Category: Genre

CADDYSHACK

By Marc S. Sanders

Do you think in 10 years or even 50 years from now, people will remember that Harold Ramis was one of the funniest writers in film history? Animal House, Stripes, Scrooged, Groundhog Day (I hate it, but I won’t deny its legacy every February 2nd), and Ghostbusters. One film that cemented the stage for his success in the 1980s is arguably Caddyshack, which focuses on the snobs vs slobs at a high-end golf country club known as…ahem…Bushwood. It’s okay to laugh. Your mother is not in the room.

Caddyshack is more or less a vehicle for the comedic talents of Saturday Night Live players to put out their best material seemingly made up on the fly. Bill Murray is the demented grounds keeper tasked with getting rid of a damaging gopher. Chevy Chase seems to be the charmer with a delivery of wit in every word he says. He’s more or less good looking here but just as deliberately stupid as everyone else. Rodney Dangerfield goes beyond his stand-up routines, or maybe he doesn’t. He’s just shoved into the film and let loose to anger and harass the head snob, Ted Knight. Knight is unquestionably the best of the bunch here. He’s got such great timing with his outbursts and delivery. I even love how he pronounces the car maker Audi. It’s more like “ottie.”

Ramis has a thin storyline about one caddy (Michael O’Keefe) trying to win a college scholarship. Meh. So what! Caddyshack works best when it’s just playing for skits and raw laughs. There’s gross out comedy like doodie in the swimming pool, compliments of a Baby Ruth candy bar, and vomiting in cars. Dangerfield’s one liners are fast and loose. The judge’s daughter is a sly minx for the dweeby male cast to ogle, and the gopher footage with Murray is straight out of Looney Toons. I do love the irony of the Catholic priest going out to play 9 holes in the middle of an electrical storm; a prophet who will spit in the face of God. “OH RAT FARTS!!!!”

Caddyshack is not my favorite of Ramis’ films, but it’s become a touchstone in comedy quotes and repeat viewings. It’s stupid and coarse and silly and belongs nowhere in the Parthenon of great filmmaking efforts but it’s a favorite of almost anyone’s for how brash it truly is. It’s an R rated interpretation of The Three Stooges. If not for nothing, I’m sure that somewhere there is an esteemed judge of the cloth who was proud to sentence young men to the gas chamber as a means of “owing it to them.”

Harold Ramis with co-writer Brian Doyle Murray (Bill’s brother) conceived of Caddyshack as a push back against that system of order. Well done, men. Tee up!

FRACTURE

By Marc S. Sanders

When director Gregory Hoblit was shooting this film, did he ever wonder how preposterous this courtroom mystery is?  

This ridiculous effort featuring a tired Anthony Hopkins as a suspect representing himself, and a very green Ryan Gosling as the prosecuting attorney proudly boasts a centerpiece storyline of simply finding a gun used in an attempted murder.  That’s it really.  No nuances.  No subtle riddles.  Just a “what happened to the gun?” plot line.  

It’s any wonder that I had never heard of this movie until I found it on Netflix.

Take my advice.  Find something else on Netflix.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Byron Haskin
Cast: Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 89%
Everybody’s a Critic Assignment: Watch a Movie “Classic”

PLOT: A small town in California is attacked by Martians, touching off a worldwide invasion.


I admire the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds most when I try to imagine myself back in that era as someone seeing it for the very first time.  For me, 69 years is still an almost unimaginable gulf of time.  In 1953, TVs were not quite a luxury item anymore, but a color TV definitely was.  Little kids still wore coonskin caps and watched The Howdy Doody Show for fun.  The very concept of UFOs was only six years old.  And the Cold War was a direct threat to our national security and our general peace of mind.

Into this culture came a film that, while thoroughly cheesy by today’s standards, nevertheless captured the paranoia of a nation.  Unstoppable creatures from another planet!  Wreaking havoc wherever they go!  Not even the mighty A-bomb can defeat them!  And who could resist those terrifying movie posters?  “A mighty panorama of earth-shaking fury!”  I would have been BEGGING my parents to give me ticket money.

Is a plot summary even necessary for this classic story?  A fiery meteor plunges to Earth near a small California town, but instead of making a crater, it carves a gully as it slides to a stop.  A scientist hypothesizes it might be hollow inside.  Presently, an alien spacecraft emerges from the meteor, bearing a fearsome weapon that looks like a cobra’s head and rains destruction and death on anything in range.  Forsaking Wells’ original vision of Martian tripods, this version presents sleek, manta-ray-shaped spacecraft supported by nearly-invisible electromagnetic currents.  Or something like that. Reports start coming from around the globe of other meteors and other spacecraft, and it quickly becomes apparent they’re not interested in friendly negotiations.  To paraphrase the stentorian commentary that bridges some scenes, this is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.

The heroes of this film are Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) and Sylvia van Buren (Ann Robinson).  To put it kindly, their acting skills are…adequate.  To be fair, they weren’t working with a stellar screenplay, but the filmmakers wisely decided the real star of the movie should be the Martians and the Oscar-winning special effects.  As a result, Clayton is reduced to either giving scientific explanations of the Martians, while Sylvia’s main purpose is to look scared, scream loudly, and fry some eggs for Clayton in the middle of a war zone.  (I’m not making that last part up.  It’s not exactly Aliens.)

Regarding those special effects, sure they’re dated, but consider that, at the time, Hollywood studios regarded effects-heavy films as financial losers.  At least, that’s what they thought before The War of the Worlds.  It did so well that one of the head honchos at Paramount – one Cecil B. DeMille – presented the extraordinarily effects-heavy The Ten Commandments (1956) just three years later…and it broke box-office records.  The current trend is to blame Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) for singlehandedly creating our insatiable appetite for special-effects extravaganzas, but look back far enough and there’s plenty of blame to go around, in my opinion.

