Don’t Fear The Reapers

Blade 2 models itself after the 1986 science-fiction flick Aliens, which is an excellent choice. Aliens was an outstanding action movie, and one of the few sequels to outclass the original. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning two, which is almost unheard of for any action movie, especially a sequel. It was director James Cameron’s follow-up to The Terminator, and helped establish him as a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. If Blade 2 just has to be a derivative mess (and as a sequel it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else), Aliens is a good choice for imitation.

Like Aliens, Blade 2 has a lone-wolf reluctant superhero with a difference. Aliens featured Sigourney Weaver as its action superhero; Blade 2 has Wesley Snipes back for a second go-round as a vampire-hunter. Both movies feature weird love interests; Weaver showing her maternal side in protecting a young survivor of an alien attack, Snipes falling for a shapely vampire (Leonor Varela). In Aliens, Weaver was teamed up with a band of Space Marines that were there primarily to challenge her and to die in noisy, complicated ways. In Blade 2, Snipes joins up with a vampire SWAT force known as the “Bloodpack”, who serve much the same function. In Aliens, the real villain (true to Hollywood’s anti-corporate bias) was revealed to be a profit-hungry corporation. In Blade 2, the vampire nation has its own corporate presence, to no one’s great surprise, complete with, er, bloodsucking corporate counsel. (As if it weren’t bad enough that vampires suck your blood; corporate vampires can presumably raid your 401(k) and suck the blood out of your stock portfolio.

The most obvious parallel between Aliens and Blade 2 is the villains. Here, Blade is hired by the leaders of the vampire nation to go after the “Reapers”, mutant vampires with superhuman (supervampire?) strength. The Reapers skitter through the sewers of Prague in exactly the same way that H.R. Geiger’s aliens scoot through the bowels of spaceships. And like those aliens, the Reapers have what seems to be needlessly complicated dental arrangements.

These are the primary, superficial traits that Blade 2 shares with Aliens, unfortunately, it doesn’t share much else. Blade 2 is more or less a run-of-the-mill, ordinary action movie, as unhealthy as junk food. To extend that metaphor, Blade 2 is marinated in blood and gore, breaded with chopsocky action sequences, and deep-fried in its own cliches. It features some dazzling fighting scenes and some interesting new anti-vampire weapons, but to no good end. It’s one thing, perhaps, to be desensitized to violence, it’s another thing to be bored by endless repetitions of the same violence, over and over again. There’s a scene where Snipes has to cut through a double-dozen stormtroopers to get to one of the vampire henchmen (Ron Perlman, from “Beauty and the Beast”). Snipes looks bored as he kills off the last of the stormtroopers, and Perlman looks bored waiting for him to finish, and if they’re bored by all this, you might be, too.

Blade 2 is also problematic because of the nature of its star. In this rendition, Blade is much less sympathetic than he was in the first movie. There, we saw him living on the edge, struggling with his vampire nature, stealing watches from dead vampires just to get by. In Blade 2, Snipes is tougher, meaner, and stronger, but he’s no longer interesting or special. In fact, he might as well be a computer-generated character for all the humanity he shows in this part. To make matters worse, Blade is practically physically invulnerable here, suffering all sorts of damage without so much as a scratch. You get the feeling that a building could fall on Blade without doing more than knocking his sunglasses off, which is no fun at all. (And action heroes need to be vulnerable now and then. Even Superman had kryptonite.)

Another element that’s almost missing from Blade 2 is the whole vampire ethos; Blade’s Bloodpack might as well be werewolves or dementors for all the presence they bring to the movie. Blade was decent enough to give us a look at the vampire underworld, but that’s not a topic that Blade 2 is really concerned with. The nature of the Reapers doesn’t help much, either; they’re a touch more vicious and bloodthirsty than regular vampires, but they don’t possess any of the signature vampire flair. They’re grotesque and weird, but they’re somehow not truly terrifying. In a movie that badly needs a sense of style and an impulse to terror to counterbalance the gritty settings and the overwhelming level of violence, the Reapers hurt Blade 2 more than they help.

By the end of the movie (which, of course, features a climactic duel with the top Reaper that’s two-thirds chopsocky and one-third Wrestlemania), there’s been so much blood shed and so many bones broken that the audience is ready to breathe a sigh of relief and exit the theater. Blade 2 features good visuals and good fighting choreography and decent mutant vampire villains and all, but it has almost no suspense, very little in terms of a sense of humor, no sense of the dramatic, and seemingly no real interest in its subject matter. Worst, there’s never a true sense of fear anywhere in the movie; there’s little cause for terror (or any other emotion, for that matter) in the money. Although it shares superficial similarities with Aliens, no one should believe that it is anywhere near the same quality. Aliens was the kind of movie that wanted to fly down your throat and pop out of your chest; Blade 2 just wants your seven dollars.

Campfire Classic

I was talking with one of my reformed slacker friends about the movie scene in Austin, when the subject of Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) came up. “He’s a great guy,” I was told. “We were pretty good friends when we were both living in Austin.”

I asked, “Is it true that he got the money to film El Mariachi at Pharmaco?” Pharmaco, by the way, is (or was, they’ve renamed it) a pharmaceutical research company that pays impoverished University of Texas students to serve as guinea pigs in drug research.

“Oh, yeah. That’s how I met him.”

If you know that story, you probably know the one about how Harvey Keitel got hold of the script for Reservoir Dogs and gave Quentin Tarantino a hand in finding the money to shoot the film with real actors instead of his video-store pals. Stories like these are to Generation X what the story of Lana Turner getting discovered at the soda fountain were to an earlier generation. Being an independent film director/producer/writer is today what being a movie star was to kids in the Forties, or what being a rock star was to kids in the Sixties. It is the coolest thing you could ever hope to be. (This side of playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, of course.)

