Cynical Cinema

Don’t get me wrong.  Cheers was always great.  And season 10 contains some of the classic episodes the world has come to know and love.  Like the one where Sam, Cliff, Norm and Fraser go on a road trip to find their inner manliness, or the one where Norm and Cliff ruin Fraser’s therapy group.  Every actor is totally comfortable in their role, by this time they can do it in their sleep, and on occasion it seems as though they are.  But the indications that Cheers was nearing it’s end were there throughout the season.  And mainly, that’s as a result of the theme throughout the season where Sam and Rebecca decide to conceive a baby.

Not that the lame idea of the formerly promiscuous bartender and the uptight gold-digging whiner trying to have a child together can being down the entire series.  It can’t.  Cheers was just too good, and Norm and Cliff and Woody and Fraser and Carla and even Paul and Lilith made the series great regardless of the subject.  But where, in an earlier season, Sam’s romance with Diane was clearly going to be a fleeting one and was easily dismissed as Sam went back to his old ways, this time we feel as though it’s one of those will-they-or-won’t-they plots that could go on forever.  Like that Rachel and Ross thing that made Friends suck so very much.  Cheers is still hilarious, still way better than Friends, but Season Ten was the beginning of the end.  It comes out today, September 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

I have already gone on at length about No Country For Old Men.  Without a doubt in my mind, it was the best movie of last year.  For the full review:  http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/10/no-country-for-old-men-best-movie-of-the-millenium-1010/  Now, Alliance Films is releasing it again, along with The Man Who Wasn’t There in a two-disc set.  A two-disc set everyone should buy.  Not only is No Country For Old Men the best film of the past ten years, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very underrated classic.  Since I have already reviewed No Country, I’ll talk about that one here instead.

Billy Bob Thornton plays a barber who hates his life.  He tries to do something, anything, to relieve his boredom, and that something is blackmail.  He blackmails James Gandolfini, his wife’s boss, who is having an affair with his wife (Frances McDormand).  A fairly innocent, one-time plan at first, the whole thing, as with all film noir, spirals out of control, and before long, Thornton is involved with murder.  And then things get really weird.  The film is shot in black and white, set in the forties, and feels just like 1940s film noir.  It captures the tone, the feeling, and the pacing of great noir, and there are some great performances by Thornton, McDormand, Gandolfini, and Tony Shaloub as a high-priced lawyer.  Also terrific is Scarlett Johannson, who appears as a young ingenue piano player, and looks even hotter in black and white with a 40s hairdo.  And then there is the whole alien abduction thing.  Insane, but this movie is terrific.

The Coen Brothers have done some of the best movies of the past twenty years.  And two of them are packaged together today by Alliance Films.  Well worth picking them both up.

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.

The Walker is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.  It knows exactly where it’s going, exactly how to get there, and exactly how long it’s going to take.  But that’s kind of like saying the same of a Michael Bolton album.  Sure, he made the exact album he wanted to make, but why in God’s name would anyone want to listen?  And in the same way, I can’t understand why people would want to watch The Walker.  Well, the cast in impressive.  Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Bacall and Kristen Scott Thomas.  Which might get some people to rent this film.  But I can’t see it getting them to like it once they have done so.

Harrelson plays a gay man in Washington who doesn’t seem to do much except hang out with the society ladies and play canasta, gossiping about everything tawdry that goes on around him.  He is referred to as a “walker”, a man who walks around with rich women.  I don’t know if these people actually exist, or are referred to as such, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Harrelson has this fake southern accent which is disconcerting at best, obnoxious at worst.  He comes off as a gossipy cross between Truman Capote and Scarlett O’Hara, which is not a character I thought we ever needed to see.  His friendship with these women is a shallow one, based almost entirely on surface appearances.  His life outside his gossip-sewing circle is also shallow and surface-deep.  This is what we learn in the first half hour.

And that first half hour, as with the rest of the film, is meticulously planned out and executed.  Soon, Harrelson is driving Kristen Scott Thomas to visit the man with whom she is having an extra-marital affair.  When she finds that man murdered, a vague plot is exposed.  A vague plot, involving vague motives, featuring vague power players in Washington with a vague denouement and a vague resolution.  Shadowy figures pass through the scene, old friends turn out not to really be friends, and Harrelson takes a vague stand based on some vague morals and some vague motivations, which seems to basically involve him being vaguely questioned by vaguely politically motivated cops.

You get the sense that this film is vague?  Well, it is.  Nothing concrete ever really happens, certainly nothing exciting happens, and although the narrative is pretty straightforward, the movie barely scratches the surface of what surely is meant to be a very complex political murder plot.  There is just not enough here to interest people, and on top of that, you have Woody Harrelson playing the central role, one which is just plain irritating.  Skip The Walker.

