Cynical Cinema

My step-kids wanted to watch The Game Plan, available now on Rogers On Demand.  And much as the idea didn’t appeal to me, I felt as though I should capitulate, because after all, they were excited about the football covered in glitter.  (Or, as it turns out, “bedazzled”.)  So I paid the $5.99, and tried to find six dollars worth of enjoyment from the film.  And sadly, I cam up about five bucks short.  There are very few films, for kids or otherwise, that are more formulaic than the Game Plan.  The Rock, you see, is a pro football player with a massive contract, a massive condominium, a massive following and a massive ego.  All of a sudden, a small girl shows up at his house claiming to be his daughter.  He doesn’t question the claim, since it seems fairly likely to him that this girl’s mother (who is apparently some kind of philanthropist saint) would just leave her, unattended, on the doorstep of the father who never knew she existed. 

This would not, to most of us, make sense even if the mother was a crack-addled junkie prostitute (which she isn’t - this is a Disney movie).  You see, if a mother is so messed up that she would be willing to leave a girl in a situation like this, she would not have the werewithal to get the girl to the apartment.  And if she was indeed the wonderful person that The Rock and the little girl agree she is, she would never do something this insane.  One would think she would at least call first.  Or something.  But The Rock’s willingness to leave the whole situation unquestioned, his publicist’s failure to think anything through, and the stupidity of those around him, mean that these questions go unasked and unanswered.  Which is essential to the movie, or the big revelation at the end would come in the first two minutes.  And frankly, it should.  There is no reason we couldn’t have found out the real reason this little girl is there right away.  The same thing would have happened.

This egomaniac quarterback never throws to open teammates if he can run twenty yards to paydirt instead.  He considers himself above the team and above the sport.  He is a glory hound to the detriment of those around him, especially his team.  But his team doesn’t question that.  At all.  They still love him, because he’s the party-guy playboy with the sweet apartment where they all party.  No bad blood from the receivers who don’t get their due, no bitterness from the temmates who are unjustly overshadowed.  It’s a life of blissful ignorance and ease.  Until the little girl shows up, and teaches him what he can really be, and what’s important in life, and blah blah blah.  Sure, she’s cute and sweet and childish and so forth, but she’s also smarter than he is, more perceptive, better grounded…she’s six.  And the only reason she is six is that this way Disney can set up all the standard pratfalls for a movie like this one.  He gets covered in foam.  She puts a skirt on the bulldog.  The blender makes a mess in the kitchen.  She bedazzles his prize football.  And he falls down a lot.  Haha.

The one thing that bugged me the most about the movie, however, was the fact that they didn’t seem to have the rights to anything.  The Rock plays “Professional Football” for a team based in Boston called the “Rebels”.  His team is competing for the “Championship trophy”.  Why wouldn’t you be able to say Super Bowl?  Or New England Patriots, or the NFL?  There are dozens of other movies that use those words.  Even Disney has already used “NFL” in a movie, a movie about a real-life guy on a real-life team, called Invincible.  Mark Wahlberg played Vince Papale, a walk-on from Philadelphia who made the Eagles in the 70s.  So we know they would be allowed to use these things if they wanted, or if they were willing to pay enough money.  So why not?  It’s really irritating hearing all these generic words like “Football Championship Trophy”, a trophy which, when you see it, bears a striking resemblance to the Super Bowl trophy.  Or, the Vince Lombardi trophy, if you will.

There are a lot of cameos from real football players and analysts.  Boomer Esiason, Marv Albert, Jim Gray, Stuart Scott, and Steven Levy all show up.  But they can’t say NFL?  And then he starts endorsing something called “Fanny’s Burgers”.  What, they couldn’t get McDonalds or Burger King to pay massive dollars for a product placement?  Or was it because the kid keeps saying that they make you fat and give you gas?  So he ends up doing endorsements for a burger chain that sounds as appealing as Krusty Burger.  And of course, the whole movie has to be peppered with the most brutal football talk in movie history.  Everything that comes out of the Rock’s mouth is a football reference, from the playbook to the post pattern to the buttonhook to, of course, the Game Plan.  It’s so forced and contrived that it almost makes me cringe even thinking about it now.  This is some of the worst dialogue in Disney history.

There is one reason to watch The Game Plan.  Roselyn Sanchez is smoking hot as the little girl’s ballet instructor Monique.  But her involvement in the movie is also a painful cliche, so it almost cancels out the hotness.  Almost.  Sanchez being as hot and flexible as she is is worth one dollar.  That leaves five dollars worth of movie rental that I am wanting back.  At least the kids liked it.  But then, they are unfamiliar with terms like “NFL”, “Burger King”, “flea flicker”, and “giant pile of crap”.

Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of movie you get when producers look at all the other movies and TV shows that have been made in the past year, and try to make one just like that.  But with a new idea that will make this movie seem different!  And they’ve already done the spy thing, they’ve done the cop-on-the-edge thing, they’ve done the Negotiator (also with Jackson), and they’ve done every combination and permutation of the characters from CSI and Bones and Cold Case and Medium and every other cop-related profession.  But wait - we have never done a movie about the guy who cleans up the blood after murders!  This is so NEW!  Oh, it doesn’t matter that it’s the exact same story we’ve used in every movie and TV show over the past ten years, this character is new.  He cleans up blood!  Get it?

So you get a movie about a murder, and a guy trying to solve it, and police corruption and extramarital affairs and betrayal and father-daughter relationships and blah blah blah, ground up in the meat grinder of every script ever written, and spit out into this movie with the fresh new character idea.  And we have Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who comes by after cops are done their investigations and cleans up the blood and gross stuff at murder scenes.  This, really has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  It just gives the film a title and a new, fresh main character who is still a cop and still solves crimes but isn’t the same.  And next thing you know, he gets caught up in a web of intrigue that involves a mysterious hot chick (Eva Mendes) and his former best friend and cop-buddy (Ed Harris).  Be warned - the next bits here contain spoilers!

In watching Cleaner, I discovered a few bothersome things.  First of all, one of my favourite actors, Ed Harris, has somehow become a bit of a caricature.  I was sad when Harris showed up, as Jackson’s best friend, and I thought - oh, no!  You can’t trust Ed Harris!  Think of Gone Baby Gone, A History of Violence, and now this!  I knew it the second he stepped onto the screen.  Ed Harris is just too big an actor to play second-banana, the hero’s best friend.  If he’s in there as something other than the star, he’s the surprise hero cop, or the bad guy.  That’s it.  And then Eva Mendes shows up.  And I’m thinking  - oh no!  Don’t trust Eva Mendes either!  She just looks like a vamp who will screw you over.  And then there’s Luis Guzman, who I really like.  He seems untrustworthy, which likely means that by the end he will be a good guy, and an ally to our hero.  And lo and behold, all of these assumptions turned out to be true!  This is either because these actors are now typecast, or because the director somehow telegraphed the ending.

 And I believe that the latter is true.  The direction in this movie, by Renny Harlin, is clumsy at best.  Harlin, I would argue, has never directed a good movie in his career.  His previous best was The Long Kiss Goodnight, also with Samuel L. Jackson, and it was average at best.  Too often he seems to try to add a small twist to existing plots and cliched scripts, and ends up making boring film.  And Cleaner is no exception.  The clumsiness is most apparent in the relationship between Jackson and his daughter, played very ably by Keke Palmer.  But the best acting in the world couldn’t save Cleaner from the clumsy, awkward, obvious and irritating moments between the two.  Their relationship swings wildly from that father-daughter sharing-everything warm and fuzzy one to the absentee-father-who-lets-his-work-dominate-his-home-life one.  Sometimes within the same scene!  And the latter relationship culminates in that oh-so-obnoxious cliche, him MISSING HER SOCCER GAME!  I HATE the parent-missing-the-child’s-soccer-game cliche. 

And the other, close-bond father-daughter relationship culminates with another horrible cliche that I hate.  The daughter, having to choose between her distant father and the trusted family friend who all of a sudden can’t be trusted, chooses to shoot the formerly trusted family friend.  I hate this ending.  It hasn’t been original or interesting since the third time it was used, in 1923.  Oh, come on.  Just an example of the powerfully unoriginal, clumsily constructed movie that is the Cleaner.  It is so neatly wrapped up in a tidy little package at the end that it looks really stupid.  This movie really needed to be far rougher around the edges to even keep my attention for more than half the film.  Avoid this, it sucks.

As I wait, with breathless anticipation, for a chance to go see Son of Rambow, I have been forced to make do with regular Rambo in the meantime.  The fourth installment in this moribund franchise came out yesterday, and I begrudgingly rented it, feeling as though it were something of a duty, rather than a pleasure, to watch this re-hashing of the aging Stallone’s one-time moment of glory.  But then, I felt the same about Rocky Balboa, and it was the second-best of the moribund Rocky series.  So pleasant surprises are possible just about anywhere.  Although I hate to call Rambo a pleasant surprise.  In point of fact, Rambo did not surprise me in any way.  Rather, I surprised myself in watching it.  I’ll explain that in a moment.  First, a bit of Rambo history.

