Valentine's Day  Weekend



Valentine's Day Weekend opens with two great movies...

The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins, is a nonstop thriller set in Victorian England. Beautifully shot with memorable dialogue. Del Toro, last seen playing Argentine guerilla Che Guevara, shows how far his range as an actor can go. Emily Blunt plays the annoying damsel in distress. Best line is by the investigator from Scotland Yard, addressed to the laissez faire and the fascist among us: "Rules, Mrs. Kirk, you know. They're all that keep us from a dog eat dog world".

Los Angeles residents can take a jaunt to the California Science Center to see The Ultimate Wave Tahiti 3D. Featuring surfing champion Kelly Slater, this movie will have you clutching at the screen. As soon as I donned the comically large 3D glasses I felt like I was swimming in the Tahitian waters. One little girl in the row ahead of me got up and started grabbing at the fish that she thought were right above her head. The three-dimensional effects are that good. Pencil this in as good entertainment for the liberal family. Tahiti is beautiful, which explains to me why the French painter Paul Gauguin gave up his life as a banker to live there. Not only does the movie edify us with the scientific basis for a giant wave, but we are treated to the phenomenal surfing abilities of Slater and his death-defying surf buddies. For a New Yorker who has been searching for the big waves ever since he got to California, I had a blast. The movie is practically a kinesthetic experience.  (Bardel)

written by Justin Haythe
directed by Sam Mendes
starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio


What if the hopes and dreams of marriage and the nuclear family turned out to be empty?

Revolutionary Road is a critique of the 1950s American Dream, which in many ways lives on today.

This dream, critics say, is the hopeless existence of suburbia where man wins the bread whilst woman stays home barefoot and pregnant taking care of house.

Winslet and DiCaprio storm the picket fence and blow open the door of the tidy house that is middle class life in tour de force performances. Dark, funny, compelling.

The surreal breakfast table scene must be viewed. I laughed hysterically and saw the deep irony in this ostensibly sad portrayal.

Revolutionary Road is the second movie in the last year, following Jada Pinkett's The Human Contract, that seriously critiques monogamy, as each movie is perhaps calling for a brave new world of bisexuality and openness.

It is clear now that DiCaprio is a great actor and has been since, at the tender age of nineteen, he portrayed a mentally handicapped youth in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He quickly followed that with renditions of poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse and Jim Caroll in Basketball Diaries. Throughout the years he has used the craft of acting - in the manner of Brando at his best - to make a serious critique of the society we live in: Gangs of New York, Blood Diamond, Body of Lies, Departed, The Aviator, Catch Me if You Can.

Then, of course, there's the matter of that movie he did about a boat.

STREETS OF BLOOD

written by Claudio Carvalho

directed by Charles Winkler

starring Val Kilmer, 50 Cent and Sharon Stone

What’s worse: corrupt cops, Latin Kings or the ravages of Hurricane Katrina?

 

Enter a post-hurricane city which has plunged into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. The Four Horsemen trample over the misbegotten streets where no one can be trusted and no one dares to come out at night, unless you are a drug kingpin, pimp or cop.

 

This is a city rivaling Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

A police psychologist Nina Ferarro, played by Sharon Stone, interviews members of the New Orleans Police Department after a slew of lethal shootings, including the killing of an FBI agent. Ferarro can’t be trusted either. She has gotten orders from the police chief, played by Barry Henley, to weed out potential rats.

 

Feeling the heat of an FBI investigation into his department, the Chief says to Ferraro: “I got the Feds so tight on my ass I feel like I got on J. Edgar Hoover’s g-string.”

 

Enter Andy Devereaux and Stan Green, played by Val Kilmer and 50 Cent respectively, two cops on the beat who disregard the rule of probable cause and feel like warrants are unnecessary scraps of paper. Their attitude, which allows them to sublimate their innumerable crimes, is that they are the only ones standing between civilization and the end of the world. In their view, the barbarians circle their city and it is “us against them”.

 

Green says to Ferraro: “Guys like Andy and me, we’re all that stands between you and the end of the motherfucking world.”