The real legend of The Blair Witch Project has nothing to do with what may or may not be lurking in the Maryland woods. It has to do with novice filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, and how they turned a few thousand dollars and a few thousand feet of 16mm footage into the multimillion dollar blockbuster that’s got everyone talking this summer. The story’s familiar to anyone who’s caught any part of the tremendous buzz about this movie; directors Myrick and Sanchez recruited three actors, equipped them with cameras and sent them into the woods for eight days with little more than a promise that it might get a little scary for them alone out there. Combine this utterly unconventional approach to moviemaking with the unprecedented positive word-of-mouth that the movie received on the festival circuit and on the Internet, and it’s the sort of story that would make any aspiring wannabe director sick with envy.

The Blair Witch Project itself isn’t as compelling as the story of how the movie was made, but it’s not far behind. It’s a taut, scary horror thriller, one of the best of an increasingly bad lot of 1999 movies. (It’s a bit too early to tap as an Oscar contender, but one wishes Oscar would have a Rookie of the Year category.)

It begins in the most matter-of-fact way possible, with the now-famous caption: “In October of 1994, three student film makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland. One year later, their footage was found.” And that’s it. No fancy opening sequence, no list of casting directors or assistant executive producers, nothing to break the verisimilitude that all this footage was shot by three kids wandering around in the forest. (Which most of it was.)

The three kids are Heather, Josh, and Mike, played by Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams. They’ve checked out a couple of cameras and an audio recorder from school, and they’re on their way to the town of Burkittesville (formerly Blair, we’re told) to shoot some location scenes for a documentary on the local legend, whatever it is. One of the movie’s little conceits is that the trio carries two cameras for two different purposes. The actual scenes that they’re going to use in the documentary are shot in black-and-white on a 16mm movie camera. They’re also carrying along some sort of color camcorder that they mostly use to goof off with. So, the footage of Heather speaking to the camera in the town graveyard is in black-and-white, and the footage of the cast relaxing in the authentically cheesy motel room afterward is in color.

This conceit defines the look of the movie in three important ways. First, film from the two cameras is interwoven together, so the movie switches back and forth from B&W to color more often than the shuttle bus that runs between Kansas and Oz. Since both cameras are hand-held most of the time, the whole movie is herky- jerky enough to cause motion sickness in some viewers. And since cameras need light to operate, there are a lot of scenes that take place either in total blackness or in the eerie glow of a flashlight.

But the look of the movie isn’t what you’ll remember, isn’t what will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. The hyperbole about The Blair Witch Project being the scariest movie ever aside, this is a movie that will scare you. It may not scare you sitting in the theater. (Myself, I didn’t think I was all that scared, although it was comforting to have an aisle seat just in case things got a little too scary.) But there are scenes that will stick in your memory, that will haunt you at odd moments when you’re alone in your car or trying to get to sleep or when you hear a strange noise in the middle of the night.

The Blair Witch Project does not rely on surprise or gore, the two mainstays of the Hollywood slasher movie. Instead, it uses the rules of the campfire ghost story. Myrick and Sanchez know that fear is contagious, and they scare their actors silly, knowing that they will transmit the fear to each other and to the audience. They also know that they don’t need to show a lot of really scary stuff in the movie, just set up a scary situation and let the mind fill in the blanks. (Next time you get the chance to tell a ghost story at a campfire out in the woods to a group of kids that hasn’t seen the movie, tell the story of the Blair Witch and see what happens.)

But The Blair Witch Project is more than just a spooky ghost story, thanks to the work of actors Heather, Mike, and Josh. There are some drawbacks to their performance. They’re a bunch of Generation X twits, for one thing. They wear plaid flannel shirts and whine and moan a lot. Like Tarantino characters, they seem to have only two modes of conversation, obscenity and pop culture references. (”Did you ever see Deliverance?” one of them asks as they make their way into the woods.)

They’re highly dependent on emotion. As they wander through the woods with only a compass, trying to figure out which direction civilization lies, one of them asks, “How does east feel?” The ordeal of being lost in the woods drains them emotionally to the point that they have to stop walking and have a good cry every once in a while. (I kept imagining what would happen if you placed the squad from Saving Private Ryan in a similar situation, after Normandy, seeing piles of rocks and twigs might not be so bad.)

But these are minor quibbles. The cast does a great, intense, powerful job. There’s an unfakable genuineness and sincerity to their performances. We’re not just being told that they’re cold and hungry and scared, we feel it along with them (the hungry part, especially, given how much popcorn costs these days). Their slow, linear descent into the nether world of psychological disintegration is much scarier than the things that go bump in the night.

Donahue is outstanding, taking a part that could have been nothing more than a Jamie Lee Curtis scream queen role and taking it to the next level. The movie’s signature scene is hers, and her brittle, tense, unblinking delivery will stay with you. So will the last scenes of the movie, filmed in this, um… well… place…. with this stuff everywhere… and… well, I could describe it, but you’ll want to see it for yourself without me spoiling it.

One of the best things about The Blair Witch Project is that even though we know (or think we know) that Josh, Heather and Mike are doomed, we’re still rooting for them all the way, hoping that they’ll find their car and get back home so Josh can call his girlfriend and so Heather can to turn in the camera equipment on time. And as we root for them, we’re also rooting for Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the young geniuses who started with nothing but managed to spin straw (and twigs, and rocks, and slime) into gold. Box office aside, the real success of The Blair Witch Project will be the hope and inspiration it will give to the next generation of filmmakers, actors, and screenwriters seeking to become the coolest thing you can ever hope to be.

The Other Side of the Fence

The story of A Beautiful Mind, when you get right down to it, is simple, even metaphorical.

It’s like this.

There is, let’s say, a fence. A chain-link fence, a cyclone fence, like we say down here in Texas. On one side there are the people you see every day, the normal, the usual, the (for want of a better word) the sane. And on that side, you can look across and see the others, the different, the outcasts, the… well, let’s not put too fine a point on it… the mad. You can see them, and they can see you. You know the difference; you know what side of the fence you’re on.

