This 1960 movie is one of those classics I’m willing to bet most people under the age of 60 have never watched but still feel they know all about. I admit I was one of them until the other day. Let me say upfront, I don’t really see the whole Spartacus as Christ thing, any more than I do for Neo in The Matrix trilogy; if this were so than the same would be true of the hero of nearly any straightforward epic story. But some people want to see such things anywhere they can.

Spartacus is a slave born a few decades before the aforementioned Christian savior in a north African Roman colony, where he’s spotted by gladiator trainer (Peter Ustinov, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and taken to Italy. Life is easier in Capua than in a Libyan mine but he still chafes under the rules and constraints imposed by his masters.

Then one day two leading Roman senators (Lawrence Oliver as the patrician Crassus and John Gavin as a young Juius Caesar) and their lady friends turn up at the school unexpectedly and want a show. The sniveling master is happy to oblige until the women insist the gladiators fight to the death, as is custom in Rome; he tries to convince them that doing so in the school would be a really bad idea but the arrogant women want what they want.

One shortcoming of Dalton Trumbo’s script for me is that Crassus never really understands that what he and his friends did that afternoon was the inciting incident of everything that came after, including his own downfall, the death of tens of thousands and the rise of Caesar. Even at the very end, when Crassus realizes who Spartacus is (since all the men captured with him famously stand up and say “I am Spartacus”), there’s no light of recognition.

Still, this is one of the best performances Kirk Douglas gave, Olivier is as terrific as ever, Ustinov is a very good shifty, sniveling, out for his own good Roman plebe, Jean Simmons is wonderful as Varinia, the Brittanic slave who immediately falls for Spartacus (and vice versa, to be sure), Charles Laughton punches his weight as Crassus’s populist political opponent and John Ireland a strong right arm to Douglas.

The movie was also a triumph for writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nearly destroyed by the McCarthy blacklist, the most prominent member of the Hollywood 10, and Spartacus was the first credit he got after that dark era ended. He worked for another decade after this, giving us the scripts for Exodus and Papillon before passing away in 1976.

This film was also the first really big hit directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose next four pictures were the phenomal Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick realized the epic scope of his story required grandiose outdoor settings but he skillfully navigated the line between tasteful and the campiness embraced by contemporaries like Cecille DeMille. He didn’t shy away from visuals that studio execs probably objected to, such as the crucifixions of the captured rebels which lined the army’s road back to Rome.

recommended

This was a highly regarded movie that I should have been eager to see once it hit cable but due to the subject matter, the brutally insane Ethiopian dictator Idi Amin, I was reluctant. Despite giving The Last King of Scotland a 4, which is pretty rare for me, my misgivings were correct.

The film filters our view of Amin through a young Scottish doctor (played by the terrific James MacAvoy) who sees a few years working at a clinic in the boonies of Ethiopia as a lark and an escape from his dour, domineering physician father. Unfortunately for him he meets up with Amin (Forrest Whittaker, who won last year’s Best Actor Oscar) in the days after the 1970 coup that bought him to power and Amin, who was after all literally insane, saw something he liked. Not knowing any better Garrigan reluctantly accepts an offer to be the President’s personal physician.

Up close he learns the truth, never more clearly than the time he gets back to his apartment to find it tossed over and his UK passport gone, replaced with a Ugandan one. Amin never asks permission for anything and always assumes everyone wants whatever he wishes to give them; his reign was brief–though not brief enough for the more than 300,000 countrymen killed in those nine years–as even the strongest supporters were unable to stomach the man’s increasingly horrific behavior.

Kerry Washington (Ray), David Oyewolo (who was also excellent in HBO’s 5 Days and BBC import series MI-5) and Simon McBurney (Golden Compass) have key supporting roles while Gillian Anderson, demonstrating the freedom starring in a TV series for 10 year can give an actor, has a nice cameo as the frustrated, sexy wife of Garrigan’s clinic superior.

I think part of my attitude has to do with the way director Kevin Macdonald and writers Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock slowly remove the veil from Garrigan’s eyes. At first (like many others) he thinks Amin is a strong man of the people who can root out the corruption of the previous regime, which is why the doctor decides to take the job offer, and LKoS has may laugh-provoking scenes. Even after many others have come to see the truth he still doesn’t. Finally the truth slaps him in the face, at which point he barely escapes with his life and even that costs a friend his life.

recommended

One cannot deny that I’m a big Jet Li fan. Oddly, and mistakenly, I was reluctant to watch Huo Yuan Jia since I had the impression he’d made an adoration to a man who was his own hero, who’d founded the Wushu school of martial arts a century ago. Indeed, before becoming an actor, Li five times won the Chinese Wushu championship although modern Wushu is a creation of the country’s Communist leadership and not the same style practiced by the historical Huo Yuan Jia.

Jet Li’s Fearless, the English title, is a bit idealized from the man’s real life. Not just to make a nice dramatic 100 minute package but to create a more heroic character; not that it matters to me, not being Chinese all I care about is an entertaining film. It does apparently present the man’s true position on the meaning of martial arts: self-improvement and self-development, with combat against others useful only as a means of testing one’s progress.

