Craiger’s Cinema Corner

****  out of  ****   2007, R, 100 mins. Mariane Pearl: Angelina Jolie / Daniel Pearl: Dan Futterman / Agent Bennett: Will Patton / John Bussey: Denis O’Hare / Asra: Archie Panjabi Directed by Michael Winterbottom /  Written by John Orloff / Based on the memoir by Mariane Pearl.

The emotional epicenter of Michael Winterbottom’s gripping and riveting A MIGHTY HEART is the career high, tour de force performance by Angelina Jolie.  For 100 minutes she accomplishes what all great actors do: she allows for us to forget her baggage as a celebrity and truly inhabits a role so fully and forcefully that her real life persona fades into the background.  Yes, this is the same Jolie that has had an incredibly public love affair with Brad Pitt and also has highly peculiar adoption habits, but this is also the same Jolie that has reminded us in past films why she is one of the more raw and delicately powerful actresses working today. A MIGHTY HEART is a film about a very famous post-911 kidnapping, but its true focus is in dealing with the wife of the kidnapped victim, played by Jolie.  Her performance is a textbook and methodical exercise in restrained focus and subverted frustration and pathos.  This is a woman that has seen her husband abruptly snatched by terrorist forces during a time of incredibly socio-political uncertainty in the world and she becomes a fiercely vigilante and strong person as a result.  She is a tightly coiled cauldron of despair, but she never lets this on to her friends and supporters.  She knows, deep down, that the odds of her husband’s survival are slim, but she nevertheless perseveres and emerges as a hero, not a victim.  Too many film thrillers paint the wife characters as blubbering, one note, hysterical figures that are at their wit’s end.  The “victim” of A MIGHTY HEART uses her situation to almost fuel her resolve.  The tougher the situation gets for her, the more she extrapolates from it to make her a stronger and more courageous woman.  In Jolie’s more-than-competent hands, she becomes a figure that avoids unnecessary grandstanding and instead is emotionally introverted and quietly authentic.  This is a performance that breathes out for Oscar. Of course, there is the film’s story of the wife’s kidnapped husband, which is told with the breathtaking realism and conviction of a documentary.  A MIGHTY HEART is a largely fact based account of Daniel and Mariane Pearl’s time in Pakistan after September 11, 2001.  Daniel was a reporter working for the Wall Street Journal that was on assignment at the time and Mariane, also a journalist, was pregnant with their first child.  He was looking into a story about possible links between would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.  On January 23, 2002, while he was on his way for an interview with a religious leader, supporters of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a militant group known as The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, kidnapped him.  This group claimed that Pearl was a CIA agent and – through a series of e-mail transmissions – sent the US a list of demands, the most crucial being that they free all Pakistani terrorist detainees and release of a halted US shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.  There were even photos of Pearl sent to the US and Mariane.  He was shown bound with a gun pointed to his head.  The militant group did not respond to any of the pleas of the Wall Street Journal’s editor, nor from those of the desperate Mariane.  Then their most gruesome fears became a reality.  Nine days after he was taken, Daniel was found dead.  He was beheaded on February 1 and his body was cut into ten pieces and buried in a shallow gave on the outskirts of Karachi.   Despite all of the attempts by the US government, Wall Street Journal reporters, Pakistani security agents, and Mariane herself, Pearl died a viscous and cruel death and his untimely and ghastly demise hit the media world by storm.  During an emotional trying time when 9/11 was still an open wound for most Americans, Peal’s death only put further salt on them. A MIGHTY HEART is not so much a screen biography of Daniel and his wife as it is a stirring and unapologetically disturbing examination of the efforts of Mariane and company to save his life.  Winterbottom found inspiration for the film in Mariane’s own memoirs that she wrote when she became a widow.  Instead of dealing with Daniel’s life leading up to the Karachi kidnapping, it wisely drops the viewers almost right in the middle of it and subsequently deals with Mariane and everyone around her trying to discover his whereabouts.  It would have been so deceptively easy for a lesser filmmaker to helm a sensationalistic portrait of Peal’s grisly demise.  Thankfully, Winterbottom’s approach here is equal parts tense and restrained (he wisely never attempts to thoroughly recapture Daniel’s infamous beheading video that was actually leaked; he only shows reactions to it).  The film is rigidly anti-climatic (we know precisely what the outcome will be), but A MIGHTY HEART is indicative of how a brilliant director and script can take a famous story and still make it enthralling and fascinating. Perhaps the best thing that Winterbottom does here is with his aesthetic choices.  Very much like UNITED 93,  A MIGHTY HEART uses a loose, naturalistic, fly-on-the-wall perspective of filming.  This has been a trademark of some of Winterbottom’s past works, and he uses it here to create an undeniably realistic portrait of past events.  Some have criticized this approach for emotionally stunting the film’s effect and for not allowing us to resonate with the film’s characters as systematically.  To the contrary, Winterbottom’s free-floating, improvisational style forges such a complete being there sensation that you do feel like you are watching a behind the scenes documentary.  Again, like Paul Greengrass’ UNITED 93, A MIGHTY HEART exists as an intimate in-the-moment experience.  By not exploiting the Pearl tragedy – but also by not sugarcoating it – Winterbottom does a virtuoso job of thrusting the viewer smack dab in the middle of the events like a silent, neutral witness.  In this way, the film creates an unmistakable emotional connection with the audience that’s more palpable than if it were done by traditional, glossy Hollywood standards. Crucial to the film’s emotional impact is in its tactful handling of Daniel Pearl himself (played by Dan Futterman).  He does not appear very much in the film and the film’s sparse expository scenes very simplistically establish his relationship with Mariane (Jolie) and his work in Pakistan.  His early moments are bathed in everyday normalcy.  When he leaves for the day it’s essentially like any other.  When he is kidnapped its jarring and abrupt.  The film does juxtapose the present day with segments of Pearl’s life before the kidnapping, but it never dwells on them, nor does it present any scene from Daniel’s perspective while he is kidnapped.  This story is told ostensibly through the eyes of his wife and all of those that supported her on her mission to track him down.  Having scenes dealing with Daniel and his captors would have been unnecessary.  By having him in the background the film recreates the horror, insanity, and impact of the event.  This also does an even better job of embellishing how Mariane and her supporters engaged on a troubling and frustrating chess game in order to find his whereabouts. A MIGHTY HEART could have taken the road of a standard, made-for-TV police procedural.  Yet, it’s more tense and thrilling in its simple scenes of how Mariane and everyone around her use all of their detective might to uncover clues, only to be thrown into dead ends and being forced to start over.  What’s truly remarkable about the film is how Mariane maintained such a stoic and stern facade during the entire ordeal.  A MIGHTY HEART almost inevitably becomes less about Daniel’s kidnapping and more about Mariane’s stunning and increasingly difficult task of maintaining her dignity and composure.  In many ways, A MIGHTY HEART grows increasingly difficult to watch as it progresses, especially when we see the unwavering hope in Mariane’s eyes; her love conquers all of her worst fears, and the irony is that we know what she does not.  When Mariane sits down for a CNN interview during this nightmare, she is a figure of sturdy vigor.  To watch this woman show such a unilateral front of hope in the face of an unimaginable crisis is inspiring. Jolie’s performance has come under some sharp scrutiny.  Some critics have lashed out at the actress for playing an ethnic role - further amplifying Hollywood’s discrimination against actors of color.  People who make those ludicrous statements seem to forget that Mariane was multiracial (she is actually one quarter Afro-Cuban and one quarter Chinese), which I think is enough of a validation for any actress playing the role.  Jolie is physically plausible as Mariane (thanks to hair, wardrobe, and some makeup to de-glamorize herself), but the key to her incredible performance is that it’s less about appearances and more about what’s inside the character.  She displays such formidable restraint and poise throughout the entire film that – when she finally discovers Daniel’s fate – she explodes in one of the most raw and visceral emotional breakdowns in recent movie memory.  Some may think that Jolie overdoes it here for impact, but the key here is that this is a woman that has subjugated grief longer than any normal woman would have.  Jolie nails this moment of excruciating pain with such authority.  The fact that she held herself together for so long is a testament to her courage.  Michael Winterbottom is a filmmaker of remarkable versatility and variety.  He has made films as diverse as 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (which documented the Manchester music scene of the late 1970’s), CODE 46 (a sci-fi parable about cloning), TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY (a satire and brilliantly funny comedy about the filming on one of the most unfilmable books ever), and 9 SONGS (an erotic drama that involved unsimulated sex between its actors).  A MIGHT HEART proudly continues his legacy as one of our most gifted and expressive cinematic voices as it creates such an forcefully provocative and intoxicating look at a real world, post 9/11 kidnapping and its terrible results.  With is taut, tense, and wonderfully realized pseudo-documentary camera work (which harkens back to last year’s UNITED 93 as a work of intense verisimilitude), and its Oscar caliber performance by the vanity-stripped Angelina Jolie, A MIGHTY HEART is a harrowing and emotionally wrenching portrait of feminine strength when faced with dire odds.  It’s also a refreshingly apolitical work in the way it never sermonizes about its themes nor does it trivialize its real life characters.  As UNITED 93 did so thoroughly and thanklessly, Winterbottom’s film places us in the moment of its history, which allows us to witness it, not passively judge it.