When I was a kid, Rambo was more of a punchline than an icon.  You would see someone cutting their sandwich with an unnecessarily large knife, and say “look out, Rambo’s in the kitchen”.  Or some other such clever childish thing.  By the time Rambo III rolled around, even eight-year-olds were making fun of the over-the-top idiocy of the film.  Rambo was in Afghansitan, fighting with the Afghani “freedom fighters” against the Russians.  I put freedom fighters in quotation marks not because these people were not really “freedom fighters” because it is a Rambo buzzword that separates the good guys from the insidiously evil ones.  And he mowed down half the Russian army, muscles bulging, as fifty of them stood on a hill vs. the one guy with the massive machine gun.  This was even more ridiculous than Rambo:  First Blood Part II, where he shot the communist bad guy with the arrow, and the guy exploded.  And even as children, we all understood this.

What gets lost in all this mess is that the first Rambo movie, First Blood, was actually good.  It was actually very good.  Stallone was the vietnam vet, unable to shake the nightmares and the violence that had become a part of his life, and he just wanted to eat a sandwich.  But some small-town backward hick sherrif decided to exert his questionable authority, and the next thing we all knew, everyone was dead.  A very cool, very dark, very gritty film.  But we don’t remember that, for the most part.  We remember the sheer insanity and bonkers mayhem that resulted in those last two abysmal efforts at “movie making”.  Which is why most of the world expected total nonsense and horrible acting and ludicrous pacing and unimaginable explosions with the fourth movie, 20 years after the third became the most expensive movie ever made.  (At the time.)

So I was cringing as I pressed play on the DVD player.  I was cringing through the opening credits.  I was dreading the Rambo cliches and the lousy dialogue and the ridiculous, unnecessary violence and explosions.  But all of a sudden, as the movie began, my opinion started to change.  Rambo is living in the jungles of Thailand - still a damaged man, he catches snakes and sells them for a living.  Yet somehow he can still afford a boat.  Anyway, I know what you’re saying - Vietnam was a long time ago, how can he still be damaged?  Shouldn’t he be over that by now?  But you see, this is Rambo.  He also saw (and caused) horrendous violence in Afghanistan and small-town U.S.A.  He just can’t escape it, and so he becomes a hermit at the beginning of every movie.  But then, of course, something happens to draw him back into the killing game.

In this case, that something is a group of missionaries who are trying to go up-river (it’s always up-river) into Burma (how timely) to deliver medical supplies and medical attention to that impoverished and war-torn country.  They want to rent Rambo and his boat, but he is a wise old soldier, and he knows that they should really not be going up-river.  They will be killed, he knows.  But a sweet, innocent missionary lady named Sarah (Julie Miller from Dexter) convinces him that they have to try, so off they go.  But these missionaries think that he’s John Rambo.  They don’t know that he’s RAMBO.  After he delivers them to their destination, they are of course captured by the crazy-evil Burmese.  And now Rambo is hired, once again, to take a boat up-river.  This time filled with mercenaries, who also don’t know that he’s RAMBO.

But we know he’s RAMBO.  WE have seen the three previous films, or are familiar with this cultural icon.  And it is that knowledge that fills me with anticipation as the crew goes up-river…wait - anticpation?  I find all of a sudden that I am actually anticipating the shunting aside of John Rambo in favour of the emergence of RAMBO!  Not only am I anticipating it eagerly, I am irritated it hasn’t come sooner!  I find myself thinking “when is he going to become RAMBO?” in a very whiny voice inside my head.  All of a sudden, I want ridiculous bloodshed.  I want over-the-top explosions and gigantic machine guns.  Where IS the violence?  Well, I know these mercenaries are loose-cannon and maniac enough to cause some mayhem.  Here we go!  And the violence beings, and the RAMBO emerges, and I am able to revel in the idiocy.

Bodies blasted completely into pieces are de rigeur in this film.  Whether it be by explosions, mines, sniper rifles, or the you-knew-it-had-to-be-there gigantic super-power machine gun, body parts are all over the screen and flying through the air for about half an hour straight.  Explosions which could just as easily have been small ones turn into staggering spectacles of fire and dirt and booming, as the body parts are scattered over many many miles.  It is not enough for Rambo to break a guy’s neck, he must rip his entire throat out with his bare hands.  Yes!  It’s THIS kind of excess that made Rambo II and Rambo III so terrible and so laughable, and as I realized here, so very nostalgic for me!  I found myself cheering for every single Rambo cliche in the book - the shadow that flits past the bad guy just before he dies.  The slow rise of Rambo into view behind the bad guy at the opportune moment, with murder in his eyes, so you KNOW that guy’s gonna buy it next.  And of course, the machine gun that I would assume no single human being could operate alone.

