Tag Archives: Review

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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Boxing Gym

20 Mar

Review: Boxing Gym

Frederick Wiseman serves up blood, sweat, and hypnotic cadences

By TOM MEEK  |  November 11, 2010

Whatever his subject matter, documentarian Frederick Wiseman has always been concerned with blood and sweat. La Danse, his 2009 look at the grueling rehearsal routine at the Paris Opera Ballet, is emblematic. Boxing Gym moves in a similar direction as he sets up his camera in a dingy Austin establishment. Owner Richard Lord, a former boxer with a Texas drawl and a rattail, treats all his patrons (pros and amateurs who span sex, age, race, and socio-economic strata) with equal care and respect. And despite the violent nature of the sport, Lord’s dogma of rhythm, footwork, and conditioning is delivered in a calm, avuncular tenor. Wiseman records the rituals of repetition (speed bag and footwork) in poetic long shots that often have two pugilists side by side, each unaware of the other. The cadence is both primal and hypnotic.

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Bullworth

20 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 05/21/1998,

Bulworth

Warren Beatty’s brave, if ramshackle, political farce tackles the dirty business of racial inequality and corporate greed with the tenacity of a pit bull. As Senator Jay Bulworth (named loosely after Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party), Beatty, who also writes and directs, plays an extension of himself: a Kennedy liberal in the ’60s, now disillusioned by the political environment of the ’90s, where big money and favoritism suffocate activism and social advocacy.

Sick of all the hypocrisy and in the midst of a re-election campaign (it’s 1996, as Dole and Clinton duke it out), a sleep-and-food-deprived Bulworth makes a back-room deal for a $10 million life-insurance policy to benefit his daughter, then takes out a contract on himself. His imminent demise gives him the freedom to speak his mind: he tells the parishioners of a black South Central church to “put down their chicken wings and malt liquor”; he calls a group of Beverly Hills entertainment executives “big Jews” and brands their product “crap.” From there Bulworth angles his moral rebirth as a “White Negro,” pursuing a sultry flygirl (the always alluring Halle Berry), hanging out at hip-hop clubs (where they mistake him for George Hamilton), and even taking on a pair of racist cops, but the funniest incarnation comes when the middle-aged white guy starts rapping his anti-big-business sentiments at a chi-chi fundraiser.

As a piece of social commentary, Bulworth has an edgy, in-your-face texture somewhere between Network and Do the Right Thing. And though the plot contrivances — like the self-initiated hit — are old-hat, the dead-on performances, Vittorio Storaro’s kinetic cinematography, and Beatty’s nervy social agenda make this film a provocative tour de force in political incorrectness. 

— Tom Meek

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The Machinist

20 Mar
THE MACHINIST

Brad Anderson, the local wunderkind (he now lives in New York) who made a splash with the romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland, follows up his 2001 psychological thriller,Session 9, with this gripping ordeal about a drill-press operator who hasn’t slept in nearly a year. When we first meet Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), he’s your typical strung-out Joe: emaciated (Bale lost 63 pounds for the role), disconnected, and running from his past, but just what haunts him is unclear — and that’s the mystery that propels the film. By night, Trevor soaks up his endless existence with a slice of pie at an airport diner, post-coital interchanges with his regular call girl, Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and futile attempts to plod through Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Then Ivan (John Sharian emulating Marlon Brando), the amoral arc welder/specter with a mangled hand, starts popping upeverywhere and things go sideways. As moody as The Machinist is (the Bernard Herrmann–esque score and pallid, blue texturing go a long way in that regard), the final kick is manipulative artifice and predictable to boot. Nonetheless, Bale’s complete immersion into Trevor’s afflicted soul and Sharin’s southern fried freak make the descent into paranoia worth the journey. (102 minutes)

BY TOM MEEK

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City of Life and Death

20 Mar

Review: City of Life and Death

A visceral portrait of the hopeless

By TOM MEEK  |  June 2, 2011
The events surrounding the 1937 invasion of Nanking (the then capital of China) by Imperial Japan are debated by both countries. In this harrowing dramatization of the six-week siege, also known as the Rape of Nanking, Chinese director Lu Chuan attempts to provide insight and balance by representing viewpoints of the occupied as well as that of several Japanese soldiers. Shot in opulent black and white, the atrocities never cease. Captured Chinese soldiers are lined up and executed and women are systematically raped, or forced into “comfort” service until they expire. Ironically, the one savior is a Nazi businessman (John Paisley) who sets up a safe zone for survivors. The recreation of the military campaign stuns in its scope and choreography, making this the most visceral war film since Saving Private Ryan — a portrait of the hopeless in the grasp of a sadistic oppressor.

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Of All the Things

20 Mar

Review: Of All the Things

A touching portrait of a forgotten songwriter

By TOM MEEK  |  April 15, 2009

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Dennis Lambert may be the biggest hit machine you never heard of, a songwriter and producer in the ’70s and ’80s with such classics as “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Baby Come Back,” and Starship’s now notorious “We Built This City” to his credit. After that, the New York native, who’s now 60, moved to Boca Raton and went into high-end real estate. But a call from the Philippines — where his obscure (in the US) 1972 solo album, Bags and Things, was a smash — sparked a comeback tour. Son Jody Lambert’s touching portrait reveals an artist who’s a perfectionist behind the controls but lets loose with pathos and exuberance in front of a crowd

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Dust to Glory

20 Mar
DUST TO GLORY
Dana Brown, who took over the Endless Summer surf-documentary series from his father with Step into Liquid (2003), returns to dry land with this wham-bam chronicle of the Baja 1000 dirt race. Employing helmet and hood cams, Brown delivers the jolts and the bravado in heart-pumping bursts, including two souped-up pick-ups careering off each other and a roadside RV as they blow through the main drag of a Mexican village packed with locals and spectators — at 140 mph. But Dust to Glory isn’t all breakneck machismo. As in Liquid, Brown probes the subject’s heart, uncovering its history and the bit players who hit the goat paths for the love of the race. The Baja, which began in 1967, has involved as participants or observers such luminaries as James Garner, Steve McQueen and, at the time Brown was filming, Mario Andretti. One intrepid entrant even attempts the entire 1000 miles (15 to 30 hours) on his own as opposed to the usual team of riders/drivers. Brown gets it all down with pit-stop efficiency until the final lap, when the film rambles in on vapors. (97 minutes)

BY TOM MEEK

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Waiting for Supernan

20 Mar

Review: Waiting for Superman

Guggenheim suggests the wait will be long for America’s schools

By TOM MEEK  |  September 28, 2010

If you were wondering about the state of our education system, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary won’t make you feel very optimistic. Terms like “academic sinkhole” crop up as Guggenheim chronicles the bittersweet travails of several families (in Los Angeles, New York City, and DC) readying their children for the school lottery — which will all but decide each child’s fate. Reformers appear in the form of Harlem Children’s Zone champion Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee, the DC super whose brash approach has been blamed for the recent election defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty. Guggenheim’s culprits are teacher unions, who refuse to accept performance pay, and a tangled bureaucracy; both are hideously exemplified by New York’s “Rubber Room,” where ineffectual teachers sit around, surf the web, and collect a paycheck.

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