This 1997 flick starring Kevin Costner shares a number of things with quite a few other of his big budget actioners; its commercial failure, coming right after box office bombs like Tin Cup and (especially) Waterworld (reputed to be more costly than any studio effort since Heaven’s Gate), nearly killed his career. Which is really too bad since the novel by David Brin on which the screenplay was based is such a terrific book.

In actuality, The Postman isn’t a terrible movie. I think it got trashed for being too similar to Waterworld, being set in a post-apocalyptic world with Costner’s character the reluctant hero who might, if he’s luckier than spit, set things on a path back to a good life for everyone. In this film, his character is called The Postman (even Roger Ebert’s review gives no other name), happy to wander the mostly empty desert of what used to be–this is 2013–the western states. The USA and all its attendant services and bureaucracies vanished in a nuclear war several years before and most people died with it.

No more factories or oil refineries or mail service, even FedEx and UPS were obliterated; there was an extended nuclear winter too which, most likely, would have killed any Americans who survived the initial blast and subsequent radiation poisoning but then, without people who would be in this movie? So Costner and his lovable trained mule Bill make do as best they can, performing bits of Shakespeare for food when they stumble across a small community.

A copy machine salesman before The War, General Bethlehem (Will Patton) is a disciple of Nathan Holn and has gathered an army with which he plans to establish a new empire. Holn was a modernized fascist writer with racist overtones before the War, which he did not survive, and Patton latched onto his philosophy, especially the 8 rules. His force is large enough to command obedience, supplies and conscripts from independent communities.

One day, while our boy and Bill are doing a bit of Macbeth for some kids, the General’s men roll into the village; he and the mule are dragooned into service. Soon, after confrontation that does little more than amuse Bethlehem, he makes a break and steals away. During the chase he stumbles into a crashed old US Post Office delivery truck, fully clothed postman in the driver’s seat. Mainly seeing this as a way to get fed he puts on the corpse’s uniform and takes a bagful of the old mail to the next town.

Some believe his bunk about a re-established United States, headquartered in the Metrodome in Minneapolis and lead by President Richard Starkey (aka Ringo Starr’s real name), while others as the scammer he is. Still, he gets fed, given a warm bed to sleep in and a lovely young bride, her husband rendered sterile in one of the war’s many plagues, to… er… impregnate. Abby (Olivia Williams) tells him its because asking another man from the town would end up causing problems after the child arrived.

In the morning he takes newly written letters with a promise to deliver when and where he can, and to return on his next circuit, in maybe 18 months. The General arrives in his wake, very amused to hear of this re-established federal government and its postal service, amused enough to burn out the post office. He also takes the now pregnant Abby. Uh oh! Thus is set the major conflict of our story.

The Postman is one of those films which uses science fiction as a sort of colorful costume, like Mad Max and Westworld, rather than a core aspect though in the novel this is not the case as Brin’s writing is more complex and considered of the changes wrought by such a cataclysm. Instead, this is mostly a western not terribly different from Costner’s (much better and more successful) Dances With Wolves.

Still, I enjoyed the script by Eric Roth (who was coming off Tom Hank’s blockbuster Forest Gump and went on to write the Oscar-winning The Insider, Ali and Munich plus The Horse Whisperer and The Good Shepherd) and even Costner’s staging and pacing, which were sparse and accelerating, respectively.

recommended

A powerful, award-winning exploration of the American involvement in Iraq by Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight (2005) applies inspiration from Frank Capra’s World War II motivational films and President Eisenhower’s farewell address that gave us the term military-industrial complex to explain where the thinking behind this adventure originated.

Too frequently documentaries are bland melanges of talking heads, even when the subject matter is compelling an important. 100 straight minutes of talking about almost any subject can just turn into too much yada yada yada and dramatic yet empty images do little to correct things; repetitive shots gliding down overly similar stretches of whatever are just as snore-inducing. Jarecki avoids this by integrating clips from Eisenhower and other important historical figures.

Mainly though, we see the rationale for the Iraq War through interviews with a few relevant, insightful folks:

Karen Kwiatkowski: A career military officer who was actually in the Pentagon working on the morning of 9/11, and had also spent time on assignment to the National Security Agency, she was assigned to the DoD’s policy development office but resigned in disgust after Cheney associates hijacked her bureau’s function.