Full disclosure: I still prefer Spielberg’s whiz-bang 2005 remake of War of the Worlds with its actual tripods and its CGI explosions and its callbacks to the 1953 original, including a cameo by Barry and Robinson, to satisfy cinephiles.  But this version, while dated, still has enough charm to remain effective.  Mostly.  (My favorite part is when the “hatch” on the meteor starts unscrewing; right about then is when I would’ve bought a ticket to Australia.)


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

  1. Best line or memorable quote?
    When Dr. Forrester speculates how the Martians’ death ray works: “It neutralizes meson somehow. They’re the atomic glue holding matter together. Cut across their lines of magnetic force and any object will simply cease to exist! Take my word for it, General, this type of defense is useless against that kind of power! You’d better let Washington know, fast!”  It’s formulaic nonsense that’s only once or twice removed from calling an alien mineral “unobtainium”, but it’s delivered with the kind of conviction that only exists in the movies.
  2. What elements of this film do you feel have helped it become a movie classic?
    On a surface level, I’d say the quaintness of its visual effects.  Comparing them to the films of today is like comparing a paper airplane to the space shuttle.  But its also how the film captures the pop culture of the day.  The War of the Worlds fed on the fears and paranoia of a nation and stuck in the minds of millions of moviegoers and continues to do so today.  The 1953 film was influenced by the Cold War.  Spielberg’s remake was at least partially fueled by a nation’s fear of global terrorism.  Perhaps in another 20 or 30 years, some other enterprising filmmaker will once again send Martians to Earth to lay waste to its cities as a commentary on some future phobia or event.  …perhaps a global pandemic…?  Nah, too on the nose…

FIGHT CLUB

By Marc S. Sanders

David Fincher’s Fight Club is a deliberately ugly and dreary film. It has to be to evoke the insomnia its narrator (Edward Norton) suffers from, as well as his lonely depression that offers no answers for his purpose to exist or to be loved by another person.

To alleviate his need for something fulfilling, the narrator resorts to attending support groups for men suffering from illnesses and debilitating diseases like testicular cancer. There he meets a former body builder named Bob (the singer Meat Loaf) who has developed floppy breasts after going through hormone therapy. Bob follows the processes of the self help group and embraces on to Norton’s character as a means of support; stuffing his face into Bob’s breasts. The narrator eventually becomes accustomed to this maternal practice and the ritual of attending these meetings as a regular process. However, he feels he is getting upstaged by Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a punk looking girl with dark eyeliner and wild jet-black hair.

Even though Marla and the narrator negotiate who attends what meetings and on what night, Norton meets another punk like reckless character known as Tyler Durdin (memorably played by Brad Pitt) who manufactures and sells soap but also edits film reels, sneakily inserting penis images into family films. Tyler also works as a waiter at a high-end restaurant where he proudly adds a little of “himself” to all the courses that are served.

The narrator only works at a boring desk job where his boss uses any opportunity to look down upon him and chastise him on his performance or appearance, but never recognizing anything further within his nature. The boss could care less about him. Naturally, the narrator becomes in awe of Tyler’s behavior. Tyler is a rebel and offers much more beyond Bob’s comfort. Tyler serves a purpose for the narrator to pursue.

When Tyler challenges the narrator to hit him as hard as he can it eventually leads to a new kind of gathering for both of them, a support group known as Fight Club. Men from all over soon gather underground to partake of letting out their aggressions with bare knuckle fists and wrestling. Anyone attending gets a therapeutic vibe from bleeding and bruising themselves upon one another. The narrator certainly feels better.

Going a step further leads Tyler and the narrator to fight back against a system of order and capitalism. Their philosophy picks up traction and soon a form of revolution is taking place across the entire country. Somehow, the narrator is taken off guard by this new belief system.

There’s a lot to consider and question in Fight Club, though I’m not sure I care for the film as a whole to debate its message. Sometimes it feels like it’s not moving anywhere. Norton’s character learns things about his own consciousness and need to falsely subject himself as a cancer survivor or as an underground brawler because he has nothing else really going for him. I get that, but why should I care or like it?

Tyler Durdin resides in a broken down house on the other end of the city that is leaking from every pipe and it’s electricity could ignite another fire that maybe this decrepit dwelling survived once before. Tyler is happy with his home and happy to share it with the narrator as well as Marla whom he has endless sex with. Tyler doesn’t want the fancy trappings. It’s revolting to even possess such materialism and suck off the tit of a capitalist regime. With the narrator at his side, he encourages a fight against the power of commercialism and wealth. Find a way to destroy the structures of what the country has built itself into, perhaps.

That’s the message of Fight Club. I just can’t lay claim that I cared for the execution of the revolt. I’m supposed to laugh at Tyler’s antics at times like when he steals the gross liquid fat from liposuction patients to manufacture the soap he sells. Yes, we get a moment where the bags of fat leak and splatter all over the place. It was just never amusing for me. I found no symbolism in this passage. It’s just absolutely disgusting. When Tyler happily pisses in someone’s soup, I don’t think it’s funny either. I don’t like Tyler. I don’t envy him or want to be him. I don’t find anything to cheer for with him. I’ve got more admiration for John Bender in The Breakfast Club than I do for Tyler Durdin. I might respect what he stands for to a degree as we are a culture brainwashed by advertising and commercialism. I just don’t care for the actions taken by this so-called martyr on behalf of the self-described unfortunates like Norton’s narrator.

I also find it ironic and quite hypocritical that Fincher’s film is a call to stand up to materialism and commercialism and yet the cast is headlined by Brad Pitt, arguably one of the biggest box office stars of the last 30 years, complete with his name above the title and his image front and center ahead of Edward Norton’s on the film posters that promote the film. Pitt is also the guy you see first, last and all over the middle of any of the film’s trailers and advertisements.

Now tell me, is that not a contradiction in terms?

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

By Marc S. Sanders

On my 4th viewing of this film, I second guessed myself over and over. I know I’m a Star Wars junkie, but can I truly give an objective opinion about Rogue One? I think I can.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is of one of the best films of the last ten years. Now there are conditions that accompany that observation. It’s difficult to follow its trajectory if you haven’t seen A New Hope (the intended follow up story; the original Star Wars film). Frankly, reader if you are watching this film without ever watching A New Hope, I’d imagine you’ve been on a deserted island with a volleyball for a friend, unaware of this pop culture geek-oriented phenomenon from a galaxy far, far away, and upon your return to civilization you were just randomly flipping the channels. So, let’s just go ahead and dismiss that parameter right now.

