Screenhead

First, let me say how awesome it is that Bronson Pinchot can still find work, even in this economy.  Second, let me further say that it isn’t every day I see a movie that actually makes me check my door locks and leaves me in fear for my safety.  Sounds kind of broad, I know, but as long as the writer of Mr. Art Critic is running around free and unmedicated, I’m gonna have a tough time sleeping at night.

Bronson Pinchot stars as M.J. Clayton, the titular Mr. Art Critic, who’s apparently become renowned for his blistering reviews of art galleries and their respective shows.  He sets off for a vacation on Mackinaw Island, proving once and for all that Michigan really IS the cheapest place to film movies.  And while on vacation in the wilds of northern Michigan, he runs into a previous victim who ends up getting a twisted challenge out of him–can the critic actually MAKE art?

Clearly, somebody involved with this production has been blasted by critics before.  So much so, in fact, that he felt the need to create an entire movie featuring one being systematically destroyed in every particular.

This movie represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire nature of criticism.  There are damn few critics working today that actually operate like M.J. Clayton, and with good reason.  Even if we’re so massively jaded that we can’t find anything we like anymore, chances are, we’ll still at least manage to connect SOMEBODY to it.  Those that don’t, meanwhile, generally burn out under the constant stream of venom they emit.  Real critics want to find something they like so they can tell everybody who reads them about it in a desperate bid to prove that their entire medium of choice (art, film, food, whatever) isn’t a completely irrelevant loss.

I’ve seen enough craptacular vampire movies to choke a horse, and I know that every single one I see has about a ninety-eight percent chance of sucking the second I settle in, but I can still manage to say that, if you like vampire movies, some certain titles might be good for you.  Anyone could go back through my own body of work and discover that, while I personally may have found a movie unpleasant, I could still recommend it to certain kinds of enthusiasts.  In fact, I’ll even have a specific recommendation for THIS crap sandwich.  Stay tuned.

One of the movie’s final lines is “don’t listen to the damn critics”, as though we had nothing useful to say.  The movie almost manages to begrudgingly admit that there are “some good critics out there”, as though it were being threatened with lawsuit or as some desperate last minute sop to the numerous critics who would be actually WRITING ABOUT THIS MOVIE.  But even this is much too little much too late as they’ll then gleefully carry on with the demolition of M.J. Clayton.

This bizarre poison pen letter can’t even properly be called a movie as there’s just so little going on here that isn’t aimed directly at critics.  I’m downright horrified that someone would write this.  The only way I could be more unnerved is if the islanders got together and MURDERED the guy at the end of the art show.

What’s the SEQUEL look like?  Clayton is publicly skinned and rolled in salt?

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, will rise above the repeated slanders and character assassinations, but in the end realizes that this is just some sad attempt at payback and hands this grotesque wish-fulfillment fantasy a one out of ten.  Don’t even bother seeing this unless you too have a mammoth grudge against critics.

See? Told you there’d be a specific recommendation!

Cop dramas are often entertaining, but in the case of Bad Lieutenant, recently rereleased on DVD thanks to Lions Gate, it’s not so much entertaining as it is a strange, compelling journey that really doesn’t end well.

Harvey Keitel plays the titular Bad Lieutenant, a family man, a good Catholic, a thief, a murderer, an inveterate gambler.  It’s this last that’s going to land him neck-deep in trouble as he bets repeatedly on the outcome of the World Series and finds himself running afoul of the very worst bookies have to offer.  But he just may find redemption in pursuing a case involving the rape of a nun.

Bad Lieutenant is not an easy movie to follow.  It’s not a simple movie.  It’s actually rather deep, and sometimes prone to rambling.  Everything that happens is almost just shown to kill time until the next bet.  One particularly memorable sequence involves our cop accosting two young ladies out for an evening.  It’s pretty graphic, and frankly, just features Keitel alternately muttering and shrieking obscenities for most of three minutes.

That and suddenly watching a nun get raped isn’t exactly the kind of thing you want to see, either.  Even if you know it’s coming it’s still not the kind of thing you ever want to see.

Interestingly, neither is Harvey Keitel blubbering on a cathedral floor for nearly four straight minutes, but for a much different reason.

