Denzel Washington has spent years building a critical reputation and box office success; he’s one of those (relatively) rare people whose name on the marquee pretty much guarantees a decent opening weekend gross. But over time I believe he’s realized, as have other actors (for instance, Robert DeNiro), that some films you make for the payday and some because it’s the kind of film that got acting into your blood. Out of Time is, undoubtedly, a payday film for Washington. Not that I begrudge anyone the chance to make however many million dollars someone wants to pay him or her for actually doing a job, but the resulting films are generally not worth our time to watch.

Out of Time is, at bottom, a lazy film. Written by David Collard (only prior credit is TV cartoon Family Guy) and directed by Carl Franklin, we get a standard three course meal: overly emotional acting, red herrings and unsurprising surprises. Denzel is police chief in a small Florida beach town; the woman with whom he had an affair–his wife is a police detective on the squad–turns up dead and circumstances keep turning up that center him in the prime suspect dartboard.

John Billingsley is very Phlox-like as the only friend Washington can turn to, though he’s also one of the red herrings. Eva Mendes is the ultra-hottie wife/detective who can’t decide whether to arrest and divorce Washington or forgive him and rip his clothes off. Terry Laughlin is cardboard stock as a senior DEA agent, for which I can’t blame the veteran character actor, since his only dramatic purpose is to increase the heat on our hero; his subplot has absolutely zero connection to the main story but is an indicator of the lazy factor. The moments of this movie intended to be the most suspenseful fail utterly because we know that, despite all the mounting evidence, Denzel cannot die nor can he be the murderer.

not recommended

I’m definitely a Tim Roth fan. He generally does interesting, off the main track characters. I’d never seen Little Odessa but remembered reading positive reviews from 1994 when it was in theaters, so chalk up another reasonable plus for Tivo Suggests when I saw the title on my Now Playing list. This is definitely a little film, first one produced from the mind of writer/director James Gray, certainly better than his other effort, a dreary Mark Wahlberg flick called The Yards.

Besides Roth, we have Maximilian Schell as his father, Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, Edward Furlong (still glowing from The Terminator) as his 16 year old brother and Moira Kelly as the lady friend. So pretty good cast. The setting is, as the title suggests, the section of Brooklyn where a community of Russian Jews have settled, a very insular group as immigrant communities very often are.

The tension comes out of the family’s total dysfunction. Roth is a hit man, written off as dead by his parents and unable to visit home anyway as one of his first jobs was the son of the top neighborhood gangster. Furlong of course idolizes his absent brother, perhaps even more based on the rumors about him, and has long since stopped going to school. Redgrave is bedridden, near death from brain cancer, and Schell spends what time he can with a mistress.

Gray has an interesting setting, decent characters and conflict between the main ones but in the end the fatal flaw is a lack of connecting story arc. The film mainly seems to be a corkboard connecting bit to bit. Even so…

recommended

HBO, BBC and PBS collaborated in producing a 90 minute film depicting the members of an Islamic terrorist group as they develop and explode a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive with some radioactive material above the explosive. Parallelling the fundamentalist, giving Dirty War some human scale, we are also shown a firefighter and his wife, an MP newly named minister for London and her top assistant, and a small police squad who happen onto the plotters–though not in time to stop them.

“The events portrayed in this film are based on extensive factual research.” That sentence, flashed on screen in the opening moments, the words are intentionally flat and emotionless, make the scenes that follow all the more chilling. For the most part, excepting the two scenes where police knock down house doors, director Daniel Percival and his writing partner Lizzie Mickery maintain that sort of everyday ambience for the entire film; even the one big explosion is left to the viewer’s imagination with the screen whiting out with a low key bit of noise.

The sequence of events, you’d usually say the plot, unfolds like the ticks of a clock. Someone in Pakistan has gotten hold of radioactive dust and carefully packs the shielded containers with bubble wrap in wholesale size cooking oil cans, then pours in the cooking oil to fill; the truck arrives in Bulgaria, the pallet transfered to an English driver’s lorrie; the barrels are unloaded in a quiet section of London and then delivered to the house where three bombs are to be made.

