Released in 2002, this Canadian feature from writer/director Kari Skogland, this film will generally be compared to Colin Farrell’s Phonebooth from the same year. Both have the same basic framework of a sniper hidden from everyone but a trapped, specially chosen target though in Farrell’s film–which I haven’t seen–the shooter had a very different motivation.

Starring Wesley Snipes as the man with the gun and bombs, Linda Fiorentino as his victim, and Oliver Platt as her husband, Liberty Stands Still essentially comes down to an extended conversation between Snipes and Fiorentino. He’s the father of a girl killed by a classmate with a (legally acquired) gun and she’s the vice-president of a family-owned company which manufactured it. Platt is the company president, responsible along with her father (now a US Senator), for all sorts of nefarious dealings. All other roles are played by serviceable, if little known Canadian actors as Vancouver stands in for an anoymous American city

The film plays out in real time as Fiorentina is driving to see her lover in the last performance of a play and a more intimate post-show encounter. She stops in a park across the street from the theater to buy some coke from a hot dog cart vendor and her cell rings when she takes a snort; Snipes is on the other end and a red laser target dot is convincing enough to begin the encounter.

Two key issues for me overall:

1. Given the core theme, that a modern urban society is not well-served by maintaining slavish adherence to an unrestrained interpretation of our right to bear arms, I felt that far too little of the conversation actually concerned it. Who cares if the gun company executives bribe politicians, shave corners of the laws or sell to any buyer (domestic or foreign), and why have Fiorentino rationalize her position and then rapidly cave in? The company’s been owned and run by her family since before the Civil War, would she really (without the pressure of being under the gun) agree with Snipes in less than an hour?
2. No attempt is made to disguise the Canadian shooting location even though the film revolves around America’s 2nd Amendment and political machinery; the police and television newspeople are completely generic even though placing this in a specific city, such as, say, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, would have made a difference.

Further, there’s too much clutter brought in to make sure the film fills a minimally required 90 minutes. Fussing around the lover’s play, for instance, and chatter among the SWAT team serve no other purpose. Liberty Stands Still almost feels like it was initially written as a two character stage play.

not recommended

I understand why Thirteen drew such a high level of critical acclaim and appall. The story, partially based on the life of co-star/co-writer Nikki Reed, shows how Reed’s Evie comes into the life of Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), another sweet young (13 year old) girl, and nearly destroys her with drugs, sex, thievery and lies. Not sure why director/co-writer Catherine Hardwicke felt the need to use the nearly cliched opening scene that’s set just before the climax and then jump back to the story’s beginning after the credits but it doesn’t add anything for me.

The movie’s intense and frightening yet also seductive; is as often wishing that Tracy will pull Evie out of her pit as worried that Tracy’ll be pulled down; the ending, interestingly, is ambiguous so we’re left to our own conclusions. The performances are everything–little of the plot is surprising in general terms–and besides outstanding work from the two girls, Holly Hunter is impressive as Wood’s mom while Brady Corbet as her brother and Jeremy Sisto (6 Feet Under, and the title character in USA Network’s Julius Caesar) as Hunter’s reformed addict boyfriend do what they can. 24’s Sarah Clarke (the deadly worm Nina), Cynthia Ettinger (the soon returning Carnivale) and DW Moffat have small parts as well.

moderately recommended

A bit more than three years ago I went to see the first romp with this gang and came out of the theater surprised that I enjoyed Ocean’s 11, though not as much as the 1960 Rat Pack original. Today, because it was the best mutually agreeable choice TS1 and I saw Ocean’s 12 but I cannot tell you I really enjoyed myself as much.

Three years have passed since George Clooney and crew took off Andy Garcia’s casinos for $160 million, he’s married again to Julia Roberts and the rest are generally enjoying themselves to varying degrees. Brad Pitt, for instance, bought himself an LA hotel and we see he’s dealing with difficult movie star guests like a long-haired, heartbroken Topher Grace (who, you may recall, was one of Pitt’s poker students in 11). Casey Affleck and Scott Caan were probably as grateful as any of the cast that this sequel got made, and they play the goofy, arguing brothers although they’re barely given anything to do. Anyway…

Somehow Garcia has tracked down all the men who were part of the heist and given them two weeks to pay back what they took, plus interest. Instead of killing them, though no explain is given for this, and they all agree, rather than, say, try and kill Garcia. Not an auspicious beginning. The crew realize they’re short $100 million on what they owe and can’t work in America; no problem, Pitt has booked them tickets to Amsterdam for that evening, with a meeting already set with someone (Robby Coltrane, who must have still been tired from playing Hagrid) who can point them to a small but useful job.

