Craiger’s Cinema Corner

**  OUT OF  ****

A post 9/11 Adam Sandler drama?  Is this someone’s idea of a sick joke?

Maybe…and maybe not.  The barely recognizable actor and his performance is actually the strongest element of REIGN OVER ME.  Watching his work here makes it really easy to be taken in by it to the point where one wants to deem it as Oscar caliber.  Certainly, this is Sandler’s most serious and layered character of his career, which – for the most part – has been permeated by one lamebrain and infantile comedy after another.  His dramatic resume has been uneven; he was quirky and melancholy in the unforgivably bad PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, but was much more restrained and focused in the very decent James L. Brooks family drama, SPANGLISH. 

Now comes Sandler in REIGN OVER ME as a suicidal, widowed New Yorker that had his life unalterably changed directly from the terrible events of 9/11.  Having lost his wife and two kids as a result of this decade’s worst calamity he becomes a chronic, bipolar introvert that flies off on violent mood swings one moment and then is a kind little teddy bear of a man then next.  His performance is truly a textbook exercise in angered and embittered focus and he is able to effortlessly channel the deep and mournful pain that the man has been suffering through for years.  He is completely believable in the part, even when the role is kind of shamefully written for story convenience purposes.  When the script needs him to be a loveable sap, he is; when it needs him to be an oppressive loner that should be committed, he is.

All in all, Sandler’s character he is not all that much of a stretch for him.  He has played variations of this role in many past films, including his regrettable comedies.  You know, that of a laughably goofy doofus that is calm and whispery half the time and then – without provocation – can lash out with verbal tirades and physical violence.  Even characters in his most disagreeable films – like HAPPY GILMORE, BILLY MADISON, etc. – share these traits: they’re nice, shy, and congenial when they are not engaging in acts of ferocity against their fellow man.  REIGN OVER ME shows us this very typical side to the staple Sandlerian role, but with some obvious tweaks.

Yet, Sandler’s rock-steady and haunting performance in the film is done so well that it makes everything that surrounds it kind of pale in comparison.  Ironically, REIGN OVER ME is a shallow, misguided, and horrifically uneven drama in part because of the character Sandler plays.  He is such an emotionally tortured man that is prone to fits of panic attacks, maddening anger, and manic outbursts that any sane person alive – after spending ten minutes with him – would know that the right thing to do would have him committed against his will to give him the type of help that he really needs.  Alas, REIGN OVER ME is one of those annoyingly manipulative melodramas that desperately yearn for the viewer to connect with Sandler’s pain and empathize with him to the point where you don’t want him institutionalized.  This man is a nutcase and certifiable, but the script thinks he is a perfectly decent and needs no anger management or therapy; he just needs to be alone and think things through for himself.  His best therapy is no therapy.  Yup.  Sure.  Uh-huh.

That is the Herculean task the film places on the modest viewer: to accept the fact that this utterly crazy man does not need mental help and that seemingly everyone around will also believe that.  But…this man is so clinically insane that why anyone would think that he could possibly live on his own and work out his issues by himself is even crazier.  At one point a therapist states that she completely disagrees with another’s diagnosis and that Sandler just needs some me-time.  C’mon! 

I am not sure what’s worse: the fact that the film wants us to buy into its huge leaps in logic or the fact that it uses 9/11 brazenly as a crutch to anchor the story.  Other films that have used 9/11 have not felt nearly as sappy and exploitative about the tragedy as REIGN OVER ME does.  The death of a family could have happened from any other fictional disaster.  But, this film uses 9/11 to help churn out would-be teary-eyed melodrama.  In a way, that’s kind of inexcusable.  Are we supposed to invalidate one man’s clear-cut mental derangement because – gee whiz – his family died at 9/11? 

Sorry…not buying.

The character in question is Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler, looking so disheveled that he looks like a spot-on aging Bob Dylan), a former New York dentist that saw his entire life change after 9/11.  He had a good practice, a beautiful loving wife, three cute daughters, and a poodle.  All of them – including the doggie – were on board one of the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center.  After that day he has completely shut himself off from the world by erecting an impenetrable emotional wall between himself and everyone…and I mean everyone.  He has denial and obvious post-traumatic stress symptoms, but his symptoms go beyond what anyone would see as normal or healthy.  He refuses to accept the fact that he had a family and was a father and husband and when even one slight hint of the events of September 2001 are mentioned, he just might grab you by the coat collar and beat you senseless.  In short, this dude’s nuttier than a fruitcake.

Charlie lives alone and has no friends or family, except for his wife’s parents and he wants nothing to do with them.  He lives a life of utter solitude, escaping his pain with all-night video game marathons on his giant screen TV (insurance paid him handsomely), lonely drives through New York, and record collecting (he has amassed over 5000 since his family’s death).  He also likes movies and especially digs going to all-night Mel Brooks film festivals (who wouldn’t?).  He also plays the drums in an underground grunge band.  Wait…I thought he was so socially isolated that he could not handle the public? Er…never mind.

What then emerges is one of the most noble-minded – but incredulous – buddy stories in many a moon.  One night another practicing dentist, Alan Johnson (the solid and always reliable Don Cheadle) has a chance encounter with Charlie.  It seems that Alan and Charlie were old college roommates and Alan heard all about what happened to his past friend.  He bumps into him one night, but Charlie sure can’t seem to remember Alan at first.  You would think that their first encounter would lead Alan into not wanting to forge a meaningful relationship with the hapless Charlie.  After all, he fails to remember him, does not acknowledge the past, and not does he seem willing to talk about it.  He comes across as so inescapably creepy and…well…self destructive that you’d think Alan would arrange to get him some help ASAP.

Nope.

Instead, Alan takes it upon himself to help Charlie out himself.  Why?  I am not sure.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he leads a life of upper class normalcy with his wife (in a very under-written part, played by the underused Jada-Pinkett Smith) and is drowning in the repetition of his marriage.  Maybe there is something about Charlie’s life that appeals to him.  He lives by his own rules, has a kick-ass pad with thousands of vintage LP’s, has a killer home theatre system with awesome games like SHADOW OF COLOSSUS, and even has his own recording studio.  This the dream buddy of every man that wants to reclaim the freedom of youth. 

The film supports all of those theories, but it especially embraces the notion that Alan legitimately cares for Charlie and would do anything – even endanger his marriage – to assist him.  Yet, what I can’t figure out is why Alan continues to befriend Charlie when he’s…so freakin’ nuts?!  At one point Charlie is a decent dude that he can have a drink with, and then next day Charlie is throwing alcohol right in his face, shoving him up against walls, and threatening to kick the hell out of him.  At one point he comes to Alan’s practice and nearly trashes the entire place during one of his fits.  Oh…but Alan feels pity for this man and thinks that all he needs to do is “get back into the game” and his life will be on a path to success.  Yup.  Sure.  Uh-huh.

I firmly understand what REIGN OVER ME and its writer director, Mike Binder, are trying to say, but I just could not buy how it tries to say it.  It wants to be a feel-good, sentimental story of how one decent and kind man goes out of his way to “rescue” a former colleague out of the pits of depression and loneliness.  Honestly…I really, really understand its aims.  But…for Pete’s sake…I just could not believe the motivation and impulses of Alan to so willfully help a man that he has not seen for years who now appears to be such an unavoidable loose canon.  I could not believe that he would continue to look out for Charlie’s best interests when he constantly threatens and abuses him.  I could not believe that Alan would continue to alienate his wife and kids by focusing more attention on Charlie and less on them.  I could not believe that Alan would also put his job on the line in an effort to back Charlie…and so on and so on.

To make matters even more ridiculous, Binder throws in completely superfluous subplot involving a nymphomaniac (Saffron Burrows) that likes to come to Alan’s office for dental work…and to ask if she can perform oral sex on him.  When he refuses, she files a sexual harassment charge against him.  When his superiors tell Alan that he must make up with her and continue to serve her as a client, Alan later discovers that she is seeing a therapist that also works in the building (played by Liv Tyler, never convincing in the part).  Now, you’d think that Alan would, in turn, think that Tyler has done a terrible job with the deranged chick, but he amazingly believes that she is good enough for Charlie to see.

And then there is another howler: The film boils down to one of those third act court hearings (let’s call them PATCH ADAMS testimonials) where the would-be sympathetic main character is placed in front of the court and must prove that he is sane and should not be punished by going into an asylum.  But Charlie is nuts and when an attorney flashes a photo of his family to him in court, he goes irreproachably berserk.  Ooooohhh…but Liv Tyler on the stand says that he needs to be left alone; that would be the best therapy.  The judge, played in a cameo by Donald Sutherland, nods in agreement at one point. 