I can’t tell if Bad Lieutenant is trying to be a pompous, overblown waste of film or it just turned out that way.  And yet, at the same time, it’s actually fun, sometimes.  It’s really tough to say conclusively how to feel about Bad Lieutenant, because just as it gets horrible for some reason, and by the time your disgust starts to register, they’ll segue into something new and interesting.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale has no real choice but to award the badly schizophrenic Bad Lieutenant a six out of ten for averaging out to pretty good.  It’s awful, it’s exciting, it’s entertaining, it’s boring.  It’s everything a movie can be, and most of which you don’t want it to be.

If you really, REALLY, just couldn’t get enough of the movie Seven, then I’m somewhat happy to announce that you’ll get to enjoy a low-rent knockoff in the form of Horsemen, new from Lions Gate.

When a recently widowed detective finds himself forced to make ends meet between his detective work and his family, he ends up on the bad end of a murder spree focused around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  And as his family situation steadily deteriorates around him, the case only gets stranger and more horrifying.

Okay, okay–so it watches like a low-budget version of Seven, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Just because we don’t have Brad Pitt screaming about what’s in the box doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with Dennis Quaid being a mostly absentee father!

But it’s true–Horsemen is a fairly involving crime drama, but it does leave a lot of unpleasant plot holes.  Frankly, I wondered why they even bothered with the whole family thing at all–it’s not like it made much difference on the plot.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, hands this ambivalent crime thriller a four out of ten for not being too bad, but not being anything special, either.  Plus, being derivative is never helpful in these situations; if you’re going to rip someone else off, at least do it right.

Okay folks, brace yourselves, because I’ve got a real doozy right here for you today.  I’ve got no less than The Golden Boys here today, and though that may mean less than nothing, it shouldn’t…

…it’s David Carradine’s last movie.

And this time, his LAST time, he plays one of three retired sea captains who’ve decided to move in together.  And all’s well, until the three old salts realize they can’t cook or clean worth a…bilge bubble?  Okay, so my maritime similes aren’t up to snuff.  Anyway, the problem really comes in when they decide that one of the three needs to marry, and take the other two in as boarders.  But which one will wind up married, if any of them?

I’ll say this–this may be one of the best romantic comedies I’ve seen in quite some time, and I don’t ordinarily favor them.  Why?  Because this one, unlike the others (I’m going to answer both questions at once here) focuses on the comedy and makes the romance secondary.  The Golden Boys is downright hilarious, with a spectacular cast that literally brings the whole thing to a glorious, breathing life of its own.

David Carradine, by the way, makes…or rather made, sadly…an awesome elderly sailor.  Everyone else, meanwhile, plays their roles with ample skill and aplomb.

The Golden Boys is a charmer with plenty of laughs and some interesting romantic entanglements to boot.  There will also be plenty of surprises, as stuff you never see coming suddenly shows up.  I’m extraordinarily pleased with this one–guys out there looking for a date movie, take note: you’ll be able to stomach this one without much trouble and chances are the ladies will particularly enjoy it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands The Golden Boys a full eight out of ten for being charming and funny, with plenty of surprises to boot.

If you haven’t asked this question of yourself at one point or another, then chances are you haven’t yet turned twenty five: what would you do if you had it to do again?  I’ve wondered that more than once, believe me–you wouldn’t think so, me living the dream of film criticism and all…but it’s true.  And in 17 Again, we’ll get to see just what happens when someone gets the chance.

Mike O’Donnell is a family man with regrets.  He could have, you see, gone on to college on a basketball scholarship, possibly even gone pro, but instead he married his pregnant high school sweetheart.  Doing the right thing by the young lady has left him disenchanted with life and constantly wondering about what might have been.  And when he gets the chance to be, well, 17 Again, he discovers that maybe he’s right where he should be.

Let’s be honest: this will ONLY be good if you can stand this sort of thing.  There are some good jokes in here, and Thomas Lennon is always a hoot in anything he shows up in.  It’s funny, sure–but it also tries really, REALLY, hard to be heartwarming.  Almost too hard, really.  But despite this, there’s actually a lot to like here.

The Screenhead Ten Scale is actually somewhat puzzled by this one, and in its puzzlement, hands 17 Again a six out of ten for being a fine example of a movie that only a certain kind of person will ever really enjoy.  If you’re looking for a comedy with a note of romance and and drama, and you can stand a huge load of Zac Efron, well, you should be in the right place.

