Henry Saw: Two Kinda Weird Movies...with a similar key word...

Two different movies...with one common theme...



Let's do this chronologically...



Suddenly, Last Summer: So...this happened.

Uh...have you seen this movie? Or do you know the premise? Or ever even heard of it? Because it's pretty insane...not only for 1959...but for any era.

I am going to spoil the film in this little review, because it was reading about the "reveal" in this movie that made me want to see it, so skip ahead to the next review if you don't want to know anything about Suddenly, Last Summer.

Still here? Okay...so in this movie from 1959, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve), and written by Tennesee Williams and Gore Vidal, a character gets eaten alive because he's homosexual. And it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including two nominations for Best Actress.

Again...1959, Mankiewicz, Vidal and Williams, gay, cannibalized, Oscar noms.

IMDB's plot summery: A wealthy harridan, Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn), attempts to bribe Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), a young psycho-surgeon from a New Orleans mental hospital that is desperately in need of funds, into lobotomizing her niece, Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor). Violet wants the operation performed in order to prevent Catherine from defiling the memory of her son, the poet Sebastian. Catherine has been babbling obscenely about Sebastian's mysterious death that she witnessed while on holiday together in Spain the previous summer.

Hepburn and Taylor were both nominated for Oscars (they lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top). It was Clift's first role following his car crash that turned him into an alcoholic and drug addict. It was one of Clift's last leading roles, a part that touched a bit close to home (Clift was a closted homosexual), but he was protected by his co-stars (he and Taylor were very close and Hepburn spat at Mankiwicz for how he treated Clift).

I can't say that Suddenly, Last Summer is a good movie. It's limited in scope, strictly edited and limited, and contains only histrionic performances...but it's kind of a must see. It's just so...bizarre. How did this movie get made? And by a major studio? Any fan of film, especially the stars of yesteryear, should seek this one out. It's...notable.



Cruising: An infamous film. Released in 1980, Cruising was supposed to be William Friedkin's (director of The French Connection and The Exorcist) big mainstream comeback after the disastrous Sorcerer. Starring Al Pacino, and based on a 1970 novel by Gerald Walker, the film was hated before it was even released. Gay Rights groups protested the film's production, and even tried to interfere with the filming, because they thought it would paint the "homosexual lifestyle" in an extremely negative light. Cruising was a critical and financial bomb, and was widely forgotten outside of discussions of the worst of Al Pacino's career, and took years to be released on DVD. I'll critique the film first and then address the controversy.

Cruising is not bad. Like, super-duper bad. It makes no real sense, has no emotional tether, and feels like a paint-by-numbers detective film but colored in by a robot. It's detached, choppy, and exploitative. As a serial killer thriller, the movie's main selling point, it completely fails. Al Pacino's performance shows hints of the sad-sack he's become in this decade, no other character is even worth mentioning, and the movie is actively hostile to the audience.

As for the depiction of homosexuals...I can understand why the Gay Community was so pissed off about the movie. Gays are shown in an incredibly negative light, with a few exceptions, and the movie is clearly a product of its time. While not nearly as hateful as some critics would have you believe, Cruising does rely on some ugly stereotypes, and seems completely dated today.

But maybe that's why it didn't seem that bad to me. It is dated, we have moved on from this image of gay men, and I can understand what movie Friedkin was trying to make. That doesn't keep the movie from being horrible, it fails on every other level, but I can't say that the film is totally homophobic.


So there you go...two movies, separated by 20 years and rooted in very different zeitgeists, and both interesting relics of their time. Suddenly, Last Summer is the far better film, better acting, scripting, direction, and weirdness...but Cruising is interesting in its own dated way. See Suddenly, Last Summer, it's worth a viewing, and skip Cruising. Cruising isn't the Mein Kampf of Gay-hate it was made out to be when it was released...it's just a bad movie.

Grades:

Suddenly, Last Summer: B-

Best Scene: When Liz Taylor finally tells us what happened to her cousin...


Cruising: D+

Best Scene: Seeing a young and normal looking Karen Allen...

Henry Saw: Animal Kingdom

There's a lot of cool stuff coming out of Australia these days...


Earlier this year I reviewed an awesome little neo-noir out of Australia called The Square. It was a taut, shockingly funny, and an expertly paced thriller. I was very impressed. I have since learned that The Square was released by a production company called Blue-Tongue Films which was responsible for such short films as Spider (linked in my review of The Square), the popular I Love Sara Jane (featuring a young Mia Wasikowska):



And the Oscar nominated film Miracle Fish.