Gimmie a break.

At face value, REIGN OVER ME starts off well as a honorable and emotional character driven piece about one man’s social isolation after tragedy, but it degrades into such sappy and woefully unbelievable melodrama that you want to throw your fists in the air.  Mike Binder has made films about suffering people with addictions in one of 2005’s best films, THE UPSIDE OF ANGER, but with REIGN OVER ME he focuses on a character that is so insane that thinking he’s better of without help is…insane.  Adam Sandler’s performance as the film’s unhinged and disturbed character is one of the year’s more memorable, but he needed to be in a more sensible script.  Instead, the film places this persona around blind fools that mistakenly believe that the best help for this suffering man is to not get him to seek help.  Even worse, REIGN OVER ME tastelessly uses 9/11 as a launching pad to tell its story.  There is no need to uses that real life disaster to help paint the main character’s pain.  Any other accident or disaster could have been used.  However, Binder thought it was fitting to use the memory of a past national nightmare to frame his dopey narrative.  REIGN OVER ME is a regrettable misfire because of that, and the makers themselves should have been put in straight jackets into manipulating us to believe that a suicidal lunatic should not be put away. 

Shameful, indeed.

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

**  out of  ****

PREMONITION is one of those reality-bending thrillers that offers up a unique premise and interesting twist that goes to great lengths to payoff in some meaningful way and – when it does not by the end credits – the only reaction one has is to say is, “Huh?  That was it?” 

There film’s somewhat tantalizing premise is not its problem (what if you found yourself living your days out of order while dealing with a personal tragedy), but rather its manner at dealing with, explaining, and wrapping it up for a reasonable conclusion that spoils the film’s overall value.  PREMONITION is a film that has too good of a buildup to warrant such a largely underwhelming conclusion.

Perhaps what spoils the film even more is that is has one of Sandra Bullock’s strongest dramatic performances in years as a grieving widow.  As an actress of limitless appeal and innate likeability, Bullock has a field day here at generating our instant sympathy with her role as a wife who has just suffered from a deep and wounding emotional setback.  With her every-woman good looks and charisma and her natural way of playing the role with a quiet authority, she is always a plausible figure of sadness and despair in the film.  She gives such a soulful and uncharacteristically somber performance in PREMONITION that you are more than willing to forgive her for some of her past film indiscretions, like MISS CONGENIALITY 2, for example.

Unfortunately, what Bullock forgot to do when she signed on for the film was to see the obvious similarities between it and her last drama, THE LAKE HOUSE.  Both films deal with time travel, albeit with a somewhat different vibe in PREMONITION’s case.  The latter film is more a thriller than it is a romance.  THE LAKE HOUSE, unfortunately, was not undermined by its bewildering time travel premise, but rather by one glaring plot inconsistency that had to be one of the most annoying of any recent film I’ve seen. 

There is nothing wrong with using a time travel device as an arc to tell a story, but oftentimes the best manner to deal with the sheer ludicrousness of the arc is to not go out of your way to explain how it is possible to the viewer.  The manner with which PREMONITION attempts to explain how Bullock’s character is able to bounce around in a temporal flux is a real cop out.  Let’s just say that the film was kind of effective as a supernatural thriller, but when it attempts to go all religious on the viewer and offer up some hokey, metaphysical mumbo-jumbo explanation, I just wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen and yell, “C’mon!”  The film takes an entrancing idea and turns it into a silly gimmick, which hurts it overall.

Bullock plays Linda Hanson, who is a very happily married, upper class suburban housewife that lives a life of affluent normalcy.  She has a kind and caring husband named Jim (played well in an underwritten role by Julian McMahon) as well as two cute-as-a-button daughters named Megan (Shyann McClure) and Bridgett (Courtney Taylor Burness).  At the beginning of the film Jim surprises Linda with the purchase of their “dream house” and the ecstatic Linda sees it as solid foundation to raise their kids and live out her years with her husband.  Everything is going just as planned for the family.  Jim is doing very well at his job, their kids are healthy, and their home is immaculate.  What could possibly go wrong?  Linda’s life is perfect….

…at least until her husband is killed.

One morning, without warning, Linda answers the doorbell and speaks to a local police sheriff, who has the difficult job of telling her that Jim was killed in a horrendous car accident on a highway on his way to a business trip.  He was killed instantly when a semi-truck jack-knifed on the road.  Bullock’s performance here is brilliant in the way she lets her silence do all of the talking.  Instead of breaking down in a would-be Oscar bating moment of emotional turmoil, she quietly cowers deep within herself in a fit of denial and bewilderment.  She does such a great job of effectively underplaying the scene that it adds to the realism of the moment.  Her later scene where she is forced to reveal the dreadful news to her daughters is equally heartbreaking.

Soon, her mother (Kate Nelligan) arrives on the scene to assist her and her granddaughters with dealing with the loss of Jim.  After going through the worst day of her life, Linda drifts off to sleep.  When she awakens the next morning the miraculous happens: Jim is alive, in perfect health, and is drinking a cup of coffee, watching the market recap, and preparing for a day at work.

Huh?

How could this be?  Jim is dead; at least that is what the sheriff reported to her the previous day.  Did she dream the whole thing?  Was she hallucinating?  Is she paranoid and on the verge of mental breakdown?  Or, does she miss him so much already that she is just imagining Jim there in the kitchen?  Yet, Jim seems real and responds with absolute puzzlement to his wife’s very peculiar behaviour.  To make matters ever more odd, Linda discovers that it is Monday.  She was told on Wednesday that Jim was killed, which would mean that when she feel asleep that night and awoke the next morning that it should be Thursday.  Just what in the h-e-double-hockey sticks is going on?

Needless to say, Linda continues on her day like Jim’s death never happened.  As she goes to bed that night and wakes up the next morning she is greeted with another shocking twist: she wakes up alone, comes out of her bedroom and journeys to the living room, where all of her friends and family are dressed in black and are at Jim’s wake.

Huh?

In pure Rod Serling-esque fashion, Linda comes to accept the fact that – for reasons she cannot fathom – she is not living her life in chronological order anymore.  Every time she falls asleep she awakens in a previous or later day that does not fit into a natural daily cycle.  She falls asleep the day of Jim’s funeral and wakes up again days before he is killed.  When she falls asleep that night she awakens on a day after his death.  Is she nuts, or is she time traveling? 

Her mother and kids sure start to think she’s wacky.  Yet, Linda appears to be defying the space time continuum and is living her days out of sequence, kind of like in GROUNDHOG DAY, but just not the same day over and over again.  She attempts to get some help in the form of a therapist, played by the creepy Peter Stormare, who also thinks she is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  He prescribes her some pills and asks her if he can see her the next day (she sarcastically laughs it off.  How could she if she never makes it to the next day?). 

As the odd rhythm of living out of sequence continues, Linda discovers some interesting things, like the fact that it is Wednesday that seems to be the central focal point of her odd week (the day Jim died).  She is also able to use her disjointed temporal existence to her advantage and learns some terrible truths about Jim that could have destroyed the fabric of their marriage before he died.  The film soon begins to ponder on some intriguing concepts, like whether or not Linda – when faced with the damning news about Jim while he was alive – actually wanted Jim to be dead and – if she had the ability to do so– would she save his life as a result?  By the time the third act roles on Linda desperately tries to meet up with her husband at the scene of his “death” in hopes of saving his life…but will she be able to?

PREMONITION has some decent things going for it, like Bullock’s believable performance as a troubled and grieving wife figure that slowly begins to spiral downwards into paranoid denial.  Also, the film deals up the tragedy very early on in the story to throw the viewer off (the sudden death of a loved one comes as a shock, and the fact that the film has it early on is noteworthy).  The narrative as well – at least for the first hour – is able to generate some legitimate forward momentum.  The more Linda seems to be living her days out of order the more we want to know why and how it is occurring.  Predictably, the more Linda fails to live one day at a time in sequence, the more delusional she gets and the more deeply concerned her kids and mother grow about her.

However, PREMONITION runs completely out of gas on the strength of its conclusion.  This is a typical “PWP” film – or premise without payoff – where the jigsaw-like nature of the time traveling story begins to develop one inconsistency after another, not to mention that the way the film wraps everything up is hopelessly rushed and contrived.  Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with time travel paradox in a movie (you simply have a hard time avoiding them when you use the device), and PREMONITION does not suffer from the teeth-grating stupidity of one time loophole that THE LAKE HOUSE had.  Yet, PREMONITION has a witless scene between Linda and a priest where he offers up his insight on the spiritual significance of her plight and…well…let’s just say that it’s used as a crutch to hold up the rest of the film towards its end.  I grew dizzy just postulating the different endings the the film could have had.  Few thrillers turn as boneheaded in the end as this one.

