Cynical Cinema

When I first told our music director that Alliance Films was going to send my a copy of Control to review for June 17th, I asked him if he would play a Joy Division song after this review, so that I could perhaps expand the minds of our classic rock listeners to a new kind of more obscure, but equally classic, rock music. His exact words were “there’s no way I’m putting that namby-pamby British sad-sack crap on CHEZ”. OK, maybe those weren’t his exact words, but he certainly said something along those lines. And this is the attitude many people have about this era of British music. The Smiths, The Buzzcocks, the Jam…they seem to make the bile rise in the throats of many hardcore rock afficionados, the way emo does today. But for the life of me, I can’t understand how anyone would love Nirvana and hate Joy Division. Or how they can talk at length about the merits of R.E.M. and down on The Jam.

But I think those people are in the minority, since Joy Division has become, since the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, recognized the world over as one of the most influential and one of the greatest bands of the late 70s and early 80s. And it is Ian Curtis who is the focal point of Control, the biopic by music video director Anton Corbijn. This is Corbijn’s first effort at a feature film, and it is terrific. It was Corbijn who, as a photographer, took the iconic photo of Joy Division that has become the definitive portrait of the band in the years since the death of Curtis. He has a real sense of history, shooting much of the movie in the real locations. Sam Riley stars as the singer, and he walks out of the house in which the real Curtis lived, down the street to the real building where Curtis worked. Corbijn has an incredibly astute visual sense, and the streets of Manchester are as important to the story as is the band itself.

Riley gives what truly is a star turn in the film. While it appears he was chosen for the role primarily because of his uncanny resemblance to the real Ian Curtis, he becomes so much more than that. Riley was not really an actor before landing the role in this film, be was a singer. And it really is him singing the songs on stage with Joy Division. The actors playing the rest of the band are really playing the songs. Riley has managed to mimic Curtis’ actual stage movements so precisely and so convincingly that on occasion I leaned in closer to the screen, certain that I was seeing file footage of Joy Division in 1979, and not Riley in a movie in 2007. Also wonderful are Samantha Morton and Alexandra Maria Lara as his wife and girlfriend respectively, the two women who (unintentionally, it would seem) tore his world apart. In fact, I think the very best thing about this film is the casting. This movie is perfectly cast all around.

Not only is Manchester a star of the movie, so too is the music of Joy Division, music which just gets better with every subsequent listen. As the movie goes on, the music itself tells a bit more of the story than we’re getting otherwise. And that’s because Ian Curtis was a man who lived through his music, who expressed himself in song and poetry and lyrics far better than he could in the real world, with words and conversation. (I have one bone to pick here though - “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, the definitive Joy Division song, appears too early. It’s a song about the conflict raging inside Curtis concerning the two women he loved, and the song appears in the movie before we really see that conflict appear. But it’s a small bone to pick.)

In many ways, Control is the best musical biopic of the last few years. Corbijn recognizes that it is impossible to tell the story of an entire life in just two hours without leaving some huge gaps. So he chooses to tell the story from the time Joy Division began through Ian Curtis being diagnosed with epilepsy, through his fits and his depression and his ups and downs, and finally through to his tragic suicide. There are still, of course, some giant gaps, but the streamlining of the biography helps Control avoid the bloated feel of movies like Ray and Walk The Line. And the fact that the music itself tells so much of the story is, I think, a luxury unique to this particular subject and this particular man. Very few singers in history have written such open, bare and honest songs about themselves, without being cryptic. Ian Curtis was not cryptic, he was not artsy for art’s sake, he was crying out for help through his music. Control is the story of the help that never came.

With the release of Control on DVD June 17th, there is a market for all things Joy Division, at least for a time. So Alliance Films is releasing a documentary film the same day, simply called Joy Division. Control is a fantastic film about Ian Curtis, the tragic lead singer of Joy Division in the late 70s and early 80s. And while it’s terrific in the way it focuses on Curtis himself, the rest of this powerful and influential band gets pushed aside in favour of the compelling story of their lead singer. Joy Division is the story of the rest of that band, and it’s more a celebration of the band’s history than it is a eulogy for Curtis himself. It features interviews with tons of the great movers and shakers in the Manchester music scene of the time.

