Leaves of Grass

I like Edward Norton as an actor, but I haven't really noticed him in movies over the past few years.  Looking at his filmography, I have to go back to 2003's The Italian Job for a movie of his that I actually liked, and he's not even very good in it.  I stumbled across Leaves of Grass more or less by accident, and the cover gave me pause; Edward Norton was pulling an Eddie Murphy and acting against himself in a comedy?  Okay, I'm intrigued.

Sadly, neither of these men are Tyler Durden.

In case you are wondering, this movie takes its title from a book of poems by Walt Whitman.  Whitman published the collection when he was thirty-six, but he continued to revise and edit it until he died at age seventy-one.  While that history doesn't really have much to do with the movie (or does it?), I've always found that interesting.

OCP: obsessive-compulsive poet

The film focuses on the Kincaid brothers, Bill (Edward Norton) and Brady (Edward Norton).  Bill is a quiet professor of classical philosophy, who spends his time critiquing the critiques other professors have made about classical philosophers.  Brady is a redneck drug dealer with enough scientific smarts to design and build his own state-of-the-art hydroponic marijuana warehouse.  Brady finds himself in a bit of a pickle when the local drug kingpin, Pug (Richard Dreyfuss), starts to breathe down his neck; Pug put up the money for the pot lab and wants either his investment repaid or for Brady to start dealing hard drugs.  Brady and his dim-witted friend, Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson, who also directed the movie), come up with a plan, but it requires Bill to come home for a visit.  That's a problem, because Bill hasn't returned --- or even returned phone calls or letters --- since he left to go to college.  How would you get your estranged twin brother to return home after twenty-odd years?  If your answer was "fake your own crossbow-related death," then this movie might not have any surprises for you.  Once he's home in the deep South (which is in Oklahoma?) again, Bill faces his fears and reevaluates his life, and gets entangled in his brother's shenanigans.

One of the difficult choices filmmakers are forced to make when making a comedy is how silly to make it.  Do you go insultingly broad, like the Wayans, or do you go for the 1% chance of a cult hit, like in Napoleon Dynamite?  Or **ugh** do you go just go for predictable stupidity in a romantic comedy?  Writer/director Tim Blake Nelson opts to go the most difficult route, that of the black comedy.  I love black comedies in theory; the idea of cracking jokes at inappropriate times appeals to my inner asshole.  Unfortunately, I don't think Nelson truly succeeds in this attempt.  There are some funny moments and lines of dialogue (I can think of two that involve crossbows), but the humor level is pretty low, unless you count references to pot smoking as knee-slappers.  As a drama, Leaves of Grass doesn't really come together, either.  I thought Nelson directed the funeral scene at the end well enough, but the rest was pretty emotion-free.

On the other hand, I thought the acting was pretty decent.  Edward Norton did a fine job in both roles, but I didn't ever really care for either one.  It was momentarily amusing to see Norton as a redneck, but that novelty wore off quickly.  Neither brother was particularly interesting, either, which made this movie harder to watch.  I enjoyed Tim Blake Nelson as Norton's sidekick; no one can play a well-meaning idiot better than Nelson.  Keri Russell pops up to play a poetry-spouting, catfish-punching local, and she's decent enough.  It was interesting to see Richard Dreyfuss as a villain, and his rant about drug dealers being anti-Semitic was...unusual, I guess.  Susan Sarandon played the mentally fragile mother of the brothers, Melanie Lynskey pretended that she was pregnant, and musician Steve Earle looked really, really ugly.  Nobody gave a bad performance, but many of the characters were unmemorable or just dull.

Which came first, the accent or the facial hair?