PREMONITION is a time travel thriller that could have greatly benefited from not going to any lengths at explaining the nature of its phenomenon.  Sometimes, the best films that deal with time travel don’t labor for explanations and instead bravely ask the viewer to just go with it.  That ideology could have greatly benefited PREMONITION, which allows itself to implode under the weight of its silly and ill-handled explanation of its premise.  The fact that it concerns a wife that lives her week out of order and tries to come to grips with her husband’s death in the middle of it is kind of fascinating.  Also, Sandra Bullock develops some terrific, soft-spoken intensity in her lead role.  The film’s tone is good, the individual performances are decent, and the film’s set up allows for our quick buy-in; it lures you into its story of mystery and intrigue.  Unfortunately, the film concludes everything in such an indecisive and misguided manner that you are left wondering whether or not all the attention and time you invested into it was worth it.  In short: it wasn’t.  As a result, the film emerges as a honorable failure.  

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

***1/2  out of  ****

At one point in his life, Alex Fletcher was a member of one of the biggest selling musical groups of its time.  He was in a hugely popular pop band named PoP that had a number one hit pop single called “Pop Goes My Heart.”  At their height the group sold 20 million records, during which time the lead singer stated that they were “bigger than The Beatles.”  However, Alex is quick to point out that his lead singer meant that literally: there were 5 members of Pop compared to 4 in the Fab Four.

The comedic heart to MUSIC AND LYRICS, a wonderful new romantic comedy, is Hugh Grant, who plays Alex at a point in his career where he has hit nearly rock bottom.  PoP was a smash in the mid 1980’s to early 1990’s, but when the group’s lead singer abandoned them to forge a widely successful solo career, the rest of the gang suffered greatly.  Tight pants, cheesy lyrics, and rear ends endlessly shaking simply do not sell albums in our more nihilistic times.  Alex is now just a laughable byproduct of a yesteryear.

As a matter of fact, he is in such rough shape that he even has a gig at Knott’s Berry Farm cancelled.  He does, however, get an invite to a TV network that wants to pitch him a new idea for a realty show called Battle of the 1980’s Has-Beens.  Alex seems to greet the concept with enthusiasm and asks the suits what he should sing on the pilot episode.  Dumbfounded, the executives tell him, “No, Alex…the all of the Has Beens box one another and the winner gets to sing at the end.”  Alex pitifully responds, “Right…I see.  I bet that Debbie Gibson can sure take a punch.”

Grant is the absolute master of droll, witty, underplayed, and self deprecating humor, and it is his willingness to play Alex with intelligence and goofiness that makes MUSIC AND LYRICS reinforce his status as one of the kings of the genre.  After some serious comedic misfires – lack 2006’s categorically awful AMERICAN DREAMZ – Grant is back in sure-fire, hilarious form that harkens back to his great performances in past romantic films like LOVE ACTUALLY, ABOUT A BOY, NOTTING HILL, and FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL.  The amazing thing about Grant is in his effortless charm, wit and snappiness he brings to his dialogue.  Yes, it could be said that this is Grant on autopilot here, but critics are too quick to shun him for what he continually does and forget to credit him for how well he does it.  John Wayne made the Western, and in many ways, Grant makes the modern romantic comedy. 

He’s not afraid to look simultaneously smart and dumb, the latter as demonstrated in the utterly side-splitting and totally spot-on music video for “Pop Goes My Heart”, which bares a striking resemblance many Wham videos, both in choice of lyrics and dance moves.  The strobe-induced camera work, the spirited and light-as-a-feather lyrics, and the choreography are hilariously true-to-life.  Beyond the physical comedy, Grant still has time to come forth and let out some of his dry, trademark zingers.  Consider one passage that - with another lesser comedic actor - would never hit the right comic note:

Pop Singer:

Come and see my roof.  It’s upstairs.

Alex:

(after seeing it)

I really like your roof.  It’s good that it is upstairs.

Grant’s abilities to garner chuckles at the most innocuous of dialogue is in full form here, and MUSIC AND LYRICS is funnier than the norm because of the intelligence it displays in the dialogue and exchanges.  At the the film’s epicenter lay Grant’s charismatic self-loathing.  The way he subtly jabs at himself and those around him reveals how his strengths as a comedic actor often fly under the radar.  His agreeably sarcastic performance in this film and his other successful romantic films kind of illicit suitable comparisons to the best genre films that Gary Grant did.  Hey…they both have the same last names!  I’m on to something here….

On top of Grant’s natural and unmatched comic timing and precision, MUSIC AND LYRICS is a sweet and bubbly romance.  It follows the generic staple elements of these types of formula pictures, but the manner it puts all of those stock elements together is done exceedingly well.  To chastise the film for being pedestrian and routine kind of misses the point.  Yes, the film is predictable and, yes, one can easily surmise exactly where it’s heading at any given vantage point, but it’s the film’s journey that makes it pleasurable. 

The film wisely avoids unnecessary slapstick (which many modern films like this try too hard to aim for) and instead lets the likeable lead actors and their chemistry generate more natural laughs.  MUSIC AND LYRICS commands chuckles in just the right dosages without overdoing it too much, and the film balances off those moments with scenes of light drama that give weight to the characters.  Most importantly, the film gives us two people that we like and want to see together, despite all of their faults.  When great romantic comedies click on these levels – as MUSIC AND LYRICS does – they can be great entertainments.

The film has the obligatorical meet cute.  But before that, Alex and his agent, Chris Riley (the very funny in modest dosages Brad Garret) try to find a job for his falling star status.  Now that he is approaching middle age, Alex finds that he just can’t hit that target teen demographic like he used to.  Well, he’s still a hit with 40-plus women that were swooning teens in the 80’s, but they just don’t seem to buy up albums anymore.  His only solo effort was a miraculous flop (only 50,000 ever sold, with most of them being purchased by his mother) and now the only thing he can get is amusement parks playing for geriatrics.  Within no time, Alex gets a possible career-rejuvenating job.  He is asked to pen a new song for Cora (Haley Bennett), who is an obvious clone from half of the DNA of Shakira and half from Brittany Spears.  She is a gigantic international star, but she worshiped Alex when she was young.  She hopes that he’ll write a duet song for the both of them within a few days.  No problem, but Alex has issues.  He can certainly write melodies, but stinks at lyrics.  If only someone can help him…?

Enter cute and sassy Sophie (played well by Drew Barrymore) who comes to Alex’s apartment to…take care of his plants.  Why can’t Alex water his own plants?  I dunno.  It does not matter.  Anyhoo’, as Alex struggles at the piano he begins to notice something truly astonishing about Sophie: she’s a natural born lyricist and is incredibly gifted at poetry.  After some pesky coaxing on his part, Alex manages to convince her to become his partner on what he sees as a somewhat insurmountable task of coming up with a new hit song in only a few days.

Despite a few hiccups along the way, Alex and Sophia get really acquainted with one another and start to hammer out the song.  Along the way the film manages to have some real insight into the process of the art and craft of music and song writing, not to mention the fact that it infuses some commentary on the nature of contemporary music as a whole.  Alex represents old-school Top-40 fluff and feels like he’s not equal to the task of creating a new song.  Sophie inspires in him confidence. 

They have soulful and meaningful conversations about past artists that they love, like Smokey Robinson, and they both begin to understand that the key to writing a hit song is to not try too hard.  If you think about making a huge hit, then the song will loose its passion and soul and become just another forgettable chart topper.  The film is sort of revealing in how the writer’s craft is often undermined in the lights and glamour spectacle of the stars that perform the songs.  Cora sharply represents the polar opposite of Alex and Sophie in the sense that she cares little about the craft and is nothing more than a preening media whore.  Her biggest concern is not so much the lyrics, but the fact that “Shakira is riding up” her behind in the charts.  All she needs is a new single to dance and shake her scantily clad body to.

Alex and Sophie do care about quality, and they even go so far to test the song numerous times to the apartment doorman, who gets a huge laugh when he finally tells to two, “You know…I’m tone deaf, but I’m sure it sounds great.”  When the two finally concoct their song, it’s surprisingly good, but in the hands of Cora, it predictably becomes something seedy and unsavory.  She wants to spice it up a bit with her beyond-obvious sexuality on stage, and her efforts to take everything that Alex and Sophie slaved away at says a lot about the forces in the modern music industry.  It also leads to some of the film’s best lines.  After Sophie sees and hears what Cora has done to their work, she sardonically blurts out to Alex, “Are you trying to tell me that you enjoyed that orgasm set to the GANDHI Soundtrack?”

