For someone with an MBA, I tend to have a fairly negative opinion of American business leaders. So watching The Corporation was right in line and held few surprises for me; despite relying a bit more on Michael Moore, Noah Chomsky and Jeremy Rifkin than I would have the material is well-organized and delivers clearly the message that modern corporations have simply become uncontrolled and unhinged.

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan were the documentary’s key collaborators and realized that the story is so provocative that restraint in its telling was the best choice. Mixing interviews with CEOs, labor leaders, political activists and academics in between onsite footage, the first half is structured as a checklist of symptoms that add up to what would be diagnosed as psychotic in a real person.

Especially effective were the comments from Ray Anderson, Chairmen of Interface, Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer. This is a man who realized that his products were literally plundering the earth and decided to overhaul the entire system to completely change its environmental impact. One scene was a clip of Anderson speaking to a group of North Carolina business leaders and I was sad to see many of them yawning out of boredom.

recommended

TS1 got this cute animated film for a Christmas present and we broke it open a night early so she could see the penguins. Not bad but no match for the best of the recent crop, Madagascar features the vocal talents of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith and David Schwimmer as, respectively, a zebra, lion, hippo and giraffe who leave the cozy confines of Central Park Zoo for the grass-not-so-greener jungles of Madagascar after Stiller reveals his birthday wish to visit “the wild.”

recommended

Frankly, I don’t get why people love this movie. There are plenty of similar status movies that I do get (for example Office Space and Rocky Horror Picture Show) so the fact that ND is quirky and non-standard is not the reason. I just can’t get past the inanity and the whole ’step 1: say it loud, step 2: repeat until stupefication sets in’ formula. After half an hour I literally could not keep my eyes open.

I wasn’t going to even bother adding this to the blog except I want to test the Structured Blogging plugin. So suffer as I did!

not recommended

Not sure why I missed this early (1986) Sean Penn effort for so long, I’m just glad I finally saw it. Director James Foley (who later did Confidence, Glengarry Glen Ross, and The Corrupters) sets this father v. son tale in rural Pennsylvania, pitting the building tensionof the story against the wide open corn fields of the area’s farms. In one crucial, naive scene, Penn and girlfriend Mary Stuart Masterson literally run out of her house and race through the corn stalks!

At Close Range has Penn as the son of Christopher Walken though Walken has never been more than a fleeting figure in his life. Penn’s younger brother Chris plays his younger brother Tommy, who still idolizes dear old dad, though Sean has few illusions. Walken is the leader of a crime crew, most of whom are his brothers (most prominently David Strathairn and the always sleazy Tracey Walter), and Sean wants to join up to earn enough money for him and Masterson to get their own place. Though Penn does fine with his assigned part of the first job things go pear shaped immediately afterwards. Walken is so good as the sociopathic Brad Sr. I sometimes wonder what he does away from movie sets.

Definitely recommended

Roland Emmerich is a guy who does big movies, taking steps into the arena with Universal Soldier (Jean-Claude Van Damme AND Dolph Lundgren, plus a just before Law & Order Jerry Orbach) and Stargate and then whacking them out of the park with Independence Day (I have the DVD, should watch it again and do a write up), Godzilla (er, this was a clunker–but a big clunker) and The Patriot (Mel Gibson before he went completely round the bend), you go the whole SF ecological disaster theme, and Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal are doing some pretty good work these days so I had hopes when this was coming to theaters.

Sadly The Day After Tomorrow didn’t live up to those expectations, not for me, not at the box office where the $185 million take likely barely covered the production tab, and with terrible reviews and word of mouth I doubt the DVD sales added much more. Which is a shame because TDAT has the blockbuster ingredients but Emmerich got the proportions all wrong. Really wrong in a big way.

Quaid and Scottish scientist Ian Holm (Bilbo himself!) see outsized weather changes which could be precursors of a new ice age, even confronting a Dick Cheney-like US Vice President who sloughs them off as ridiculously alarmist. Then the storms start. Monsters. So big that astronauts up in the International Space Station see them blotting out huge chunks of the nothern hemisphere. So cold that people freeze solid within a couple of seconds’ exposure.

