Movie Maven

An Inconvenient Truth
Starring: Al Gore
Written by: Al Gore
Directed by: Davis Guggenheim
Official Website

Photo courtesy of Film Threat

I needed to assuage my liberal guilt.

The best way to do this of course is not by, you know, actually doing anything, but watching other people doing something and agreeing with them heartily. That's what I do. I don't do things. I watch other people do things, and then write about what I watched them doing. This is usually about as active as I can get.

With this philosophy in mind I went to see An Inconvenient Truth last weekend. Both hailed by critics and booed by the right-wingers, I was pretty sure I would enjoy it. Plus I admired its brilliant marketing campaign, which touted the film as a disaster movie a la The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon, and was called "the most terrifying movie you will ever see."

But while there were some truly unsettling and even frightening moments in An Inconvenient Truth, I didn't exactly run from the theatre screaming. I think there were probably too many graphs involved for that. What An Inconvenient Truth is, is a highly informative and captivating lesson in environmental science, courtesy of Al Gore. Basically a taped session of his "slide show," as Gore endearingly calls it, the movie puts forward the evidence surrounding global warming, discounts the theory's critics and provides a practical, unhysterical view of what will happen to our planet if we continue to slowly poison it.

Gore is at his most genial (dare I say charismatic?) using Matt Groening cartoons and badly done CGI polar bears to illustrate some of his points. But he is also deadly serious, weaving this story of the not-so-distant future with a sense of urgency that hasn't been expressed before. He showed what New York City would look like if the polar ice caps melted and the ocean's level rose (the World Trade Center Memorial site would be completely submerged, a truly disturbing symbol Gore doesn't shy away from.) He flipped through one photo after another of mountain ranges and glaciers slowly melting from the late 1970s until they are practically nothing. "By 2050," he says bluntly, "there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro."

I wouldn't call Inconvenient Truth a documentary, necessarily- in many ways it reminds me distantly of the movies I was shown in high school science class. People have argued that it's skewed, but that's entirely missing the point. Gore's argument is that his slide show- and likewise this film- can't be skewed because all scientific evidence (not some or most but all) points to global warming as a human-induced process that is rapidly changing our climate and world. Graph after graph of the distinct rise in temperature, emissions, and climate events like hurricanes can't lie. Gore isn't skewing the truth, because for him (as well as the vast majority of scientists) the truth can't be skewed.

Go see An Inconvenient Truth. The critics are right that it is an important film and actually a lot more entertaining and captivating than a lot of people would believe. But most importantly, see it because in the end it's not a movie that terrifies. At least not by the end. Because Gore, at the end, has hope for the future. His main point is that this is a fixable problem, that every single person can help to slow. By making global warming our fault, he is also showing that what we began we can cease. We can all do something, not just watch others doing it and agree with them. We have power over our world.

I've been disappointed in TV lately.

This is of course usual for summer, a period that becomes an endless circulation of pointless reality shows and sit-coms half-heartedly begun and then abandoned around mid-July. And there are few things actually worth watching on network TV anymore, in general. It was a fairly good season in '05-06, with The Office flourishing and Battlestar Galactica somehow managing to thrive in the wasteland of the Friday night lineup. The Daily Show is always a keeper, and The Colbert Report on afterwards has become a fantastic platform for Stephen Colbert's limitless talent. Law and Order: CI seems to have taken up the cop show slack that the original L&O has dropped in the last season after the still-painful death of Jerry Orbach/Lenny Briscoe. And though The Sopranos ended on a irritatingly boring note, it's still a revelation of the modern televised drama.

But most of these shows have left for summer vacation, forcing TV execs to fill the void. Summer programming for the most part has always seemed awkward, a little cheap, and thrown together. I'm not a reality show kind of girl (Project Runway being the exception- oh, how I loves the Santino) and if I have to sit through one more cop/sexy lawyer show I am most definitely going to hurl. Yes, it is a long, hot, barren summer in TV land.

Except for Deadwood.

An oasis in the desert of summer programming, Deadwood (Sundays, 9 p.m. HBO) has quenched my thirst for entertaining and thought-provoking television. Masterfully crafted for the past three years by creator and writer David Milch, the show about the infamous South Dakota town set during the Gold Rush takes the traditions and cliches of the western for a ride. The best factor by far is the dialogue, which is a mingling of undulating Shakespearean-inspired prose and unadulterated profanity. It's a sweeping epic of a show, with a massive, talented cast and fascinating historical sub-plots. Deadwood was created to show the development, and so-called civilization, of America in a microcosm.

