Boy’s night out and we decided to see director James Mangold’s take on the old locked room mystery, Identity. Good choice, because Mangold really knows how to work within some pretty serious constraints (which are self-imposed, but still) and the cast is really strong. You’d think, for example, that having nearly the entire movie set during dark hours at a beaten up motel in the middle of a Nevada desert while the rain comes down in non-stop buckets would make for simple and not too interesting visuals but what Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael put up on the screen is surprising and exciting and a strong accompaniment to the other elements of the film.

I really enjoy watching John Cusack, who has the biggest role, and he shows real range in this performance, with mannerisms and speech patterns very different than the normal laidback guy he often plays. Identity isn’t the starring vehicle for him that, say, High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank were but he owns this movie too, right up until the last few minutes. Ray Liotta gets a much better role than the dreck he usually takes, Vince Pruitt Taylor has a small but crucial part, Rebecca De Mornay and Amanda Peet not only act but add whatever sex appeal the movie has, and Bret Loehr (the only kid in the film) is quiet but provides a significant clue to sharp-eyed viewers.

Because Mangold and writer Michael Cooney have come up with a really different twist which most people won’t figure out until the plot shows it to them (I did figure it out about 20-25 minutes before that, but I’m not giving any spoilers here). A real surprise in the way that Bruce Willis’ true, er, nature, in The Sixth Sense was for most people, who then went back through the movie making little “Oh yeah” sounds as they revisited each scene.

Definitely recommended

Tivo Suggested that I’d enjoy these two movies and there was nothing else I could find (one can only watch the NFL draft for so long, after all) and so I pushed the button. But I just didn’t get either one, sorry. Fellini may be one of the greatest film directors ever but Satyricon is just a rambling incoherent mess of violent colors and homosexuality. I could care less about the latter but give it some context and dramatic tension, not just a poorly-lit set pretending to be ancient Rome. Mira Nair’s tale of the clash between tradition and modernity was (and this is, of course, just my opinion, no offense to film school students with no sense of humor) more successful but there are too many cultural roadblocks and places where I couldn’t understand due to the actors’ accents for me to enjoy this one either. I gave both of them about an hour and then I gave up.

Not Recommended

Tivo Suggested that I’d enjoy these two movies and there was nothing else I could find (one can only watch the NFL draft for so long, after all) and so I pushed the button. But I just didn’t get either one, sorry. Fellini may be one of the greatest film directors ever but Satyricon is just a rambling incoherent mess of violent colors and homosexuality. I could care less about the latter but give it some context and dramatic tension, not just a poorly-lit set pretending to be ancient Rome. Mira Nair’s tale of the clash between tradition and modernity was (and this is, of course, just my opinion, no offense to film school students with no sense of humor) more successful but there are too many cultural roadblocks and places where I couldn’t understand due to the actors’ accents for me to enjoy this one either. I gave both of them about an hour and then I gave up.

Not Recommended

For some reason, the reviewers came down hard on Chow Yun Fat’s new flick Bulletproof Monk but after seeing it I can’t tell you why. About the only thing that Roger Ebert, for example, seems to like is the opening fight scene, which takes place on a rickety, missing a few slabs rope and wood bridge, and the one action scene for which I didn’t care as I though the wirework was simply too obvious.

I’m more of a mind with Mick Lasalle of the SF Chronicle, who points to the little dustup between Fat and co-star Seann William Scott (yeah, Stiffler but with no mom here) when, despite Scott’s best efforts, Fat doesn’t so much as spill a drop of milk from his bowl of coco puffs as Scott tries to evict Fat from his oh-so humble abode, and gives the movie a good review.

Any movie that revolves around a scroll (or more accurately the words on the scroll) that has the power to give a person who speaks its words aloud world dominion requires viewers to suspend disbelief. Films that use martial arts to drive the onscreen violence also require this, because even Jackie Chan can’t move quite as fast nor jump quite as high as all that. So bringing in Nazis as the villains was fine with me since writers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris set this up by starting the action in 1943. Then we get the pleasure of seeing the original Nazi bastard’s hot granddaughter (Irish lass Victoria Smurfit) fight Scott’s desired female Jaime King. Cool that even the ladies get to do some wired flips and twists.

Fat is really making strides with his English enunciation, much better at this point than, say, Chan or Jet Li, and same with his comic timing. Chan has been making comedies for years and has good timing but I still spend just a few extra beats understanding what he’s said before I can laugh and I didn’t need to do that while watching this one. thumbs up to first time director Paul Hunter.

Side note: Hard to believe it but I checked and it has been two months since I was last in a movie theater, seeing Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers for the second time. Not counting movies that only opened in the last week or so, there’s only been one in all that time I really want to spend money to see, The Quiet American, which fortunately is still playing.

Recommended for action fans

When most of us think of the ’60s and the hippies these days, we remember San Francisco’s Summer of Love, the scene in Greenwich Village, or the Mods in London but not too much about the little pockets that surfaced all around the country. Like one that just happened to root for awhile in Stockbridge, Masachuesetts. Ray and Alice Brock, who’d taught some exceptional students at a nearby school, bought Trinity Church there in 1964 and made it into a place where their friends and former students could hang out and explore themselves.

So when Arlo Guthrie, son of famed folksinger Woody, found himself booted from college and at loose ends the next year, he hitched rides and made his way there. Alice also opened her restaurant in town and Arlo recorded a quick ditty for a radio commercial; that later became the chorus of his most famous song:

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Walk right in it’s around the back.
Just a half a mile from the railroad track.
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.

