As my regular readers know, I’m definitely a Jason Statham fan. So I knew that when this film came out I was going to try and see it in its big screen glory and fortunately, at the last minute, my friend mentioned wanting to see this. I mean, she told me as we were walking up to the ticket window, in passing, after seeing the Crank poster on the wall so we swapped to it instead of Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah, a very different movie indeed.

Crank is a lot like the Keanu Reeves Speed flick except there are only bad guys (and innocent bystanders) and instead of having to keep the bus going at least 50 MPH, Statham has to keep his heart going triple time. Oh yeah, and the other main difference is a much better script, tighter action and far more tension.

Written and directed by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (their feature film debut), this movie starts with a gas–Statham’s hit man character Chev Chelios wakes up and finds out from a DVD left on his TV that a small time, but ambitious, crew boss has knocked him cold and shot him up with a “Beijing Cocktail” that will have him dead in minutes–and keeps busting ass for the entire 90 minutes. The events play out in real time, like 24 or the 1995 Johnny Depp-starrer Nick of Time.

Chev, of course, is tougher than Verona (a suitably sleazy, arrogant Jose Pablo Cantillo) expects and so he’s racing off to take care of business before the last grain of sand drops. Every so often he gets a phone call with his doctor, who clearly is operating without a license, and gets a bit of advice on staying alive; Doc Miles is played by played by country singer Dwight Yoakum, looking as far from a star as seems possible, completely dissolute. Chev tries to say goodbye to his girlfriend (Amy Smart), a ditz who had no clue she’s dating a hit man and doesn’t believe him when he tells her. I love the scene where the two have sex on the sidewalk, in the middle of a huge crowd, and not discreetly either!

The film is smart, lots of small bits that show Neveldine and Taylor are using the action thriller form as a vehicle, the way Tarantino did with the heist in Reservoir Dogs. I look forward to what they, and Statham, do next.
recommended

Back when I first read about this movie it seemed like a must see–starring Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, and Bob Hoskins, written and produced by Luc Besson and directed by Louis Leterrier ( who also collaborated on The Transporter) right?–but when it was released it got poor reviews and box office and disappeared before I had a chance to make up my mind. So when it premiered on HBO last Saturday I decided to go for it. No money out of my pocket so what the heck.

Unleashed is about a relentless fighter (Li, of course) who is more or less owned by a mob debt collector (Hoskins) and who can destroy any gang when his collar is removed (unleashed, get it?). After some unhappy “customers” riddle their car with bullets, Li believes Hoskins died and wanders off on his own, a reality he is unequipped to deal with since Hoskins has literally kept him caged and isolated since he was a small child. He connects with Freeman, a blind piano tuner who he met while waiting on Hoskins to make a collection, who takes him in no questions asked.

But of course Hoskins isn’t dead and a few months later, after Li has come out of shell, one of his thugs runs into Li on the street. Understanding that to do otherwise would bring only pain and/or death to Freeman and his stepdaughter, Li returns to his old life. That is soon unacceptable and so the two have a final showdown.

The martial arts sequences were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, one of the true masters, are awesome. As soon as his collar comes off, Li jams into action and takes down all the opposition; going against Hoskins is just stupid but some people won’t learn that lesson. There are also a couple of arrange ultimate fighting style scenes, to the death, that show Li at his nonstop best.

But this is IMO a good movie too, not just a shell for the battles, which I think is also true of The Transporter and, though this was more fisticuffs and guns, Besson’s 1992 classic Leon (released in the US as The Professional). The story holds together–as much as can be expected in such a strange setup–and Li really has a chance to act. Which is a good thing since he’s getting old enough (43) that one wonders how much of the intense martial arts he can keep putting on film.

recommended

Back before Islamic terrorists and drug lords became the standard Hollywood villains, Russians were the go to bad guys. Even after the Soviet Union fell apart they were “the source of troubles.” So in 1995 (or, probably more accurately given studio approval and production schedules, 1993) renegade Russian nationalists were an excellent choice to set off a nuclear conflagration.

Crimson Tide follows the crew of an American nuclear sub on what they thought was a reasonably normal patrol assignment only to have the aforementioned Russian baddies attempt a coup and capture a missile and sub base about ten days in. The American Navy of course has well-established principles for controlling the launch of missiles on our subs; at the time of this (fictional) incident the Captain and his XO had to agree that the received orders were authentic. If the two didn’t agree the missiles weren’t launched.

In Michael Schiffer’s screenplay, the Executive Action Message with final instructions is cut off, and the USS Alabama’s Captain (Gene Hackman) and First Officer (Denzel Washington) disagree that the missiles should be launched anyway (an earlier EAM did call for this). And this is the pair’s first mission together. Uh oh!

Both men attempt to take control of the sub through regulation, force and rhetoric. Complicating matters, a Russian sub is in the same stretch of ocean and tears off the Alabama’s radio antenna so they must surface to receive the update orders.

