Cynical Cinema

“If we got heart, we got everything we need.”

The Longshots was much, much better than I expected.  You see, this movie is directed by Fred Durst.  Former Limp Bizkit singer-rapper, backwards-red-hat-wearing, Break Stuff Fred Durst.  If his career with Limp Bizkit was any indication, he became a singer-rapper-sucker before doing anything else with his life, which would lead me to believe that this was the area in which he showed the most talent.  The whole singing-rapping-sucking thing.  Which means that if he were to direct a movie, he would be a worse director than he is a musician, and his movie would likely be the worst one made since Glen or Glenda.

But I was pleasantly surprised.  Fred Durst IS a much better film-maker than he is a musician.  (I would, after all, give Limp Bizkit’s entire musical career a collective one-star rating, and the one star would come solely for the song “N 2 Gether Now”, which was produced by someone else and was basically a Method Man song that just happened to appear on a Limp Bizkit album.)  So I expected this movie to be absolutely abysmal, and hands-down the worst movie of the year.  But it isn’t.  As it turns out, it just really, really sucks.  Which drastically exceeded my expectations.

And with that, I award this weeks Cynical Cinema Schmaltzy Claptrap award to The Longshots, a movie which exemplifies Schmaltzy Claptrap perhaps better than any other.  (It helps, too, that I didn’t review any Christmas movies this week.)  Ice Cube has had a musical career that has been decidedly superior to that of Fred Durst.  He has also had an acting career that has been vastly superior.  (Cube has been in Boyz N Tha Hood, Three Kings.  Durst starred in Population 436.  Remember that one?  Didn’t think so.)  And Ice Cube has also been a producer of movies for a long time.  How did he not laugh in the face of Fred Durst when approached to play the lead role in this film?  How did he not read the script and bust a gut over the simplicity and lameness of it all? 

It doesn’t matter, I suppose.  This movie stars Ice Cube, and I’ll have to get used to it.  This is, after all, a logical next step in the career of a guy whose last two big movies were Are We There Yet? and Are We Done Yet?  I was really hoping we were actually done, but apparently not.  There was still The Longshots that needed to be filmed.  And respected people like Ice Cube, and talented actresses like Keke Palmer, were talked into appearing in it.  Somehow.  Possibly through threats and intimidation?  No…that wouldn’t work on Ice Cube…I’ve got it!  Revelation here people - Fred Durst must know the Jedi Mind Trick.  You heard it here first.  Look for him to be dating Scarlett Johanssen soon.

OK, listen to this and see if it makes you laugh.  Because had this film project been proposed to me, I think I would have cracked up.  The fact that it’s a “true story” is nice, but how often do true stories unfold exactly like every other movie Hollywood has ever made?  Here goes:  A young girl is getting picked on at school.  The other girls call her a loser, presumably because she…reads books, I suppose.  She’s pretty, she’s funny, she’s smart, but she’s still the school loser because…the other girls say so.  Her uncle is a down-and-out unemployed man who is basically homeless - a real-life loser.  When he begins taking care of her after school, they don’t much like each other.  He doesn’t want to be bothered with kids, and she thinks he is a drunk and a deadbeat.  They are both right.

Her teacher asks him to come into the class one day, as he’s standing outside in the hall.  With a full beard, a woolen cap, and a paper cup full of booze, he embarasses Jasmine in front of the class, and almost gets into a fight with one of her classmates.  But then - he learns that Jasmine can really throw a football.  And he begins playing football with her after school.  Within about a scene and a half, they all of a sudden love each other, they have bonded over football, she has become totally self-confident and he has cleaned himself up.  They strike a deal - she will try out for the school football team if he will ask her teacher for a date.

Wait - the same teacher whose class he invaded, unshowered unshaved and smelling of liquor, threatening to fight the kids in the classroom?  That one?  Yep - apparently, he really impressed her, and she has a crush on him.  Perhaps she is blind.  And deaf.  And has no sense of smell.  Or maybe she likes ‘em really dirty.  She’ll be awfully disappointed when she finds out that he’s cleaned himself up since two scenes ago.  But of course they will like each other, and everything will work out.  That’s the kind of movie this is.

Now, the coaches don’t want a girl on the team.  Because they are coaches in a movie about a girl playing football.  And the other players are angry about having a girl on their team.  Because they are acting in a movie about a girl playing football, and that’s how players are supposed to be.  Otherwise, there would be nothing for her to overcome, and no trust for her to gain!  And I bet that within a scene and a half, that hurdle will be overcome as well!  And of course it is.  And the coaches love her and the players love her and she is leading the team toward the championship game, known as the Pop Warner Super Bowl.

Sidebar -
I recently reviewed The Game Plan, a dreadful movie starring The Rock from WWE, about a little girl who changes the life of her NFL quarterback dad. 
http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/31/the-game-plan-should-have-come-up-with-a-betterplan-210/
And in that movie, they were not, apparently, allowed to say “Super Bowl”.  Because there is a copyright on that or something.  And yet in this movie, they say “Super Bowl” over and over.  I suppose that the main reason there is because in The Game Plan, the NFL teams would be playing for the actual Super Bowl, and in this one it’s just the Pop Warner Super Bowl.  Which must not fall under the same copyright laws.  Or something.  Just a thought I had.