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*1/2 out of ****

2007, PG, 96 mins.

Evan: Steve Carell / God: Morgan Freeman / Joan: Lauren Graham / Rep. Long: John Goodman / Rita: Wanda Sykes / Rep. Burrows: Harve Presnell

Directed by Tom Shadyac /  Written by Steve Oedekerk /  Based on a story by Oedekerk, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow.

I like to think that God – if he is out there - has a sly sense of humor.  After all, he gave mankind freewill, which in itself is some sort of cruel practical joke that must make him wince with laughter all of the time.  Perhaps even more funny is what people do for his sake.

Consider the new biblical comedy EVAN ALMIGHTY, which in itself is a sequel (well…kind of) to the 2003 Jim Carrey comedy BRUCE ALMIGHTY.   That film concerned how a mild-mannered TV reporter – while trying to deal with his own lack of faith – was given a highly seductive and undeniably cool gift from the big guy upstairs himself: he was embodied with all of God’s powers in order to see what he has to deal with on a daily basis.  He also was given God’s extraordinary, omnipotent gifts to see whether or not he could do a better job than the Almighty himself. 

Part of that film’s drollness was embedded in how Bruce misused his powers.  He took advantage of them in seemingly normal ways (like making his wife have better sex with him and rigging professional hockey playoff games).  He was also very smart by organizing the world’s daily prayers in e-mail form.  However, the film had some sobering commentary despite its overt zaniness, and this occurs when Bruce does realize that – gee whiz – being God ain’t that easy.  I fondly remember one of the film’s funniest – and meaningful – exchanges when Bruce asked God, “How do you make someone love you without affecting their free will.”  God matter-of-factly responds, “Welcome to my world.”

As a comeback comedic vehicle for Carrey, I liked BRUCE ALMIGHTY for its silliness and spirit.  It also had its heart in the right spot.  I think that the makers of EVAN ALMIGHTY also had their hearts in the right spot, but their brains were curiously absent.  Truth be told, BRUCE ALMIGHTY was a fairly simplistic comedy with a one-note premise, but it went beyond its simple-mindedness and got some decent comedic mileage out of it.  It also wisely did not feel the need to be too overly preachy and sentimental. 

I think that the gigantic error that EVAN ALMIGHTY makes is that (a) it’s simply not very funny and (b) it’s an ostentatiously overpriced, sermonizing sitcom with little actual faith in it.  The fact that this film was made on a budget that eclipsed previous entries in the LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS films is kind of jaw dropping.  Exiting the theatre I was dealing with disparaging voices asking me, “So, is this what nearly $200 million dollars buys these days?”

The film’s laughably huge budget – and misappropriation of it – is not its only damning trait.  Even more blasphemous is its shamefully condescending and trite religious allegory that it tries to sell.  The movie has a cute and cuddly message: random acts of kindness will change the world more than any broad action.  Oh, it also shouts out to be-good-to-your environment or you’ll pay dire consequences.  EVAN ALMIGHTY is proof positive that some definitive divine intervention was required to save this mess.  When a film has a talent squad of reputable performers and tries to marry incredibly lazy sight gags and physical comedy with indulgent and dumb biblical allegories and further combine that with disaster set pieces akin to TITANIC, then you know you have a recipe for a inanely shallow, preposterous, and dreadfully laugh-free religious comedy.  And not only that, but can’t anyone have the nerve enough to do a faith-based comedy with a bit of subversive recklessness? 

Hell, even the OLD TESTAMENT had some edge.

Before I go further, I will go on record to say that I am a huge fan of Steve Carell’s work.  He stood out in his hilarious supporting character in ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY, as he did in a small cameo in BRUCE ALMIGHTY, playing an egotistical and amoral newsman.  He hit comic gold with THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, one of the best comedies in many years, where he showcased how he can alternate between his low-key everyman temperament and zany, capricious goofiness.  LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE displayed an even more subdued Carell, who managed to inject some quiet pathos in his subtly funny role. 

No doubt about it, he is capable of being insidiously funny, but he is essentially reduced to a camera-mugging charlatan in EVAN ALMIGHTY. Everything that he did so well in his past comedies has been reduced to lame and mindless gags involving him getting pooped on and being hit in the groin.  His reflex reactions to such occurrences are the stuff of B-grade comedic actors, and Carell is certainly better than the material he’s stranded with here.  God help him.

At least the first minute builds to the film’s only decent laugh.  The film begins with Evan Baxter (Carell) who still – for reasons inexplicable – has his anchor job with a Buffalo station, despite being utterly humiliated on camera via Jim Carrey’s divine intervention in the first film.  In BRUCE ALMIGHTY Evan was an unscrupulous a-hole and the first few minutes of EVAN kind of remind us of that.  During this moment he goes on air to say good-bye to his viewers and shows a montage of clips of how he went on to win an election to Congress.  Evan then turns to the camera with a beyond-obvious fake tear and says, “I feel just like that old Indian standing in front of all that garbage.”

Funny?  Yes.  Alas, it’s all down hill from that initial big laugh.

Amazingly, EVAN ALMIGHTY does not continue to paint the Evan character as a heel.  That’s a huge misstep.  Now, you’d think that a smart and sardonic script would have had a field day with showing how a lecherous fiend like Evan copes with being in Congress and his later dealings with a higher power.  Instead, the screenplay miraculously changes him into a PG-rated, affable, family friendly father/husband figure.   He has the obligatorical loving and idealistic wife (played by Lauren Graham, who seems utterly lost in her part) and three sons who think the world of him.  Of course, this all is set up for another one of those mind-numbing preordained stories of how one overworked hubby spends too much time at work and not enough time with the fam’.  There should be no doubt that – at some point in the film – the wife will have her things packed up with the kids and threaten to move back home with her mother.  Sigh.

