Key comment from LordB while watching Man on Fire: This movie is so slow we can sit here doing play by play and not miss a thing. Tony Scott is a veteran director with plenty of taut thrillers in his past, so I don’t really understand why he didn’t cut the 146 minute run time down to 100-110. Almost every scene is bloated, slow, almost languid except when he’s doing his MTV thousand cuts per minute, shake the camera to make you dizzy imitation.

Denzel Washington is great, even trying to get through this morass, and he has great chemistry with Christopher Walken–why haven’t they worked together before? Dakota Fanning, if she doesn’t burn out, could be one of the great ones, she’s just intuitive and natural in all her scenes.

not recommended

Romantic comedy isn’t easy. There are far too many ways to fall into cliches, to make plot movements through a simple wave of the hands or lose it by poor casting of the loving couple. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is not the perfect example of a romantic comedy but it doesn’t fall off the pier due to any of those three common pitfalls and ends up delivering an enjoyable couple of hours.

Matthew McConaughey has the kind of relaxed, soft pace that lends itself well, as he’s shown in EdTV and The Wedding Planner (though he was badly matched in the latter with Jennifer Lopez); he doesn’t show nearly as well in the big action films he apparently prefers. Kate Hudson gets a bit beyond the generic in this film, especially in the scenes where she’s going bonkers on the guy, though I’d suggest she get some better advice in role selection.

Director Donald Petrie has pretty bland oevre but seems to hit the occasional double, give him credit for a light touch here where he could have gone overboard–the bits with Mrs. DeLauer and Hudson’s girlfriend pretending to be a therapist, for instance. The soundtrack was reasonably memorable too, and made nice use of the classic Carly Simon tune You’re So Vain. An enjoyable diversion.

recommended

If you take nothing else away from this movie, you will know without a doubt that Julia Stiles at 21 was gorgeous and will only get more so over the next two decades. She just has one of those faces that starts out from beautiful and winds up over the border into some uncharted territory. But enough drooling.

A Guy Thing, released in 2003, is filled with cliches, sexual innuendo and shopworn gags, telling the story of the last few days before the wedding of Paul and Karen (Jason Lee and Selma Blair) in a very modern romantic comedy. At his bachelor party, Paul gets drunk and hooks up with Becky (played by Stiles)–but not really, of course, since they’re both too drunk for anything to happen though they do spend the night together. Leading to all those tired, trite Hollywood components just mentioned.

Yet Guy Thing isn’t just another waste of celluloid. It’s funny, occasionally even witty, has characters who rise beyond stock and cast chemistry that engages. Props to director Chris Koch, who clearly is better than the material he had in Snow Day, his first feature directing assignment. And Lee is more than just a vessel for Kevin Smith.

recommended

Renny Harlin and Shane Black were clearly going for an over the top, cartoon-level action flick in this 1996 outing. Consider just three bits:

• “Life is pain, get used to it,” Geena Davis tells her daughter after an ice skating accident. Later we find that the eight year old broke her wrist
• “Continue dying. Out,” Craig Bierko, the chief baddie, said to a henchman who was radioing for help.
• Blood trickling artfully down out of her nose, Davis urges the daughter to run away from the climactic bomb. But the daughter can’t bear to leave her dying mom and tells her “Life is pain, get used to it.” Of course the next shot is Davis getting up off the ground.

But The Long Kiss Goodnight is good cartoon, the way the first two Die Hards (Harlin directed the second) and Black’s Last Action Hero were. Maybe I’m just reacting to my longstanding attraction to Davis, who is both Amazonian and a red head, but I don’t think so. Because there are also lots of tight situations barely escaped and big explosions too.

recommended

Barely 20 years after the events depicted, director Alan Parker made a very courageous movie about the murder of civil rights workers in the Old South. The specific acts are fictionalized but there were so many sad, terrible real events that the authenticity is no problem. The fight by the powerful whites to keep their black neighbors down was often violent and always tragic and that is what Parker brings to life.

Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman star in Mississippi Burning as FBI agents sent in to investigate the disappearance of those three workers who were trying to set up a voter registration facility in some dinky dusty town. Dafoe, running the investigation is a young agent who is sure of his procedures while Hackman is a veteran who’d been the sherriff of a distant Mississippi county as a younger man; predictably, by the end, the two come to an understanding and Dafoe is not so sure of himself.

But Parker is an excellent director and while there are few surprises he has no problem bringing out powerful emotions and a quickening tempo that keep a viewer involved. Other actors who help him achieve this quality are Brad Dourif as an evil deputy, Frances McDormand as Dourif’s wife (who, catching Hackman’s eye, is the closest thing we get to a romantic subplot), Darius McCrary as a black teen who understands the reason for the fight and Pruitt Taylor Vince as a white coward (named Cowans).

The film won the 1989 Oscar for Best Cinematography (by Peter Biziou) and was nominated for six more: Best Picture, Hackman and McDormand for acting, Parker for directing and Best Film Editing and Best Sound. Can’t complain about losing Best Picture, Director and Actor to Rain Man (Barry Levinson for directing and Dustin Hoffman for acting).

definitely recommended