But maybe… maybe you get close to the fence. It doesn’t matter why or how. You may have never intended to get that close in the first place. You get up close, and peer through the fence. You reach out to touch the fence. You put your hand right on it, feel the coldness of the metal. Except that it isn’t there. And - it may take you awhile to discover this - the fence is still there, it’s just not where you thought it was, and you’re on the wrong side.

If you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.

This is, in a nutshell, what happens to Dr. John Forbes Nash, Ph.D. from Princeton, leader in the complex mathematical concept of game theory, which explains all sorts of intricate social problems, everything from antitrust legislation to the NFL salary cap. At one point - although exactly where is difficult to pinpoint, at first - Nash crosses that hypothetical line and ends up on the other side of the fence.

That’s what the movie is supposed to be about, anyway. The problem with A Beautiful Mind is how it goes about being what it is about, how it fails to tell the story it ought to tell, how it wastes time on irrelevancies.

The biggest irrelevancy in the movie is, unfortunately, one of the most relevant doctrines in all movies. The Iron Law of Hollywood is that all movie stars must always be likeable, must always project that aura of likeability. Dr. Nash here is played by Russell Crowe, who is as big a star as you can get nowadays, so before he ends up on that other side of the fence, he must be likeable. If we don’t like him, maybe we can’t identify with him; maybe by the time he reaches the point where he’s undergoing the worst that 1950’s psychotherapy can throw at him, we won’t recognize him. So he has to be likeable, and the first act of the movie is devoted to that task.

This is more than a little problematic. Dr. Nash is not terribly likeable, by his own admission. Also, he’s a genius, and geniuses aren’t popular. (Holly Hunter in Broadcast News: “No, it’s terrible.”) To make matters worse, he’s a mathematician, and it’s terribly hard to translate that sort of talent to film. (A Beautiful Mind manages this by stealing - over and over again - the scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon draws on the mirror.) Worst, though, Dr. Nash is a twitchy, neurotic, awkward mess, and it takes all of Crowe’s considerable wit and charm to make him likeable. It also takes a good, grown-up performance by Jennifer Connelly, who shows us that Crowe is not only likeable, but also has the potential of being loveable. (Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate: “You just cannot believe, Ben, how loveable the whole damn thing was.”)

All of this is not handled with a great degree of subtlety, so it’s actually a bit of a surprise that the second act is handled with a little more subtlety than you might expect (especially with Ron Howard directing an Akiva Goldsman script, which is about as subtle a combination as Dick Vitale calling a game with Bobby Knight). We know that Dr. Nash is headed for the far side of the fence, but his journey is handled with compassion and concern rather than with the sort of drippy, goopy manner that Hollywood usually handles disability issues. We empathize with Dr. Nash, but we never pity him.

Up to a point, there is a lot to admire about A Beautiful Mind. The acting is superb, the set design is impeccable, the campus locations are gorgeous, and the story is handled with skill and a fair degree of understatement. Unfortunately, though, A Beautiful Mind falls far short of what it needs to be, of what it ought to be. The real meat of the story is in the third act, and it’s the part of the story that is terribly neglected.

You see… or maybe you don’t.

It’s like this.

Maybe you’ve never come across that fence before, maybe you’ve never stood near the edge, maybe you’ve never reached out to touch the cool metal and found yourself on the other side, if even for a moment.

But if you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.

You know the challenge. You know how it feels to get up every day, and how just that simple act itself can require all the courage you have and then some. You know how hard it is to simply persevere. You know what can happen when you don’t persevere, too.

The third act of A Beautiful Mind ought to have been about that challenge, about the ongoing struggle of dealing with a mental illness. In Dr. Nash’s case, the struggle is described vividly, but not in any depth. There’s a terrible, relentless sense of speed about the last twenty minutes of the movie, skipping over forty years of Nash’s life in order to get to what the movie thinks is the real triumph of his life. The real triumph, of course, is getting out of bed every day, coping with your demons, living your life; and if it is not the sort of triumph they give Nobel Prizes for, it is no less worthy, no less dramatic, no less important.

If you’ve never been close to the fence, maybe you won’t recognize the arm’s-length treatment that Howard and Goldsman give to Dr. Nash’s illness. Maybe it won’t bother you that the movie skips over the most interesting part of Nash’s life. Maybe you won’t notice the lack of focus on the part of the story that really matters.

But if you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.

Twilight Time

Blood Work ends where it has to end, with Clint Eastwood sailing off into a golden California sunset. No surprises here. But things aren’t quite what they seem. The sun is not setting on the movie and its story but on Clint Eastwood, action hero. Eastwood laid his Man With No Name and The Outlaw Josey Wales to rest in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven; now it’s Dirty Harry’s turn to call it a day.

Eastwood’s character here, Terry McCaleb, is a slightly smarter, more polished version of Inspector Harry Callahan, but the essentials are the same. McCaleb begins the movie as a hotshot FBI profiler chasing down a shadowy serial murderer known as the “Code Killer”. McCaleb appears early on at the scene of a bloody rampage by the Code Killer, perfectly coiffed, well-dressed, looking for all the world like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. McCaleb spots the murderer at the edge of an intrusive media scrum, and tries to chase him down. The killer goes over fences; McCaleb knocks them over. The killer jumps over boxes; McCaleb crashes into them. The scene ends with McCaleb lying on the asphalt in a narrow alley, clutching his chest from a sudden exercise-induced heart attack.

The action jumps to two years later, after McCaleb’s successful heart transplant surgery. (Throughout the movie, Eastwood absently taps his chest, as if to check to see whether his heart hasn’t fluttered away.) The heart transplant leads directly to his involvement in a murder mystery, which he solves in the same old way. Dirty Harry said that “a man’s got to know his limitations,” advice that McCaleb doesn’t heed. Despite incessant warnings from everyone around him to take it easy, McCaleb fights with suspects, eats Krispy Kreme doughnuts, fires weapons, climbs stairs at a good clip, and generally does everything that you shouldn’t do when you’re two months out of transplant surgery. This causes his cardiologist, played by the regally snippy Angelica Huston, no end of grief. McCaleb’s only concession to his health is that he doesn’t drive, depending instead on taxicabs and his neighbor Buddy (a blissed-out boat bum out of a Jimmy Buffett song, played to perfection by Jeff Daniels).