For those unfamiliar with the history of Deadwood, it was mining camp in the South Dakota territory, a filthy, lawless place run by a handful of power brokers. The most powerful of these was Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) owner and proprietor of The Gem saloon and whorehouse. The entire cast of characters (which over the years has included Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock,) are wonderful, rich and intriguing, but it is McShane as Swearengen that captures the show and makes it what it is. He's one of the most well-defined, and complex characters I've ever seen, capable both of grotesque brutality and unbelievable mercy. He is funny and terrifying, intelligent but capable of making very serious mistakes in his business dealings. But most interestingly of all, Swearengen becomes integral to the evolution of the camp into a real town and its subsequent annexation to the United States. He does this determinedly, even though he knows it means the end of his reign as the leader of the camp. He is willing, even glad, to relinquish his authority to help make Deadwood what it could be. His affection for the camp, and his hopes for its future parallel those of the founding fathers, albeit he accomplishes his goals by slitting a lot of throats.

This season sees a threat to his plan, when historical mining mogul George Hearst comes to town with a thought to bend Deadwood and its leaders to his will. The first episode "Tell Your God to Ready for Blood" banged onto the screen, featuring a shoot-out in The Gem, Bullock beating the slimy E.B. Farnum to a bloody pulp and a shaky conspiracy between Bullock and Swearengen against Hearst. I've never seen an episode I haven't enjoyed, but this season is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and captivating I've ever seen.

And probably with good reason. Because HBO hasn't renewed it.

Deadwood is not a show to view idly. You cannot fold laundry or do your homework while you watch it. You have to sit and take it in, like a fine meal, focusing on each line, partly because of its innate beauty, and partly because it can sometimes be heinously confusing. So it is either abandoned for lighter, more accessible fare, or (in my case) it becomes an obsession, viewed several times throughout the week, scanned and analyzed and discussed with other true believers. Symbols and mundane details are picked apart with the intensity others reserve for Scripture or poetry. Characters are mourned in their deaths. Swearengen is worshipped as a demi-god. These are Deadwood people. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough of them.

Milch asked for four seasons in which to tell his story. He had a very specific plan, and an image of the time-frame he wanted for his show. But falling viewership combined with more money spent on another sweeping epic, Rome, has caused HBO to re-prioritize. The execs have given the go-ahead for an two two-hour film "episodes" completing the series, but it's just not the same. So while the tedium of Entourage and the truly ghastly Lucky Louie continue unabated, smart programming has once again been trumped for ratings. This is less common on the network, since it's based on subscriptions, but they still need viewers, and the large base audience just isn't there.

Of course since this was announced, Blogland and near-neighbor MessageBoardistan became riotous with protesters rising up against The Man to save the show. To no avail, probably, but if you'd like to join the resistance against the George Hearsts of HBO, visit savedeadwood.net or The Huffington Post, which are rallying supporters.

Deadwood will soon pass away to television heaven, though I have a sneaking suspicion that DVD sales might cause the tyrants at HBO to re-think their original decision. But until then, we can all have shot of whiskey every Sunday, as we watch a show about America in the making, toasting to Al Swearengen with a grand "Huzzah."

Photo courtesy of: St Petersburg Times

The Mighty Peking Man (Xing Xing Wang) (1977)
Starring: Danny Lee, Evelyne Kraft
Written by: Kuang Ni
Directed by: Meng-Hwa Ho

Photo from shaolinchamber.com

I have been overwhelmed cinema-wise lately: Netflix has been bombarding me, as has Blockbuster Online, which I have joined free for one month, and tends to send its movies en masse. Friends have been lending me western, sci fi and drama staples, that I "just have to see" and Deadwood, the best show on television has returned for its final season (a post on that coming as soon as I can get my act together.) Not to mention the blockbuster season is upon us, with all sorts of fun, interesting and stupid things to see in theatres.

Unfortunately, this boon of information has coincided with a writer's block the size of the Berlin Wall. I sit in front of my laptop (or desktop in the case of when I'm at the Real Job) and tap my fingers across the keyboards, hoping against hope that perhaps the clacking sound will jog my sluggish imagination. I don't like using writer's block as an excuse for not doing work, but I don't know what else could be the cause.

