mmckaibab Reviews

The Social Network (2010)

Why should I care? This film doesn't tell me.

[2/10 · 12 January 2011]

As one of those who completely fails to appreciate the inherent narcissism that underlies Facebook (as well as its clunky, confusing interface), I was disappointed that Aaron Sorkin completely failed to make me understand why I should have any interest at all in the story he tells. What I saw was a story about a social incompetent who screwed over several people and somehow blundered into something that made him very, very wealthy but, in the end, had no effect whatsoever on who he was as a person.

Classic drama is all about how the central character faces a personal crisis, learns important lessons, and comes away changed in some fundamental way. In this film that just doesn't happen. It's just a story about an unpleasant person who created this "thing" that appeals to people's least interesting characteristics, made a WHOLE lot of money, but came away from it pretty much the same person he was when he went into. Boring. Just like most of what I see on Facebook.

What was really disappointing was that, given Sorkin's powerful work on "The West Wing," I was expecting some profound reflections on what effects this shallow person has had on society. That might have been an interesting film--too bad it didn't get made. Instead, we get a navel- gazing look at someone who made it possible for millions of people to make their navel-gazing public.

Just like Facebook, this was mostly just a major time-suck and I left wishing I'd done something more important with the last two hours of my life.

Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Brideshead . . . Revised? Brideshead . . . Reviled? Definitely NOT Brideshead Revisited

[2/10 · 7 August 2008]

Here is the ultimate definition of cowardice. Mr. Jarrold apparently wanted to make a period piece but didn't have the courage to actually write his own stuff from scratch, so he stole character names and isolated scenes from Evelyn Waugh's classic, then superimposed his own much less interesting, much more banal story. The crime is that the Waugh estate allowed this piece of tripe to be released under the name "Brideshead Revisited."

How far does this thing go from the original? Well, let's see. Waugh wrote a profound meditation on the power of memory, the inevitable tragedies of life and love, and the mystery of faith. Jarrold gives us a not-very-titillating bisexual love triangle with a pasted on last reel reveal of the main character's shallow motivation. Waugh's characters were rich, multi-layered creations. Jarrold's are plasticine clichés with no depth, no recognizable motivation, and no growth . . . hell, they don't even age. In the 15 or so years in which Jarrold sets his story his characters look EXACTLY the same at the end as they did at the beginning.

One has to wonder what Jarrold was thinking If he didn't want to make something even remotely resembling Waugh's work, why use its title and steal a handful of its scenes? Was it just that he didn't think he could sell "Last Love Triangle in 1920s Venice?"

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Incredibly well-acted waste of time

[1/10 · 20 February 2008]

Maybe I'm just becoming a curmudgeon but this thing and this year's other critical hit, No Country for Old Men, left me cold and wondering "what was the point of that?"

There Will Be Blood is almost 2 hours and 40 minutes of a pretty-much one-dimensional portrait of one really evil guy. There's no depth of character, no character development, and only the feeblest of conflicts. Maybe if the film-makers had made me believe there was actually some real emotional connection between Daniel and his "son" this would have been interesting. But they did everything they could to avoid even that nuance.

After an hour I was checking my watch and asking when something was going to happen. However, because it's nominated for best picture, I sat there. After two hours I was checking my watch and hoping desperately it would end soon. At the end I just wished I hadn't wasted 2 hours and 40 minutes of my life on it.

Apocalypto (2006)

Blood Porn or . . . Mel's Got Issues

[1/10 · 16 February 2007]

Mel Gibson really does need to get some help--both psychological and cinemagraphic. The first half of this thing is almost exclusively lovingly shot scenes of various pieces of graphic violence that most closely resemble a fetishistic porn film. The violence and gore goes WAY beyond making any sort of point and seem included because Gibson thinks his audience will get off on it. The second half of the film is nothing but a long series of rehashed clichés that were tired even as long ago as The Naked Prey. The lone hero, armed only with his wits and ridiculous luck, runs from a party of evil hunters and picks them off one-by-one only to survive and live happily ever after (which I suppose is a spoiler but anyone who didn't see this one coming needs to get out more often). Gibson's only change to this cliché-fest is his addition of a bizarre birthing pool and the arrival (in true deus ex machina form) of the Europeans.

All of this might actually work had Gibson bothered developing any characters the audience could identify with or if he had actually followed up on the portentous (pretentious?) quote about the decay of civilizations that opens the film. But Gibson and his co-writer seem incapable of doing either so the surface-level depictions of the decaying (Mayan? Aztec? It's really not at all clear.) civilization and the hero's escape provide no emotional engagement at all.

Finally, this thing makes me wonder anew about the "average American parents" that supposedly make up the MPAA's ratings board. I find it frightening that these folks are so afraid of simulated depictions of sexual penetration that they monitor those to the millisecond, yet they apparently think nothing about extended graphic scenes of violent penetrations (with arrows, spears, knives) and dismemberment. If ever a film deserved an NC-17 (or whatever they're calling it these days) for graphic depictions of violence, this one did.