Richard Perle: One of the original Neocons, Perle is also one of the heavy lifters in the Project for the New American Century, a thinktank which provided analytical firepower for the attack on Iraq and the use of pre-emptive strikes that are the core of the Bush Doctrine. Perle fervently believes, if we are to take him at his word, that bringing down Saddam Hussein was massively important in reducing the threat to America’s national security.

Wilton Sezker: A retired New York City police officer, Wilton’s son died in the World Trade Center’s collapse. Searching for a way to memorialize him, and thinking back to his own service in Vietnam, Sezker wrote to the military to ask that the son’s name be painted on a missile before it got dropped in Iraq. His request was granted and they even sent him photos of the adorned bomb. Shortly thereafter, though, the former cop saw through the Bush Crew lies about Iraq and now spends his days wondering why he let himself be duped.

Susan Eisenhower: The former general’s granddaughter weighs in, pointing out that exactly what he warned of in that historic speech came to pass nearly immediately, to his great chagrin, and the relationship has become so enmeshed in the system that its invisible.

Chalmers Johnson: A professor specializing in Asian politics who was also a CIA consultant in the Vietnam era, Johnson became disillusioned with American government tactics during the scandals of the ’70s and has since been trying to use his insight and contacts to bring wrongheaded policy into public view, including the publication of three books on what he calls the American Empire. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Johnson wrote an article for The Nation called Blowback, which is a CIA term referring to unforeseen responses to secret government actions, because in his view this is exactly what caused the terrorist horror in Manhattan and DC; in fact he published a prophetic book with that title in 2000 which received little notice until that sad September day, at which time it jumped onto the bestseller lists.

recommended

Ivan Reitman has directed many funny movies, including Stripes, both Ghostbusters, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Junior and Dave and writer Don Payne comes out of the Simpsons camp (and also co-wrote this summer’s F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer) so the creative pedigree is certainly strong. Actors Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard and even Anna Faris have made their share of decent comedies.

In which case you shouldn’t be surprised that My Super Ex-Girlfriend is pretty darn funny. Mashing up the superhero/supervillain conflict with a romantic comedy and today’s computer F/X returns a potent combination that Reitman, whose Ghostbusters flicks flirted with similar territory, and Payne deliver fully.

Matt Saunders (Wilson) has a history of falling for slightly crazy chicks and when he meets Jennifer (Uma Thurman), the Clark Kent front identity of superhero G-Girl, he gets crazy on a. Whole. ‘Nother. Level. Jennifer falls for him quick and hard after Matt chases a purse snatcher for several Manhattan blocks but this is her first crush since the day back in high school when she and her friend Barry were in the woods making out and a strange meteor crashed near their car. Touching the rock transformed Jennifer into a superpower (and a superhottie) via otherwise unexplained radiation, and she left Barry in the dirt. Not at all happy about that, Barry becomes her arch-nemesis Bedlam.

G-Girl reveals her true self to Matt but this lady has a case of jealousy that matches her powers and he breaks up with her. Bad move. But Matt really loves his co-worker Hannah (Faris) and while comforting her after she catches her model boyfriend in bed with two or three women he finally tells her. So they hook up, which superstalker G-Girl sees an, er, terminates by tossing a live shark into Faris’s bedroom, many floors up in a high-rise.

Bedlam uses this behavior to convince Matt the only answer is tricking Jennifer into touching the meteor again, which experiments show will return the radiation to it. Matt pretends a reconciliation and at dinner gets her to touch the rock. Bedlam, of course not so nice as he pretended, is about to kill them both when Faris turns up, a catfight ensues and the women both touch the meteor before Bedlam can (again).

This is really funny. Thurman is not really that good at broad humor but does very well as the straightman to Wilson and Faris. Also helping out is Rainn Wilson as Matt’s superhorny best friend, though his advice seems as often calculated for his amusement as actually helping Matt.

recommended

BBC America had this 2000 mobster flick on their Brit Movie night last Sunday. It’s got Sean Bean, Alex Kingston and Tom Wilkerson in what I saw posited as an English Goodfellas, and I loves me my Goodfellas. In the end Essex Boys was okay but not great; the comparison to that great Scorsese flick is a stretch in several dimensions.

Bean is a wiseguy called Jason Locke just out from a five year term and while he was away his boss did amazingly well (e.g., mansion, fancy cars, trophy wife). He’s also an extremely jealous man and not quite able to believe that his wife (Kingston, looking even hotter than she did on ER) was faithful all that time.

Our point of view is provided by a young guy named Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) who is recommended to Locke by prison friend John Dyke (Wilkerson) as a driver, a job Billy does occasionally for the older man as well. He quickly becomes one of the guys, despite some concern about just what it is he’s getting into.