I can't say that I enjoyed this movie as either a drama or a comedy, but it has some redeeming value.  The story wasn't confusing and a few of the jokes were funny.  I think the best thing about this movie is that it doesn't assume that people with thick Southern accents are stupid.  As Brady, Edward Norton has a few interesting and intelligent things to say, even if he is saying them with a mullet.  Unfortunately, the script is not strong enough to make the occasional funny bits into a cohesive or interesting whole, despite a solid cast.  I think the biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn't embrace or take advantage of Norton in his dual roles.  You don't make a movie with an actor playing multiple parts unless you're making at least one of those characters into a joke; failing that, you go the Adaptation route and make a genuinely weird movie.  Leaves of Grass does neither, opting for pretty conventional characters, even if they are rednecks.  When I prepared to watch this movie, my only hope was that it would be better than Norton's last dark comedy, Death to Smoochy.  This movie doesn't have the highs and lows of that film, but it disappoints, just the same.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

There are tons of science fiction movies about aliens, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind really changed the genre.  When I think of alien movies, I think of alien invasion movies because, let's face it, that's pretty much the only type of alien movie that gets made.  Sure, you might get a comedy like *batteries not included or Paul, but those are the exceptions to the rule.  Alien movies typically feature fearsome enemies, hell-bent on destroying mankind or, at the very least, Danny Glover.

Everyone is too old for that shit.

Close Encounters takes a different approach, and I found my love for the sci-fi genre refreshed by that approach, especially after some of the crappy post-apocalyptic flicks I've reviewed recently.  It's also a plus to watch just about any movie scored by John Williams.

I normally like to take the time to explain the plot a bit in my reviews, but I'm going to skip that step today.  I tried to summarize the movie, but I never really did it any justice.  That could certainly be interpreted as incompetence on my part, but I feel that this is a film that focuses on a sense of discovery and wonder.  Explaining the movie undermines it.  But, briefly, I can say this: a "close encounter" is an alien sighting.  The first kind are UFO sightings, the second kind leave behind physical evidence, and the third kind involve actually meeting aliens.  Average joe Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has a close encounter of the first (and second) kind, and the largest part of this movie focuses on his struggles in the aftermath of his encounter.

The acting in this film is very solid all around, but Richard Dreyfuss's surprisingly understated performance is what drives the movie.  I'm not a big fan of Dreyfuss, mostly because of his string of hammy roles in the late 90s, but he's actually really, really good here.  He shows great comedic timing, but is able to balance that with some very good dramatic acting, as well.  My favorite example of this is in the scene where he scares himself after his UFO sighting; it isn't funny because of the words in the script, but because his performance is so natural that you laugh because you can imagine doing the exact same thing.  Melinda Dillon doesn't get the chance to showcase as much range as Dreyfuss, but she plays a very good mom character (as evidenced by A Christmas Story) and her panic is surprisingly raw at times.  I also liked Teri Garr as Roy Neary's wife; most films would make her a supportive character, someone who believes her husband's crazy alien theories when no one else will.  Instead, her character did the all-too-believable thing and refused to believe in Neary's X-Files-worthy tale.  What's most impressive, though, is that she doesn't come off as a villain.  Francois Tuffaut makes a rare acting appearance here (he is a famous French director) as the French scientist studying the uptick in UFO activity, and he's perfectly serviceable in his role.  He doesn't really have much of an emotional stake in the story, but I thought he did a decent job.  His interpreter, played by Bob Balaban, is more well known for his straight-faced comedic roles, but he apparently can play it straight, too.

Director Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters right after Jaws, and it really shows his versatility.  Sure, he could make a scary monster movie, but what can he do with a concept picture?  Quite a bit, it turns out.  A lot of the discussions on Close Encounters focus on the special effects, and for good reason.  The different ways Spielberg indicates the presence of aliens without actually showing them are all pretty impressive.  I'm not exactly sure why all electrical devices turn on around aliens, but they make for some very memorable scenes.  And yes, the alien ships look pretty cool, especially for a movie made in 1977.  Focusing on that stuff misses the point of the movie, though.  This is an unusual story.  It's presented as a kind of mystery --- exactly what did they see? --- but, as an audience, we assume that we know the answer (hint: it rhymes with "baliens").  And since we know the answer, there really isn't a sense of revelation in the film.  And yet, it is a compelling movie.  Maybe it is the way Spielberg assembled the film, splicing the big picture involving the French scientist and his discoveries within the narrative of Dreyfuss's character, that makes the movie work.  Maybe it was the way that that "big picture" came together; the scenes in India were pretty cool.  Or maybe it is just the simplicity of the story: aliens want to meet us.  I'm not exactly sure what Spielberg does that captures so much innocent wonder about the unknown, but it is definitely what makes this film so impressive.