We've gotten used to seeing Kilmer in B-movies as of late yet he brings season and credibility to this low-budget flick. This time he plays a mean son of a gun, with a nose that the makeup department (I assume) turned into a meatball. 50 Cent, aka Curtis Jackson, on the other hand, does an amateur job at playing a corrupt cop and family man and is sometimes painful to watch.

 

The Latin Kings rule the night, taking over an abandoned school for summit meetings with other drug lords and turning it into a den of iniquity, with drugs and orgies. The Kings decide who deals drugs and who can walk the street at night, ruthlessly killing anyone who gets in their path.

 

But we don’t know who’s worse, the lawbreakers or the law themselves, as the police of the Mid-City district compete with the drug lords for depravity. “I’m from Mid-City where we eat our dead,” says one corrupt cop. They set people up, jack drug dealers, intimidate and fuck their suspects, forcing one female crackhead to suck on the end a rifle to stay out of trouble.

 

Devereaux, goateed and looking mean like a lone wolf, says to Green: “When they see the flames come out of my shotgun, the devil himself won’t be able to shoot straight.”

 

The movie revives the cheap B-movies of the seventies, lots of blood and a plot that favors action over realism. Some scenarios seem improbable but it is true enough that the Big Easy is now the murder capital of the world, with large swaths of the city abandoned. One thing missing from the movie, however, is the National Guard and military that have patrolled the city for years, making the actions of the Latin Kings impossible.

Streets of Blood, written by Brazilian writer Claudio Carvalho, elevates to the level of science-fiction, equaling Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest for intensity in portraying corruption and bloodletting murder. But what more can you expect from a writer that hails from Rio de Janiero, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, who has been doing TV dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Gallactica. The movie, directed by actor-turned-director Charles Winkler, simultaneously exploits and calls attention to a city that has suffered, as President George Bush says in the movie, the worst storm in U.S. history.

Ironically, New Orleans might have suffered from the worst neglect in U.S. history as it was the weak busted levees not the storm that caused eighty-percent of the city to flood.

Winkler does a good job opening the movie, establishing the apocalyptic setting. The voices of renegade journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez speak over scenes of massive inundations of water and people standing on rooftops. Then later on giving it that N'Awlins mood with obligatory scenes of trumpet players, classy French Quarter architecture, the streetcar, tangled oak trees and FEMA trailer parks.

But for all of its B-level cheesiness, the movie is a serious attempt to examine the veil of silence that shrouds police departments, especially one like the NOPD. As Ferraro snaps back at the police chief: “Is your duty to the law less important than your duty to these men?”

 

KING KONG

Reviewed by Louis Bardel

Directed by Peter Jackson

2003

King Kong knows how to make the ladies scream.

He’s thrilling, ferocious, gentle, and passionate. He even saves a damsel in distress. Basically he’s Marlon Brando in a fur coat.

 

Uber man! And he’s in love with a beautiful blonde.

 

But like Romeo who can never truly have Juliet, Kong can never truly have his beautiful blondie. For starters, his lips are bigger than her whole head.

 

Kong is mad, bad and dangerous to know, which is why the natives in the movie offer up blondie as a sacrifice to him. He takes away his beauty deep into the jungle, fights off freakish creatures and dinosaurs (a la Jurassic Park) and beauty and the beast fall in love. But the humans will not let this bestial romance last long. They do all they can to stop King Kong and enslave him for their monetary interests.

 

From beginning to end, the flick makes your heart beat and leaves you at the edge of your seat. Filmmakers must have brushed up on their Joseph Campbell and the myths of the ages as we see a National Geographic magazine transformed into a berserk combination of voodoo, prehistoric beasts and Gauguin.

 

The movie is a masterpiece, a super metaphor for man, love, and all things social. Whether it is the army launching missiles at Kong as the beauty and the beast enjoy a loving moment in Central Park ice skating, or whether it is a crew of sailors and one Hollywood madman (Jack Black) dragging the monkey back to NYC for a lucrative freak show with Kong at the center, this story never stops telling us truths about ourselves.

 

The movie is hilarious when viewed as a romantic tragedy, but it is also adeptly paced with masterful special effects.