And then there are the nightmares, and the flashbacks.  Just so we don’t forget who John Rambo really is, we get flashbacks - to the previous movies!  Now it is these movies that are giving Rambo himself nightmares, as I am certain they did for many a movie critic in the late 80s.  Scenes from First Blood - “Nothin’ is ovah!”, scenes from the other two, all tormenting this man.  And it is important to know that he is still tormented.  Rambo has never voluntarily, in any of his movies, taken up arms.  He has been forced into a position where he had no choice but to kill everyone he met.  And this movie must fit that mold.  Also, there must be a cause, a noble one, that could be taken up somewhere in the world.  In this case, Burma (or, Myanmar), a horribly violent country with a civil war that has been ongoing for many, many years.  (In fact, bootlegs of this movie were the hottest selling items on the streets in Myanmar until the devastating hurricane that killed thousands.  Now, the hottest selling items are bootlegs of video footage of the hurricane devastation, so people can see what is actually going on, and not the sunny everything’s-OK picture painted by the government.) 

And all of these things add to the greatness of Rambo.  The fun one has when watching.  This is a real country, with a real fight, that really needs help in a big way.  And yet, the people who made Rambo are willing to, on a certain level, trivialize the conflict itself by showing an aging Sylvester Stallone get behind the biggest machine gun in the world and blow the arms and legs and necks off thousands of people.  But they don’t care.  They have a budget, and explosives, and damn it all, they are going to use every single ounce of both!  I am still cheering for the dream sequence, which was absolutely hilarious.  And there are some seriously wicked Rambo-style lines - my personal favourite being “you either live for nothing, or you die for something”.  I think we could all picture Mel Gibson delivering this line in Braveheart, for example, but Stallone?  As Rambo?  LMAO.

Stallone still has what it takes to play John Rambo.  The ability to flex and the inability to articulate.  In the year leading up to the film, he was caught with steroids.  I guess he had to stop taking them, which is why Rambo, for the first time, does not appear shirtless at all in this film.  His arms are still gigantic, and he does flex them a lot, but one would assume that at the age of eighty-four, Stallone’s abs are not what they once were.  So he wisely keeps his shirt on, and we are all the better for it.  And in the end, we are all the better for having seen this movie, knowing that Rambo is still out there, unable to speak his mind but still tortured inside it, unable to persuade people not to fight but still the ultimate fighter.  And the final scene in the movie, which makes it almost inevitable there will be a sequel, is sublimely foolish, powerfully obvious and the cherry on top of this movie.  A movie which is not brilliant by any means, and it probably isn’t even good, but it is Rambo.  John Rambo always finds himself in a situation where he has to do bad to do good.  RAMBO, on the other hand, just has to be bad to be awesome!

This is the tagline for A Force of One, a Chuck Norris movie from 1979:  “He hears the silence.  He sees the darkness.  Only he can stop the killing.”  That isn’t even a joke.  I didn’t take it off the Chuck Norris list website.  It is really printed on the cover of the DVD, just like that. 

My thirteen-year-old step son has just discovered that Chuck Norris stuff on the internet.  You know, “Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep.  He waits.”  And, “Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer.  Too bad he’s never cried.”  And such like.  So he asked to see a Chuck Norris movie.  And I realized that with the exception of Return of the Dragon and Burn Hollywood Burn, I had no Chuck Norris movies at all.  The first is a Bruce Lee movie that happens to involve Chuck Norris in the climactic fight scene, and the second is just a poorly done comedy where Norris stars as himself.  But I didn’t have what could reasonably be considered a “Chuck Norris Movie”.  Like Missing in Action, or Missing in Action II.  Or, Missing in Action III.  I’m not sure what else he did.  I don’t like Chuck Norris.  I’m a Seagal man.  In fact, I’m not sure Norris has worked in years - last I saw, he was backing Mike Huckabee for the Republican presidential nomination, starring in infomercial reruns, and basically existing on that list on the internet, which was funny one year ago but really irritating now.

So when I saw A Force Of One for just six bucks at Rogers Video, I decided to experience Chuck Norris, just one more time, with my curious step-son.  I warned him ahead of time.  You know those Seagal movies that I watch a lot?  This might actually be worse.  But he has (through me, I think) developed a similar appreciation for irony to mine, and loves a truly bad movie almost as much as I do.  So we were very excited for this film.  Chuck Norris, you see, is a…karate expert…of course.  He needs to teach the cops how to fight, because a serial killer is knocking them off.  And there are drugs somehow involved, and eventually, his adoptive son is killed by the mysterious karate-expert serial killer.  This is so he can go on a vengeful tear, which of course culminates with the big final fight scene between the two karate fighters.

But here’s the thing - A Force of One wasn’t bad enough.  It mostly made sense.  It featured some average acting performances from the supporting cast.  The fight scenes were halfway-decent.  This was not what we wanted!  We wanted terrible!  Local-car-commercial-level acting!  Nonsense plot!  Inane dialogue!  A false sense of it’s own excellence!  The earmarks of Seagal fare.  But no.  This movie defied all odds and made a little bit of sense.  It was difficult to make fun of A Force of One.  Sure, there were cliches and idiocies, but not nearly enough.  And so the movie just became boring, and that made me sad.  Both of us, in fact.  We wanted abysmal.  Oh well, better put on Alone In The Dark.

