No doubt, X2 is your straightforward, simple fun, action-packed Summer blockbuster. Unlike another recent box office big deal, which aspires yet fails to be so much more. As the current email joking goes, the cross-dressing Larry Wachowski needs the money more for his soon-to-be due divorce settlement and half of $16 million doesn’t go as far as it used to, while X2 director Bryan Singer only has to deal with homophobia.

Simply put, I enjoyed X2 a lot more than Matrix Reloaded and I expect that’s true for many people who’ve seen both. Singer, his writers, and producers understood their mission–create something fun that’s true to, but not limited by, the comic book legacy–and they did it. Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Franke Famke, Anna Paquin, Ian McKellen, and even Patrick Stewart look and act bigger than life, punching and psychokinetically moving anything in their way, and the main new mutant, Alan Cummings as the blueskinned Nightcrawler is terrific. Cummings seems to have taken Joel Grey’s Master of Ceremonies character from Cabaret as his template, if Grey had been playing an exceedingly religious German with a tail.

The visuals, including the SFX, are also great. We loved the detail shown for the X-Men’s jet and the destruction of the dam was just…serious. Props to cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, production designer Guy Dyas, and, hell, the entire makeup, special effects, and set dressing crews, I don’t know who to single out; for example, the attention to detail shown in Bobby Drake’s bedroom had an attention to detail I just didn’t expect.

Definitely recommended

Trying compete with the production might of HBO has not been easy for the executives at Showtime. Since they seem to have fairly similar subscriber counts (AFAIK, of course), they ought to have similar monies available, but then again HBO is part of AOL Time Warner and Showtime is owned by Viacom, so the difference may be corporate philosophies. Showtime is trying to pick up the pace lately, while also differentiating itself from HBO with more adult-oriented material, so perhaps in a few years they difference will be minimal.

Last night we watched two original films on the #2 cabler, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Our Town, both filmed versions of classic stage plays. Each is produced quite often on stage and have been filmed numerous times before, of course, so I’m always curious to understand why someone chooses to do so again. The reason for shooting Our Town was quite obvious: any chance to get some proprietary Paul Newman is worth doing. How much could it have cost to just set some cameras up in front of a stage play where the drama was being staged anyway?

The rationale for Roman Spring is not so easy to uncover but I chalk it up to HBO envy–just look at the movie they’re premiering tonight! A movie with an older star set in Italy, just to make the connection explicit. But I’m surely making too much of this, given the long cycles of decision making and production.

Our Town is primordial drama, written by Thornton Wilder and first produced back in 1938, where small events, a few days in the lives of small people in a small town, are used to scrutinize the largest meanings of life. The late ’30s were a time when, as a friend pointed out today, so many intellectuals were attempting to absorb the messages of Nietzsche and Wilder certainly was trying to do so in an American context. In other words, lump this play in with current megahit Matrix Reloaded as fiction attempting to pull the covers off the bed of existance. without all the cool technology and special effects, of course.

Newman plays the Stage Manager, the central role which narrates the play, providing glue material and enough interpretation to ensure that no viewer misses the core message: savor life’s little pleasures before it’s too late. The production, not surprisingly, is filled with name actors: Lorraine Newman, Jeffrey DeMunn, Frank Converse, and Jake Converse; actor James Naughton directed.

Viewing note: Don’t worry if you don’t have Showtime, since this is a Masterpiece Theater co-production and will be seen on that PBS series in August.

Recommended: I watched it because it’s been years since I saw a serious production of the play and, well, Newman is a great actor and I’ll almost always watch anything he’s in.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was originally written as a novel in 1950 by Tenessee Williams, after Greta Garbo declined his entreaty to use it as a starring vehicle, then later transformed into a play; the original Broadway production starred Vivian Leigh as Stone, an actress who’s passed that certain age, and Warren Beatty as Paolo, the proud but poor Italian count who services rich American widows in post-WWII Rome.

In this version, shot as a film unlike Our Town, Helen Mirren plays the woman past her prime but not past her pride and Olivier Martinez (the hottie who disrupted Diane Lane’s marriage to Richard Gere in last year’s Unfaithful) as the marcetta (Italian for gigolo). Mirren is a good match for the role, as the wrinkles and changes wrought in her face by Time make the contrast with oh so pretty Martinez as well as her own misgivings absolutely explicit. She struggles with the turn in her fortune–her rich, adoring husband dies early on–and is stalked (or so we would call it today) by a character known only as The Young Man throughout. Finally, Stone’s pitiful existence cannot sustain whatever attraction she once had, Martinez moves on to a more tempting target, and Stone surrenders to The Young Man. I didn’t draw the connection, but another reviewer says that The Young Man is William’s symbol of Death; the movie ends semi-ambiguously with Stone embracing him.