Tony Wilson, the now-deceased founder of Factory records, is a big part of the film, and was an even bigger part of the scene in Manchester at the time. He’s the guy who broke Joy Division big in 1978, and was the subject of the terrific 2002 movie 24 Hour Party People. The other band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris make appearances here too, talking about their memories of fame and the beginnings of Joy Division, as well as reminiscing about Ian Curtis and his death. Of course, the three of them achieved far greater stardom than Curtis ever did. After his death, they would reform as New Order, and become internationally recognized pop stars.

But it was Joy Division that started it all. To be a little more accurate, the Buzzcocks really started it all in the late-70s Manchester scene, but Joy Division soon became the shining light of that group with the release of their first true album, Unknown Pleasures. That then paved the way for New Order, The Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Inspiral Carpets, and countless other Manchester bands who would all, at the very least, achieve a cult following the world over. But this film doesn’t deal with the legacy of Joy Division, just the moment in music history that was theirs and theirs alone. As the other band members remember Ian Curtis toward the end, you get some lines that were actually used in Control as well. No one, at the time, thought that Curtis’ lyrics were anything more than art. That he, like Neil Young or Bob Dylan, was singing about things that he created as an art form. It was only too late, however, that they discovered that when he sang lyrics like; Mother, I tried, please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things
I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am

on “Isolation”, he wasn’t just creating art, he really meant it. One of his bandmates calls Curtis’s story “one of the last true stories in pop”, and he is absolutely right.

The whole story of Joy Division in general IS one of the last true stories in popular music. And it’s laid out for us here in stark terms, with an eye to historic relevance and to the feel of the times and the city. The influences on Joy Division that came from the Buzzcocks and, more directly, the Sex Pistols. The brilliance of the music, the effect it had on people, and the legacy the band left in just two staggeringly brilliant albums. Also appearing as interview subjects are producer Martin Hannett and Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend Annik Honore. His wife, Debbie, does not appear in the film, but text shows up on the screen from her biography Touching From A Distance, so her presence is felt throughout the film.

A wonderful retrospective on one of the great unknown bands of our time, Joy Division is essential for lovers of British music, a wonderful companion DVD to those of you who are going to buy Control, and simply well worth watching for anyone else. A fascinating story about a fascinating time, place, and band. If you’re a music lover, pick it up.

          Spike Lee made a fairly lousy movie a few years ago.  It was called Summer of Sam and starred John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino, and it pretty well sucked.  It was all about
New York, in the summer of 1977, when Son of Sam was terrifying the people.  And although it was a fairly bad movie, it did one thing very well.  That being the fact that the movie didn’t really focus on Son of Sam at all.  Oh, he was there, killing people with his pistol, and showing up now and again.  But the movie dealt with a bunch of young people doing a bunch of stupid young-people things while the killings just happened to be going on at the same time.  It was a nice device to put the serial killer in the right perspective.  People talked about it, they worried about it a little, but it existed on the periphery.  And a new TV miniseries called The Bronx is Burning does the same thing.  It will be released tomorrow, June 3rd, by Alliance Films, and it’s all about the New York Yankees in the summer of 1977. 

          Now, before I start my review, I must state, for the record, that I am a Red Sox fan.  A big fan.  And I therefore am against everything Yankees-related.  However, I still enjoy John Goodman as The Babe, and I still cry at Pride of the Yankees, and I really enjoyed this miniseries.  I can still revel in the successes and the history of the enemy.  I would love to see an interesting documentary on Rush, or a fascinating retrospective on Coldplay’s career, such as it has been.  And it was with great pleasure that I watched the behind-the-scenes 1977 Yankees season.  Some great actors came together for this ESPN special series, including John Turturro as oft-fired and oft-rehired Yankees manager Billy Martin, and Oliver Platt as oft-insane Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.   

          Now, I must say it’s a bit tough to watch Platt’s Steinbrenner, because he seems to be channeling the “George Stenbrenner” of Seinfeld fame.  And every time he talks, or makes a big speech, I’m always a little surprised when the camera turns away and George Costanza isn’t shaking his head and waving his hand and walking out of the room.  The combustible and crazy relationship between him and Martin forms the dramatic centre of the series, but there are other story lines at play here as well.  The friction between Reggie Jackson and the rest of the team, particularly Thurmon Munson, is a big one.  And then there are the
New York-in-1977 stories that set the Yankees story in context.  The Son Of Sam.  The devastating power blackout.  The hotly contested mayoral race.  And the fires and looting and violence that plagued the streets of the Big Apple that year. 