Animal Kingdom, the latest film import from Australia to hit U.S. screens, is not technically a Blue-Tongue production (though they are mentioned in the credits) but does involve much of the same cast and crew as The Square and those shorts. Written and directed by David Michôd, who wrote I Love Sarah Jane and directed the award winning Crossbow, Animal Kingdom is one of the best crime films to come out in years.

The movie follows a 17 year old boy named Josh who's mother dies of a heroin overdose. Josh goes to live with his grandmother and subsequently becomes involved with his three uncles' criminal activity. Following the murder of their best friend, Josh's three uncles become embittered and paranoid, and Josh realizes just how far his family is willing to go.



This is not a "fun" film. Animal Kingdom, outside of a few awkward moments, lacks a sense of humor. This is a serious movie about seriously disturbed people. Animal Kingdom manages to cover a wide range of subjects and themes, for instance the camera seems to be running too early, or cut too late, so as to uncover the supporting characters' lives and paint the entire world the film.

The film's cast is solid all around, with the wicked Jacki Weaver as the mother of the gang and Ben Mendelsohn as the scariest brother Pope, as the two standouts. The main character Josh, who is played by newcomer James Frecheville, is relatively charmless but that is a conscious choice by Michôd to show how young, damaged, and overwhelmed "J" is.



Like The Square, the movie is filled with genuinely shocking moments, but has a much darker and more artful tone. There is less irony in the violence here, an in a strange way less cynicsym, but offers just as bleak at look at human nature. Only Guy Pierce's character offers any kind of morality in the film and, in the end, he too is beaten down by the nature of his profession.

A fantastic film, a must see, and deserves to have its name mentioned a lot during awards season...

Grade: A-

Best Scene: When we see just how far Mother Cody is willing to go to protect her sons...

Henry Saw: I Love You Phillip Morris

Ugh...what the hell was the point of this?


What a weird and confused movie. I Love Phillip Morris was supposed to come out early last year, it has already been released and come out on DVD throughout Europe, but was delayed for myriad reasons here in the States. Finally getting a release in December, I was able to watch a European copy of the film and can now understand why it has taken so long for the movie to hit screens. It stinks and no one here in the States will want to see it.

IMDB's summary: Steven Russell is happily married to Debbie, and a member of the local police force, when a car accident provokes a dramatic reassessment of his life. Steven realizes he's always been gay and decides to live life to the fullest - even if it means breaking the law. Steven's new, extravagant lifestyle involves cons and fraud and, eventually, a stay in the State Penitentiary where he meets sensitive, soft-spoken Phillip Morris. His devotion to freeing Phillip from jail and building the perfect life together prompts Steven to attempt, and often succeed, at one impossible con after another.



I Love You Phillip Morris, which is based on a true story, was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who previously wrote Bad Santa together. Bad Santa was a surprisingly winning movie, unpleasant at times but always darkly funny, and was very aware of what kind of movie it wanted to be. I Love You Phillip Morris is all over the place. It is technically a comedy, Jim Carrey plays it all very broad and it's cut together as if we are supposed to be laughing, but it's just not funny. At all.

Jim Carrey is incredibly irritating, Ewan McGregor continues his run of lame performances in Hollywood movies, and the script is just horrible. Repetitive, aimless, condescending, smarmy...the movie just goes nowhere. While I respect how frank the film is about gay sex, there's a lot of man-on-man action in this one, I am not sure it helps the movie. It's like the filmmakers were so happy they got to shoot Ewan McGregor performing oral sex on Jim Carrey that they forgot that there's no comedy to be found in that.



This movie reminded me of another movie I disliked: The Informant!. Both are true stories, both are retold in a "quirky" manner, and both have an unreliable narrator at their center. Did I smirk a few times? Yes, there are a few clever lines and transitions. Overall though, I found I Love Phillip Morris a wholly unlikable film, and have no question it will bomb in December. Americans will not only be uncomfortable with the homosexual scenes, probably the main reason why it has taken so long to be released in the United States, but will just not like the movie. I certainly didn't.

Grade: D+

Best Scene: "My word is my mother ****ing bond!"

Ben Saw: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

One of the nerd-crush movies of the summer. So how was it?