But then - wait!  I checked out, on a whim, the special features.  And there it was!  A documentary on American Cinema, the company that put this movie out!  And it was all about - how “American Cinema”, the company, changed Hollywood and the movie industry in general.  And they were serious!  And here it is - this is how they changed Hollywood forever - they made a star out of Chuck Norris!  This was not tongue in cheek, it was totally serious, THIS is what the movie itself should have been.  Totally inflated with an undeserved sense of self-importance.  But even with this gem of a special feature, this DVD is still not worth six bucks.

“Recount” is an HBO movie that premiered on May 25th on HBO in the states and The Movie Network here in Canada.  Originally, Sydney Pollack was slated to direct the film, but pulled out at the last moment due to an undisclosed illness, which of course was cancer, the same cancer that caught up to him yesterday.  A sad coincidence as this fantastic movie premieres.  This is one of those major TV drama events where a made-for-TV movie actually gets hype and buzz and deserves it.  Well worth checking out.

HBO has just put the movie on TV, a dramatized version of the real events that led up to George Bush being fictitiously elected over Al Gore in 2000.  I recently saw Antonin Scalia, one of the American Supreme Court justices directly responsible for the handing of the election to Bush, saying in an interview “it was eight years ago.  Get over it.”  But America can’t get over it.  They still have that falsely-elected president, who is still screwing things up on a daily basis.  And not in a fun, keystone-cops kind of way.  Screwing things up in a malicious, Mr. Burns sort of way.  Scalia, by the way, is also the Supreme Court justice who believes torture is not an act in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the one dealing with “cruel and unusual punishment”.  His reasoning - although torture, such as waterboarding, IS cruel and unusual, it does not qualify as “punishment”.  You see, people who get tortured are not being punished for anything, since they have not been convicted of anything.  They may well be innocent.  And if they are innocent, then they are not being punished.  A prince of a man, Mr. Scalia.  But I digress.

Anyway, although the politics and questionable behaviour of Antonin Scalia are something about which I could rant for aeons, the man does not figure prominently in Recount.  Rather, the movie is about several other people.  Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Al Gore’s fired-then-rehired campaign advisor.  Warren Christopher (John Hurt), the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who was sent by Gore to supervise the recount.  (Sidebar - Christopher, so far, is the only person portrayed in this film that has objected to his protrayal.  He has not seen it, but he read the transcripts and felt they made him sound way too naive.)  Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Republican Secretary of State who exhibited terribly partisan and unethical behaviour during the 2000 election, doing everything she could to hand victory to Bush.  And James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), the Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., who was the chief legal advisor to Bush Jr. in 2000.

Each of those actors gives an examplary performance, especially Spacey, as an idealist who will fight to the end, and Dern as a woman in way over her head with a self-esteem problem and a taste for the spotlight.  Also terrific are Dennis Leary as Michael Whouley, and Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies.  Although we already know the end result of this film, (and for many of us politically interested folk, the entire process), this film still plays like a thriller.  Each moment is more and more tense, as you really get a sense of the machinations behind the scenes.  You get righteously indignant at the Republican troublemakers who tried to delay the re-counting of the votes.  You get furious at the groups who intentionally excluded more than 20,000 voters, most of them African-American, under the false pretext that they had been convicted of a felony.  You pull for the supreme court to render the right decision, and you can get right into it when something goes the right way for a change.  Even though you know for a fact that at the end of the movie the bad guys win and we get eight years of Chaney and Rumsfeld and Rove and Rice and that president guy.

 The only really irritating thing about the movie is the appearance of Bush and Gore themselves.  The two of them appear courtesy of archival footage, which is fine, but then they are shown, always from behind, and played by some stand-in actor.  That gives Recount, if only for those few brief moments, the feel of one of those lame, cheap, re-enactment scenes from a When Animals Attack show, or Unsolved Mysteries.  Aside from that, however, Recount is incredibly brisk, moves along very quickly, and is an absolutely thrilling political true story.  Tour-de-force performances all the way through, and a script that I’m sure just wrote itself.  Catch this one while you can, playing on The Movie Network right now.

Sydney Pollack, one of the great directors in movie history, passed away yesterday from cancer at the age of 73.  Also a great producer and actor, you can see him on the big screen right now performing in Made of Honor and on DVD giving a fantastic performance in Michael Clayton.  Cynical Cinema pays tribute to Sydney Pollack with a list of his must-watch films.

 1.  The Interpreter (2005) - Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman both give exemplary performances in this espionnage story about a U.N. interpreter (Kidman) who overhears an assassination plot.  The must-see moment:  The scene on the bus, when many of the characters, including a terrorist bomber, come together on the same bus at the same time.  One of the most tense (and intense) moments in recent cinema, worthy of Hitchcock.  Pollack produced and directed this terrific movie.