But then came the infamous Thanksgiving dinner that ended up causing so much hullabaloo. As depicted in the film, the dozens in attendance had a wild, wonderful time, full of love and happiness, with Vietnam and the world’s other troubles far, far away. Really, the problems were all afterwards, when Arlo and a friend packed up all the garbage they’d made into his VW Microbus and went looking for a place to dump it. Then, thanks to Offier Obie, a blind judge, and a building full of military madmen Guthrie encountered during his draft physical, he was able to turn it all into a classic folk story song, perhaps the greatest of that decade and surely better than any I’ve heard since.

Hollywood, of course, couldn’t resist such an obvious low hanging fruit. They made a deal to have Arlo star as himself, brought in a name director (Arthur Penn), and threw something together fast, clearly made in a haze of sweet smoke. A movie so bad it was almost good but, to be honest, not really. Yet still enjoyable if you can ignore the soap opera subplot and focus on Arlo’s antics and the inserted for the movie scenes with his dying dad. Woody (played by a semi-anonymous actor) lays flat out on a hospital bed and never moves, he’s too far gone with Huntington’s Chorea. James Broderick, Matthew’s dad and the only well-known actor in the cast, plays Ray; his professionalism shows and stands out almost as an oddity in this bunch of amateurs.

The efforts of Arthur Penn, a director generally held in high regard and coming off his Oscar nomination for Bonnie and Clyde, are barely noticeable throughout the film. As Charles Tatum, writing on the eFilmCritic site, says, there are really only two scenes where Penn seems to be actually working sober: the very last shot, of Alice standing in front of the church with a sad look on her face watching Arlo drive off as the camera swings around the yard, the trees occasionally cutting in front of her and Shelley’s funeral, featuring only an extremely young Joni Mitchell standing among the mourners, playing her guitar and singing her Song of the Aging Children.

Here you go, the lyrics and tab. Arlo’s semi-official website used to have the full 30+ minute performance for free download but not any more. I looked through Google but couldn’t find any free sites that have the whole song. Which is too bad because it’s a lot of fun to hear and it really isn’t in the movie.

Worth watching, a semi-authentic look at ’60s hippy life.

What is the measure of a man? That’s the question writer Tony Gayton asks us to consider while watching 2002’s The Salton Sea, a quote he takes from Plutarch: “The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.” Gayton gives us a single man who’s had to take on a second identity, due to misfortune, and then asks which is the true man.

Director D.J. Caruso takes this script and creates a film that attempts to infuse it with the spirit of the Beat poets of the ’50s. Characters are addicted to methamphetamine, crank or gank, and the movie tries to ride along at the rhythm of a trip that’s gone on and on, extended by snorting another line, then by shooting up, over and over. But he misses out on what any movie requires: a dramatic rope that pulls the audience along, deeper and deeper, until the climactic release.

Val Kilmer plays the central character, born Thomas Van Allen but transformed into Danny Parker a year before the events of the movie when his beloved, adored wife is murdered in front of his eyes by a crew ripping off some meth dealers. A death for which Van Allen must hold himself responsible, since they’re only at this house because he’s lost driving them somewhere unspecified and needs directions, and which he survives only by virtue of having gone to take a piss and therefore not visible to the killers.

He becomes Parker in order to take revenge on the killers. He completely changes himself to be this new identity, covering his body with outrageous tattoos, ear piercings, heavy silver rings and jewelry, sweeping his hair up into a Mohawk, and, most importantly, becoming a tweeker, an addict, to infiltrate the world and create an opportunity to have that revenge.

Caruso opens the movie at the end, Kilmer sitting in a room on fire, playing Van Allen’s trumpet, in a voiceover that asks the audience to decide which persona is real. But sequence is handled poorly throughout with few but random jumps in time. Gaydon and Caruso also insert subplots and characters that only exist to bring this Beatnik existence to the screen since it has little relation to the main story, except to sometimes help Parker advance his agenda.

For all that I’ve focused on the negatives, I do think Salton Sea has its positives too and is a movie worth watching. Kilmer pulls off a difficult role, Vincent D’Onofrio is too much as another dealer named Pooh-Bear, Peter Sarsgaard has a small but well done part as Kilmer’s pal, and the ever-surprising B.D. Wong is, well, too hard to explain without spoiling the ending.

An intriguing, stylish movie

First scene with Britney shows us the starlet dancing and singing along to a Madonna tune wearing only panties and a tight, barely there top, then wriggling into pajama bottoms. So we know who the target audience is for this film, no doubt. Crossroads is a poorly made piece of pop twaddle which I only watched because TS1 desired it, and I was drained after two really good NCAA semifinal games. And there was the unintentionally hilarious scene where Spears and her high school pal rent a room to finally shed their virginity.

What’s wrong with Crossroads? Just to name a few things: she drives crosscountry to meet the mother who abandoned her at age three but the confrontation lasts all of 45 seconds and avoids the actual difficult emotional interaction; in what is alleged to be her first time singing on stage, Britney belts out I Love Rock and Roll using all kinds of tricks and techniques that only a professional knows; Dan Ackroyd plays her Poppy in yet another wooden, emotionless payday performance; and, every problem encountered by anyone in the cast is solved without more than shedding a few tears, except for one medical situation, which can’t have been very hard either since the girl involved is up and bouncing around a stage a short time later.

Recommended only for ogling Ms. Spears