 

Viewers will squirm in their seat as the man-eating snails slowly devour a man’s head or gaze with delight at the majestic views of New York. The skies are wonderful backdrops to the mighty Kong who climbs to the top of the Chrysler building and beats his chest like the alpha monkey he really is – the king of the urban jungle.

 

But aren’t we all monkeys? Don’t we still have remnants of a tail bone?

 

It is nearly impossible to give away the story. Unless you are very young, you have heard the tale of King Kong, which has been made three times in the United States and then again in various Japanese and Mexican incarnations. The original screenplay, put together by committee as many Hollywood films are, is loaded with scenes ready to be milked. The latest version, done in 2003, starring Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, Evan Parke, and directed by Peter Jackson is a three-hour and eight minute roller coaster. Director Jackson creates a textbook example of how to build up suspense and then deliver.

 

King Kong, the latest version, is a socially conscious film set in the Depression-era 1930s. The film shows early on views of shantytowns and marches protesting rampant evictions. This was an economy perhaps three times as bad as our current one, with unemployment rates that hovered in the thirty-percent range for nearly a decade. This is how Watts’ character, Ann Darrow, an unemployed actress, gets tied up with the madman hustler and thief played by Black. She is desperate and one step from becoming a stripper, although this is only hinted at in the movie.

 

Black’s character, Hollywood producer Carl Denham, draws parallels to Captain Ahab of Moby Dick, as he madly pursues film footage the way Ahab pursues the mighty white whale. Ultimately, Denham’s camera and tripod become a symbol of his burning desire and self-glorification, which again can represent so many guys down on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

 

Adrien Brody, a bird-beaked Oscar winner and well reviewed on this website, finds himself playing a character caught in a love triangle. He falls for the beautiful blonde, Ann Darrow, but then must play second fiddle to an ape that takes a bullet better than 50 Cent. He is undaunted by Kong's aggressions toward him, constantly chasing after Darrow while she and the beast are away staring into each other’s eyes and caressing. The movie approaches Theater of the Absurd, stopping short of being a bestial comedy because the woman and the ape never actually kiss.

What does it signify if the beast and the beauty kiss?

 

One has a feeling that if the French get a hold of this script it will turn into a full-fledged bestial farce as they are unshackled by many of America’s Puritanical hang-ups about sexuality, even the transgressive kind. What if the Germans or the Dutch got a hold of this script? Or the Spanish? What about the Iranians? Would Darrow remain in a hijab the whole time?

 

 

 

 

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
written and directed by Woody Allen


4 STARS

Woody Allen has outdone himself.

He's created a masterpiece statement about love and joie de vivre.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is worth the ten bucks admission into the theater.

Set almost entirely in Barcelona – the new city that never sleeps – this movie juxtaposes two lifestyles: European Bohemianism and the Puritanical Materialism of the USA.

Allen hilariously showcases Barcelona as everything America is not.

Allen’s Barcelona is a place where one can eat, drink, and be merry as a matter of divine right. For the most part, Americans are portrayed as clods who just don’t get it. Allen shreds the country (USA) that condemned him for marrying Soon-Yi Previn.

The plot is typical Woody Allen: cuckolds gone awry and the absurdity of people’s schemes to keep it all together. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johannson) each fall for a world-class artist (Javier Bardem), after he invites them to go away on a romantic trip to the country and, ahem, have sex with him. This puts serious strain on Vicky’s upcoming marriage.

The poetry of the Bardem character makes promiscuity seem completely rational. The movie overall is a clear message that Americans work too damn hard and are too damn stodgy.

Penelope Cruz expertly plays Bardem’s crazed lover, putting pepper on a few very surprising and, again, hilarious scenes.

This is a MUST SEE movie.

It must be seen as a matter of philosophy; it serves as a reference point in the philosophical debate between Calvinism and Hedonism.

By the way, excellent cinematography.

 (Bardel)

 

Gonzo:
The Life and Work of
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Written and directed by Alex Gibney  

3 STARS


                 
                                  
                                   Hunter "Gonzo" Thompson



Sir Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson: a freak, a boozer, a genius. He lived a good life, enough to base a movie on.