I went in to ‘Scott Pilgrim’ with some trepidation. Having read the series of graphic novels, and really enjoying them, I had deeply mixed feelings when the movie was first announced. Edgar Wright was undeniably an inspired choice to helm the project, but whom would they cast for the title character? On my reading, it had to be someone fairly young, semi-scrawny, capable of a hyperactive slacker charm, a goofy sense of humor and enough charisma and good looks that you understood why a woman would ever be drawn to this man-child dunce of a character. Someone like..........

Michael Cera?

Really?

That rang false for me from moment one. It screamed ‘oh crap, we have a no-name genre-blending property that will be hard to summarize in a trailer! What young comic actor can make this more commercially viable??’ And so they said Cera. Because Hollywood is usually stupid and, despite it all, Cera’s star has shone modestly bright for the past few years.

Admittedly, I don’t like Cera in the first place. No, I didn’t like ‘Arrested Development’. I watched a number of episodes and I found it poisonous; smug, self-satisfied, sneering non-jokes that weren’t half as clever as the folks involved thought. That was the writing’s fault more than Cera’s, but his performance as a stuttering jellyfish did nothing for me. And that’s always the character he plays. Cera was intolerable in his bad movies (‘Nick & Nora’, anyone?) and a neutron rod in the good movies (‘Juno’, ‘Superbad’). So, like I said, I don’t like Cera in the first place, but I just couldn’t see how someone read 'Scott Pilgrim' and thought of him or the simpering character that he plays in everything he ever does.

I say all this because, while I tried to go in with an open mind and a willingness to not judge the movie in comparison to the books, I’d be lying if I said it probably didn’t influence me. As you can perhaps guess from all of the above, I wanted to like ‘Scott Pilgrim’ a lot but it ultimately didn’t work that well for me.



I’m assuming you know the plot already (if not, feel free to check IMDB’s summary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/synopsis), so let’s talk about the movie itself. (Finally, right?) There’s a lot to like about the movie. The creative team clearly LOVED its source material and tries to be a faithful channelling of the source material’s tone and themes in to a new medium. They put a busy, scattershot aesthetic to good use by packing the movie full of gags, asides and clever references.

‘16-bit’, ‘nerdy’ and ‘arty’ clearly served as the watchwords in cinematography and post-production; as a result, the movie has a striking visual style that tries to blend the fantasy of video games in to real life. Scott ‘levels up’ on screen. ‘POW!’ flashes on screen when someone gets punched. Not everything works (‘Bollywood dance fight’ sounds more amusing than it turned out to be) but it is fun and not overly intrusive. The visual guys should probably get an Oscar nod because it’s just so different and fully realized than anything else out there today. And the cameo by Clifton Collins Jr. and Timothy Jane was genius.

That scattershot aesthetic I mentioned is part of what makes the movie so hard to market. It’s a love story! It’s a comedy! An action movie! A rock band flick! There are trippy asides! Bi-sexual ninjas! Psychic vegan rock stars! Did I mention Jason Schwartzman is running around here somewhere? And the new Superman? But the movie finds that tone and often makes it work well, especially in the first half.



The supporting cast deserves props for this. Most of them understand the silliness of the movie they’re in and are willing to be a part of the joke as opposed to recoiling from the ridiculousness of it all. ‘Great’ is too strong a word, but ‘very good’ is spot-on for the cast’s high points: Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and (to a lesser extent) Jason Schwartzman all stand out as the most enjoyable of Ramona’s evil exes (keep an eye out for hilarious fake promotional materials for Evans’ movie star character) and Kieran Culkin kills as Scott’s roommate.

But as much as there were many things to like, the movie fell flat for me. There were two problems: Cera and the script, and if either of them had been better, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ could have really soared. Let’s start with the script. It tries to distill the 1000+ pages of the graphic novels in to movie form and that caused a lot of problems. Not as an adaptation (I’m trying not to judge on that basis), but as a story in its own right. That supporting cast that I had such nice things to say about...? Diluted by the fact that the film tries to cram about 20 fairly relevant characters in to a two-hour narrative. So as much as I liked Culkin’s witty, acerbic and sometimes off-kilter performance I didn’t get to see much of it because the movie gave itself very little time to let any one aspect of the film develop. The script tries to bring so many things in that lots of characters and interactions feel perfunctory, notably Scott’s fights with the fifth and sixth evil exes, as well as virtually every female character. It’s worth an aside: In retrospect I was struck by just how the female roles, often with talented actresses filling them, are given no room to breath due to the script’s race through the material. Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson and Ellen Wong are particularly poorly treated.

