Machete (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (113)

Machete (co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis) is a gonzo B-movie spoof based on a trailer for a phony movie in the middle of the Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse from a few years ago. Machete (Danny Trejo) is a renegade Mexican Federale who runs into the powerful world of Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal).

He escapes to Texas a few years later and is hired by a guy named Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Senator McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro) (who, it turns out, Booth works for), an anti-immigration demagogue gaining strength in the polls for the upcoming election. When the shooting goes wrong, Machete must go underground into a network of Mexican immigrants (called The Network!) to save his skin and fight back against a rising tide of anti-immigrant venom coming from McLaughlin and the renegade border sheriff Stillman (Don Johnson).

Typical of a good B-movie, he is assisted along the way by scantily clad hot women with big boobs (who are all too happy to show them). Machete not only kills people but he's a prolific fucker, bedding the head of the Network, Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), as well as the head of an I.C.E. task force, Sartana (Jessica Alba), who herself is conflicted about her position on immigration. (He also has a brief three-some thing with Booth's daughter, played by Lindsay Lohan, and wife - who are both thrilled to strip nude as well).

This is a totally fun and hilarious film to say the least. The ridiculous story seems to have more and more levels of intricacy as a way of thumbing us in the eye and keeping us focused on the immediate actions of characters rather than the bigger picture. The dialogue is full of amazingly written horrible one-liners, very self-aware of how they will be received. The main problem with the script (written by Rodriguez and his cousin Alvaro), and with the film overall, is that it is too long. Clocking in around 105 minutes, it should have been cut to closer to 90-minutes as it drags significantly in the middle third.

This is not a "smart" movie, per se, despite the rather heavy-handed pro-Mexican, pro-immigrant political text. This is a ridiculous gorefest where people are chopped apart by blades and blown up by bombs as a matter of fun. It very cleverly plays with genre conventions and constantly alludes to schlocky B-films, Blaxploitation pieces and bad crime flicks (think of Machete as a more rugged and Latin Shaft). It is not for everyone - if you don't get it, you're just not going to get it - but I think it's really enjoyable.

Stars: 3 of 4

The American (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (112)

Anton Corbijn's The American is very similar stylistically and emotionally to his 2007 piece Control. On paper the two films would seem like complete opposites. The latter is a very small biopic of the moody and suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis shot in black and white. The former is an action flick from a major studio about an assassin played by one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.

I guess it is an achievement that Corbijn is able to put so much angst and pathos in a film that would otherwise be so superficial, but it really just comes off as a funny marriage more than anything. Guns, car chases and explosions are not a good match for such long, slow, emotional scenes we get in The American. It mostly makes us keep looking at the movie stub thinking went into the wrong multiplex theater.

George Clooney is a mysterious hit man who doesn't have much of a past that we know about. As the film opens he's in some Swedish wilderness with a hot and naked girlfriend as a gang of bad guys roll up on him and try to shoot him dead. Of course he kills them (and the girlfriend for good measure) and escapes to Rome. There he meets his boss who tells him to go to a remote mountain town to wait for further instructions.

He goes to the town and quickly begins a romantic relationship with a prostitute (who is totally appropriately businesslike with all her clients, unless they look like George Clooney, of course). He then meets a woman who has him design a special gun for her - a gun she presumably needs for a murder job she has coming up. He gets to work on the gun, continues his relationship with the hot hooker and tries to dodge the pesky Swedish gang who has followed him to Italy to finish the job they started in the snowy North.

This is a very, very slow film with much more silence than dialogue. It plays almost like an art film (like Control) than it does a summer blockbuster movie. We don't really know anything at all about Clooney or what he does. Is making guns just a side project that goes with assassinations or is that his main gig? Does he have some particular pain in his past - like a dead wife or a mistake that killed a friend? We really don't know much of anything. (And, by the way, why the film is called The American is also unclear - he is American, but so what? He's also got some tattoos and likes doing push ups and staying in shape. Why isn't it called The Gymrat?)

Clooney is seen with a butterfly tattoo on his back and clearly knows about the creatures (he actually reads a book about butterflies at some point too). This seems way too blunt for my tate - that the guy is obsessed with these creatures that metamorphosize from one thing into another and then die quickly. Do you get it? That's what he does too! Oh!