Some Muslim woman who owns a corner shop tips off the police and the newest addition to the anti-terror squad, a young Westernized muslim woman, runs the lead through the bureaucracy. All very methodical. Her team manages to identify the two men tipped by the shop owner and arrests them as they’re packing to flee. Despite somewhat aggressive interrogation techniques neither will talk, of course, other than to proclaim the greatness of their God. The Muslim copper finds a lead to another location used by the cell and races there, arriving just before the first bomb is exploded, at 8 a.m. outside a busy Underground station.

The police have identified two other vans that may be carrying addition dirty bombs but to avoid spooking the drivers are not moving in. One of the vans suddenly drives off and an unmarked car darts out in front, shooting quickly enough to kill the terrorists before their bomb is detonated. The remaining 15 minutes or so are used to show the aftermath, a bit of the personal, mostly larger scale, especially the containment of crowds of potentially irradiated people, tens of thousands, who were far enough away to escape a violent death but close enough to the explosion to need decontamination. These people are not happy at the slow pace and lack of comforts.

The final shots are an aerial tour of the huge section of London which has been fenced off and cannot be entered for 30-50 years. Millions of square feet of office space, thousands of shops and homes, cars left to rust in place. No mention of that third bomb either.

The actors are almost unnoticable, though I mean this as a compliment. Koel Purie, Ewan Stewart, Alistair Galbraith and William El-Gardi, thinking back on the performances, were so submerged in their characters they were able to deliver what Percival needed from them. Compared to, for instance, the histrionics seen constantly in 24 the cast allows viewers space and mental energy to consider the real world meaning of what would be a catastrophe dwarfing 9/11 or the Madrid bombings.

highly recommended

Note: This topic has been popular recently with Hollywood types: TNT and the BBC co-produced a miniseries called The Grid, FX had a film called Smallpox, Day 3 of 24 had narco-terrorists attempt to infect LA with a very nasty bug and the current series is going in the direction of Islamic terrorists and nuclear emergency on our soil, and A&E’s (British import) MI-5 has more than one episode on some aspect of the concept; one can even go back a few years to the George Clooney/Nicole Kidman movie The Peacemaker. The excellent PBS series frontline features al qeada’s new front tonight while that network will broadcast Dirty War late next month. Further, John Robb’s latest post to Global Guerillas suggests that despite the absense of any successful attacks on American soil in three years there has not been an absense of planning for them.

The Rock is starting to show real acting ability, first in The Scorpion King and now in 2003’s The Rundown, with more than just action chops; I’m looking forward to his performance as a gay bodyguard/aspiring singer in the upcoming Get Shorty sequel Be Cool. For my money, the ex-WWE wrestler has emerged with Vin Diesel and Matt Damon as the newest class of American stars capable of delivering successfully in action and comedy (the Governator even makes a passing the torch cameo in this movie’s opening scene); he’s apparently attached to play the title character in a live action version of Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo which might be an interesting indicator of how far Dwayne Johnson can move from his action base.

Beck (The Rock) dreams of opening his own restaurant, keeping a small notebook for recipe ideas, but is stuck–reason unspecified–working for an LA crime boss (veteran character actor William Lucking) as a retrieval specialist. One more job will fulfill his obligation but his assignment is a real doozy: head down to the Amazon, find the gangster’s wayward son Travis and bring him home.

American Pie vet Sean William Scott is the son, a college dropout and modern day Indiana Jones wannabe, on the trail of El Gato de Diablo (the Devil’s Cat), a mythical pre-Columbian statue made of pure gold. Director Peter Berg (most recently in theaters with the semi-hit Friday Night Lights) wisely wastes no time getting Beck and Travis together: one minute Beck has his orders, the next he’s on a tiny plane avoiding herd of steers on the dusty landing strip, and the next at Rosario Dawson’s bar, Scott sneaking out but betrayed by the bar’s mirror.

Two obstacles stand in between Beck and a simple success: Hatcher (Christopher Walken), an American running an illicit goldmine on whose territory the statue is hidden, and Mariana ( the lovely Dawson), providing Scott with material support for her own ulterior motives.