But apparently humidity has done the trick. It's a wretched 90-something degrees in Boston right now, with a humidity factor of one hundred million percent. So after a weekend of dirty Boston beaches and laying on my bed in boxers and a tank top trying to move as little as possible, my brain has clicked somewhat back into place, and my fingers are typing merrily away.

While in the heat-induced trance in my un-airconditioned apartment, I needed something that didn't require the workings of too many brain cells. The Roommate and I flipped about the cable until landing on IFC, and the hysterically bad Mighty Peking Man, a frightfully dubbed rip-off of King Kong.

So here's the deal: this giant ape-man, right, he's, like totally freaking out all the villagers around the Himalayas, he's all "Oooohh, I'm Peking Man, I'm so mighty, I'm gonna eat you and stomp on your house!" So all the humans around him are like, well screw this, let's get some bad-ass kids to come show Peking Man what for. So they get this anthropologist named Johnny (Danny Lee) who's all messed up because his girl cheated on him with his brother, and needs to get away. So he agrees to go to the Himalayas and capture Peking Man with a group of trappers. It's all awesome, because they run into some rampaging elephants (which are really just meandering elephants they sped up on the film to look all... rampageous) and climbing the Himalayas is really really hard, and Johnny runs away because he's fragile or something. He gets lost, and they all give him up for dead, when he finds this jungle chick in a skimpy animal hide bra (Evelyne Kraft) who has been there since her parent's plane crashed when she was a little girl. She calls herself Ah Wei, but Johnny keeps calling her Samantha for some reason (probably just the crappy dubbing.) Anywho, Ah Wei/Samantha has a repore with Peking Man, saves Johnny's ass and they fall in wild jungle love. But Johnny, he wants to, like, civilize her and stuff, but she, like, can't be tamed, you know? So Peking Man takes them back to the city, but other people who want to put him on display capture him, and Johnny doesn't care because he's got his hot jungle wench. I stopped paying attention for a while after that, but basically the ape-man is put on display, he sees the evil promoter attempting to rape Ah Wei/Samantha, freaks out and starts trashing the city. He does get up on a tall building and is shot at by planes, but I think he actually dies in a fire. Ah Wei/Samantha almost dies too but Johnny saves her. The End.

It's not so much the derivative aspect of this movie that makes it so lovable- it's the fact that it has absolutely no sense of humor about itself. This was made in a time and place before spoofs and ironic remakes, a time of supreme cinematic innocence. We are not expected to laugh at the immovable, emotionless face of the guy in the ape-man costume, we are supposed to feel heartfelt sympathy. Passionate sadness for the tragic creature. When Peking Man picks up Ah Wei/Samantha (as she strikes one of several provocative poses in the beast's claws. like she's vogueing for Cosmo) we are only supposed to see their primitive friendship and doomed love. It's sweet.

So as summer hits with its derivative films and remakes, its monsters and hot chicks in slut-tastic jungle wear, be sure not to forget the monsters and slutty jungle chicks of summers past. When we lived in a kinder, gentler time of animal-hide underwear and multitudes of fleeing Asian extras. Long live Mighty Peking Man.

The Omen
Starring: Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, Mia Farrow
Written by: David Seltzer
Directed by: John Moore
Official Website

Photo by: 20th Century Fox

I'll start by saying that I was pretty sure this movie was going to suck. All the reviews were indicative, and the director was the guy who did Flight of the Phoenix. But I went to see it (not on 6/6/06, unfortunately it was sold out) hoping that it would be scary. Really scary. I can handle a bad horror movie if it frightens me. I hadn't been sufficiently scared by a contemporary film in a long time, and I was jonesing for that sense of unease, for the feel of my heartbeat fueled with adrenaline, a good gasp and jump. I wanted to sleep badly that night. I saw the original Omen when I was 10 or 11 and I still remember it fondly as one of the most frightening films I'd ever seen. I am a fear junkie and I was hoping for a fix.

Too bad it just kind of sucked.

This movie was not scary. I couldn't believe it. It was like it wasn't even trying. There were a couple moderately good jumps- choppily edited visuals of Damien in a scary mask, holding a rope, predictable but still effective. But the rest is hideously dull and flat. Damien's father and a reporter (David Thewlis) go to a cemetary populated with upside-down crosses and a giant black dog attacks them. Oooohh, subtle. Julia Stiles, besides looking far too young for the role as Damien's mother, is wooden and stilted, a far cry from Lee Remick's nuanced and brittle portrayal in the original. Even Schreiber, who's usually consistently good is beaten down with bad dialogue. The movie klunks along with predictability, like a badly oiled machine. It seemed like Moore had maybe seen the original Omen a few years ago on HBO and had a vague sense of how it was supposed to go. It had all the plot, to be sure, but none of the atmosphere, or sense of unease of the first.