This compression not only prevents most of the cast from airing out their characters, it also forced the writers to pick different themes than the book to focus on, and introduce ‘neat’ resolutions in to the narrative. The former is only a problem because of the latter; there’s nothing wrong with a new focus, two hours is not a lot of time, but if you want to make this about Scott’s emotional maturity then let us see a somewhat believable arc. I know it’s a silly movie, but it’s ultimately grounded in pathos and not action, so telling us the whole thing takes place over a week or so rings incredibly false. I don’t think of ‘declaring love for someone after a week’ and ‘emotional maturity’ as particularly compatible. And some of the ‘neat’ decisions carry the hallmarks of bad writing: What makes Ramona so desirable? Why does the band make certain sacrifices for Scott? Why is Knives necessary in the climactic fight? Stuff like this makes the script feel like an early flying machine: it’s full of admirable, inventive and clever things, but bumps along on the ground without ever taking flight for more than brief spurts.



To really soar, the movie needs to give the audience something to latch on to, so a choppy script would be less of a problem if we had a charming, likeable lead who helped us be more inclined to overlook the problems. Instead we get Cera who is, by far, the weakest aspect of the cast. He’s not awful, that would be unfairly harsh since he is surprisingly fine in the fight scenes and does sell some of his better material fairly well, but he has much less energy than the rest of the cast and gives no sense of depth or interest to his character. The story is about Scott winning over Ramona, so it rests on Scott Pilgrim being eminently likable despite his obvious flaws. Michael Cera is not likable, making ‘Scott Pilgrim’ fall back on it’s admirable creative energy and crackling supporting cast. It’s not enough, making this a movie to rent unless you are curious about the imagery or really, really like Michael Cera...........although I can’t imagine why.

Grade: B-

Best scene: The movie is filled with more great split-second moments than great scenes, but if I had to pick one it would probably have to be the battle against Brandon Routh.

Henry Saw: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

An interesting but paint-by-numbers documentary...





Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is a documentary made by one of Basquait's friends Tamra Davis. Opening with a reading of the Langston Hughes poem Genius Child, The Radiant Child is a fairly straight-forward documentary. It tracks Basquiat's rise from a graffiti artist named SAMO, to being the star of the New York art scene, to his friendship with Andy Warhol, to his premature death due to heroin abuse. Using mostly narration, archival footage of New York in the early 80's, interviews, and shots of Basquiat's artwork, Davis presents a linear presentation of Basquiat's life and career.

As someone who was not familiar with Basquiat's life, or artwork, this film had a lot to offer. I had seen Julian Schnabel's film Basquiat, but not in a long time, and had forgotten much of Basquiat's story. Unlike Shnabel's film, which was not granted the rights to Basquiat's art, Davis is able to accurately track Basquiat's progression as a provocative graffiti artist to a painter who's works now sell for over 12 million dollars.

The film's best attributes are its footage of New York during Basqiuat's time, Davis really manages to recreate the era, and the discussion of Basquiat's art by his peers and critics. There is nothing that, fundamentally interesting in Basquiat's story, being the first truly famous Black American artist and befriending Andy Warhol are his most famous "attributes", so Davis wisely lets the art and history speak for itself.



Where Davis fails is in portraying what was so innovative about Basquiat's work. We hear that he was a genius, and ground-breaking, and brilliant...but Davis just trusts us to agree with these ideas via the art we see. While that's fair, the man was clearly talented, I think we could have used more information about why his art was significant. She also fails to make the film interesting beyond Basquiat's life, it's such a "standard" documentary, and shows little creativity for a documentary about an artist.

If you're interested in Basquiat then you should definitely see The Radiant Child. If not, it's still worth watching, but more for the art and archival footage than anything else. The production values are on the level of a History Channel documentary and the insight is not much deeper. I was very interested in learning about Basquiat, so I enjoyed the film, but I cannot fully recommend it on it's own merits. The best historical documentaries, such as The Times of Harvey Milk, When We Were Kings, One Day in September, etc., manage to convey to the audience a reason these films needed to be made; I never got that with The Radiant Child. Perhaps it was made in a response to Schnabel's film, which as one critic said should have been called "My Basquiat", but that's just an inference.



It's good that the The Radiant Child exists. It's a new way to share Basquiat's art, most of which I found fascinating, and I hope it does so. Unfortunately, as a film, I cannot give it a high recommendation. It's just too flat, too standard, and too shallow. I'm glad it's out there...but you don't have to see it.

Grade: B-

Best Scene: The early footage of New York in the late 1970's...