All right, folks–you’re going to want to brace yourselves for this one because, better than a MONTH ahead of schedule, we’ve got a copy of Ghost Image, set to be released to DVD August 25th by MTI.

With a name like Ghost Image, you know it’s going to be a horror flick, plain and simple.  When a video editor loses her boyfriend to a tragic accident, she soon discovers that her boyfriend isn’t as far away as she once thought.  But the problem is, plenty of other things that she thought were far away–like her dead sister–are also closer to hand than she thought.  Now, she’s got to figure out if her boyfriend’s trying to get a hold of her from beyond the grave…or if she’s just slowly going crazy.

I know, I know…just a little bit done to death.  But I have to admit, as far as ghost-driven mystery / thrillers go, this one is actually pretty compelling.  The cast, which actually has a lot of solid history, coming off such stuff as Law and Order, The Sopranos, and even Walk The Line, does a nice job of keeping us involved in the action.

I was afraid, going in, that this was going to be some kind of second-rate Lifetime-esque sort of thriller.  You know, one of those really cheesy ones where the women are all heroic and the men are all rapists who secretly want to hurt all the women around them?  But no, this was actually fairly more highbrow than that.  In fact, there were plenty of creepy moments here (whoever did the effects on the bloody little girl that kept popping up either deserves some kind of award or a sock in the gut for providing some serious nightmare fuel), and plenty of good solid twists and turns.  As a horror movie, it’s definitely got the scare chops.  As a thriller, it’s got the necessary twists.  As a romantic drama, it delivers the goods there too.

I’m abundantly surprised in how many directions Ghost Image will go in, and how effectively it will go in those directions.  Seriously, this is some pretty sweet stuff right here, and I’m really very pleased with what I saw.  There wasn’t anything too predictable in this one, and there were a lot of nifty surprises that were pretty hard to even suspect coming.  Seriously, I’m very, VERY happy with this.  The last twenty minutes of Ghost Image are going to prove to be laden with a whole host of twists and surprises that’ll just amaze you.  I was stunned.

Now, like I said up above, you’ve got a bit over a full-on month to wait until you can lay hands on this little beauty yourself.  But I assure you, that when the time finally does come that you can see it, you should.

I’ve said this more than once so far, but it bears repeating.  Ghost Image is the kind of movie you definitely want to see, and on the Screenhead ten-scale, ranks a very solid eight out of ten.

Five Fingers is the kind of movie that must be seen to be believed, and once it is seen, cannot help but be appreciated.  This is a wildly clever title that will do downright amazing things, if you’re willing to spend about two thirds of it completely in the dark.

Basically, it’s about a young Dutch pianist named Martijn who’s going to Morocco to set up a food program.  On the way there, he’s shot full of some random drug, his traveling companion is shot, and he’s forced into some kind of interrogation / mind game in which he’s out to not only survive, but also learn his captor’s true objectives and also escape, if he can.

Five Fingers will be an extremely, EXTREMELY deliberate movie, giving away only tiny bits of the plot at any given time.  They will take an excruciatingly long time going over it all, and they will only toss out a tiny bit after a good long sequence has passed.

Oh, and there’s a really creepy reason they call it “Five Fingers”.  Trust me on that one, it’s creepy.

It’s hard to say much of anything about a movie like this.  It will require great focus to get anything out of it because they’ll be advancing the plot in tiny, tiny chunks at a time, surrounding it with alternating sequences of tedium and brutality.  It’s not even organized the way a standard narrative would be, with the backstory in one solid mass somewhere near the beginning, and then the remaining events of the narrative proceeding outward from there.  But in Five Fingers, we get the backstory in little bits at a time, pieces and pieces here and there, and the story they form is downright amazing.  You will be in suspense for literally most of the film.

By the time you get to the end of this monster, you’re going to be absolutely amazed by what has just happened.  The concept is just mind-boggling in its complexity.  I’m still amazed by the sheer number of twists the last fifteen minutes represented.  Even after seeing it through, they sprung a trap on me the likes of which I’d never seen before.  I’m repeating the word “amazed” a lot here because I just plain old AM AMAZED by this.