The structure of the film is also problematic as we see Clooney getting the assignment to be in this small village in Italy and then nothing happens for about an hour. At the very end there's an action sequence, but it's very late in the game. This slow pace would work much better on a movie not about crime and guns, but it doesn't work well here. I was dying for something to happen through most of the film.

I was very surprised by Corbijn's use of basically totally unnecessary nudity throughout the film - mostly with the whore (though Clooney gives a show to those who would like his rippled body). A few times we see her stripped naked waiting to screw him - entirely unneeded for the course of the story (not that I minded, but it was weird and again, more "art house" than "multiplex").

I appreciate what Corbijn was trying to do here, but I think it's the wrong fit for this story. I think a more traditional fast-paced flow would have suited this film much better. George Clooney is not Ian Curtis (for a lot of reasons) and there's no reason to make him so similar and morose.

Stars: 2 of 4

Prince of Broadway (Tuesday, August 31, 2010) (111)

Prince of Broadway is a pretty typical story that I've seen at least a few times before. In this case Lucky is an illegal immigrant from Ghana living in New York City and hustling fake sneakers and handbags in the Garment District. One day a woman shows up while he's working on the street and gives him a young boy (maybe 2 years old) and says he's the kid's father.


Lucky doesn't believe it and can't figure out what to do with the kid. On top of all the problems of taking care of the baby, he is worried about how this will get in the way of him selling his merch. He bitches about his situation to anyone who will listen to him - basically bitching for most of the film about how much his life sucks. Lucky tries to get his girlfriend ho help him, but she leaves him when he can't get his act in gear fast enough. He is forced to grow up quickly and learn to be a father overnight.


In the mid 1980s, this same basic story was called 3 Men and a Cradle or 3 Men and a Baby. (OK, those were about three men, not just one, but in the big view they are the same story.) In the 1990s it was called Big Daddy; now it's called Prince of Broadway. I guess the original twist this time is that it's about a poor illegal immigrant guy rather than the other films about more established white guys. But Lucky's illegal-ness is not really what this movie is about. Yes he says he can't go to the police with the kid because they'll arrest him for his status, but the movie is really about how the kid helps Lucky grow up - the same way Adam Sandler, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson and Tom Selleck (and those three French guys) were forced to grow up in their movies because of their kids.


What makes this movie especially frustrating is how much time Lucky spends complaining about the baby and how little time he spends actually engaging with him. He pushes the kid around in a stroller for a few months before giving it a name (when he gets the kid from the mother he doesn't know his name). One day well into their time together he starts calling the child Prince and decides he likes him. We don't really see the growth from disliking him to loving him - it's much more binary than that.


Director and co-writer Sean Baker uses a rather effective hand-held camera for most of the shooting here, putting us directly inside the back rooms where Lucky sells his fake goods. This is a nice touch, but doesn't fix the larger problems with the script that are still here. Ultimately this is a pretty trite story that spends too much time covering recycled material rather than examining the world of New York's illegal immigrants, which would have made for a much more interesting story.


Stars: 1.5 of 4

Change of Plans (Sunday, August 29, 2010) (110)

Change of Plans is a very tidy, writerly dramady about a big group of friends who gather for a dinner party. In the group there are at least two couples whose relationships are on the ropes and another few people who have major secrets they are hiding from the others. We see each story play out over the course of the night before jumping to the same night exactly a year forward.

One year later most of the stories have either come to a head or have been washed away by other events. One woman was hit by a car and is not in a ridiculously complicated wheelchair, one couple is in the process of getting a divorce, at least two of the people who are not married are having an affair together.

This is a cute, but ultimately over-written film that ties up much too neatly. The ensemble cast is good throughout, though none of the characters are particularly complicated. The best of the actors is Christopher Thompson (who also co-wrote the film with his brother Daniele, who is the director) who plays the most outside-the-circle character in the story. He and his wife are clearly on the rocks on the first night and having a rough divorce a year later. He's very good navigating the rough waters of this weird clique and maintaining his very posh, snobby demeanor.

There are some very nice directoral moments from Daniele Thompson, though most of the movie is rather beige and style-less. There is really nothing bad about this film, but there's also nothing very great about it either. It's nice enough, but utterly trite.