"The unknown" is apparently mashed potatoes.

I have to note that I watched the original theatrical version.  There are three versions of the movie available (all of which are in the new Blu Ray package): the original theatrical version, the Special Edition, and the Collector's Edition.  The Special Edition re-edits the movie, removing some scenes and adding a new ending, where we get to see inside the spaceship.  The Collector's Edition includes some of the edits of the Special Edition, but cuts the spaceship interior shots, leaving it to your imagination.  The original theatrical version features Carl Weathers in a small part that was cut in the subsequent versions, as well as a few other scenes that don't really add much to the overall story.

An actual screen shot of Weathers in Close Encounters.  He was easy to miss, I know.

Obviously, I really like this movie, but I am not blind to its flaws.  Its pace can seem glacial if you are not in the right mood to sit and watch it.  The laser light show at the end probably should have Pink Floyd playing instead of John Williams's five-note theme.  I'm not quite sure why electrical devices turn on around our little visitors, but I'm downright confused as to why mailboxes rock back and forth in their presence.  And why is there so much goodwill toward these aliens?  They kidnap people.  They implant images in our brains that compel us into certain actions.  They force creepy, hillbilly-esque people to whistle "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain."  And there's no R. Lee Ermey-type character in this film that wants to blow the little green men back to (space) hell?  That seems very unlikely.  And what about Richard Dreyfuss's character?  His life was ruined by the effects of his encounter, and yet he is enamored with the aliens.  That just doesn't make sense.

See?  I can critique the movie, even if I have trouble summarizing it.  Even with those problems, I still think it is great.  Science fiction is the result of our fascination with the unknown, but the genre rarely conveys that wonder on the big screen.  It's really nice to see a movie that celebrates that joy without being manipulative.

Piranha (2010)

Most movies want to convince you that they are high quality pieces of work, worth your time and your money.  Not every movie has the same strengths, of course, but action movies, comedies, dramas, horror or whatever, they all want to be thought of as "good."  However, not every movie is going to be good, and filmmakers know that.  Every year, there are hundreds of B-movies made for nickels on the Hollywood dollar, some of which turn out to be surprise hits, but most are just crappy direct-to-DVD fodder.  Once in a while, though, an odd beast rears its head: the big budget B-movie.  Piranha (2010), or Piranha 3D, is one of these strange creations, following in the proud footsteps of Snakes On a Plane.  It has no pretension of being anything but a cheesy movie with ample nudity and gore, no apologies needed or asked for.  Oh, and you can take your "piranhas are native to South American rivers, not Arizona" and shove it, along with your "research has proved that piranhas are more nuisances than dangers."  Take that, science!  Here's a fun fact: this film was made for $24 million, which is more than it cost to make four of this year's Best Picture nominees, and twice what it took to make the Best Picture winner, The King's Speech.  Don't get angry, it will just give you nosebleeds.