Can’t really recommend this as the best use of two hours of lifespan

Trying compete with the production might of HBO has not been easy for the executives at Showtime. Since they seem to have fairly similar subscriber counts (AFAIK, of course), they ought to have similar monies available, but then again HBO is part of AOL Time Warner and Showtime is owned by Viacom, so the difference may be corporate philosophies. Showtime is trying to pick up the pace lately, while also differentiating itself from HBO with more adult-oriented material, so perhaps in a few years they difference will be minimal.

Last night we watched two original films on the #2 cabler, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Our Town, both filmed versions of classic stage plays. Each is produced quite often on stage and have been filmed numerous times before, of course, so I’m always curious to understand why someone chooses to do so again. The reason for shooting Our Town was quite obvious: any chance to get some proprietary Paul Newman is worth doing. How much could it have cost to just set some cameras up in front of a stage play where the drama was being staged anyway?

The rationale for Roman Spring is not so easy to uncover but I chalk it up to HBO envy–just look at the movie they’re premiering tonight! A movie with an older star set in Italy, just to make the connection explicit. But I’m surely making too much of this, given the long cycles of decision making and production.

Our Town is primordial drama, written by Thornton Wilder and first produced back in 1938, where small events, a few days in the lives of small people in a small town, are used to scrutinize the largest meanings of life. The late ’30s were a time when, as a friend pointed out today, so many intellectuals were attempting to absorb the messages of Nietzsche and Wilder certainly was trying to do so in an American context. In other words, lump this play in with current megahit Matrix Reloaded as fiction attempting to pull the covers off the bed of existance. without all the cool technology and special effects, of course.

Newman plays the Stage Manager, the central role which narrates the play, providing glue material and enough interpretation to ensure that no viewer misses the core message: savor life’s little pleasures before it’s too late. The production, not surprisingly, is filled with name actors: Lorraine Newman, Jeffrey DeMunn, Frank Converse, and Jake Converse; actor James Naughton directed.

Viewing note: Don’t worry if you don’t have Showtime, since this is a Masterpiece Theater co-production and will be seen on that PBS series in August.

Recommended: I watched it because it’s been years since I saw a serious production of the play and, well, Newman is a great actor and I’ll almost always watch anything he’s in.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was originally written as a novel in 1950 by Tenessee Williams, after Greta Garbo declined his entreaty to use it as a starring vehicle, then later transformed into a play; the original Broadway production starred Vivian Leigh as Stone, an actress who’s passed that certain age, and Warren Beatty as Paolo, the proud but poor Italian count who services rich American widows in post-WWII Rome.

In this version, shot as a film unlike Our Town, Helen Mirren plays the woman past her prime but not past her pride and Olivier Martinez (the hottie who disrupted Diane Lane’s marriage to Richard Gere in last year’s Unfaithful) as the marcetta (Italian for gigolo). Mirren is a good match for the role, as the wrinkles and changes wrought in her face by Time make the contrast with oh so pretty Martinez as well as her own misgivings absolutely explicit. She struggles with the turn in her fortune–her rich, adoring husband dies early on–and is stalked (or so we would call it today) by a character known only as The Young Man throughout. Finally, Stone’s pitiful existence cannot sustain whatever attraction she once had, Martinez moves on to a more tempting target, and Stone surrenders to The Young Man. I didn’t draw the connection, but another reviewer says that The Young Man is William’s symbol of Death; the movie ends semi-ambiguously with Stone embracing him.

Can’t really recommend this as the best use of two hours of lifespan

I have to say I was disappointed by Matrix Reloaded, not that I was the only one, in what turned out to be the second highest opening weekend grosser and all-around geek Xmas in May. True that the special effects software gave the Wachowski Brothers amazing capabilities but they wasted them on cold, mechanical fight scenes that served no purpose in advancing the story. Neo versus a horde of Smiths, very impressive technically but no heart.

Then there’s the problem of too much talking, loads of five dollar words with five cent meanings. Morpheus’ speech to the orgiastic partiers in Zion stands in stark emotional contrast to Neo’s one on one with The Architect (and to a lesser degree with The Oracle) but neither gives us meaning to match the emotion with which the actors imbue their speeches. The explanation Neo gets, in both cases, make the fights seem entirely irrelevant whereas in the first movie they meant so much more because of the difference in our understanding.

Even with the amazing capabilities, such as in the Neo/Smith brawl, the fights don’t impress me as fights because I never doubt that Neo will win and Reeves never appears to work up a sweat while fending off whoever. And where is what ought to be a highlight of the FX work, the battle between the human fleet and the drilling machines? Why did Andy and Larry leave it offscreen even though they had a chance to show us an entirely different kind of fight? Last complaint: I didn’t buy the intensity of Reeves’ affection for Carrie-Ann Moss, probably because the film spent zero time giving us a reason.

Patrick Lee, writing in SciFi Weekly, suggests the film really requires, and deserves, two viewings to really get. Plus make allowances for this being the middle of three films. Maybe. We’ll see.

Mildly recommended, probably ought to see it once on the big screen.

Talk about irony! We go to see a film about folk singers and then after, in search of some evening java, end up at a coffeeshop where a folksinger is playing. Funny or what?

