For A Few Reviews More

Body of Lies

October 10th, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Ali Suliman, Alon Abutbul
Director: Ridley Scott
Runtime: 118 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: R

It’s a fair assessment to say that the more complicated a subject is, the more infuriatingly oversimplified and dumbed down the Hollywood studio machine will render it – hackers cracking national defense grids with laptops, dinosaur DNA courtesy of a mosquito and the eternal mysteries of the heart mastered by a gazillion blubbery speeches in airport departure lounges everywhere. So when you hear Warner Brothers announce a film that dares to tackle the geo-political instability in the Middle East and the global War on Terror, you would be forgiven for not being exactly brimming with confidence.

William Monaghan knows a little something about weaving subtle misdirection as characters are forced into dangerous alliances having previously penned The Departed. Thanks to his tight and tidy script, some classy performances and Scott’s confident, assured direction together they just about manage to save this film from its big studio fate. Chief amongst the plus points is a noticeable lack of soap boxing. With so many films built around post 9/11 politics, seemingly unable to resist offering a crude and grossly oversimplified statement as to the why of it all, Body of Lies ignores all that and just focuses on the how.

Click here to read the full review at WiFly Radio.

Posted in Feature Films, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »

Eagle Eye

October 3rd, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob thornton, Michael Chiklis, William Sadler, Anthony Mackie
Director: D.J. Caruso
Runtime: 118 Minutes
Distributor: Dreamworks
Rating: PG-13

Quietly and without fuss Shia LaBeouf is fast on the ascendancy to mega-stardom and could just be the new Teflon Don of Tinseltown in that nothing bad seems to stick. High on a crest of anticipation over Transformers 2, he has already achieved the impossible in bringing respectability to the PG-13 thriller with the sleeper hit Disturbia (over which exec producer Steven Spielberg now finds himself embroiled in a copyright suit). He managed to completely avoid all the finger-pointing fallout from Indiana Jones and the Fridge Nuking Mess. He also seems to be able to leap tall DUI charges in a single bound.

Now here he is at the center of this hi-tech, hi-concept, post 9/11 tale of paranoia that’s blistering pace and excitement level are only exceeded by its ability to confound and ignore all semblance of logic. Indeed its very release suggests a mish-mash of different ideas and muddled priorities that make it hard to categorize – too serious and somber in theme to be a summer event movie and too ridiculous in plot and execution to be part of the Oscar-baiting fall schedule.

Click here to read the full review at WiFly Radio.

Posted in Feature Films, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »

Righteous Kill

September 30th, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Brian Dennehy
Director: Jon Avnet
Runtime: 101 Minutes
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R

More than a decade on from Michael Mann’s underworld epic Heat, whether you are a hardcore cinephile or a part time movie patron, when talk turns to that cup of coffee, the hairs on the back of your neck still stand on end just a little. Ever since then there have been promises and rumors flying around of an extended coming together of arguably cinema’s two greatest living actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino – and now that daring dream is finally a reality. Except that it’s about twelve years too late and a bloody awful, needlessly convoluted genre picture that starring any two other actors in the world would be arriving at a Wal*Mart bargain bin instead of a multiplex.

On paper it’s clear how this unfortunate beast was born; the two actors, De Niro now 65 and Pacino 68 wanted to work together again, realized that they probably should have been more pro-active years ago and that it was now or never. Enter longtime producer, bit-part director Jon Avnet waving a sophomore script by Inside Man writer Russell Gerwitz about two dogged maverick cops hunting a vigilante killer and the scrambling “will-this-do?” project is a green light. From the opening credits onwards it’s clear that in the minds of those making it this isn’t a movie, it’s an event. A quick cutting MTV style credits sequence proudly slaps up PACINO and DE NIRO in gigantic lettering so big it’s a wonder that they even bothered giving the film a title at all.

Hard Candy

September 29th, 2008 admin

2005
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh, Odessa Rae, Gilbert John
Director: David Slade
Runtime: 104 Minutes
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: R

Now that Ellen Page has made such a sensational splash in this years little Indie that could, Juno, this 2005 film that quietly slipped under the radar might get a little retro traction as something more than a curiosity. If it does, it is no more than it deserves as this tightly wound thriller has enough tricks up its sleeve to shock and surprise with an audacity that is likely to catch more than a few people off guard.