2.  The Firm (1993) - Say what you will about Tom Cruise (and I will agree with much of what you say), this is one of his finest films, and one of the only decent John Grisham book adaptations.  Also great in this movie are Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ed Harris, Gary Busey and of course Gene Hackman.  That scene between Hackman and Tripplehorn near the end is great.  Pollack produced and directed.

3.  Out of Africa (1985) - Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, both close to their best, in a sweeping epic romance.  Pollack won Best Director for this one, and it also took Best Pictuer honours, among the 11 Oscars for which it was nominated.  David Watkin aids Pollack considerably here with some of the best cinematography you will ever see in a film.

4.  Three Days of the Condor (1975) - Pollack directs this political espionnage thriller which opens with one of the most memorable film openings of all time, as Robert Redford, a CIA operative, returns from lunch to find his entire office assassinated.  An intensely political film, Three Days of the Condor took on the CIA, Watergate, the press and the Pentagon Papers.  Often overlooked, but still a great film.

5.  Jeremiah Johnston (1972) - Robert Redford again, in this Pollack-directed wilderness western.  Many comparisons have been made between this and Dances With Wolves,as Redford is a man alone in the wilderness, befriending the native people in the area, until a horrific final act sees him exact brutal vengeance against the same people, leading to a final moment of questionable redemption.  A magnificent movie.

6.  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) - The movie that put Pollack on the map, he wrote, directed and produced this tale of a bizarre dance marathon gone awry.  Jane Fonda also found her star on the rise with the film, as it put her on the map as an actress as well.  She is terrific as Gloria, a woman who finds the worst in her being brought out by the prospect of $1,500.00 in prize money in this two-month-plus dance marathon.  Strange, but pretty darn good.  Gig Young is terrific too as Rocky, the irritating emcee of the contest.  This was nominated for nine Oscars.

7.  The Way We Were (1973) - More Redford, this time with Barbra Streisand.  Cynical Cinema must admit that this is one we haven’t seen, but from all accounts it is an all-time classic.  Streisand won a Best Actress Oscar.

8.  Tootsie (1982) - Pollack’s tour de force, and his best movie.  Dustin Hoffman gives yet another defining performance as a struggling actor who finds that the best roles are being given to women, and so he dresses up as one in order to land a dream role.  Funny, sharp, and incredibly perceptive, Tootsie was one of the first, and still the best, of it’s kind.  Men dressing up like women for laughs is now commonplace, but usually in movies like Big Momma’s House and Norbit.  Which indicates how great Pollack had to be to prevent this movie from falling into that sinkhole.  Only Mrs. Doubtbfire since then has even come close to capturing the tone and the intelligence of this film.

 Sydney Pollack was the Scotty Bowman of the film world.  Always working with a star-studded cast, just as Bowman always worked with star-studded teams.  And the knock on Bowman has always been that anyone could win with those players.  In movies, not anyone can craft a great movie simply by casting great actors.  Pollack was a genius in that he not only got the best out of those actors, he made sure that they had something to do that could elevate the films from decent to memorable to classic.  On top of that, he was a fantastic actor as well - just look at his incredible performance in last year’s Michael Clayton.  He will be missed.

It has been brought to my attention by a couple of people today that this website can be daunting at first glance.  That is because I have limited computer skills and I don’t know how to make it any easier.  In order to comment on a review, you have to click on the “no comments” link on the bottom.  Or the “1 comment” or “2 comments” or whatever it may be.  Because there is apparently a lot of spam out there, you have to write a word you see in a box next to the comment section.  Although I have that spam filter going, I still somehow get thirty spam messages a day, so I have to approve them.  Your comment will appear within a day of you making it, and I will not refuse to approve any comments.  Even the comments on the Family Ties review that are mean to MacGyver.  They hurt my feelings, and, I’m sure, those of Richard Dean Anderson, but I put ‘em up anyway.  On the right, the audio reviews can be played in mp3 form.  This is the stuff you may have heard on the air, and the stuff you would have heard on the air had it been run.  This is divided into sections alphabetically, and that portion contains all the reviews that are available.  Further sections are as follows:

New Releases - All the releases for the current week that have been reviewed, as well as the previous three weeks.

Movies to watch before you die - Self-explanatory.  Watch all these movies.  Before you die.

Coming up in CHEZ nation - Reviews of the DVDs being given away in CHEZ nation this week, and the days they are available.  So you can decide whether or not you are willing to spend those hard-earned points.  Not all the DVDs that are available in CHEZ nation will be reviewed, because I am not always allowed a copy to see before it is available for a giveaway.

Movies on The Movie Network - I just added this one today.  This is all the movies playing on TMN and MPix for this month that have been reviewed.  Also the movies that will be premiering next month are listed at the top.  Many people tell me that they don’t rent movies and they don’t go to movies, they just pick the ones that are on TV already.  So I have decided to add this section to hopefully help a bit.

