There have been a number of movies in the last few years focused on people dealing with the emotional devastation of 9/11 and, for the most point, I tend to avoid them as too painful or too likely to be maudlin. Somehow, though, I had the feeling that Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler could be trusted not to make those mistakes.

Reign Over Me, the story of how a lost friend (Cheadle) helps a lost soul (Sandler) come to grips with the loss of his wife and daughters, doesn’t make those mistakes. A terrific supporting cast helps too. Jada Pinkett-Smith, Saffron Burrows, Liv Tyler, Melinda Dillon, Robert Klein, Donald Sutherland and Paula Newsome all add to the total what their roles as family and friends permit.

Particularly surprising was the understated script by writer/director Mike Binder (though not his performance as Sandler’s friend), since his previous work rarely rose above the level of dreck like The Upside of Anger, Man About Town and especially the HBO flop comedy series Mind of the Married Man. Maybe I’m trying find excuse but I think the difference with Reign Over Me is likely down to the influence of the two stars, who produced it.

Mostly I like this movie because the story is primarily about having to go on with life after tragedy rips away the ones you love most, where the events of 2001 are the origin, offscreen, and next about how giving friendship can be repaid many times over in self-awareness.

definitely recommended

When I was about 10 or 12 I started reading Allen Drury’s Cold War tales of political intrigue in Washington, D.C. He had such an imaginative way of retelling what the real life pundits and politicos tried to warn us were the true dangers of those villainous Soviets and Red Chinese.

Advise & Consent was the first and most famous of those novels, originally published in 1959 and made into a stage play before turning out this 1962 film version. Henry Fonda plays Robert Leffingwell, nominated to be Secretary of State by a (never named in the script) president, a very controversial choice, mainly because he ran afoul of a very senior southern senator several years before. Senator Seabright Cooley (played by Charles Laughton) does not like to be shown up, not hardly, and knows how to hold on to a grudge.

Leffingwell’s politics are, perhaps, a bit too liberal in what was a country barely passed the McCarthyite Era and sure enough Cooley uses a trick right out of that nasty playbook. The nomination also runs into the ambitious young senator named Van Ackerman (a very young George Grizzard) and the morality of the committee chairman, Lafe Smith (Don Murray, Smith is the junior senator from Utah so of course he’s called Brigham Anderson). Playing a Kennedyesque bachelor senator is Peter Lawford (who was the real ones’ brother-in-law) and also stuck in the middle is Walter Pidgeon as the loyal workhorse majority leader.

Directed by Otto Preminger and with a screenplay from Wendell Mayes, Advise & Consent wisely avoids explicitly stating to which party any of the politicians belong. Though if one were to suggest the majority (and all the main characters) were Democrats, I’d probably agree. Preminger made this movie at the height of his career, coming after the Sidney Poitier version of Porgy and Bess, the Jimmy Stewart thriller Anatomy of a Murder (with script also by Wendell Mayes) and Exodus, improbably starring Paul Newman in the dramatic journey of Holocaust survivors trying to get past nasty British soldiers into pre-Israel Palestine.

This film version is just okay, the novels were much better; Preminger and Mayes take the melodramatic portions of Drury’s novel and as much as possible avoid the political story. Fonda is barely seen in the first half and refuses to involve himself in the back room maneuvers surrounding his nomination. Laughton and Murray have the meatiest parts, though the few women present–mainly Gene Tierney and Inga Swenson–have juicy cameos.

moderately recommended

Nicholas Cage has starred in many big action movies over the years but given his physical and emotional natures has been a poor choice for the roles (e.g., Gone in 60 Seconds, Face/Off, Con Air). Characters that are a bit on the quirky, self-conscious side are better fits (Matchstick Men, City of Angels, The Rock). This film, which does not require him to be strong or fast or even all that smart, turns out to be a good choice.

In Next Cage plays Chris Johnson, a man made nearly miserable by having been born with the strange talent to see about two minutes into his own future. He uses this skill to be a modestly successful Las Vegas magician and win just enough money to stay under the radar of the various casino bosses.

One night, though, he catches the eye of a security manager and needs his ability to barely escape (the unstated) unpleasantness that would surely follow being caught. On his way out, however, he bumps into a man who plans to rob the casino’s cash cage and shoot two people dead; his nature won’t allow him to skate by without stopping it from happening.

Somehow–the movie never explains this important fact–Johnson has also already come to the attention of FBI counterterrorist agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) and a polyglot terrorist band who’ve smuggled a nuclear device into Los Angeles. Both are tracking him, though the baddies just want him out of the way and Ferris wants his help stopping them.

The last complication is Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel). For the first time in his life Johnson has seen one thing more than two minutes in the future: he sees Liz walking into a Vegas diner. And he sees it over an over again, to the point where he goes to said diner every morning at the time of his vision, since he doesn’t know the day. Finally she shows up and he uses his ability to ensure the perfect approach. They leave together.