That job’s a bust, a setup by a “notorious” European master thief known only as the Night Fox (played by a well-known European actor named Vincent Cassel). Oddly enough, our boys have connections who tell them instantly the real identity of their nemesis despite his ability to elude all the police forces of Europe for over a decade. Even Catherine Zeta-Jones, a detective on a made-up continental police squad. Cassel, it seems, was insulted by an older, father figure thief (brief cameo from Albert Finney), who said that the crew’s casino job made Danny Ocean a better thief. No, no, great wealth and an ability to fool nearly every person on Earth is not enough; such an insult cannot be suffered. And so we have our challenge.

Enough recapitulation. I noticed that George Nolfi, whose only other movie credit is co-writer of the dreadful adaptation of Chrichton’s Timeline, is the sole credited writer here. The New Yorker review of 12, though, mentions that Nolfi wrote a script called Honor Among Thieves and director Steven Soderbergh and producer Jerry Weintraub “shoehorned” it into what they needed for this movie. I am not surprised to learn this because there is little of the banter and ensemble work of the first film and instead Pitt and Clooney have major focus instead of being leaders of a group.

Further, the structure and cinematography get lost in Soderbergh’s experimentalism, a tendency he was able to put aside in 11 and Erin Brockovich, almost a game of we’re too smart for you boobs. There’s too much of a two steps forward, one step back to the whole thing, and a wildly inconsistent approach to the camera work and color scheme.

Disappointing

Trying a European variation on Bonnie and Clyde, I suppose, Warren Beatty made Richard Brook’s anti-hero caper flick $ with Goldie Hawn in 1971. He’s a bank security consultant come to Hamburg to bring the latest tools and methods to a big bank and she’s a cute American somehow turned to hooking there and somehow, we’re never told so much as how they meet, but they’re working together on his scheme to rip off the safe deposit boxes of customers who can’t complain about their losses.

The targets, who all depend on then-existent bank security laws guaranteeing anonymity, are a mob lawyer (character actor Robert Webber) who makes monthly deposits from the Vegas skim, a pair of American serviceman stationed in Germany and running a series of protection rackets and other scams and a murderous drug courier. Beatty uses a fake bomb threat to trap himself inside the vault holding the boxes and craftily transfers the contents into Hawn’s own box.

Written and directed by Brooks, who’d been nominated and won Oscars for such great films as Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Professionals, and In Cold Blood, the film should have ended there, with Beatty and Hawn laughing in his car and the three victims discovering their loss, but no, that’s not good enough for these moviemakers. Though the mob lawyer appears to die of a heart attack after opening his empty box, the other three connect and go after their money. So we get a strung out, two part chase, on foot, in cars, up an enormous stairway, even across a frozen lake. And yes, that champagne bottle does finally get used.

Not bad, not great

A bit of quality in a small major studio film, Gene Hackman, a year after leaving office as the most popular president in US history, and Ray Romano, owner of a local hardware store, define the word contrast as they contest for the mayoralty of a small town and the hand of a pretty veterinarian (Maura Tierney) in Welcome To Mooseport.

Something you don’t see a lot of, scriptwriter Tom Schulman gives both of the men character growth and personal insight and director Donald Petrie, often a hit or miss proposition, creates an authentic modern small town environment. Everybody knows each other and says good morning but they also play golf; one bit missing, now that I think about it, is an almost complete lack of home PCs or internet use. I suppose movie makers in general are still figuring out how to integrate something that doesn’t lend itself well to the visual demands of film.

A little nit: While they chose a great, completely suitable song to run over the end credits, Mayor of Simpleton, why did they use some unknown band called The Engine Room which I can’t even find in AllMusic instead of the classic powerpop original by XTC?

moderately recommended

“You’ll shoot your eye out.” That’s all poor Ralphie hears from adults when he answers the question what do you want for Christmas with the one thing that he’s just dying to have: a Daisy Brand Red Ryder repeating BB carbine with a compass mounted in the stock. Now this story’s set in the late 1940s in small town Indiana, so don’t go getting the wrong idea.