Locke wants a bit of the good life too, more than what he’s likely to come by soon as someone else’s muscle. That’s the beginning of the end. Written and directed by Terry Winsor, many of the twists are unexpected and most of the bad guys get what’s coming but Essex Boys lacks the complexity and scope of Goodfellas. Goals should, I think, be farther than one’s fingers can quite reach but one must accept the results that come.

recommended, just

I read Christopher Buckley’s novel from which this movie came and though the film isn’t bad the book was better. Probably Aaron Eckhart, who plays Nick Naylor, the lead, is just a tad too bright and shiny compared to my mental illustration formed while reading.

Thank You for Smoking is, as most of Buckley’s tales, very dark humor. Naylor is the vice president of marketing for the Academy of Tobacco Studies; in other words, he’s the chief lobbyist and spokesperson for Big Tobacco. But Nick is still human and is desperate to have a solid post-divorce relationship with his nine or ten year old son (the step-dad, of course, is a doctor who harps on Naylor everytime he brings the boy back).

Senator Finisterre (D, VT), played by Bill Macy, has decided the time has come to drive another very big nail into the tobacco business: require a large skull and cross bones to be printed on the front of every pack of cigarettes. He even gets the spokesperson for a Latino group to claim the current English-only warnings are racist.

Naylor and his bosses (Robert Duvall, JK Simmons) can’t let this law get passed and so we get to see Nick pull out all his rhetorical tricks. This guy is the captain of the best debate team in the state crossed with the hunkiest star in the drama club, meaning he can usually get what he wants.

There are two obstacles this time: reporter Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) is writing an article about Nick and some radical anti-smokers kidnap him. Being somewhat deficient in the ethics department, Heather has no trouble using her smoking body to get our man to open just a bit more widely than he should have. When the article comes out, Naylor is nearly done for and then comes the kidnapping. After getting free he uses the attending publicity and his rhetorical jujitsu to completely disarm the Senator and his plans.

Along the way is a trip to Hollywood with the boy. Nick thinks the key to turning around the tobacco image problems is to go back to what worked so well in the ’30s and ’40s: hot movie stars lighting up. Their trip is to meet with superagent Rob Lowe who is arranging, for the small product placement fee of $25 million, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie enjoy a post-coital smoke in a soon to film far future science fiction flick. Also, Nick has to drop off a briefcase of cash with a cancer-stricken former Marlboro Man (Sam Elliot). The cash isn’t hush money, but close.

I noticed some web commentators claiming that Thank You for Smoking is not only not a satire, its the opposite, a pro-smoking commercial. Anyone who read the original novel would know better.

recommended

Going against my previous thinking that this 1999 Johnny Depp/Charlize Theron movie wasn’t worth watching, I gave it a spin yesterday. Sadly, I should have stuck with my original thought because writer/director Rand Ravich clearly did a better job pitching this scifi-ish thriller to the studio suits than he did in getting the film in the can.

The Astronaut’s Wife of the title is Jillian Armacost (Theron). Astronaut hubby Spencer (Depp) and mission commander Alex Streck go EVA to repair a satellite during an otherwise routine shuttle mission when something strange happens. The two exchange unexpected shouts and then lose communication with their shuttle. The other crewmembers take two minutes to get to them, apparently (this was never clear to me) Armacost and Streck are unconscious, and then make an emergency return to Earth.

While there’s no apparent medical reason, the commander dies soon after and at the wake his widow commits suicide. Spencer gets out of the hospital fine and rides his new fame to a high level executive slot at a big New York City aerospace company. Jillian, a second grade teacher, reluctantly agrees to the move.

Sherman Reese (Joe Morton) suspected that two minute gap was more than a bit strange, especially when neither Streck nor Armacost can or will explain their recorded dialog or the blank time. He has an explanation, though everyone at NASA thinks Reese’s gone off his nut, and comes to Manhattan to warn Jillian and maybe get his help. Instead he winds up dead and the key to his storage locker ends up in her hands.

The explanation that no one will buy? That, physical interstellar travel being immensely unlikely, an alien transmitted its essence (mind, soul, the movie’s never clear) to Earth and took over the two spacemen’s minds, without erasing what was there before. As a lifelong science fiction reader I’ve made some leaps before to accept a story’s premise but this is just so poorly done that I couldn’t get over it.