Disney is the only studio with enough resources and scrutiny to ensure a good product is developed in the franchise. Rogue One proves that theory. From the Rebel uniforms to the Stormtroopers, to the Yavin 4 set recreation, and even a harkening back to Darth Vader’s original 1977 appearance (red eyes in the helmet), director Gareth Edwards, Lucasfilm and Disney ensure consistency in its side chapter apart from the 9-part saga. You relish the familiarity of it all, and what’s new you welcome with appreciated enthusiasm. It all works within the long-established universe.

The cast is superb with major highlights from Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso (great name) as a brash no nonsense rogue in and of herself. Jones comes off with tough bravado reminiscent of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, as well as Jodie Foster. Nothing will intimidate her, though she will show her heart and soul for her father, the reluctant architect of the Empire’s Death Star played by Mads Mikkelson, an important character to the story but not much material for him to capitalize on.

Alan Tudyk is a marvelous voice actor here as the tall droid K2SO, with a personality combination of Chewbacca & C3PO. He’s honest, maybe a little to honest, but he’s also physically strong and a smart aleck. His tone is Anthony Daniels, but his delivery is snide and arrogant. He’s just so entertaining.

Ben Mendohlson plays Imperial Director Krennic as a frightening antagonist who embraces the terror of this super weapon he oversees. “Oh it’s beautiful,” he sighs and really believes he sees beauty as a planet gradually combusts under the laser blast emanating from the Death Star. He expects greatness from his accomplishments and Mendohlson is also good at surrendering to what he’s not permitted to celebrate thanks to a strong Darth Vader and welcome return of Grand Moff Tarkin, a beautifully recreated CGI of deceased actor Peter Cushing. Tarkin is important to the Krennic storyline and his insertion in the film is flawless.

The cast also boasts Donnie Yen. He’s a real crowd pleasing blind martial artist. Not a Jedi, yet arguably even more fun.

The planets are crowded and different. Scarif where the final battle takes place is draped in palm trees and ocean blue. Great because it’s daylight setting allows all the action to be seen. Nothing is blurred.

The story structure is phenomenal as it centers on a race to make contact with an Imperial pilot who has just defected and then on to Jyn’s father in order to prevent this new Death Star from going into operation. I especially salute its honest, uncompromising, but still necessary ending. You’ll get a lump in your throat, followed by an adrenaline shot of excitement in the last five minutes. The end is pure genius. One of the great cinematic endings. Absolutely absorbing.

I really appreciate the various demographics in the film as well. For a story about an unending and lived in galaxy everyone should look and sound different. So, we are treated to Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and English, and then you have the droids and fictional alien species.

If anything is shortchanged, it might stem from some of the actors’ dialects. Forrest Whitaker, Diego Luna and Riz Amed play primarily roles that at times are hard to comprehend, even in a fourth viewing. This is forgivable though. The story lends value to all of the players on screen.

So yes. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is sensational; the best of the 4 Disney produced films thus far. There’s weight to its story, and its characters on both sides. It moves at a fast pace of action, dialogue and runaway suspense. It will go down as one of the best installments in the vast franchise that’s thrived for over 40 years so far.

BATMAN RETURNS

By Marc S. Sanders

I’ve always been a little hot and cold with Tim Burton’s films.  They are beautifully constructed in set and costume design, always well cast with exceptional talent and composer Danny Elfman’s music accompanies perfectly with Burton’s wide collection of social misfits and altogether celebrated weird material.  Still, more often than not, I leave Burton’s movies feeling less fulfilled than I want. Tim Burton’s one sequel film to date, Batman Returns, is one such example. 

To commemorate the annual Batman Day, I opted to watch Burton’s return to the murkiest of comic book locales, Gotham City, where Michael Keaton reprised the role of billionaire Bruce Wayne who dons the costume of The Dark Knight.  This time the villains of the week are the grotesque Penguin (Danny DeVito) and the sexy, dominatrix like Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer). 

Penguin resurfaces from the sewers of Gotham 33 years after his parents abandoned him as an infant, depositing him into the city reservoir in a bassinet to be raised by…you guessed it…penguins.  (Schools of penguins reside in the city sewers???? I guess it’s better than rats.)  Nerdy and mousy Selina Kyle is raised from the dead by the gnawing and licking of random alley cats to take on a warrior persona for Catwoman.  How exactly a feline resurrection works in either myth or science is never explored.  I guess I just have to go with it.  The manipulator behind these villains’ actions is a wealthy industrialist named Max Shreck, portrayed by Christopher Walken.  I was never sure of his stake here.  I’m only supposed to understand that he’s unlikable on the surface and he is not good for Gotham. 

I love all these actors.  I love them in these roles.  I do not love the script doled out for them though, which serves none of them well.

Batman Returns is best when the Batmobile or the Bat Glider is on screen.  They are awesome pieces of hardware to see in action as much as any tripped-up James Bond vehicle.  However, these are props.  They don’t speak, or laugh, or cry, or get angry.  Therefore, they don’t drive or develop a story.  When Luke Skywalker pilots an X-Wing Fighter, I care about the pilot.  The pilot speaks for the vehicle.  Batman doesn’t speak for the Batmobile. 

It’s ironic that the title character has only one sentence of dialogue in the first 30 minutes of this two-hour film.  There’s no dynamic to Batman or Bruce Wayne.  Keaton looks great sitting by his fireplace in deep thought or watching his television as the bat signal beams upon him.  He stands, and then when we see him next, he’s sitting in his bat car in full horned head regalia.  Otherwise, the Batman character is a prop to be used for scapegoat tactics by Penguin, Schreck and Catwoman, or he’s present to hurl a bat gadget, or throw a stiff-arm punch.  He doesn’t even do much of that stuff, anyway.  In Batman Returns, I learn nothing new about Batman or Bruce Wayne or his crusade to protect Gotham City.