There’s not much to tell without ruining Brian Helgeland’s workmanlike, but admirable, script. Despite its reliance on old chestnuts like stern police captains and Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters and a little racial stereotyping here and there and everywhere, the script is pretty solid (absent one big gaping hole). The acting, too, is pretty solid, absent the incongruity of Paul Rodriguez as a tough-guy cop.

Eastwood directs with a light touch, and although the pacing is a little slow it matches the reflective, introspective nature of the movie. Eastwood by now has done Dirty Harry often enough to grow into the character, to feel comfortable in his skin, to be a little more relaxed, though no less intense. The key scene for Eastwood is in his doctor’s office, when he tells Huston that he has to chase down the man who did this “evil, hateful thing”, and we get to see what it is that drives Dirty Harry besides just testosterone and attitude.

Here we see Dirty Harry at the close of his career, still putting away bad guys, still squinting down the forces of evil, still with that telltale delivery and a face like twenty miles of bad road. If this is the twilight time for Dirty Harry, and for Eastwood as an actor and a director, it is a glorious twilight, shot through with professionalism and grace and a dogged willingness to deliver the goods. Blood Work reminds us that although we have to know our limitations, sometimes we can transcend them, too.

The Manly Art of the Con

Giovanni Ribisi’s character in Boiler Room does something I really like. He’s at home, eating breakfast, when he’s interrupted by a bored telephone solicitor ineffectually trying to sell him a newspaper. Ribisi is incredulous. “You call that a sales call?”, he asks, then prods the poor schnook into doing a better job of sales. Having talked the sales guy into giving rebuttals and not taking no for an answer, Ribisi’s character then hangs up on him.

I loved that scene, because it’s something I do myself (or did, before the era of Do Not Call). I spent two summer vacations in college trying to sell long distance and car warranties over the phone, and to this day I will hector any poor soul who has the nerve to call me with an incompetent sales pitch. (Lately, they’ve been calling trying to sell me on Caller ID to “screen out unwanted phone calls.” I say, “You mean like this one?” and hang up.)

Boiler Room is no essay on sales technique. At its heart are concerns of manliness and the lure of the con, the staples of any David Mamet movie. Only it isn’t: although the script pays homage to Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, it’s not a Mamet movie.

But all the elements are there: you have Ribisi, playing Seth, the young, innocent (sort of) initiate into the world of the cold call; the shady discount brokerage on Exit 59 of the Long Island Expressway, populated by fast-talking, hard-drinking macho brokers; the smooth, confident, profanity-laced talk (exemplified by Ben Affleck, in an extended cameo); and the pigeons, just waiting to be plucked by the wily pros. The name of the firm is J.T. Marlin, and its brokers are out looking for new fish to hook. (A really big customer is called a “whale” in firm lingo.)

Seth is our guide to this world. He starts at J.T. Marlin with the goal of impressing his dad (who is not impressed with Seth’s current job running a casino and sports book out of his living room) and to make a million dollars. Affleck’s character, the firm’s recruiter, is quick to tell his trainees that it’s only a question of when, not if, they become millionaires. Spurred on by this tantalizing prospect, Seth enters the J.T. Marlin training program, which consists of making cold sales calls almost like the ones I made when I was Seth’s age, and for not much more money. (Only AT&T never promised me any million dollars, or gave me anything but a refrigerator magnet. Not that I’m bitter or anything.)

Seth makes a Rake’s Progress through the world of J.T. Marlin, and it’s fun to see him get more and more self-confident about scamming rich doctors and wannabe rich salesmen out of their disposable income. It’s almost as much fun to see the antics of the other J.T. Marlin brokers as they roam the Irish bars of Long Island. (The movie actually begins with a party celebrating the end of an SEC investigation.)

Unfortunately, both of these subplots are much more fun than the real plot, which involves how and why Seth finds out that J.T. Marlin is crooked. The “how” is almost depressingly straightforward: Seth sort of stumbles into a series of little discoveries that add up to a big scam. He gets curious, and finds a few more things out, until he is able to deliver a maddeningly detailed and precise explanation of how, exactly, J.T. Marlin is able to sell phony stocks to clients.

The “why” of Seth’s actions — why he investigates J.T. Marlin, why he acts as he does in the final reel — is a little more interesting, although it’s never adequately explored or explained. My theory is that Seth’s experience running his casino has given him a good knowledge of how and why people gamble on dodgy stocks with the Dow above 10,000 (for the time being, anyway). However, it’s also given him a pretty good idea of what the house odds are, and he’s smart enough to know that the numbers don’t add up.

Boiler Room has almost every element of a good Mamet movie present but one: the twisty plots and cunning surprises that are the hallmark of any Mamet script. Boiler Room is like a live performance by a good cover band: entertaining, but nowhere near the original.

Boiler Room also serves one other great, albeit unintentional purpose: it’s a great advertisement for Ameritrade. See this movie, and you’ll never see your broker — or the guy calling to sell you a newspaper subscription — in the same light again.

Fractured Fairy Tale

There are any number of cameos in the new Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, all but the ones that I really wanted to see. Despite the very welcome presence of David Alan Grier, Jonathan Winters, Janene Garofolo, and a couple of others that I won’t mention lest I spoil the surprise, there is no reference whatsoever to Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman, time travelers extraordinaire. (For that matter, there isn’t any reference to any of the other characters in the Jay Ward canon, and Bullwinkle doesn’t even try to pull a rabbit out of his hat.)

