Back when men were men and Russia was still the major part of the Soviet Union, some manly men on both sides were convinced that the only way for their country to survive the destructive power of the other was to develop a weapon so overwhelming that it could be used while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. Fortunately for us all those men never got a chance to test their fever dreams.

Released in 1990, The Hunt for Red October was a fictionalized version of what mighted have been, if the Soviets had developed a nearly undetectable submarine engine and built a huge MIRV launching system on top of it. Since this is an American made movie, from Tom Clancy’s first huge hit novel, the captain of this first strike weapon is a man perfectly suited to defect.

Sean Connery is Ramius, the iron man running this show, the senior captain of the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet, and he takes the Red October out on its first cruise, with Sam Neill as his number two who dreams of Montana’s open skies and a fat round American wife. Alec Baldwin (replaced by Harrison Ford and then Ben Affleck in later flicks) is American intelligence analyst Jack Ryan, the man who figures out what Connery’s up to. Scott Glen is Bart Mancuso, the American sub captain tailing the Soviets out onto the open seas, and he teams up with Ryan to enable the plan.

Directed by John McTiernan, a top action man, Hunt is an excellent thriller that marches through twists and turns better than Connery’s sub does through the ocean bottom. The first two thirds are filled with the separate races Ryan and Ramius run just to meet up and the final act notches the tension tighter through several false endings. The cinematography and editing are totally sharp.

I’m not writing this well. It’s a holiday, so cut me some slack.

recommended

Roger Ebert writes a better review of this awesome 1955 French noir classic than I could. A direct inspiration, along with the contemporaneous Bob La Flambeur, for the modern heist genre. Tarantino would never have made Reservoir Dogs without it. Rififi, as its titled in English-speaking countries, has one scene that stands out as terrifically memorable, the actual robbery, which lasts for 28 minutes and has no dialog or music, just the natural sounds of the four men as they break in, disable the alarm and drill into the back of a huge safe. So cool and, for the record, Frank Oz and David Mamet (who both should have known better) should be sentenced to watch this over and over until their eyeballs bleed for making The Score and Heist.

definitely recommended

The first time around, the balance of romance and jokes, not to mention the quality of the jokes, was spot on. In this sequel, there’s a fourth credited screenwriter and a change in directors, neither change to the good. There are jokes this time, of course though too many are obvious set ups rather than flowing organically from the story, Zellweger’s chubbiness seems too substantial for the four weeks the movie claims have passed since the first, and, worst of all, there is a completely needless heavy dramatic turn about two thirds in that brings all good cheer to a thudding halt.

All in all, Bridget Jones - The Edge of Reason, is a pretty good example of why you shouldn’t make sequels to romantic movies. Action films can be just as formulaic with them but in those films the audience is looking for more big booms, some high speed chases, a good villain and the hero saving everything in the last few minutes having nearly avoided losing everything. In movies where the lead character is looking for love and ends up finding it, a sequel has a lot of trouble because right off the story must account believably for why the relationship is off.

Let me tell you, using an airport drug bust with a half dozen cops pointing loaded AK-47s at Bridget as the external event that everntually brings the two lovers back together–but not before all humor and romance is lost as she faces 10-15 years in a Thai prison–is so over the top in the wrong direction that I cannot imagine how not one of the writers, producers, lead actors, nor studio executives stopped it. And while I applaud three major studios for making a film with a pleasantly plump over 30 actress as the star, shoving this factor constantly to the front of the screen gives it the weight of a gimick where subtlety would have been much better.

not recommended

PS: This wasn’t my conscious choice for it but I will note that this write up is the 300th such post I’ve made to the blog in just a bit over 3.5 years. Nice to reach milestones and fun to continue the effort.

The ’semi-autobiographical’ movie about a woman born to rock, just never quite succeed,
Prey for Rock & Roll is a glimpse into the life of co-writer Cheri Lovedog (called Jacki, played by Gina Gershon) and what one assumes are amalgamations of people she met and played with during her days as part of the LA punk scene between about 1980 and the early ’90s.

Jacki’s just turned 40 and wondering if the time’s come to give up her dream but her band might just get that big break, if some sleezy promoter can be believed. Lori Petty plays Faith, the band’s lead guitarist, who teaches wannabes during the day and is in love with the band’s drummer Sally. Drea de Matteo (Sopranos, Joey) is the bass player, a trust fund baby, and way past well done on drugs, drinking and a bad boyfriend. Who rapes Sally, but gets paid back by Jacki (she runs a tattoo shop, so go figure) and Sally’s brother Animal (named by her for the Muppet’s drummer, played by Marc Blucas), whose just turned up after doing a dime for manslughter of their stepfather (who was raping Sally).

Lots of angsty, inner thought voiceover from Gershon which is fine if you want to hear Lovedog’s, well, inner thoughts, and less interesting if you want a better movie. The women are punkers, more or less, and this is no Hollywood flick so no one looks all that pretty, dresses nicely and every scene is cheap and messy. The director, Alex Steyermark, has mostly produced music and soundtracks for movies and this is first time directing. He’s not a natural but doesn’t get swallowed up by the material either. Which reminds me, if you don’t dig RiotGrrl rock, that’s gonna be a problem.

not really recommended

We started out watching Russell Crowe’s Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, the HBO Saturday night premiere, but it was so bloated and ponderous and, well, full of itself that we turned it off after an hour in favor of something with nowhere near the same ambition, Tim Allen’s goofy The Santa Clause 2. You know, we had some laughs and smiles and sometimes ambition and a budget to match just don’t get you a great movie; Master and Commander had such a big budget three studios (Fox, Universal and Disney’s Miramax) had to split the cost.

