Category Archives: biography

Find Me Guilty

Posted on March 25, 2006

Vin Diesel shows a little range in Sidney Lumet’s courthouse comedy Find Me Guilty, stretching his chops outside the action and semi-action comedy flicks he most often makes. Not that I don’t enjoy both of the linked films, but it’s nice to see Diesel try to move outside the little square Hollywood tries to draw around people to make their investments safer.

I’d probably give the biggest chunk of credit to Lumet. He’s been making terrific films for half century now, a slew of ’50s Golden Age live TV dramas and 1957′s 12 Angry Men (tell me the faceoff between Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb isn’t among your favorite mano-a-mano verbal brawls), 1964′s Cold War masterpiece Fail-Safe (Fonda again), the ’70s trifecta of Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and Network, Paul Newman’s underrated The Verdict and, his last great movie IMO before a run of dogs, River Phoenix’s Running On Empty.

FMG retells the true story of the lengthiest mafia trial in American judicial history when, in the mid-80s, 20 New Jersey members of the Luccese family were prosecuted on 76 criminal counts in a trial that lasted over 21 months. Can you imagine being on the jury for all that time? Me neither. Amusingly, after all the hundreds of witnesses and mounds of evidence the jury only needed 14 hours to get the verdict.

Vin plays Giacomo “Jackie Dee” DiNorscio, a clearly cruel mobster but one who still kept to omerta at a time when it was beginning to break down as others were taking deals and ratting rather than doing time. The Feds offered DiNorscio a deal three times but even after a separate drug bust landed him a 30 year sentence he refused to talk. In fact, of the 20 defendents he was the only one already in prison; he went back to the Manhattan lockup each night while his associates slept in their own beds.

Fed up with attorneys who, after all, did little good as he was railroaded to that 30 year term, Jackie decides to do for himself and this is where the comedy comes from. Lately, when a movie is ‘based on a true story’ you can give it a miss more often than not but Lumet and co-writers T.J Mancini and Robert J. McCrea (both with their first screenplay credit here) deftly take the larger than life mook with nothing to lose, tread carefully around DeNorscio’s awful CV and what in real life was a boring, neverending process and come out the other end with a fairly lighthearted fish out of water comedy.

The opposition, the man who is really the good guy, is a guy who just wants to put some very bad men behind bars, US Attorney Sean Kierney played well by Linus Roache (a Mancunian who almost has the mostly-neutral Mid-Atlantic accent correct). Kierney rightly cannot understand how this chubby, balding mobster is beating him with the jury but Americans have frequently sided with the populist over the intellectual. 21 months is a long time to sit and listen and Fat Jackie, well, he entertained them. He admitted to plenty of crimes, just not the ones for which he was on trial, and was able to shovel some serious dirt on (what Lumet presented as) the most important witnesses.
Good supporting cast too. Alex Rocco, looking really old, as the crew’s boss; Peter Dinklage (Station Agent) as the lead defense attorney (the constant deliberate wheeling out of his podium got annoying after awhile); The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi as an FBI agent and one of the discredited witnesses; Annabella Sciorra as Diesel’s ex-wife who, of course, still has some feelings for him and has them, er, interrupted by guards during a brief jail visit; and, Ron Silver as the judge, his best scenes coming in his office and from riding herd on the very large herd.

recommended

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Hotel Rwanda

Posted on February 13, 2006

Incredible movies can be made about the strength some individuals find within themselves in the face of terrible things men do to other men. Life is Beautiful, where an Italian man is caught up in Hitler’s Holocaust, and The Killing Fields, about Pol Pot’s ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, are two which come easily to mind. Hotel Rwanda is easily worthy of joining this company. That Don Cheadle and Terry George did not win Oscars two years ago–Cheadle lost Best Actor to Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles and George lost Best Original Screenplay to Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--is something I don’t understand.

