s ill-conceived version of Psycho, but that same spirit of mindless copying is what animates this film. The result is a movie that, while not aggressively terrible, is almost utterly without merit.
FROZEN RIVER 2008
Written and Directed by Courtney Hunt.
Starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, James Reilly, Michael O’Keefe, John Canoe, Dylan Carusona, Craig Shilowich and Mark Boone Junior.
Frozen River is a small, delicate film about two women and the lengths they go to for their families. It’s a quiet story of mostly quiet moments that will touch you if you open your heart to it.
Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is a woman who looks like she’s lived a rough life and she still is. Her gambling addict husband has abandoned her and their two sons a week before Christmas, taking with him the down payment for their new doublewide trailer. Left with only her part-time job at a local five-and-dime in their town on the U.S./ Canadian border, Ray has no idea how she’s going to get enough money for her family. She just keeps going until she runs into Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a young woman from the nearby Indian reservation. Lila drags Ray into the business of smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S., across a frozen river within the boundaries of the reservation. Ray becomes an enthusiastic smuggler, seeing the money she gets as the only way she can grab and hold onto her little dreams. Lila loses her taste for it, though, after recognizing all the money she could get won’t help her reclaim her one year old son from her mother-in-law. The cops eventually tumble into Ray and Lila’s scheme and one of these women will have to sacrifice herself for the other and her family.
Frozen River is a good little movie that focuses on a few weeks in the life of working class America. This is the life of people who live in mobile homes or campers, who have big screen TVs from Rent-To-Own, walk to work along the highway and whose wildest dream isn’t winning the lottery, it’s having enough money to have insulation in their trailer so the pipes won’t freeze. These are folks who literally live from paycheck to paycheck and don’t have time for emotions like despair or fear or joy except in brief moments. This is an America you don’t see much of in the media unless it’s being made fun of.
Frozen River succeeds on the strength of Melissa Leo’s performance. Misty Upham’s Lila is too stoic and impassive. All the heavy emotional lifting is left to Leo’s Ray and she beautifully carries the load. She gives the role an uncomplicated and unflattering sincerity. Ray is a woman who has to work so hard getting herself and her family from one crisis to another that she doesn’t have time to worry about anything else. Leo has a very nice relationship on screen with Charlie McDermott as Ray’s teenaged son. You can feel the love and tension between a young man who’s desperate to help his family and the mother who wants just as desperately to spare him that burden.
Frozen River is a heartfelt and reflective but very grim tale. It’s not exactly fun to watch, but it is engaging. It makes you wish bigger, broader movies were done with this level of artistic care and integrity. If you’re looking for that will make you think and feel, instead of just react, give it a try. |