It is Spring Break and the tourist town of Lake Victoria is overflowing with drunken co-eds.  The local sheriff, Julie Forrester (Elizabeth Shue), and her deputy, Fallon (Ving Rhames), are trying their best to keep the annual chaos to a manageable minimum.  Since this is such a busy week for Julie, she forces her college-age son, Jake (Steven R. McQueen, grandson of Steve McQueen), to baby-sit his younger brother and sister instead of partying.  That's too bad, too, because the girl he totally has the hots for, Kelly (Jessica Szohr), is back in town and is hanging out with a bunch of jerkwads.  Life is tough sometimes.  Jake stumbles into some luck, though; he casually meets Derrick (Jerry O'Connell), the man behind the Girls Gone Wild Wild Wild Girls video series, and Derrick needs a local to help him find all the right spots to shoot his softcore pornography.  Shrugging off his family duties, Jake joins up with Derrick, some hot Wild Wild Girls starlets, and Kelly (more on her later) as they cruise their yacht to somewhere a little more comfortable.  Little do they know that a earthquake the afternoon before opened a chasm at the bottom of Lake Victoria, connecting it to a previously unknown subterranean lake.  And that lake is populated exclusively by thousands of piranhas.  These aren't regular piranhas, though; these are a proto-piranha species, thought to have been extinct for over two million years.  Piranhas, meet Spring Break.  Spring Break, meet your gory doom.

A quick side note on Kelly's character.  She first shows up in the movie with a douchey boyfriend in tow, who (of course) picks on Jake for no reason.  She then runs into Jake as he is about to board the slut boat party yacht, and when Derrick sees Jake talking to her, he invites her to join them.  Derrick is obviously a sleazebag, and she has just commented on how lame the Wild Wild Girls thing is, so Jake tries to help her and tells Derrick that she has other plans.  This causes Kelly to board the ship out of spite.  Later, Derrick tries to pressure her into doing body shots with one of the starlets (on camera, of course) and Jake once again stands up for her; once again, she decides that she definitely wants to do whatever Jake wants to protect her from.  So, let that be a lesson, young men: defending the girl you have a crush on will inevitably turn her into an exhibitionist.  Fact.

It should come as no surprise that the acting in Piranha (2010) is not fabulous.  The cast is surprisingly noteworthy, though.  Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Lloyd, Adam Scott, Paul Scheer, Ricardo Chavira and Jerry O'Connell all damage their reputations by working in this film.  I'll give the young actors a pass, because work is work, but those established actors should have known better.  The movie also has famous nude model Kelly Brook in a main role, as well as porn stars Riley Steele, Gianna Michaels, and Ashlynn Brooke in small (and, not surprisingly, boobtastic) parts.  I guess I shouldn't be so hard on the actors for being in this movie, really.  B-movies are meant to be silly and fun, for actors as well as audiences.  With that perspective, Jerry O'Connell and Adam Scott turned in shockingly competent/quality-appropriate performances, with Ving Rhames occasionally deciding to overact in between bouts of sleepwalking through scenes.  Shue plays everything pretty straight as the main character; personally, I think that was the wrong angle to take, but I've seen worse.  Eli Roth also had a decent small part, but he was definitely aware of the quality of the movie and his acting.

These piranhas are extra dangerous, because they look like humans!

I hesitate to say that anyone actually directed this movie, but Alexandre Aja took the credit for it.  His direction is absolutely wretched.  You know how ineffective horror movies like to kill time between their theoretically scary scenes by startling you?  Like when the main character walks into a room, hears something behind them, and they turn around while the music simultaneously gets suddenly loud --- and nothing's there.  This movie wishes it was that competent.  In one scene, after the piranhas are loose but before the characters realize it, Jake notices that the inflatable chair Kelly was sitting on just minutes before is now empty --- duh-duh-DUMMM; he calls her name, gets no response, and dives in to find her.  It turns out that she was apparently right behind him on the boat.  Huh.  In the very next scene, the camera shows an empty canoe, which had two children in it the last time we saw it duh-duh-DUMMM; the camera pans to the left a few feet and shows the kids on the shore.  If film directing could be described in Monopoly terms, Alexandre Aja is pure Baltic Avenue.

You tell 'em, Uncle Pennybags!