Keaton shares one good scene in the film with Michelle Pfeiffer. It may be the one scene with a story to it as the two are dressed down from their comic book evening wear to dance slowly at a masquerade Christmas ball where they gradually realize who they are when they are not with one another.  Of course, we know this should be so obvious, yet a rule of thumb for comic book literature is not to realize what’s right under your nose.  A nice touch to this scene is having Keaton and Pfeiffer be the only guests not wearing a mask while everyone else is.  Batman and Catwoman have in fact dressed up as someone else for the costume party.  Very ironic and almost clever.

Too much material is given to Walken as the conniving Max Shreck.  Walken performs well, but just like his Bond bad guy in A View To A Kill, he belongs in a different movie.  The Schreck character lends nothing to this Batman adventure.  Who’s interested in this guy?  McDonalds and the other merchandising companies could even see how unattractive this character is.  So, why couldn’t Tim Burton or his writers and producers?  I’ll pay you a gazillion dollars for your rare, never manufactured Max Schreck action figure.  Yet, the bland script from Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm arguably provides the most dialogue to this guy.  You’ve got Batman, Penguin, Catwoman, even Alfred the butler and Commissioner Gordon, and yet this grey-haired guy with a wolf like pompadour in a bland, black business suit is hijacking a Batman movie.  Makes no sense.  Much of Batman Returns is made with cutting room floor material taped together featuring an unwanted Christopher Walken.

Who else is better to play The Penguin than Danny DeVito?  No one!  So, it is disappointing when the squat actor has nothing to do.  A seemingly inspired storyline from the campy Adam West TV series, and maybe a handful of comics, have him running for Mayor of Gotham.  A good start, but then the script does nothing remotely interesting with it, even though this stuff sells itself.  Where’s the political jokes to parallel the campaign? Where’s the ridiculous podium debates?  Imagine Penguin kissing little old ladies and holding babies while on a campaign trail.  None of that happens here.  You have outstanding talent from DeVito and yet all he’s left to do is ride around in a duck boat, spit out black and green sludge goo, and scream frustrations in a groggy, ear-piercing bellow on more than a couple of occasions. Unlike Jack Nicholson before him, DeVito is abandoned to play scenes with no dialogue while he chomps on raw fish or screams for the sake of screaming. 

An error in judgement was layering the actor in ugly makeup and unattractive costume wear.  Usually, DeVito is seen wearing a stained and damp white footy pajama suit with black dental pieces and very black eyeshadow on a whited out facial texture with a giant hook nose.  This is Danny DeVito.  He already looks like The Penguin.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!  The only charming accessories are his top hat and his collection of umbrellas (shooting fire or bullets or flicking out knives) that serve as exclamation points on dialogue when a jokey punchline could not be considered with even just a smidgen of effort from the writers.  The umbrellas were more expressive than the guy operating them, and yet even they were hardly used in any action scenes.

Batman Returns has some sloppy scene cuts as well.  A scene will appear with Catwoman skipping through a store, then it’ll jump to Batman punching out a few circus clowns, then the two meeting up on a rooftop somehow.  Why, where and how did this all happen?  The math doesn’t add up.  Penguin will somehow appear within this stitchery too.  For what reason?  Three movies are happening here and none of them are communicating with one another.

Films like the original Batman, or Edward Scissorhands or even Pee Wee’s Big Adventure carry the weirdo trademark of Tim Burton.  I know what I’m getting when I turn on almost any one of his films.  (Ed Wood being the surprising, and pleasing biographical exception.)  These are gorgeous, macabre films to look at, whether they are dimly lit or staged in deliberately bright and gaudy rainbow colors.  Yet, there are often scenes or moments that lack that hook that carries you from the exposition to the acclimation I normally get from the universe on screen before my eyes.  Batman Returns especially lacks that transition. 

Because the film looks so good, it is not the worst of the Dark Knight’s many films.  Yet, it is an uninspired and disappointing piece.  Any film with such storied and legendary characters as these is going to be a big letdown if they are given nothing to do.  Why, oh why, did they give almost all of the lines to the boring guy in the business suit?  If I wanted to entertain myself with an accountant, all I needed to do was sit in the lobby of an H & R Block.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An in-depth examination of the ways in which the Vietnam War impacts and disrupts the lives of several friends in a small steel mill town in Pennsylvania

[Author’s note: This will be the first in an ongoing series of reviews inspired by a book given to me as a birthday present by my long-suffering girlfriend.  Entitled Everyone’s a Critic, it challenges readers to watch a movie a week within a given category, then answer questions like, “Why did you choose this particular film” or “Do you feel this film deserved the award? Why or why not?”  Clearly designed to inspire discussion.  This category was “A Film That Has Won Best Picture.” This format is a work in progress, so I hope you’ll bear with me on future installments.

I am going to assume, for the most part, that most readers will have seen the movies being reviewed in this series.  Therefore, some spoilers may or will follow.  You have been warned.]


Once about every couple of years, I like to pick up and read Stephen King’s The Stand in its original uncut version.  My paperback copy runs to 1,141 pages, not including King’s foreword and a brief prologue.  Even Tolstoy would look at that thing and go, “Dude…edit yourself.”  But having read it numerous times now, I cannot imagine what could possibly have been excised from the edited version of King’s novel.  Every detail of that apocalyptic saga feels necessary.  Reading it is like falling into a fully realized alternate universe.

That’s what watching The Deer Hunter is like.  I can still remember the first time I watched it.  I knew its reputation as one of the greatest Vietnam War movies ever made, had heard of its harrowing Russian Roulette scene, and was intensely curious.  I popped it into the VCR, hit play…and for the first 70 minutes I got a slice-of-life drama about steel workers in a tiny Pittsburgh town (Clairton, for the detail-oriented) where, mere days before three friends ship off to Vietnam, one of them is getting married.  And the centerpiece is the wedding reception.  Ever watch a video of a wedding reception?  How high do you think a young teenager would rate its entertainment value on a scale of 1 to 10? 