          Steinbrenner comes off as the villain of the piece, with his craziness and his impossible demands and his need to control everything that goes on within the organization.  Turturro’s Martin, in an odd way, despite his lascivious and fractious behaviour and volatile temper, therefore becomes the hero of the show.  And Reggie Jackson, although in real life his transformation may not have been so dramatic, is the person who grows the most over the course of the season and this six-hour miniseries.  Now, I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying the Yankees won the World Series in 1977.  I think most people who were alive at that time know this.  And those who weren’t, like me, also know this if we are baseball fans. 

          Although me, being a baseball fan, and having six hours to watch, I would have liked to see a little more baseball.  I would have liked to see more players than just Munson and Jackson and Bucky Dent.  I was hoping to learn more about Catfish Hunter, Ron Guidry, and Dock Ellis (who is of particular interest, because on June the 12th, 1970, pitching for the Pirates against the Padres, he threw a no-hitter while completely bombed on LSD.  See - fun baseball stuff.)  Also fun stuff - Graig Nettles, who was with the Yankees that year, said in 1977 “the best thing about playing for the New York Yankees is that you get to see Reggie Jackson play every day”.  Nettles (played by Alex Cranmer) is barely mentioned in the series, but
Jackson is portrayed excellently by Daniel Sunjata as he really was.  More of a Star than a great player, a larger-than-life sports figure.  While exceptionally talented and passionate about baseball,
Jackson was always more of a Star than he was a great player.  He was the Joan Crawford of baseball. 

          But what makes The Bronx Is Burning great is that you don’t need to be a baseball fan to appreciate it, (although it helps), and you don’t need to be a New Yorker either.  You don’t need to have lived through it, and you don’t need to know anything about the city, the summer, the team or the sport to enjoy it.  The actors are very good, the dynamics on the team are believable and rarely stray into the realm of cheesy re-enactment, and the characters are well drawn.  And the Ramones-intensive soundtrack is both awesome and a-propos.  The
Bronx is Burning comes out June 3rd, from Alliance Films, and it is worth the trip to the video store.

“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.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

There are many, many movies just like The Great Debaters, which comes out May 13th from Alliance Films. Movies that deal with race relations in the Jim Crow south. Movies that show kids in college achieving a greater understanding of the world through a special teacher and through competition. Many of which have starred Denzel Washington. All of which means The Great Debaters is nothing new. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent. What sets this film apart is the crafting of the movie, courtesy of Washington, who directs, and the performances that hold it together, also courtesy of Washington. He is terrific as the college professor who molds a team of Africa-American debaters into the most potent orators in the college world.

Also terrific is Forrest Whitaker, who now has to merit some consideration as one of the finest actors of our time. He plays a preacher at the same college as Washington, a fine orator himself and a renowned scholar. He doesn’t quite understand, the way Washington does, how best to harness his intellectual powers to effect true change, but he grows over the course of the film. But the character who does the most growing is his son, who is played by the aptly-named Denzel Whitaker. As the youngest member of the Wiley College debate team, Whitaker is both the emotional centre of the movie and the one character whose growth most mirrors the story arc. His performance as 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. May well be the best in the film.

Rounding out the terrific cast are Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, as the eventual other two members of the debate team. Parker plays a rebellious student, who is brilliant but tortured. Smollett is a driven, intelligent woman, who aspires to become only the third black female lawyer in the United States. Their story, (and romance) is incidental to the film, but it works. Denzel Washington’s story seems incidental as well, at first. When he isn’t working at the college, he is dressing up as a farmer and holding clandestine meetings in barns, attempting to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. This leads to him being branded a communist, and there is a backlash against him that comes from both the white establishment and his African-American colleagues. In the end, this is not simply an incidental story line, it is essential to the full fleshing out of the story.

The fact that this film is based on a true story might be the most remarkable thing about it. These people did exist, they did do this remarkable thing, and who knows - had we been there at that time, in 1936, it may well have been as powerful and inspirational as the movie itself. Now, I do have a quibble or two. If this were 1936, using a reference to Hitler to win a debate wouldn’t exactly have the gravity that it does now. In fact, it might have been a rather weak argument in 1936. Like making a Gearge-Bush-is-awful argument in August of 2001. Maybe you can see something terrible coming, but it sure isn’t there yet. And also, the top-ranked Harvard debate team seems to have had their lines dumbed down a little. They don’t make enough sense and they aren’t good enough points for such a highly-touted debating team. That being said, however, I would have really liked to see a little more of the debates themselves. They are all so compelling and so interesting that I could have handled another hour of movie if it was all debating.