So now, the uncle is cleaned up and sober (although we never see him getting sober.  We just notice that all of a sudden there is no beer can in his hand at all times, because his neice can throw a football.)  The neice is accepted by her team-mates and her coaches and her peers.  Her mom is proud, and the town has both embraced her and developed football fever, and are rooting the team on to victory, Jasmine especially.  So…what is left to do?  How can there be a conflict before the Big Championship Super Bowl Game?  Easy.

First, Ice Cube must explain his back story.  One which we already, unless we were totally brainless, knew.  He was a football star.  Right there, on that same field, in that same place his niece is now a star.  He had the world at his feet, his whole life ahead of him, and fat college scholarship offers and blah blah blah.  So on and so forth.  Then he injured himself.  And his dream of pro football faded away, and he took a job at the Ol’ Mill or whatever, and left behind the glory, and then the Mill closed, and he was out of work, and blah blah blah.  Such and such. 

Now, he is explaining this to his sister-in-law.  The one who came to him to ask him to look after her daughter.  And you have to think, she asked her daughter’s homeless drunken uncle to look after her, and didn’t even know THIS much about the guy?  Like where he used to work, or that he was a football star years ago?  So one can only assume that ALL she knew about him was that he was a drunken homeless guy.  And yet she set him up as her daughter’s babysitter anyway.  Thank God she did this in a movie about girls playing football, or there would have been some serious questions about her parenting skills when her daughter perished in a cardboard-box fire.

And then - the big drama.  The father, who abandoned Jasmine years ago, and for whom she has been pining the whole movie, shows up.  He’s Ice Cube’s brother, so Cube knows he’s bad news.  And that he’s only there because his daughter is a star on TV and in the news and such.  And Cube knows that he will leave her again at a moment’s notice, because running away from his responsibilities is what he does.  But of course, his daughter is thrilled to see him, and hangs out with him a bit before the Big Game, and they re-connect. 

Then after the big game, the movie has to wrap up pretty fast.  So although the father has done nothing bad since he returned, and nothing to indicate to his daughter that he is in fact bad news, and although she was thrilled to have him back in her life just a day ago, she now *bing* comes to her senses and rejects him.  Why?  Because the movie needs to end.  And then he does some mean stuff afterward, showing his true colours, so we can feel good about the fact that she was so mean to him.

But we don’t.  For all we know his intentions were pure, and he was really trying to do the right thing.  So we don’t feel good about it.  In point of fact, we don’t feel bad about it either, because we just don’t care any more.  It’s time for the movie to wrap up, and wrap up it must, and not a moment too soon for me.  I was getting pretty tired of this sickly sweet cookie cutter Schmaltzy Claptrap anyway.  Oh, and Fred Durst - it’s cool with me if you still want to make movies.  So long as you are not planning to make any more albums.

Hustle is a 2004 movie from ESPN and Alliance Films, all about the troubled life of Pete Rose. It comes out on DVD today, July 22nd, and it begins after his retirement as a baseball player, in 1987 when he was the manager of the Cincinnatti Reds. I assume we all know the Pete Rose story, but here it is in a nutshell anyway: Rose is still the all-time hits leader in baseball history, a man who knew nothing but baseball. In 1988 he was banned for life from baseball by commissioner Bart Giamatti for gambling. As the manager of the Reds, he was betting on baseball, (including some bets on his own team). Tom Sizemore plays Rose, and one can only imagine he brings many of his personal demons to the role. And I found his performance alternately brilliant and irritating. At times, he really seems to embody Rose as he was at his most charming and reckless (he really does look like him), and at other times, I couldn’t shake the image of John Turturro. Somehow, he really reminded me of John Turturro. But that’s likely my own problem. The movie opens with Springsteen singing Glory Days, which is a promising beginning.

Hustle is directed by Peter Bogdanovich, the man behind such classics as The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. Bogdanovich shows a sure hand here, but he isn’t given much to work with. I have always felt that the way Rose played the game was an incredibly important part of his story. That on the field, he had no off switch, and that made him an all-time great. But off the field, that lack of an off switch made him something of a menace, to himself and others. The moment when, in the 1970 all-star game, he ran over Ray Fosse, a catcher for the Cleveland Indians, separating his shoulder. Fosse was never really the same after that.

And at the time, this moment became famous in baseball. Look how much Pete Rose wants to win! Even in a meaningless All-Star game he’s willing to get dirty! Well…OK. But suppose, for a moment, that Scott Stevens had laid out say, Ron Francis at centre ice during an NHL All-Star contest, ruining his career. Would anyone celebrate this? Or would they call him a maniac? No one throws at batters in an All-Star game. No one slides hard into second or runs over a catcher. It’s a meaningless exhibition. This was perhaps more an indication of a sociopathic personality than it was an example of hard-nosed baseball.

