Cynical Cinema

Hancock has a great star.  It has a great soundtrack.  And it has a great premise.  Will Smith stars as a superhero with a drinking problem, a man who saves people just because that seems to be the thing he should be doing, while showing complete disregard for the property he destroys while doing so, or the massive amount of destruction he creates while rescuing innocent people and stopping criminals.  I absolutely love the idea that this is the first movie I’ve seen that really shows the consequences of the actions of a superhero.  Sure, he stopped the gun-toting bad guys, but in doing so he’s caused four million dollars worth of damage to L.A. highways and buildings.

A few funny scenes open the film, with Smith flying through highway signs, destroying cop cars with his drunken buffoonery, and eventually setting down the SUV full of bad guys on top of a building in the sky over Los Angeles.  But the movie quickly takes a turn when he meets Jason Bateman - in another hilarious scene where Hancock saves Bateman from a train, then unnecessarily destroys the train rather than getting out of the way.  The one thing I wish I had seen in this film is a little more of the consequences of these actions.  With the train derailment, the cop cars exploding, wouldn’t there be a rather heavy toll in terms of human life?  Why are we hearing about the monetary vaule of the damage when people clearly would have died?  Well, as it turns out, Peter Berg wanted to maintain a light tone in the movie, and keep some humour in there.  And it would be tough to do that if Hancock was actually killing people.

 When he meets Bateman, a P.R. man, the movie changes as Bateman tries to change Hancock’s public image.  He realizes that deep down beneath the drunken exterior, Hancock really just wants to be liked.  And he convinces Hancock to respond to the 6,000+ outstanding warrants out for his arrest.  The theory being that if Hancock goes to jail, he will be seen by the public as admitting his sins, and that eventually the public will miss him when crime rises.  And, for the most part, it works.  We learn a little bit about Hancock’s back story, and yet another story line develops, this one involving Bateman’s wife, played by Charlize Theron.  And by this time there is too much going on.  And we stop caring, even when things start coming together.

A drunken superhero is a great idea - how would one arrest this man?  Who could possibly convince him to sober up?  Would the lives he saves be worth it compared with the lives he inadvertently takes?  All of these things are touched upon in Hancock, but it isn’t quite enough.  In the end, there is nothing terribly interesting about the movie.  Watching Will Smith is always a good time, and he is reliably engaging as the imbittered, sour Superman figure.  But the bizarre story twists near the end feel like a clumsy way to create some actual drama.  You have an invincible superhero, and he’s the only one of his kind on Earth.  So in order for there to be a real bad guy who can actually kill Hancock, and therefore create some drama in a will-he-make-it sort of way, they had to find a way for this to come about.  And it’s contrived and irritating.

Hancock is decent.  It features a great Will Smith (but we all knew he would be), and a solid premise with interesting ideas.  But I would have really liked to see those interesting ideas explored more, and (amazingly) I’d have liked to see Charlize Theron less.

There is an absolutely phenomenal box set being released on August 26th. Woody Allen has been one of the greatest American directors for many years, and while he is mostly remembered for his all-time classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall, every one of his films is worth watching for one reason or another. With his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona in theatres, Alliance Films decided to release Woody Allen: The Collection today, August 26th. Every movie in this box is good, some are great. And while six of the discs have been readily available before this on DVD, the seventh is the bonus.

Wild Man Blues, a 1997 documentary film about Woody Allen, has been a hard-to-find item for some time. Not a film about Allen the film maker, but a film about Woody Allen the jazz musician. Allen, when not making films, plays jazz clarinet at a New York club. This film, directed by Barbara Kopple, follows Allen around as he takes the jazz ensemble on the road. The documentary was made right around the time when the public image of Allen was at it’s lowest. He had just left Mia Farrow for their stepdaughter Soon Yi Previn, and people were beginning to look on him as some kind of sexual predator. This film was accused of apple-polishing by some critics upon it’s release. As though it were some kind of brown-nosing attempt by Kopple to repair Allen’s tarnished image, and the movie was quickly forgotten. But in watching it now, it is merely a window into the man’s private life, his relationship with Soon-Yi, which really does appear to be pretty normal, and his relationship with his parents, which is eye-opening.