The plot taps directly into the hyper-aware, ultra paranoid world of the parent confronted with the vast expanse of cyberspace, where potential predators lurk behind every seemingly innocent url. Ellen Page’s Hayley is a streetwise 14-year-old, who has an online romance brewing with Patrick Wilson’s much older Jeff. After meeting for the first time in a coffee shop, photographer Jeff takes her back to his apartment to burn some music. Already a sick sense of dread is bubbling at the back of the mind and director David Slade knows it and plays with it to the full. Once inside Jeff’s apartment the safe familiar medium shot is banished from the picture and Slade subjects us to a barrage of sweaty reverse shots and suffocating close ups. It’s a deliberately uncomfortable invasion of personal space. As Hayley begins to relax the flirting slowly builds the relentless, forced intimacy and has you climbing the walls for an escape.

Inside Man

September 24th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Plummer
Director: Spike Lee
Runtime: 129 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R

Spike Lee directs an all star line up for this stylish, high concept heist movie in which Lee attempts to show that he can do mainstream Hollywood thrillers just as well as politically driven dramas.

Denzel Washington is Keith Frazier, a police detective trying to make first grade but under investigation over some missing drug money that he claims he knows nothing about. When Clive Owen’s wily bank robber and his crew decide to knock off a bank, it forces Frazier to step in as hostage negotiator and try and prevent a bank full of hostages from coming out in body bags. Unfortunately, that is not all he has to worry about. There is also something hidden inside the bank’s vault that could be very embarrassing for the bank’s president. Jodie Foster’s political fixer is dispatched to lean on Frazier to make sure that Owen doesn’t get what it is that he wants and offers to make all his IAD problems go away if Frazier can guarantee that he won’t.

Enemy of The State

September 5th, 2008 admin

1998
Starring: Will Smith, Gene Hackman, John Voight, Lisa Bonet, Barry Pepper
Director: Tony Scott
Runtime: 140 minutes
Distributor: Touchstone
Rating: R

Think way back before 9/11 to a time when nobody had even heard of Al’Quada. Before there was The Patriot Act, before administration scandals about data mining, monitoring of telephone calls and public outcry about Guantanamo and the war on terror, there was this slick and somewhat contrived high-tech thriller from Tony Scott starring the then hotter than volcanic lava Will Smith. A sort of Hackers for grown-ups it played into a mindset of mistrust and paranoia in the face of blatant abuse of power that many today feel we are closer to than ever before.

Smith stars as labor attorney Robert Dean, a man trying to juggle investigating mob-related union busting with trying to repair his marriage in the wake of an affair with a colleague. When a nature photographer catches the murder of a US congressman by high-ranking NSA officials on videotape, a black bag NSA team headed by Jon Voight’s corrupt politician comes after the tape hard. Fleeing for his life the photographer offloads the tape to the unknowing Dean, who then becomes the target of an intense and relentless technological assault bent on invade his life and destroy it in order to prevent the tape being made public.

Miami Vice

August 29th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Jamie Fox, Colin Farrell, Li Gong, John Ortiz, John Hawkes, Ciaran Hinds, Naomie Harris
Director: Michael Mann
Runtime: 134 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R

In the hands of virtually any other director, this would be a guaranteed unmitigated disaster. A big budget remake of a hugely popular eighties television show that had essentially already been remade into the Bad Boys movies. But hope springs eternal whenever Michael Mann steps behind the camera and the last time he had a pop at remaking television, he had Pacino and De Niro share a cup of coffee amidst one of the greatest cops and robbers films of all time. Here he turns his attentions to Florida drug running. Undercover cops Tubbs and Crockett (Fox and Farrell), along with their DEA unit suddenly find themselves drafted into a compromised federal investigation of a dangerous Columbian cartel. As the only people left whose cover is not blown, they infiltrate the network, but quickly discover that getting in is a lot easier than getting out again.

Examine his work and one thing is clear above all else – Michael Mann loves cities, just loves them. Never before has a director gone to such great lengths to make a skyline of bloated sky scrapers and ugly high rises look like Monet could have painted it. The blinking lights, the lure of the streets at night, the gentle hum of the neon are this director’s paradise and here he is in good form. Miami Vice looks spectacular; crisp, clean visuals blanketed in diffused neon and bathed in the soft warm glow of the street lamp. The fact that Crockett and Isabelle take a speedboat to Cuba and go dancing is less of a plot point and more of an excuse for Mann to hop in a helicopter and majestically track Crockett’s approach to the Miami harbor on his way back.

