Made in the last years of the Evil Empire, I noticed Red Dawn on a movie channel and wanted to see how well it held up 22 years later. The story is basic Cold War stuff, turned on its head. The Soviets, with a force lead by their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade but all we really see is what happens in one small piece, a small town in the Nebraska plains. Few nukes, it turns out, were needed to take America down.

As an airborne unit lands one September day, a few kids break loose and head into the mountains; fortunately two of them, brothers played by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, had a dad (the laconic Harry Dean Stanton) who taught them to hunt and camp, to be real redblooded American men.

Swayze keeps them hidden and safe for the first month but then they head into town to find out what’s happening. The boys find Stanton and a few dozen other potential troublemakers hearded into a re-education camp and themselves atop the most wanted list. Time to do something!

The boys start small, picking off occupying soldiers when they travel in small numbers outside town. After picking up two granddaughters of a family friend (Leah Thomspon and a barely recognizable Jennifer Grey), they get busy with the help of weaponry taken off the dead. It goes on from there.

This is a couple of years, by the way, before Grey teamed up with Swayze in Dirty Dancing or Sheen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While she was the love interest of both in those movies, and despite the difficult, isolated lifestyle they endure together, nobody hooks up here.

Directed by Apocalypse Now scribe and all-around tough guy John Milius and co-written by Milius and Kevin Reynolds, Red Dawn is the nightmare side of our struggle with the Communist bloc. The complacency and arrogance of our political leaders is what could lead to this result.

But Milius is guilty of some serious laziness himself, or perhaps the blame belongs to the budding Brat Pack cast (C. Thomas Howell is in the gang too, and of course gets to do his anguished shtick), but someone needs to tell me how these kids’ hair is always clean and neatly trimmed, their clothes reasonably fresh rather than in tatters and how the boys don’t have at least scraggly beards. My hair would be a greasy, tangled–and long–mess after months in the hills!

modestly recommended

Frankly, I’ve put off writing up this movie because I wasn’t sure how to say what I feel. Regardless of party affiliation or attitude towards Al Gore, this is very watchable and a film you must see. Assuming you care in the least about the world we–or perhaps more importantly, your children and their children will–live in. I’m not saying its perfect or that the science cannot be challenged.

I am saying that we essentially face a real world variation of Pascal’s Wager. If the science is wrong, in whole or in degree, or if other developments make the problem irrelevant, then there’s little lost in acting as if we are in a climate crisis; if the argument made in Truth is correct, then we either start making real changes or sentence generations yet to come to a horrific future.

Frankly, if the science in An Inconvenient Truth is correct, some environmental changes may come within a decade that will make our present horrific. Two high probability events, significant ice cap melts in Antarctica and Greenland, could kill millions of people living in coastal areas on all continents and make tens of millions more refugees; you can write off big chunks of San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami, Manhattan, Naples, Venice, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, coastal India, Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. Plus oil export port facilities throughout the Middle East.

That’s just the most direct, near term effect from one pair of high probability events. Gore lays out much more dire consequences if we maintain the status quo and frankly the research he presents seems very solid to me. Look at the temperatures for the last month or so, 2006 is already shaping up as the hottest year since we began keeping records!

Solutions are available and, Gore asserts, will have positive near-term economic benefits. That is, despite the negative progaganda of the corporate interests fighting them, changing our products and consumption habits in ways that greatly decrease human environmental impact will increase employment and gross global economic activity. Just not for the huge oil and gas companies, which is where almost all the funding for opposition to the changes comes from!

Some related linkage:

• Climate Crisis, official movie site
• “Key” to An Inconvenient Truth: Apple article on how Gore and Co used Keynote to compose the movie
• Harvard University Press Publicity Blog: Spencer Weart on “An Inconvenient Truth”
• The Discovery of Global Warming, a deep site by Weart
• BBC News: A load of hot air?, Q&A on Climate Change
• Matt Haughey on Vinod Khosla on Biofuels at Google

absolutely recommended

I avoided Steve Carell’s 2005 hit because the comedy was perhaps a bit vulgar and too close to home but my sweetie wanted to see it so I gave it a shot. Though there were parts that were too vulgar, Carell and co-writer/director made The 40 Year Old Virgin funny even for me.

A lot of the screen time is wasted on antics with three co-workers (a truly wasted Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Romany Malco); the real fun of the movie to me is Carell’s interaction with women. The arc of his relationship with Sell it on eBay shopkeeper Catherine Keener (and her daughter) is especially terrific. And we loved the ending, when the cast bursts into a full-blown song and dance of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine in!

recommended

The New York art scene has always been fertile ground for a certain type of movie or novel, and the 1998 High Art fits neatly in that hole. Radha Mitchell plays Syd, an aspiring assistant editor at a photography magazine and, through a plumbing leak, meets Ally Sheedy, her upstairs neighbor.

Sheedy’s Lucy was a photography wunderkind, but burned out a decade before, a trust fund baby happy to spend her days snorting heroin with her German actress lover (a very different Patricia Clarke) and a few friends. Syd doesn’t recognize Lucy’s name, she’s that young, but recognizes art when she sees it. After being shown a book of her published photos, Syd gets Lucy and her bosses to agree to a cover article with new work from Lucy.

Syd and Lucy of course fall for each other. In their society–I assume writer director Lisa Cholodenko intended the title to riff on our mental image of high society–being a lesbian is no trouble but snorting heroin always has a price.