Which fits in perfectly with A Mighty Wind, the latest film from Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, and gang. Guest was also responsible for (co-wrote and directed) recent intelligent humor outings Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman; he first came to attention with a year on Saturday Night Live back in the ’80s but really as bassist Nigel Tufnel in This is Spinal Tap (compare that Tufnel pic to this still from Wind).

This movie tells the story of a memorial tribute concert for Irving Steinbloom, recently deceased and the number one impresario of the folk music scene of the late 1950s and ’60s, and the three groups that come together for it. In two weeks with Public Broadcasting televising it live, no less. The Spinal Tap trio (Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean) make up The Folksmen, who for unstated reasons haven’t seen each other in 30 years. Catherine O’Hara and Levy are Mitch and Mickey, who also haven’t seen each other in 30 years either but because Mitch went insane. The last group is The New Main Street Singers, a nine piece ensemble though none of the nine are actually original members or even close to old enough to have been one.

The script, by Guest and Levy, had plenty of jokes in it, which is hardly surprising but Wind also has a lot more subtlesituational humor. Some instances: Shearer’s bald head and under the chin beard; the former porn actress turned New Main Street singer (the terrific Jane Lynch, who played the lesbian lover in Best in Show) and her utterly fantastic cosmological explanation; Ed Begley Jr.’s public broadcasting honcho, a native of Sweden who peppers his speech with Yiddish; Fred Willard’s character, who is completely oblivious to reality yet able to operate successfully for decades in the entertainment business when in any other industry he’d be lucky to have a job packing up return shipments.

There is quite a bit of folk music throughout the 90 minute movie, which is a problem for some people, but even with this the filmmakers have gone to the trouble of writing songs that fit the period perfectly while effectively parodying the originals. The movie title is also the name of the closing song, performed together by three groups, but also a, well, jocular reference to a big fart. Plot, as usual for this group, is mostly ignored in favor of sketches but there is progress towards the concert as well as hiccups along the way and I think that any more plot would have just gotten in the way.

Definitely recommended

My best man and I had a celebration last night featuring dinner at the amazingly delicious House of Prime Ribs and Michael Caine’s Oscar-nominated Best Actor performance in The Quiet American. HPR is only about two blocks away from the much better known Ruth’s Crist Steak House on Van Ness in San Francisco but better known does not equate to better dinner in this case–the entrees, for instance, are about the same price but HPR includes salad, potato, and delicious creamed spinach sides with unlimited refills while RCSH is a la carte. Yummy!

The UA Galaxy is only a few blocks south of the restaurant and it wasn’t quite raining so we walked over. Let’s just say this theater, part of the huge Regal Entertainment chain, looks better on the outside, is in serious need of a refurbishing, and leave it at that. The movie is based on the classic 1955 novel by Graham Greene and tells the tale of very early American involvement in Vietnam, just before the French lost their nerve (LOL, history repeats itself over and over) after Diem Bien Phu and pulled out, leaving the anti-communist battle to the gung-ho CIA cold warriers.

Brendan Fraser co-stars with Caine as one of these Americans. Fraser seems to be shaping his career in much the same way as Caine has, or Anthony Hopkins for that matter, making interesting, smaller quality films like this (or Gods and Monsters) while taking the big paydays (the Mummy films, Dudley Do-Right). He plays his part straight, the quiet American of the title, yet a man who knows his path in life, who doesn’t care if his arrogance shows, and one has to give Fraser a well done for the job.

The story opens in Saigon in 1952, where Caine is Thomas Fowler, a reporter for The London Times with an unloved wife back home in Blighty and an entrancing native mistress, played by Do Thi Hai Yen, when Fraser’s Alden Pyle accidentally on purpose meets him at tea time. Yen also shows up and Pyle can no more resist her charms than Fowler; this triangle forms the dramatic core of the film, along with the boiling Vietnamese politics.

Yen and Caine have been together for two years, he loves her desperately but his Catholic wife won’t give him a divorce and her concerned older sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa) is making a quiet fuss about their relationship because she fears Caine, like so many other foriegners, will simply pack his bags and leave Yen behind at his convenience. Fraser, in front of Caine, admits his instant love, but Yen turns him away. Still, Fraser has a job to do while Caine avoids a home office recall and eventually their paths cross again.

Director Phillip Noyce has made a number of critically acclaimed films, including the recent Rabbit Proof Fence, and he gives The Quiet American the sort of smooth, languid pace one expects existed in Saigon and in collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle uses an interesting, unusual visual style that mixes rough handheld shots, extreme closeups of the actors reacting to each other’s dialog or lost in thought, and colors that never seem to be truly lit. The key problem is the script by Christopher Hampton, which never quite breaks through the surface with sufficient dramatic tension though one assumes that the novel had an advantage in it’s ability to present the inner thoughts of the characters which an unseen narrator (voiced by English Patient director Anthony Minghella) can’t match.

Mildly recommended