The worst part, of course, is the actor who plays Damien. Child actors are difficult in the best of situations. Apparently the director chose not to tell Davey-Fitzpatrick that he was supposed to be playing the son of the devil- I'm not being glib either, they really didn't tell him. They apparently didn't want to "freak him out" (a perfectly legitimate thing when dealing with a six-year-old) but how is the poor kid supposed to play somebody evil when he doesn't know that he's supposed to be evil? Suddenly it's very clear why Damien never really looked "evil-" he just looked kind of sullen and frustrated. Less antichrist and more "a bully stole my tricycle."

The two who actually manage to pull their weight are Thewlis as reporter Keith Jennings and Mia Farrow, playing the satanist nanny Mrs. Baylock. They both liven up the joint and bring a surprising amount if nuance to their limited roles (and both of them bite the dust in fabulously nasty ways.) But they are the exception, not the rule.

The Ring Two. The Haunting. The Grudge. All sucked. All were re-makes or adaptations. But they were all scary, primarily because they managed to catch the subtle facets of horror. They had timing and a profound sense of what images truly keep us up at night. The Omen had none of this- only a trudging sense of obligation to re-make a perfectly fine film. Not to expand upon the ideas within it, or tell the story with a different perspective, but to make money and capitalize on a fortuitous date.

There are only so many ways Damien can frown.

I have a friend who, if it's even possible, is a bigger TV and film addict than I am. So one rainy day last weekend, I meandered over to said friend's house for a day of being completely useless and sedentary. As we flipped through the cable, which is normally rather trashy of a Saturday afternoon, we landed on the ABC Family channel and Love Don't Cost a Thing, starring Nick Cannon and Christina Milian.

Can you think of a bigger waste of time? We were overjoyed and made merciless fun of the dialogue, filming (which had a weird shaky-cam effect that is really more appropriate for an intense documentary than a beach dance scene) and Steve Harvey, the poor bastard, who played Cannon's father. Basically the plot is Cannon is a geek who pays Milian $1,500 to be his friend for a few weeks so he'll become cool. There are coordinated dance numbers, which makes it worth a viewing for me, and we watched happily until this line:

Cannon: "I'm with her now."
Milian: "Her? (Snorts derisively) She's given more rides than Greyhound."
Cannon: "Yeah, but at least I didn't have to pay $1500 for a ticket."

At this point my addict friend sits up and screams "Oh my God! I know this movie! Have you ever seen Can't Buy Me Love?" I admitted shamefully that I had never even heard of it. We popped it in immediately (well, right after a hysterical viewing of Real World/Road Rules Challenge,) and I hadn't realized how incomplete my life had been before this movie. Patrick Dempsey as skinny lawn boy with floppy hair pays cheerleader Amanda Peterson to be his girlfriend for two weeks to make him popular. Cheerleader plays it tough, but she's got a sensitive side too, and in the midst falls in love with nerdy Dempsey. But Dempsey's had a taste of popularity, and (oh shame!) loses both his friends and the girl. But all will be well, for the floppy-headed Dempsey learns his lesson, gets his old friends, frightens the school bully and gets the girl.

In effect, it is the same movie.

There are montage sequences and 80's power chords and (huzzah!) coordinated dance numbers. But the whole reason for the movie's existence is Dempsey's truly fabulous performance as Ronald Miller, 80's lawn-boy geek extraordinaire. He becomes popular purely by accident, and never really stops being a geek. Cannon, by contrast, is simply a playa-in-waiting, one who exhibits two extremes of personality, and simply chooses the good one.

But let's not get technical. After all, we are talking about a movie with Nick Cannon and Christina Milian.

All the best lines in Love Don't Cost a Thing are simply stolen from Can't Buy Me Love. Besides the Greyhound lines (which are indeed identical Amanda Peterson's dialogue) there's an entire poem recited word-for-word from the original script and a couple of other exchanges that are hauntingly familiar.

It's kind of like they took the script, and added in a "dawg," "playa," or "shorty" every time there was a gap in the dialogue. Classy.

