The Express

18 Mar

The Express

Football bio-pic offers a reflection on our not-so-proud past

By TOM MEEK  |  October 9, 2008

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Ernie Davis may be the greatest running back never to play in the NFL. He was the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, in 1961, and though the color of his skin didn’t break new ground (Jackie Robinson had already suited up for the Dodgers, and Jim Brown preceded him at Syracuse), this bio-pic offers a stark reflection on our not-so-proud past. Gary Fleder, who’s known mostly for pre-fab work (Kiss the Girls and Runaway Jury), and his screenwriter, Charles Leavitt (working from Robert Gallagher’s book The Elmira Express), choose to recount the bittersweet rise to stardom not so much in the big moments (winning the 1959 national championship) as by focusing on Davis’s personal trials and triumphs before he became a household name and those he experienced later, after he was diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a smart call, showing Davis vulnerable as a stuttering youth in the face of bullies and then as a young man challenged by a childhood friend turned radical to use his blossoming star power for the greater African-American political cause.

The Pride of the Yankees and Brian’s Song were poignant depictions of promise, courage, and greatness cut short, and the actors threw their souls into their characterizations. The same holds true here. Rob Brown (Finding Forrester) portrays Davis as torn by optimism and anger. (A scene in which Davis and his black teammates are not allowed to attend the national-championship banquet in Dallas does more in that brief moment to bring to light past racial inequities than the whole of Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna.) And Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of ’Cuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder, a decent man sometimes forced to choose between virtue and victory, personifies the conflicted American conscience of the era.

 

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Cycle Killers

17 Mar

Cycle killers

With its own porn, polo, and personalities, bike culture in Boston isn’t just about getting to work any more

By TOM MEEK  |  April 30, 2010

From atop their mounts, the participants — some with helmets and gloves, many more in just T-shirts — jostle one another for a chance to whack the ball with their care-crafted mallets from one goal line to the other.

“I want to see some blood!” screams a spectator in fishnet stockings and glittering hot pants as others nod in degenerate agreement.

VIEW:Photos from Boston bike polo matches

Clearly, this isn’t the sport of gentlemen unfolding at, say, the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, but rather urban bike polo at a street-hockey pit in Allston. Many are dressed in black and look like refugees from a club Goth night. Participants sometimes wear Mexican-wrestler masks, while others have no shirts on at all.  Continue reading →

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The Final Chapter

17 Mar

The final chapter

Sylvester Stallone discusses Rocky Balboa

By TOM MEEK  |  December 19, 2006

It’s been 17 years since Rocky V and 30 since the original. This week, Rocky Balboa opens, and you can almost hear the comics and late night TV hosts sharpening their knives. After all this time, why make another beat-the-long-odds boxing movie, especially when the franchise’s star, Sylvester Stallone is 60?“The fifth one ended with no emotion,” said Stallone, looking fit in jeans and a white button down during an interview at the Ritz Carleton. “It did not come full circle. The optimism that is usually associated with Rocky was not there. There was no moral message, nothing uplifting, zero.”

John G. Avildsen (The Karate Kid) directed the first and fifth Rockies, while Stallone, who cooked up the series and penned each script, helmed the others. Balboa, he says, will be the final chapter, and a tone of therapeutic necessity marks voice of the ’80’s icon. “I just wanted to end the series on the right note, and to do that, you’ve got to do it yourself. You go back to basics. If it stumbles, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”  Continue reading →

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Rambo

17 Mar

Rambo

Inadvertent camp

With Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone closed out his pugilist franchise on a sentimental note; here, as director, co-writer, and star of what might be the final First Blood chapter, Sly seems to be angling for the same effect, the difference being that Rambo is devoid of humanity. We catch up with the title nihilist in Thailand wrangling cobras and pythons. A bevy of cloying missionaries entreat him to take them up-river into war-torn Myanmar (formerly Burma) so they can deliver medical supplies. As the film has it, the Burmese army is violating human rights as a matter of policy — rape, land-mine games, and death by pig nibbling are just a few of the gory gems. That shit doesn’t wash with Rambo. Machete-honed, the real carnage begins. Devotees will find rewards in the action sequences; the punch-drunk dialogue, however, reduces matters to inadvertent camp. Let’s hope the fork has been firmly planted.