Stars: 2 of 4

Mesrine: The Killer Instinct (Saturday, August 28, 2010) (109)

The Killer Instinct is the first of a two-part biopic on French super criminal Jacques Mesrine who tore across France and Quebec from the late 1950s through the 1970s robbing banks, kidnapping billionaires and killing scores of people.

The story opens as Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) is in Algeria in the late 1950s torturing a few insurgents along with his fellow French soldiers. When he gets back from the war, his loving father has arranged a nice, respectable job for him in a factory. He wants none of this and falls back in with his childhood best buddy, Paul, who introduces him to crime-boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu).

Mesrine stars running small jobs for Guido (robbing houses, beating up rogue pimps) and builds his reputation and his lust for blood and violence. At some point he goes to Spain with Paul and knocks up a woman there who he marries and has three kids with. Ultimately he has to leave France on the lam and ends up in Montreal with his new girlfriend Jeanne. There they keep robbing, kidnapping and killing, ultimately getting caught and locked up in maximum security prison. Mesrine breaks out, of course, and then returns to the prison to take out his frustrations on the warden.

More than a proper narrative, the story is simply a string of action pieces, one leading to the next, leading to the next. There is very little motivation for these sequences. Mostly he commits a crime, gets away from it, and just when you think he'd be wise to stop, he commits another crime - as if addicted to the thrill. Characters come and go with little explanation (only minutes after his wife leaves him to return to Spain, we meet Jeanne who picks up with him on a robbery with no explanation), and locations change dramatically from one moment to the next.

Vincent Cassel is good in the role, however the writing of the character is so limited there's not very much for him to work with. We never really understand what drives Mesrine or what he gets out of the violence. We see that he gets bored with a simple domestic lifestyle, but we never totally understand why he does what he does. Depardieu is also a good enough actor to make Guido work enough, but in the end he is just another banal "type" - the crime boss - and not really three-dimensional.

Director Jean-Francois Richet has some very elegant moving camera moments and adds some rather nice touches to the work. At moments in the early going of the film, it feels like we're watching Goodfellas. We see the back-room deals that run the crime world and see the access that criminals have in Paris (especially with pimps and whores). What follows is mostly fun, but it's all over the place and hard to follow. I would hope the second film will have a bit more structure and a bit more insight. At least it will have a lot more Ludivine Sagnier. Thank god for that!

Stars: 2 of 4

Cairo Time (Tuesday, August 24, 2010) (108)

There is not a heck of a lot of story in Ruba Nadda's Cairo Time. Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), a middle-aged American woman visiting the Egyptian capital to see her husband who is a U.N. aid worker in Gaza, meets Tareq (Alexander Siddig), a youngish good-looking guy who had worked with her husband but is now "retired." As her husband is being held up by his the work and she is left to explore the city by herself, she and Tareq consider a romantic fling, but never really fully commit to it.


I guess there's something romantic about the "almost-romance" here, but I found it pretty dull and unmotivated. Juliette seems to be pretty happy in her life. She complains a bit about how her grown kids now have their own lives, and she's certainly not thrilled to be abandoned by her husband, but all in all, she seems pretty happy. There is no real reason that wee see that she would fall for Tareq, aside from the demands of the banal script and the romance of beautiful post-card vistas she sees around her.


Throughout the film the dialogue is laughable and Tareq suffers most from this. At one point Juliette is speaking about how she's never been to the Middle-East and he quickly interrupts her saying, "I don't understand why they call it the 'Middle East.'" Uh - I don't know how to explain it to you, dude, but if you're speaking a language developed in the West, there's the Far East and the Middle East. That's about it.


Moments later she says something about how her daughter is in college studying creative writing, to which Tareq jumps in inquisitively saying, "Well, how will she make money doing this?" This is not a rhetorical thing, the way two Americans might joke about how there's no money to be made in artistic endeavors - this is a serious questions. To begin to explain "creative writing" here is ridiculous, let alone suggest that Egypt is home to a long history of great "creative writers".


On top of both of these things is the concept that Tareq is supposed to have worked in the U.N. for a decade or more and the idea that he is so un-cosmopolitan is ridiculous. He's never visited New York or Geneva? It's not like he's some scarf-wearing Bedouin who's never seen Western stuff. This is just sloppy and silly.