Again, MUSIC AND LYRICS is readily predictable.  We know that the two will fall for one another despite their inherent differences.  Alex is a pop has-been and Sophie, at first, has no idea how big of a star he was.  The two will also have emotional baggage that they have to shift through, which leads to a heartrending break-up and then to the requisite moment where the male takes a prideful stance to get back the woman he really loves.  The plot is fairly preordained, but the real strong aspects of the film is in its two appealing leads, the daft and quietly amusing banter between the two, and the sharp and sly wit that permeates many moments of the film.  Like a great recent romantic comedy, FEVER PITCH (also starring Barrymore) MUSIC AND LYRICS engages in a commendable balancing act between generating strong laughs with hearty sentiment, along with something meaningful to say about song writing.  On top of that, the overall tone of the film is pitch perfect.  Nothing is hammered over our heads to the point of being overwhelming. 

Most crucially, just about everyone here is funny and endearing.  Grant pulls out all the stops - as expected - to be as casually charming and silly as only he can muster, and Drew Barrymore is also very effective here at doing what she does best: being effortlessly cute and adorable without milking it too much.  Even the supporting characters get a lot of comic mileage, such as  Kristen Johnston (from TV’s Third Rock From the Sun) as Sophie’s sister and Alex’s biggest all-time fan.  When she discovers that her sister is working with a singer she worshiped as a teen, her giddy and orgasmic excitement reaches such a boiling point that you’d swear she was going to suffocate from hyperventilation.

Writer/director Marc Lawrence, who made some hit or miss romantic comedies like MISS CONGENIALITY and TWO WEEKS NOTICE, makes MUSIC AND LYRICS such a winning, funny, and joyful genre film that it ends up rising far above the level of disposable entertainment.  The film is wickedly droll, terrifically agreeable, and spirited, but it also grounds its characters realistically and gives them real feelings and moments of insight.  Neither too sugar coated and saccharine with its drama nor too bold and outlandish with its comedy, MUSIC AND LYRICS understands how to do a routine formula picture just right.  During a time where romantic comedies have nauseatingly inane premises (like FAILURE TO LAUNCH) this film reminds me of the simple pleasure of seeing two immanently likeable people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after.  As a warm-hearted, cheerful, and catchy diversion at the cineplexes, MUSIC AND LYRICS has surprising harmony.  And not only that, but Hugh Grant yet again reminds us of his superb timing and limitless amiability…just like another famous Grant.

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

****  out of  ****

If General George S. Patton were alive today, then I categorically believe that 300 would be his favorite film of all-time.  While I watched it I was constantly reminded of one of his most famous quotes: “The object of war is not to die for country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”

300 is like GLADIATOR on a cocktail of speed and hallucinogenic drugs.  It feels like it was written with copious amounts of splattered blood and fever pitched adrenaline and machismo.  This is a movie for guys that like movies, where men can be super-humanly chiseled and powerful and lay a path of bloody and unparalleled carnage behind them in an effort to fight for God, country, and for the voluptuous women back home.  What male ego does not fantasize about that?

More than anything, it is a fearsome and vigorous exercise in wall-to-wall violence and wanton mayhem.  Yet, by the end of 300 I found myself marveling at the sheer insanity and irresponsibility of its excesses.  It certainly attains the level of a stirring and powerfully mounted action picture and a groundbreaking visual effects odyssey.  The film may be sick and deplorable with its imagery (in terms of bloodshed, this one may set a cinematic record for most on-screen deaths ever), but there is considerable artistry and craft in its presentation. 

300 is an audio/visual symphony that is orchestrated brilliantly Zach Snyder (DAWN OF THE DEAD), who found inspiration for the film in the form of the classic graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller (the latter – it could be argued – is one of the all-time greats in his field).  As an evocative illustrator with bold and in-your-face visuals and a writer with strong storytelling, few are Miller’s equal in the comicdom.  He crafted the SIN CITY novels and a few of them made it to the big screen in the most faithful comic book adaptations ever in 2005.  SIN CITY was a supreme achievement and a gorgeously mounted comic book film if there ever was one.  Now comes Snyder and 300, which again uses most of the same shooting style to lovingly recreate Miller’s stirring and boisterous visuals to the silver screen.

I read all of the 300 graphic novels back in 1998 (which were illustrated as double page spreads – twice the size as a normal comic book page) all of which had wonderful titles:   Honor, Duty, Glory, Combat and Victory respectively.  The story loosely (and I use the term strongly) depicts the Battle of Thermopylae and the events leading up to it from the perspective of King Leonidas of Sparta. 

Miller himself was inspired by the real-life battle after viewing the 1962 film THE 300 SPARTANS as a child.  It should be noted that his novels (and the film adaptation) never goes out of its way for historical accuracy.  Anyone familiar with Miller’s work in the books knows that he was not going for faithfully re-enacting history in comic book form, nor was he doing a accurate biography.  Instead, Miller was chiefly concerned with presenting a heightened sense of a surrealistic reality.  There was a vividness and haunting strength to Miller’s imagery.  You find yourself not challenging their integrity; you more or less allow yourself to escape within them. 

300 – the film – works precisely in the same fashion.  It’s a piece of pure cinematic escapism.  We are less conscious of the reality of its images.  Most important is how the visuals work on us by transporting us to a different time and place.  There is little denying that 300 is far from a precise retelling of a famous historical battle, but the film is a powerful out-of-body experience.  The more you become entrenched in the chaos and implausibility of its scenes, the more you buy into them.  Again, 300 is not about historical realism.  The film is about finding that often difficult intersection where comic books and the language and grammar of the movies intertwine.  Like SIN CITY, 300 kind of effortlessly hones in on this meeting point.

Just as Robert Rodriguez did for his adaptation of Miller’s work, Snyder aimed for a shot-for-shot appropriation of the 300 novel.   Numerous images - even lines of dialogue - are directly lifted from the books, not to mention the huge levels of artistic licence that Miller used in telling the story.  Most crucial to getting the tone and look of the film down was Snyder’s decision to film 300 using a “digital backlot.”

300 was filmed in Montreal, but it just as well could have been Mars.  Only the actors and props were filmed on gigantic bluescreen stages in the city.  Everything else was created by computer generated visuals.  Of the 1500 cuts in the film, 1300 involved some CG pixel trickery.  A lot of the film was shot using real elements (all of the film’s actors portraying the warriors trained for six months to showcase themselves in ultimate, six-packed, bicep-bulging glory, and extensive animatronics and makeup were used for some of the creatures), but 300 is an unqualified triumph for its artificial, aesthetic flourishes.  The ambitiousness of its art direction and style is astounding.  Imagine Herculean super heroes that all look like Conan The Barbarian occupying a standard historical film story, but told with sweeping and fantastical vistas ala LORD OF THE RINGS and you kind of get 300.  It’s a wonderfully audacious hybrid…and it works.

The film is 10 per cent story and characters and 90 per cent ceaseless energy, bombastic intensity, and wall-to-wall, animalistic bloodshed.  300 is gory, kinetic, action pornography.  You would need a survey crew to assess the causalities in the film (at one point, the Spartans pile up the bodies of their victims to erect walls as high as small buildings).  However, there still is a basic story and some well-rounded characters. 

The basis for the film is ancient Greece and one of its most legendary and mythical battles – the Battle of Thermopylae from 480BC.  In a nutshell, the the battle pitted 300 members of the battle-hardened Spartan army lead by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, oozing rough and rugged manliness) versus the vastly superior Persian force of a million led by god-king King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, portrayed as an 8 foot giant that looks like a creepy cross between The Rock morphed with Prince).  The Persians scour the lands and do anything within their means to conquer others and put them into slavery.  Well, Leonidas will have none of that BS.

I do not need to post a spoiler warning here by saying that the Spartans gallantly lost the battle in the end (it is widely regarded as historical fact).  The essence of the 300 Spartans and their determination and courage against odds eventually inspired future warriors to deal Xerxes’ forces a bitter defeat a year later at the Battle of Plataea.  Yet, this film is about the mighty 300 that stood bravely against an impossible number of adversaries that would make Las Vegas handicappers wince.  But…geez…those Spartans were tough.