Well, at least the film gives her a valid excuse for wanting to dump Evan.  It appears that God (played again by Morgan Freeman, showing unfortunately that he is far too good of a sport to be in this film) comes before him and tells him that he would like Evan to build a gigantic ark.  Why?  Because a gigantic flood will be coming…on September 22 to be exact.  So, he needs Evan to get to work ASAP so he can load up all of the animals and such before they go under water.  After some much needed coaxing, Evan realizes that God is serious (he Googles Genesis 6:14 for research purposes).  He especially sees that God means business after he starts delivering tons of wood and tools and even manages to turn him physically into a Noah figure (Evan’s hair and beard start to grow very fast, and when he tries to shave it, it grows back instantaneously).

Of course, his wife thinks he’s nuts.  Yet, his plucky kids help dear old dad with the construction effort.  Hmmm…slap me silly, but the film’s implausibility had me flustered when it shows a montage of the three constructing the ark which – in all fairness – would have been impossible considering its raw size (when the ark is finally revealed, it’s an impressive sight, so impressive that an army of a hundred workers could not have plausibly erected it so fast, but I digress).  Also, we get all of those predictable and dumb scenes where everyone around him thinks he’s a loon.  Okay, so you’d think that Evan would just show a demonstration of how his hair grows back right after he cuts it to his wife, kids, and fellow work colleagues.  Nah.  The film is not smart enough.  It’s on Idiot-plot auto-pilot.

Then there is the subplot involving a disreputable senior Congressman played wretchedly by John Goodman.  Of course, he initially seems like a good, decent chap, but he is later revealed to be a two-faced environmentally unfriendly politician whose scheming may or may not have something to do with God’s plan for Evan.  If seeing a talented performer like Goodman be completely wasted in this film is not disappointing enough, then seeing how the film explains how he, God’s plan, and Evan’s work are all linked together is even more sub-standard.  It’s one thing to have a preachy and safe faith comedy, but when it’s also servicing a witless environmental message, then you kind of want to throw your hands up in disbelief.

Then there are all of those animals and the film’s large-scale effects-heavy conclusion.  Much has been made about the usage of animals in the film.  Yet, there is very little, if any, magic and grandeur in the visuals when it appears that CG composition was used to place the animals in the frame together rather than using any painstaking wrangling efforts.  Yup, we get many stock cute animal reactions shots along with images of dogs sniffing at Evan’s crotch and an endless series of bird-crap gags (this film sets a Guinness Book record for most birds defecating on human shoulder gags).  When the ark is revealed and the flood inevitably comes, it’s initially impressive but it soon gets bogged down into a fairly routine computer generated action sequence.  Considering that this is the most expensive comedy in Hollywood history, EVAN ALMIGHTY sure goes out of its way to not show the money on screen.

EVAN ALMIGHTY is a comedy that professes to have soul, but has no tangible one to speak of.  There is a more sophisticated satire that could have been made here.  I fondly recalled one of my favourite newspaper cartoon strips, Gary Larson’s FAR SIDE, while sitting through it.  That strip often took sarcastic shots at God and religious themes without being offensive.  The film could have benefited from those strips’ reckless spontaneity and whimsy.  Yet, EVAN ALMIGHTY is too wishy-washy, sanctimonious, and sappy for its own good and squanders an opportunity to take the lovably loathsome Evan character from BRUCE ALMIGHTY and use him to good effect here.  Regretfully, the film sacrifices intelligence and sophistication with its humor and instead goes for Sunday school inspired religious lessons and juvenile, lame brained jokes.  Because of that, EVAN ALMIGHTY is nothing more than an overstuffed, unfunny bore.  More than anything, the film reminded me – throughout its 96 minutes – about something that the late Gene Siskel often asked about bad movies:

Is this film more interesting than a documentary about its actors having lunch? 

With its $175 million price tag, there certainly must have been a better film to be salvaged out Steve Carell’s off-camera eating habits.

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zero stars  out of  ****

Watching Eddie Murphy’s new comedy NORBIT is akin to being forced to compete in a physically dangerous extreme sport that you have no desire whosoever to participate in.  The film is a cruel, offensive, and categorically wretched cinematic endurance test of will and fortitude.  Being in a theatre for all of its 102 minutes is arguably less torturous than being tied to a chair and sadistically accosted by one of the psychopaths from the HOSTEL films. 

NORBIT is a cheap, worthless, unfunny stink bomb that showcases a veteran comedic actor making a novice mistake of being in a film that’s disastrously terrible in every conceivable way.  The very fact that the film does not even have the decency to be less than 90 minutes is an insult in itself.

There is not one joke out of the slimy, poop infested toilet bowl that Eddie Murphy and company don’t scrap out here in abundance.  Firstly, it assumes that famous male actors performing in drag is cutting edge and remarkably humorous (note: Martin Lawrence couldn’t do it in the dreadful BIG MOMMA series, so why try again?).  It also assumes that a comic actor playing more than one role is inherently funny, which – if handled incorrectly – can either be laughably entertaining or abruptly backfire.  Lastly, it uses fat people as a cheap reason for atrocious, offensive sight gags. 

Morbid, life-threatening obesity is not funny.  Trust me, as a person that has battled with weight issues for most of his life, being well above your determined and ideal weight is nothing to smile at.  When films like this make fun of fat people for the sake of entertainment, then there is something undeniably cruel-hearted and petty about it.  Yes, there have been other successful comedies that have utilized heavy-set characters to tell their stories, but those films never laughed at their characters; they laughed with them.  Movies likes SHALLOW HAL (an underrated Farrelly Brother comedy) and – ironically – Eddie Murphy’s first NUTTY PROFESSOR film dealt with obese figures, but those films had a certain level of sympathy and understanding for them.  We also liked them.  After suffering through NORBIT, it is clear that the overweight female character in it exists primarily for an excuse to laugh at her because she is an abomination.  There’s just something foul about that.

If you don’t know, Murphy plays the character under what seems like pounds of Rick Baker’s astoundingly realized rubber prosthetics.  As a matter of fact, the makeup is so convincing that it should make the film a categorical shoe-in for an Oscar in the category.  This may be the first film I’ve seen where the cellulite roles of blubber looked totally convincing.  Yet, while watching this utter marvel of special effects occur on camera, it ultimately left a hideous taste in my mouth.  Consider: countless hours – and an Academy Award winning makeup man – were squandered on this film when other for deserving works could have been focused on.  Hyperbole aside, that’s a shame of astronomic proportions.

This trainwreck of disgusting, amoral excess stars Murphy as the title character Norbit, who looks very much like a black, poor man’s Napoleon Dynamite.  Norbit is a skinny, insidiously shy, irreproachably geeky and a painfully awkward guy.  His childhood was not very kind to him.  He was abandoned as a baby (in an opening scene that is borderline tasteless; his infant body is thrown out of a moving car onto a gravel road, always good for a laugh).  Baby Norbit is picked up by Mr. Wong (Murphy character number two, all done in white face complete with slanty-eyed makeup).  He runs what every Asian man in Tennessee has – a restaurant/orphanage.  However, he is particular about the ethnicity of the babies he picks up.  When he realizes that Norbit is African, he pitifully states, “I won’t be able to give you away at all.”  Ho-ho.  He also calls the African baby the ugliest he’s ever seen, which is only the beginning of this film’s awful, gut-churning penchant for vindictiveness.