The other films in the set are all second-rate Woody Allen films, which would be first-rate films by almost anyone else. Mighty Aphrodite, the film for which Mira Sorvino won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, is a pretty fluffy film that works best as a reminder that Mira Sorvino CAN actually act. Bullets Over Broadway is a brilliantly funny comedy about gangsterism and the roaring twenties, featuring terrific performances by Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical comedy that is absolutely jammed with star power, and as such is one of the only Julia Roberts movies, AND one of the only Drew Barrymore movies, that I actually enjoy. Deconstructing Harry is a very dark comedy that is equally star-studded, with Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal and dozens of others in perhaps Woody Allen’s most under-rated movie. Celebrity is also jammed with big names, but isn’t one of Allen’s best efforts. And Scoop is likely the low point of the box set, with Scarlett Johanssen turning in a surprisingly mediocre performance and Hugh Jackman being a little more irritating than necessary. Not a horrible movie, but weak by Woody Allen standards.

Woody Allen: The Collection is a must for fans of his work, with Wild Man Blues being the icing on the cake. Get this box set, then pick up Annie Hall, Manhattan and Crimes And Misdemeanors, and you have all the Woody Allen you’ll ever need.

Sleepwalking came out Tuesday the 15th from Alliance Films.  And while I want to like it, and I want to recommend it, I just can’t.  It’s a movie that almost gets there and almost succeeds, but in this case a near-miss is as good as a mile.  You know, horseshoes and hand grenades and so forth.  It’s the story of Tara Reedy, a young girl played by Annasophia Robb, whose mother Joleen (Charlize Theron) is a pretty awful mom.  After her boyfriend is arrested on drug charges, Joleen and Tara are evicted from their house and have no place to go.  They move in with Joleen’s brother James (Nick Stahl), but after a couple of days Joleen is gone.  She has taken off on her daughter, leaving her stuck with James, who has no idea what to do with a 12-year-old child.

The relationship between Stahl and Robb is a great one.  It is awkwardly sweet, tender yet clueless.  And while initially he is the one making all the sacrifices for her, and she’s kind of the twelve-year-old jerk, eventually she comes around and helps him as much as he helps her.  Stahl is terrific as the unstable, meek loser of an uncle, and Annasophia Robb is absolutely wonderful as the young girl.  (You might remember her from her terrific performance in Bridge To Terabithia.)  Theron is great as the absentee filthy neglectful possible-prostitute mother.  Which means the movie feels like it’s building toward something intense.  Something that reveals the whole story, that explains Joleen and James and why they now are the way they are.

And it seems like this moment is coming.  James has lost his job, has been evicted from his place, and has nowhere to go with young Tara, so he takes her on a road trip to see his dad (and Joleen’s) at his farm a few states over.  We know that this will lead to a watershed moment, either a reconciliation with a father that has been wronged, or a confrontation with a father that has wronged his kids.  We don’t really know until we get there.  And when we do get there, the final resolution is, in a way, even more intense that we would have expected.  And, in another way, much less intense.  You see, the father is played by Dennis Hopper.  And unfortunately, he portrays the father as a complete cartoon character. 

The entire film, up until that point, hinged on the father.  Every other character has deep issues and serious damage, all of which can be traced back to this father.  Stahl, Robb, and Theron have all turned in deeply nuanced, wonderfully emotional performances to this point.  Things are hinted at but never said.  And now here comes the big resolution where we find out for sure what has happened…and Hopper shows up as Dr. Evil from Austin Powers!  I don’t think this is his fault.  I think his character was written that way and that this is how the movie was supposed to go.  And when we get that major, watershed moment, it’s a far more over-the-top intense scene than we could ever have imagined.  And yet - the questions we have remain unanswered!

This is a movie that I think gives it’s audience an awful lot of credit.  Thinking that just hinting at certain things and creating damaged characters is enough for us to piece together, for ourselves, just what this father did.  And we probably can.  But the lack of a real resolution with acutal confirmation of our suspicions left me feeling ripped off.  The final scenes all of a sudden feel unnecessary, rather than a real climax.  And that means we sat through the rest of the movie for almost nothing.  With so many good performances and so much development leading up to this big final showdown, we needed more.  A lot more.