Interviews - Exclusive Cynical Cinema interviews with various figures in the film world.  Currently, that consists of just one, with Sharkwater director Rob Stewart.  But hopefully there will be more soon, when I get the time.  And when I can convince people to talk to me.

OK, that’s it.  Oh, one more thing.  At the bottom of this particular post, you will see something that says “Administrative stuff”.  If you click on it, you will see a list of all the administrative stuff that has been posted on this website.  When you see these little places to click at the bottom of the review, the same thing applies.  If there is one that says “drama”, you will be shown a list of all dramas that have been reviewed by Cynical Cinema.  If you click on “garbage”, you will be re-directed to a list of all the garbage.  The fact that the “garbage” tag so often coincides with the “Steven Seagal” tag is just that.  A coincidence.  Don’t read too much into it.

Rambo (7/10):  The fourth installment in the muscles-and-big-guns series that got worse with each of the first three episodes.  You won’t know you missed this crap until you watch this crap again.  And then you will wonder how you went 20 years without it.

Grace Is Gone (8/10):  A poweful, heartfelt movie about a family torn apart by the death of their mother in Iraq.  John Cusack is terrific as the father, and so is Shelan O’Keefe as his 12-year-old daughter who becomes something of a caretaker to her father as the embark on a road trip.

Cleaner (2/10):  Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Mendes star along with Ed Harris and Luis Guzman in a cop movie that is garbage.  Never trust Ed Harris or Eva Mendes!  And Luis Guzman and Sam Jackson will star in anything.  This movie is…anything.

All Hat (3/10):  A Canadian film that fails in many ways.  It’s heart is in the right place, but it’s too simple, too boring, and too all-over-the-place.

Darfur Now (8/10):  A star-studded cast, including Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Hilary Clinton, and John McCain, among many others, talk about the most pressing human rights situation in the world right now, Darfur.  This documentary is getting rave reviews.

Jackass Presents:  Mat Hoffman’s Tribute To Evel Knievel (5/10):  Johnny Knoxville yammers on for thirty minutes while fifteen minutes worth of stunts actually take place.  The connection to Evel Knievel himself is…tenuous.  But it’s worth it just for the no-parachute sky diving stunt.

Simon Says:  Horror movie starring the always-creepy Crispin Glover, as a bunch of teens get knocked off by some demented brothers in the woods.  This does not at all sound familiar.

Flashpoint (7/10):  Donnie Yen and a bunch of other solid Asian actors for some seriously bad-ass kung-fu, UFC fighting and hockey fighting, along with a ton of gunplay and something of a decent story.

Shelter:  A surfer begins to discover he is gay in this indie drama.  No actors I have ever heard of star in it.

Nightmare Detective (7/10):  Japanese horror movie that is very effective, particularly in atmosphere and mood.  Scary, creepy and very very dark.  It all takes place in people’s nightmares, and even bikes and bridges become frightening.

Waiter:  A waiter is dissatisfied with his job and his home life, and again I haven’t heard of any of these actors.

The Fall of the Roman Empire Special Edition (8/10):  Three-disc special edition of one of the better epic films from the 1960s.  Alec Guinness, Sophia Loren and Stephen Boyd star in this massive, impressive spectacle.

Holocaust (10/10):  The famous 1978 TV miniseries starring Meryl Streep and James Woods is as powerful and devastating as ever.  Requires a commitment - it is seven and a half hours of video - but this is as important a document about the holocaust as Schindler’s List.  A true classic.

Degrassi:  The Next Generation Season 6 (6/10):  A surprisingly watchable season of this TV show.  It seems watered down from that original Degrassi that was so famous and popular, mostly because there are way more hot chicks in this version.  But solid writing and decent acting in places.

Gunsmoke Season 2 Volume 2 (8/10):  One of the longest-running TV shows in history, still a Western classic.  Guns and bullets and frontier justice and Marshall Matt Dillon and barstool wisdom equals good times.

The Invaders Season One (5/10):  Sci-fi series from the 60s starring Roy Thinnes as the only man on Earth who is aware of an alien invasion.  It lasted only a season and a half, so you get pretty much the entire thing on this disc.

Rawhide Season Three (7/10):  Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates, when he was a young, young man.  Cattle-driving and gunfights and frontier justice and Clint Eastwood.  It all spells awesome!

My biggest complaint about Grace Is Gone is the very first scene. John Cusack is obviously some manager at some company, and he is leading his co-workers in one of those office cheers. You know - “who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “THE CUSTOMERS!” And then everyone runs off to begin their day. I once worked at a place like this. Every morning, before they began, they would put their arms around each other in a circle, close their eyes, and listen to Eye Of The Tiger all the way through. I’m not even joking. They really did this. I’ll tell you, my time at that job before I quit was the longest eleven hours of my life! Well, watching The Postman, twice, on the same overseas plane ride, with Mission To Mars sandwiched in between the two showings, was the longest eleven hours of my life. But this job was a close second.

