An out and out police farce–compared to the original TV series–Starsky & Hutch is plain funny. Not smart and funny like, say, a Woody Allen or Coen Brothers film but more in line with the better National Lampoon movies. Director/co-writer Todd Phillips (Road Trip, Old School) is showing increasing skill and improving timing. Ben Stiller gets a role and a director that keeps his more obnoxious habits in check and Owen Wilson is smooth and smart.

recommended

Some movies, especially indie movies where the protagonist is a young man, are clearly the wet dream version of a writer’s own idealization of his coming of age. So no surprise that Elijah Wood’s character in All I Want claims to be a writer even at age 17, even still a virgin, even though he does nothing all day but write letters to a father he’s never met that tossed into a footlocker rather than mailed.

Wood’s Jones Dylan shows up in some anonymous small town (which is not in Texas and is somewhere 2000 miles from either Chicago or New York), drops out of college and takes an apartment off campus. He clearly has issues, having shown up with nothing but the aforementioned footlocker and an old red portable typewriter on which he composes the missives. A quick learner, he buys things as soon as their absence is mentioned by one of his housemates. Who are a gay painter cowboy (Aaron Pearl), an aspiring slut actress (Mandy Moore looking luscious as a blonde) and a confused photographer (Franke Potente from Run Lola Run and Bourne Identity), and of course the two women despise each other so having to do with one puts the other off the range.

Wood’s character frequently hallucinates and in some scenes I feel we are supposed to be uncertain whether he is dreaming or not. The belly dancer is obviously in his head, for example, but the scene where he is making out with Moore, well, not sure. Presumably the car crash is real. In a craftier director’s hands, this trickery might be more successful but Jeffrey Porter is too much of a novice to properly handle the surreality. Overall not bad, definitely has some good performances, but not something I’d go out of my way to see even on TV.

okay

Back when I was in high school, I don’t know if there was a funnier movie or one I wanted to live in real life than Animal House. John Belushi, with his awesome body language, eyebrows that had a life of their own, and nasty, witty dialog, set a standard with Bluto Blutarsky that as yet no college comedy has come close to matching. John Landis, Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller created amazing farces, characters and situations that just blew our minds.

That’s the standard that Old School is competing against and by that standard, fails. But if you want 90 minutes of laughs and aren’t in the mood to watch Belushi and crew again, you might watch this anyway. Todd Phillips, who co-wrote and directed here, is developing a touch that continues to grow in the current Starsky and Hutch and, one can hope, do even more in the upcoming Jim Carry version of The Six Million Dollar Man. Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn team up here with a display of behavior that tittilates and amuses. A boatload of hijinks and eye candy.

recommended

A post-Millenium Catcher in the Rye with Kieran Culkin as a cuter-than-thou Holden Caulfield pretty much sums up 2002’s Igby Goes Down.

not bad

One of the films I remember most fondly from college days (appropriate, eh?), I was surprised that TS1 had never seen Chariots of Fire and when it popped on the TCM schedule there was no doubt we had to watch. This story of a few British runners in post-WWI years won four Oscars in 1982 including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Soundtrack–everyone knows that seminal new age theme on piano and synth by Vangelis.

Chariots of Fire is the true story of Eric Liddle (played by Ian Charleson) and Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross) who ran for gold in the 1924 Olympics despite great personal obstacles. Liddle, a devoutly religious man, would not run his qualifying heat because it fell on a Sunday, while Abrahams, who was Jewish, faced anti-Semitism. The bulk of the film sets up the climactic races in Paris and, aside from a single race well before that, the two protagonists really never meet or interact. The movie tells of the mental and athletic preparations as parallel stories.

I find it very interesting that none of the primary group of younger actors (Charleson, Cross, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell and Daniel Gerroll) really went on to have substantial Hollywood careers. Of course John Gielgud and Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins in the recent LotR movies, for instance) were different but they were older and firmly established by this point. Cross did make a few pictures and big TV miniseries but the rest of them basically went on to British TV, which is sad as the evidence here is that they were capable of more.

This film takes time and trouble to develop the lead characters by way of a series of set pieces, some focused on running while others explore the conflicts which give meaning to their achievements. Abrahams is set off against both his Cambridge chums as well as Holm as his (naughty boy!) professional coach while Liddle mainly has conflict with his equally religious sister.