Just ahead of the Feds and bad guys, as it happens. He’s already fallen for her and sure enough she falls for him (he cheats, of course). Then the downside of his emotional attachment becomes clear as the bad guys take Cooper hostage to get to Johnson.

This movie doesn’t require Cage to be a fighter or a genius, just to be overly aware and able to portray a man weary beyond his years, something he can do quite well. Think about how ‘old’ Chris Johnson’s brain must be, reliving so many moments in time until they come out just as he desires; two minutes over and over again.

Lee Tamahori, a Bond veteran (Die Another Day), has a good touch with the mix of special effects and action, not always showing all his down cards. The script, by Gary Goldman (Total Recall) and Jonathon Hensleigh (Die Hard With a Vengeance, Armageddon, The Punisher), muddles a bit more than one would like but decent overall. Honestly I’m a bit surprised that Next wasn’t a bigger hit since I think it’s a better movie than a number of Cage’s which were.

recommended

This 1960 movie is one of those classics I’m willing to bet most people under the age of 60 have never watched but still feel they know all about. I admit I was one of them until the other day. Let me say upfront, I don’t really see the whole Spartacus as Christ thing, any more than I do for Neo in The Matrix trilogy; if this were so than the same would be true of the hero of nearly any straightforward epic story. But some people want to see such things anywhere they can.

Spartacus is a slave born a few decades before the aforementioned Christian savior in a north African Roman colony, where he’s spotted by gladiator trainer (Peter Ustinov, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and taken to Italy. Life is easier in Capua than in a Libyan mine but he still chafes under the rules and constraints imposed by his masters.

Then one day two leading Roman senators (Lawrence Oliver as the patrician Crassus and John Gavin as a young Juius Caesar) and their lady friends turn up at the school unexpectedly and want a show. The sniveling master is happy to oblige until the women insist the gladiators fight to the death, as is custom in Rome; he tries to convince them that doing so in the school would be a really bad idea but the arrogant women want what they want.

One shortcoming of Dalton Trumbo’s script for me is that Crassus never really understands that what he and his friends did that afternoon was the inciting incident of everything that came after, including his own downfall, the death of tens of thousands and the rise of Caesar. Even at the very end, when Crassus realizes who Spartacus is (since all the men captured with him famously stand up and say “I am Spartacus”), there’s no light of recognition.

Still, this is one of the best performances Kirk Douglas gave, Olivier is as terrific as ever, Ustinov is a very good shifty, sniveling, out for his own good Roman plebe, Jean Simmons is wonderful as Varinia, the Brittanic slave who immediately falls for Spartacus (and vice versa, to be sure), Charles Laughton punches his weight as Crassus’s populist political opponent and John Ireland a strong right arm to Douglas.

The movie was also a triumph for writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nearly destroyed by the McCarthy blacklist, the most prominent member of the Hollywood 10, and Spartacus was the first credit he got after that dark era ended. He worked for another decade after this, giving us the scripts for Exodus and Papillon before passing away in 1976.

This film was also the first really big hit directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose next four pictures were the phenomal Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick realized the epic scope of his story required grandiose outdoor settings but he skillfully navigated the line between tasteful and the campiness embraced by contemporaries like Cecille DeMille. He didn’t shy away from visuals that studio execs probably objected to, such as the crucifixions of the captured rebels which lined the army’s road back to Rome.

recommended

In the not-distant past Bob Hoskins made a good impression on me with his performances in movies like The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? So when I noticed that he produced and starred in a recent (1996 release) version of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel of European political intrigue called The Secret Agent in the on demand menu I figured it would be a good choice for a Friday evening show.

Sadly, my hopes were not met. The movie was ponderous and scattered, writer/director Christopher Hampton clearly unable to reduce Conrad’s sophisticated language to a producible screenplay. Eddie Izzard did a wonderful small bit as the Russian spymaster who is Hoskins’ new boss and a very fresh Christian Bale was okay as a mentally addled young man in his care but Patricia Arquettte was out of her depth as his young English bride (and Bale’s sister).

Frankly, I gave up after about 40 minutes.

not recommended

Seriously, how did this win the Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay and Director of 2007? Maybe there were subliminal messages embedded in the theatrical or screener version that I missed watching on DVD. The only other reasons I can think of are along the lines of technical excellence, the combination of cast and source material or just that this year was the Coen brothers’ turn. Oscars and movie critics, go figure.

I expect most readers are aware that No Country for Old Men is a period piece (although 1980 is a fairly recent period) about what happens to a West Texas welder (Josh Brolin) after he finds a half dozen dead drug dealers whose merchandise and cash was somehow left behind and leaves the powder but takes off with the $2 million in $100 bills.