Needless to say, Wong raises the young Norbit and as he grows older he falls very easily for a fellow 5-year-old girl named Kate.  The two become such an item that they do everything together.  They even - as Murphy’s voice-over narration explains and a creepy shot in the film displays - poop together.  Anyhoo’, young Kate unfortunately gets whisked away at nine when she is adopted.  Norbit’s nerdy heart is broken, but he picks himself up in hopes of meeting someone new to start his life with.

Then he meets Rasputia.

She is one big, bad momma.  When she introduces herself to Norbit at a playground, she is ginormous, even for a girl of 10.  Their meet cute is odd enough: she manhandles two older teens from bullying him.  After she makes mincemeat out of the two youths, she asks Norbit if he has a girlfriend.  When she finds out that his single, she makes a decision right then and there that Norbit will be her new boyfriend…whether he wants to or not.

Ridiculously, the kind and sweet Norbit marries the vile Rasputia, perhaps partially because her three equally gigantic brothers, Big Jack (Terry Crews), Earl (Clifton Powell) and Blue (Lester “Rasta” Speight) kind of coerce him into it.  They also tell Norbit that if he does anything to make their sister unhappy, then he will be in a world of pain.  Rasputia and her brothers are real criminals.  They essentially run a construction company that is basically a front for corruption and extortion.  Their main ambition – after achieving city-wide domination – is to get control of Wong’s restaurant/orphanage and turn it into…a strip club.  This builds to the film’s only legitimate chuckle - the name of the club.

However, Kate (the beautiful and utterly wasted Thandie Newton) returns after a long absence and reveals to Norbit that she has plans to buy the orphanage and run it on her own.  However, she has a few stumbling blocks, like her on-again, off-again relationship with Norbit, her secretly scheming  fiancé Deion (Cuba Gooding Jr., in another embarrassing turn) and the devilish Rasputia herself.  Meanwhile, a couple of pimps are thrown in for good measure.  They are Pope Sweet Jesus (Eddie Griffen, dreadfully unfunny here) and Lord Have Mercy (Katt Williams, equally horrible).  They facilitate the script’s need for a lot of talk about bitches, whores, and pimping, not to mention that they help give Norbit an ill-timed makeover in hopes of him rekindling a romance with Kate.

NORBIT’s borderline predictability is not its only undoing. The story methodically chugs away with mind-blowing inevitability.  We know that Norbit will fall back in love with Kate, that Kate will reciprocate love back, that Deion will emerge as a two faced bastard, that Norbit will have to prove that to Kate, and that Rasputia will do anything to manipulate Norbit for her own wishes.  Again, this is not radical material here.  No, the most head scratching and flabbergasting part of NORBIT is its wanton desire to be crass and repulsive.

No expense is spared at showing how many fat jokes and pratfalls the audience is served up because of Rasputia.  Several scenes are feeble and dead-on-arrival for laughs and display a complete desperation.  We see a horse cry – literally – from Rasputia’s weight.  We also see a gross moment of her getting a bikini wax, followed by a moment where she goes swimming and shows off her tiny bathing suit (the attendant has to ask if she wearing bottoms because her belly obscures it).  We also witness other childish and stupid sights, like her beyond-large breasts hitting the steering wheel, her plowing right through a table while chasing Norbit, and in the film’s would-be hilarious montage, she climbs to the top of a waterslide and barrels down it with RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES blaring in the background.  She then hurtles through the air like a missile and ends up in a nearby pool, completely draining it as a result of her girth. 

Hardy-har. 

Murphy plays this character as a offensive caricature.  Rasputia is cold-blooded, ruthless, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous.  She has no redeeming qualities at all.  Murphy has played plump roles before, as he did with Sherman Klump, but the difference there was that Klump was a likeable and affectionate creation.  He created a real resonating character; with Rasputia she’s a one-note monster and perhaps the single most annoying on-screen personality in a long time. 

At least his Norbit is a lispy dork that is affable to a degree. The same can’t be said about Mr. Wong.  Sure, the makeup here is as fantastic as it was for Rasputia, but Murphy plays Wong with a revolting adherence to bad Asian stereotypes.  Funny, but if a white comedian played a crusty, bitter, and potty mouthed African character in black face, then he would appear like racially prejudiced personality.  Yet, when Murphy does it playing up to incredulously foul Asian stereotypes, he thinks it’s a hoot.  I wanted to shut my eyes and assume the fetal position every time he spoke as Wong.  It’s like I time traveled to watch some bad, Vaudevillian act 100 years removed from any progressive level of acceptance of other ethnicities.

And what the hell is a gorgeous, luminous, and gifted actress like Thandie Newton doing in this mess?  How can one go from giving an Oscar nomination worthy performance in CRASH to this filth?  I am less surprised by Cuba Gooding Jr’s participation here.  It seems like eons ago that he won an Oscar for his performance in JERRY MAGUIRE.  It’s sad and pathetic to see a once promising actor reduce his standards and morals to appear in films like CHILL FACTOR, SNOW DOGS, and the unreservedly bad BOAT TRIP, thus ruining his reputation.  Gooding can now add NORBIT to his resume of humiliation.  Sorry, but it appears that his career peaked with “show me the money.” 

NORBIT revels in complete and imbecilic mediocrity, which is all the more damning when one considers that Eddie Murphy co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in the film in no less than three equally unfunny parts.  There is no doubt that Murphy – many years ago – was a comedic force to be reckoned with.  NORBIT strips all of that away with one effortless stroke by playing up to offensive jokes that include orphans, racist portrayals of Asians and overweight women, and a slew of other flatulence-laced sight gags that are developed and implemented with a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard level of annoyance.   By appearing in yellow face as a acid-tongued and bigoted Asian and in a huge rubber suit as a reprehensible, stereotypical fat woman with anger management issues, Murphy here seems insistent on engaging in a parade of the monumentally unfunny.  There is not one amusing or redeeming quality about NORBIT.  After a series of unattainably terrible duds like A VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN, THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH, DADDY DAY CARE, I, SPY, and SHOWTIME, it was momentarily relieving that Murphy garnered critical respectability with his Oscar nominated work in last year’s DREAMGIRLS. 

NORBIT all but destroys that short-lived notoriety.

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**  out of  ****

Steven Soderbergh is one of the best American directors of the past 15 years.  He has nothing creatively or artistic to prove. 

Nothing.

He began his career with such stirring independent efforts like SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE; he’s an Oscar winning director; he made such extraordinary films like TRAFFIC (arguably one of the decade’s best efforts), OUT OF SIGHT (one of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations), and SOLARIS (one of the best remakes and sci-fi films of recent memory).  He is a filmmaker not inhibited by genre, as his resume clearly proves.  He made THE GOOD GERMAN last year, a somewhat disappointing, but miraculous visual odyssey done in the style of a World War II noir.  Soderbergh is a director of variety and clear vision.

I guess that I say all of that as a way of coming to grips with my regretful frustration sitting through OCEAN’S THIRTEEN, the third (and hopefully) final film in the OCEAN’S trilogy that began modestly in 2001.  The first film, OCEAN’S ELEVEN was a remake of the classic 1960 Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr.) film that managed to achieve the very difficult task of being faithful in tonality to the original but still coming off as fresh and novel. 

Watching that first breezy and hip film was an exercise in seeing Soderbergh perform at the top of his directorial game in terms of him demonstrating his command over genre filmmaking.  It was also a sincere effort on his part to craft an entertaining, clever, and funny popcorn film, but not without sacrificing his Godardian aesthetic sense.  The film worked because of Soderbergh’s command over the material and also in large part because of the insurmountable star power that the film possessed.  Part of the fun of watching OCEAN’S ELEVEN was seeing big name actors have fun on screen.