Just how tough?  Well, these men look like they were carved out of granite.  Maximus and Spartacus together could not beat one of these monsters even if both of his hands were tied behind his back.  These Spartans love battle to the point of sexual fantasy.  This “love” is spawned at an early age.  By the time they are 7-years-old Spartan lads are trained to lay a keg of whoop-ass on their opponents and then are – get this – thrown out into the snow covered wild to battle carnivorous wolves.  If they return, they are worthy of being soldiers.  It’s a boot camp from hell.

Even the women of Spartan are pretty kick-ass.  When Leonidas leaves home and his gorgeous, luminous babe of a wife, Queen Gorgo (the beautiful Lena Headey) she stands by her man and tells him to either come home walking or come home dead on his shield.  Now that’s support.  Yet, the women are not mere sex objects in the film, nor are they useless worry-mongers back at Sparta.  When an unscrupulous and cagey politician named Theron (Dominic West) tries to frame Leonidas while he’s away, he also tries to frame his wife in a rather…uncompromising fashion.  Let’s just say that when Gorgo stands up for herself and finally confronts this vile man once and for all, it creates a unanimous cheer from the viewers.  The women of Sparta don’t put up with crap either.

Then there are the battle scenes, and when they occur they are among the most incredibly sustained moments of sheer head skewering, limb popping, bone crunching, and blood flying orgies of death that I’ve seen.  The vast fights are every geek boy’s wet dream.  We have beefed up grunts wearing speedos and long, flowing Superman-esque capes and wielding swords and shields battling enemies by the thousands.  Just about everything but the kitchen sink is thrown at these guys and they come back looking for more.  Nothing, it appears, quenches their collective thirst for the kill.

At one point a charging, armored Rhino is sent after them, then a series of giant Elephants, then a disfigured and malevolent giant with razors for teeth and a venomous taste for human blood (at one point this creature takes a sword right through his bicep, to which he removes it and throws it back at his victim).  The visceral gore is oftentimes thrown at the screen in ridiculous levels, but the violence here is stylized in sort of a laughable and spirited kind of way.  Amidst all of the decapitations and limbs flying everywhere, the film does infuse some light humor.  I especially liked one moment where Leonidas enjoys a late, post battle snack - an apple – as he walks through the thousands of corpses that his men have left on the ground.  An even funnier moment occurs when his captain has lost an eye in battle.  He quickly bandages it up and when Leo asks him if he’s fit to go on, he responds, “God was kind enough to grant me a spare eye.”

The film will be remembered for all of its jaw-dropping effects and action sequences, but many may overlook its more subtle achievements, like the performances.  Gerald Butler, who has given many forgettable performances in films like THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and TOMB RAIDER 2, gives a fairly multi-faceted performance as King Leonidas.  In terms of his outward façade and his personality in battle, Leonidas is a scenery chewing, one-man slaughterhouse.  With his thick beard, gnarly temperament, teeth clenching stoicism, and Rasputin-like stare, Butler is a living, breathing iconic Miller hero come to life.  Butler’s ferocity as Leonidas will have men applauding in the aisles as he leads his man to death, but there is also a quiet conviction and humbleness to the man that realizes the gravity of his situation.  For a larger-than-life comic book film, Butler’s nuanced and truthful performance helps ground the film down at times to help us catch a much needed breather at times.

300 is one of the great blood-soaked, sweat pouring, testosterone-induced tributes to guts and rugged masculinity than I’ve seen.  By adapting the great graphic novel by Frank Miller of the same name and utilizing the same state-of-the art computer effects that saw the light of day in SIN CITY and SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, director Zack Snyder vividly recreates powerful and ethereal vistas that seem ripped right out of the comic pages.  The film takes a real historical battle and manages to tell an old school Hollywood epic in redefining ways with New Age technology.  Brimming to the hilt with sound and fury, 300 is an astounding realization of bringing the world of Miller’s work to life.  The film is disgustingly violent and hyperactively tenacious, but its undying bravado is infectious and the artistry behind bringing the graphic novel to the screen is beautifully handled.  I was simply exhausted after seeing 300, but not so much because it was a negligible and depressing experience at the movies.  Like STAR WARS and LORD OF THE RINGS - two effects-heavy works - the film is designed to be actively experienced, not passively viewed.  That’s the sign of great escapist spectacle, and 300 wholeheartedly delivers.  Boy…does it ever.

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

****  out of  ****

David Fincher’s ZODIAC is a crime masterpiece and a stirring and intoxicating police procedural.   This is not foreign territory for the director.  He made a real name for himself in his landmark police film noir thriller, SE7EN, which single-handedly reinvented the genre back in 1995.  His other efforts, like his evocative and timely social satire, FIGHT CLUB (one of the underrated films of the 1990’s) also demonstrated Fincher as a film making auteur with considerable skill and vision. 

Now comes his near three-hour ZODIAC, which never draws attention to its long running time.  It’s a sprawling, lavishly produced, and brilliantly told narrative of the investigation into one of the greatest unsolved mass murder cases in history.  Only a filmmaker with tremendous abilities could have pulled this off, and Fincher does so with dazzling period design, sharply written characters, and a fascinating story that spans four decades.  This is a virtuoso and painstakingly crafted crime epic and easily the best film of our young year.

The screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith, is a narrative jigsaw puzzle that does such an incredibly immersing job of diving into the most meticulous details of the Zodiac killings.  This is not some sort of glossed over, sanitized, TV movie of the week handling of the material.  The film wisely focuses on the men behind the investigation of the viscous brutality of the enigmatic killer.  It’s chiefly concerned with how journalists, police investigators, the Federal government, and one highly resourceful editorial cartoonist spent decades trying to uncover the identity of a ruthless slasher that easily deserves worthy comparisons to England’s Jack the Ripper. 

Both the Zodiac and Ripper killings were unsolved and both killers’ identities were never discovered.  That’s perhaps the overall hook – and sheer ingenuity – of Fincher’s ZODIAC.  It crafts such a unilateral sense of foreboding dread and tension, despite the fact that we know that the film will never reveal who the real man behind the killer was.

However, that is not to say that Fincher and company don’t have a say on whom they think could have been the killer.  Despite the fact over a dozen people would eventually become suspects during the course of the long police investigation, ZODIAC sets its sights ultimately on one man.  That is not to say that the film ignores facts and details (to its ultimate credit, ZODIAC is a remarkably faithful and scrupulously detailed real-life-based work), but it simply offers up to the audience one interpretation of the established facts and draws its own conclusions. 

In many ways, ZODIAC reminded me considerably of another ingenious murder mystery, J.F.K., where the filmmaker offers his own prerogative on the who’s and the how’s of the case.  Both films use there liberal running times and a kaleidoscope of multiple characters and time lines to reveal a convoluted – but coordinated – explanation of their mysterious events.  Whether or not you agree with their outcomes is beside the point; what is crucial is the film’s journey, and ZODIAC never feels dull, lifeless, or meandering.  As a murder mystery and as a layered and intricate character study of obsession, it always lures us in without letting go.

The real enthralling aspect of the case is – yes – that it remains unsolved, and perhaps that it was, at the time of the killings, something that was really terrifying to the public.  The Zodiac killer operated primarily in Northern California for ten months in the late 1960’s.  He would coin his name in a series of letters that he sent to the press well into the 1970’s.  In his letters he sent puzzles in the form of cryptograms, and to this day only three of the four have ever been solved.  His murders seemed so ruthlessly random and no serious connections have ever been made between them all.  Some believe that that the killer knew his victims, but the evidence is flimsy at best.  To make matters ever more complicated, several other killings during the time have also been theorized to be Zodiac killings, but the evidence again has been limited.

No one was ever identified as the killer, and as more time elapses the true identity may never been known.  The San Francisco PD officially marked its Zodiac case as “inactive” in early 2004, citing pressures from other more pertinent and timely caseloads.  They would later reopen the case in 2007.  When the first DNA evidence from Zodiac letters was introduced for analysis, a partial genetic profile was generated, but these results appeared to have ruled out the main suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, the man the film itself seems to squarely focus it’s attention on.  If anything, the lack of anyone concretely solving this case has allowed it to enter to domain of American folklore.  In an age of flower power and hippy love, the Zodiac was a dark and deadly figure that permeated the American social conscience.