I could not appreciate, as I do now, how vital this scene is.  Relationships are stated, expanded upon, and brought to a kind of cliffhanger.  Take the mostly non-verbal interplay between Linda (a luminous young Meryl Streep) and Michael (Robert De Niro).  Linda is clearly in a relationship with Nick (Christopher Walken), but it is painfully obvious that Michael and Linda have eyes for each other.  Mike watches intently from the bar as Linda dances at the reception, and whenever their eyes meet you can almost hear their hearts stop beating.  The oblivious Nick even pairs them on the dance floor while he visits the bar himself.  The awkwardness as Michael forces small talk and Linda shyly reciprocates is palpable.  And…is that Nick giving the two of them the eye at one point…?

As a kid, I wondered why this soap opera nonsense was necessary in a Vietnam film.  Of course, I didn’t know what was coming.  That’s the beauty and wonder of The Deer Hunter.  It challenges you to follow along with this miniature melodrama to give meaning to what comes next.

There is a key moment during the reception when an Army soldier wearing a green beret stops by the reception.  Mike, Nick, and Steven (John Savage), who are gung-ho about serving their country, yell their support and let him know how much they’re looking forward to killing the enemy.  The steely-eyed soldier raises his glass, looks away, and says, “Fuck it.”  It’s not terribly subtle, but the ominous nature of this moment always fills me with a sense of foreboding, even having seen the film many times by now.

But even after the reception is over, there is one more small-town pit stop to make before the movie gets to Vietnam.  (In fact, The Deer Hunter spends surprisingly little time in Vietnam.)  Michael and a group of friends including Nicky and Stan (John Cazale) go hunting for deer in the mountains as a kind of ritual before Nick, Mike, and Steven are deployed.  It is in this sequence that Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s talents are put to stunning use.  We are shown vistas of the Allegheny Mountains that are simply breathtaking, with Mike and his friends seen as mere dots in the mountainsides.  Choral music with a men’s choir singing in Russian is heard on the soundtrack, giving the sequence a majestic aura that must be seen and heard to be believed.

Then the hunt is over, and the boys all have one last drunken night at the bar owned by another friend, John (George Dzundza in an under-appreciated, realistic performance).  Here they all sing along to Frankie Valli and listen somberly as John plays a sad classical tune on his piano.  And then, in one of the film’s masterstrokes of editing, we slam-cut immediately to the jungles of Vietnam – no boot camp, no footage of them being trained or flown over there, just suddenly they’re there and the contrast between the carnage we experience in the first few minutes of Vietnam versus the rhythms of their lives in Clairton could not be more extreme.

In a horrific but mercifully brief sequence, we watch as a Viet Cong soldier calmly walks into a burned-out village, discovers a hidden pit holding terrified villagers, and remorselessly tosses a grenade inside.  We then watch as Mike, now a battle-hardened soldier, emerges from a hiding place with a flamethrower and burns the VC soldier alive.

The effect of this scene cannot be understated.  To witness Michael torching a soldier, even after that soldier committed a brutal act himself, is jarring.  And why is it so jarring?  Because we have seen Mike as a civilian, as a friend, as a would-be lover, during that lengthy sequence at the wedding reception and while hunting with his friends.  Admittedly, you got the sense that he could or would get violent if necessary.  (He’s clearly the alpha male of his “clique.”)  But this…I mean, damn.

Then, in one of those Hollywood conveniences that never get old, Mike is unexpectedly reunited with Nick and Steve who just happened to arrive at that very same village with another platoon of US soldiers.  And then, immediately after being reunited, they are captured by enemy forces, imprisoned with several enemy combatants in a riverside compound, and forced by their sadistic keepers to play Russian roulette with each other as the guards bet on the outcome.  Michael comes up with a horrifyingly logical escape plan: convince the guards to put THREE bullets in the chamber instead of one.

Much has been made regarding the historical inaccuracy of this scene.  To those arguments, I say: who cares?  As someone once said, riffing from Mark Twain, “Never let facts get in the way of truth.”  The truth of the matter is, the Vietnam experience was a modern-day horror show, leaving physical and psychic scars on its participants and on our country.  In my opinion, the Russian roulette scene can be interpreted as a symbol of how those soldiers, or ANY soldiers, must have felt every single day.  Going on a routine patrol in the jungle could have potentially lethal circumstances.  They rolled the dice every time they called in an airstrike, betting they didn’t get firebombed themselves.  Booby traps were everywhere.  How is life in a war zone that much different from being given a one-in-six chance at living or dying?

I’ve already gone into far more spoilers than I am accustomed to, so let’s just say this happens and that happens, Michael winds up making it back home, Steven is grievously wounded in the escape attempt, and Nick goes AWOL when, after making it back to a military hospital in Saigon, he wanders the streets at night and discovers an underground ring of lunatics who run a high-stakes game of Russian roulette.  And we’re still just at the mid-point of the film.

When we see Michael back home, the earlier sequences establishing the rhythms of small-town life and his feelings towards Linda, for example, all come into focus.  We need that reception and the hunting scenes so we can see how much Michael has changed.  For example, when Michael is arriving back home by taxi, still in full military dress, he spots a huge banner: “WELCOME HOME MICHAEL”.  He tells the driver to keep going.  In a hotel room later that night, he sits on the edge of his bed and rocks back and forth, winding up crouching against the wall.  He is completely unable to process how to deal with people anymore.  Or, at least, he doesn’t trust what he will or won’t say.  I watch that scene, and I feel such intense sympathy and empathy.  What he’s feeling, what he’s been through, what he’s seen, is so huge that he knows he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone who hasn’t been there.  He knows he’ll get questions like, “What was it like?  Did you kill anyone?  How are you feeling?  Where’s Nicky?”  I’ll never know what it’s like to fight in a war, but if I had gone through what he’d gone through, I wouldn’t have stopped either.