Given a role that other actors might have walked through for the paycheck, Walken takes too much pleasure from his performances and takes the part of a greedy, arrogant sociopath to the next level; in my mind’s eye I saw Hatcher twirling the ends of his waxed mustache as his eyes lit up when Beck appeared on (security) camera to initiate the climactic battle. Dawson, too, was given a substantive, interesting character rather than the stereotypical bimbo so often used to add salaciousness for the teen male demographic.

Ernie Reyes Jr. has a great supporting part as leader of a band of Amazonian natives that capture Beck and Travis. Reyes is not much more than half the size of The Rock but he and his crew use some amazing martial arts skills and aerobatics to nearly win a fight that Travis provokes to escape from the no-nonsense Beck. This was one of the most original, enjoyable movie fight scenes I’ve seen since Hollywood imported Jackie Chan, John Woo and associates from Hong Kong.

Writers RJ Stewart (breaking back into film after writing many scripts for Xena: Warrior Princess) and James Vanderbilt (Darkness Falls) also give Beck a very memorable recurring standard bit. To open each confrontion with another character–such as the meeting with Travis, to explain that the two will be returning to his father in LA–Beck offers Option A and Option B. The former is to go easy, the latter to go hard and, in answer to Travis, there’s never an Option C even if Travis and later Hatcher, to their detriment, believe otherwise. These bits provide The Rock good material which he uses to show that acting ability I mentioned.

Berg keeps the action moving at a very good pace and wastes very few of his 100 minutes on scenes that don’t serve both plot and character development. One could easily imagine a version by a different director who added, for instance, scenes to establish the relationship between Scott, Dawson and Walken or, strengthening the mirroring between protagonist and antagonist, how Walken came to be running the mines. Good job.

recommended

Bonus note: Scott will make a brief cameo as Stiffler in the upcoming straight to DVD attempt to capitalize on a cash cow American Pie: Band Camp, with the plot focusing on his character’s younger brother and his plan to make a Girls Gone Wild-style video. Yes, Jennifer Coolidge will reprise her role as America’s favorite MILF.

Vegas is a changed city; from the ’50s through the late ’80s/early ’90s it was THE place to go for adult entertainment and kids were a nuisance best left home with Grandma. Steve Wynn, who’d grown up partly in the city as his father tried to break in with a bingo parlor, had one of those rare $50 billion insights that can create waves of change in even the biggest industries: Las Vegas can be a destination for the whole family.

So he took control of Circus-Circus, built The Mirage, with its working volcano out front and purpose-built theater for Sigfreid and Roy, and proved his concept. He went on to expand and print money with it through several more hotels including Excalibur and the Bellagio finally selling those off at huge profit; but I suppose the lure is too great and so he bought the old Desert Inn, demolished it and in a few months will open a megaresort topping even the Bellagio, initally named La Reve after a favorite Picasso painting but now known as simply Wynn Las Vegas.

The Cooler is a film about a few people in the last place on the Strip unwilling to acknowledge the power of Wynn’s vision but are forced to nonetheless. Alec Baldwin is the casino manager, set in his ways and happy with them. William Macy, the title character, is a childhood buddy of Baldwin’s and a sad sack on a losing streak so long he can barely remember its start, and his job is simply to show up at any table or machine that’s paying out to the rubes, because his luck instantly changes the results.

The drama comes out of the collision between a change in Macy’s fortune (Maria Bello! Showing that even art house movies are subject to the ridiculous age gap rule) and the arrival of a hotshot MBA (Ron Livingston, playing a role closer to Lewis Nixon in Band of Brothers than Office Space’s Peter Gibbons) with a plan to rebuild the Shangri-La into a modern behemoth. Macy’s instant love affair turns his luck 180 degrees at exactly the wrong time for Baldwin, who needs to fend off his boss (Arthur Nascarella, a New York City cop for 20 years with a longrunning second career playing wiseguys). Livingston has brought along a scale model of what he plans to build.

Early on we get a taste of how Baldwin operates, in a few quick scenes with an old school crooner (Paul Sorvino, who definitely shows his singing chops) never able to kick his drug habit. And the explanation of Macy’s limp, part of the price he paid–to Baldwin–for running up a casino debt too large to cover. One of his better efforts, Baldwin earned Best Supporting Actor nominations for both the Oscars and Golden Globes.