Hugh Hudson, who did such a fine job directing the movie, also never did much more. I really wonder why that was. The studios are reputedly such strange, dangerous and incestuous places but one would think that Hudson would have earned more than such schlock as Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Revolution (the Al Pacino Revolutionary War flick) but there you go.

recommended

Watching this 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock, I was a little surprised by how mechanical everything seemed, and how little suspense generated, and then I read this review by B. Kite of a recent revivial and found out the original release was part of that mid-’50s craze for 3-D movies. Unlike most of the movies he made, Hitchcock came on late in the game with Dial M for Murder and had less opportunity to make it his own.

Set in post-WWII London, Ray Milland plays former tennis pro Tony Wendice and the lustrous Grace Kelly his rich wife Margot, who’s having an affair with American mystery novelist Mark Halliday (played by Robert Cummings). Supporting them are John Williams (I remember him from Sabrina and To Catch a Thief) as a classic British police inspector and Anthony Dawson as one of Milland’s long-ago university classmates.

Milland uncovered the affair a year before but Cummings returned to America and is just returning to England as Dial begins; Milland has spent the year preparing and now thinks he’s plotted the perfect murder. The lovers think they’ve been discrete and one of the early scenes, with the three of them in the Wendices’ flat talking, is painfully amusing. Milland even asks the novelist if he’s come up with the perfect murder for one of his books but Cummings says such a thing is not possible in the real world.

And of course it isn’t. The plan develops cracks from the moment it goes into motion and this is where Hitchcock can work his gleefully intense magic on what began life as a minor stage play. Lighting, sounds, carefully designed movement, even purposeful looks combine to overcome the bloated, talky opening act.

recommended

Nothing much appealing on last night so we watched Vin Diesel’s essentially failed attempt to broaden his proven base beyond big budget flicks with this look at a cop driven beyond the pale. A Man Apart didn’t do the box office New Line Cinema had hoped nor did it get the kind of critical reaction Diesel wanted.

The story is basic enough, and Diesel actually gives a fine performance, so I blame director F. Gary Gray (who did a much better job on his next movie, The Italian Job) or perhaps writers Paul Scheuring and Christian Gudegast. This is a police thriller, not science fiction, and I really don’t expect to have to suspend my disbelief quite as much as A Man Apart demands. For instance, at the begining Diesel and his DEA team take part in a raid of a Tijuana nightclub by their Mexican counterparts; while officially the Americans are not allowed guns, someone reaches in a bag and passes enough of them around so everyone has one but in the end their are no repercussions and the targetted drug lord is simply whisked off to American justice (second impossibility as their would be years of court battles over extradition).

not recommended

Yet another film made in New Zealand but Whale Rider is to Scarfies what Airplane is to Scary Movie 3. In this movie based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel, we get an honest emotional trip by a young woman who refuses to accept the place in life others want to assign her. Kind of resonates with my recent reading of The Secret Life of Bees.

The movie begins with a tragedy, the mother and one of a pair of twins, a boy, die as she gives birth; though the other twin, a girl, is healthy and lives, the father is driven away and the grandfather is shaken to his core. Whale Rider is set in a Maori village in New Zealand and the grandfather (Rawiri Paratene) is the tribal chief. According to tradition, the firstborn son must succeed him as chief but after his wife’s death, the son (Cliff Curtis) leaves the village, his daughter and future behind to become an artist in Germany. The grandparents raise Pai, their granddaughter, but the tradition-bound old man cannot bring himself to allow her a place mandated by present-day mores. Instead he goes so far as to re-open a school to teach the village teenage boys enough so they may participate in a contest to find the new chief.

But Pai will not go along, hanging around outside the school, practicing mostly on her own, sneaking help from her uncle at times, and all along simply looking for the normal approval any child wants from the man who raised her. Keisha Castle-Hughes won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her effort; while she lost that to Charlize Theron, I can see why she was shortlisted–Castle-Hughes did win the New Zealand version of the award as well as numerous others–and look forward to seeing her in Star Wars Episode III (even if I end up waiting to see that on TV).

Niki Caro did an excellent job of adapting the novel into a screenplay and directing the film. People in America generally look at the landscapes of New Zealand and break into excited words, which Caro uses a bit here, but more than that she connects the characters to their territory visually. The dialog does well by avoiding overt sentimentality as would be all too easy in scenes such as when Pai’s father returns for a brief visit or when her grandfather is let down by the young boys.

definitely recommended, this is not a chick flick