Mr. Peabody and Sherman would really have fit in to the spirit of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, whose main characters are all refugees from the Way-Back Machine. The start of the movie has some of the best gags, detailing the lives of Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle Moose in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, since the 1964 cancellation of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show. It’s a bit reminiscent of a classic Saturday Night Live routine with Ed Asner going in to save Mary Tyler Moore from a life of reruns (”I like my life in reruns, Mr. Grant!”), but things are grim in Frostbite Falls as the residual checks get smaller and the forest is cut down. Bullwinkle is reduced to gags that weren’t funny in the Sixties (or the Seventies, or the Eighties) and Rocky is so dispirited he can’t even fly.

Fortunately for our heroes, kind fate intervenes (it does a lot of that) and Boris Badenoff and Natasha Fatale and Fearless Leader exit post-Soviet Pottsylvania to take on a new plan to conquer the world. They’re brought forth from the cartoon world into the world of today by Janene Garofalo, who confirms the worst fears of would-be screenwriters as a drone whose responsibility is to feed screenplays into the shredder. (”Too intelligent,” she remarks, as she feeds yet another labor of love into the industrial-strength maw of the machine.) Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader emerge from the television as Jason Alexander, Rene Russo, and Robert DeNiro, and immediately start to hatch their plan. They start “RBTV”, Really Bad TV, which is designed to mesmerize the viewing public into a state of complete catatonia. (Predictably, this starts a rash of jokes at TV’s expense, but not so many as you might think.)

At this point, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle takes its greatest risk, and it pays off dramatically well. From almost out of nowhere, the movie taps the heretofore unknown Piper Perabo to play FBI agent Karen Sympathy (say it out loud), who’s responsible for luring Rocky and Bullwinkle out of rerun hell and marshalling them against the forces of evil and rottenness. Perabo makes a huge, tremendous splash in her first starring role, rivaling Matthew McConaughey in A Time To Kill, almost. She’s a sweet-faced cutie, a young Meg Ryan, almost, and she’s going to be turning heads and breaking hearts for the rest of the decade, you just watch. Here, she’s got to maintain a tough-guy FBI agent persona and check the wild excesses of Rocky and Bullwinkle (who constantly chide her for telling fibs and stealing cars).

It helps that Perabo is so lively and sparkly and.. er… well… animated, enough so that she can hold her own on the same screen with the Moose and the Squirrel. (Note: Telling the ticket person at the movies that you want “One for Moose and Squirrel” will not get you a laugh, although it seems like it would.) She has the same thankless task that Bob Hoskins had in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and she pulls it off with more dash. Unfortunately, she falls victim to a transparent Boris and Natasha plot early on, and the minute she’s removed from the proceedings is the minute that the movie goes completely off the rails. (Somehow, it manages to involve both Norman Lloyd from St. Elsewhere with Keenan and Kel from Nickelodeon in the same scene, presumably in the name of cultural and intergenerational diversity.)

However, the proceedings are buoyed considerably by the trademark postmodern sensibility that made the original Rocky & Bullwinkle show so fabulous in the first place. (The Simpsons, among others, owes a huge debt to Rocky & Bullwinkle, enough so that Homer J. Simpson was named after Jay Ward, and Simpsons fans should be first in line here.) Kenneth Lonergan (who penned the witty Analyze This screenplay) does things the way that Jay Ward would have wanted, with heaps and heaps of good-natured social satire (it’s a treat, for once, to hear a cell phone go off in a movie for once and have it belong to a character and not an audience member) combined with slapstick and goofy, groan-inducing puns.

The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle is like a hammock; comfortable, just right for summer, but it sags badly in the middle. Fortunately, the laughs pick up towards the end - helped by the funniest product placement scene since Jackie Chan spilled all those Pepsi cans in Mr. Nice Guy — as the movie comes to its zany conclusion. It should keep the little ones happy while providing a cool and refreshing jolt of grown-up humor for the adults in the audience. It’s not quite a comic masterpiece, but I don’t expect to see a better, sharper comedy this summer.

However, there are two major disappointments in the movie, and I’m dealing with them last. As I said, this is a movie where cameos predominate. It works out that the two potentially juiciest roles in the movie — Alexander’s and Russo’s — are little more than extended cameos themselves. There just isn’t enough for Natasha and Boris to do in this movie, which is just too bad. Russo is more fabulous as Natasha than you possibly might have thought. (As it turns out, Natasha wants nothing more than to be a Stay-At-Home Mom, which tells you something you might not want to know.) Alexander looks the part of Boris, but he seems like he’s got a bad cold or something, and just doesn’t have the edge you need to be truly rotten. In contrast, DeNiro’s part works best as an extended cameo, and he looks like he’s having a lot of fun if nothing else.

The second disappointment is the one that no one can do anything about. Jay Ward is gone, so is the voice of Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, and the Narrator, William Cannon. (June Foray is still around, thank goodness, and voices Rocket J. Squirrel, with Keith Scott taking over as Bullwinkle and the Narrator.) Really, all that The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle had to do is remind us of the greatness of the Jay Ward legend to be a worthwhile effort. It does that, and more besides. (Would it have been so hard, though, to give a little love to Sherman and Peabody? )

Murder Most English

Well, the news is that Hollywood is going to remake Kind Hearts and Coronets, no matter how much we tell them we don’t want them to. The rumors have Will Smith and Robin Williams attached to the project, which probably means it’ll cost umpty-million dollars and be horrible, with the ending all changed and everything. Yuck. Bleah. Nasty.

The only advice worth giving at this juncture is that of Sir Humphrey Appleby, from the greatest British sitcom there ever was, Yes, Minister, who once said, “If you must do this damn silly thing, don’t do it this damn silly way.” If Hollywood is so hard up for comedy scripts that it has to recycle forty year-old Ealing Studios black comedies, then, for God’s sake, get the Pythons out of retirement and let them have a swing at it. Only good form.