One of the most significant problems with the flow of the story is that Juliette and Tareq really only begin their almost-romance at the start of the third act. Before that they're hardly onscreen at the same time. Most of the first two acts have Juliette walking the streets and back-alleys of Cairo in silence (well, actually there's a beautiful piano score and a very nice use of traditional Egyptian music, including the magnificent Umm Kulthum). Basically nothing happens in this film before stuff starts happening.


This film is basically the recent Irish film Once, but with no music and no story. It's about how easy it is for two people to almost fall in love. That is suggests that this is some mid-life, mid-marriage crisis for Juliette is rather beside the point. Nadda would have been much smarter to re-write the script a bit and focus more attention on the couple's relationship instead of making such a tribute to the gorgeous sights of Cairo.


Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Tillman Story (Sunday, August 22, 2010) (107)

I have to admit that even as a pretty avid football watcher (college and pro) I had never heard of Pat Tillman until he was killed in action in Afghanistan in April 2004. (In my defense, I don't really care about Arizona State football and the Arizona Cardinals were going into their 70th or so year of cellar dwelling around the time he started playing for them.) For me the original story I heard about him made total sense: As a meat-headed jock he decided to enlist in the Army the day after September 11, 2001; he was tragically killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan. He immediately became a national hero, in part because he played our national sport and in part because he gave up lots of money to serve in the Army.


Of course, almost none of that story is actually true. What came out over the next months and years was that Tillman was a wild individualist who did join after September 11, though his motives for doing so were always a bit murky. He was a very smart guy and by the time he was killed, he was basically totally against the war in Iraq and much of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. He hated George W. Bush and was a proud atheist. He was killed by friendly - not enemy - fire, although the Pentagon hid this fact for at least a month after his death.


The Tillman Story is a very interesting and heartbreaking documentary about how Pat Tillman's death was used by the Bush Administration and the Pentagon as a political cudgel, burying the truth and never owning up to the disgusting lengths they went to create a fantasy universe of heroes and American Exceptionalism. Director Amir Bar-Lev does a very nice job of weaving in the facts of the story with the emotional experience of his family and friends and the greater political meaning of these strands.


The film walks us through the main points of the narrative, from his background as a foul-mouthed wildboy jock (he and his brothers never met a use for the word "fuck" they didn't love), to his college career (with a 3.8 GPA... not bad!), to his days busting his ass to make an NFL team despite his rather average height, to his enlistment and service in two tours of duty. We see how his family was informed about his death and how immediately facts of the case were being kept from them.


For his family, there was the Pat they knew and the Pat they saw on the TV news. Senator John McCain made a sickening speech at his memorial service about how he was being "reunited with his God" or some such nonsense - of course Pat didn't have a God... but that was not something a politician or a 24-hour news outlet could admit to. The heroic prop he was turned into was disheartening to his family, and his mother, Dannie, began doing the job no journalist was willing to do: looking into the friendly-fire killing and finding out why it was covered up and never owned up to.


We should not forget that by April 2004, the war in Iraq was not going brilliantly. The administration had been embarrassed by the fraudulent Jessica Lynch rescue story and the damning torture photos from Abu Ghraib had just been released. The tragic death of a professional athlete (even an obscure one) became a life raft for military support. It could re-position the war as a battle of good against evil and lift it up out of the mud it was in.


The film is as much as condemnation of the press (especially cable news) as it is a condemnation of Rumsfeld and Bush (who are shown to be the dark, evil men that they are). We see how brazen the news companies were to tell a binary story of an uncomplicated man who died in action. Once it came out that he was killed by a fellow American soldier, it became a double tragedy, and he became a symbol for the confusion of battle.


Bar-Lev shows how television news programs used the term "fog of war" dozens of times to hold nobody accountable for the tragedy (lest the troops who actually fired on their fellow soldier be disciplined). And with nobody accountable, Bush and his cronies got away with turning Pat Tillman into something he never was. Even after all the facts of the cover-up were on the table, we see Wolf Blitzer still talking about how some general at the Pentagon "bungled" the story. There was no mistake made by the Pentagon. That general was following orders to lie and cover-up the friendly fire - orders he got from higher up the chain of command. Of course we never get that view of the story.


This is a very well crafted, well structured film. It presents the story in a way that shows the Pentagon, the news media, Bush and his posse as well as main street America all complicit in the cover-up of a truly terrible story. It is not preachy, but it is very powerful.


Stars: 3 of 4