Oddly enough, OCEAN’S ELEVEN was not a stand-alone effort, and a sequel, 2004’s OCEAN’S TWELVE, followed.  It was a film that I paradoxically found impressively and stylishly directed, but was lackluster and convoluted in terms of story.  The film worked by being yet another consummate bit of big celebrity glamour porn.  To watch George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and company return again to see them sink their teeth into wonderful comic dialogue and let their self-indulgent charisma and chemistry with one another bathe the screen was enjoyable.  TWELVE, much like its prequel film, exists as a work for the audience to drink up its uber suaveness.  The actors’ effortless and charming interplay – along with Soderbergh’s wonderful direction – made TWELVE a noble-minded failure.  These are all players with skill and intelligence, which is why TWELVE felt oddly perfunctory.

I felt even more of these vibes while sitting through OCEAN’S THIRTEEN.  Make no mistake about it, the film once again displays Soderbergh’s assets in full force.   Like the pervious two films, THIRTEEN is a great film to look at in terms of its style and mood - with its great retro score, slick camera work, and a level of precision and timing, Soderbergh again shows himself to be a masterful film conductor.  He knows his way through material like this and now that this is his third chance at it with the same actors working in the forefront, there should be little doubt that he could not make THIRTEEN as funny, energetic, and vivacious as its predecessors.

Soderbergh has proven he can film a good remake and has also demonstrated that he can made a efficient heist flick worthy of Rat Pack comparisons.  THIRTEEN reminded me constantly of THE GOOD GERMAN in the sense that Soderbergh is a keen and astute scholar of the cinema and knows precisely how to make a film evocative of a time period and genre.  The first OCEAN film also subscribed to this notion.  I guess that after the redundant sequel that was TWELVE my willingness to see yet another redundant and unnecessary sequel was low.  There is only so much ingenuity one can bring to the heist genre.  After making one very entertaining film in ELEVEN, I was earnestly hoping that  Soderbergh would be adventurous enough to know when to call it quits. 

Like the previous entries in the series, THIRTEEN at least does a decent job of developing and setting up the obligatorical heist.  All of the principle players are back: we get the group leader, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), Linas Caldwell (Matt Damon), Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner), The Amazing Yen (Shaobo Qin), Virgil Malloy (Casey Affleck), Frank Catton (Bernie Mac), Turk Malloy (Scott Caan), Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle), Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison), and Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould).  The first film had them striking a big score by ripping off Las Vegas casino mogul Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia).  The second film saw Benedict discovering all of the groups’ whereabouts and putting a bounty on their heads.  Ocean and company needed a new big heist to come up with payoff money for Benedict to leave them alone.  In THIRTEEN they – you guessed it – go along for the so-called heist of their lives, but in this case their prize is not money or riches, but revenge.

It seems that there is one pesky, shameless, and egomaniacal casino owner in Vegas named Willie Banks (Al Pacino, looking unusually stiff), who – in the film’s opening – royally screws Rueben out of a lucrative deal for running a new hotel/casino.  Banks essentially backstabs poor old Rueben out of everything he had.  Unfortunately for Rueben, the shock of the double cross is too much to bare and he ends up in the hospital as a result of a heart attack.  Sure, Banks may have knocked down the eleven-some that was Ocean’s group by a peg, but he never counted on the rest of them.  Danny, being a good and honorable man, vows at Rueben’s hospital bed to seek some serious revenge on Banks and his whole empire. 

No, he’s not going to whack him; he has something more inspiring altogether.  He has a twofold plan of attack.  First, he will crush the hotel-casino’s reputation by plotting an insurmountably difficult scheme of rigging slot machines, card tables…you name it…in favor of the players.  This in itself is a Herculean task, and the levels that Ocean and company go to exact revenge is astounding (one of the men goes as far as impersonating a slave laborer and works in the Mexican factories where the casino dice are manufactured).  However, Willie ain’t no dummy and he has some of the world’s best computer technology available to spot a cheat from a while away.  The computer systems he uses are so advanced in terms of A.I. that they can even pin-point pulse rates in players to see if they are honest or not. 

Now, Ocean sees this as a big problem.  Alas, he and his posse see a way to overcome this by overcoming the system.  A simple power outage will not suffice; the system has contingency plans in effect for such an occurrence.  Only an apparent “Act of God” could dismantle it.  Rusty, being clever, says they will manufacture one.  They decide to buy an large underground drilling machine and use it to set off an earthquake, which will scare away all patrons and shut down the super computer for three and a half minutes. 

Hmmmm…I certainly would have liked a scene or two where the film shows us (a) how the boys transported a massive, heavy, mechanical boring machine secretly into Vegas undetected, (b) how they managed to drill without being noticed and (c) how they are able to find a drill seller so incredible fast…but I digress.  It seems like this particular aspect of the job would require Ocean’s Hundred, not Thirteen.

Problems arise when the drill goes haywire and the gang needs a new one.  Realizing that they don’t have the money for one (big surprise) and that time is of the essence, they all go to one man whom they know will have the money to help them with their caper: Terry Benedict himself, their old nemesis.  I guess that suspending your disbelief about the boys getting their hands of a vast underground boring machine was huge enough, but believing that the crew would go back to their enemy is an even larger stretch.  However, Benedict does not make it easy.  He will help them only on two conditions.  First, he wants in for $72 million and second he wants Ocean and crew to steal $250 million  dollars worth of diamonds from Banks.  Yet, he is quick to point out that he does not want the diamonds; he only wishes to see Banks embarrassed and suffering, as do the boys.

I imagine that dissecting the film’s lack of a plausible plot along with its incessant disregard to common sense and logic is beside the point.  OCEAN’S THIRTEEN,  like the previous entries in the series, are all about eye candy and slick coolness.  The film is primarily concerned with immersing us in hero worship of the well-dressed, quick witted, and trendy rogues that Ocean and his group are.  Surely, watching Clooney, Damon, Pitt and the rest of the clan is fun, but too much of THIRTEEN is awash in a level of petty casualness. 

There is very little in the way of character development in the film; it’s all concerned with character interplay.  Plus, we’ve  seen that good actors that populate this film can do this material blindfolded with both hands tied behind their backs.  There are no doubts that the actors are having fun with reprising their parts for the third time, but they most certainly look bored-as-ever doing so.  The film never pauses to develop new character dynamics or to flesh them out any further than they have been.  THIRTEEN is a somewhat wasted and excessive exercise in movie star vanity run amok. 

I have always appreciated Clooney and Pitt, but they sleepwalk through their performances here.  Sure, they are dignified and refined, but they are essentially extrapolating from what worked in the past films.  It is equally numbing to see other gifted talent like the great Don Cheedle get sidelined with mechanical and stilted dialogue.  Al Pacino himself, who is capable of being an explosive and dangerous screen presence, is kind of feeble as the evil casino owner.  He, like most of the other actors, goes through the motions here.  He never once seems menacing or truly evil.

Newcomer to the series, Ellen Barkin, (still a beautiful sight) has a feisty spiritedness in her small roll as Wallie’s lieutenant of sorts (she fills the feminine gap left by Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones; their disappearance in this third film is barely alluded to).  Only Matt Damon seems to be having any real sense of duty third time out.  His Linus is curiously goofy and bumbling compared to the calm, collected, and sophisticated facades of his partners.  Damon is always good at light comedy and puts in a respectable effort.  I only wish the same were true for all of the other participants.