Cheadle portrays Paul Rusesabagina, local manager of a swank hotel owned by Belgian airline Sabena in the capital of Rwanda and a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman, as fighting between the Hutu and the Tutsi for control of the African nation comes to a head. The movie opens the night before everything comes crashing down, as Hutu militia rebel against their own President; they assassinate him after he signs a cease fire pact and claim it was Tutsi rebels. This is justification enough to begin a horrific massacre in which the death toll quickly runs to a million or more Tutsi men, women and children.

Cheadle is reasonably well connected and intelligent. He’s been paying off one of the key Hutu generals (played by Fana Mokoena, who reminds me of Yaphet Kotto) and is able to leverage that relationship, with some fast thinking, to keep his hotel a sanctuary for over a thousand people who would have otherwise surely been among the bodies littering lawns and roads. Nick Nolte has a good supporting bit as an American colonel running the UN Peacekeeping force in Rwanda, frustrated by protocol which makes him unable to do much more than stand in between militiamen and potential victims.

Hotel Rwanda also reminds me of City of God in that both are stories of incredible sadness about people who are unfortunate enough to live in places which Americans and other Westerners simply don’t connect to or care about. Neither Rwanda nor the slums of Brazil have any resources we find useful, no terrorist groups have emerged from them, and therefore they don’t register on our radar. Bob Herbert has been attempting to raise consciousness on similar tragedy going on right now in Darfur, Sudan, but despite having the bully pulpit of several columns a week on the OpEd page of The New York Times I don’t believe he’s saved one life after writing columns for more than two years.

definitely recommended

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Alexander

Posted on January 13, 2006

Oliver Stone made this trainwreck of a movie. Colin Farrell, hair dyed blonde, stars as the ancient Macedonian boy king who conquered most of the ‘known world’ before he was 30 and then died shortly after. Angelina Jolie plays his mother, if you can believe that, as a twisted woman who couldn’t keep control of her husband. I mean, seriously, Jolie may not be exactly your taste in looks but there’s no denying she’s incredibly gorgeous and sexy and so besides being too young she’s too beautiful for the role.

What really makes this movie terrible, and I mean railspike in forehead terrible, is that Stone took what should have been an amazing, epic story and bloated it so badly that after an hour (it’s almost three) I was screaming through the Tivo program guide looking for something, anything else to watch on an early Saturday evening.

Sure, Stone stood almost firm on the homosexual relationship and Hephaistion (well-played by Jared Leto). Where the action could have popped off the screen as Alexander took on Persia and each further conquest, he kept taking the movie into slack, talky scenes. Yes, Oliver, we get the point that the other Macedonians wanted to go home and enjoy their plundered treasures but yack yack yack.

Maybe the movie got better after I changed channels; seems unlikely that I’ll ever know.
not recommended

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No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Posted on October 4, 2005

PBS series American Masters broadcast the Bob Dylan documentary last week but I finally got to watch the second part last night. Zimmy is a musician who’s always been in the background for most people my age and younger, making new music occasionally, sending out some strange messages at times, but this film goes back to his origins and the days when he was very much in the spotlight’s glare.

Covering his life only until a horrific motorcycle accident in 1966, No Direction Home is a deeply flawed production though it offers a view of Dylan that’s informative and enlightening. PBS included after the second half a brief interview with Martin Scorsese (by the nearly useless Charlie Rose) during which the acclaimed director explained that all the interview segments we’d seen of Dylan were conducted not by Scorsese or a journalist but by one of Dylan’s associates. This explained the complete lack of any really probing questions.

In fact, if I understood correctly, all of the material in the movie was assembled prior to Scorsese’s involvement and his major contribution was to “find the narrative” and oversee an editor piecing together the footage. For just this part, I’d say he did a good job and overall I feel, other than a few slow spots in the second hour, the documentary is worth watching for any fan of American culture. I know that the man has never been interested in answering those questions, not seeing them as interesting or perhaps even possible, but I feel the lack of real insight from Dylan himself was a missed opportunity.