And the Fosse incident is dealt with in Hustle, early on in a throw-away moment. “Oh, isn’t that Ray Fosse? He was never the same, eh?” And that’s it. So although the details of the Pete Rose baseball playing career are glossed over, his gambling habits are put under a microscope. The whole movie deals with just two years - from 1987 when Rose met Paul Janszen, the man who would become his assistant and later bring him down. And really, Paul is the star of the movie, as he goes from wide-eyed hero-worshipper to a disillusioned, badly used former friend of Rose who turns him in partly because he has no choice, and partly because he has been victimized by the man.

And that’s fine, Paul is played quite well by Dash Mihok, but this really is a movie about Pete Rose, right? Well, why not spend the time learning about Rose and how he got to be the way he is, instead of focusing on the other guy? Why not start during his playing career, at least a bit? Rose comes off at first as a guy who just wants everyone to like him, but slowly it becomes clear that he is just using these people who consider him their friend. And that’s all we really learn about him throughout the whole film. Which makes the whole picture feel very long.

The baseball scenes are few and far between, and really don’t look realistic at all. The supporting cast is decent, but Melissa DiMarco as Rose’s wife Carol doesn’t really seem to know how she feels about her husband at all. Sarain Boylan, as Paul’s wife, is pretty easily placated. And the people playing Marge Schott and Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent all look quite a lot like the people they are playing, but that is where this story really is. In the back rooms of baseball. And these characters are terribly underused. This movie is really not good enough for the story it tells.

But wait! There is a reason to pick up this DVD! It is the special features. Bart Giamatti’s press conference in 1988, where he banned Pete Rose from baseball for life, has an eerie ring in the context of baseball today. His line “the integrity of the game of baseball must be defended by a process which, itself, lives up to the same standards of integrity” (I paraphrase because I can’t remember it word-for-word) is really striking when looked at through the lens of the steroid scandal. The interviews with Rose are incredible to watch as well - the Primetime interview where he finally admits to betting on baseball in 2004. A Sportscentury interview with John Dowd. There is even an interview with Paul Janszen on ESPN. But what’s saddest about these special features is that they give more of a window into Pete Rose than does the movie. The movie is a miss, but the special features are magnificent.

If you are going to make a movie starring just one actor, you could do worse than Will Smith. I Am Legend is a movie concept that isn’t exactly new, it’s basically a remake of the old Charlton Heston post-apocalyptic film, The Omega Man. The film opens with a cameo from Emma Thompson, who plays a scientist on TV announcing a cure for cancer. I suppose we are to believe that whatever that cure was is the same thing that unleashed the virus that wiped out humanity. The next thing we know, it’s three years later and Will Smith is the only man left alive, and he tears around New York City in sports cars shooting at deer, who apparently now live right in the city with the humans. He is accompanied by his faithful dog, Sam, and he lives a fairly quiet life. He has set up mannequins in the local video store to appear as though there are people around, and he rents movies there every night. He has to make sure he is home by sundown, and then he sits there with his dog watching the films.

The reason, it becomes clear soon enough, that he has to be home by sundown each evening, is that not everyone has died. There are strange, mutated human beings living in the darkness. Like vampires, they die in the sunlight, and therefore the daylight hours are perfectly safe for Smith and the dog Sam. Like the volleyball in Castaway, Sam becomes a very human character in the film, like a child who can’t speak. He helps Smith with his work - which is, basically, finding a cure for the virus. Because he is immune to it himself, he uses his blood to try to cure the infected mutants, which he captures by means of snares and traps, the kind one might lay for rabbits as a third-grade boy scout. He then takes them back to his underground lab and injects them with…something…that might cure them. All very experimental, all very high-tech.

But of course, something has to go wrong. And I don’t want to divulge the end of the movie, so I won’t say exactly what it is that goes wrong. But I will say it involves mutants, since that seems obvious, and it involves Will Smith, since that too is obvious. He behaves, toward the end of the film, exactly the way I expect I would behave were I utterly alone save for a dog for three long years. There are some good action scenes, and the mutants are suitably scary. They do seem old-hat by now, however. We have seen many similar scary mutants in movies like Blade II, The Descent, 28 Days Later, and so forth. But they work, and they serve their purpose, so I really can’t complain.

There are some problems with the plot. How come his house still has electricity so many years after the world disappeared? How do his various cars seem to have an endless supply of gas? How come he has those massive steel doors protecting every possible entry into his house, yet the mutants can so easily break in at the appropriate moments? How do the mutants remember where he lives when the time comes? And how can he have the lights on in his house at night if he is afraid those mutants may discover where he lives? Furthermore, if his lab is in the basement of his house, how can daylight get down there to protect people from the mutants when the need arises? And most of those deer-in-the-city shots are very obviously (and therefore poorly) computer-generated.

All problematic, but in the end, irrelevant. As I said before, a movie with (basically) just one actor needs someone like Will Smith, who can make his way through scenes completely solo and still keep our attention. We enjoy this movie because we enjoy Will Smith, plain and simple. And despite the fact I have seen it many times before, despite the problems involved, I did indeed enjoy this movie.