Young at Heart
April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
There’s a movie in theaters right now about a bunch of old farts who get on stage and sing Rolling Stones songs. That movie is called SHINE A LIGHT, directed by Martin Scorcese, and actually features The Rolling Stones.
This is not that movie. YOUNG AT HEART (Also known as YOUNG@HEART) is a documentary about a New England choral group comprised of seniors citizens (Average age: 80) who sing a variety of contemporary songs in concert, including ones by The Talking Heads, The Ramones (”I wanna be sedated!”), Sonic Youth, James Brown, and yes, The Rolling Stones!
Directed by Stephen Walker, this was originally a BBC documentary, expanded to feature length. Bob Cilman, the director of the choral group, formed it in 1982 and it’s continued ever since, with various members.
The group has toured in Europe, although this movie follows the seven weeks preparing for a concert in their home town. Along the way they do a little Jailhouse Rock concert at a nearby prison.
Some songs give them a lot of trouble in rehearsal (”Schizophrenia” by Sonic Youth, and “Yes We Can Can” by The Pointer Sisters in particular), and there’s actually some suspense in whether or not they’ll be able to pull it off.
This is a funny and poignant film about not assuming you’re Too Old For That Kind Of Thing. One outspoken woman in the group is 92.
In some cases the members are fighting the clock, hoping their health permits them to be able to perform, or indeed, hoping that they’ll still be among the living come concert time.
This film is a delight, and there’s no other way to put it:
YOUNG@HEART ROCKS!
The Visitor
April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Thomas McCarthy wrote and directed this film (He’s also an actor on THE WIRE). He also did the excellent 2004 movie THE STATION AGENT, and this is a somewhat similar theme of alienated strangers coming together.
Richard Jenkins, a character actor whom you’ve probably seen in a lot of movies but didn’t know by name, plays Walter, a widower college professor in Connecticut. His wife died some time ago, and now he’s just going through the motions, teaching classes he doesn’t care about.
When a colleague asks him to present a scholarly paper at a conference in New York City, he goes to his second apartment there which he hasn’t been to in months if not longer.
To his (and their) great surprise, he finds two people living in his apartment, a Muslim couple living illegally in the U.S. Tarek is a drummer from Syria, his girlfriend Zainab is from Senegal in Africa, in a relationship that would raise eyebrows from some other Muslims.
They first assume he’s a burglar. As it turns out, they’ve rented the apartment in good faith from a con artist who somehow had the keys.
They vacate the apartment, but when he sees them out on a street corner obviously with no place to go, he offers to let them stay for a few days until they can find another place.
Gradually friendships grow between the couple and this guy. He discovers an interest in
drumming, and Tarek begins to teach him to play the drums.
Complications ensue when the INS becomes aware of Tarek’s illegal status.
This is a quiet, touching movie, that revolves around realistic characters from entirely different walks of life coming together.
Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
April 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The original Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is one of those guilty pleasure movies. It’s the modern day stoner flick. While watching it you know it’s stupid, and you can almost feel your IQ points dropping by the minute. But at the same time you’re laughing so hard you’re about to wet yourself. Guess what? The boys are back.
Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay picks up right where the previous movie left off. And I mean literally. When we rejoin the boys we are treated to what happens after you eat 30 White Castles. And that pretty well sets the tone. If you thought the original was politically incorrect and risque, well let’s just say they really raised their game in the sequel. They pushed the R-rating hard with some downright raunchy moments.
So, the boys are back from White Castle, and now they’re off to Amsterdam to find Harold’s would-be girlfriend and of course partake in some legal weed. In today’s world, airline passengers get a little nervous when they see anyone who looks Arab on their flight. And Kumar just cant wait til they get to Amsterdam so he is caught trying to strike a high-tech bong which everyone thinks is a bomb. Next thing you know the boys find themselves in Guantanamo Bay and “hilarity ensues” as they try to escape and clear their names.
If you’re easily offended, stay home. And this is definitely not the movie you want to rent and show during the holidays with Grandma, Aunt Bertha and Uncle George. Otherwise you may find yourself being dragged to church by your ear. Also, there’s not many ethnic groups that aren’t made fun of at some point during the film. And oh, by the way, it’s freaking hilarious!
We’ve always said if you’re going to go over the top, you’ve REALLY got to go over the top. Ladies and Gentlemen, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay went over the top, jumped back over and did it again. We saw it with a decent sized audience and the whole theater was laughing. Our sides were hurting by the time it was over.
This is a 5 star movie. We’ll watch it multiple times. We’ll have to because we keep missing lines because we’re busy laughing and wiping tears from our eyes. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even feel inclined to vomit. Go see it!
Highlander: The Source
April 18, 2008 | 1 Comment
I knew Highlander, sir, and you’re no Highlander!
Ah, how the mighty have fallen.
In 1986 there was a movie called HIGHLANDER starring Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod. It involved guys who were “Immortals”, existing down the centuries, who could only be killed by decapitation. If one killed another, he’d get more power, leading to some legendary final battle where the last two vied for a rather vaguely defined The Prize, which seemed to be mainly a burst of movie special effects. All this was window dressing for a neat concept: Dudes having swordfights hundreds of years ago in flashback, and current day in parking garages. One of these Immortals was Scottish, thus, The Highlander.
Then there was HIGHLANDER 2 (1991), a movie so incomprehensible that there are fans of the first movie who will tell you, earnestly, “There WAS no movie called HIGHLANDER 2“, hoping to induce hysterical amnesia.