One of the strong points is that though interviews with contemporaries (Liam Clancy and Pete Seeger particularly), performance footage and some surviving radio interviews and press conferences we get a very good understanding of Dylan’s early development and his effect on the folk music scene. Most of the film, after all, takes place before he became a pop star; that really didn’t happen until about 1965, after his “shocking” electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival. 40 years on, there’s still controversy about the crowd’s reaction but the footage used shows that they did boo. In fact footage from the subsequent tour of Britain shows that audiences there were also quite upset with the change.

To some extent, after watching, I can understand it. Up until these concerts the show was Bob Dylan onstage with his guitar, harmoica and voice. Period. Hearing, for example, his original versions of “Blowing in the Wind” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” are revelations. No band behind him, I can see the simple power of his poetry; a lot of things about Bruce Springsteen are more understandable now.

No Direction Home is a very good film. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of his music to enjoy it. Scorsese could’ve used his scalpel a little better and reduced the run time by 20-30 minutes, and certainly the circumstances of the Dylan interviews should have been made clear. Nonetheless, worth watching.

recommended

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Grand Theft Parsons

Posted on September 21, 2005

A quirky little film, Grand Theft Parsons is the story of what happened when country-rock originator Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose in September, 1973. He and his pal Phil Kauffman (not the film director) had pledged that if one died before the other, the survivor would take the other’s body out to the Joshua Tree desert and set it free with fire.

Kauffman went through some shenanigans but eventually made good on his promise. The movie tells of the day, more or less, between Parson’s death and the pyre. Johnny Knoxville does an intersting turn as Kauffman, with Marley Shelton as his girlfriend, Mike Shawver as a druggie with a yellow hearse used to transport the coffin, Robert Forster as the dead star’s dad, and Christina Applegate as Parsons’ uberbitch ex-girlfriend.

Irishmen David Caffrey directs from Jeremy Drysdale’s script and neither really brings much to the party. Honestly the facts of the situation don’t leave them much room to maneuver and in hindsight one wonders if there’s really enough material to justify a 90 minute movie. Sure Parsons was a rock star but by ’73 drug overdoses had taken many greats, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, and he was more of a star to other musicians than the listening public.

not recommended

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Edgeplay

Posted on August 27, 2005

Back in the ’70s teen chick rockers the Runaways almost pushed it over the top but, sadly all too common in the history of rock and roll, fell apart in a frenzy of intramural ego battles, drugs and external manipulation. Of all the members only Joan Jett really went on to realize her ambition and commercial success with Lita Ford managing a few hits. Edgeplay is a documentary made by Victory Tischler-Blue, better known as bass player #2 Vicki Blue, that takes an honest look back in surprising detail at what happened from the inside out.

The two biggest drawbacks are that Jett wouldn’t participate and is heard only a few times on contemporaneous interview tapes and the other women, though clearly at times in physical proximity, never talk with each other (other than Blue’s questions) in responce to sometimes startling revelations. Lesser evils are a general lack of performance footage and Runaways music as well as very strange interspersed comments from the very strange Svengali who put the group together, Kim Fowley.

On the plus side, putting Edgeplay into the watchable column, the women are forthright in discussing the incidents and emotions which after all happened when they were between 14 and 20 years old. Drummer Sandy West tells us that during those years she was doing drugs and men to the point that after the band dissolved she was forced to become a mule and collector for dealers to support her habits, breaking down doors gun in hand. Original bassist Jackie Fox confirms longstanding rumors of a suicide attempt that sent her home early.

Lita Ford, still the hardbodied gorgeous blonde I remember from her late ’80s/early ’90s videos, comes across as less honest or perhaps simply remembers events from her own self-esteem supporting POV. I think the film’s biggest miss is a conversation/confrontation between Ford and lead singer Cherie Currie, the second to leave after one too many feuds with the guitarist.

recommended, barely

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Ray

Posted on February 20, 2005

Far too often a Hollywood studio movie “based upon true events” would be better off not having been made. I’m not talking about documentaries, I’m talking about lightly dramatized real events like French Connection, Silkwood or Erin Brockovich. Except the three I mentioned are exceptions because, frankly, the bad ones aren’t worthy remembering. Biographies tend to be a little different though producers seem to overestimate the box office appeal more often than they should.