And Depp is so blond! Maybe if he had dark hair I would have liked this. But I doubt it, a lot.

not recommended

This 1995 flick, which I watched the other day since it was on the HD On Demand list, is a fun adaptation of a longrunning British comic that works for me mainly because director Danny Cannon keeps each scene to a bare minimum (not the bangs and the booms but the dialog and length) and star Sly Stallone plays Dredd as so straight you’ll need a laser to measure the variance in his spine.

Set in the not too distant future after the Earth’s ecology completely collapsed (so it’s a very early Green flick too), the survivors live in huge enclosed megalopolises, tens of millions in each one. Governments collapsed as well and the only rule is provided the Judges, police, prosecutors and (if necessary) executioners in one person, but even this modest system is barely keeping society on the verge of collapse.

One member of the ruling council, the top rank of judges, Griffin (German hard guy Jurgen Prochnow) feels that the only way to avert this final collapse is to remove what small amount of freedom remains to the general populace. To execute his plan he springs an insane ex-judge called Rico (Armand Assante, chosen as much for his physical resemblance to Stallone as any other reason) from maximum security and, concurrently, frames Dredd for the murder of a journalist getting a little too close to things that Griffin wants kept hidden.

But you know that Stallone don’t play that way. Assisted by Herman, a computer criminal played by Rob Schneider (before he got bogged down in so many stupid roles), and idealistic–and hot–young Judge Hershey (Diane Lane), and spurred on by the memory of his father figure and former Chief Justice Fargo (Max von Sydow), Dredd fights his way back into the city and kills Rico and Griffin.

Nothing terribly smart or fancy about Judge Dredd but this movie does show that action fluff can be enjoyable when done well.

modestly recommended

A 1948 classic psychological thriller from Alfred Hitchcock starring Bill favorite James Stewart along with John Dall and a young Farley Granger, Rope is a take on the sensational 1924 murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Hitchcock does something rarely seen these days, staging the entire film inside a single, modest-sized space, specifically the living room, foyer and dining room of an uptown Manhattan apartment.

Dall and Granger are Brandon and Phillip, two upper crust young gentlemen recently graduated from an Ivy League college, whose apartment we’re looking at throughout. Having been avid pupils of Rupert Cadell, a purveyor of some very elitist, libertarian philosophy as the headmaster at their prep school, the two–but especially Brandon–are determined to act on their belief that the rules of common morality don’t apply to men of superior intellect.

Just how they’ll act on it is by strangling their prep school chum David, in the opening scene. To maximize the return on the deed, the young men have a dinner party just afterwards, with David’s parents, his fiance Janet and her previous beau Kenneth, plus Rupert, as the guests. Pushing this to the limit, after murdering him they hide the body in a big wooden chest on which the dinner buffet is set out. David was invited too, of course, and his whereabouts are a continuing question for the characters.

Brandon is the strong one; if it were just him involved he’d have gotten away with it. Phillip, though, is far too high strung and as the time goes on Rupert picks up more and more on little clues he gives off until at the climax, when the others have left, he comes back to the apartment on a flimsy excuse and extracts the truth.

You may wonder why I’ve given away the plot here but I doubt few people would have trouble seeing the result far in advance. No, the real pleasure here is in the superb acting by Dall (especially), Granger and Stewart and in Hitchcock’s staging and pacing; compared to current filmmaking, even low budget indie flicks like, say, Clerks or El Mariachi, the director does so much with nothing but a handful of actors and even fewer simple props. For some reason I’ve not seen too many of the master’s movies but now I see that will have to change.

recommended

This is a fun Saturday night cable movie. Not one I’d have been happy to pay $10 each to see in the theater but the colorful fashionistas do look really good on our HDTV screen. Star Anne Hathaway’s made several fairy tale princess movies and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) seems like a bit of a translation of one of those to the fashion/publishing world.

A fairy tale must have a bitter queen and Meryl Streep surely goes to town as Miranda Priestly, longtime editor of Runway (think Vogue) and the ruler of the designer kingdom. Hathaway’s naif Andy comes to Manhattan after college graduation, school newspaper clippings in hand as well as a complete lack of interest in fashion. Somehow she gets an interview to be Miranda’s junior assistant and is hired by showing, er, spunk.

A fairy tale also needs a magician to guide our heroine and Stanley Tucci plays Hathaway’s, as Miranda’s long-suffering design chief Nigel. I never did decide if Tucci was going for the understated gay or tasteful yet slightly fey straight, which probably means he did a good job; certainly he was nothing like the aggressive, fuse burner Tucci’s played so often.