(UPDATE:  Since this was written, Kind Hearts and Coronets was not remade, but The Ladykillers was, and the Pythons came out of retirement for Spamalot.  Shows what I know.) 

In watching Kind Hearts and Coronets, we see seeds being planted that would ripen into the glory that was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Oh, there’s none of the trademark Python silliness or physical comedy, but there’s all the drollness and a dryness you’d expect, along with lots of black humor and class satire, and even some cross-dressing. However, instead of the seven Pythons, there’s just one Alec Guinness, which is better in lots of ways.

Guinness has eight parts to play here, all members of the doomed d’Ascoyne family, marked for death by the villainous Dennis Price, presumptive heir to the dukedom of Chalfont. (Price is the narrator, and a cool customer, but he’s got a weird haircut that makes him look like Andy Kaufman’s evil British twin.) Guinness’s performance is usually described in glowing terms, but the script really doesn’t require him to put together a great performance in any of the eight parts. The parts aren’t really characters, per se, but character types, and all that’s needed is a stiff upper lip.

Guinness isn’t really playing eight different characters, he’s playing the same person over and over again, but at different ages, and in different roles. Kind Hearts and Coronets should be noted more for the quality of the satire than the quality of Guinness’s performance. Guinness could have played any of the characters — the haughty young aristocrat, the stammering henpecked husband, the aged curate, the kindly old banker — in his sleep.

And sleep is almost what happens. Kind Hearts and Coronets is about a half-hour too long. There’s much too much narration, much too much foreshadowing. It takes seemingly forever before Price starts shedding blood, and once he’s finished, there’s a lengthy, pointless courtroom scene. Although the script sparkles with wit and irony, it’s in need of a good edit.

However, it is not in need of a remake. No. Don’t. Stop.

Originality, On Ice

Stripped down to its essentials, the basic action movie is quite simple. You chase your hero up a tree and then try to watch him climb back down again. So far this year we’ve seen Ben Affleck chasing down a neo-Nazi plot in the ruins of Baltimore, Matt Damon losing his memory while on the run from the CIA, Mel Gibson in the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Vietnam, Harrison Ford on a submarine with a runaway nuclear reactor, Tom Hanks on the run from the Mob, Mike Myers chasing through the streets of Tokyo in a Mini, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones contending with a horribly lame script… you get the idea.

Wimps, all of them.

Try this on for size, guys. Your hero is in the Arctic. No big deal, he lives there and is used to it. He is ambushed by his brother-in-law and his two friends, who tear down his tent, kill his brother, and are poised to kill him as well. The attackers are distracted for a moment, allowing our hero to make a run for it. There is just one little problem. Our hero is butt-naked.

It gets worse. As I said, butt-naked, which implies barefoot. Only two routes of escape. Back the way the pursuers came, except that it’s absolutely covered with little jagged rocks. The only smooth way is over the ice. Our hero takes off, running as fast as he bloody can — which, given that the ice is slippery and that it is also a little thin, is not that fast. The good news is that his feet get very numb very fast, the bad news is that he doesn’t then notice how bloody they are. And when he falls, invariably he falls in very cold water. And then there is the ice sheet itself, which is phenomenally empty, no place at all to hide, no weapons but snowballs. (The would-be murderers have pointy wooden sticks, and you think for a minute, Wood? Where the hell are the trees?) And the bad guys just keep coming; they may be slow, but they keep up, for what seems like hours.

And then, the truly awful realization; the actor is probably working for scale.

Forget about it. The most ruthless actor in Hollywood, the kind of person that would eat raw human flesh for a bad part in a bad movie, wouldn’t take this on. If Hollywood ever made this movie — “Dances with Caribou”, let’s say — they’d shoot it in some studio and use a blue screen; the biggest indignity the hero would have might be slow room service at the hotel.

The best thing about Atanarjuat is that it is real. Atanarjuat is a retelling of an ancient Inuit myth. It’s a pre-Columbian setting, there isn’t a word of English spoken. All the principals live out in igloos or tents, depending on the weather. (It is something of a shock to see igloos looking more or less the way they do in the old Warner Bros. cartoons.) They hunt and eat raw or very undercooked meat. (Vegetarians in general and animal rights activists in particular are advised to see Lilo and Stitch or some such instead.) Women are not treated very well at all. (The climactic scene, which involves an old woman speaking her mind, is a jolt.) It is a very real and honest portrayal of how the Inuit lived their lives, alone on their frozen tundra; it’s like a Discovery Channel special but with a better script.

There are enough good and extraordinary things about the production values that it is hard to knock Atanarjuat. It is a lovely, wild movie, with some quite good performances by Inuit actors, and everyone involved should be encouraged to continue in their craft. It would be unkind of me not to say as many good things about the movie as possible. And if it were for just one thing, I think that I could wholeheartedly recommend it.

Unfortunately, I can’t. Atanarjuat is the name of our hero, an Inuit name meaning “The Fast Runner”. Unfortunately, Atanarjuat the movie, however, is anything but fast. It clocks in at just over three hours, an immense length of time for anything other than a huge epic. It has a slow-moving, almost ponderous plot. (Atanarjuat is occasionally described as being “Shakesperian”, which is true, if you can imagine, say, Romeo just punching Tybalt out instead of killing him, marrying Juliet, going off to Venice for a business trip, and coming back with another wife in tow.) It requires a lot of concentration to keep the different characters straight; they all dress the same way, the women all have the same patterns tattooed on their faces, and the names are just impossible.

There’s nothing wrong with Atanarjuat, at least not anything that a good session in the editing room couldn’t cure. It is a very high-quality arthouse movie, and people who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing that they like. But the casual moviegoer needs to know that this is a very long movie, dull in stretches, with entirely too much focus on meal preparation and igloo construction.

But still, there is that one incredible scene, and it may be worth the price of admission all by itself. Atanarjuat is, at least, the only movie out this summer where you can honestly say that it’s not derivative; you’ve literally never seen anything like it before.

