While the band was incredibly influential after blasting onto the rock stage in the early ’70s, the New York Dolls came along about two or three years too soon for me to really have gotten into them and by the time I might have the band splintered and David Johanson more or less spoiled things with his Buster Poindexter act. Not to mention I had second generation, “improved” versions in the form of the Clash, the Talking Heads and so on who took the raw inspiration of the Dolls and made it–let’s be honest–more radio friendly.

New York Doll is a documentary made in 2004 about Arthur “Killer” Kane, the Dolls’ bass player, by Greg Whiteley in the weeks leading up the band’s first reunion concert in nearly 30 years at the 2004 Meltdown Festival in London. Whiteley, a recent art school grad, had become friends with Kane through their membership in the Mormon Temple in Los Angeles and got the idea for the film after Arthur told him about the concert.

Its a small film, barely 85 minutes or so, with almost no production values, just a single camera pointed at whoever’s talking with a little footage of the old days and from the Meltdown shown cut in. Kane is the dominant character but not dominant himself, I felt like he was about at peace with the highs and lows of his life but that his life energy bank account was almost all drawn down. Meaning I was not surprised when, just three weeks after the big reunion concert, he died.

“Aging’s not for sissies” is a quote I heard years ago, apparently attributed to Lucille Ball though that’s not where I hard it, and Kane’s life is proof of it. At 21 he was riding high, literally of course from drugs and booze, just about becoming the next rock god, but at 31 he was in the gutter with no money, no skills, no friends. He got the chance to resolve the demons that plagued him after the band broke up, which is something quite rare.

A big part of this film’s appeal is that Whiteley doesn’t try and make a history of the Dolls. He doesn’t show us, for instance, how they came together or the details of their breakup but mainly shots of their flamboyant lifestyle and footage of their appearance on an episode of the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. Instead the camera follows Arthur on his bus rides to and from work–yes, the man is too broke to own a car… in Los Angeles–and comments from a few of his co-workers at the LDS Library of Family History and his bishops. Mainly we get Arthur, 30 years after he stopped wearing the makeup and dresses.

recommended

This seemed like the kind of small quirky film that I enjoy so when TiVo grabed it for me a second time I watched. Sadly, this is a bad small quirky film so I hit delete after about 30 minutes. The 2005 movie is the first feature written and directed by actor Liev Schreiber, from Jonathan Safran Foer’s critically acclaimed novel, and he clearly needed a bit more mentoring from his producers.

Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood as a strange little Jewish American man (named Jonathan Safran Foer, though this is post-modern fiction and not autobiographical as far as I know) who travels to the Ukraine after his beloved grandmother’s death to find out about the woman who saved her from the Nazi muderers during World War II and Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin as a strange grandson/grandfather pair of Ukrainian tour guides who specialize in showing around relatives of dead Jews.

not recommended

Harrison Ford compares well with, say, Tom Cruise when it comes to this kind of movie (or most kinds, probably) even if at about 62 when filming happened he’s getting a little long in the tooth to be a daddy with kids in the single digit age range. Plus, motion and momentum are necessary but not sufficient factors in a thriller–technobabble and handwaving don’t get the job done given the level of awareness of computer security in 2006.

Firewall pits Ford as head of technology for a newly-acquired regional bank against Paul Bettany using the Office Space-ish idea of skimming small enough not to be noticed amounts from many large accounts, except Bettany’s crew have Ford’s wife (Virginia Madsen, a typically Hollywood 18 years younger than hubby) and three kids hostage with Ford monitored at all times through wireless audio/video. Not to mention big guns they aren’t troubled about using, and inside help.

Neither director Richard Loncraine (Wimbledon, the Winston Churchill biopic The Gathering Storm) nor writer Joe Forte (only previously produced film is the well-received indie wedding comedy Say I Do) seem up to the task, leaning too heavily on moody Seattle weather (i.e., buckets of rain), indoor running and easily seen-through misdirection.

not recommended

I’ve always had fond memories of this 1998 movie, which suffered by being released in close proximity to the very similar but more traditional action and star-oriented Armageddon. Not to mention that Willis, Affleck and Company had the Muzak Aerosmith hit pop single I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing too but this emphasizes brains over brawn, generally preferable to me.

Deep Impact also sends a nuclear-armed crew out to deflect or destroy the extinction level event meteor headed for Earth but focuses more on how Americans are dealing with the threat of imminent mass death and doesn’t allow a complete esape from disaster. The difference in the movies shouldn’t be surprising once you consider the creative forces behind each: Impact was directed by Mimi Leder (the 1997 George Clooney/Nicole Kidman The Peacemaker and a lot of good TV) and written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin while Armageddon was directed by Michael Bay (The Rock, Bad Boys I and II, Pearl Harbor and the upcoming The Transformers), written by Jonathan Hensleigh, Robert Roy Pool, JJ Abrams, Tony Gilroy and Shane Salerno and, most importantly, produced by Jerry “no explosion is big enough” Bruckenheimer.

