Category Archives: Not Recommended

300

Posted on April 27, 2007

There’s a reason this film disappointed me: Despite the amazing visuals from start to end and near non-stop action, it is essentially one battle scene stretched to fill a two hour movie. I initially thought it was a box office disappointment too, but Box Office Mojo reports it’s taken in over $200M in the US and $217M elsewhere as of last weekend. Even with a production budget of $65M and plenty of marketing support, that’s surely sufficient for a good profit despite Hollywood studio’s arcane accounting methodology.

300 is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel retelling of the battle between the Spartans of ancient Greece and Xerxes, greatest leader of the Persian Empire. Directed and co-written by Zack Snyder (whose only major previous effort was the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead), the film is unsurprisingly similar to Sin City. Unsurprising because that was also based on a Miller graphic novel but not near as good, probably because the underlying material was meatier and the significantly greater participation by Miller.

If one can ignore that much of the stunning imagery is from blood spurting and body parts flying, which in the end I could not, then one might enjoy 300 more than I did. Gerard Butler is a mighty King Leonidas, Lena Headey is a match for Butler’s iron will and pure hardbodied sexiness as his queen, David Wenham (Faramir from The Lord of the Rings) and Vincent Regan are both quite good–especially Wenham’s storytelling, which Snyder uses to frame the entire film–as Leonidas’s captains, even props to my boy from The Wire, Dominic West, as a slimy politician and Rodrigo Santoro as a majestic Xerxes.

But in the end, there was far too much killing and nowhere near enough storytelling to justify spending $65 million making this movie.

not recommended

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Everything is Illuminated

Posted on January 22, 2007

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

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Firewall

Posted on January 21, 2007

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

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Havoc

Posted on January 21, 2007

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

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Ultraviolet

Posted on January 4, 2007

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

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Domino

Posted on December 21, 2006

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

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Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Posted on December 17, 2006

I wanted to like this film, directed by star Tommy Lee Jones, and it was a close thing, but I just couldn’t get into it. The emotions, the core of the film, were too laid back to connect with me. Also, the nearly arbitrary and often confusing sequencing of the scenes simply annoying rather than suspenseful or revealing. So -1 to Jones, who probably ought to stick either with acting or directing less complex scripts.
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is titled quite literally, concerning the three times a Mexican cowboy named Melquiades Estrada gets buried. Mixed in with them are scenes that explain who Estrada was, the quality of the man who killed him, and the trip Jones, the killer and the corpse take to get to the third one.
Decent acting by Melissa Leo as a married woman who also keeps warm with the Sheriff and Jones, Barry Pepper as the killer and Julio Cedillo as Estrada. Not so good are a completely listless January Jones as Pepper’s wife and Dwight Yoakum as the Sheriff.

not recommended

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The Ice Harvest

Posted on December 12, 2006

This film was a huge disappointment for three main reasons:

  • I read and enjoyed the Scott Phillips novel on which its based;
  • It stars one of my favorite actors, John Cusack; and,
  • The creative team, director Harold Ramis and writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton, have collectively made quite a few terrific movies.

Sadly, I had to switch off The Ice Harvest after watching less than 30 minutes. Perhaps having the entire movie set at night during a winter downpour (on Christmas Eve) works better in the mind’s eye than on the big screen. Perhaps the collective creative collision of Ramis, Cusack, Russo and Benton were too many chefs for the one pot.

Whatever.

Not recommended

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Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Posted on June 18, 2006

I finally saw Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith last weekend and I can’t say it was worth the wait. Or worth seeing sooner. George Lucas made the darkest movie of his career but there were too many nods to the fans, lazy shortcuts and simply overdone acting.

not recommended

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The Da Vinci Code

Posted on June 6, 2006

I didn’t have high hopes going into the theater, despite more or less enjoying the novel and that Tom Hanks, Akiva Goldsman and Ron Howard were once again collaborating, but for most of the two and a half hours The Da Vinci Code exceeded my expectations. And then it all came crashing down as the movie went wishywashy on Dan Brown’s core condemnation of the Catholic Church in a vain attempt to appease the mass market.

Well, maybe not completely in vain since the film has taken in over $170 million at the US box office since its release 17 days ago. Not chicken feed, the $77M opening weekend was by far the biggest of Howard’s or Hank’s careers.

Taking the knife to Brown’s allegations of centuries of suppression, murder and deceit of the true nature of Jesus’ relationship to Mary Magdalene didn’t help that much since their were people with banners and placards outside most theaters on opening weekend including the one at which we saw the film.

Not being a Christian, the interest for me was in whether the movie was as good a thriller as the novel, not always an easy task when most of the audience has read, or is at least largely familiar with, the novel. Like I said, for the most part it held up. Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen are all very good actors and Howard and Goldsman know how to pace a film.

Code even has an innovative visual effect: when a character is recounting some historical episode (such as the Last Supper, a battle from the Crusades or the funeral of Isaac Newton) we see it recreated onscreen, transparently overlaid on top of the current scene. I don’t think this brief phrase really does it justice but I can’t think of a better one.

Where the filmmakers lost me, though, is a scene towards the end where Langdon and Neveu (Hanks and Tautou) discuss what the final revelation of the Priory of Scion’s mission means for Neveu. They added a speech where Hanks, much more of a father figure than I’d have expected, tells her that she can toss aside 2,000 years of struggle by many, many men and women and allow the terrible deeds (alleged by Brown) to pass into history.

not recommended

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