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Sometimes I watch a movie because I want to think.  Sometimes I want to just have fun.  Inside Man was this week's pick for nonthinking.  I watched it with some close friends and I am sure that the audience affected my opinion.

Seeing Spike Lee produce a fun movie was a fresh switch from his usual heavy topics.  The only heavy moment was when a Sikh had been detained for questioning and was robbed of his turban.  He could not even focus on the line of questioning because his head was exposed.  It was interesting to me because it was akin to asking a woman to be questioned while topless, but the officers either did not understand or wanted to use the disctraction as a sort of truth serum.  As a teenager, my mom barged in on me while I showered and asked me a question.  I was so shocked that I couldn't have fibbed if I wanted to!

Back to the movie.  It was written with scenes interspersed between past events, present events, and suspect questioning.  The cutting was not innovative; it just seemed like an episode of CSI.

The reason to watch a Bonnie and Clyde movie like this is to root for the criminal.  Similar to Heat, the conflict between the head of the police force and the head of the gang was the focus of the plot.  Who is more clever? Which person has the attributes that the writer and director deem to be worthy of granting success?  Well, I liked both Clive Owen's and Denzel Washington's characters, but the mental duel was not that suspenseful to me.

There was also a sequence regarding the personal history of one character.  The was a secret document and a big reveal.  At that point, I thought, "so what?"  It was just not the huge revelation I thought it would be.  Also, some of the big dialogue scenes had no reason to occur, so the writer found clunky reasons to stick two people alone in a room.  I didn't buy the setup and in most cases the dialogue wasn't that intriguing either.

It sounds like I have a ton of reasons to indict this movie, but I enjoyed watching it.  The acting performances were all excellent.  It was different enough from the usual but still not overly heavy.

[rate 3]

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What's with the name Ericson Core?  Sounds like a Battlestations pilot name.  Look at his son's name.  Huh? 

Against my better judgement, I went to see a movie in a theater.  I was immediately annoyed by the lack of stadium seating and by the cigarette burns on the screen.  The theater was also showing the movie in digital, but that showing started at 10:50PM and I was too tired to stay awake that long.

I might want to cringe when I see Disney making a film, but I shouldn't.  I think they learned a lesson with Pirates of the Carribbean.  A movie can look good and be written well even if it's not edgy Touchstone material.  Disney did continue its long history of main characters with only one parent.  In this case, it's a true story, but stilllllll.  Do audiences feel more compassion automatically because of the lack of nuclear family?

The scenery of the film was great.  I love the dirty feel of South Philadelphia.  The streets were littered, the despair palpable.  Even better was the point-counterpoint of the brilliant look of the scenes shot in the context of professional football: sparkling white-and-bright scenes full of clean hope.  Thanks to the NFL for allowing this movie to be officially licensed, too.  Seeing fake teams in a movie is as irritating to me as 555 phone numbers.

There is grit here, and it's depressing.  The working class of America is on full display and it isn't pretty.  There are those who want a hero but there are also those who want to pull every crab back down in the bucket with them. 

Mark Wahlberg has the je ne sais crois to make this role perfect.  I would say that his greatest feat as an actor is picking the right roles.  Papale is not shown as a man of great passion, so Wahlberg's restrained acting range is perfect.  He immediately drew me into caring about his character.  His love interest, played by Elizabeth Banks, drew a mixed review from me: I wanted to like this shining star of a man's man's woman, but her performance did not always deliver.  There were great scenes, like in the Eagles stadium wearing her Giants gear, that she nailed.  She managed to be beautiful and the center of attention and admiration while being a complete pariah.  But occasionally, such as in the bar reciting her favorite player's stats, when her lines seemed disjointed from the rest of the dialogue.  It almost seemed as if the director reshot those lines and the original scene's feel was lost.  Banks looked more like she was reciting than being.

Yeah, it's Disney, it's uplifting.  But it's a true story and sometimes what a nation needs is a hero.

[rate 3.5]

editor's note: oh, and now I'm totally stoked about football season.

IMDb link

You know, sometimes I have a hard time wasting my energy on reviewing films.  While this isn't a zero-star clucker, I was not impressed.

The scenery of this motion picture is beautiful.  It opens with chiron over fall foliage of a gorgeous prep school campus.  The actors are pretty and the views are beautiful.  I particularly like the color palette of the outdoors: the school uniforms coordinate with the fall colors, and the redhead siren's hair is a perfect punch of color.  But on to the plot…

This bunch of high school kids plays a game that becomes too much like reality.  The leader of the group, Dodger, is an attractive redhead with no acting skills.  I say she has no acting skills because I think she's just acting like herself.  I saw her screen test and she was dressed like a stripper.  An attractive stripper, yes, but she wasn't trying to get the part based on the merit of her read alone.