As Wiley College mows down their opponents in Texas, and takes on the best Negro colleges in the States, a final showdown is set when Harvard agrees to meet the team and debate against them. Harvard is, of course, the perennial powerhouse team, the best in the country, and they are willing to meet this remarkable Negro team in an historic debate. Of course, this is the big, climactic, and inspirational finale of the film, and it’s fairly routine in the way it ties everything together, but it is set up and delivered so well that it doesn’t feel like a cliche or like the obvious ending, it just feels great. And so does the rest of The Great Debaters.

Mad Money is about Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah stealing money. Katie Holmes is Tom Cruise’s wife and was in Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Queen Latifah was a rapper who appeared in the movie Taxi and produced Who’s Your Caddy. Diane Keaton, on the other hand, was Annie Hall. She was in The Godfather. And Manhattan. She is the one who should have known better. When a director whose previous credits include “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” approaches you about starring in a movie with Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah, you say no. Well, if you’re some actress just trying to break into films, you don’t. But if you’re Diane Keaton, with seven certifiable all-time classics under your belt, you do. You say now, you walk away, and you wait for the next legitimate offer to come rolling in. Saying yes to this movie would be like Jack Nicholson agreeing to star opposite Adam Sandler in a comedy directed by the guy who did The Nutty Professor II and Tommy Boy. Oh…wait…that happened too.

Frankly though, I think Diane Keaton’s appearance in Mad Money is not a reason to make fun of her. I think it is more likely a result of so few good roles popping up in movies for women over the age of 35. There have been five good, older-lady starring roles in movies over the past decade. Two have gone to Judi Dench, and three to Helen Mirren. There is nothing left. So if you want to continue acting, you take whatever comes along, even if that means appearing in one of the worst comedies of 2008, Mad Money. Keaton plays a upper-class yuppie who gets thrust back into the work force when her husband (Ted Danson) gets downsized. She ends up getting a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank, where she decides she really does want to be able to continue buying those Faberge Eggs after all, and so she decides to steal some money to continue her yuppie lifestyle.

She enlists two other cleaners to help her. Katie Holmes is a spaced-out airhead. Queen Latifah is an angry single mother. And…laugh! OK, laugh! Nope. Laughs are few and far between as the plan gets put into action. There is also very little drama, very little excitement, and no boobs at all. So…what reason would someone have to watch this? A good question. The answer is - none. No reason at all. Mad Money doesn’t even work on the level of one of those loser idiot gross-out Adam Sandler movies. Like the one directed by the guy who did Tommy Boy. At least there was something interesting about it. Like, how low can Jack Nicholson actually GO in a movie? Here there is no suspense. Diane Keaton has already shown how low she can go by appearing in Because I Said So, which was even worse than this. (To see Keaton and Nicholson both phoning it in for a paycheque at the same time, watch Something’s Gotta Give.)

There are some seriously lousy performances in this movie, although Keaton’s isn’t one. Latifah plays who she always plays, she’s phoning it in too. Katie Holmes is given a role so unchallenging that it doesn’t matter whether she’s any good at all. Stephen Root, however, is unnecessarily obnoxious as the boss of the Federal Reserve. You would think that a guy in charge of something like that would be a little less smarmy and creepy than Steve Carrell in The Office. But what do I know. Ted Danson is useless as Keaton’s husband, existing only to cry about the loss of his job and complain about the thievery, both of which he doesn’t do well. There are a few funny moments. The moment where Queen Latifah asks the dean of her son’s private school if she can pay him in crack is hilarious. But…this IS supposed to be a comedy. One laugh and fifty-five cringe-inducing moments do not a comedy make. They make a turd heap. And Mad Money is one. It comes out tomorrow, May 13th, courtesy of Alliance Films.

I hate to call something a must-watch, because people send me emails, angry that I said Hot Fuzz is a must-watch, and they hate British people. Or that A History of Violence is a must-watch, but they hate violence! (I really did get both of these emails. I liked the violence one best.) But this is one. The Hunting Party is a movie that asks the question - how hard are the agencies of the world really looking for the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? Specifically, this movie deals with the CIA and their “efforts” to track down the war criminals of the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. As it stands right now, most of the war criminals - murderers, genocidaires, rapists and worse - from the former Yugoslavia are still on the loose, (many believe some are sheltered in Russia) despite agencies like the CIA having vowed to track them down and find them half a decade ago.