There is a heartbreaking scene where Linda, who is more than a little distraught that Nicky is AWOL, hesitantly suggests to Michael that they go to bed.  “Can’t we just comfort each other?”  Mike rebuffs her, but in a way that makes it clear he’d like to, regardless.  De Niro’s performance here is staggering.  As he walks out, he makes a statement, showcasing how much he is feeling but also how unable he is to articulate it: “I feel a lot of distance, and I feel far away.”  I knew exactly what he was talking about.

The very end of The Deer Hunter is one of the most emotionally shattering finales of any movie I’ve ever seen.  It ends with a simple song, first sung as a solo, then joined by everyone else at the table.  I will not reveal what happens to get us there.  Is it shameless manipulation?  Yes.  Does it work?  Yes, so I can forgive the “shameless” part.

One of the criticisms I’ve read more than once about The Deer Hunter is how “one-sided” it is.  To which I say, “Well, duh.”  The Deer Hunter is not presented as a history lesson or a lecture on the internal politics in the country of Vietnam during the war.  The Deer Hunter is intended to make us feel something.  It wants to show us what happens to a person who is exposed to the very worst side of human behavior and lives to talk about it.  It wants to remind us that a country can wave a flag and stand for what’s right and be willing to sacrifice its best and brightest souls for a righteous cause…but it must also be prepared for the aftermath.  The Deer Hunter is a somber prayer that our country remembers the cost it demands, and that it will take care of its own when the dust settles.

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, THE BOURNE LEGACY, JASON BOURNE

By Marc S. Sanders

Sometimes the same old thing is all we want, right?  It’s like comfort food.  That’s what the Jason Bourne films offer.  The first time (The Bourne Identity) it is original.  The second time (The Bourne Supremacy) it is familiar.  The third time (The Bourne Ultimatum) it is what we expect.  When you get to the fourth and fifth time (The Bourne Legacy and Jason Bourne), well then perhaps you’ve overstayed your welcome.

The second and third films in the Matt Damon action series function as one long four-hour film.  They are absolutely gripping in high octane, fast cut editing, pulse pounding music from James Newton Howard, and taut direction from Paul Greengrass.  They work because at least two thirds of the material is shown through the eyes of the former assassin Jason Bourne who is trying to learn of his past and who he worked for and why.  Plus, though he may hide deep undercover on the other side of the world in places like populated India, he only resurfaces when he discovers someone is trying to kill him.

The other third of these two pictures function on the other side of the coin with clandestine departments within the CIA who only consider Bourne being alive as a threat to the integrity of their black operations.  He must be eliminated.  There are great acting scenes with Joan Allen first up against an intimidating Brian Cox, and later she’s going toe to toe with David Strathairn.  If you are not part of the chase for Bourne, then you are engrossed in the cause these three supporting players offer with government politics and debate.  With each passing film, it’s an old, grey haired white gentleman in a suit who is insistent on eliminating Bourne and anyone who he associates with.  This started with Chris Cooper in the first film followed by Brian Cox (my favorite) over to David Strathairn.  The baton is then passed to Albert Finney.  A new film moves over to Edward Norton and then Tommy Lee Jones.  Scott Glenn and Stacy Keach are in the recipe too, but they are not as prominent.  All these guys start to look alike and when you watch the films in succession, one after the other, like I recently did, you start to question when this actor and this actor entered the fold.  Best way to describe it is that it is a ladder climb.  There was one guy in charge, then another above him and so on.

The appreciation for the Bourne series comes mostly from its action and the absolute cleverness of its hero.  Jason Bourne functions with ease about staying one step ahead of those trying to kill him.  They think they have a lead on him, but in reality, he has the lead on them.  Do you know how satisfying it is when he calls these people to talk to them and they play dumb? Jason will simply say “If you were in your office right now, then we would be having this conversation face to face.”  Moments like this are what gets an audience to clap and cheer.  The old white guy has been duped.

The action works because, once again I lay claim to the lack of CGI.  So, the overabundance of car chases seems nerve wracking like they are supposed to.  That door on that car is actually getting bashed in.  That taxi cab is really getting t-boned and turning into a 360 tailspin.  Jason can grab a seatbelt, lie down on his side and when the car careens over the barrier onto the landing fifty below, upside down, I’ll believe he gets out with only just a slight limp and a dribble of blood on his brow.  Only Jason Bourne can drag a wrecked rear bumper on a stolen police car through a busy Times Square and bash an SUV into a concrete barrier.

Fight scenes are not just fight scenes in the Bourne films.  It’s not just fists and punches and karate kicks.  Creatively speaking, the films construct their fight scenes to have the hero arm himself with a ball point pen or a magazine that’s wrapped up ready to wallop an opponent in the nose.  I’ll never forget when my colleague Miguel and I saw Ultimatum in the theatres and witnessed Jason punching a book into the face of a dangerous bad guy.  How many times have you seen a guy get punched in the face?  How many times have a seen a guy punch a book into the face of another guy?  There’s a difference. 

Matt Damon has been quoted as saying he believes the Bourne films carried the least amount of dialogue for him to memorize.  Yeah.  That’s likely true.  These films are visual feasts.  They rely on watching Damon move.  They are paced by how he walks, drives a car or tinkers with props.  Even how he listens and observes move with a kinetic progress. 

The locales are spectacular, spanning the globe from India, to Russia, to London, to Morocco, to the Philippines, and on to New York City and Las Vegas.  Following the first film, Paul Greengrass directed three of the next four.  (Writer Tony Gilroy directed the fourth film, The Bourne Legacy with Jeremy Renner taking the lead while Damon’s character was only talked about.) Each film takes every advantage of the atmosphere, using the overpopulated extras as obstacles and means to hide and weave away from the antogonists while on foot, behind a steering wheel or saddled upon a motorcycle.  Greengrass practically invents the concept of putting the viewer so much within the environment, you can almost smell the diesel or the food trucks within the area.  Zoom in overhead shots offer quick glances of the playground and traffic we are engrossed in.  Approximately twenty-five minutes within the center of The Bourne Ultimatum go by with no dialogue as Jason Bourne pursues a bad guy through a labyrinth of apartment tenements and rooftops, while the bad guy pursues actor Julia Stiles.  Finally, when all three catch up to one another, with a leap through a window, do you let out the deep breath you never realized you were holding on to. 