OCEAN’S THIRTEEN wants to be a supreme implementation of style and movie star power.   Yet, coolness is now remorsefully replaced by smugness in this third outing for Ocean’s group of high stakes con men.  With a mechanical and predictable plot that sputters along and fails to travel new territory, mawkishly phoned-in performances by most of its leads, and a genuine lack of surprises or intrigue, OCEAN’S THIRTEEN is a rather comatose heist film.  It’s not undone by the effort of its director (Soderbergh, to his ultimate credit, never makes the film dull and lifeless to view), but rather its worn out by exhausted characters and material.  This ho-hum enterprise does little to take the series in any new-fangled direction.  This results in making OCEAN’S THIRTEEN feel like a party with people you liked hanging out with once before, but grew more tired off with each subsequent engagement.  Celebrity presence on auto-pilot alone can’t hold a film together.  Because of this, THIRTEEN is artificial and intuitively uninspiring fluff.  And watching the supremely gifted Soderbergh slum through the same tired material again is like seeing a child prodigy be taken out of his honors studies and placed in a remedial classroom.

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****  out of  ****

“I steal from every single movie ever made….Great artists steal, they don’t do homages.”

- Quentin Tarantino

RESERVOIR DOGS has one of the cinema’s great introductory scenes.  It begins simply and quietly with an endlessly spiralling camera and focuses on a series of tough guys smoking, drinking endless amounts of coffee, and verbally jabbing with one another about many pertinent topics.  Some of them include whether or not Madonna’s LIKE A VIRGIN was about a girl that had main preoccupation in life to find a well-endowed man with the largest male organ possible.  We also get a terrifically spirited conversation about the nature of tipping.

One of the young men refuses to tip.  Why?  Maybe it was because the waitress he had was not friendly enough in his book.  Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she only refilled his coffee three times, not his self-imposed mandatory six times that he has grown to expect.  He also goes out of his way to specify how society in general has some sort of unwritten rule of conduct when in comes to tipping people of certain occupations and not others (I agree with him on this point, having been a gas pumper for most of my teen life in bitter Saskatchewan winters and never received one gratuity). 

In his final summation, he states, “I don’t tip because society says I have to.  All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I’ll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it’s for the birds.  As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doing their job.”  His boss comes by and dryly and hilariously deadpans back to him, “Cough up a buck ya cheap bastard.”

Welcome to Quentin Tarantino-land.

RESERVOIR DOGS opened with a whimper at the North American box office back in 1992, but it would go on to become one of the most critically revered, influential, and popular independent crime films of the decade.  It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and then went on to have a rather inauspicious debut on only 19 screens in the US and made under $200,000 its first week.  It did expand to 61 theatres and went on to finish with $2.8 million.  In terms of financial success, RESERVOIR DOGS barely clawed its way into the consciousness of mainstream American audiences. 

Yet, when it saw its release on home video, it became a cult hit.  The film recently was voted “Best Independent Film Ever” by Empire Magazine and even was voted “Most Influential Movie of the past 15 years” by the same magazine.  The IMDB lists the film #63 out of 250 on the Best Films of All-Time as voted by readers.  All of these accolades for a film that cost peanuts, whose first draft was written in three weeks, and whose writer/director/star had never previously made a feature film, never went to film school, and whose previous credits include a guest walk-on on TV’s GOLDEN GIRLS.

RESERVOIR DOGS is by no means one of the best films of its decade, but it does deserve an honorable mention.  It still remains a wonderfully conceived, directed, and written work, and its importance on the modern movie world should not be diminished.  It gave life to a seemingly old and stale genre and infused in it some much needed energy, spunk, and – most importantly – hipness, attitude, and intelligence, especially from a dialogue standpoint.  The film shows a remarkable mastery of the material, which is all the more significant considering the relative filmmaking virgin that Tarantino was in the early 90s.  Yet, Tarantino knew precisely what he wanted and the results can now be considered, even 15 years later, to be cutting edge.

The film should be seen, in direct retrospect, as one made by a novice director who was himself a work in progress.  RESERVOIR DOGS contains many of the staple elements that would make all future Tarantino works what they are (most specifically, amazingly fluid and rapid fire dialogue ripe with obscure pop culture references; a breezy and stylistic shooting aesthetic; and a disjointed and fracture narrative).  Certainly, broken up storylines were hardly nothing new (CITIZEN KANE pre-dates DOGS by 50 years), but Tarantino imbedded in a lethargic genre a much need freshness. 

His command of dialogue has seen comparisons to David Mamet and Elmore Leonard, and with DOGS and future films (like his masterpiece, PULP FICTION), Tarantino indubitably became the most imitated screenwriter of the last decade.  After DOGS and especially after FICTION, more young directors made fruitless attempts to duplicate his films, oftentimes with decidedly questionable results (films like 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, SUICIDE KINGS, and KILLING ZOE come immediately to mind).  DOGS, in essence, created a new type of irreverent, self-aware crime thriller.

Tarantino’s directorial career is now the stuff of movie lore.  He never went to film school.  Instead, he –as he has always asserted - went to films.  He got his film school education working at a Los Angeles video store, where he willfully whored himself out to as much free rentals as he possible could, gorging on pictures of various obscure genres.  His aims at making DOGS was initially modest.  His original plans were to shoot the film with his buddies on a shoestring budget of $30,000 with a black and white 16mm camera. 

He would then receive an answering machine message that would change his life forever. 

Harvey Keitel contacted the then young filmmaker and asked if he could not only be in the production, but produce and help find financial bankers.  Keitel managed to get a copy of the script via an acquaintance of the film’s other producer, Lawrence Bender (who went on to produce many future Tarantino pics).  With Keitel’s name on the marquee, the film was able to secure a vastly superior $1.5 million dollar production budget.  Keitel, in pure hindsight, was the savior of Tarantino’s career.  Without his intervention, the film – and all of Tarantino’s future works – could have never seen the light of day.

The money was fairly high for an independent film, but monumentally low by contemporary Hollywood standards of the time.  As a matter of fact, the film’s financing was so low that many of the actors in the film had to use there own clothing as their character’s wardrobe (the gaudy track jacket wore by Chris Penn in the film is indeed his own).  The film’s now legendary black suits with white shirt and black tie were courtesy of a designer who loved American crime films.

By his own admission, DOGS was made primarily based on his fondest impressions of some of his favourite films.  He is quick to go on record by saying that his works are not homages; he simply borrows.  That’s a staple of Tarantino’s future works as well: their willingness to borrow heavily from past films, albeit very obscure ones at that.  This is all not to say the DOGS and all other works are downright copies of past films, but Tarantino’s collected body of work reveals a love and understanding of the cinema.  No other director displays his sensibilities and tastes in other films as much as he does with his own movies.

If one goes beyond a cursory look at DOGS, its influences can easily be seen.  Firstly, Tarantino was vastly inspired by Asian cinema, particularity Hong Kong action films, which would also seen fruition in the KILL BILL series later on.  The film’s script itself bares many resemblances to a 1987 film called LONG HU FENG YUN (CITY ON FIRE), reportedly a favourite film of the director.  Both films have many correlating elements, like key plot points and most obviously in the “Mexican Standoffs” that occur at the conclusions of both films.  Both films are also about undercover cops that have to deal with their increasingly conflicted personalities.

French New Wave directors and films (most notably the collective works of Jean-Luc Godard) had a lasting impression on Tarantino, especially with their use of radical and unique editing and stylistic flourishes.  Even more familiar filmmakers like the heist films of Sam Fuller and the work of Stanley Kurbick come to mind (look at the suits the characters wear in THE KILLING).  If there is one things that can be categorically said about RESERVOIR DOGS, it is a film that – as all other future Tarantino works demonstrate – reveal a visceral auteur effort.  Any lay filmgoer that does not believe that movies reflect their director’s tastes and personalities definitely need to watch RESERVOIR DOGS.