In The Valley of Elah did poorly at the box office. It turns out people just don’t want to be challenged these days. This is why movies like “Meet The Spartans” debut at #1. I was almost ready to write a review of Meet The Spartans, sight unseen, simply to convince people to avoid it. The same guys who made Epic Movie and Date Movie, which were two incredibly bad films, were clearly going to make one just as bad. And I felt that people going to see this film at all would just encourage them to make more. And so next year we will likely get Pirates Of The Beowulf or some such garbage. But even had I done so, it would not have mattered much. People would still have gone out to Meet The Spartans in droves, and the dumbest two percent of those people would have recommended it glowingly to their friends. “They have a pit! Like the one in 300. Like, EXACTLY the SAME. And they kick Britney Spears into it! I have never laughed so hard in my life! Except for the time I took that IQ test and got a result lower than ‘celery”". Meet The Spartans earned 18.7 million dollars in it’s first weekend at the box office, narrowly beating Rambo for top spot. In The Valley Of Elah made 1.5 million dollars on opening weekend, and left theatres having earned 6.7 million overall.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning Meet The Spartans and In The Valley Of Elah in the same sentence. I think it’s merely a method of illustrating the general idiocy and apathy of movie audiences today. Because people do not want to be challenged. They don’t want to think at the movies. And they certainly don’t want a movie that will make them think once they have left the theatre. That’s like bringing your work home with you! Imagine going to that movie with your wife, and then in the car on the way home, she wants to TALK about it! That certainly seems like more effort than it’s worth, doesn’t it? And, I’m sorry to say, for all you movie-watchers, that In The Valley Of Elah will spark discussion, and make you think, and might just lead to other topics of discussion as well. Topics like…Iraq. How this war is different. This war is not World War II. It is not even Vietnam. This is something that we haven’t seen before, and in this film we see that perfectly through the eyes of Tommy Lee Jones, who has deservedly earned a Best Actor nomination for this Sunday’s Oscars.

Jones plays the father of a missing boy. His son returned from the war in Iraq, and then disappeared completely. And Jones goes after him with the single-minded determination of a war veteran. A vet himself, Jones is that uber-American army guy who, after his many years of service, is still completely invested in the army. Not that he still works with them and does army-related things, but he is emotionally invested. He believes strongly in the bonds that connect soldiers, in the military code of discipline and in the army. Which means he believes the war in Iraq is important, that it is American and that it is just another proving ground for young men who love their country and are bringing democracy and peace to a backward nation. But his search for his son challenges those beliefs, and he will not be the same man when the search is over. In The Valley of Elah was in the top 200 movies at the box-office in 2007. It was in the top 100 R-rated movies. (Although I really don’t know why this was rated R. We don’t see that much of the blood and gore that is insinuated throughout the film.) And it had the 233rd biggest opening weekend of the year. But it is one of the 20 best movies made in 2007.

Charlize Theron co-stars as a police officer who aids Jones in his quest for his sone, and provides one of the few problems I have with the movie. We know who Charlize Theron is. We have seen her in dozens of movies where we are fully aware that she is one of the hottest women alive. And yet, in this movie as in others, she seems to be intentionally dialing down her looks. She is just not that hot here. And we have to think to ourselves - we know how gorgeous this woman is. Why wouldn’t she want to look good? Sure she’s a police officer, but would she, as a police officer, go out of her way to look as plain as possible? Well, maybe. Susan Sarandon shows up in what turns out to be a bit part as Jones’ wife and the boy’s mother. And a stellar cast make up the military unit with whom the boy was serving. In The Valley of Elah is a terrific achievement. It’s slow, it’s deliberate, and it’s very political. It will challenge your assumptions - even if you are already against the war in Iraq, there are still other questions posed by the movie that will make you think. This may be the most accurate representation of soldiers in Iraq yet put on film in a feature film. It should really be seen. By everyone. Let’s at the very least make it a success on DVD!