The first three films in the series (Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum) work as a tight trilogy.  Each film ends with hanging threads to consider and lend to the next film.  By the time Ultimatum concludes, you feel as if all that needed to be told has been covered.  The next two (Legacy and Jason Bourne) function as cash grabs for the studio.  Legacy is entertaining and it boasts a good cast with Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz trying to outrun the government adversaries.  It hinges on operating as parallel material that occurs in the prior Damon installment.  While Jason Bourne is being pursued, this is happening over here.  It’s not unwatchable, but it is also truly unnecessary as it doesn’t advance the universe of the series at all.  A thrilling motorcycle chase closes out the film, but it’s a retread of what we’ve seen before.  It gets old quickly.  The film demonstrates that guys like Jason are trained to become dependent on drug enhancements for their highly trained arts of warfare and instinct.  Renner’s character is just another kind of Jason Bourne.  I was more impressed when I thought Jason was just a highly skilled fast learner to all that he’s capable of.  If you tell me blue and green pills lend to what he’s capable of, well then, he’s not much of a superhero in my eyes anymore.

With the final film, Jason Bourne, Greengrass returned to the director’s chair and Damon agreed to come back (paycheck had to be right, I’m sure), though he was significantly greyer and older than his prior films.  It was a weak return.  Just when we think Bourne has learned everything he needed to know and he could now live comfortably underground as a street brawler for bucks, he is informed that his deceased father knew and did some things for these secret agencies that put Jason on this path of special operations.  It doesn’t hold much weight and the payoff is nothing special.  Another car chase occurs in Vegas that appears nearly shot for shot similar to what we already saw in Damon’s prior installments. 

I wrote in an earlier review of The Bourne Identity, that Matt Damon works so well in the role because he’s such an unexpected surprise.  He’s not the muscle guy like Stallone or Schwarzenegger.  He comes off common.  In the first three films, he’s simply a kid.  When you place him in action or see how he gets the drop on a bad guy who is surveilling him, it is so satisfying.  The Bourne films work best with the locales they choose to shoot from.  Bourne will spy on his pursuers from a rooftop building across the street from where they are.  This is inventive filmmaking not just found in the pages of the script.  Paul Greengrass strategically shoots his players.  Director Doug Liman planted the seeds for this series’ potential (The Bourne Identity), very loosely based on the Robert Ludlum novels with creative adaptations from Tony Gilroy, primarily.   Greengrass enhanced the characters and their motivations by use of scenic locales, skillful shaky cameras to make it look like the audience is running at the same pace of Bourne and his adversaries, and quick cut, real time editing.  He applied this approach to his 9/11 film United 93.  The last two films are good even if they seemingly peter out the series, but overall, the four sequels hold up very well. 

If you’re asking, the best of the series is The Bourne Ultimatum, followed very closely by The Bourne Supremacy.  Either way, no matter which film you’re watching, you’re in for a good time when Jason Bourne shows up on the grid.

PIG (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Michael Sarnoski
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must venture to urban Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is, I guess, pig-napped.


Gotta tell you, that plot summary is one of the most bizarre summaries I’ve ever typed out.  To me, it’s on par with, “A file clerk working on the 7th-and-a-half floor of an office building discovers a portal that transports you into the brain of John Malkovich for 15 minutes before spitting you onto the side of the Jersey Turnpike.”

Who read the elevator pitch for Pig and thought it was worth filming?  Nicolas Cage himself is credited as one of the producers, so that’s a partial explanation, I guess.  The film has twenty other credited producers and executive producers, so it’s clear the financial burden was spread around.  But still…a movie about a guy looking for his stolen pig?  Is this a movie you should run out and rent/stream/buy?

Yes.  Yes, you should.  Oh, but let me tell you why.

Cage plays a scraggly fellow named Rob who lives in the aforementioned cabin with his pig, whose name is never spoken throughout the movie.  (Although when it was over, I had one or two guesses of my own, each as unlikely as the other.)  This pig excels at finding valuable truffles hidden in the shallow forest soil.  How valuable?  Well, the ones we see in the movie are black, and the current market price for winter black truffles runs from $300 – $1,300 per kilo, depending on the variant.  So…yeah, pretty valuable.  Rob apparently funds his meager existence by selling his truffles to a high-end buyer named Amir (Alex Wolff, Hereditary [2018]), a slick customer who drives a banana-yellow late-model Camaro.  I’m not sure how many Portland restaurateurs can afford Camaros, but it didn’t bother me until this precise moment, so I’ll let it slide.

One night, unknown parties break into Rob’s cabin, beat him up, and steal his pig.  At this point, I was reminded unavoidably of the opening scenes of John Wick (2014), and I thought we were in for another kill-crazy-rampage film like Mandy (2018).  But I was very pleasantly surprised.

It turns out Pig isn’t a revenge movie, or a weird Spike-Jonze-esque journey into absurdity, or a mind-numbing Bergman-esque examination of the human condition.  Ultimately, it’s about food.  Yeah.  Or the transformative properties of food.  Or maybe it’s just about cooking food.  It feels like the kind of movie Anthony Bourdain would have loved, if that’s not being too presumptuous.

Once he gets a line on who the thieves might be, Rob convinces Amir to help him track them down by driving him into the city.  First stop is a sketchy-looking guy who rebuffs Rob’s request for information and asks Amir, “Do you even know his real name?”  That leads to a hidden restaurant under another restaurant where we learn Rob’s full name…a name that brings shock and awe to the eyes and faces of everyone who hears it.  Who is this guy?