Morgan Freeman once again shows why he should have gone into politics in the post-Bush I era, playing a U.S. president able to keep calm and intact in a crisis. Tea Leoni is a journalist who stumbles onto “the biggest story in history” with Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell as her (divorced) parents. Elijah Woods is a teenage astronomy buff who discovers the humongous unrushing disaster with Leelee Sobieski as his neighborhood object of desire. Robert Duvall comes out of retirement (his character was the last man to walk on the moon) to pilot the meteor landing. Good acting all around really helps with many TV stars in small roles including Ron Eldard, Bruce Weitz, Richard Schiff, Mary McCormick, Blair Underwood, Laura Innes, Mark Moses, Denise Crosby, Tucker Smallwood, Concetta Tomei and Kurtwood Smith and a few soon to be movie stars like Jon Favreau and Dougray Scott.

recommended

Anne Hathaway presumably saw Havoc, with two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple directing (Best Documentary in 1991 for American Dream and 1977 for Harlan County, USA) and a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan (Traffic), as a sure path out of the kiddie flick ghetto. Enough to do nude scenes, showing off her *deleted* breasts.

Sadly this tale of bored LA rich high school kids, in which Hathaway trades her wanna-be boyfriend for a real barrio gangsta, never climbs out of its class consciousness into InterestingLand.

not recommended–I switched off after 40 minutes

I always thought Schwarzenegger’s 1993 action farce was vastly underrated, especially when considered as a set with True Lies. Of course, I could be mistaking the accidental achievements of the many chefs who had a hand in this entree, between the four credited writers (Zack Penn, Adam Leff, Shane Black and David Arnott), director John McTiernan (Die Hard I and II, Predator, The Hunt for Red October and the remakes of The Thomas Crowne Affair and Rollerball), and the half dozen or more producers. The key for me anyway is that this is so over the top it’s become camp, intentionally or not, and filled with laughs. Since it was available via On Demand in high def I couldn’t resist.
Last Action Hero asks what if a golden movie ticket gifted by Harry Houdini to an old movie theater usher (Robert Prosky) when he was a child really does have a bit of magic. Prosky gives the ticket to troubled teen Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) before unreeling the brand new Arnold actioner Jack Slater 4. Wonder of wonders, the ticket is magical and minutes into it Danny finds himself in the movie’s world. Right in the back seat of Slater’s red convertible in the middle of a car chase between Slater and a pickup truck full of mobster Anthony Quinn’s henchman.

Danny is a huge fan and knows things–from the first three Slater movies–that Jack cannot understand. Of course he doesn’t agree that his world is simply a cinema fantasy despite the many strange things pointed out to him like an animated, speaking cat as a police office, that every woman seen is at a minimum hot or that Slater himself is never sick nor more than minimally injured.

Benedict (Charles Dance), a high-powered English hit man working for Quinn, gets Danny’s wallet and the half of the magical ticket in it. Realizing what it can do, Benedict steps in and out of different movies recruiting bad guys to terrorize the “real” world. Danny and Jack get back themselves (Jack and Danny’s mom, played by Mercedes Ruehl, hit it off but do not hook up), in order to stop Benedict and the others. Ian McKellen, playing Death in what’s supposed to be an Ingmar Bergman film, even steps out to check out Jack because no one has ever not been on one of Death’s list.
recommended

Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000 of rap supergroup Outkast) and Grant Hedlund play (somewhat) grownup brothers adopted as hellraising kids by neighborhood saint Fionnula Flanagan; the movie opens with Flanagan being gunned down in a grocery store robbery and the four coming together in the nasty Detroit ghetto where she lived for her funeral. And revenge.

Since Four Brothers is directed by John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood, the Tupac/Janet Jackson flick Poetic Justice, the Shaft remake and 2 Fast 2 Furious) you’re probably not surprised that Gibson and Benjamin have grown up marginally more civilized than Wahlberg and Hedlund. But Singleton is not a one dimensional filmmaker and all four of them are at least moderately complex, filled with shades of grey, as is the movie as a whole.