One good sign for a biography is the participation of the subject but only if she or he is willing to be reasonably honest. Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is a terrific example; not only does Fosse participate, he wrote and directed a strongly critical examination of his emotional life. Ray isn’t as trippy as that late ’70s masterpiece but Ray Charles was active in the project right up to his death and his son was a producer. Neither felt the need to pull punches and so we get a portrait of a creative genius that includes huge portions of guilt, loneliness, shame and arrogance.

Jamie Fox plays Ray in the performance of his career, perhaps one of the top American movie performances since the turn of the century; if he doesn’t win the Oscar next Sunday night there’s a bigger problem in Hollywood than I thought. I haven’t seen his four competitors and though all are respected actors Fox just too many chops to lose. There are other good actors in this film, Clifton Powell as bus driver, confidant and manager Jeff Powell, Regina King as backup singer (and one of Charles’ many lovers) Margie Hendricks and Bokeem Woodbine as Fathead Newman, a great sax player who was Ray’s first connection to heroin. But Fox is simply all over this movie, completely inhabiting his character, blindness, piano playing, ruthless self-confidence.

Director Taylor Hackford has had a decent career, he made The Idolmaker, a film I consider seriously underrated, and An Officer and a Gentleman early on and then seemed to get lost in the studio system until now. Here he makes a movie, one that never seems to drag or get lost in the minutia of a life jampacked with public events. The only quibble I can make is that he ends the movie in the late ’60s after Charles is busted for bringing drugs back to America in his jacket and goes through detox to finally quit them. True, after that the hits stopped coming but I felt an abruptness that jarred me out of the groove; 30 more years of life surely justifies some kind of coda better than few sentences in voiceover and a photo montage.

One funny thing about Ray is that despite all the music, of which there’s plenty and it’s all good, this never becomes a tribute concert with some biographical sketches gluing things together. We get a complex, complete portrait of an imperfect wonderful human being.

definitely recommended

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A Christmas Story

Posted on December 24, 2004

“You’ll shoot your eye out.” That’s all poor Ralphie hears from adults when he answers the question what do you want for Christmas with the one thing that he’s just dying to have: a Daisy Brand Red Ryder repeating BB carbine with a compass mounted in the stock. Now this story’s set in the late 1940s in small town Indiana, so don’t go getting the wrong idea.

Based on Jean Shepherd’s (much better, I thought) novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, A Christmas Story was almost unnoticed when first released before Thanksgiving 1983; word of mouth pulled more and more people into theaters after it almost closed before that Christmas but the real turning point was its release on video and now cable station TBS has a 24 hour (12 repeats in a row!) showing every year starting on Christmas Eve.

Ralphie (Peter Billingsly, the cute kid co-host of the then hit TV proto-reality series Real People) is a pretty basic kid and the movie wastes little energy fleshing his character out. The two biggest bits of character development are his fight with a bully and his disillusionment after finally receiving a secret Little Orphan Annie decoder sent away for weeks previously. Mainly he’s deadlocked on getting that rifle.

Mom and Dad are Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin; mom’s mainly a stickfigure housewife, dad a midwestern cliche. Ralphie’s little brother has one big scene, where he refuses to eat his dinner until Dillon suggests he pretend his plate is a trough and he a pig. There are friends too, one of whom gets to show us what happens when a gullible boy licks a flagpole in winter.

I suppose writer/director Bob Clark, coming off the first two Porky’s teen schlockers, was looking for a movie that would show a bit more of his creativity but Shepherd’s material–which I’d read ten years or so earlier–doesn’t offer a story of sufficient depth to drive a feature-length film. His best works are short stories and even the novel from which the movie comes is more episodic, a series of connected incidents. Clark’s script tries to work in many of these, the father’s leg lamp award, ongoing battles with the neighbor’s pack of dogs, Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, but is constrained from really making a meal of them.