The sheer minimalism of this one is what’s doubly disconcerting–they did this with a cast of about half a dozen speaking roles and most of it was shot in what might have been an abandoned steel mill.    They’ve done so much with comparatively little that, looking at some hundred million dollar piece of summer movie excess almost leaves me feeling bloated and revolted by comparison.

Seriously, if you want to see what just a little bit can do, get your hands on a copy of Five Fingers.  This will prove the immense value of a good script.  There are virtually no special effects in this–a few squibs and blood packs, that’s really about it.  There are no huge set pieces, no expensive backdrops, just the kind of thing that could probably be done on the strength of an everyday consumer credit card.

Five Fingers may be one of the biggest surprises of the year, and if you want to see what kind of surprises can hit you when you’re not looking, run out and get one of these amazingly clever pieces.

When I first saw ads for Johnny Depp’s Public Enemies, I was intrigued.  The last time I’d seen a good gangster movie was back around The Untouchables.  Bringing the notoriously suicidal Melvin Purvis into things was an interesting stroke, and as we’re all well aware, Johnny Depp is a fine actor who brings class and a compelling performance to whatever he touches.

So why, when I actually saw Public Enemies, was I so spectacularly bored by it?

First, the plot–Johnny Depp plays John Dillenger, one of the most successful and most famous bank robbers of the early twentieth century.  During the height of the Great Depression, Dillenger and his cohorts tackled hundreds of banks.  Of course, when Dillenger wasn’t robbing banks, he was off eating dinner with friends and enjoying his passions in life: baseball, movies, fast cars, good clothes, and recent addition Billie Forchette, a coat check girl from Indiana who’s part Indian.

As the movie continues, Dillenger and Forchette will grow closer together, the world will steadily change around them, and bank robbers will actually become a liability to the mob as new laws threaten their operations in turn. So what will happen, in the end?  Well, you all know exactly what will happen because John Dillenger didn’t live to a ripe old age with his girlfriend in tow in real life.  No sir or ma’am as the case may be–he died, shot to death by police.  And no, that’s not a spoiler, because it actually happened.  If you didn’t already know it going in you can’t accuse people of spoilering for interjecting discussion about real life.

Anyway, the biggest problem with Public Enemies can be summed up by the use of one common gaming term:

LESS QQ, MOAR PEW PEW!

This is the perfect explanation of both what’s wrong with Public Enemies and also how to fix it. For those of you not already familiar with the term, some explanation is in order.  QQ is, essentially, a reference to crying eyes.  Also used to describe things like relationship drama and other similar phenomenon, it’s a derogatory term.  Its converse is “pew pew”, or the sound sci-fi laser weapons make when fired.  It’s essentially an exhortation to action via shaming the target into stopping behavior that’s seen as overemotional and getting their head back in the game.

The biggest problem with Public Enemies is that it focuses so much on the relationship between Dillenger and Forchette that it seems to forget that it’s supposed to be a movie about bank robbers.  Occasionally, Public Enemies will remember its roots, and in these moments makes a downright entertaining movie.  But meanwhile, the movie is so wildly overcommitted to exploring this relationship between two characters that it A. has several other characters available for use and B. was supposed to be an action crime drama, not a romantic drama with occasional bank robbery.

The movie is CALLED Public Enemies, not Two Schmucks Who Fall In Love.

Even worse is that this nightmare of a movie has a run time well in excess of two hours, meaning that the sheer amount of time they’ll spend on the romance aspects will weigh on what little action there is like an anchor around the movie’s neck.

Essentially, this movie is profoundly boring.  Stay away from it unless you’re desperate for a good romantic drama.

Given that Ford is now pretty much the only major automotive manufacturer left on the face of the earth, it’s not surprising to see that movies are made about their earlier days.  Flash of Genius is one such movie, a dramatic pseudo-documentary about the earliest days of the intermittent windshield wiper and their original inventor, Dr. Robert Kearns.

In Flash of Genius, Dr. Kearns and his family create the Kearns Corporation, a firm designed to develop and eventually produce the Blinking Eye Wiper, a windshield wiper designed to move at various speeds to improve reaction to falling rain.  It could adjust its speed according to the rate at which the rain fell, and it’s essentially the same as the design is today.  But back then, when Kearns first developed the wiper, Ford was amazed to see it.  So amazed, in fact, they made a push to keep it for their own.  Thus began a long and arduous legal battle for Robert Kearns and his family, filled with hardship and peril and loss and everything else, but hopefully reaching the climax they all long for.