This Magnolia Pictures biopic shines a light on a literary giant known for wild times.

Admirable and well-shot, it is worth the ten bucks admission into the theater.

Who was this Gonzo guy?

Let’s turn to the encyclopedia.

Gonzo Journalism: A mixture of fact and fiction. Pour on a heavy dose of drug-fueled revels and a whole lotta guts.

According to the biographers, Thompson spawned a generation of reporters, who shed objectivity for more first-hand, lively accounts.

His tales of the Hell’s Angels biker gang in the early sixties were pure derring-do. The early Angels were true outlaws with guns and illegal libidos, and were dangerous to associate with much less report on.

Thompson got political too, running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, and almost winning. His casual yet stirring approach brought legitimacy to the “freak” culture of the late 1960s.

As the new decade dawned and the shine of Aquarius began to wear off, Thompson continued his drug-soaked rambling around the country, searching for the American Dream. Hunter brought Gonzo-style to the Kentucky Derby, and then to Las Vegas where he wrote the seminal “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. He covered the 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns with a highly unusual (read surreal) flair, enamoring himself to many a politician and even those on the Right.

The movie amply chronicles Thompson’s life. Very exciting at times, it runs for two hours and never drags. It elucidates the trap Thompson fell into once he became famous and his fictional and real selves merged.

Thompson was most notably lampooned as the gun-toting, boozed-up Duke in the comic strip Doonesbury. As Thompson did the lecture circuit at colleges, attracting a legion of groupies, he said, “I’m not sure who to be: Duke or Thompson…I don’t know who they hired.”

His career hit its peak in the early seventies as the Rolling Stone reporter, getting assigned to such far-flung places as Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight. But drugs and drink took over.

He held on to life for the next thirty years, attracting hangers on – like musician Keith Richards and actor Johnny Depp – who came and got stoned with him.

Thompson committed suicide in 2005.

The talking heads in the movie are George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Douglas Brinkley, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Buffet, Pat Buchanan, and Johnny Depp.

Some memorable images include Thompson as an old man tapping on the typewriter with two fingers. Obviously writing was his labor of love.


Thirty years earlier at the peak of Thompson's vitality he tangles with a malfunctioning, dinosaur of a fax, trying desperately to get his article across the country to the offices of Rolling Stone magazine and meet deadline. Fed up with the convolutions of the malfunctioning fax, he shoots the sucker dead and goes and gets drunk at the local saloon.

Such is the life of Sir Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson.

(L.B.)

2 1/2 Stars

Going to a movie screening in Hollywood is like walking through customs after you get off a plane. There’s lots of security – uneducated bozos with badges – frisking you with their wands. Inside the theater a young sneaky guy discreetly films the audience with a camcorder. But perhaps this setting enhances the viewing of Charlie Wilson’s War, a movie about a bawdy congressman and his covert involvement in Afghanistan during the early eighties.

Part comedy, part documentary, the plot rollicks from a Las Vegas coke party to D.C. congressional sessions. Only while sipping on scotch as he sits next to a hot stripper does Charlie Wilson realize the horrors occurring in Afghanistan. As 60 Minutes footage of Dan Rather in Afghanistan is shown, Charlie – played by Tom Hanks – apes for the camera in mock surprise and awe. He immediately doubles the covert operations budget for that country from five to ten million, which is petty change even in those days, and he will be forced by his own conscience  to do much more.

Charlie enjoys the feminine wiles of a Texan billionaress – heavily made up Julia Roberts – who sees a chance in the lawmaker to beat the Reds and goes for it. This is done with and without clothes.

The movie is fortified with the always gritty, always right on acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman. His interpretation of a chain smoking, barely shaved spy is hilarious and poignant.

None of this exempts the movie from being a piece of Christmas propaganda. The Cold War ended fifteen years ago, but the movie script calls for actors to say, “Kill some communists” at least five times, which makes a former college communist like myself feel bad. The Russian air force appears callous and ruthless as they fly over helpless villages killing every living thing in sight. The movie does, however, capture a time when Afghans were celebrated by Americans as war heroes. 

(P.G.)