Co-writer/director Wayne Kramer (not that Wayne Kramer) throws in some good plot twists and interesting characters–but what happened to the son and his girlfriend?–and I like the way he uses dirty, darker sets and lighting; enough bits of humor that earn The Cooler entry into the black humor wing. Heck, I think the motel where Macy lives is the same one used in the Tarantino starrer Destiny Turns on the Radio. The stacked endings create a nice crescendo of tension, release, tension, release and again, with a very emotionally honest confrontation to resolve the Baldwin/Macy relationship.

recommended

A Spanish movie released in 2001, Sin noticias de Dios (titled Don’t Tempt Me in this subtitled English version) is a conflation of the end of the world and love triangle in a humorous vein written and directed by Agustin Diaz Yanes. Penelope Cruz and Victoria Abril are beautiful angels sent from, respectively, Hell and Heaven to fight for the soul of a boxer named Manny (Demian Bichir); the Rebellion is beating the forces of Heaven so badly that if Manny goes Down, the side of Good will finally be beaten and God is unreachable to give a hand.

I often wonder how well subtitles are translated, especially when dialog is intentionally subtle, and that was certainly true for me on this film. While Yanes’ main intents came through well enough, I felt a small level of surreality creeping in when some of the peripheral characters had focus and when characters spoke longer bits of exposition. Acting, movement, imagery were all well done, nothing to really complain about, but the subject matter was so large that these other apsects were overwhelmed.

not recommended for non-Spanish speakers

I was expecting more from this odd little movie about a dwarf named Fin (Peter Dinklage) whose careful life, small in an oddly similar way to his own body, is disrupted when his boss dies and the Hoboken building housing the model train shop in which they work and the apartments in which they live is sold. Fin, not totally stranded, is left a small plot of land on which stand an old train station and a few train cars outside a small town in southern New Jersey.

The Station Agent, which was nominated for and even won a few awards, focuses on Fin and the few relationships he allows others to form with him. Joe (Will & Grace’s Bobby Cannavale) is in town to run his sick father’s hot dog truck, which seems to be parked on Fin’s land though no explanation is provided for why the insular little man doesn’t kick him, Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) has run away from a tragedy and nearly kills Fin the first time she sets eyes on him, and Emily (Michelle Williams from Dawson’s Creek) is a gorgeous librarian who prefers Fin to her normal body sized but small minded boyfriend.

Now I’ve watched and enjoyed many movies that were driven by the exploration of one or a small group of characters but I honestly don’t understand what the critics saw in Agent that had them writing such overwhelmingly positive reviews. Yes, Dinklage is short and have no doubt that viewers are never allowed to forget it. Whether it’s Emily’s boyfriend and his pal with their foolish namecalling, the stares he attracts from everyone in town, the way a little girl thinks he’s also a child, hardly two minutes go by without this emphasis.

This is the first produced film written by Thomas McCarthy and his first directing effort and, despite the decent performances by all the main actors and reasonable cinematography, I really wonder why this movie was given the green light because there’s just so little tension or growth; the saving grace, I suppose, was the estimated budget of $500,000, so small it was no more than the rounding error on the 2003 Miramax budget.

not recommended

This 2003 film was really beaten up by critics and a box office failure. The hype was all about Meg Ryan playing against type, not at all the sweet pretty thing she’s done over and over again, and even (finally) some onscreen nudity. Tivo Suggests recorded it so I figured what the heck. I’m not sure I should have bothered, haven’t really decided whether it’s worth watching or not.

In the Cut stars Meg Ryan as an English teacher in Manhattan who wants to be (of course) a writer but all she does in that regard is collect words and scraps of poetry to pin on her wall. Plus she tutors a hardbodied young black student in bars and he has the hots for her. Jennifer Jason Leigh is her half-sister, same father, who lives above a go-go bar and makes appointments with doctors to fuck them in hopes of landing one as a husband.