What made this movie so bad?  Let me list the ways:

• CGI effects that were only marginally better than SyFy's (far more amusing) rip-off, Mega Piranha
• The film was edited by "Baxter."  No last name needed
• From a cause and effect standpoint, earthquakes cause piranhas
• Okay, imagine you are a teenage boy, living at home and looking at porn on his computer.  Picture it clearly in your mind.  Now...did anyone imagine having their computer screen clearly visible from their doorway for Mom to see when she walks in?  Or did anyone leave the door unlocked?  Amateurs.
• Stupid effing little kids
• The first thing the Wild Wild Girls people know about Jake is that he is seventeen, and they invite him for a day of drinking, drugs, and slut banging?
• Big breasted women can hold their breath for up to five minutes, as long as they are fondling each other underwater
• Whenever the camera takes on an underwater POV perspective, it is always to fake you out.  Piranhas get their own special "piranha view" shots to let you know they are coming
• Piranhas that have spent two million years in dark seclusion still have large eyes that can see
• There is visible light in the subterranean lake
• Most of the scenes from the previews are not in the final movie
• ...and many more!

Nope.  Not in the movie.

Okay, fine.  It's easy to watch a movie that is intentionally stupid and list off its failures.  The challenge is in finding what made the movie work.  For starters, the body count is pretty big.  I counted at least twenty confirmed on-screen deaths, and that doesn't count three scenes that were full of presumed deaths.  There was some pretty good gratuitous nudity in the film, too, but not as much as you might expect from a Spring Break flick.  Besides, all the nudity came from people who take their clothes off professionally; I'm sure this movie is tame compared to their normal work.  But I'm being negative again, sorry.  There was a ton of gore, including smashed-in heads, ripped-off faces, limbs gnawed down to the bone, and even a CGI severed penis (that was eaten and then puked up by a piranha that was "experimenting").  While I didn't see the movie in 3D, I could tell some of the things that were meant for the third dimension, like chopped up fish parts and vomit.  The very last scene of the movie was actually pretty amusing, too.  Oh, and the proposed sequel has (and I'm not joking about this) the working title of Piranha 3DD --- which, I think we can all agree, is brilliant.

But, even when you factor all that in, this movie just isn't stupid enough to be awesome and fun.  Consider this: the best death in the whole movie (Eli Roth's) was not piranha-related.  The second-best death had a girl getting her hair caught in a propeller and getting her face ripped off, which was also not piranha-related.  Heck, most of the piranha attack victims looked like they had been scratched by a large cat or had acid spilled on them.  Silly me, I thought they were supposed to look like they had the flesh eaten off of their bodies.  The script was dumb, and some of the characters were campy, but --- and I can't believe that I'm writing this --- it needed to be so much dumber and campier to work for me.  This is stupid-bad, not so-bad-it's-good.  So, even though it was being deliberately bad, it wasn't bad enough to be enjoyable.  On the plus side, though, boobs and gore.

Red (2010)

Apparently, America, we are having trouble saying goodbye to our aging action stars.  If you truly doubt that, please explain the appeal of Rambo or The Expendables.  Don't get me wrong, I miss the days when a hero could stand in one spot and shoot down fifteen thousand ninja-Communist-Nazis, without getting even a flesh wound, and I've enjoyed Stallone's increasingly idiotic movies.  Still, it's kind of strange that we haven't seen anybody (except maybe Jason Statham) truly embrace the stupid action hero role, given how important dumb action movies were in the 80s and 90s.  When you think about it, the success of The Expendables is an amusing insight into just how badly we want these actors to keep killing bad guys.  I don't know how intentional this was, but Red seems to be in on that joke, too.

It's kind of like the song from White Christmas...what do you do with a former CIA black-ops agent when he stops being a CIA black-ops agent?  Well, if you are Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), and you are living an inoffensive existence as a lonely retiree whose only friend is a customer service representative at a bank several states away, the answer is simple: kill him.  For reasons unknown to him, Frank discovers that his status in the intelligence community has been changed from "retired" to RED ("retired, extremely dangerous").  Being RED means that assassination squads infiltrate your home in the middle of the night, looking to terminate with extreme prejudice.  However, the "extremely dangerous" bit is an understatement; Frank quickly kills his attackers and begins a quest to find out who wants to kill him and why.

