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42

13 Apr

’42′: Jackie Robinson wins again

The new-look Red Sox bring the excitement back to Fenway after two downer years that made the preceding seven years of World Series bliss seem like 84 years away. You all remember “The Curse,” right? Those 84 years may still seem like a long time to go without. But consider the plight of blacks in America: nearly 100 years of slavery and almost another 100 until Civil Rights, then endless cycles of documented racism and prejudice thereafter.

Recent historical movies such as “Lincoln” and “Mississippi Burning” take us back and make us feel both ashamed and proud of our pasts – ashamed that anything like slavery, segregation or inequality of rights based on color was ever possible, proud we were able to correct the injustices and move beyond. “42” follows that vein. We all know Jackie Robinson was the first black player in Major League Baseball, but how many know the story of how he got there? Continue reading →

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Trance

11 Apr

Sedated three-way tangles in Boyle’s Trance  Going Under

by Tom Meek

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Trance

Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Vincent Cassel, James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson
Rated R

Danny Boyle’s always had a way of tethering tension onscreen, keeping the audience on the edge while holding back just enough. Think of the calm serenity among the crew aboard the spaceship in Sunshine as it voyages uncertainly toward the sun on a mission to save an ice-encased Earth, or the pot head Eden in The Beach who ultimately erupts into Lord of the Flies savagery, and even before James Franco’s adventure seeker in 127 Hours gets pinned under the cruelest of all boulders, there’s a forbidding pall that hangs over him even as he frolics with two nubile hikers in a remote canyon pool.

Trance comes out of the gate a bit meaner as a midday hold-up of a London auction house goes somewhat sideways and the coveted object of the heist, Goya’s “Witches in Air,” winds up missing. It turns out Simon (James McAvoy), one of the auctioneers, is in cahoots with the robbers, but because he took a gun butt to the head during the robbery, he can’t remember where the Goya’s stashed.  Continue reading →

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God Grew Tired of Us

29 Mar

God Grew Tired of Us

A devastating and uplifting documentary

By TOM MEEK  |  January 17, 2007

Back in the ’80s, long before Darfur became a word linked with genocide in the Western media, the Islamic north waged a bloody campaign against the Christian farmers and tribesmen in the south, targeting young males. Known as the Lost Boys, some 27,000 youths fled more than 1000 miles to a UN refugee camp in Kenya. Along the way, many fell victim to hunger, lions, and enemy attacks. Eventually some 3600 made their way to the US. Narrated by Nicole Kidman, this documentary from Christopher Dillon Quinn and Tommy Walker follows a clutch of Lost Boys relocated to Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Their journey is telling of their culture, as well as our own. After the initial helping hand, many struggle to pay back their debt. And there’s the duress of isolation and not knowing whether family members are alive. John Dau, the film’s main subject, is an affable soul, full of wisdom and hope. After so much devastation, his grace and perseverance is an uplifting example for all.

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Spring Breakers

22 Mar

‘Spring Breakers’: Harmony Korine’s Day-Glo road trip to hell

“Spring break forever” and “pretend it’s just like a video game” are just a few of the naive, saccharine-sweet platitudes that roll off the lips of a quartet of sexually budding coeds in Harmony Korine’s cautionary tale of innocence adulterated and gone grotesquely awry, “Spring Breakers.” By the end of the film, those flighty mantras expand and take on a prophetically deep meaning that their utterers and the audience could not have predicted or prepared for. It’s one of the many charms Korine imbues into the Day-Glo road trip to hell.

Much has been made of the film’s casting, which dips into the well of Disney and transforms girly icons Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens into wanton purveyors of hedonism. This is Justin Bieber’s ex and the wholesome lead of “High School Musical” running around in bikinis, snorting coke and kissing other girls. But what else would one expect from the scripter of the l’enfant terrible eye-opener “Kids” and his subsequent turns as director of such psalms of sociopathy as “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy” and “Trash Humpers”?  Continue reading →

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The Devil’s Rejects

20 Mar

THE DEVIL’S REJECTS

Rob Zombie, Haverhill native and former White Zombie frontman, again roils in ’70s slasher gore with this sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. Serial killers Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Baby Firefly (Rob’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie), and Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) — all variations of names in Marx Brothers films — are dislodged from their dilapidated abattoir by Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), whose brother was offed in Corpses. What ensues is a cop-killer grudge match with some binding, torturing, and killing of innocents along the way. Rejects is an upgrade from Corpses. For one, it’s coherent, and despite the clichés and the profanity, there are some hilariously wicked moments. The biggest snag in the gritty homage is that Zombie’s heroes are cold-blooded killers. Oliver Stone tried the same trick with Natural Born Killers and almost succeeded, but even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left hung on the promise of victim survival and justice.