Rich in Other Ways

There is one question that must be answered about The Fellowship of the Ring before any serious discussion of the movie can be attempted. It’s a question that has been preying on the minds of all those who have read and loved The Lord of the Rings, ever since director Peter Jackson announced his intention to create three movies from the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy. It’s the question that crystallizes all of the doubt and dread around the speculation that the movie would not, could not do the books justice.

“Were you disappointed?”

Let me say now, for the record, categorically, that I was disappointed in The Fellowship of the Ring. I was disappointed for one very specific reason. When I opened my box of Junior Mints, I was disappointed to find that about two-thirds of the candies were crushed and melted into unappetizing goop. Since I bought the candy at my local 7-11 and snuck the box into the theater in the ample pockets of my Lands’ End field coat, I was in no position to complain to the management. Unwilling to pay the exorbitant cost of movie candy or eat the gooey remnants of what had been a refreshing box of Junior Mints, I had no choice but to suffer. Additionally, I had to shush a group of talkative Vietnamese teenagers sitting directly behind me, more than once. All in all, you can see why the movie experience was such a disappointment. It was such a disappointment that I really have to see The Fellowship of the Ring in better circumstances next time, preferably with popcorn and a Dr Pepper.

It is of course terribly unfair - unfair to director Peter Jackson, the talented cast, the hard-working crew, the moneybags producers, those brave souls at the New Line studio, the wonderful people and scenery of New Zealand - to talk about The Fellowship of the Ring in terms of disappointment. Unfair, yes, but inevitable. Most who loved the books came to the movie prepared for disappointment, for the fear that the movie wouldn’t, couldn’t, come up to the incredibly high standard of the trilogy. (And speaking of high standards, the standards of the fanboy True Believers are impossibly high; expect lengthy Internet discussions on whether Liv Tyler’s ears are the wrong shape or whether Hugo Weaving has a proper Elvish accent.) On the other hand, those with little or no knowledge of Middle-Earth could reasonably expect some level of disappointment as well, if only due to puzzlement over the unfamiliar characters and place-names.

Despite this immense potential for disappointment, The Fellowship of the Rings succeeds and overcomes. It succeeds because of Peter Jackson’s simple realization that the surest path to failure is to try to please everyone. Jackson takes the sprawling epic journey of the hobbit Frodo Baggins and his eight companions from the Shire to the gates of Mordor and whittles away at it, removing the poetry and the minor characters and the literary touches until all that is left is the basic, powerful elements of the story. The Fellowship of the Ring is somewhat like William Goldman’s “good parts” version of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride; the essential story survives even without the visit to the house of Tom Bombadil or the description of Buttercup’s wedding gown.

What this means, of course, is that the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring is comparatively poorer than the book; it is nowhere near as lavish, as elegant, as rich as Tolkien’s work. But as all poor children eventually learn, being poor does not mean that you are not rich in other ways. The Fellowship of the Ring is rich in its own way, as rich as any movie would ever want to be.

It is rich first in its cast. One source of concern about the movie was that the scale of the movie - the cost of the film, the length, the remote location - would preclude hiring good actors. While there’s not a big name among the cast, the performances are uniformly excellent. Ian McKellan was nobody’s first choice to play the wizard Gandalf, but he does an outstanding job, at once magisterial and playful and wise. Ian Holm has the smaller, showier role of the old hobbit Bilbo Baggins, and handles it masterfully. The unheralded Viggo Mortenson brings a subtle uncertainty to the role of Strider the Ranger that many better-known actors couldn’t have handled. The actors playing the four hobbits (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan) look enough like hobbits to maintain the movie’s magic, although The Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t ask them to do much more than stare on an unfamiliar world with wide-eyed amazement.

Best of all, though, is Sean Bean as Boromir, who rates his own paragraph in this review if nothing else. His performance was good enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t seen him in anything before, and lo and behold, it turns out that he’s starred in the British TV adaptations of Bernard Cornwell’s outstanding Richard Sharpe series. (I just finished one of the prequels, Sharpe’s Triumph, and it is highly recommended to any and all military/historical fiction addicts.) This, of course, means that he knows his way around a sword, and around disappointment. In the book, Boromir is a bully and a braggart; in the movie he’s something more, a brave and honest man struggling under the weight of duty and a great temptation. Bean does a superb job and would earn an Oscar nomination if this were a just world.

Another source of riches is the excellence of Peter Jackson’s directing. The native New Zealander has an unerring eye for the scenery of his homeland, with the expressive mountain vistas contributing mightily to the majesty of the movie. He’s rearranged the timeline of the book so as to make more sense as a movie, dipping into both The Hobbit and The Two Towers here and there to help hold everything together. The action scenes are skillful and graphic and riveting, with seamless special effects handled admirably. Despite the movie’s impressive length, the pacing never falters; there aren’t any slow spots to speak of. Best of all, the look of the movie is astonishing; The Fellowship of the Ring looks as much like Middle-Earth as anyone could ever expect.

What’s more, Jackson deftly adds a touch here and there of pop-culture sensibility, just to remind us what century we’re in. McKellan’s urgent cry to Frodo about the security of the One Ring - “Is it safe?” - is a direct echo of and indirect homage to Sir Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man. Hugo Weaving’s Elrond has the same clipped speech patterns and contempt for humanity as his character in The Matrix. The fight scenes in the mines of Moria, with giant trolls and shifting staircases, are clearly meant to upstage similar scenes in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and do. These touches aren’t pure Tolkien, but they are pure fun, and that may be more important.

Having said that, there are flaws in the movie, but not so you’d notice. Primarily, these are in the area of character development; there’s just not enough time to do all the characters justice. Tolkien fans probably won’t notice the lack, but there’s just enough missing so that non-fans may wonder exactly who is doing what to whom. (Those who haven’t read Tolkien aren’t required to do so before seeing the movie, although you may feel at times that the movie needs a glossary.)