One thing I noticed during this film was the great economy of the storytelling.  Scenes that might involve pages of dialogue in other movies are handled in seconds with either terse dialogue or sometimes none at all.  For example, there’s a scene in Amir’s apartment.  Rob wakes up on the couch to the sound of a fire alarm.  The camera tilts up and we see Amir standing on the counter trying to fan smoke away from the alarm.  Cut immediately to a kitchen table, Amir slides a plate in front of Rob, and he says sheepishly, “I don’t cook a lot.”  I can easily imagine that scene in some other movie involving a setup showing Amir trying to cook, burning something, trying to put the fire out, all very comic and probably well-done…but ultimately unnecessary.  Asking the viewer to do the occasional heavy lifting is not the worst thing in the world.  Pig is full of moments like this.  It’s a welcome change when it’s done right.

The screenplay is brilliant in other ways.  It convincingly leads you down one path where you think you can guess what’s about to happen, and then it throws a curveball or neatly sidesteps your expectations.  At least, it did mine.  Rob visits the house where he used to live, where he has a conversation with a small boy.  Where are the parents?  Who knows?  Doesn’t matter.  Amir talks about his family life, about his very successful father who doesn’t believe Amir can cut it in this business.  Later, there’s a scene where Rob and Amir cook a fancy meal for Amir’s father, and the dinner service for that food has a huge emotional payoff I did not expect, and which is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Is Pig a good movie just because it’s unique?  No.  But unique it is, and it is VERY good.  Cage gives one of his most understated performances in forever, so if you have been avoiding this one because you didn’t think you could take more Cage-ian histrionics, you don’t have to worry.  He’s very low-key.  There are a couple of moments where you can see the anger boiling deep within Rob, or when you might expect him to overturn a table or throw a glass of wine in someone’s face.  But it doesn’t happen, and that works for this unexpectedly touching film.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Shaka King
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In the late ‘60s, William O’Neal, offered a plea deal by the FBI, infiltrates the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers to gather intelligence on party Chairman Fred Hampton.


By the time it was over, Judas and the Black Messiah made me think of that scene in Psycho (1960) where Norman is cleaning up after his mother and the car starts to sink in the swamp and then stops…and Norman gets nervous.  At that moment, I started rooting for Norman, getting in his headspace: “C’mon, car, sink.”  I was empathizing with the bad guy.  Neat trick.

That’s how I felt during Judas and the Black Messiah.  Instinctively, I know I’m supposed to be rooting for one character, but the movie empathizes with the “villain” character so well that I found myself rooting for him, too.

In the late 1960s, Fred Hampton’s star was on the rise in the black community.  As portrayed in a sensational performance by Daniel Kaluuya, Hampton is a fiery, charismatic, passionate public speaker who publicly advocates armed patrols of Black Panthers in black neighborhoods to keep an eye out for harassment from white cops.  When he is made Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, the FBI takes an interest.  Well…Hoover takes an interest, which pretty much means the FBI followed suit regardless.

Meanwhile, a petty thief named Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is arrested by the FBI, who gives him a choice: serve a 5-year stretch for impersonating an FBI officer, or…go undercover into Fred Hampton’s Black Panther chapter and bring out good intel that will help them arrest Hampton.  O’Neal agrees, and what follows is an exercise in classic cinematic storytelling and misdirection, done up with glossy modern cinematography that looks like the best movie Oliver Stone never made.

(…actually, “misdirection” is not the right word.  I’m not sure what the right word is.  I’ll explain.)

Fred Hampton is clearly meant to be the hero of the film.  Hoover even refers to Hampton as a “messiah” of the black movement.  This all takes place a few years after both Dr. King and Malcolm X had been assassinated.  (If things had turned out differently, Fred Hampton’s name would be synonymous with King and Malcolm X, but it’s not, and based on this movie, that seems distinctly unfortunate and unfair.)  He boldly walks into a local meeting of white supremacists and, incredibly, turns them around to his way of thinking, using a brilliant metaphor of America as a house on fire.  If that moment is not based on fact, it should be.

So, if Hampton is the hero, then O’Neal is clearly meant to be the villain.  Hampton is the messiah of the title, so O’Neal is Judas, the traitor, the informer.  As a direct result of his intel [SPOILER ALERT], the FBI makes several arrests, including Hampton himself, and eventually initiates a raid during which Hampton is killed in his bed with his pregnant wife in the next room.  (This is all a matter of public record, though it’s interesting that it took this movie to really make me aware of it.)

But it’s easy to make a movie with a two-dimensional villain.  Judas and the Black Messiah does something much more difficult.  It asks us to empathize with both Hampton AND O’Neal.  We see the conflict in O’Neal’s face when Hampton promotes him to chief of security for their chapter.  We see O’Neal’s fear when he is recognized by a member of a local gang.  We see how few choices he really has in his various meetings with his FBI handler (Jesse Plemons), who constantly reminds him that, if he runs, they will find him and put him in jail.  Hampton says numerous times in the film that if he were to die for the cause, it would be a life well spent.  O’Neal has no such ideals.  I’d go as far to say that, if that were me in O’Neal’s shoes, I might do the same thing to stay out of jail.  I know my limits.

So, the entire film, I was pulled back and forth between admiration for Hampton and his cause and feeling anger towards O’Neal; and feeling terribly sad for O’Neal and what he’s essentially being forced to do by the FBI.  In other films depicting the Jesus story, I felt no such sympathy for the Judas character.  Director Shaka King accomplishes what so many other films do not: total alignment with one viewpoint while also demonstrating that not everything is so – forgive me – black and white.

Frankly, for me, the movie is worth watching just for the closing epilogue alone.  We get a glimpse of the real Bill O’Neal being interviewed for a real PBS documentary in 1989, and he is asked what he might tell his son about his role in the events surrounding Fred Hampton’s death.  His answer feels like something he’s rehearsed and said all his life.  And then there’s a closing subtitle…and it’s devastating.

I feel like there is more I could say, but it would involve getting into much more detail about several plot points, and I would prefer to leave them for the viewer to discover on their own.  Judas and the Black Messiah is worthy enough to stand with Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) as one of the best films ever made about the black experience in America.