Based on Jean Shepherd’s (much better, I thought) novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, A Christmas Story was almost unnoticed when first released before Thanksgiving 1983; word of mouth pulled more and more people into theaters after it almost closed before that Christmas but the real turning point was its release on video and now cable station TBS has a 24 hour (12 repeats in a row!) showing every year starting on Christmas Eve.

Ralphie (Peter Billingsly, the cute kid co-host of the then hit TV proto-reality series Real People) is a pretty basic kid and the movie wastes little energy fleshing his character out. The two biggest bits of character development are his fight with a bully and his disillusionment after finally receiving a secret Little Orphan Annie decoder sent away for weeks previously. Mainly he’s deadlocked on getting that rifle.

Mom and Dad are Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin; mom’s mainly a stickfigure housewife, dad a midwestern cliche. Ralphie’s little brother has one big scene, where he refuses to eat his dinner until Dillon suggests he pretend his plate is a trough and he a pig. There are friends too, one of whom gets to show us what happens when a gullible boy licks a flagpole in winter.

I suppose writer/director Bob Clark, coming off the first two Porky’s teen schlockers, was looking for a movie that would show a bit more of his creativity but Shepherd’s material–which I’d read ten years or so earlier–doesn’t offer a story of sufficient depth to drive a feature-length film. His best works are short stories and even the novel from which the movie comes is more episodic, a series of connected incidents. Clark’s script tries to work in many of these, the father’s leg lamp award, ongoing battles with the neighbor’s pack of dogs, Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, but is constrained from really making a meal of them.

Then there’s the cultural obsolecence of A Christmas Story, a distance from our own times that grows greater every year but doesn’t reach the classic resonance of, say, A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th Street. I’m not sure why, maybe the movie’s too new or we’re not far enough from 1948, but as I listened to the frequent voiceovers, Shepherd himself as the adult Ralph, I couldn’t help but wonder why he was talking so much.

recommended because I seem to be about the only person who didn’t warm to this tale.

After reading comments on MetaFilter, Slashdot and elsewhere over the years, I finally took the chance to watch Japanese animation classic Ghost in the Shell. Based on a bestselling manga (a distinctly Japanese, adult form of comic book) of the same name, the movie is a brief science fiction story about a squad of government agents matched up against another agency of the same, unnamed government to retrieve an artifical intelligence called both Project 2501 and the Puppet Master.

Story and graphic design remind me of such films as Blade Runner and The Matrix. The Big Guy suggested to me that perhaps I was less impressed by GitS watching it in very late 2004 than I would have been during its initial 1995 run. Perhaps. The dialog was a bit stilted and pedantic, though possibly due to the English translated voiceover rather than the Japanese original. Ah well, not a bad way to spend 90 minutes, and maybe the 2002 TV series and 2004 full-length sequel will be worth seeking out as well.

recommended

January 30, 1972, is a day that will always be known as a milestone, a turning point, in the history of English control of Northern Ireland. That day thirteen people were killed by British Army and has become known as the Bloody Sunday massacre. Think back to 1983’s U2 album War, the song Sunday Bloody Sunday was about this tragic event:

I can’t believe the news today
I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.

Imagine Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood done up as raw celluloid, that’s the closest comparison I can think of for the 2002 movie Bloody Sunday. Written and directed by Paul Greengrass (who also helmed the excellent Bourne Supremacy released earlier this year), the movie is shot and structured as if the cameraman in each scene, especially those set under a roof, was wearing some type of flat camera over his left breast pocket and all he could do is turn or lean up and down. If another person walked in front or was too close ahead going up the stairs, you got to see their torso or bum. Okay, many of the exterior scenes have more conventional distance shots but that’s the only way Greengrass could give us the necessary scope and context.

What happened on this day? For me and I expect many Americans I think not much is understood about it. Two forces collided and one side had machine guns, tank-mounted water cannons and radio communications, and were itching to crack some heads while the other groups was, in the main, looking to put on a massive non-violent march of the kind put on by Gandhi and Martin Luther King though with a small leavening of hotheads and some even more violent types convinced the British government would not be swayed by anything less.

Certain members of the British Army units stationed in Northern Ireland, here the British 1st Parachute Regiment, were in fact already fed up with the level of violence directed their way, with more than 40 soldiers killed and many more wounded, and were inclined to see any large gathering of Catholics as trouble waiting to happen. These men went into play on that Sunday morning armed and more than ready to respond in kind. No one who fired a shot was given the least of reprimands from the inquiry convened immediately afterwards.