The movie can be divided into three parts: Huo’s childhood and early adult years, his years in the wilderness absorbing some tough lessons and finally, the emergence of a national champion at a time when Westerners and the Japanese treated China like a toy chest. At first Li’s character is arrogant, his ambition only to defeat every other fighter in his home city of Tianjin, but on attaining this goal its revealed as shallow and empty and his conceit leads to the death of his mother and daughter.

Destroyed, he’s nearly killed after running away from the shame but saved on the point of drowning by the crew of a fishing boat from a simple village. A lovely young blind woman and her grandmother take him in, restoring his health and teaching her their traditional wisdom. After several years working his way to an integrated, mature mental state, he returns to Tianjin only to find that foreigners have arrived in his absence and reduced his proud friends and neighbors to servants.

With his hard-earned insight Huo travels to Shanghai to take on a massive boxer. This O’Brien has defeated every Chinese fighter who gets in the ring with him and mocked the entire nation as weak, providing the final spark in Huo’s thinking. Not only does he defeat the boxer, easily, but does so with such graciousness that his opponent is able to push through his rage to acknowledge defeat.

Huo then founds the Jingwu Sports Federation (Jing Wu Men) based on the idea that only through unity will China pull free of foreign dominion. The foreigners don’t cotton so quickly to this thinking and challenge him to fight a champion from each of their four nations, a British boxer, a German lancer, a Spanish fencer, and a Japanese martial artist. Huo wins but also loses.

Li has the meat of the action, but also turning in strong performances are Betty Sun as the blind woman, Shido Nakamura as his Japanese opponent in his final match, Yong Dong as his lifelong friend and partner; the youngster who play’s Huo as a child isn’t listed in the IMDB or official website credits but was also terrific.

The movie was directed by Ronny Yu, one of Hong Kong’s most highly regarded filmmakers, and the action sequences were choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo Ping.

recommended

I think Truman Capote would have been reasonably happy with this movie about the most significant period in his life. While he was already a rising literary star for the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s and as a regular writer for The New Yorker, there’s no question that In Cold Blood was not only a masterpiece but a breakthrough in modern journalism. Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson all followed along in the path the book blazed, as did New Yorker colleague George Plimpton.

Capote covers the years from 1959, as Capote read a newspaper story about the brutal Kansas slaying and immediately sensed this was a story he could write, through the 1965 execution of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Coming more from the perspective of a novelist and playwright, Capote inserted himself into events in a way that no journalist ever would. He befriended Smith and found the pair better lawyers for their appeals than were possible for the trial; despite his efforts, they were actually guilty and no Midwestern court in those days would have allowed the murders of four clean-cut solid citizens to go unpunished.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman got most of the praise for his portrayal of the titular character, and took home the 2006 Oscar for Best Actor (over a relatively weak field), though several others won or were nominated for major awards. Director Bennett Miller and co-star Catherine Keener (who played bestfriend Harper Lee) lost out to Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener), and to Crash for Best Picture.

From my perspective, the focus was spot on as Hoffman completely dominated Capote; I’m hard-pressed to imagine a more definitive example of Method acting. He captured the author’s manipulative, narcisstic persona, willing to say what he needed to get people to open up to him. That may not seem like much but over the course of 110 minutes it creeps and grows with the final acts clawing out from the inside.

recommended

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

I can understand why Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke and even Delroy Lindo wanted to make this movie and I can see where it could have been great. Sadly, director Tony Scott and writer Richard Kelly did not deliver on the promise Domino had.

Then again Scott has been very erratic over the length of his career. He directed really good films like Top Gun, Enemy of the State, Crimson Tide, True Romance and Spy Game but also clunkers like Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder and The Fan and especially rail spike in the forehead bad Man on Fire. Kelly, a fellow Trojan alum, had only previously written (and directed) the cult classic Donnie Darko, which I’ve never seen.

The elements are all there: Knightley plays Domino Harvey, the daughter of ’50s film star Lawrence Harvey, who never fit with the fast, rich crowd into which she was born. Modeling and school bored her and instead of turning to drugs or sex she got into martial arts and action; she tossed the runway for bounty hunting, teaming up with Rourke and a smoldering hot Latino guy to work for Lindo.

The movie opens with FBI behavioralist Lucy Liu interrogating Knightley; the rest of the movie is a flashback as Domino tells Liu how things ended up with her all bloody and in custody. Honestly I turned off after 45 disappointing minutes so I’m not really sure how it all turns out but after consideration the problem for me was really down to Scott’s directing. After all these years you’d think he’d have the big action flick down solid but apparently not–trust me I won’t be spending money or time seeing his current release, Deja Vu, in the theaters or when it turns up on TV.

not recommended

I’ve been of two minds about seeing yet another biopic of a musician caught up in the demands of stardom and ego so it got past me in the theatrical run but with a little free time today and HBO On Demand finally saw Walk the Line, the 2005 movie about Johnny Cash, his rise to stardom and romance with June Carter. I suppose all those Oscar nominations, including Reese Witherspoon’s win for Best Actress, came from somewhere in the deserving territory.