Adrian Grenier, of Entourage, is Andy’s aspiring chef boyfriend, who has difficulty handling the transformation she goes through in order to come out the other side of her time with Miranda intact. Simon Baker (TV series The Guardian) is a writer with the hots for Andy’s body but no real interest in her mind. Emily Blunt is Emily,  Miranda’s senior assistant, a woman pretty good at taking the boss’s piss albeit not without sucking in the stress.

recommended

Can you believe it’s been 19 years since we first heard John McClane tell off some baddie with his trademark retort “Yippiekiyay, motherfucker!” right before he blows them to the next life? In 1988 no one outside of academia had heard of the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t invent the World Wide Web for another half decade but in the short time since the last Die Hard flick network connectivity has become a pervasive utility underpinning our economy and government. It’s not just blogs, YouTube and Facebook after all.

Live Free or Die Hard, as unlikely as this sounds, is one of the first major studio productions to recognize this sea change and take it into account in a serious way. An uber-geek brought into the federal government in the wake of 9/11 told his new bosses on his first day of work that network security was far more important than they thought as well as nowhere near sufficiently implemented to protect us. Determined black hats could easily break through and conduct a “fire sale.”

What, you ask, is a fire sale? Think of our country as a three-legged stool: government, finance and energy. Because each of them have become so dependent on connectivity they are all vulnerable through an attack via this single route. And our angry geek (Thomas Gabriel, played by Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) left the government when he wasn’t taken seriously and decided to show everyone how right he was.

Part of Gabriel’s plot requires the assistance of other alpha level computer hackers, which he acquires through innocent looking fronts. Helping him is his combo martial arts/hacker lover, played by Asian hottie Maggie Q, because you know young hackers are totally out of their minds dealing with such a luscious lady. With the plot about to launch and their assistance no longer needed, Gabriel’s muscle squad murders the external contractors.

McClane, already over the river in New Jersey to visit with his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) whose now a college student at Rutgers; actually he’s there to spy on her as she returns from a date and Lucy is, not surprisingly, angry at him. The Feds, noting a strange glitch in their computer network, have started rounding up hackers they think could have been responsible and have asked the NYPD to have a senior detective to pick up Matt Farrell (Mac Guy Justin Long) in Camden and drive him to D.C. (Okay, why wouldn’t they ask the Philadelphia police, who are much closer, or the Camden police? Because then John wouldn’t be in Washington when this goes down.)

McClane arrives literally just in time to save Matt. We know that if he’d pressed Enter on his computer keyboard the plastique planted inside would have killed him and McClane and Farrell find out seconds later when the musclemen launch a frontal assault after the computer doesn’t explode. The two get away, barely, and head to the Capital.

Gabriel’s attack gets into high gear while our heroes are on the road. Traffic computers are programmed to keep lights green in all directions. He forces the same videos to be shown on all television networks and net-connected computers. Cell phone networks and then landlines and even satellite phone systems are shutdown. Stock market computers are flooded with false transactions. Government computer networks are compromised.

The public is going into full panic mode, precisely as planned. Even the FBI’s team tasked with responding to this type of attack, lead by Bowman (Cliff Curtis) and Molina (Zeljko Ivanek, who seems to be playing key supporting roles everywhere these days), are having a hard time understanding events. Which is where Farrell steps in and is the first to utter the words Fire Sale, something the Fibbies won’t accept. Yet. Until they realize Gabriel is going after the power distribution grids as well.

Live Free, though, is a Die Hard movie–in fact I think it’s the best of the four–and so, once he understands what’s going down, John McClane steps up and does what only he seems able to do, cutting through the BS and panic and putting his life on the line through an increasingly threatening series of confrontations until the bad guy gets to hear him utter those two words and then die.

Director Len Wiseman (Underworld, Underworld: Evolution) and writer Mark Bomback (the 2004 Robert De Niro thriller Godsend) smartly recognize that McClane is older now and as ungeeky as one can be, so that having him succeed singlehandedly would have made this movie a farce. There’s plenty of the cynical, sardonic humor you’d expect but having Justin Long’s character stay with McClane, despite our boy’s misanthropy and the youngster’s fear, provides a far more believable result. Lucy, kidnapped when Gabriel realizes that McClane just won’t go away, also gets the chance to step up in the end and show she’s a chip off the old block (as disgusted as that might make her). In fact, I wonder if the producers did this with the idea of a Die Hard: Next Generation movie in mind.

recommended