About ten minutes into the movie, I realized that I didn't care at all about the main character, Owen.  I think he was supposed to be some sort of British heartthrob but I just couldn't care.  The dialogue was written with the slow crayon simpleness of a George Lucas script, so I can blame not just the actor but the writing.

Several scenes that would normally have really scared me were merely interesting.  They had predictable slasher suspense, with minor-key music and eye-of-the-victim camera work.  This stuff scares me every time.  However, because I was not interested in the plot, these scenes often fell flat.

There is a late plot twist that is interesting.  As it dawns on the character who discovers it, the movie uses a lazy device: showing previous scenes that should have given us the clues.  I often feel that if the scene didn't resonate the first time, then the film maker didn't do his/her job. 

The death scenes are shot in the same flashback, gritty quality of CSI.  Except CSI does it a little better.

Maybe I'm too old to care about teenager-style movies.  Maybe I'm not, and I should just watch one that isn't awful.

[rate 1]

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I don't see many comedies.  There are two reasons: the first is just mechanics;I'm not in charge of writing the Netflix queue.  Second, most comedies are not that great.  How many times have I seen a movie preview for a comedy and thought, "well, I think I just saw every funny line in that movie."  With that said, I truly love comedy.

As my TiVo will tell, the summer hiatus has been good for me.  The stored dramas are staying stored; I don't think I can care about another dead body on CSI or watch another orange-clad detective on CSI Miami.  Why does the costumer put everyone in orange?  It's not the new black.

Oh, wait.  I'm supposed to be writing a movie review!

Anyway, I love comedies but tend to watch television sitcoms instead of movies.  In 22 minutes, they tall a lot of throwaway jokes and it makes me laugh.  I had kind of a bad day and this movie's been on my TiVo for months, so I watched it.

It was hilarious.  As a former soap opera (what's the PC term now?  Daytime serial drama?) watcher, the jokes were hilarious.  They even had good sight gags- one character, Bolt (of course named something silly), never wears anything but spaghetti string tak tops and tight workout shorts.  He also has the requisite glistening skin.  The only costuming that fell flat was the tweetie bird reference.

Kevin Kline simply shines in his role.  I fell in love with his comedic style during Dave, and it is alive in this earlier film too.  His intelligent deadpan is brilliant.  Sally Field's trumped-up overacting is great also.  I can't even look at Garry Marshall without laughing because he's so funny.  The "play within a play" style of the movie delivers comedy, irony, and a dash of self-deprecation that is so necessary in a campy film like this one.

I laughed out loud more times than I can count.  I know the movie is fifteen years old but it is worth watching.  And a note to current comedy directors: look! No stupid jokes about genitalia nor scatology!  A movie doesn't have to be disgusting to be funny!

[rate 4]

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As always, the reviews of others pre-colored my thoughts of this movie.  I had heard that it was difficult to understand the plot switches.  This little piece of forewarning was very helpful, because I was sure to concentrate.  Even so, some of the plot was too tangled in badly constructed dialogue.

This movie was full of quotes.  Someone would say a line, and I would want to jot notes so I could use it later, gems such as “it’s not racist if it’s positive” and “corruption is why we win.”  I think the writer may have been so busy filling the movie with profundity that he forgot plot movement and clarity is vital in the American market.

Some of the lack of clarity may have been intentional.  Three plotlines interweave and the theme that binds them is often the confusion of the characters or oil ruining their lives because the culture of oil is a tangled web.  There is no absolute good or evil in the film and each person makes decisions based upon their reality at the moment.

My problem with the movie is that there are two audiences of viewers: those that believe the film is more of a documentary than fiction and those that think none of the film’s concepts are plausible.  Both insulate themselves from the fact that we do not know that truth and cannot suppose to understand the climate of oil culture.

Whether truth or fiction, I started thinking more about how much I dislike our oil gluttony.  I think E85 is only a crutch used by automakers who don’t want to really leap into alternative fuels; however, it is quickly renewable and its source can be grown almost anywhere in the world.  Then again, it takes energy to make it, and it only delivers 66% of gasoline’s energy per gallon, and the facts are so politically charged that who knows where the truth lies.

Hey…wait…I’m talking about energy in the middle of a movie review.  Maybe the director accomplished his purpose.

If you want to feel like you’re seeing something that is “high art,” good for you, you should rent this.  If you just want to watch a superhero save us from ourselves, there are better choices.

[rate 3]