We are in an age of perpetual remakes, adaptations and general lazy screenwriting. From the painstaking rip-offs of Japanese horror to the remake of Superman, due out soon, it's hard to find a movie that hasn't been recycled from something else. Some are good and some are bad, but this example takes the cake. So here's your homework assignment: watch Can't Buy Me Love and then Love Don't Cost a Thing, and view the degeneration of filmmaking at work. Or, if you disagree, let me know.

Patrick Dempsey says don't be frontin'. Someone should have told Nick Cannon.

X-Men: The Last Stand
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, Ian McKellan
Written by: Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn
Directed by: Brett Ratner
Official Website

Photo courtesy of: Slide 2

In the hectic atmosphere that is Movie Maven's existence, I didn't get a chance to wish you a Happy Summer Movie Season!! All semblance of budgeting my money and time at the theaters has gone out the window with the prospect of air conditioning and watching some seriously cool shit blow up. While I suppose my unofficial entre into Summer '06 came with The Da Vinci Code, I decided to celebrate the vacation from school and Oscar films with X-Men 3.

The first two installments of the series have been my favorite comic book movies to date. Bryan Singer, who directed X-Men 1 and 2 really tapped into the universal themes established in the comics, and the link to issues today: racism and government control, the ambiguousness of evil, etc. It was less about the plot and more about introducing whole, real people into a fictional crisis on the world stage. Singer had a poetry and rhythm in his work, a beauty and darkness that stayed with you long after you saw the movie. The special effects were impressive not just because of their noise and flash, but also their ingenuity (one part I always have in my mind is when Magneto (Ian McKellan,) who can manipulate metals, sucked all the iron out of a guard's bloodstream and used the iron as a method of escape from his prison in X-Men 2.) The X-Men flicks were always big, loud movies, but there was a method to it. I always had a sense that Singer and his crew handled the story and characters with care and affection.

I didn't get that sense with the third, this one directed by Brett Ratner. The story centers around a "cure" to mutant power that's been developed and is now available to the anyone who wishes it. Some think it's awesome, some think it's an attempt at mutant genocide. And then the fun begins. If in adept hands, this would be a terrific jumping-off point for serious discussion, but Ratner apparently is no Singer. Ratner doesn't handle the story so much as inflate it, stuffing it full of sub-plots, exploding cars and tons of extraneous mutants until it heaves and begs for Pepto Bismol. He doesn't love and develop his characters so much as introduce them and then leave them hanging off the proverbial cliff. There's just too much stuff. For example, he introduces Angel (the delectable Ben Foster,) a boy with wings. One of the truly memorable scenes in the film is in the beginning where a 10-year-old Angel is in bathroom of his home, desperately cutting off his own wings with a saw, a look of pure terror in his eyes. After this one would think Angel would be featured. Perhaps have some sort of extended dialogue with other characters. Some development of who he is as a man. But no, the poor lad is relegated to jumping out of a building, his CGI wings flapping behind him, and, in one scene, saving his mutant-phobic father from death as his lab is destroyed. That's all she wrote. So a truly impressive beginning dwindles and melts away in the face of blowing up some seriously cool shit.

Now if this was just benign summer fun, I would not gripe so much. But as an X-Men fan, Ratner and screenwriters Kinberg and Penn did something completely unforgivable in my eyes.

They made Phoenix into a sub-plot.

Phoenix, for those who are not as dorky as I am, is a pure, undiluted manifestation of the powers of the telekinetic Jean Grey (Famke Janssen.) She's not evil, per se, but is pure emotional and supernatural energy, rendering her unstable and incapable of reason. For many comic book aficionados, this plot-line borders on scripture- it's the grand-daddy of X-Men literature.

The problem with it in this movie is not that they oversimplified it (though they did) or completely changed the way in which she operated (though they did that too) but that they didn't consider it worthy for a main plot. She comes back, she looks evil and kills a lot of people, including several main characters. The end. Her coming is wrapped up in the war between mutant and "homo-sapiens" (as Magneto derisively calls them,) and in the end the movie is about the war and not Phoenix. While I admire the directorial bravery in having her kill off the people she did, there was simply not enough of her story to make any kind of coherent sense. Plus it's just disrespectful.

I would still call X-Men worth a viewing, though I think a rental from Blockbuster would suffice in lieu of spending your ten dollars on Surround Sound and cup-holders. It was a disappointing end to a rather wonderful series, but Hugh Jackman is still bad-ass, Patrick Stewart is still dignified and smart, and Ian McKellan still has gravitas to spare. The director may have sucked the life out of the plot, but these three still manage to emerge from the bloated film intact.

Plus some really cool shit blows up.