          Just putting Will Ferrell in a comedy means a few things.  First, it will do decent bank at the box-office at worst, and massive bank at best.  Secondly, even if it sucks, it will feature a few great laughs somewhere in the film.  And Semi-Pro has both.  A decent bank at the box office for a crappy comedy, and some seriously great laughs in an otherwise crappy comedy.  Will Ferrell is Jackie Moon, a one-hit-wonder singer with a song called “Love Me Sexy”, which is kind of funny, but not as funny as it should be.  He made enough money with that song that he is able to buy a team in the fledgling American Basketball Association, the Flint Tropics.  The team is playing in a tiny market, to few fans, and Ferrell is constantly dreaming up bizarre promotions to get more fans out to the games.  Since this is a second-rate basketball league, he is also able to play on the team.  As the owner of the team, he can decide this for himself, and he does. 

          The rest of the team doesn’t seem to resent this, however, because they really don’t care about their careers or the game.  They just want to be minor-level local celebrities, which gets them the occasional free beer and every now and then gets them laid.  Which, for them, is good enough.  They do have a substantial talent on the team, however, in Clarence “Downtown” Withers, a Dr. J type player who changes his name before just about every game.  And when it is announced that the
ABA is going to be merging with the NBA, and that the top four teams in the league will get to join while the others will fold, the Tropics all of a sudden have something to play for.  Inclusion in the NBA, which is everyone’s dream.  So Ferrell hires a loose-cannon ex-NBA player (Woody Harrelson) to help get the team over the hump. 

          In the meantime, he keeps devising these crazy promotional schemes to draw people to the arena to watch the games.  These schemes provide the bulk of the laughs in the film, especially the scene where Ferrell wrestles the bear.  This scene (to start out, anyway) is remarkably underplayed by Ferrell, and really works.  So do a few others, but overall the movie doesn’t.  It doesn’t work because it doesn’t do anything.  It doesn’t go anywhere, it just muddles it’s way through a story we’ve all seen a thousand times - an underdog misfit team decides to play well, and fights their way to glory…with hilarious results.  And in doing so, they throw in a bunch of used-up sports movie cliches from Slapshot, Major League, Bull Durham, and a host of other sports comedies that are much better than this one. 

          In the end, I would actually recommend this movie, because the few laughs that are in there are very good, and because Ferrell, Harrellson and Andre Benjamin (who plays Clarence Withers) all do extremely well with the thin comedy they are handed.  And also because, on some level, this movie is interesting, historically.  Semi-Pro actually seems to feel some empathy and some reverence for the
ABA, which merged with the NBA in 1976 and saw the Spurs, the Nuggets, the Pacers and the Nets join the big league.  And although Semi-Pro seems to think that just having an afro in the 70s is funny, it still manages to find some kind of a heart under the poorly executed comedy.  Not a great movie, but not Ferrell’s worst by a long shot.  Semi-Pro is being released tomorrow, June 3rd, by Alliance Films.

The Coen Brothers have collaborated on twelve films in their illustrious career. There have been some interesting misses (The Ladykillers, The Man Who Wasn’t There) and some terrific movies (The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?) And there have been three absolute classics. They are Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and now No Country For Old Men. This is an absolutely brilliant film, taken very literally from Cormac McCarthy’s absolutely brilliant novel. This may well be the best movie the Coens have done, and that’s saying a lot - Fargo was the best film of the 1990s.

Tommy Lee Jones plays sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a backwoods country sheriff who is smart and determined, but he is long on wisdom and short on solutions. There is a slight echo of Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo, an officer of the law who would seem less than brilliant to those around them, yet we the audience get to see inside their head a little more and we can see that their outward appearance is deceptive, and that they are in fact very intelligent. He is the centre of the movie, but, this movie is not about Jones. Javier Bardem gives one of the creepiest performances in recent memory as a maniacal killer named Anton Chigurh. He has a strange, Beatles-type moptop haircut, and he is cold, emotionless, and single-minded. His performance in this movie is as scary as any turned in by the other masters of the creepy of this generation - the Christopher Walkens and John Malkoviches of the world. But this movie is not about Bardem.
Josh Brolin is the main character in the movie, Llewellyn Moss, a man who stumbles across the aftermath of a bloody shootout in the desert. There are bodies everywhere, and two trucks still sitting in the middle of the desert. Brolin finds massive amounts of heroin, which he leaves there, dozens of guns, some of which he takes, and two million dollars. He takes all of that. His performance is also single-minded in the film, he is a good ol’ boy, a tough Vietnam veteran who believes he can take on anyone and anything. His undoing proves to be a seemingly unnecessary act of kindness - he goes back to the site of the carnage to bring water to the one man who is still clinging to life. Why he does this is simply an extension of his character. He is that determined, that headstrong, and that committed to whatever it is he is doing. And in this case, he is doing what he believes is the right thing. But, this movie is also not about him.