The Hitcher

August 28th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neil McDonough
Director: David Meyers
Runtime: 90 Minutes
Distributor: Focus Features
Rating: R

With Hollywood seemingly intent on remaking every classic that ever was, it can only be assumed that it is part of a grand effort to feng-shui the mansions of Fox executives with their entire back catalog. Picture the prints of every title placed equidistant from its remake on opposite sides of the room so that the harmonies might resonate, attune, and maybe then generate some fresh and new ideas for once. With this in mind, we come to The Hitcher, a “re imagining” (because remake apparently equates to “shit” these days for some unimaginable reason) of an absolutely first class and much underrated killer thriller from 1986. Not in line with the avalanche of killer films of the 80’s, ‘The Hitcher’ draws closer parallels with Duel and The Terminator in that an unstoppable killing machine in the form of a hitchhiker, played in this case by Rutger Haur then and Sean Bean here, relentlessly stalks his helpless prey without respite or mercy showing no pity or regard for his own life in the process. If the remake could capture anything like the original’s dark and brooding atmosphere, then we are certainly set for a winner.

Unfortunately handing it to a debut director whose only experience was creating music videos for manufactured artists the likes of Jennifer Lopez was not the wisest choice. Cringe then, as the film begins and out rolls every tired horror cliché there is. Clean cut, naive young teens from big city decide to drive across the desert? Check. A Pitch-black night setting, pouring down with rain? Check. A creepy looking, Deliverance knock-off clerk at service stop? Check.

Duel

August 25th, 2008 admin

1971
Starring: Dennis Weaver, Eddie Firestone, Gene Dynarski, Tim Herbert, Charles Seel,
Director: Steven Spielberg
Runtime: 76 Minutes
Distributor: ABC Television
Rating: PG

This made for television film was Steven Spielberg’s feature length directorial debut and also serves as perhaps his most underrated film. This mostly forgotten effort, which was adapted from a supposed real life short story published in Playboy magazine of all places, is an exercise in minimalist tension and hand trembling suspense – a technique high that would come in handy for a certain shark film he would make just a short time later.

David Mann (Weaver) is a traveling businessman driving his Plymouth across country, along the back highway roads of the California desert to a client meeting. On a narrow stretch of highway he comes across a slow moving long haul truck. Irritated by its holding him up, he overtakes it at speed. From this point on the truck becomes the stuff of nightmares for this big city man caught alone and unawares amidst the unrelenting exposure of the desert – harassing Mann mercilessly, taunting him, ramming him, running him off the road and driving him into a feverish state of terror and paranoia.

X-Files: I Want To Believe

August 18th, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly, and Amanda Peet.
Director: Chris Carter
Runtime: 105 Minutes
Rating: PG-13
Distributor: 20th Century Fox

With the sharp decline in quality that quickly followed the departure of Glen Morgan and James Wong from the writing staff and the train wreck of the final two seasons after Duchovny also bailed, it’s easy to forget what a masterful blend of intelligent drama, supernatural suspense and conspiracy theory the show used to be. At its height the X-Files completely redefined the way people conceived small screen drama. It captivated the imagination of such a vast cross section of viewers that programming executives began to rethink their ideas, realizing that viewers could not only cope with heady, cerebral meditations on the existential as they tucked into their meatloaf and peas of an evening, but were actively hungry for it. Without the X-Files there would be no Lost, it’s just that simple.

By the time the series came to an end, however, it had systematically begun to jettison many of the core elements that fans so vehemently clung to. It tossed beloved characters aside (Krycek, Cancer Man, The Lone Gunmen, The Syndicate) with alarming regularity and slowly but surely descended into a derivative, shambling self-parody of its former glory. Yes, they did eventually manage to find a groove for Robert Patrick’s Agent Doggett but by that point he had long been tried, convicted and sentenced to death by fan boy venom in vitriolic backlash unseen since the days of Wesley Crusher for the heinous and utterly indefensible crime of not being Fox Mulder, and by the eventual whimper that was the show’s finale fans had already began to tune out by the legion.