The trouble is that Emmerich stretches every trouble past the breaking point. Some examples:

• Quaid’s wife (Sela Ward) is not just a doctor, she’s a pediatric oncologist, and rather than evacuating with the rest of the patients and staff she insists on staying behind when an ambulance for her eight year old patient–who can’t travel without one–doesn’t come. So Ward sits and reads him a story.
• Gyllenhaal’s love interest (Emmy Rossum) isn’t satisfied with helping a stranded French speaking mom and child as a tidal wave is closing in on them on the streets of Manhattan but after getting them to safety rushes back to the taxi to grab a purse with their documentation.
• Quaid sets off to rescue Gyllenhaal (holed up in the New York Public Library) with his two research teammates. After losing their pickup truck outside Philly and setting out roped together on snowshoes, supply sled roped behind them, the sled crashes through thin ice and pulls a grizzly Jay O. Sanders in as well. Fine, Sanders can cut the rope and release the sled. Is that good enough for Emmerich? Of course not! Sanders has to cut himself loose and plunge to his death too. Puh-leeze!

The whole movie is more or less at this level. No room for subtlety and by ruling that out, any real dramatic tension is out the window as well. About the only thing really interesting or entertaining about TDAT is the computer special effects; to extend a meme, the disaster porn.

not recommended

I remember a year or so ago reading someone suggesting that Topher Grace, moving on from The ’70s Show, might have the makings of a new Cary Grant. This is 2005 and standards, not to mention people’s motivations for making such a claim, have changed but I can kind of see it. Dennis Quaid, on the other hand, is a known commodity and generally able to rise to a good script. They get a chance to see if Paul Weitz’s script and direction can spark chemistry and maybe give some heft to the Grace/Grant comparison.

In Good Company does deliver and shows that the promise of Weitz’s previous film, the terrific About a Boy, will likely be fulfilled. I really enjoyed this movie about a dotcom boy genius (Grace) who collides with an old school, happy middle class ad sales manager (Quaid) when a Rupert Murdoch-like tycoon (madman Malcolm McDowell) swoops in to buy Quaid’s Sports Illustrated-like magazine. Also adding to the sauce are very sweet Scarlett Johansson as Quaid’s oldest daughter (and Grace’s barely age-appropriate love interest) and, adding to the pressure, wife Marg Helgenberger is pregnant again.

definitely recommended

This is not a movie I would have turned on intentionally even if TiVo had recorded it for me but when you’re on a four hour flight with a free headset why not? Maybe the tiny screen will make it better. Reasonably formulaic, though with the odd interesting touches, The Perfect Man stars Hillary Duff as 16 year old daughter of Heather Locklear and Chris Noth is the titular target. As an aside, I know Noth is tall, dark and handsome but this is the second time (Sex and the City) where he’s held up as the ideal dream date and I don’t get it, though I expect that’s the point. Anyway, I did enjoy this enough for 90 minutes stuck on a 737.

Basics: Locklear has been burned so much by men that she simply picks up and moves her two daughters as soon as the latest romance goes south. At the open she decides to move to Brooklyn and being a world class baker there is of course a bakery anxious to have her services. Breadman Lenny (played by Mike O’Malley), who seems to think his favorite high school band, Styx, is the greatest ever, jumps on from the first sight of such a total hottie and Locklear grabs on as if he’s her last chance at love. Aside: Dennis de Young, the real lead singer of Styx, plays the lead singer of a Styx tribute band for a concert date.

Duff, horrified at the thought, connives with the semi-geeky boy who has the hots for her (Ben Feldman) to create a mysery suitor for mom based on gal pal Vanessa Lengies’s uncle (Noth). Hijinks ensue. Finally we must resolve the tension but I’m glad to say that director Mark Rosman and writer Gina Wendkos didn’t go for the standard Hollywood ending.

mildly recommended