The Fellowship of the Ring is not a great, classic, landmark movie on its own. However, it is a great achievement, and brings considerable honor to Jackson and all those involved in its creation. Turning Tolkien into celluloid is a quest all its own, as daunting a challenge in its way as anything in the book, and the filmmakers handle it admirably. Anyone who is disappointed in The Fellowship of the Ring should be ashamed of themselves.

For Reasons I Cannot Explain

If 3000 Miles to Graceland serves any purpose — and it’s hard to argue that it does — it is its value as a reference guide to the movie career of Kurt Russell. 3000 Miles to Graceland is more or less the A&E Biography version of Kurt Russell’s life, without the annoying Peter Graves narration, or, if you’d rather, the ESPN SportsCenter highlight package.

Russell spends a lot of time in this movie — although not so much as you might think — in the guise of an Elvis impersonator, a career path he more or less helped create in 1979 with his portrayal of the King in a 1979 TV movie. (Not to mention that he apparently got his start in a predictably bad Elvis movie, It Happened At The World’s Fair.) Russell’s character is an honorable thief, similar to his honorable crooked cop character in Tequila Sunrise. Russell’s character has a boat, as did his characters in Overboard and Captain Ron. Russell’s character is some sort of electronics whiz, and Russell made a movie called The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes. At the same time, Russell is pretty handy with a gun in this one, and he’s played all sorts of military characters, not to mention Charles Whitman. (And Russell and Kevin Costner have both played Wyatt Earp, for what that’s worth.) There’s even a scene where Russell is being loaded into an ambulance that’s eerily similar to one in Ron Howard’s underappreciated Backdraft. And the movie’s last lines are a direct homage to Russell’s signature role as Snake Plissken.

Other than that, it’s not worth seeing.

3000 Miles to Graceland begins with, of all things, an off-the-wall homage to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The two films share a superficial similarity in that they’re both about outlaws making a big heist and then fleeing the country, but they are as different as chalk and cheese. (And you don’t have to guess which is which; 3000 Miles to Graceland is unforgivably cheesy.) Anyway, The Wild Bunch begins with a shot of a scorpion being attacked by fire ants, which is mean to be a metaphor for events to come. 3000 Miles to Graceland begins with a shot of two mammoth metal cartoon scorpions fighting, which is meant to be a metaphor for… er… well, I don’t know. Nothing good.

The signature moment of 3000 Miles to Graceland is the heist; an unforgivably bloody and violent robbery of the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas. Russell, Costner, Christian Slater, and two other actors whose names I am too lazy to look up dress up like Elvis impersonators and shoot up the casino in a huge violent bloodbath straight out of Natural Born Killers (just in case you thought this was Ocean’s Eleven, which it ain’t). The heist is edited to a fare-the-well, with scenes of the heist spliced in with Elvis wannabe footage and casino surveillance tapes (a trick used by Brian DePalma in Snake Eyes, and if that doesn’t warn you away from this movie, nothing will).

Surprisingly, the heist is worked in quite early into the movie; most of the film concerns the denouement of the heist. This is a trick that has worked well in exactly three movies — Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and A Fish Called Wanda, and only the latter two tried to include a love story. There’s a love story of sorts in 3000 Miles to Graceland; Russell hooks up with plucky, trashy single mom Courtney Cox. But there’s also a road story, and a chase story, and an explosion story, and one of those stories where the hardened criminal ends up having to be a surrogate dad for a little kid.

In fact, if you were specifically trying to make a movie that, one way or another, rips off every single movie ever made — every single one, from The Shootist to The Fugitive to Twin Falls, Idaho — you could do worse than 3000 Miles to Graceland, although it’s hard to imagine. If Kevin Costner’s character were a vampire — and you could make the argument — or if Courtney Cox’s character were suffering from an incurable, nameless disease that didn’t ravage her good looks, you’d have all the bases covered.

To make matters worse, there’s the casting, which deserves a place in the Bad Casting Hall of Fame. Everyone but the aforementioned Russell and Christian Slater (who basically plays himself in a brief role) is horribly, criminally miscast. The primary offender is Kevin Costner, who was last seen as a bad guy in the underappreciated Clint Eastwood movie A Perfect World, and is out of practice. (Costner ought to have taken voice lessons from Eastwood, his whiny midwestern honk is completely misplaced here.) Not to mention that Costner belongs in a polyester Elvis jumpsuit the way that Bill Clinton belongs in jogging shorts.

As for the supporting cast, 3000 Miles to Graceland is just one bizarre casting choice after another. You want Howie Long — a graduate of the Terry Bradshaw School of Subtle Acting — as the helicopter pilot? You got it. You want Jon Lovitz? He’s here. You want yet another horrible movie featuring someone from the cast of Friends? Step right up. 3000 Miles to Graceland even manages to tie the record set by Gattaca for Most Refugees From the NBC Prime-Time Lineup in One Movie by casting Thomas Haden Church (”Wings”) and Ice-T (”Law and Order Special Victims Unit”) in bit parts. Kevin Pollak also wanders in from some other, better movie that must have been filming in the area.

You might think that the soundtrack would be a saving grace, but you would be wrong. Despite the movie’s infatuation with Elvis, there’s not a lot of his music in evidence, and what is there is bad and unmemorable. There is a Paul Simon cut on the soundtrack, but it is not from the “Graceland” CD, and one wonders why;

I’m going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland
And I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending
Or maybe there’s no obligations now
Maybe I’ve a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

I have no intention if defending every love or every ending in 3000 Miles to Graceland. However, if some part of you absolutely has to see this movie, despite all of its myriad flaws, there is one way that you can enjoy it. See it with a big group of friends and see if you can list every movie that 3000 Miles to Graceland rips off, steals from, copies, emulates, or references. It will be a long list, and you’ll probably have a lot of fun making it — much, much, much more fun than you’ll have seeing this awful, awful movie.