FEBRUARY MOVIE ROUNDUP

DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTER BOYS (2002) – In the tradition of STAND BY ME in that it’s a movie about kids made for grownups. It has an inventive first act, and it sustains itself through Act II, but the ending doesn’t dramatically fit the lead up. It’s set in the 1950s and our main character and his friends have drawn their own alter ego comic book super heroes. Periodically through the film the characters come to life in an animated sequence that parallels the live action angst of our hero. I found this to be generally interesting, but it annoyed me that it wasn’t done in 1970s style animation. Would this kid really have imagined the technological advances of the medium?

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND (2002) - It turns out that Amish kids can run wild when they turn 16 and most do. They’re expected to eventually give it up and join the church and be God fearing in the old tradition and most do that too. This was an interesting documentary about what these kids actually do when the freedom comes. Some of the subjects join up and others go running off. I grew up about 20 minutes from where this was shot so it was particularly interesting for that reason alone.

THE ALAMO (2004) – This was the equivalent of a well made TV movie. The script is adequate. The actors don’t run into the furniture. I was maybe supposed to be thrilled by the battle scenes, but they weren’t particular inventive. We did get to fly with a cannonball once like we fell with that bomb in PEARL HARBOR (2001). Video games use to copy movies and now movies are copying video games. Another similarity to PEARL HARBOR was that this massacre didn’t complete the film. We got to see Sam Houston route Santa Anna like we got to see General Doolittle bomb Japan. We’re not far away from a time in which Romeo and Juliet ends with Mr. Capulet strangling Friar Lawrence and the Nurse.

+ANIMAL HOUSE (1978) – Still good after all these years. Tim Matheson does a decent job leading the film and Belushi is still funny. Bruce McGill plays D-Day, which means nothing except that he’s turned into a very productive character actor. You see him all the time in small roles. He played Ralph Houk in 61 and he played Peter Arnett in LIVE FROM BAGHDAD. He’s also in Collateral, Matchstick Men, Ali, The Sum of All Fears, Bagger Vance, The Insider. . . Why didn’t Tim Matheson have a better career?

+DRESSED TO KILL (1980) De Palma’s Psycho homage. The heroine dies early in the film via the ugly knife. The shower is used in dream sequences. An adultery angle pops up. The killer is fighting multiple personalities, one male and one female. DePalma’s career choices? SNAKE EYES? MISSION TO MARS? Gimme a freakin break.

SECOND HAND LIONS (2003) – Duvall and Caine wasted on an uneven film that changes tone frequently. The title is some sort of obvious symbolism, while the plot reminds one of BIG FISH (2004) without the stylish magic. There are some funny moments early on, but the screenwriter ran out of gas and the director couldn’t keep things together.

A PERFECT CANDIDATE (1996) The movie doesn't seem to take sides in the 1994 Senate race between Oliver North and Chuck Robb. It's mostly about North though and he comes off as earnest, although his campaign manager is a self-promoting jerk. North is gracious in his defeat, but the campaign manager is so self-involved he doesn't even care how his candidate feels. And who knew Chuck Robb was so void of personality. No wonder George Allen defeated him in 2000. The most interesting character in the movie is the Washington Post reporter who follows and asks questions of the candidates. He's totally over Chuck Robb, because Robb claims to have never told a lie. Who hasn't told a lie? A seminal moment is that same reporter asking Robb to clarify his position on strikebreakers. Robb talks in circles and will not answer the question no matter how many ways it is posed.

+TARGETS (1968) – Peter Bogdanovich’s debut was a low budget suspense film produced by Roger Corman. Corman told Bogdanovich that Boris Karloff owed him two days and that he could use 20 minutes from the Karloff picture, THE TERROR. Instead of writing a horror film around the footage, Bogdanovich dreamed up a scenario in which an aging film actor wants to retire while a young man goes on a shooting spree. It’s just a matter of time before the two meet up. It’s full of the gee whiz acting style contrasted by some grizzly shootings.

+SHORT CUTS (1993) I hadn’t seen this since the theatrical release, and at the time I had only seen two Altman films, THE PLAYER the year before and MASH when I was real young. In the last year or so I have seen NASHVILLE, LONG GOODBYE, and THREE WOMEN. I am amazed at how they all have the same soft dreamy camera work and nonchalant pacing style. Of the previous three, I only liked LONG GOODBYE, and I would have liked it better had they stuck to the original Raymond Chandler novel. For all the praise NASHVILLE gets I found it one long snooze. THREE WOMEN was Atlman’s attempt at a weird Euorpean style. SHORT CUTS works better than any of them.

+ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958) – I just recently came across the name of Andzej Wajda, a man considered Poland’s greatest director. There was a time that I would read about someone like this and just forget all about it. Now we have Netflix. Zbigniew Cybulski is a young man who is part of an underground movement to rid Poland of Communists shortly after the war. The movie begins with he and his boss offing a couple of dudes thought to be the new communist leaders coming to town. They got the wrong guys. The rest of the movie takes place inside their hotel where the real communist leader is also staying. Cybulski is ready to try it all over again, but in the interim he meets and romances the fetching young bartender, Eva Krzyewska. Our character is therefore torn between having a normal life with Eva and carrying out his duty to the resistance. If Eva is the standard looking Eastern European babe, it’s no wonder it took them so long to tear the iron curtain down. Who could keep their mind on the revolution?

HAPPY ACCIDENTS (1999) From Director Brad Anderson, the guy who just directed the MACHINIST with Christian Bale’s weight loss. Kooky actor Vincent D'Onofrio plays a kooky character that may be from the year 2470. Marisa Tomei plays his wacky girlfriend that alternates between playing along with him for the excitement and getting angry at his active imagination. These actors are both better as supporting players. They don’t have enough of that heroic magnetism to make you root for them. The payoff is somewhat interesting if you make it that far. I was ready for it to end.

THE CROSSING GUARD (1995) – This is a perplexing movie at first sight. It’s written and directed by Sean Penn, a man who couldn’t put a single coherent thought together in one hour on the Larry King show in 2002. Penn’s case that night of the wonderful people in Iraq and why we shouldn’t go to war was nothing but emoting through a string of disjointed words and phrases that lacked argument, evidence and conclusion. It might go down as the perfect example of how artists are ill equipped to function in the real world. The CROSSING GUARD is full of the same kinds of unfocused emoting, but it works here somewhat better. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston split up after their daughter was killed by a drunk driver. The driver (David Morse) is getting out of prison at the beginning of the film and Jack plans to put a hole in him. The plot gets no deeper. Morse feels as bad as Jack and they spend the movie in parallel despair. It’s certainly the kind of movie made by someone who likes to see acting rather than story. If you add this movie to his other directorial effort, THE PLEDGE and the Eastwood film, MYSTIC RIVER, the Robbins film DEAD MAN WALKING one would get the idea that Penn is building an entire portion of his career around the murdered daughter plot device.

HURLY BURLY (1998) – One of those showcase for actors movies that gets a top notch cast because the characters get to do so many random and exciting things. For the audience waiting to see how this slice of life nonsense fits together, it’s less thrilling. There’s a few moments and even some decently written dialogue, but it falls short of something I would call either art or entertainment. My old theatre teacher, Susan Harper labeled this category as actor masturbation.

+EMPEROR’S CLUB (2002) – Kline is a classics teacher in one of those typical Eastern prep schools circa 1975. Emile Hirsch (one of the kids from DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTER BOYS) plays the rebellious kid that Kline must set straight. It has something interesting to say about how teachers sometimes waste effort on bad kids that cannot be reached at the expense of kids that could better use and appreciate that same help. It also has much to say about the inherit value of personal virtue. The movie doesn’t denigrate capitalism or the real world, but appreciates the successful graduates who learned their lesson in that school. You’d expect the rebellious kid to be redeemed through efforts of the great teacher, but instead he’s proven dishonest twice, once as a student and later as a candidate for the Senate. As the Senate candidate he repeats the hackneyed lines about the importance of education that as we know he doesn’t believe. His donation to his Alma Matter is nothing but cheap political opportunism. This film is about the inherent value of education not a propagation of the institutions or processes that masquerade as education while functioning as jobs programs and daycare. Since I spent the better part of the movie trying to guess the liberal twist, I was surprised to find a conservative movie that didn’t apologize for it.

+61* (2001) – I had no patience for reading when I was a kid. But meeting Mickey Mantle when I was 7 changed my life. I started reading books about Mantle and the Yankees. Reading those books led to other baseball books and I eventually wrote Roger Maris a letter asking for his autograph and he kindly sent me his signature only a few years before his early death from smoking. Mickey would eventually succumb to the drink and both habits can be witnessed in the painfully accurate Billy Crystal movie. I saw it again last night for the 5th or 6th time. Will McGwire, Sosa and Bonds someday die from the effects of Steroids? Crystal uses CGI to great effect and he has a real love for the material. Mel Allen and Scooter Rizzuto are fun. Yogi has a couple of Yogi lines. Whitey Ford pipes in from time to time. It's hard to get over how much Barry Pepper and Thomas Jane look like Maris and Mantle.