Beyond its influences, DOGS had one of the best assembled casts of the 90’s.   As a heist/crime film, we get a relative who’s who of gnarly, kick ass tough guys.  The group’s leader alone is the personification of cool, detached, scenery chewing vitality. He is played by Lawrence Tierney, who brought a lot of method to his part as boss Joe Cabot (he did time for real ).  He is an experienced criminal who tries to gather a team of loud mouthed, tough talking crooks to score a big diamond heist.  He has one ingenious part of his plan: all members of the crew will not – under any circumstances – reveal to each other their real names, which subsequently means they won’t squeal if caught.  So, Boss Joe gives the crew color-coded pseudonyms (a concept borrowed deeply from subway-heist classic THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE).

This leads to one of the film’s funniest moments.  All of the crooks are gathered for an informational meeting to plan the crime and Cabot dishes out each of the men their “names”.  He names off everyone’s alias with ease and simplicity, not thinking twice about color metaphors or symbolism.  One of the sniveling and whiney crooks, played in a great performance by the jabbering Steve Buscemi, complains that his name sucks.  “Why am I Mr. Pink,” he questions.  Tierney provides two more of the film’s most hilarious responses.  First, he tells him,  “Because you’re a faggot, alright.”  Mr. Pink still complains.  “Why can’t I be Mr. Black?  That’s a cool sounding name.”  Again, Tierney wryly responds, “Just be thankful you’re not Mr. Yellow.”

We slowly but surely meet the rest of the hired goon squad.  The apparent second in command is Keitel’s Mr. White, who’s all by-the-book and no-nonsense.  Beyond Mr. Pink and White we have a slew of great character types, like the hot tempered and big mouthed Nice Guy Eddie, Cabbot’s son, played by the late Chris Penn.  We also have wise old veterans like Edward Bunker, Tarantino himself who – as mentioned earlier – gets the film firmly started with his virtuoso monologue about the real meaning of LIKE A VIRGIN.  Finally, we have Michael Madsen and Tim Roth, the former who plays a quiet and soft spoken sadist.  Roth plays the film’s most crucial and tricky part; he’s Mr. Orange, the new man of the crew, but what the other men don’t know is that he’s also Freddy Newandyke, an undercover cop hoping to bust them.

The film’s non-linear storyline was DOGS most noticeable element outside of its rambunctious and jovial dialogue.  The film does an fantastic job of knowing precisely where to intercut moments from the past and present.  We see bits and pieces of the heist story unfold as they’re intercut with Freddy’s back story as to how he managed to get involved with Cabbot’s gang and his overall plan to capture them.  What Tarantino does best is the way he starts the film casually at the coffee shop with conversations about pop songs and tipping and then thrusts the narrative right in the aftermath of the botched heist.  At this point we see a bloodied and dying Freddy be driven by Mr. White to an abandoned warehouse where the gang is supposed to rendezvous at after the caper.  The warehouse is the epicenter of the film, where the most crucial bulk of the material takes place.  From here were go back and forth in time and get all the details as to what went wrong with the robbery. The style here creates tension and interest in the underlining story.  We know what happened, but just don’t know how.

The film snowballs into the characters’ growing apprehension and suspicion with one another.  Just about everyone thinks that there is a mole in their midst, and the real thrilling aspect of the story is in their discoveries.  We grow to know that Freddie is a cop, and as he helplessly bleeds to death on the warehouse floor we see all of the other crooks bicker incessantly with one another to find out what went wrong.  Mr. White always manages to keep his cool and befriends Freddie even when accusations get thrown his way.  Mr. Pink is much more trigger happy and grows more crazed by the minute.  Then there’s Madsen’s Mr. Blonde who is the real scary one of the bunch.  He plays the role with such an emotional economy.  He’s such an inwardly mean and domineering presence that never screams to get an response: he’s all about attitude and looking badass.  This makes him unpopular within the group, but his mean-spiritedness is clearly reflected in the film’s most famous moment where he tortures a cop that he nabbed.

While all of the other men leave, Blonde is left alone with the rookie cop that he’s trapped and bound up.  He decides to viciously torture the man, not because he wants to get information from him, but only because his warped and twisted mind wants to hurt him.  As he turns on the radio, he grabs a switch blade and proceeds to dance and strut to Stealer Wheels’ “Stuck in the Middle with You.”  The scene creates an unparalleled sensation of black comedy and cruel ruthlessness, which takes a turn for the worse when Blonde slowly approaches his victim and proceeds to saw off his ear. 

 Interestingly, Tarantino dollies away from the carnage and only shows the aftermath.  DOGS has gained unfair recognition of being brutally violent (many modern action films have more than cranked up this film’s ante of bloodshed), but in its defense most of the carnage occurs off camera.  With the ear-cutting scene, we only see the results.  The shot alone seems indicative of a similar one in Martin Scosese’s TAXI DRIVER where he pans away into black space as Travis Bickle gets turned down for a date on a pay phone.  Both moments in the films reflect that it is often what we don’t see that is most effective.  In Scorsese’s film, he spares us of seeing the pain in Bickle’s eyes.  In DOGS Tarantino has mercy on us by not showing Blonde’s actions.  In a way, not seeing what Blonde does makes him all the more terrifying.

The film itself has many other fine, memorable moments.  A later scene that shows Freddie rehearsing with a cop friend about how he will “perform” in front of the criminals is inspired.  There are also numerous scenes which sparkle with Tarantino’s razor sharp dialogue.  It’s really wonderful to see these robbers actually engage in conversations about everyday things instead of the standard type of perfunctory dialogue that most witless films use to forward the plot.  As demonstrated In DOGS and later films like PULP FICTION, JACKIE BROWN, and the KILL BILL series, Tarantino will be remembered as a filmmaker who is able to so fluently and easily give his personas personality through his intelligent and verbose dialogue.  Even when characters have an exchange about something as inconsequential as Pam Grier movies,  it creates a realism and spontaneity to the characters.  Certainly, real lowlifes have conversations like this.  What DOGS epitomizes is the notion that a film’s characters need to have character.  Tarantino, better than any modern filmmaker, has a spot-on sense of the rhythmic lingo of colloquial speech.

I think that another aspect of the film that works is its scatological wit.  DOGS is vulgar (its R-rated script uses everyone’s favorite f-bomb vulgarity 272 times in its 99 minutes)  and masculine to its core (there is not one female part in the film).  Seeing these testosterone induced men engage hyperactively through the particulars of the failed crime creates an odd level of dark comedy amidst all of the chaos.  Buscemi is one of the best actors at being a hyper-agitated presence, and he is offset by the sophisticated demeanour of Mr. White (Keitel is always a commanding presence).  Chris Penn has a field day playing the boss’ son with an ever-suspicious eye, and Madsen plays his Elvis-coifed killer with a sickening, introverted edge.  Roth’s Freddie has the film’s most interesting and layered dynamic.  He grows to both like and chastise the men he infiltrates.  When the film finally boils over to its Mexican standoff final scene, where all of the major characters are one trigger away from death, the film creates real intensity and pathos.