Dreamgirls (2006)

What WERE they thinking?

[1/10 · 13 February 2007]

Yes there are great performances here. Unfortunately, they happen in the context of a movie that doesn't seem to have a clue what it's doing. During the first 45-60 minutes of this all the music takes place as realistic performance. Suddenly, about an hour in, the characters who, until this point, had always spoken to each other, suddenly start singing to each other. To further confuse things, a little further in, out of nowhere, they actually do about 15 minutes of sung-through dialog, then seem to drop that idea and move on to other things, such as a number that begins in a jazz club with a drummer and two electric guitars suddenly turning into a fully orchestrated piece with a massive unseen string section. On top of all this inconsistency in how the music is used, is the composers' clear inability to actually write music in the style that is supposedly being portrayed. While the first couple of pieces do sort of mimic the 1950s Motown sound, the rest of the film is just (bad) Broadway show music. Then there's the pure silliness of snippets of a group doing a bad Jackson family imitation and Eddie Murphy morphing from Little Richard to James Brown to Lionel Richie. When he started channeling Stevie Wonder I couldn't help laughing out loud. This was clearly one of those films that make me appreciate how little time I have on earth and resent that I wasted two hours of it watching this film.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Lucas couldn't afford a competent screenwriter?

[3/10 · 1 June 2005]

Such a disappointment! After reading initial reviews of Ep III I was looking forward to a film that would really bring the circle to a close. Instead, what we got was dialog so bad it wouldn't have been accepted on a day-time soap, a lead "actor" who was wooden, and endless light-saber duels that just filled out screen time. Worst of all, what should have been the pivotal moment when Anakin Skywalker abandons the Jedi and aligns with the Dark Side is so anticlimactic it almost gets completely lost. In fact, it's done so badly Lucas has to have the Chancellor actually *announce* that the transformation has been made. The result is that the back story for one of the cinema's great villains turns out to be that he was a sniveling, indecisive adolescent who just sort of blunders down the wrong path. Bleahh! The best course for the future is, I guess, to just watch Eps IV through VI and forget all about this wimpy prequel trilogy.

Friday Night Lights (2004)

One hell of a sports cliché fest

[1/10 · 12 February 2005]

***Spoilers below***

For the life of me I don't understand how so many folks are so ga-ga over this turkey. For me this was a complete snooze-fest until around half-way through when it got entertaining simply because it was so much fun counting up all the old, tired sports clichés they managed to cram into it.

1. First, there's the setting: small-town, nowheresville Odessa, where high school football is the True Religion, all the kids are desperate to get out, and the football players are the local Gods who get all the free food, booze and sex they want. And, oh yes, there are also the Beautiful Sunset Shots and the Soaring Aerial Views of parts of the town, especially the football field, that tip us off to the fact that something beautiful is really going on under this bleak surface.

2. There's the troubled quarterback with the single mom (who may be seriously ill). Early in the season he's a pretty mediocre player but, when adversity strikes, he steps up and becomes the team leader with skills only slightly less impressive than Troy Aikman's.

3. There's the kid abused by his father and his father's athletic dreams who also, when everything is on the line, suddenly becomes one of the team's stars. He also gets to listen to his father, in a fit of remorse, lecture him on making the most of his senior year because it's all downhill from there and these are the best memories he'll ever have.

4. There's the strutting minority star player with dreams of riding his athleticism to fame and fortune who suffers a serious injury, tries to come back too soon (through the negligent inaction of his coach and his beloved father-figure Uncle), and has his career ended. To drive the point home, the film-makers show us the star sitting dejectedly after his injury watching a group of trash collectors going about their jobs.

5. There's the solid, silent defensive star who has spoken hardly a word, but during half-time of the Big Game he suddenly gives the inspirational speech that fires up the team.

6. There's the calm coach in the center of the storm who, again during half-time of the Big Game, gives the "it's not about the scoreboard, it's all about what's in your heart, it's all about love, and you're all winners" speech. This despite the fact that he has previously (and negligently) ignored what he really knows about his star's serious injury and allows him to play because he wants to win so badly.

**Spoiler follows**

7. Then there's the Big Game itself in which Our Heroic Team gets pummeled by the Bad Guys (including flagrant fouls and one incredibly bad officiating call that make the crisis even worse)in the first half only to suddenly find a way to claw their way back (with accompanying swelling music) to one final last-second try that gloriously fails. Then, for the next several minutes we watch in slow motion shot after shot (from different angles of course) of the stars kneeling in noble defeat next to that football just a few agonizing inches from the goal line.

Then there are the Big Steals from Hoosiers:

1. The "Davids" from Odessa end up in the Big Game playing the "Goliaths" from Dallas Carter.

2. The entire town of Odessa apparently closes down and the entire populace drives across the state of Texas in a long convoy.