ZODIAC is so precise with embodying this vibe throughout its running time.  Even more significant is how it manages to go through a cross-section of different times, places and characters to create such a dense and nuanced perspective of the events.  It parallels the killer’s obsession with taunting the media with the obsession of a disregarded newspaper cartoonist who becomes so transfixed in the case that it eventually destroys his personal relationships.  Early in the film he is shown as an unassuming amateur detective with a penchant for puzzles and anagrams.  However, when the Zodiac murders begin - and when the cryptic letters start arriving at his newspaper’s offices - he begins to be drawn into the evidence.  Like Jim Garrison in J.F.K., his initial curiosity overtakes him into a realm of near fatalistic fixation. 

After a chilling and unnerving introductory scene of the first Zodiac killing (portrayed with a Hitchcockian predilection for timing and tension), Fincher settles into the narrative.  After the first killing letters start arriving at the editorial offices of three Bay Area newspapers, one of which is the San Francisco Chronicle.  Within the letters is a very sophisticated and complex code, but the letters themselves also simply reveal the fact that the writer has claimed responsibility for the murders.  He gives intimate details from the crime scene that only the murderer and police could now.  After the newspaper corroborates the facts of the letter with the real crime scene details, the editor soon realizes that this letter is from the actual killer.  Even more unsettling is the fact that the murderer says the worst is yet to come.

Robert Graysmith (in yet another rock solid performance by Jake Gyllenhaal) is the newspaper’s cartoonist, but while penning political shots at Tricky Dick, he is able to see some of the code from the letters.  He begins to take a real interest in the case, which – more or less – seems to really turn off Paul Avery (played brilliantly by Robert Downey Jr.), the reporter assigned to the case.  Avery too is interested in the case, and he begins to fuel the paper’s stories with a combination of facts and idle speculation.  Avery is a walking, eye-twitching, neurotic time bomb that is habitually addicted to alcohol and later to drugs.  Saying that Robert Downey Jr. playing the character is a walk in the park for the actor – considering his past problems with sobriety – is redundant.  He inhabits this manic and lucid-tongued reporter with an underplayed drollness, rebelliousness, and wackiness.  It’s one of his most inspired performances.

The film then segues into the police investigation, where two intrepid police detectives, Dave Tosci (the great Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (the quietly effective Anthony Edwards) use their skills in the homicide division to start gathering clues in hopes of solving the case.  At times, their journey has numerous decent starts which leads to dead ends.  They often get assistance from Graysmith and Avery.  Considering the fact that the papers were the ones getting the letters, then they would seem like the first place the police would go to. 

Unfortunately, the officers and journalists become embroiled in a jurisdictional tug of war not only with each other over evidence, but with other police files from outside towns where some of the murders were committed.  What’s intriguing in the film is how the investigators are sometimes not thrown off course on the case by the evidence, but rather on the lack of disclosure of the evidence from other investigators.  Policemen and journalists from opposing towns get involved in a pendulum of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your’s.

Years pass and the Zodiac killings stop, and the multiple-jurisdictional investigation also seems to slow down.  Graysmith becomes entombed within all of the minutiae of the case.  He begins to investigate old files, records, reports, and looks back at testimony and the encrypted letters from the Zodiac himself.  Soon, he begins to sacrifice everything that he has successfully built around him in order to bury himself in the case and solve it once and for all.  He decides to abandon his artistic career to write a book about the madman and hopes one day to be able to look the killer right in the eyes and know that he has caught him.  The more he plunges head first into the case files, the more he’s convinced that Arthur Leigh Allen is his prime suspect.  Whether or not the real Allen was a legitimate suspect is questionable, but there is no denying that the film paints a rather convincing argument towards his guilt.

As far as thrillers go, ZODIAC is longer than the norm by typical standards in terms of running time.  Yet, the film’s length is kind of necessary to its overall effect.  Yes, it’s long, but it’s never tediously lengthy, and it sort of accentuates the scope and breadth of the decades-long investigation into the murders.  Some critics have said that the film lacks narrative focus, jumping around from one investigator to the next.  However, that aspect more or less reinforces the myriad of people that were a part of the investigation and how complicated a process it was.  Like it was in real life, the film showcases false starts, quickly and hastily made conclusions that were made from a cursory look at the evidence, and how frustrating the lack of cohesion and cooperation that existed between the journalists and police.  Inexorably, the film is about the fanatical journey towards discovery and the absolute failure that lies at the end of that journey.  Graysmith thinks he has found his man, but the circumstantial nature of the evidence does not make his case airtight.  This only fuels his drive.

Fincher’s directorial eye has never been as confident and rock steady.  From a technical standpoint, the film is not the film noir escapade of stylistic flourishes that made SE7EN so atmospheric and creepy.  Instead, Fincher let’s the story and characters speak for themselves.  In terms of production values, ZODIAC completely immerses the viewer during its various time periods and uses state of the art visual effects to create a completely realistic backdrop of San Francisco from the 60’s and 70’s.  The period decor here so accomplished that it’s almost kind of invisible; you truly feel in the moment. 

The lack of overly fancy camera work and aesthetic touches lends credibility to the story and rightfully allows the viewer to feel like their inhabiting the America of the past.  Modern visual techniques would have washed out the period detail.  Fincher lets the multiple characters, the multi-faceted storyline, and his timing with scenes create an eerie docu-drama aura to the proceedings.  There is a definitive level of fear and anxiety that permeates the film.  Unlike other films about serial killers, ZODIAC is never exploitative and gratuitous.  The movie is chilling in the way it taps into America’s then fledging fascination with sadistic killers and how one man’s interest spirals into fixation.  Like Graysmith in the film, the longer the film progresses, the more we want to – and need to - know more details.

ZODIAC is epic in length and structure, and it daringly and consummately deals with a landmark unsolved American murder mystery that has remained as enigmatic as it was when the atrocities first occurred in the late 1960’s.  With captivating performances, impeccable period detail, and heart pounding pacing, the film is executed with exemplary skill and patient precision by David Fincher.  The film is ultimately engrossing not in the way that it focuses primarily on the killer (which is the focal point of other similar films), but in how it hones in on the people on the fringes of the monster.  The film is more interested in the milieu of how an everyman can become enthralled by multiple murders and in his self-fulfilling duty to solve them.  In many ways, Fincher has dialed down his normative noir style he has used in the past and instead tells a great mystery story from a fly on the wall perspective.  Similar to the great films about investigative journalism, like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, and unsolved murder mysteries like J.F.K., ZODIAC is an absorbing, intricate, and fiercely ambitious thriller that stays with you.  If Eastwood dominates the Western genre, Lucas and Jackson the Fantasy, and Scorsese the gangster film, then it can now be said that Fincher has complete command of the crime thriller.  ZODIAC easily typifies this.  

www.craigerscinemcorner.com

**  out of  ****

“My son is perfectly capable of sending his father into space.”

- Billy Bob Thornton from THE ASTRONAUT FARMER

I have always been a fan of Gary Larson’s THE FAR SIDE newspaper cartoon strips.  They had a sort of exuberant, wickedly droll, and zany outlandishness to them.  You kind of laughed at their sheer silliness. 

They took many pre-conceived ideas and concepts, rigidly tipped them upside down on their heads, and held them up for riotous laughs.  My favourites include one that showed God rubbing what appears to be silly putty with the caption “GOD MAKES SNAKES” (his speech balloon says, “Gosh, these things are easy!”).  I also appreciated one that showed the crew of the Starship Enterprise seeing a floating head on their view screen with the caption “Kirk and the Enterprise are shocked when they encounter the floating visage of Zsa Zsa Gabor.” 

The poster for THE ASTRONAUT FARMER kind of reminded me of the spirit of Larson’s comic strips…at least in terms of overall tonality.  It displays a man in a space suit riding a horse in front of his farm.  If it was a FAR SIDE comic its caption could have easily stated “Buzz Aldrin feebly attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream by launching himself into space via his horse.”

Even the story for the film could have easily been the fixture of one of his daily strips.  It sure is one hum-dinger of a narrative.  It is one thing for a father to engage in a bit of middle aged soul searching by wanting to recapture past glory by gunning for and ultimately achieving a lifelong dream.  Some men have modest aims.  I know of one friend whose father desperately yearned to take up sky diving and – with the support of his wife and kids – he finally saw his wishes taken to successful fruition. 

The father/husband figure in THE ASTRONAUT FARMER has much loftier aims.  He simply wants to convert his barn into a missile silo, build a rocket, mortgage his house and farm six times over to the point of absolute bankruptcy, risk financial ruin for his wife and kids, and fly himself into outer space.

Oooookay.