RESERVOIR DOGS remains to this day one of the more indelible crime thrillers of the last 15 years.  It re-established the genre as one with vitality and creative gusto, thanks in large part to the then novice writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s blending of obscure cinematic references and his limitless skill with polished and layered dialogue.  As a first time filmmaker in 1992, Tarantino laid is claim to be a director of confidence and authority with his mastery of creating a dense atmosphere for his desperado universe.  The film contains the key fundamental ingredients that would go on to make his future films, like PULP FICTION, to be among the finest and most often-imitated films of their decade.  RESERVOIR DOGS is assuredly an exercise in wicked, exercise style, but it still has undeniable substance beneath it, something that far too many aspiring filmmakers who make Tarantinoesque works fail to do.  As one of the most influential independent efforts of the 90’s, DOGS deserves its accolades as being the hypodermic needle to the heart of the film industry which launched a series of uninspired imitators.  It also introduced a new breed of director that awoke the film world out of its complacent slumber.

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**  out of  ****

I will start by review of MR. BROOKS by saying something rather blunt:

Gary Cooper would have made a horrible Nazi.

Okay…hear me out.

I have always been a staunch Kevin Costner apologist.  He has a sort of easy-going, restrained charm and charisma.  He will never be remembered as an actor of broad range (key point: ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, where he feebly tried to approximate an English accent…yikes!), but he has always infused in his roles an innate earnestness, likeability, and soft spoken vitality.  He has made some of the best films of the last 20 years (FIELD OF DREAMS and DANCES WITH WOLVES) and has been in some duds (DRAGONFLY and 3000 MILES TO GRACELAND comes immediately to mind).  Yet, Costner is kind of an appealing actor the way Gary Cooper was.

I think that the comparison has merit and weight.  Cooper himself was noted as an actor that will always be personified with playing to his strengths, which in his case was an understated acting style that contains equal parts stoicism and introverted intensity.  This, of course, made him a legend in the western genre and allowed for him to achieve the level of Hollywood icon.  However, no one would ever take Cooper seriously if he attempted to play opposite of his innate strengths as an actor.  Cooper was at his best making Gary Cooper films.  There is something to be said about actors taking risks and going down new creative territory with their careers.  However, there just reaches a point where one has to be realistic with expectations.

Honestly…would anyone have ever taken Cooper seriously as a vile and repugnant character like…say…a Nazi?

Unlikely.

This builds, of course, to my main reservation with MR. BROOKS, an interesting and frequently intriguing – if not mishandled – new thriller.  The film has a kind of odd mixture of being absolutely implausible and genuinely tense and creepy.  It has few dull moments and has a title character that plays captivatingly as a Jekyll and Hyde dual personality that is constantly at odds with one another.  As a psychological thriller, MR. BROOKS is both absurd and strangely entertaining; it’s one of those films where, with the right mindset, you are able to look beyond its sometimes ridiculous plot developments and simply go with it.  Unfortunately, the whole enterprise is done in by the fact that it seems to typify how bad miscasting can hurt a film overall.

In its case: Kevin Costner is cast as a schizophrenic serial killer.

Ooooookay.

Costner, despite what other critics have said in the past, is a good actor that has fuelled a decent career based on his affability and low-key charisma.  He has played some of the most likeable characters in the past, and even when he played somewhat against type as anti-heroes (like a jail convict with violent impulses in Clint Eastwood’s vastly underrated A PERFECT WORLD, or as a drunk in 2004’s THE UPSIDE OF ANGER, his best performance), he still maintained a plausible screen presence.  Yet,  plausibility is precisely what Costner lacks here as the title character in MR. BROOKS.  Within the film’s otherwise chilling and shocking first few minutes, I found it next-to-impossible to buy Costner has a severely mentally deranged sociopath.  He is just severely out of his element here.

I not sure why he not only agreed to star in the film, but co-produce it as well.  Perhaps the real problems with his work in MR. BROOKS is it the execution of the character itself.  As the film sort of spirals down towards one silly and convoluted plot twist after another, I think that the performances should be self-aware and play up to the film’s overabundance of contrivances.  That’s Costner’s main problems because, throughout the film, he never seems to have a real clue as to how to play this nutcase. 

He plays Mr. Brooks with an everyman type of edge when he really should have gone for broke and portrayed him with a lunatic spirit and passion.  Instead, Costner plays Brooks as the actor has portrayed most of his parts, which is all wrong.  Beyond that, he seems to fail to acknowledge the sheer madness of the film’s story and instead of hamming it up for some campy, dark laughs, he lurks into a self-indulgent level of seriousness with the part.  The film is a parade of intentional and unintentional laughs.  Costner’s Brooks is so somber and stern in the role that he seems to forget to have fun with it.  You also never once buy Costner as a sleazy and frightening killer. 

I mean…was Christopher Walken not available?

Most multi-millionaires have exciting hobbies outside of work.  Earl Brooks takes it one step further.  In his regular life, he is a fifty-something businessman that has made his enterprise from a nickel and dime organization to one that deserves a rank in Forbes.  Life at the beginning of the film could not be better for the affluent and well-off entrepreneur.  He has just been voted as “Portland’s Man of the Year”, is adored by his staff and fellow collogues, and has a gorgeous wife, Emma (Marg Helenberger, still an complete babe at 48), who is as loving and adoring as any man wishes his wife to be.  Earl also has a cute-as-a-button 18 year-old daughter, Jane (Daniel Panabaker) who has just recently left the nest for her freshman year at college. 

Brooks has all of the spoils of any rich man as well.  His home is an architect’s wet dream.  It even has a special studio where he can engage in his love of making pottery.  Earl has a really good best friend in the form of Marshall (the great William Hurt) who likes to appease the darker side of him from time to time.  Marshall has a particular thirst for trying to convince his buddy to partake in his favouirite extracurricular activity:

Murdering people. 

You see, Earl is not only wealthy philanthropist, but he is also a deranged serial murderer know as “The Thumbprint Killer” by the press.  And Marshall is not really a flesh and blood confidant; he is Earl’s eerie conscience, a hellish and sickening alter-ego that communicates to Earl whether he likes it or not.  To Marshall, killing is as natural of a high as cliff diving, and he miraculously is able to convince Earl to commit murder again and again.

We, the audience, see Earl speak with the lecherous Marshall, but no one else around him in the movie sees Marshal, nor can they hear their conversations.  One night after Marshall convinces Earl to drop his wife off, Earl proceeds to go to his next victim, pleading with Marshall that it will be his “last.”  Earl is a smart, ruthless, and painstaking killer.  He never commits one out of passion.  He uses the Internet to research his prey as thoroughly as possible before the inevitable slaughter.  However, he makes one large mistake on his last mission: he kills the couple in question with the window drapes open and a creepy voyeur named Mr. Smith (Dane Cook) snaps some pictures of Brooksie in the act.  Whoops.

What then happens is kind of fascinating.  Instead of running to the cops, Mr. Smith approaches Earl and asks him for a deal.  Either he lets him come with him on his next kill or he takes the pics to the cops.  Also, if Earl kills him, the photos will leak.  Caught in a corner, and at the criticism of Marshall, Earl takes the deranged Mr. Smith with him on his next mission.  However, Smith is a real hot head and is not content with Earl’s patient style of research. 

Meanwhile, Earl has more problems in the form of Police detective Tracy Attwood (the rather wooden Demi Moore, as out of her element as Costner is), who is trying to capture the Thumbprint Killer once and for all.  She has her own problems as well.  She has to deal with a nasty divorce that could cost her millions (she is worth $60 million…don’t ask) and a criminal she put in prison is now on the loose and wants her dead.  Beyond Detective Atwood, Earl is faced with another real challenge when his daughter