Then came a 1992 TV series, which, after a rocky first season, became a fairly good show and ran until 1998, six seasons (and even had a short-lived spinoff). Adrian Paul was Another Highlander, Duncan MacLeod (”Same clan, different vintage.”).
HIGHLANDER III (1993) ignored the second film, and for that matter parts of the first film, and the TV series. But, all in all, it wasn’t a bad movie, just not very necessary. Essentially a remake of the first movie.
In 2000, there was HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME, a fourth movie, which attempted to bridge continuity between the movies and the TV series. Not a very good movie.
Then in 2007, straight to the SciFi channel, came HIGHLANDER: THE SOURCE, the fifth HIGHLANDER movie, and the first not to be released theatrically. In 2008 it was released to DVD.
It has the distinction of being almost but not quite as bad as HIGHLANDER II. Duncan MacLeod is back, and it’s set in some vague almost-MAD MAX future where society is falling apart.
There’s some mumbo-jumbo about The Source, presumably The Source Of Immortality, a legend among Immortals that everybody neglected to mention through 4 movies and 141 TV episodes. No matter.
We have another villain, called The Guardian, who, like other HIGHLANDER villains, seems to have a thing for bondage fetish clothing.
For some reason Duncan MacLeod’s girlfriend has been getting psychic visions about this Source business.
Hilariously, it’s announced at some point that all the planets in our solar system are moving out of their orbits into alignment. Nobody seems to notice this except the Immortals, even though we’re repeatedly shown this graphic of planets bumping around in the night sky bigger than the Moon. Also, it’s mentioned that this phenomena goes STRAIGHT TO THE CENTER OF OUR GALAXY. We wouldn’t be able to tell this for some 28,000 years, but apparently the speed of light doesn’t exist in the HIGHLANDER universe. No matter.
So we have our good guy, aligned with a handful of other immortals (Maybe all that are left), against the Bad Guy.
They run around Eastern Europe, and, as happens in HIGHLANDER movies, we get a final showdown between the good guy and the villain.
Adrian Paul tries to give some dignity to this, but it’s just bad. The villain is absurd, wearing a small version of a steam engine’s cowcatcher around his neck as an anti-decapitation device. He says everything in various funny voices, and occasionally is shown speeded up like something out of silent movie Keystone Kops routine.
So. Incomprehensible plot, not very good swordplay. Attempt to explain everything with an explanation contradictory and more vague than even the lame attempts of the previous movies.
Anything good about it? Well, we do get to see some characters from the TV series return. The Immortal Methos, and human Joe Dawson, a Watcher (HIGHLANDER Watchers are sort of like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER Watchers).
Other than that, drek. It takes a pretty bad movie for me to only give it one star.
But it’s still better than HIGHLANDER 2!
DVD Extras: An 82-minute Making Of documentary that is almost longer than the movie itself (and, unfortunately, more interesting). A tribute to Bill Panzer, producer of the HIGHLANDER movies and TV series who died in 2007. A storyboards-versus-scenes comparison. And a preview of a HIGHLANDER video game.
Emperor of the North
April 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This 1973 film by director Robert Aldrich (THE DIRTY DOZEN, and the original THE LONGEST YARD) is one strange movie. Finally released on DVD in 2006, it was originally titled EMPEROR OF THE NORTH POLE, but apparently changed because people were mistaking it for a Christmas movie. It’s about hoboes in the 1930s in Oregon trying to ride freight trains.
One train in particular is guarded by a notorious conductor named Shack (Ernest Borgnine). He likes to knock hoboes off his train with a sledgehammer. The movie opens with one guy falling under the train and getting sliced in half.
A-Number-One, who is more-or-less the King of the Hoboes, is determined that he’s going to ride Shack’s train. There’s a young upstart named Cigaret (Keith Carradine) who wants to get into this hobo secret society.
The last hour of the movie is a brutal King Of The Mountain game played atop a moving train. These hoboes don’t have anywhere they particularly need to go on this train, and the railroad probably wouldn’t go bankrupt if a few of them managed to ride the train, so it’s pretty much Men On Trains Behaving Badly.
Something maybe not readily apparent in the movie is that it’s (very) loosely based on stories by Jack London (CALL OF THE WILD), and the real-life hobo A-Number-One. In fact, Jack London’s hobo nickname was Cigaret.
DVD Features: Commentary by a film historian, theatrical trailer and TV commercials.
Leatherheads
April 4, 2008 | 1 Comment
George Clooney directed this comedy about 1920s football. It’s also a homage to 1930s screwball comedy, with George Clooney and Renee Zellweger doing a Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn imitation.
Clooney plays Dodge, a professional in the not-very-respected game of football, who’s getting a little too old for this stuff. John Krasinski (From the TV show THE OFFICE) plays a young World War I hero who, now just finishing college football, is convinced to Go Pro. Meanwhile, football is about to be transformed out of cow pastures and into the commercial venture we know today.
Renee Zellweger (who seems to be the Go To Girl when it comes to doing a 1920s movie) is a reporter ostensibly doing a puff piece on the team but actually trying to track down a rumor that the hero’s World War I experiences are much exaggerated.
What develops is sort of a love triangle.
This is a good-natured comedy that is funny, but unfortunately runs out of steam about 3/4ths of the way through it. Right before The Big Game finale, which is a bad sign in a sports movie. One problem is that Clooney seems to like all these characters so much that he can’t really bring himself to make anyone The Bad Guy.
How forgiving you are of the movie’s faults probably depends on how interesting 1920s proto-football is to you, and whether or not you know what 1930s screwball comedy is.
But Clooney has great comic timing, and he’s not afraid to poke fun at himself.
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