I have never seen such a crazy cinematic family in my relative young filmgoing life.  And I do mean crazy in the literal sense.  Charlie Farmer (Billy Bob Thornton), the film’s main character, most certainly would have to be nuttier than a fruitcake.  He was once a college graduate in aerospace engineering who dreamed of flight all his life.  He trained on experimental fighter aircrafts, but really set his hopes for becoming an astronaut during the space race.  Due to an unforeseen personal setback, he was forced to resign from NASA and instead became a lonely rancher.  His heart is simply not in it.  Like another film farmer, Ray Kinsella from FIELD OF DREAMS, Charlie really becomes driven by his obsessions.  No, he does not plough through hundreds of valuable acres of corn crop to erect a baseball field because the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson told him to do so.  No sir.  In Charlie’s case, he builds a rocket and hopes to fly into outer space.

Much like Kevin Costner in DREAMS, Charlie has – pardon the pun – a family of such astronomical patience, understanding, and commitment.  Everyone in the town thinks Charlie is an utter lunatic that has thrown common sense into the wind…and could ya blame them?   For most of his adult life he has slaved away at building his space vessel for what he hopes is his first star trek.  He has also spent the literal farm at making his rocket.  Every last penny that his family has in their tight pockets has been put into his dream.  Early in the film the bank’s loan manager instructs him that if he does not give up his silly, infantile plan, then he will loose his farm.  Charlie, being a plucky optimist, sees it otherwise.  I mean, what’s to worry about?  He’s only on his sixth mortgage, and who cares about sending the two kids off to college.  Forget about their futures!

His family goes to remarkable levels to support him, even in the midst of a town that thinks him to be as stupid as Kinsella for putting up a baseball field in his corn crop for no apparent reason.  His wife, Audrey (played in yet another supportive wife role by Virginia Madsen, playing the same variation of this character in recent films like FIREWALL and THE NUMBER 23) thinks highly of her husband and supports him through thick and thin.  Not once does she call the doctor to arrange for Charlie to be sent to the psychiatric ward in a straight jacket, despite when the evidence seems to point to the fact that Charlie just may be clinically insane.  Maybe she thinks it’s just a phase he’s going through, but when he reveals to her that he is trying to make a bid for buying several tons of premium grade fuel for his rocket, she then starts to see things differently.

Charlie’s kids are idealistic to the point of being a Capraesque wet dream.  They also love dear old dad and never seem to question his sanity or integrity.  His oldest child, Shepherd (Max Thieriot) seems like a bright kid with an affinity to science and math.  He sort of places his dad on a peculiar pedestal of hero worship, maybe because his dad wants him to be in charge of mission control.  Call me crazy, but last I checked, NASA has never had any mission controllers who have just entered puberty.  But – gosh darnit – if I was Charlie’s adolescent son and I was asked to be his number two for his flight to space, I would think it was the coolest thing ever.

Rightfully, the FAA gets wind of Charlie’s inane plan and thinks it’s pure hogwash.  However, when they and the FBI start to dig further and notice that – holy cow – this guy is looking to buy thousands of pounds of rocket fuel, they start to take him seriously.  They first send FBI stooges to his ranch to investigate him, perhaps to see if he is making a WMD on American soil.  Charlie, with his aw, shucks gumshum and lighthearted spirit, laughs off their concerns.  At one point he tells them at a hearing, “If I was building a weapon of mass destruction, you wouldn’t be able to find it.”  Check mate for Charles!

Yes, no inspirational film about a down-on-his luck rancher that wants to spend his family’s collective assets to build a rocket to go to outer space would not be complete without a formal hearing of some kind.  These types of movie hearings almost could be called “Patch Adam Formals”, named after ridiculous film of the same name.  You know, the type of hearing where the “hero” of the film has to explain his actions and their validity to a group of administrative heads that are woefully painted as villains for challenging the hero’s shaky motives.  It always kind of rubs me the wrong way when films like this take characters that have every right in the world to oppose the so-called hero’s choices and make them look like heels.  Usually, their opposition makes perfect sense, but in a movie they are dastardly, unscrupulous, and uncaring A-holes because – for cripe’s sake – they are standing in front of the hero’s dreams.  For crying out loud, maybe then don’t want him to blow himself up.

J.K. Simmons is cast as the FAA head and – at seemingly every moment – he tells Charlie and the public that there are laws that prohibit citizens from making rockets and going to space.  Furthermore, NASA has people that have trained for years and have experience to go into space.  But, c’mon, Charlie has a dream and they are stepping on it.  In a speech he gives near the end of the hearing, Charlie steps up to the board and in pure, Patch Adams-ian fashion, says that – yeah – there are laws, but how can you stop individualism and one man’s lifelong dream of going to space?  Well, the board tells him that they will make up their mind in 60 days.  Oh no, but Charlie’s farm will go into foreclosure in 30!!  Geez, good thing Charlie was not wanting to launch his ship into space in 30 days to dock with a dangerous asteroid that was on a collision course with earth.  Actually, wait a tick, Thornton had his hand already in a film like that called ARMAGEDDON.

There are even other moments of sheer, unbridled incredulity that made me laugh.  Bruce Willis (oddly enough, in an uncredited cameo) shows up in the film as a former shuttle pilot that comes to Charlie’s farm to find out what the hell he’s really up to.  Yet, when Charlie takes him to his barn and shows him the rocket, Willis stares in complete awe and giggles like a schoolgirl and the sight.  Does he immediately call the Feds to report on this nut job, or does he try to drag Charlie away to the Lonnie bin?  No.  After a few beers and talking with Charlie, he kind of develops some strong respect for his limitless drive.  Yup.  Sure.  Uh-huh. 

Even wackier is one sly moment when J.K. Simmons quietly tells Charlie that he will never fly his rocket because – if he did – then he would have the collective arsenal of the US government pointed straight at his farm.  Charlie’s lawyer said that the FAA head was bluffing…but was he?  Last, but not least, the film journeys towards a third act that shows the hero see terrible defeat and then achieve ultimate victory in a manner that will truly have audience members want to not only admit Charlie, but his entire family to the psyche ward.

THE ASTRONAUT FARMER is one the strangest films that I have seen.  On one level, is sort of typical of most inspirational films by following its conventions to the letter though and through.  It has the driven hero, a family that supports him no matter what, and a group that wants to boycott his dreams, only to be overcome in the end by the hero.  In this way, the film is hopelessly predictable.  I guess the overall storyline is kind of fresh, in a warped, reality defying kind of way, and it sort of combines ROCKY with FIELD OF DREAMS with sprinkles of Capra put in for good measure.  You most certainly have to suspend your disbelief while watching a film like this, but the premise of it makes it very, very difficult to do so.  I guess there is too much dark irony in THE ASTRONAUT FARMER.  Sure, Charlie is a man of perseverance and guileless courage and drive, but in the end, he’s inescapably a nutcase.  The fact that his family is also so universally accepting of his ridiculous scheme is even tougher to swallow.

If anything, the film is marginally redeemed by a decent performance by Billy Bob Thornton, who thankfully underplays the role to not accentuate the sheer absurdity of it.  It’s also nice to see the actor play a nice and affable character after a string of hit-or-miss films where he plays an amoral S.O.B. (like in SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS, BAD NEWS BEARS, and BAD SANTA).  His effortless charm and low-key appeal hear help to establish our willingness to root him on, even when his ultimate quest is beyond realistic.  Madsen does what she can with the perfunctory wife role when she supports her husband, has the obligatorical spats with him, becomes emotionally distant, and then later comes and stands by her man.  J.K. Simmons is characteristically vile and seedy in his performance.

THE ASTRONAUT FARMER emerges as 2007’s most absurdist of films.  It has a quirky and light-hearted appeal in its story of a farmer that dreams of building a rocket to journey to the stars, and its allegory on the spirit of individual dreams is noble.  The film has a nice performance by Billy Bob Thornton and some lovely production values (the cinematography has a sun drenched, luminous kind bucolic beauty in many scenes).  However, the film is yet another in a long line of predictable formula films that veers heavily into clichés and seriously suffers from an overall lack of credibility.  I guess I am willing to buy into a fairy tale of a farmer that makes a ball diamond in his cornfield so that the ghost of MLB’s past can come to play.  Really…I do.  But, there is just something about a man that wants to put his family into bankruptcy and provoke the Federal Government into attacking him by building a rocket in his barn so he can launch himself into space that’s…well…insane.  There is nothing wrong with having a dream, but what if it can lead to your own demise and destruction?  What’s the point?  Alas, in films like this its characters worship the so-called hero when they should be forcing him against his will to get therapy. 

www.craigerscinemacorner.com

*  out of  ****

WILD HOGS stinks, kind of like the odor that emanates from a festering pile of smelly road kill.  It’s made all the more dreadful based on the fact that it takes a talent pool that is – for the most part – comprised of gifted talent and reduces them down to infantile comedic levels.  This is a comedy that likes to incorporate - in one instance - multiple Oscar nominees mugging the camera with feces all over their faces as a source for laughs.  In all fairness, WILD HOGS is about as humorous as a poop-filled diaper.  To take a page out of an AC/DC song, I journeyed on a Highway to Hell sitting through it.