Along the way, Frank has to pick up that bank representative, Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker).  He realizes that his phone must have been tapped prior to the assassination attempt and that the next logical step for the bad guys would be to kidnap Sarah and use her as leverage against him.  She's not very willing at first, but as more people keep showing up to kill her, Sarah quickly gets on the Frank Moses bandwagon.  Frank can't unravel the plot against him all by his lonesome, though, which means he needs to find help.  Since he's retired, it turns out that his help is also a little past their prime.  Joe (Morgan Freeman), Frank's mentor, is now living in a retirement home and passes the time by ogling his nurse's ass.  Marvin (John Malkovich) is a well-armed conspiracy theorist that is paranoid to the extent of having a decoy house.  Victoria (Helen Mirren) is a prim and proper housewife, formerly the best wetworks specialist in the business.  With a little help from Ivan (Brian Cox), a Russian spy and former adversary, the group sets out to learn the truth.

I so so so wish he yelled "Flava Flaaaaav!" here.

 I was excited to see this movie after seeing the trailers for it.  It didn't look like a great action movie --- it has Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren, remember? --- but I thought it looked funny.  I was wrong.  It is funny and a good action movie.  This is one of Willis' more wooden roles, but I don't know if I would have bought a black-ops specialist with a talent for wisecracks.  His stoicism was probably for the best.  Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren clearly had a lot of fun in their roles, with Mirren taking particular relish in being the gun expert.  I go back and forth with my appreciation for John Malkovich, but he plays a pretty amusing paranoid here.  Malkovich was probably my favorite character in the film, but I also really enjoyed Brian Cox.  I think I just like the idea of former arch-enemies getting together and reminiscing about "the good old days," when they used to try to kill each other.  Cox doesn't get nearly enough comic work, in my opinion.  Mary-Louise Parker was also good as the relative newbie to all the danger.  Is it just me, or was Parker neither attractive or talented until she turned 40?  Weird.  I liked seeing Ernest Borgnine again, even if he wasn't threatening to shoot anyone in the face.  The rest of the cast was kind of meh.  James Remar was in the movie for all of two seconds.  Rebecca "Mrs. David Mamet" Pidgeon and her ugly jaw was as awful as she usually is, as was Richard Dreyfuss in his small-but-overacted role.  I'm not exactly sure why Julian McMahon took his small part in the film, but he was definitely many years too young for the character he played.  The bulk of the meh comes from Karl Urban, though.  While I appreciate his dedication to the action movie genre, Urban is best when he speaks little and doesn't develop as a character.  Here, he tries to actually act, with little to show for it.

Though this isn't from Red, Ernest Borgnine is still awesome.

This movie shouldn't be as good as it is.  The screenwriters that adapted this story from the comic book series are the same people who wrote the dreadful Whiteout.  The director, Robert Schwentke, has never shown a talent for either action or comedy, with his only other English films being The Time Traveler's Wife and Flightplan.  Somehow, those films managed to collectively gross over $300 million and still have absolutely zero appeal to me.  Regardless, the script was smart, the actors were directed well, and the action was pretty cool.  I don't think I've ever seen so many bullets fired into one suburban home before, but I liked it.

Probably the thing I appreciated most about this movie was that it didn't keep calling attention to the age of its characters.  Aside from an assassin calling Malkovich "old man," and maybe a similar remark made during a Willis-Urban fight, age was not a joke in this movie.  Thank you, screenwriters.  Instead, the humor was largely contextual and delivery-based.  The main actors were all very good, and only the bad guys weren't funny.  The pace is quick, the action is good, and many things go boom.  This is exactly what From Paris With Love should have been, but was not.  I will go so far as to say that Red is one of the most enjoyable action movies of 2010, and the perfect antidote for anyone who cannot fathom the success of The Expendables.