Cynical Cinema

There is a bit of controversy over the shutout of American Gangster at the Oscars. It was not nominated for best picture, and both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington were shut out of the nominations for best actor. I understand the snub of Crowe. (Frankly, he deserves it more for 3:10 to Yuma than he does for this movie.) But the only reason I can think of for snubbing Washington is that he is too tailor-made for this part. You forget that he is an actor, because you’re watching Denzel Washington. As though it were a reality show about his life. If Denzel killed people and ran a drug empire and married Miss Puerto Rico, this would be exactly what his life would look like. The one role he has played to which I could compare this one was in Training Day, and he won the Oscar for that one. And here, he is better. That really is the strength of American Gangster, the performances.

Not just Washington, but Russell Crowe is reliably terrific as the cop tracking him down, and the supporting cast is remarkably good. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang clan, appears here, and as soon as I saw him I thought “oh, no! A rapper in a major role means this movie will start to hit Seagal territory in parts”. But the RZA is good. So is Armand Assante, who I love, and Josh Brolin as a crooked cop. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the film also, and I absolutely hate Cuba Gooding Jr. However, he has maybe five lines, total, and wasn’t around long enough to irritate me. I also really like the inclusion of Clarence Williams III as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Johnson was a real-life legendary gangster figure in New York, and he was the subject of the under-rated 1997 movie “Hoodlum”, where he was played by Lawrence Fishburne in one of the best roles of his career.

In American Gangster, Bumpy dies near the beginning, and his right-hand-man, chauffeur and gopher, Frank Lucas, is left a little adrift. Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and he has few choices. Now that his mentor is gone, he can either leave town and go back to his family, or work for someone else, or take matters into his own hands. Of course, he chooses the third option and rises to power as the number one dealer, importer and gangster in New York. He manages to exist on the periphery, away from the other gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the good cops. One of those good cops is Russell Crowe, who has been blackballed by his police department for being a good cop. In a few scenes very reminiscent of Serpico, he is left hanging because the other cops in the department feel that if a cop won’t take money, then he of course would turn in cops who do. But of course, it isn’t black-and-white. Washington is not all bad, Crowe is not all good, which of course happens in any great movie. And a lot of bad ones.

What really sets American Gangster apart, aside from the fantastic actors doing fantastic acting, is the style. Ridley Scott has managed to make some of the most visually appealing movies in history. (Check out his early work, like The Duellists, or Alien). Sometimes that goes off the rails and the movie suffers for the stylish makeup - think Hannibal, or Black Hawk Down. But in American Gangster, Scott seems to treat the whole movie almost like a period piece. Of all his movies, this one feels the most like The Duellists, both in it’s theme and it’s style. It moves along at a crackling pace on the backs of Washington and Crowe, and although it runs more than two and a half hours, you never have a sense of the time passing. Tremendously engaging and fantastically done.

Here is my review of the original mash-up in this dreadful series:

Download Alien vs. Predator

It sucked then, and it sucks now.  I am certain that there is a group of people working at, say, Pontiac.  Or any other major car company.  And it is their sole function to accept or reject the names of new cars based on their connotation.  And were this group to be presented with a new idea for a car name, like the Pontiac Requiem, they would do some research, say in a dictionary or on Google, and decide against going with that name.  They would say “yes, it sounds badass, but it isn’t a good name for a car”.  And the Pontiac Requiem name would die on the operating table, as it should.  So, too, should Aliens vs. Predator have died on the operating table.  The name, yes, but also the movie.

A requiem is a musical mass for the dead.  Usually, a Roman Catholic mass for the dead.  Mozart wrote probably the most famous requiem of all, but other great ones have been written by Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms and Dvorak.  So…the title of this movie means…there are going to be dead people?  That doesn’t quite work, but what the hell.  It sounds badass, and the producers of the film didn’t have that Pontiac-naming focus group to help them out.  So they went ahead.  Perhaps “requiem” was left on the reject pile from all those Resident Evil video games and movies.  (Nemesis, Survivor, Outbreak, Dead Aim, Apocalypse, Extinction, Degeneration.  4.)  But I digress.  The name is not the worst thing about the movie.  The movie is the worst thing about the movie.

At even the most basic level, the only reason anyone could possibly want to watch this (and the previous one as well) is that they want to see giant unkillable monsters fighting extra-terrestrial unkillable hunters.  Does anyone really expect a story, or a plot, or snappy dialogue?  Right.  So the key scenes here have nothing to do with the irritating human protagonists, but rather the predators and the aliens.  And those are the worst scenes in the movie!  They are filmed SO dark that unless you have one of those incredibly sharp, high-definition TVs, you have no hope whatsoever to understand what’s happening.  I started out watching this on my old TV downstairs, and my step-son had to bring it upstairs to the good TV just to find out what was happening.  And we still couldn’t really see.  Maybe it’s all a ploy to force people to buy it on blu-ray when that comes out.  Or maybe it’s just lousy movie making.

So, without the predator-alien fight scenes, why watch?  Perhaps for the mutant bizarre hybrid, the PredAlien.  Which is, from what I understand, half-alien, half-predator, and therefore twice as ferocious and unkillable.  Or something.  Which would lead us to suppose that the Predators, as was explained in the first movie, are a race of intergalactic hunters who hunt these Aliens for sport, but sometimes, when they are not killing them…they have sex with them?  I’m sure this was actually explained in some way during the movie, but I sure didn’t care enough to pay attention.  This movie sucks.