The Derry Civil Rights Association, led by their (Protestant but in love with a Catholic woman) Member of Parliament Ivan Cooper (played by James Nesbitt, who also did the title character in BBC America’s Murphy’s Law series), was adamant about this march taking place and without violence. Several times in the first act Cooper goes to talk with Provos and other dangerous men and begs them to stay away, if just for one day, and also speaks with local police chief to emphasize their intent.

But in a crowd so large, with so many men on edge, trouble is nearly impossible to avoid and so this day became a tragedy, beyond the deaths and injuries of the day, because many Irish Catholics decided the British would never make an honest deal unless driven to it. Thirty three years later, people are still trying to find that deal and perhaps are even close to it but over this span many have given their lives and bodies.

Getting back to the movie, I don’t think anyone can be certain of the precise details of the day and so more knowledgeable people (which would probably also mean more biased) have probably quarreled over the depiction but it does seem reasonable to me. Characters on both sides are portrayed with misgivings ahead of the clash and regrets afterwards though the senior British officer, Major General Ford, is shown as indifferent to the casualties as are a number of the soldiers who caused them.

Greengrass, who was born in England and was 16 on the day, does show the soldiers consciously shooting at unarmed marchers, putting a finishing bullet into one man already hit and another into a man waving a white handkerchief so he could bring one of the wounded back to a sheltered position. Even soldiers who object to the mission plan and try to convince others its a mistake in the end go along and lie to investigators.

The movie is very harsh, hard for it to be otherwise, but the cinematography and soundtrack are matched to the action, with handheld shots jouncing and accented voices jarring–at times incomprehensible to these American ears–and the overall sense of everthing being rushed, alternatives and options ignored is strong.

definitely recommended

Monster was much more of a Monster than I expected, a big one. Charlize Theron was remarkably different, in looks, body language, attitude and accent from the film I saw her in last weekend, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. One of the surprises was Selby, Christina Ricci’s character, the woman who was the final element in making Theron’s Aileen Wournos a serial killer.

Selby could not have been more of a passive/aggressive manipulator. Wournos killed her first man after meeting Selby but before really getting involved with her, but that first one was self-defense and it was Selby who insisted she keep going from there to put food on the dinner table and a roof over it.

Patty Jenkins did a terrific job in both writing and directing her first feature. The pacing, a bit meandering early on, picked up after the first act and matched the story well. She doesn’t make Wournos sympathetic at all to open, just a drunken whore, but does the old onion layer trick–only moments prior to the climax do we hear her tell Selby that a family friend began raping her at eight and when she finally told her dad he blew her off. Then killed himself.

No doubt Wournos was a loaded gun, and the man who raped and tried to kill her put a bullet in the chamber. Selby put her finger on the trigger and pulled. Wournos was so transformed by her love for Selby, the first chance she had for real emotional sustenance, that she took the whole rap–electrocuted in the chair in 2002–and let her off entirely.

definitely recommended

From 1999, writer/directors Allison Anders and Kurt Voss explore the world of the leftover rock star in Sugar Town. Sadly the duo don’t come close to the creative achievement Anders made with a previous music industry insider look-see, Grace of My Heart, and instead get stuck in a morass cataloging cliches.

Michael Des Barre, John Taylor and Martin Kemp are all actual rock stars–okay, Des Barre less so than the others and more famous for playing rock stars on screen–and the fourth member of the unnamed film band, Larry Klein, is a professional musician and ex-husband of Joni Mitchell; the film also features punker turned actor John Doe as a studio guitarist. The women in their lives are played by Beverly D’Angelo (a rich widow willing to finance their album if Des Barre will satisfy her), Ally Sheedy, Roseanne Arquette (Taylor’s wife, coming to grips with the Hollywood reality that her best film days are in the past), Lucinda Jenney and Jade Gordon.

In a way this reminded me of a lot of Robert Altman’s films, especially the less successful ones like Short Cuts and Ready to Wear, trying to weave a series of short stories around a loosely connected group of people. But at least Altman had the clout to make his films long enough whereas the 92 minutes allotted Sugar Town aren’t enough to create meat on most of these bones. The film would have worked much better if Anders and Voss had focused on Taylor and Arquette with perhaps Gordon’s cutthroat arc as the mirroring subplot. Oh well.

not recommended