This is, when you get right down to it, the story of just one man–more specifically, just one family–against one of the largest corporations the world has ever known.  It could never be regarded as simple, nor could it ever be called easy.  But what it could be called is an amazing movie.

Not only an amazing movie, but an amazing journey down the road of one man’s life with a corporate carjacker in the passenger’s seat.  Interestingly, this movie was released only about four years after the death of the actual Robert Kearns, and if it hadn’t been for that, you might well have never had the chance to see this incredible story of one man’s struggle against corporate hubris so massive it earnestly believed it could steal the very ideas from a man and use them for its own purposes.  It’s shameful.  And yet, at the same time, it’s hopeful.

Robert Kearns, you see, fought back.  Robert Kearns took on a company with only one thing in mind–not the money.  Not the public accolades.  But rather, the sheer RIGHT of the matter.  He would not back down until it was acknowledged, publicly, that HE was the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, despite the fact that he had to destroy his job and his family and his sanity to do it.

He did not. Back. DOWN.

Okay, granted, by most reasonable standards this is insanity, but still.  He was right.  Why shouldn’t he fight?  This story should give us all hope.  It’s a uniquely American–a uniquely Michigan, even–story.  We’re looking to corporations to stand up and reduce carbon emissions and go green, we’re looking at our governments to police the corporations.  Why aren’t we looking to guys like Kearns and his ilk, guys in their basements, gals in their garages, families in their spare rooms?  Corporations are great in their way, sure.  They give economies of scale and access to bigger markets.  But they’re just a means to an end.  They’re not city-states.  They’re not powers and forces.  They’re just TOOLS.  Like the windshield wiper.

In a time when everyone the world over is losing their jobs, and when the little guy seems at his most powerless, it’s good to look at stories like Kearns’ and remember that sometimes the little guy can win one.

And so can we.

I’m not really one of those people who’s ever really trusted the government. They’ve made entirely too many major mistakes for me to put a whole lot of trust in them. After all, these are the guys who brought you “ketchup is a vegetable”.

But then again, I don’t much trust people much either, and if you ever wanted a good look at a slow descent into barbarism of the kind that’ll make you want to go out and buy a shotgun, just take a good long look at Disney’s Blindness. Yeah, this is all coming to us from Disney, by way of Miramax.

Basically, there’s a strange disease roaming the countryside, and possibly the entire planet, steadily turning the populace blind. In a bid to keep the disease from spreading, the government sets up a quarantine zone in what looks like a hospital. But the government’s efforts at containment aren’t going very well–the population of that quarantine zone gets bigger with every passing day and even figures in the government are starting to come down with it. As the quarantine zone grows more and more populated, it doesn’t take long for the criminal element to slip in, and soon, the quarantine zone is run by vicious criminals who take over the food supply. Will everyone else make it through alive? And what will happen after that?

This is an extraordinarily important movie–not because we’re all likely to be struck blind soon but rather because this is an excellent look at what life is like without a very precious little thing called the rule of law. Without the rule of law, people who would normally be criminals can run amok without anything but regular people to stand in their way, and regular people aren’t normally given to vigilante justice, the only kind of justice there is in a society without the rule of law. You’re going to see that point in almost heartbreaking detail in this one.

But by like token, you’re also going to see some real human decency here. You’re going to see just about every kind of behavior human beings can exhibit in a crisis–you’re going to see love and compassion and generosity and incompetence and horror and misery and greed and everything else.

You’re going to see everything…whether you like it or not.

It doesn’t surprise me that this was a translation from a book, and that the guy who wrote it won a Nobel prize. Because for what faults this movie has, like a cookie-cutter happy ending and some bizarre choices made by the “good” guys of the quarantine zone, it’s still an amazing look at humanity in crisis.

This could easily be one of the most literary and engaging of all the dystopian movies out there, and there have been plenty of dystopian titles. I count myself something of an expert in dystopian fare, having seen the world threatened by alien invasion and by demon horde and by disease, zombie, bad weather and everything in between, but without doubt, the biggest threat is inevitably man.

So basically, Blindness is an incredibly hard-hitting look at man without law, and if you can’t get enough of the dystopian, take a hold of this one. And just to complete the punchline offered by the headline:

…and he is us.