A woman is brutally murdered in Ryan’s neighborhood and a detective, played by Mark Ruffalo, comes by to check if she saw anything related, but she says no; Ruffalo, without any reason beyond appearance, feels an instant sexual attraction to her. There’s another savage murder. Ryan and Ruffalo have sex after a nasty bar conversation. Still another murder, the victim someone close to our heroine. Ryan is confused and is trapped by the villain.

My first problem is Mark Ruffalo. He does well in the right roles but I’m still waiting to see him move at a speed greater than lethargic–which never happens. Urgency, excitement and the like, which would be appropriate in at least some of his scenes in Cut just aren’t able to emerge. Second is the absence of sufficient build up in the script, co-written by director Jane Campion and novelist Susannah Moore, of clues hinting at the villain’s identity so when we do learn who did it, the surprise carries no weight in its punch and I just didn’t care.

Positives are there too: this is a rough film, in many ways. The language, the imagery, the movement, the plot, the sex are all very angular and rubbed up on raw edges. Seeing Meg Ryan in a sex scene after all these years. Most of the ingredients are almost but not quite there. In the end I guess my final words are:

not recommended

Released in America with the title Beyond Hypothermia, 1996 Korean gangster flick Sip si 32 doe faces off an emotionless female assassin (Wu Chin Lin) and a passionate Korean mobster (Han Sang Woo), with a seemingly witless noodle vendor caught in the middle. The American title apparently refers to the assassin’s barely alluded to subnormal body temperature though there’s also the opening scene in which she does the business from inside an icehouse fortuitously located above and across the street from the location of a hit.

The theme here is human connection–she has none, not even with her ‘mother’; he is consumed by his, determined to avenge the killing of the boss he failed to protect; and the noodle man has lost all human warmth and then is drawn into her stuttering romantic (sexual?) awakening. Plot is minimal: the assassin does several jobs, one is killing the triad boss, and after each job she returns at closing time saying nary a word but nonetheless enchanting the noodle man. She was seen and chased after the triad killing, gets away, and yet (we’re never told how) word gets back to him on how to contact her handler. From there the explosive collision is inevitable.

But that isn’t really a criticism because Sip si 32 doe is all about visual imagery and violent interaction as a modern mode of ballet. Perhaps such an assessment is old hat by now but director Patrick Leung really does an excellent job with it. Even the final gun battle has sensibility different from what Americans first came to know through the work of Leung’s mentor John Woo; there’s very little evidence of such Woo trademarks as a gunman, preferably the protagonist, jumping across an opening between shielded spots blazing away with two big handguns.

All in all this is a worthwhile film for genre fans though I might have enjoyed it more with the original Korean (or Chinese?) dialog instead of the dubbed English.

recommended

I should know by now that seeing John Goodman listed in the credits is a near perfect indicator that I am going to end up not enjoing a film. This is true even when the film is set in Australia, as here, which automatically gives a film bonus points because I have an irrational attachment to the land Down Under and is not particularly connected to whether Goodman does the business or not.

Dirty Deeds is set in 1969 Sydney, where young Darcy has returned from a tour in ‘Nam and mobsters Tony (Goodman) and Sal have arrived from Chicago bearing a prototype video slot machine. Plus $2 million US in cash to buy their way into control of the flourishing slots business, currently controlled by Darcy’s uncle and surrogate father Barry (Bryan Brown). Barry’s married to Sharon (one of my favorites, Toni Collette) and sleeping with Margaret (the gorgeous Kestie Morassi), who lives in the apartment next door to Darcy. Of course the two youngsters fall for each other, particularly after Collette puts the facts of life to Morassi. Sam Neill, who I quite enjoyed in a recent run of old Reilly: Ace of Spies episodes, is a corrupt police detective giving cover to the gangsters.

Not an unreasonable setup, but writer/director David Caesar doesn’t give enough emphasis to any of the various plots to bring them to life except the Darcy/Margaret romance. Brown’s characer gets most of the best lines with Collette getting one or two good scenes. Neill is wasted and the two visiting mafia soldiers are cardboard stereotypes. If I had to guess I’d probably have cut out the subplot where Brown is being challenged by another local wiseguy.

not recommended