This movie is about No Country For Old Men. That is, it is about the country. The end of the country and world that we all know, and the presentation to us of a world that is completely alien to us. You could call the film a western, in that it takes place in the west. Desert scenes and cowboy hats and gunfights and strong characters who come to a head with each other at various points in the movie. You could call it a thriller, in that the bad guy might get the good guys, the good guys might get away, there are chases and battles and guns and violence and tense moment after tense moment. It could almost be considered a black comedy, with certain scenes having a bizarre comic effectiveness. I’m not even sure if it was intentional or not, but in particular one scene where Bardem blows up a car outside the pharmacy. You may have seen it in the trailers. The car blows up, and the glass window outside shatters, the pharmacy descends into chaos, and people begin running everywhere in a panic. Bardem, on the other hand, just keeps walking. Straight toward the back, no reaction at all, totally unconcerned with the chaos, and determined to complete his task. It comes off as something out of Buster Keaton, the stone-faced man who doesn’t know he should be ducking for cover because he is too preoccupied with whatever is going on in his head. And in many ways, No Country For Old Men could qualify as a horror movie as well, thanks mostly to Bardem. He moves slowly, purposefully, and relentlessly toward the man he means to kill, almost like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees.

Bardem’s portrayal of the psychopathic killer is bone-chilling and fantastic, but the movie doesn’t really delve into him at all. It’s treatment of Chigurh is almost clinical, in that we watch his evil acts with more of a sense of dispassionate astonishment than a sense of moral outrage. We are just amazed that someone like this could exist in our world. His scene with an old man in a gas station is one of the most tense in recent memory, and contains some of the best dialogue in the Coen’s repertoire. Woody Harrelson makes a brief appearance as a man sent after Chigurh by his bosses, and his time on screen is almost anecdotal as well. In the end, we don’t really get to know any of the characters, even Brolin. There is no character development to speak of, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. And the one character we do get to know a little, Tommy Lee Jones, is pretty well the same man at the end of the film that he was in the beginning. His voice-over to open the movie is one of the best I’ve heard since Morgan Freeman’s in the Shawshank Redemption.

Also anecdotal are Stephen Root as a crime boss, Ana Reader as a woman by a pool in a hotel, and Kelly MacDonald as Brolin’s wife. In the book, Reader’s character has a much larger part, but the end for her is the same. MacDonald is great in her small amount of screen time, and her final confrontation with Chigurh is as chilling a moment as any I’ve seen. The photography of the country is unbelievable, making that scenery itself a character in the film, just like the Coen’s previous best work, Fargo. The movie deals with many moral questions without delivering answers. The choices men make, the questionable morality of each character, the inevitability of fate, and ruminates endlessly on human nature. Sometimes this rumination comes directly from Jones’ words, other times out of the camera as we are left to ponder the consequences of the previous scene while the next one begins to play out. No Country For Old Men is bleak, entertaining, and virtually flawless. Cormac McCarthy wrote a tremendous novel, which was translated into a brilliant screenplay, which was then transformed into an absolute genius movie. To say something is as good as Fargo is something I might have considered ridiculous five years ago. No Country For Old Men is as good as Fargo. And therefore it is better than any other movie of the past ten years. Rent it, buy it, whatever. Just do it now.

Cheers is one of the very few shows from the 80s that actually stands the test of time. And season nine is out on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s in the midst of the Kirsty Alley years, back before she was a gigantic Jenny Craig spokesperson. As a child watching this show, I could not understand for the life of me why Sam Malone always wanted to sleep with Rebecca Howe. It confused me. I thought, this guy sleeps with every hot woman who walks into the bar! Why does he want the one who is fairly attractive at best? Not only that but she’s high-maintenance, she’s irritating, she’s kind of dumb, and she is a little mean. My mom explained that it was because he wanted the one woman he couldn’t have. At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought, the less effort the better, no? I understand better now, having succumbed to the same sort of mind set once or twice, but I still think it would be a lot better to just find a really hot girl with a great mind, like that one he meets every year on Valentine’s Day at that cabin in the woods, and go with it. Kirstey Alley seems like a lot of effort for very little return. But, that’s just me.

Season nine features some of the classic episodes of the series, like the one where Norm’s wife takes a job at the restaurant upstairs. In fact, the best part about season nine is the introduction of Keene Curtis, who plays John Allen Hill, the owner of Melville’s restaurant. His introduction leads to several great episodes where the ownership of the bathrooms in the back of Cheers come into question, and the feud between him and Sam reaches epic proportions. While Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammar are possibly the most successful actors to emerge from Cheers, it’s John Ratzenberger and George Wendt who kept the show outstanding. The ninth season was one of the best, and if you’re going to pick up one season on DVD, this is a good place to start.