The film is advertised as a middle-aged, coming of age comedy, but its attempts at laughs barely reach the level of a third-rate TV sitcom.  Its attempts at small scenes of low-key sentimentality have the dramatic weight of a Pilsner commercial.  The film is about being free and hitting the country for a life-affirming road trip.  I certainly enjoyed two aspects of my journey seeing this film: my walk into the theatre and my very abrupt exit out of it.

WILD HOGS is a CITY SLICKERS for the intellectually challenged.  That latter Billy Crystal comedy was wickedly funny and had a right amount of heart.  It did a decent job of showing nine-to-five men desperately trying to find some meaning in the monotony of their lives.  The script was sharp, sly, and spoke towards some basic truths about getting older. 

WILD HOGS covers the same basic territory, at the most superficial levels.  It too has men in their 40’s and 50’s that are trying to recapture their long-lost sense of freedom and independence that they felt in their youth.  However, in this film the comedy is lethargic, tired, and brainless, largely revolving around everything from fecal matter and jokes against gays.  When are studios going to realize that humor based around bodily fluids and seedy, sex-starved homosexuals are just not that cutting edge anymore?  I think it peaked with a certain bodily fluid was being used as hair gel in 1997’s THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY.  That Farrelly Brother comedy is Tolstoy compared to HOGS.

Maybe I should have read the label going into the film: it was directed by the talentless Walt Becker, who made one of the worst films of recent memory in NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VAN WILDER.  That film’s idea of a laugh-out-loud pratfall was to use canine ejaculate to stuff pastries with in order to cruelly play a foul joke on some witless character.  Is it just me, or is the sight of a person masturbating animals for the purpose of completing a donut recipe not all that appealing?  Call me crazy.

Perhaps my biggest finger wag of shame should go to all of the participants, which includes the likes of Academy Award nominated actors like John Travolta, William H, Macy, and Marisa Tomei (a winner, no less) alongside the likes of comedic stars like Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence.  Ray Liotta also shows up - a terrific actor when he wants to be - but when I left WILD HOGS I never once thought that this was a script that any of the actors truly had their hearts in.  I am amazed that I could not see them all collectively rubbing their hands together at the thought of their big pay cheques, because those were certainly required to convince A-list stars to participate in this tired and witless exercise.  All of the actors mentioned have been funny in films before, but the absolute shocker of WILD HOGS is how utterly vacant the film is for even modest chuckles.

The title characters are four middle-aged men that live in suburbia and have their own motorcycle gang.  One is a dentist named Doug Madsen (Tim Allen, never generating one decent laugh), the unemployed Woody Stevens (John Travolta, who has never looked so desperate to get a laugh), a janitor named Bobby Davis (Martin Lawrence, a comic dead zone here) and a computer geek named Dudley Frank (William H. Macy, playing an uber nerd on comedic auto pilot).  Much like those other movie city clickers, this foursome have let their tedious lives of normalcy get the better of them.  Most of them have wives and families that they love and support, but what they yearn for is a little bit of adventure and excitement.  Doug himself seems really energized for a little R & R (“I have not been out of Cincinnati in over 12 years!”).

Needless to say, they all seemed coaxed by the very persuasive Woody to all get together and go on a Born To Be Wild road trip of excess, fun, and spontaneity.  They leave everything behind, including their families, kids, and mortgages.  This is the ultimate journey of freedom, and I guess the film’s idea of “freedom” is to gather this talent and parade them through every old and recycled joke in the book.  I use to respect John Travolta for the way he managed to escape career suicide out of those slumbering LOOK WHO’S TALKING films and forge a great comeback in films like PULP FICTION and GET SHORTY.  When he is forced to overact to egregious degrees and is part of scenes where massive amounts of insect excrement is thrown at his face, then it is clear that is career is quickly spiraling back downwards.  There is nothing more embarrassing than seeing a great actor make a complete ass of himself. 

The group has setbacks along the way, which are highlighted in scenes of such startling, head shaking, cringe-worthiness.  There is one moment where Dudley is driving his bike and goes right into a billboard sign and is thrown off his bike and to the ground.

Ho-ho. 

There is also another mind-numbingly dumb scene where the group tries to set up camp for the night and one of them sets fire to the tent, after which Dudley comes and throws alcohol on it to put out the fire. 

Hardy-har.

Of course, the group is all forced to sleep together on one air mattress and in the morning a state trooper wakes them all up.  Now, the joke here is that you would assume that the trooper would think that the men are all gay.  Alas, in this film, the creepy trooper is a gay deviant, is aroused by the sight of the men in their underwear, and asks if he can join in. 

Hee-hee.

The gay jabs don’t end here.  When the group goes skinny dipping later (don’t ask why), a young Bible-thumping family wants to join in, but when they find out they are all naked, they – yup – think that the men are all involved in a gay orgy.  And – yup – that gay sexaholic state trooper catches up with them and again wants to join in. 

Oy vey.

If being mistaken for homosexuals was not bad enough, the hapless group also finds their way into a nasty looking biker bar.  Inside houses a real badass biker gang called The Del Fuegos, who all look like really mean vermin.  The film could have generated some real laughs if their portrayed the bikers against stereotypes and made them all home loving, Martha Stewart worshipping suburbanites like the Hogs.  Nope, instead the film goes rigidly with standard conventions and makes the bikers gnarly and despicable.  They are all led by Jack, played by a never-more-obnoxious Ray Liotta, who – at least I think – yells out every single one of his moronic lines for proper evil effect.  His performance here is teeth-grating, which is sad to see, considering the fact that he is usually an enthralling and charismatic actor.

Of course, the Hogs go in and thinks they will be treated like equals.  Yeah…right.  In no time Jack steals Dudley’s bike and sends the bunch packing.  Woody will have none of that, and attempts to go back for some payback.  Unfortunately, he inadvertently blows up the biker bar and trashes their bikes.  Realizing that their lives are all in danger, Woody convinces his buddies to shack up in a small New Mexico town and hide.  While there, Dudley meets up with a cute restaurant owner, Maggie (played in a marginalized role by Marisa Tomei) and the two fall in love.  Soon, it appears that the evil gang discovers their whereabouts and the Hogs decide that they will have to stand up to the them once and for all.  Well, they kind of have to, seeing as the town sheriff has no gun and got his training via an online correspondence course.

WILD HOGS is 99 minutes, but it felt like 999.  I have rarely seen films like this that go for broke and aim high for hilarity and then fall so utterly flat.  If I were a multiple finger amputee then I still would have too many fingers to count how many times I laughed during the course of the movie.  Travolta seems to have recoiled back to his BATTLEFIELD EARTH-method of chronic overacting (I was always waiting for him to spew out “Filthy man-animals” at some point in the film).  He has never been so unbearable as he is here, and his attempts at even lowbrow comedy are as forced as they come.  Macy is kind of appealing as a nerd, but – c’mon – this is not a stretch for him.  Lawrence and Allen never generate sustained giggles from any of their antics, and Liotta himself seems like he should be in another movie.  Tomei herself plays such a one-dimensional figure that it must have been out of absolute career desperation that she agreed to be in the film. 

And another thing: I never once believed that all of these guys are actual friends.  In CITY SLICKERS I felt a natural and realistic sense of camaraderie with those characters.  They had chemistry and appeal.  In WILD HOGS I felt more like I was watching actors that were pitifully reciting lines of dialogue off the page verbatim in an effort to generate chemistry.  There is never any rhythm or cadence to their highjinks and no one ever really plays effectively off of one another.  At one point when Dudley says that he wanted to approach a girl and talk to her but all he could think of was “black jokes”, Lawrence stares at him with puzzlement.  I did as well.  You could hear a pin drop in the theatre.  The laughs in the film should have been high octane, but instead the film is purely running on gaseous vapors.

If you like jokes about homosexual perverts, mosquito dung, jugular eating crows, urination, or any other juvenile and inspired pratfall of the most inane variety, then WILD HOGS is the comic vehicle for you to get on board with.  For the rest of us that have even modest demands out of actors like Travolta, Macy, and Liotta, then the film represents a travesty of horr