BY TOM MEEK

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Sucker Punch

20 Mar

Review: Sucker Punch

Loud, sexy, and inane

By TOM MEEK  |  March 31, 2011

The words “loud, sexy, and inane” pretty much sum up the latest from Zack Snyder. The director of 300 and Watchmen has plenty of visual panache, but when it comes to storytelling, he’s a bombastic hack. Sucker Punch is the dark ballad of Babydoll (Emily Browning), a sulking waif committed to a mental institution by her nefarious stepfather after her sister is found dead. A lobotomy awaits, and to gain her freedom, or some semblance of justice, Babydoll drops into alternative planes of reality that involve a sweatshop bordello, where her dance skills rival those of Salome, and a fantasy landscape where she and several other scantily clad inmates battle Nazis, orcs, and dragons. The visuals, backed by a hip soundtrack, offer a ripe spectacle, but the trivial framework and insipid dialogue rupture the spell so often that no dance, no matter how titillating, can punch it up.

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Crash

20 Mar

Road kill

Paul Haggis gives America the Crash test
BY TOM MEEK

Crash

Written and directed by Paul Haggis. With Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Larenz Tate, and Michael Pena. A Lions Gate Films release (107 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.
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YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, but it turns out you have no idea.

In Sidney Lumet’s unheralded 1990 police drama Q&A, Nick Nolte delivers a blistering portrait of hate as a racist cop who struts through a New York City precinct with Machiavellian bravado, roasting minorities with racial epithets. No one dares touch him, not the higher-ups or his peers. The film may be about dirty cops and corruption, but underneath it all, Lumet lets us know that tribalism is alive and well in the urban jungles of contemporary society.

In Crash, Matt Dillon plays a similar character roaming an equally stark landscape, yet writer/director Paul Haggis, who sailed to the top of Hollywood’s It list after penning Million Dollar Baby, isn’t concerned with departmental politics. Instead, he slices into the racism and the elitism that are rife in America today.

Continue reading →

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We Are Marshall

20 Mar

We are Marshall

More than a football film

By TOM MEEK  |  December 20, 2006

In 1970, a plane carrying the Marshall University football team crashed, killing all on board. Director McG (Charlie’s Angels) tenderly re-creates the rise from tragedy as the university head (David Strathairn), an injured player who missed the flight (Anthony Mackie), and an idealistic coach (Matthew McConaughey) rebuild the West Virginia team in short order. Their biggest obstacle is the school board, which thinks it’s too soon; the upshot is that the film deals more with the nature of grief than with moving the ball downfield. McConaughey combines flakiness with optimism, and Matthew Fox (Jack on Lost) delivers the details as Red Dawson, the remorseful team recruiter, who can’t get over his decision to surrender his seat on the plane to someone in a hurry.

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Get Carter

20 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 10/12/2000,

Get Carter

Sylvester Stallone trying to fill the thespian shoes of two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine? That’s what this remake of the mod 1971 British noir is all about. Caine even gives it credibility by lending his mug to a supporting role. At least Sly doesn’t try out a cockney accent — the setting has been transposed to cyber-hip Seattle, where his Jack Carter, a heavy for the Vegas mob, has returned home for the funeral of his brother. The alleged car accident doesn’t play well with Carter’s instincts; he suspects foul play and starts poking around. Caught up in the gnashing revenge mix: Miranda Richardson as the widow in mourning, Rachael Leigh Cook as her punked-out daughter, Mickey Rourke as the porn king, Alan Cumming as the flamboyant start-up geek, and Caine as the avuncular overseer with a hidden agenda. The aged Stallone, robotic and thuggish, is almost admirable, and Stephen Kay’s direction is visually slick, but the insipid dialogue and inane plot development do him in. Why would anyone attempt a straight-up remake of one of the truly great British gangster films? I just don’t get it.

— Tom Meek

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Blood and Wine

20 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 02/20/1997, B: Tom Meek,

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Sterile ‘sequel’

Rafelson’s Blood & Wine runs thin

by Tom Meek

BLOOD & WINE. Directed by Bob Rafelson. Written by Nick Villiers and Alison Cross, based on a story by Rafelson and Villiers. With Jack Nicholson, Judy Davis, Michael Caine, Stephen Dorff, and Jennifer Lopez. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson mesmerized audiences with Five Easy Pieces in 1970; two years later they struck again with the bitter, dark The King of Marvin Gardens. Pieces featured Nicholson as the kind of self-concerned, sardonic antihero that was so prevalent at the time (The Graduate, Easy Rider). In Gardens, Rafelson took a chance and cast him as the introverted, intellectual brother opposite Bruce Dern’s pie-in-the-sky shyster — a gonzo role that seemed tailor-made for Nicholson’s on-screen persona. Now, some 25 years later, Rafelson and Nicholson have reunited to conclude an unofficial trilogy that journeys through the veins of dysfunctional bonds.

For all that Blood & Wine is a complex and engaging drama, it feels contrived.Pieces and Gardens flowed naturally; here Rafelson seems to struggle with the standards of ’90 sensationalism. Nicholson’s Alex Gates, a Miami-based wine merchant, is a one-dimensional character: he’s on the brink of financial ruin, his marriage is in shambles, but he continues to indulge in a life beyond his means with a sporty BMW and a sultry mistress.  Continue reading →

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