 

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Rocky Balboa

17 Mar

Rocky Balboa

Solid for 15 rounds

It’s been 16 years since the last Rocky, and even then, most thought of star/creator Sylvester Stallone as a has-been kicking a dead horse. But we’re talking boxing, a sport propelled by kitsch and lore. So into the ring the 60-year-old actor goes again, outdoing George Foreman’s return by nearly a decade and a half, but before the big brawl against the undefeated champion (generic, real-life boxer Antonio Tarver) there’s the Rock update: Adrian has passed (perhaps Talia Shire got tired of being a shrew in the later Rockys), and as we learned in Rocky V, the aging pugilist is of humble means and estranged from his son. Stallone, who also writes and directs, is still able to conjure the rough and earnest underdog with infectious results. And the film is surprisingly wry, especially when Burt Young as Rock’s morose brother-in-law, Paulie, is on screen. It’s no knockout, but it does go a solid, nostalgic 15 rounds.

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In the Land of Blood and Honey

17 Mar

Review: In the Land of Blood and Honey

Angelina Jolie’s feature directorial debut

By TOM MEEK  |  January 5, 2012

Much has been said about Angelina Jolie’s feature directorial debut set against the bloody Bosnian conflict of the 1990s — vanity project, plagiarism, and so on. Putting that aside, Jolie has loosely reworked the story of Romeo and Juliet in an infamous setting familiar from CNN but here seen from the inside. Serb police officer Danijel (Goran Kostic, looking very Daniel Craig–like) and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim artist, make a fetching Sarajevan pair until the war hits and they’re relegated to opposite ends of the ethnic equation. Muslim women are brutally raped as a tactic, so Danijel, now an officer and the son of a prominent general, attempts to shield Ajla. His power is limited, and fate and internecine rage take over. Jolie’s narrative power also has limitations, but thanks to the cast and chaotic historical backdrop, the horror of hate and war takes on a compelling human face

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The Game

17 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 09/18/1997,

The Game

David Fincher’s grandiloquent mind fuck works tirelessly to maintain its heightened, if heavily engineered, state of paranoia. The film’s relative success lies in the dark, eerie moodiness that the director elevated to an art form in Seven. Here, however, his visual palette barely masks a slight, manipulative plot.

As Nicholas Van Orton, Michael Douglas resurrects his Wall Street creep, Gordon Gekko, except this time Douglas’s scrutinizing power broker has a hole in his life: he lacks love and excitement. So for his 48th birthday, Nicholas’s loopy black-sheep brother Conrad (Sean Penn catching minimal screen time) gives him a gift certificate for a high-concept gaming experience, a personalized adventure that comes to the player. Nicholas’s endeavors are surprisingly mundane as he is plagued by a series of minor life tragedies and near-Twilight Zone encounters that imply something larger and more devious is at work. The rocky blur between reality and fantasy aspires to be a Hitchcockian After Hours, but at two hours plus, The Game gets played out early on. Douglas and Penn help keep things credible with solid performances, and Deborah Kara Unger extends the sexual immediacy of her Crash role by playing the object of desire who doesn’t wear any panties.

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Kolya and Prisoner of the Mountain

17 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 02/06/1997, B: Tom Meek,

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Foreign correspondence

Kolya and Prisoner are moving tales of war

by Tom Meek

KOLYA. Directed by Jan Sverak. Written by Zdenek Sverak. With Zdenek Sverak, Andrej Chalimon, Ondrez Vtchy, Lilian Mankina, Iren Livanova, and Libuse Safrankova. At the Kendall Square.

PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAINS. Directed by Sergei Bodrov Sr. Written by Sergei Bodrov Sr., Arif Aliev, and Boris Giller. With Sergei Bodrov Jr., Oleg Menshikov, Jemal Sikharulidze, Susanna Mekhralieva, Alexei Jharkov, and Valentina Fedotova. At the Kendall Square.