Anyway, SC2 picks up a eight years after the first and all of a sudden he’s de-Santafying because he missed the small print on the card he got when becoming The Man. What does it say? He must bring a Mrs. Clause to the North Pole before the stroke of midnight Christmas Eve or else. Back in the Real World his son is running into trouble and so Allen wants to get back there anyway. Let’s just say that the two problems collide and meanwhile some toys get uppity, driving the plot sufficiently for the much lower ambitions of this kid-targeted flick. Cute, simple, fair share of cliches but in the end that’s okay.

modestly recommended

The art of recording music has been born and revolutionized time after time in just the last century and a bit. One man, with a beautiful heart and a soul that was simply musical, is little known to the lovers of modern music but made undisputable contributions to several of those revolutions and helped give us an amazing amount of many different types of hugely popular music.

Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is a loving biography of that man, made in the months before Dowd passed away, during a time when he was still making new music with modern talent in his mid-70s. He began as a recording engineer when Atlantic Records was founded in the late ’40s, built the first real commercial stereo and multi-track studios and took to the computerized studios of the ’90s and later like he was born to it.

Who did Dowd record? Jazz and R&B artists like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. And rockers, man did he work the board magic for rockers: Eric Clapton (both The Cream and Derek and the Dominos), The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Young Rascals, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart and Cher. So many more, just an awesome discography.

There isn’t too much detail about the technical aspects of what Dowd did, though he does go back to the original Layla tapes and give a little taste of how the individual tracks fit together in the mix. Some discussion of his pioneering work in stereo and multi-track recording. Lots of interviews with artists he worked with–Clapton talks about believing so much more in Dowd’s musical instincts than his own and Gregg Allman cannot say enough about Dowd as a man. Plus his important partners at Atlantic Records, his boss and company founder Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler and protege Phil Ramone.

A sweet taste of the last half century of music. A portrait of a man who was a key piece of connective tissue across musical eras and genres.

Recommended

From 1998, Monument Ave. is one of those small films that I’m really glad get made. No big explosions or special effects, no rash personal transformations. Just some really good acting driven by good characters in an interesting situation.

Denis Leary plays the lead, a smalltime Boston gangster named Bobby O’Grady, edging well into his 30s with no prospects for the future and nothing more anchoring him to the present than a few friends (busy Brit Ian Hart and Ed Diehl of Miami Vice and The Shield) stuck in the same rut; all three work for a jerk boss, played by Colm Meaney. Mixing it up a bit is O’Grady’s cousin Seamus, over from Dublin, looking to make something happen in the States he couldn’t find at home. Martin Sheen as a local cop and Famke Janssen as a women in the middle round it out.

There isn’t much plot, basically just a few eventful days in the life of Leary’s O’Grady, but the man really shines. You can see a lot of what he later used as the cop in The Job and the fireman in Rescue Me, just from a different angle. Director Ted Demme (Blow and a bunch of other Leary films) stitches the scenes together by nearly always alternating day and night, transitioning through photos of what one can only assume are the main characters as kids. Very sharp and just enough of Leary’s trademark nasty humor.

recommended

There is a concept in animation called the Uncanny Valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori, which says that the human mind works in such a way that it responds to images or robots or other human-looking objects which are close but not quite close enough to true humans very negatively. As computer-generated animated films (or video games) get better and better at depicting reality, the makers need to take care not to fall in to it.

I bring this up because the visual quality seen in The Incredibles makes it clear that the years remaining until films can jump across the valley is probably measured in single digits. Comparing the images of humans and other objects like trees and ocean waves, I thought that the Pixar staff probably lowered the human characters’ resolution; they certainly seem somewhat more wooden and less detailed.

Even so the film has the highest quality I’ve seen yet in a feature-length animation. And writer-director Brad Bird (previously acclaimed for The Iron Giant) makes superb use of it for the first Pixar film that features only human characters. The basic story is superheroes versus would be supervillain, though with the added fillip of the superheroes being husband and wife with their three kids plus one superhero buddy. Craig T. Nelson was a terrific choice as Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr, the other outstanding voicework comes from Bird as supercostume designer Edna Mode.

Bird uses the family subplot as counterpoint to the main story though one of my complaints is that the main conflict doesn’t feel hefty enough. If this were, like so many action movies, the first screen version of a well-established comic book and telling the origin story that might not even be worthy of mention but Bird said that he didn’t make Incredibles to launch a series. Over half the movie goes by before we truly meet Syndrome (Jason Lee voicing a credible villain) and I was wondering if there was going to be a single bad guy, or just the story of a man beaten down by modern life.

Because if anything, the script goes all out showing how our litiginous, all victims culture deals with people who stand out from the crowd. Not just by shutting all the superheroes down with lawsuit after lawsuit and the government pushing them into witness relocaiton-like programs but with the small details of the Parrs’ lives. Bob must cram his huge body into a tiny car and drive to work at a tiny job where he is berated by a tiny boss and sit in a tiny cubicle; son Dash must hide his speed instead of even competing in sports and daughter Violet retreats so far into shyness that no one notices her becoming invisible at the least attention.

How good they all feel when forced to confront Buddy “Syndrome” Pine! No problem with lawsuits since the action is off on a tropical island where there are no innocents. Even when the action moves back to the big city, no one stops to think about shutting down and letting Syndrome have his way. I’m tempted to say this is another small flaw but by the last scenes Bird has dialed the action and pace up to where it’s immaterial.

recommended