Monthly Archives: September 2001

Space Cowboys

Posted on September 17, 2001

Looking for a distraction and maybe a few laughs, tuned in this Clint Eastwood-directed flick. Very few laughs indeed in Space Cowboys, where Eastwood and three buddies try to get into space 40 years after they blew their chance to be among the first astronauts. The main problem is this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, so it isn’t very good at being anything. Is it a comedy about the four old farts trying to prove they can still hack it? A melodrama about love and death, heroes and villains? A spy/action story about saving the world from a nefarious Russian plot? Eastwood has made some great films as a director but you have to figure he’s getting just a little too old to play the hero. Donald Sutherland is wack as the geriatric lothario, Tommy Lee Jones is all over the place and probably suffers the most from lack of a center for his character, and James Garner is just along for a ride with his buddies with nothing much to do except smile weakly when called on.

not recommended

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American Pie 2

Posted on September 6, 2001

After reading and writing up yesterday’s anti-movie rant by Sacramento Bee movie reviewer Joe Baltake, I decided I had to go out and see American Pie 2 for myself. Short answer: he was wrong. The movie is funny and I was laughing thoughout. Yes, the filmmakers depend on sex and gross out humor for the bulk of their jokes but what teen comedy except for American Grafitti didn’t? Sure, the “Are they lesbians?,” superglue, and peeing off the balcony scenes go further than, say, Animal House did or could 20 years ago, but that’s also just a sign of our changing cultural values. Pong was a lot less violent than Quake, too. I think screenwriter Adam Herz, who also wrote the original, does a good job with the story, keeping a lot of the concepts and characterizations from AP1 but finding new ways to express them. Good example is Finch’s obsession over Steiffler’s mom (and therefore Tantra) throughout the movie and the way Oz (the ever-improving Chris Klein) and Heather (Mena Suvari) can’t quite get together even though they want to badly.

And did the producers hire every large breasted actress between 17 and 21 in Hollywood? It sure looks that way on screen. But none of them can compare to Shannon Elizabeth (whose personal website is poorly designed, IMO, but does have lots of photos), back as sex goddess/exchange student Nadia. Getting smart, Elizabeth put a no nudity (not even topless) clause in her contract although she looks awesome in anything and does one great bikini scene. Always on the lookout for titillation, I would suggest Stekson’s Shannon Elizabeth Picture Page as a good place to look.

Pauline Kael

On the other hand, Pauline Kael recently passed away. Kael was probably the most prominent and important film critic of the last half century and, had she deigned to review this film, would undoubtedly have not gotten past the opening scene–the sequel’s version of dad walking in on Jim. Louis Menand wrote an excellent appreciation of Kael for the NY Review of Books several years ago when a huge collection of Kael’s reviews and columns were published in For Keeps.

recommended

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Masterminds

Posted on September 4, 2001

Think of Home Alone except (a) the bad guy is Englishman Patrick Stewart (b) the Macaully Culkin character is a 16 year old hacker (c) the setting is a ritzy private school (d) Stewart and a surprisingly large crew of baddies hold the students hostage (e) the target is $650 million in bearer bonds and you have 1997′s Masterminds. Stewart must have a had a really hard time keeping a straight face while the cameras were rolling but he goes way over the top here (think of him in Conspiracy Theory) only to end up plunging his hopped up ATV escape car into a sewage outlet pond–literally! Vincent Kartheiser is cool as Ozzie Paxton, our slacker hero, who not only has to stop Stewart and crew but patch up his family. In an odd coincidence, Kartheiser was born the day after me, 18 years later. Mr. Showbiz called this a “Die Hard for kids” but I prefer my analogy.

recommended

Posted in movies, Recommended, Reviews, thriller | Comments Off

Beautiful

Posted on September 1, 2001

I wonder if I watched the same move as James Berardinelli, who called the film “a wretchedly insipid effort that makes a mockery of its name.” How can any film with both Minnie Driver and Joey Lauren Adams be that bad? Okay, the story is a little implausible and how anyone can think Adams could play the schlumpy best friend is a mystery to me. I admit that Sally Field doesn’t do the movie any favors in her directorial debut, though. At least Andy Klein of New Times L.A. agrees with me.

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Shane

Posted on September 1, 2001

In this 1953 Academcy Award nominated film, Alan Ladd plays the loner who walks in and saves the day. George Steven’s Shane is considered one of the quintessential movie westerns pitting ranchers against homesteaders in 1880s Wyoming. This could be simplistic but reaches deep to make the bad guy understandable–although the rancher is shown ordering murders he also gets an excellent speech explaining how he came to his position–and brilliantly uses a young boy to focus us tightly on Ladd’s stoic hero. Hollywood gets its material from elsewhere and in the case of most westerns, that source was Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian who argued that the continuously receding western frontier was the central story of America in the 19th century.

recommended

Posted in drama, family, movies, Recommended, Reviews, western | Comments Off