Cholodenko, who also made Laurel Canyon, does an excellent job of showing us the claustrophobic world these women live in. The dialog is really spot on, particularly for some of the secondary characters like Lucy’s genteel Jewish mother (Tammy Grimes) and her bosses at the magazine (Anh Duong, David Thornton).

And who can argue with seeing Radha and Ally getting busy?

In 1988 science fiction was coming on strong in Hollywood, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a hit on TV and Schwarzenneger couldn’t make movies fast enough. So when Rockne O’Bannon (who went on to do the TV series from this movie and create the cult hit Farscape) turned in the script for the SF/cop thriller Alien Nation I’m sure it didn’t take much to get a greenlight from the studio execs.

James Caan was just getting back into the movie groove after taking off the mid-80s and he’s a really good fit for Detective Matt Sykes. Angry and arrogant, absorbed by his work, he sees a backdoor way into the investigation of the movie-opening murder of his partner by Newcomer hoodlums.

Newcomers are the alien slaves who, three years before, captured control of their starship and landed it in the California desert. They’re just beginning to be integrated into American society (in much the same ways as previous immigrant waves were) and the LAPD brass jump up a Newcomer patrolman to detective as a PR move. Caan grabs Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin under some serious facial appliances) as a replacement partner.

Alien Nation (alienation, get it?) is in the long tradition of mismatched cop partners who over the course of the investigation bond and realize that their differences are trivial, they’re really brothers under the skin. Swap the science fiction for comedy and I’m reminded of Nolte and Murphy in 48 Hours. Nearly 20 years later this still stands up well.
recommended

Jim Carrey comedies are (almost) always worth watching. When he tries to get serious, the results are mixed. Fortunately Fun With Dick And Jane is a straight out comedy. And you can hardly lose with one of my favorite hot actresses, Tea Leoni. Director Dean Parisot previously entertained us with GalaxyQuest and Home Fries.

The movie started off slow, but picks up nicely once Carrey hits bottom in his job hunt and the payback plot against his thieving former boss. Alec Baldwin plays the financial finagler, a pastiche of Ken Lay, Bernard Ebbers and John Rigas who was able to foist blame off onto his CFO, though no real top exec would wear a full beard. Carrey really gets to unleash his physical comedy as he and Leoni make sure Baldwin pays for his misdeeds.

recommended

Made for Showtime in 2002, Bobbie’s Girl is a small character drama. Rachel Ward and Bernadette Peters star as a loving couple who run a pub together in a small seaside town outside of Dublin, along with Jonathon Silverman as her gay brother.

Directed by Jeremy Kagan from Samuel Bernstein’s script, the story opens with Peters retrieving Ward’s suddenly orphaned 10 year old nephew from the very English boarding school where he’d been stashed. His parents’ death occured before the movie began, which violated my preference for “show, don’t tell,” but not terribly. The nephew is played very well by Thomas Sangster, who shortly thereafter essayed a very different role as the stepson of Liam Neeson in Love, Actually.

Ward comes from a family with rampant emotional issues, as does she, and so she barely knows who the boy is and has a difficult time making room for him in her life. Peters, conversely, does her usual ditsy, gregarious thing, thrilled to finally have a child in the house. Complicating the transition is a serious illness that puts Ward in the hospital. We get the expected happy ending but it’s a nice trip.

recommended

I’m as big a cartoon superhero to movie geek as the next guy and, since I was going to Seattle the next day, we decided to see Superman Returns on opening night. Goes against my policy of paying $10 per ticket to see movies but why not?

Why not? Because somehow Bryan Singer, who gave us great movies like The Usual Suspects and X-Men (1 and 2), decided to make a film that was more melodrama than action drama. Sometimes it was enjoying, like the ethereal, waltz-like flight Superman takes Lois Lane on when they first see each other after his return.

Two and a half hours of movie with only one scene where Superman confronts Lex Luthor is the best example of why this didn’t work for me, especially when our hero’s solution to Lex’s kryptonite-infused new continent is a simple use of a super power with Baldie on a completely separate set.

The conflict which takes much more of the screen time is a put upon, more in the eyes of the audience than the characters love triangle between Superman, Lois and hubby/Perry White nephew Richard (or rectangle if you throw in Clark Kent). Brandon Routh really does seem to have been cast for his resemblance to Christopher Reeve than any particular talent. Kevin Spacey give Lex a different twist than, say, Gene Hackman but as Bill Humphries wrote “A bald Kevin Spacey is not a Sufficient Villain.” Kate Bosworth is okay as Lois but a bit insubstantial, I’d go for Erica Durance (from Smallville) any time.

mildly recommended

The final movie that Marvel will make using this main group of mutants, The Last Stand is a good but not great movie. I like that its darker than the first two but the level of conflict doesn’t match up, nor are the special effects especially innovative or stunning.

One problem that Bryan Singer, who directed the first two X movies, handled better than Bret Rattner does is integrating the extremely large cast into the movie rather than simply attempting to impress the audience by showing weird mutant powers. A good example is the ice skating scene, having a teenage boy freeze over a fountain to cheer up a girl. This type of scene injects stop energy (as Dave Winer might put it) into the movie, and there are too many of them.

Last Stand is fun and a nice wrap for the Xavier-Magneto conflict arc. But I really blame Rattner and his writers, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, or maybe Singer for jumping ship to do Superman Returns. Which was another disappointment, but that’s for a review I’ll post soon enough.

Frankly, the core of this movie was Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Famke Jansen’s Jean Grey and Halle Berry’s Storm and the movie went all over the place to show as many new mutants as could fit.

recommended