Witherspoon actually is pretty good as the true love of Johnny’s life. Joaquin Phoenix, nominated for his portrayal of the Man in Black, was good but not far from his normal (IMO) scene-chewing standard job. The best acting for my money was Ginnifer Goodwin as Vivian, the first wife, though perhaps its sympathy for what her character went through only to lose her husband to addiction and the other woman. I also really liked Ridge Canipe as a very young Cash and Lucas Till as slightly older brother Jack, their interaction was sweet and natural in a few early scenes showing the source of Johnny’s core pain as well as his drive.

The film only really covers about sixteen years in the singer’s life, except for about six minutes (I just checked) of screen time with the young boys, from his Air Force service in 1952 through 1968, when June finally accepts his wedding proposal. Johnny actually had been asking her time and time again for years, clearly in love with her from the moment they met on a Sun Records tour in 1955. Vivian, of course, was home pregnant with their second child the night of that Texarkana show.

Phoenix and Witherspoon do their own singing, the movie doesn’t use the original recordings, which I think was a good choice, comparable to Gary Busey’s terrific job in The Buddy Holly Story, rather than Jamie Foxx’s lipsynching in Ray. Foxx was great, and definitely the better actor, but in this aspect Walk the Line surpasses the Oscar winner.

The script is by Gill Dennis and James Mangold, from Cash’s two autobiographies, and Mangold directed. I generally like Mangold’s work, especially Cop Land and Identity, though I think he could have easily made this better by cutting 20-25 minutes from the 136 minute run time. Some of the scenes were too soft and others unnecessary, like the tape bomb in the tree and the confrontation with record label execs over recording his Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album.

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

This collaboration between George Clooney and writer/director Stephen Gaghan is a close cousin of Fernando Meilles’ Constant Gardener with focus shifted from pharmaceuticals to the more obvious petroleum. Cementing the relationship is that neither fits the Hollywood mold (which, despite their shared anti-corporate message, predecessors like Silkwood and Erin Brockovich very much do).

Syriana follows veteran CIA Middle East operative Bob Barnes (Clooney) and financial wizard Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) as they follow perpendicular roads to the opening of a massive new facility in a corrupt Persian Gulf emirate. Mirroring the American pair are a poor Pakistani teen (Mazhar Munir) attempting to work in the Emirate and Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig, in his first big post-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine role), heir apparent and determined to reshape his country as more than just free-spending oil barrons.

Christopher Plummer plays the master chef, happy to cut and stir behind the scenes, with Jeffrey Wright (very different from his performance in Angels in America) excellent as his sous chef; both are partners at a powerful DC law firm, working to smooth approval of a merger between Chris Cooper’s up and coming family business with the traditional Big Oil corporation run by Peter Gerety (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Wire).

Other noteworthy performers are a very subdued Amanda Peet as Damon’s wife; the visibly aging David Clennon, an Assistant US Attorney General investigating the merger, and William Hurt, ex-CIA, still connected pal of Barnes; Jane Atkinson, the ruthless head of Barnes’ CIA division; and, Akbar Kurta as Nasir’s slothful brother and rival in succession.

Syriana is based on the allegedly autobiographical book by Robert Baer though Gaghan and Cooney steer clear of that controversy by making the plot unquestionably fiction albeit inspired and informed by the source material. Making his directorial debut after writing the terrific Traffic, Gaghan has clearly learned from Steven Soderberg’s film of his script as we float from perspective to perspective, a bit of plot here and character development there, misdirection and suggestion as prevalent as clear going.

recommeded

I’d heard good things over the years and am glad to have finally seen this 1990 dramatization of the lives of twin London gangsters, coldblooded killers who were twisted just a bit in the wrong way by their Mum.

The Krays are Ronnie and Reggie, born in the depths of the Depression to a poor family completely dominated by Violet Kray, backed up by her sisters and mother. The men in the family are barely there; the boys father is an ethereal presence and GrandDad is only interested in getting up to a bit of mischief. I never did understand where the food and rent money came from.

Though this is a decent movie and the potential was there, two problems leave it short of greatness. First, the Kray boys are played by Martin and Gary Kemp and, while they’re also twins and share an exquisite sense of style with the real mobsters, neither is really that good an actor. Just a bit too stiff in movement and delivering dialog.

Second, writer Phillip Ridley and director Peter Medak try to cover too much of the boys lives in 119 minutes. If I remember correctly there were half a dozen scenes at varying intervals showing bits of their childhood but if it were me I would have started with the episode at a carnival when they got in a ring and boxed each other.

Once can understand the desire to show how their mother created their personalities, one sociopathic and the other psychopathic, but we never see how their careers in crime begin or even any particularly significant capers. The only crimes we see are them beating or murdering other gangsters!

moderately recommended