During the first half of the 1990s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences developed a penchant for awarding the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to such lite romps as Mediterraneo and Belle Époque while slighting works with real integrity and depth, like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine. In 1994, the Academy interrupted this trend of false merit when it bestowed the distinction upon Nikita Mikhalkov’s stirring masterpiece Burnt by the Sun. This year, with the submission of the Czech Republic’s Kolya and the Russian Prisoner of the Mountains, the Academy will have two more opportunities to atone for past miscues.  Continue reading →

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Ray Manzarek

17 Mar

Interview: Ray Manzarek of the Doors

The return of the Lizard King, sort of

By TOM MEEK  |  April 5, 2010

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Photo:http://www.visum-reportagen.de

It’s been nearly 40 years since the death of Jim Morrison, but the surviving members of the Doors, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and percussionist John Densmore have kept soldiering on, playing in various reformations (Densmore has, for the most part, largely declined to partake) of the ground-breaking band.  The meteoric rise of the band, during Morrison’s brief stint, is chronicled in the new documentary, When You’re Strange directed by longtime indie stalwart, Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede and Living inOblivion).

Manzarek has openly called the film “the true story of the Doors” and the “anti-Oliver Stone,” in reference to the 1991 bio-pic The Doors, starring Val Kilmer. I spoke with Manzarek via telephone to get his input on the film, Oliver Stone, his relationship with Morrison, and his upcoming East Coast tour (including a Boston stop) with Krieger as Manzarek–Krieger (with former Fuel front man Brett Scallions filling Morrison’s large shoes).

So how did the project come together?
Dick Wolf, the TV producer.  He was a big fan of the Doors and booked the Doors when he was in college a long time ago.  So he’s been a Doors fan ever since, and he came to us and said, “Let’s make a documentary.”  He had won an Academy Award with a documentary short about two firefighters who died during 9/11 [Twin Towers, 2003] and he wanted to make a feature and hired Tom DiCillo, a guy who had made documentaries and did well at Sundance. So we talked to Tom and he had a lot of great ideas, especially the whole shamanic thing with Morrison driving in his car and hearing about the death of Jim Morrison.  It was something Tom wanted to cut back to [in the film]; Jim Morrison coming back to Los Angeles even if he was dead, or is he? [The footage was from a short film Morrison made during the recording of L.A. Woman, the Doors last album with Morrison]. I thought it was an in interesting idea.  Continue reading →

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Edward Zwick

17 Mar

Interview: Edward Zwick, director of Love and Other Drugs

Beyond Glory days

By TOM MEEK  |  November 26, 2010

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Folks most immediately identify Edward Zwick as the director behind Glory (1989), perhaps one of the greatest Civil War dramas ever rendered on film. Not bad for a sophomore outing — one that came as a  stark contrast to Zwick’s first feature film, About Last Night, a 1986 cheeky romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. From there, Zwick — who’d worked in drama at Harvard and cut his teeth in TV with the popular serial thirtysomething — would embark on a cinematic directorial career encompassing a diverse and wide-sweeping range of subjects: Zwick was the hand behind such films as The Siege, Defiance, and The Last Samurai.

Equally impressive are Zwick’s endeavors as a producer. His name is etched on such Academy Award golden children as Shakespeare in Love and Traffic.

For his latest, Love and Other Drugs (read our review here), Zwick writes, produces, and directs. This one’s another rom-com, with some darker issues at heart and centered on the late-’90s pharmaceutical bubble crowned by the introduction of Viagra to the marketplace. The inspiration for the movie comes from Jamie Reidy’s novel Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman and stars desirable, upwardly mobile talents Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. I recently had a chance to sit down with Zwick and discuss the film and his life behind the camera.

What drew you to this project?
I had always been interested in human behavioral comedy. I had done it before in my career and gone back to it with My So-Called Life and thirtysomething, so it’s not like I ever left it. I think it’s really important for an artist to remain a moving target, and I think I have focused the past couple of years on pieces that were larger in scale and that were often in a historical context or epic, and I just wanted to bring it down to something that was only about the performances and only about the smaller moments and try to talk about what is epic in personal lives. Continue reading →

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