Thank God the movie is actually decent, because it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when it began. When Cusack gets home from work, we find out that he has two charming little girls, one twelve-year-old and one eight-year-old. The older one seems wise and mature beyond her years, and a little too serious for a normal little girl. The younger one is innocent and vivacious, and seems maybe a little too young for her age. We learn quickly that their mother (and Cusack’s wife) is a soldier in Iraq. The little girl sets her watch to go off at the same time every day, which is when her mom’s watch will go off in Iraq, and they’ll think of each other. And blah blah sentinemtality…blah blah. The older daughter is an insomniac. She falls asleep in school because she can’t sleep at night, because she is thinking about mom fighting a war.

Then two military men show up at the door. Mom (Grace) is dead. And this is where the movie really starts. Cusack, losing his mind just a little, scares the hell out of his older daughter and thrills his youngest when he decides that rather than tell them about their mom, he will spontaneously put them in the car and take them on a road trip across the country to some kind of Dinseyland-type amusement park, the name of which escapes me just now. The whole movie is this road trip, and although that seems boring, enough happens that we are reasonably entertained. Cusack and his daughters, with their support-our-troops ribbon on their car, meet up with his brother, an anti-war jobless bum. I don’t think the movie as a whole is trying to say that those who question the war are shiftless losers, but it sure feels that way during the scenes with the brother, ably played by Alessandro Nivola.

And it really is the performances that hold what could be an awfully thin movie together. Most notably Cusack himself, who appears to have put on a few pounds, and forgoes his usual stutter-bitter-confused delivery for something more sympathetic and damaged. His relationship with the girls, while it starts off as sort of arm’s-length and cautious, improves throughout the trip until, at the end, he tells them their mom is dead. (I’m not ruining anything here - you had to know this movie was going to end that way, right?) It’s a pretty good scene, in the sense that the entire movie has been leading up to that moment, and it would have been very easy to make it maudlin, to contrive a tear-jerking moment, but director James C. Strouse doesn’t do that. Instead the revelatory moment is nicely understated and subtle.

The older daughter Heidi (played very well by Shelan O’Keefe), throughout the movie, knows something is amiss. She puts a lot of clues together, but can’t quite figure out what’s really going on. It seems simple enough to us watching that she should understand completely, but she is unable to conceive something of the magnitude of the death of her mother. After all, she’s just 12 years old. So that option doesn’t really occur to her, or if it does she chooses not to explore the possibility any further. And although Cusack is considerably older than Heidi, he too can’t conceive of this happening either. And the two of them are the glue that holds Grace Is Gone together. Two terrific performances that raise the level of this movie from maudlin to moving. It comes out tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

Flashpoint opens with a short montage of Donnie Yen performing some impressive acts of police brutality in his pursuit of criminals. This lands him, within the first two minutes of the film, in front of internal affairs. Then the internal affairs thing is forgotten for the rest of the movie. It would just interfere with the leg-breaking and gunfights and bad-ass martial arts if he had to worry about who he was hurting and killing. Yen’s brother, you see, is also a cop - one who is in deep undercover with a dangerous and evil criminal organization. This gang is almost as good with the crazy kung-fu moves as Yen himself. Almost. Pay close attention, that will be important information at the end of the movie.

The gang is taken down, and the trial is going to happen, but witnesses start getting killed, and so do some cops. Hong Kong martial arts movies love killing cops, even when the cops are the heroes. In fact, especially when they are. And they also love to have tightly-bonded families, devoted brotherhood, and vengeance. Oh, and they’re also alla bout the lonely cops, loner cops, and possible-problem-drinker cops. Like Bruce Willis, with kung-fu and way more guns. And Flashpoint is no exception. All of these standard Asian action movie stereotypes are in place, and there is nothing new about this film at all.

However, it is good. Flashpoint, in fact, is very good. The gunfights are expertly choreographed, the action is fantastic, the story moves along at a lightning pace, the actors are suitably bad-ass, and Donnie Yen is at his best, sort of a Bruce Lee type - combining Jet Li’s fast and brutal abilities with Clint Eastwood’s dangerous stare. The final showdown is everything you could want from a martial arts movie and more. Not only are there high-flying attacks, hardcore kicking and punching and arm breaking and leg twisting, but there is a real UFC-type feel to the scene, as well as a tip of the hat to hockey fighting. Everything in the world of hand-to-hand combat is thrown at the wall here, and it all sticks. One of the most impressive climactic fights in modern Asian cinema. Flashpoint comes out, courtesy of Alliance Films, on May 27th.