Henry Saw: The Other Guys

A quick look at Adam McKay and Will Ferrel's new comedy The Other Guys which is quite funny...



NYPD Detectives Christopher Danson and P.K. Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson) are the baddest and most beloved cops in New York City. They don't get tattoos - other men get tattoos of them. Two desks over and one back, sit Detectives Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg). You've seen them in the background of photos of Danson and Highsmith, out of focus and eyes closed. They're not heroes - they're "the Other Guys." But every cop has his or her day and soon Gamble and Hoitz stumble into a seemingly innocuous case no other detective wants to touch that could turn into New York City's biggest crime. It's the opportunity of their lives, but do these guys have the right stuff?



The Other Guys is McKay and Ferrel's fourth film together, they previously teamed up for Anchorman, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Step Brothers, and I would argue it is their most successful movie. That's not to say it's their funniest, Anchorman is more quotable and has more memorable scenes, but The Other Guys holds together the best. Anchored by the most restrained performance Ferrel has ever given in one of his silly comedies, and Mark Wahlberg doing a wonderful send-up of his own overly intense persona, The Other Guys is the cop movie parody that Cop Out and Starsky and Hutch wanted to be.

The Other Guys has some great little moments, whether it is Sam Jackson and Dwayne Johnson's final scene, a highly enjoyable Derek Jeter cameo, Wahlberg's interaction with Will Ferrel's wife Eva Mendes, or Michael Keaton continuous references to a certain R&B group...there's a lot to like here.



The flaw with the film, as with many comedies, is the last third of the film. The comedy starts to drain out of the movie as they feel the need to wrap-up the unsatisfying and uninteresting Bernie Madoff based plot. I understand that a comedic movie should not be a series of skits with out a plot-line, that's my main problem with Anchorman, but a comedy should never stop being funny just because it needs to wrap up a dull storyline (I'm looking at you Wedding Crashers).



All in all I would recommend The Other Guys. We don't review many comedies here on Pitaoe, they are not much fun to write about, and humor and comedic taste is so subjective. I wanted to get the word out about this one. Critics mostly ignored it, and its only done modestly well at the box office given the pedigree, but it is well worth a watch. You don't need to see it in theaters, but give it a shot (this one might work well as an airplane movie), and I hope you find it as funny as I did.

Grade: B+

Best Scene (or line): What someone calls Derek Jeter after finding out what Mark Wahlberg did to him...

Henry Saw: Centurion

An entertaining, if forgettable, historical action film from director Neil Marshall...

Centurion, currently available via cable On Demand, and also coming to theaters near you, is a perfectly enjoyable romp. Directed by the man who made the nearly perfect horror film The Descent, Centurion more closely resembles his other films Dog Soldiers and Doomsday, but is a definite improvement on those pictures. Centurion is easily Marshall's second best film, is very capably made, and entertained me both times I watched it on my TV.

Pathé Productions' plot description: AD 117. The Roman Empire stretches from Egypt to Spain, and East as far as the Black Sea. But in northern Britain, the relentless onslaught of conquest has ground to a halt in face of the guerrilla tactics of an elusive enemy: the savage and terrifying Picts. Quintus Dias (Fassbender), sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Virilus' (West) legendary Ninth Legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth and destroy their leader Gorlacon. But when the legion is ambushed on unfamiliar ground, and Virilus taken captive, Quintus faces a desperate struggle to keep his small platoon alive behind enemy lines. Enduring the harsh terrain and evading their remorseless Pict pursuers led by revenge-hungry Pict Warrior Etain (Kurylenko), the band of soldiers race to rescue their General and to reach the safety of the Roman frontier.



Centurion is hardly a work of art. It's simplistic, fairly simple minded, and never pretends to be anything but an action film. Though led by a truly gifted actor in Michael Fassbender, the movie is happy to revel in its ultra-violence and simplistic plotting, in order to present the most exciting product Marshall can provide. As an action movie it works quite well. The fight scenes are all exciting, and aside from a muddled concluding sequence, all quite easy to follow. Centurion balances a relatively light-hearted tone, Marshall knows what kind of movie he is making, with an appropriate level of semi-serious gravitas. In this vein, Dominic West hits the perfect notes as an unconventional general in the Roman army.



I really enjoyed Centurion. It's far from flawless, and hardly adds anything new to the genre, but it is a fun way to pass the time. Relatively well directed, solidly acted, and decently choreographed...Centurion is worth a watch.

Grade: B

Best Scene: The escape scene