While we may not be the most sophisticated of viewers, I’m always glad when my wife gives a similar positive response to the more gritty kind of films we see together, which she did in this case. Casting Chiwetal Ejiofor(Kinky Boots, Serenity, Love, Actually, Dirty Pretty Things), very good as the nutso mob boss behind most of the family’s troubles,  certainly adds a point to her rating. Terrance Howard (who was better in Crash, though this is the better movie) is perhaps a bit too calm as childhood pal turned determined cop, Josh Charles (Sports Night) is good as a rotten cop and Sofia Vergara (Chasing Papi) has no problem playing Gibson’s, er, erratic girlfriend.
recommended

Fans of Roald Dahl, who wrote the novel, have generally never been happy with the 1971 Gene Wilder version released as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory because–as happened with so many of Dahl’s stories–the movie manicured off his slightly demented twists and edges.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was worth making because director Tim Burton and his frequent partners in the bizarre Johnny Depp and writer John August (who wrote Burton’s Big Fish and Corpse Bride and his his feature directing debut The Nines premiering tonight at Sundance) share Dahl’s sensibility. Taking into account the far more sophisticated special effects available today, this is very similar to the first in the big picture: the same five kid/parent characters meet the same five ends, Charlie lives in a barely standing shack where his four grandparents remain in a single big bed/dinner table (though Jack Albertson probably gave a better performance than David Kelly as Grandpa Joe) and the Oompah Loompahs sing and dance as they clean up after the greedy, grasping kids.

But Burton uses a smart twist unavailable to Mel Stuart 35 years ago, casting only a single man, the short-statured Deep Roy, as all 165 Oompah Loompahs (male and female) and additionally throws in flashbacks to Wonka’s own childhood that illuminate his brilliant insanity where Wilder seemed meanspirited; how the possessive nut sorting squirrels take care of Veruca Salt et pere was simply a hoot. I have to admit that I’d probably have joined Augustus Gloop in that amazing chocolate river.
recommended

The massacre of nine Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics was both a tragedy and turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; whatever else it generated, the world’s perception of the war against israel began to move the country’s enemy from Arabs generally, and the surrounding Arab nations specifically, to the refugees dispossessed in May 1948 and their descendants. Eleven at the time, I have only the barest memories of the TV coverage by ABC and saw little of its effects during my visit in two summers later.

Steven Spielberg is a master moviemaker (consider how well he overcame generic performances by Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and Minority Report) and realized that a simple retelling of the tense hours at the Olympic Village and the denoument at a nearby airport was not the movie to make in 2005. Instead he focused on the Israeli response–the Golda Meir government dispatched a deniable team to track down and kill the eleven men deemed responsible for the massacre–with the events in Munich shown as a prelude and then occasionally mixed in to remind us why.

Eric Bana plays Avner, the Mossad agent picked to lead the team of Ciaran Hinds (Julius Ceasar in HBO’s Rome), Daniel Craig (derr, the new Bond), Mathieu Kassovitz and Hans Zischler. The movie is nearly three hours long so I can understand Spielberg’s choice to focus all the non-assassination screen time on Bana’s personal life and emotions but it does make the other four, with the possible exception of Hinds’ Carl, just a bit above cardboard level.

The men are supplied with little more than a Swiss safety deposit box filled (and refilled) with untraceable dollars but quickly connect with an anarchistic French clan who specialize in supplying information to all comers, as long as the customer is not working for or with a government. The clan is headed by Papa, the excellent French character actor Michael Lonsdale (Ronin), who takes a liking to Avner despite eventually piercing the wall of deniability.

The problem is that Avner, like most humans not suffering from psychopathy or sociopathy, finally becomes unhinged by the death he’s dealt out and no longer has the coin to continue. Frankly, that he was able to take care of six targets, plus one’s replacement and a contract killer who ended one of his team members, seems huge to me. No matter how greatly I value Israel and the United States I could never do anything like it.

Bana was a great choice for the lead role, which I simply could not imagine, say, Tom Cruise handling. Hinds is very good as are Geoffrey Rush as the team’s Mossad handler, Mathieu Amalric as the information clan’s point person and Gila Almagor as Avner’s Holocaust survivor mother. Guri Weinberg, interestingly, portrays his own father Moshe, one of the Israelis massacred.

Spielberg does not give us a one-sided view, despite the fact that he as well as scriptwriters Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Ali, The Good Shepherd) and Tony Kushner (Angels in America) are all Jewish. The Palestinians are, mostly, portrayed in their own words and actions, the events in the Olympic Village use lots of actual footage from ABC’s coverage, the Israelis are not perfect nor unemotional in their decisionmaking.

recommended

I had a bit more hopes for this Mila Jovovich actioner and since it was the first new Starz early premiere in HD after we got our 37″ LCD we gave Ultraviolet a shot. Although its visually stunning and the elaborate fighting style and futuristic weapons tech are similarly cool, the whole thing is just too ridiculous to recommend. Apparently its a further refinement of the ideas writer/director Kurt Wimmer surfaced in his previous film, Equilibrium, but if you never heard of that one perhaps you saw his two bombs scripts produced prior to that, the Pierce Brosnan remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and the Dustin Hoffman in a scifi flick Sphere.

not recommended