Then there’s the cultural obsolecence of A Christmas Story, a distance from our own times that grows greater every year but doesn’t reach the classic resonance of, say, A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th Street. I’m not sure why, maybe the movie’s too new or we’re not far enough from 1948, but as I listened to the frequent voiceovers, Shepherd himself as the adult Ralph, I couldn’t help but wonder why he was talking so much.

recommended because I seem to be about the only person who didn’t warm to this tale.

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The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

Posted on December 9, 2004

Everyone’s got to be a fan of Peter Sellers, the man was a comic genius even if he did seem to be burning out just before his death at 54 in 1980. He made so many classics, among them The Mouse Who Roared (which deserves much more acclaim than it seems to get), Dr. Strangelove (which does get the acclaim it deserves), the four Pink Panther features (a role he got at the last minute when Peter Ustinov–you’ve got too be kidding me–backed out) and Being There (his last serious effort).

HBO continues its tradition of producing the best made for television movies with The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a real yet somewhat surreal biography starring Geoffrey Rush (have you seen him in Lantana?) as Sellers, Charlize Theron as Sellers’ utterly stunning second wife Britt Eklund, Emily Watson as first wife Anne, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards (writer/director of the Pink Panther flicks, among many other great films), Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubric (who directed Strangelove) and the absolutely exquisite Sonia Aquino as Sophia Loren.

The movie is based on a serious biography by Roger Lewis and focuses on Sellers the man; it isn’t a frothy recap of his films but a psychological portrait of a man who thinks he really isn’t there. By the climax, when we see Sellers reading and then becoming determined to make the film of Jerzy Kosinsky’s novel Being There, director Stephen Hopkins no longer needs to make explicit the actor’s inner emptiness (as he’d done frequently at earlier points) nor his remarkable similarity to the book’s lead character–Rush and Hopkins collaborate to show us via facial expressions, (lack of) conversational ability and physical isolation.

Another interesting device Hopkins uses is to play on Sellers’ own common ploy of playing multiple parts in a movie by having Rush take over another character’s monologue, dressed and made up as that other character, switching while the camera briefly swings away from their face. The first time this happened, as Sellers’ father speaks, I almost didn’t catch it but once alerted it was noticed each time. The monologues by themselves are another device as they’re spoken directly to the audience (breaking the fourth wall is the term, I believe) and a mixed bag since they deliver a good bit of that explicit messaging that Hollywood insists film audiences require. Truly great films generally understand we don’t, so let’s just put this down as pretty good.

recommended

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Prey for Rock & Roll

Posted on November 14, 2004

The ‘semi-autobiographical’ movie about a woman born to rock, just never quite succeed,
Prey for Rock & Roll is a glimpse into the life of co-writer Cheri Lovedog (called Jacki, played by Gina Gershon) and what one assumes are amalgamations of people she met and played with during her days as part of the LA punk scene between about 1980 and the early ’90s.

Jacki’s just turned 40 and wondering if the time’s come to give up her dream but her band might just get that big break, if some sleezy promoter can be believed. Lori Petty plays Faith, the band’s lead guitarist, who teaches wannabes during the day and is in love with the band’s drummer Sally. Drea de Matteo (Sopranos, Joey) is the bass player, a trust fund baby, and way past well done on drugs, drinking and a bad boyfriend. Who rapes Sally, but gets paid back by Jacki (she runs a tattoo shop, so go figure) and Sally’s brother Animal (named by her for the Muppet’s drummer, played by Marc Blucas), whose just turned up after doing a dime for manslughter of their stepfather (who was raping Sally).

Lots of angsty, inner thought voiceover from Gershon which is fine if you want to hear Lovedog’s, well, inner thoughts, and less interesting if you want a better movie. The women are punkers, more or less, and this is no Hollywood flick so no one looks all that pretty, dresses nicely and every scene is cheap and messy. The director, Alex Steyermark, has mostly produced music and soundtracks for movies and this is first time directing. He’s not a natural but doesn’t get swallowed up by the material either. Which reminds me, if you don’t dig RiotGrrl rock, that’s gonna be a problem.

not really recommended

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