Frankly, its hard to think of two actors at the time better suited to face off against each other, both strong but the strengths coming from rigidly contrasting aspects. White v. black is the most obvious, superficial difference but Washington is education, smooth, the Modern Navy Man while Hackman is grizzled, up from the engine room, the stereotypical hard-ass but lovable skipper.

Tide also is smack in director Tony Scott’s wheelhouse: big budget action but forced within strict boundaries; almost the entire movie, except the prologue, a few TV clips and the epilogue, happens inside the submarine and surounding waters. Other Scott films I’d put up as fitting in his sweet spot are Enemy of the State (another Hackman flick, with Will Smith taking the Denzel/partner role, that I meant to write up), Top Gun and Spy Game. When he tries to make movies that sprawl, literally or figuratively, they just don’t turn out as well: Days of Thunder (he and Cruise attempt to do for auto racing what Top Gun did for Navy jets, blah), Domino, and especially the horrid Man on Fire (Scott and Washington’s second collaboration).

recommended

I always thought that this sweet, musical movie deserved a better reception than it got but I guess in 1996 people were more interested in Kurt Cobain’s still fresh suicide than a look 40 years back. There must be something to it if Marty Scorsese put his name on as executive producer, right?

Grace of My Heart, written and directed by Allison Anders, uses the real life of singer/songwriter Carole King as its framework/jumping off point for Anders to explore life of a woman in the music business from the ’50s through the ’70s. King was a key member of the Brill Building songwriting crew, coming up with hundreds of hits–in partnership with first husband Gerry Goffin–for groups as diverse as the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby,” Little Eva’s “The Locomotion,” (later turned into a hard rock classic by Grand Funk Railroad), the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof,” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman.”

But King always wanted to be a singer. Numerous records she made flopped until, of course, her titanic megaseller Tapestry broke most chart standards. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon came along two years later and rewrote the books but for awhile she was as big as any act. King married again in the mid-70s; sadly her husband ODed just a year later and she retreated to Idaho for many years.

Illeana Douglas’s Denise Waverly is a Philadelphia steel hieress (nee Edna Buxton) and not a Brooklynite like King but she quickly partners and falls in love with Eric Stoltz’s beatnik wanna-be Howard Cazsatt, indicated by the annoying chinhair Stoltz wears and the watered down Marxist rhetoric he spouts during post-coital cuddling. Eventually, she walks in on him having sex with some unnamed tramp as their newborn naps in a crib at the foot of the bed.

She moves on to an affair with a married man of her own, an Alan Freed-like radio DJ, but he too leaves her in the lurch. Finally, her boss (an underwhelming John Turturro) gets her a one shot record deal as an attempt to get her back from Self Pity Land, with Brian Wilson Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon, who seemed to be taking the same drugs Wilson used back in the ’60s) to produce it. Of course they fall in love but Wilson Phillips goes off the deep end, literally here, walking into the surf with no board.

One ticket, one way, for Self Pity Land! Denise takes her daughter, her babysitter and the babysitter’s little son from a beach house in Malibu to a commune so they can plant vegetables and meditate in the mud for half a year until Turturro show up again to talk her out of her self-absorbed misery. The kids are just happy to get hamburger and fries for dinner. Denise dusts herself off and makes a platinum-seller that even her hoity-toity mom finally approves of.

Grace is better than this sounds. There is a bit of cliche in how Douglas keeps falling for the same type of guy and the ending is a little happily ever after, its not a perfect film. But Douglas, for once playing the lead and not the best friend or best friend’s wife, shows that she can act, given a chance. Sort of how King showed she could be the star, eh? And Anders includes dark touches honestly, like the reaction to the film’s version of the Shirelle’s controversial abusive love song and Phillips’ descent into madness.

recommended

My small present to Sweetie for her birthday last month was the allegedly totally cute and entertaining frozen nature flick March of the Penguins and tonight we finally got around to watching it. No one can look at the penguin chicks after they show up about halfway through–not counting the brief egg glimpses–and not come away juiced and amazed.

Mating begins in Fall and females drop the eggs as Winter is hitting, carrying the babes to be atop their claws before passing the chore to the menfolk. The ladies lose over 30% of their body weight after giving birth and need to head straight back to the ocean for food. So the men stay inland, eggs on their claws and no food themselves for over four months in the end. Even so, the dads have to be extremely careful since the briefest of exposures to open Winter air temperatures and winds will kill the chick before it can hatch.

Morgan Freeman, clearly succeeding James Earl Jones as trustworthy, believable voice of the nation, recorded the English narration (IMDB credits show that with the film’s unexpected commercial success localized versions were made for many markets) but the filmmakers did a good job of realizing that less is more and that visuals and emotional music suffice to tell the tale of the Emperor penguins and their endless annual cycle of migration and mating. Director/writer Luc Jacquet also was smart to keep all evidence of his production team out of the shot, and then bring in a taste under the closing credits and a making of featurette.

This should easily become a perennial children’s favorite, a movie they can watch a number of times as they grow up themselves and understand more of the world around them.

recommended