3. The "I love you guys" speech transplanted from the coach to the troubled quarterback.

Unless you're looking for a primer on how NOT to make a unique sports film, I'd suggest you avoid this turkey.

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

A truly ugly film full of gratuitous exploitation, Hollywood gloss. NOT as it was.

[3/10 · 19 April 2004]

It's hard to know where to start with this one. While the film's anti-Semitism might have been toned down, it's hard to ignore Gibson's anti-Semitic marketing plan that hyped this thing.

Essentially this film shows Gibson's love of gore tacked onto the Jesus story. As one other writer said, it's essentially the torture scene from "Braveheart" expanded to fill two hours. However, Gibson can't keep himself from applying the full Hollywood treatment to this as evidenced by the extended flogging scene. When the guards pick up the truly brutal instruments they demonstrate their power by chewing up a wooden table with them. Yet, after 10 minutes of flogging Jesus with the thing you just get a Hollywood make-up effect of hundreds of fine stripe-like wounds instead of the missing hunks of flesh the thing would actually have torn out. Not to mention you still have a live person when anyone flogged with those tools to that extent would have been very, very dead.

Gibson was also clearly working from sources other than Scripture or history. He throws in every station of the cross (including many extra falls) even though most of them are extra-scriptural. And his decision to have the Romans speaking Latin belies true ignorance of the times; they would all have been speaking Greek. The devil never makes a scriptural appearance at any of the times Gibson throws her (verry interesting!) at us and just what was going on with all the horror flick creatures? Finally, Gibson falls into the trap of almost every literalist in choosing to ignore scriptural descriptions of the Risen Christ. In every post-Resurrection appearance even those closest to him in life do not recognize him in his post-Resurrection form. Yet Gibson shows us exactly the same form we've seen brutalized for the past couple of hours (and why is it his hand wounds are still there but everything else has healed up so nicely?) So, even though many other writers here continue to inaccurately quote the Pope (another one of Gibson's marketing ploys that the Vatican has denounced), this really was NOT "as it was."

Finally, how anyone can see this as a "beautiful" film shows just how jaded we have all become. My Christology is clearly centuries away from Gibson's, but there's nothing at all "beautiful" in Christ's Passion separated as starkly as it is here from his life, teaching and Resurrection. Without a basic understanding of Christ's preaching of the coming of the Kingdom, his Passion makes no sense whatsoever.

Two for the Road (1967)

Not your typical sugary Hollywood love story

[10/10 · 8 August 2003]

This is probably my favorite romance movie of all time. The film tracks a couple by showing us their varied trips together through France. But what is so wonderful is that this is no Hollywood, sugar-coated love story but the chronicle of a very real marriage that should be recognizable to anyone who is working at his or her own marriage. We see the bonding that forms from the NOT love-at-first-sight trip, the glowing honeymoon trip, and the us vs. them trip. But we also see the trips that involve estrangement, infidelity, discord and marital rapprochement.

Stanley Donen takes all these trips, chops them into pieces, and presents them in a fascinatingly scrambled chronology that takes several viewings to unscramble. He also gets excellent performances from all his actors, especially Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney.

At the end we appreciate this marriage so much more because we've seen all the work it has taken and learn that "bitch" and "bastard" can really be terms of endearment.

The Truth About Charlie (2002)

Jonathan, how could you?

[1/10 · 22 May 2003]

I really wanted to like this movie. Jonathan Demme is one of my favorite film makers and I thought if anyone could remake one of my favorite movies of all time, Demme could. Demme couldn't.

Newton and Robbins are ok, Wahlberg doesn't work at all, and the other "evil" characters who were so memorable in Charade come across as interchangeable cyphers.

I usually like Demme's music selection, but here there didn't seem to be any sort of unifying theme behind his music. And, it certainly wasn't Mancini's wonderful score.

But the biggest Truth about Charlie is that Demme's rewrite is simply awful.

In the original, Charlie is a nobody and so he doesn't get in the way of all the other characters. Here he has a face and is, apparently, the big villain, so we have to be treated to a slew of foggy flashbacks that halt the flow of the story.

Newton and Wahlberg lip-lock so early, there's absolutely none of the playful sexual tension of the original. And, instead of Grant's cocky, end-of-the-film surprise, we get a bathetic Wahlberg begging Newton to forgive him. Bleacch.

The reworking of the story that sets everything in motion is so muddled I'm still not sure just exactly what was happening and why.

And the final big thing missing is the element of wonderful surprise Donen crafted so well. In the original Grant's multiple characters are peeled back with delicious surprise at each new revelation ending with the final, perfect surprise at the end of the film. And the moment when the original film reveals the big secret is still thrilling, even after watching it a dozen times. In Charlie, the big secret becomes a tiny flicker of something in Newton's eyes and when it is finally revealed, it's a moment that the word "anticlimax" was designed for.

It's such a shame that Demme made such a muddle of something that originally was so clean and clearly presented. As so many others have done, I strongly recommend you skip this one and just go back to the original.