The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a reporter and a cameraman who have been through many wars together. The film is inspired by the true story of a disgraced reporter, played by Gere, and his cameraman (Howard) and a wet-behind-the-ears young journalist who has to prove his merit because he is the big boss’s son. The three of them take off into the former Yugoslavia, searching for the region’s most notorious and dangerous war criminal, the butcher known as “The Fox”. How much of what transpires after that is true and how much is fiction, I don’t know. But I do know that the movie is enthralling. Three things make The Hunting Party tremendous. First, the social conscience and the real-world political questions raised by the film. Secondly, it’s pacing. The first time you see Richard Gere’s live, on-air meltdown on national TV, it’s almost comical, in a way. Later, you learn the circumstances behind that meltdown, and when you look back on it, you can no longer remember why you found anything funny in it at all, it just looks tragic. There is enough subtle humour throughout the film, at just the right places, to break up what would otherwise be overwhelmingly tragic and bleak subject matter. And third, the realism. These characters behave the way three real people, in the real world, would behave. Yes, they are foolhardy, yes, they are reckless, and yes, they are probably very lucky to be alive at certain points in the movie, but they never seem anything less than human at any point.

The Hunting Party is both a fascinating character study of a man who does not know how to stop being a reporter, and an eye-opening look at the way the CIA, the UN and other world agencies pay lip service to war criminals and the architects of genocide without ever really doing anything about them. It is, indeed, a must-watch. So watch it!

BlacKout is about an event we likely all recall. That giant blackout that turned off the power across Ontario and upstate New York a few years ago. I remember exactly what I did. I got a couple of girls from work to come home with me, we grabbed ice bags from the store in my building, we filled the tub with the ice and the beer that was still in my fridge, and we waited. Our phones were dependant on power, so we didn’t call anyone, we just waited. My roommate came home. Then the girls from downstairs came up. Then the two college guys from across the hall came over. Then other girls we knew just arrived from nowhere. Somehow the word was out, phones be damned, that our place was the central gathering point. People had beer, put it in the tub, and we had a great time out on our balcony and around our house for an entire night. This good time was aided by a small act of violence. When Dave from downstairs came up carrying his guitar, and set it down for a moment, we hid it in the ceiling until the next day. We were pleased to have a small party, but we’d be damned if it would turn into a campfire kumbaya party.

In other parts of the country, things weren’t so orderly. In particular, a neighbourhood in New York City called East Flatbush, where the tension boiled over into violence, looting, and a vey scary night for everyone in the area. BlacKout tells their story, and it is out on DVD this coming Tuesday courtesy of Paramount and BET. Most exciting for me was seeing that Melvin Van Peebles was in the film. Van Peebles (and yes, he is Mario’s father) is a cinematic legend, the man who almost single-handedly created the “blaxploitation” genre in the 70s with his film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaasss Song. He certainly hasn’t done much of note recently, and I’m just glad to see that he’s working. By now, he is playing George, who is in his nineties and is the super of a building in East Flatbush, the building that is central to the movie. The movie deals with several couples, a mother and son, three old ladies and a few other individuals who live in that building, and what they do during the blackout. Believe me, it is much different from what I did.

BlacKout (I don’t know why I’m still putting that big K in there. I still don’t get the big K) plays like a second-rate Spike Lee film. Specifically, a second-rate Do The Right Thing. Very very similar films, in that Do The Right Thing was centered around one day, in that case the hottest summer day of the year, and BlacKout is centered around one day, the day of the…blackout. Also similar in that it follows many people around, and their stories intersect with one another without building to any kind of massive cheesy ending where every story comes together. They just exist on their own, and in relation to one another, and it is quite good. Second-rate Spike Lee is not really a put-down. Few films could match the tempo, the dialogue and the feel of Do The Right Thing. For example, Disturbia was a second-rate Rear Window, but it was still pretty good. Comparisons to Do The Right Thing I think are unavoidable with this film, but if you can watch the whole thing while constantly thinking of Spike Lee’s masterpiece and still enjoy it, the film maker here (in this case Jerry LaMothe) has done something impressive. BlacKout is good. It just isn’t classic.