On Llewelyn Moss’s trail are sociopath mob muscle Anton Chigurt (Javier Bardem with the modified Dorothy Hamill wedge, won Best Supporting Actor) and nihilistic sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, who is at last growing into his wrinkles). Moss has no illusions, as soon as he gets back to their rundown trailer home he sends his pretty little wife (Kelly Macdonald) off to her momma and lights out himself. The mob soon realizes Chigurt is not coming back with their cash, should he get to it first, and dispatch several other hunters to find Moss, including a very mellow hitter played by Woody Harrelson.

Frankly, and the Big Guy, who watched with me, seems to agree, this is a strange and bad cinematic expression of Existentialism. Despite the extreme action that occurs none of the characters–at least none of the male characters–feel the need to change expression or body language much.

My take is that the weight of the world lay so heavy on these men that non-essential movement cost too much. Events, good or bad, happen and life goes on and, well, one day you die; sooner, later, everything is of a sameness and none matter.

Of course that raises the question of why any of these men bother. Whether the things that happen to us and around us matter after today or not is a question of import but not really why I watch movies. Exploring big questions is fine–The Wire and, judging from the first two episodes, the new John Adams miniseries do it–but I still expect to be entertained or elevated and Joel and Ethan Coen simply didn’t get close to making that happen.

not recommended

Nearly a decade after its release I finally saw this 1999 Brad Pitt/Edward Norton cult classic that, more than anything else, reminds me of a dramatic version of Office Space. Both are highly negative looks at the life of a modern corporate worker, or white collar slave as Pitt’s character Tyler Durden calls them. I like to think that, with my focus on leading edge technology and preference for the startup life, neither movie is really talking about me but that could be simple self-deception.

Fight Club begins with The Narrator (Norton, whose character is never addressed by name) showing us how attending various 12 step and illness support group meetings is the only cure for his insomnia; he also meets fellow impostor Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who attends as many of these as him.

Then our boy (the character is referred to as The Narrator since throughout Fight Club he, well, narrates) returns from yet another pointless business trip to find his apartment in flames. Everything in it is a complete loss with firefighters struggling to contain the damage. This is just after (I think) he’s explained having a serious Ikea addiction.

On the flight he met Durden and with nowhere else to go he phones him to meet for a beer. A few drinks later Tyler gets the Narrator to admit his real purpose was to ask for a place to crash. Then Tyler asks to be punched and the club is born. Somehow word gets out and frustrated men (exclusively men) show up to join; the Narrator moves into the decrepit, off the map house Durden squats in and blackmails his boss into a no-show job, complete with lots of plane tickets, and local chapters get launched all over.

Meanwhile Durden and Marla hook up. Constantly and loudly, much to the Narrator’s annoyance, though the two don’t seem capable of a direct conversation and, even more annoying, use him as an intermediary.

In the final act of the movie, the club moves on to a direct assault on American business. If the job Norton’s character held early on was a 9mm handgun, Project Mayhem is a few tons of homebrew terrorist explosive. The Narrator finally wakes up to the Sixth Sense-ish twist on reality, perhaps a shade too late, though by then we’re (the audience) no longer able to decide what’s real and what’s, er, inside his head.

Novelist Chuck Palahniuk and scriptwriter Jim Uhls (his first feature credit, Uhls also wrote the recently released Jumper) took the humor of Bill Lumbergh’s constant deadpan reminders to turn in TPS reports, to work weekends, and said screw that, let’s just go right to the heart of the problem: modern workers allow themselves to be turned into nameless slaves kept passive through mindless consumerism built on top of advertising hammered right to their brain’s indiscriminating pleasure center.

Director David Fincher, who previously worked with Pitt in the nasty Se7en and will again in a new production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button coming this Christmas, matches the visuals, particularly the sets, to the plot an dialog; that house Pitt and Norton share was an outstanding choice and the ways it changes over the course of the movie provides a mirror to the evolution of the Fight Club and the club members.

The three leads pull off some difficult acting assignments, the two men especially needing to be great to make the movie succeed and sell the last-innings twist. Meat Loaf has a great turn as a guy who connects with the Narrator early on at one of those support groups and then joins the club and both Zach Grenier and (a very dyed blonde) Jared Leto do well in smaller roles.

recommended

Another quality collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and star George Clooney following the Oceans Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen flicks plus Out of Sight and the less than stellar scifi outing Solaris. This 2006 movie was a very high profile ‘quality’ production shot in black and white with archival footage providing very realistic sets into which the cast were green screened but it only got one Oscar nomination, Thomas Newman for original score. Though Newman did win, so there’s that.

The Good German is set at the time of the Potsdam Conference, between the German and Japanese surrenders at the end of WWII, where Truman, Churchill and Stalin met to divvy up the post-war map. Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a military journalist, in fractionated Berlin to cover the conference; pre-war he’d been the Berlin office head for Associated Press.

Lena Brandt, played by a very dark-haired Cate Blanchett, was Geismer’s stringer and lover in those days, despite being married. Now she lives with a real American army rat called Tully (Tobey Maguire), allowing him to pimp her out and treat her like shite in order to survive. And in a strange coincidence Tully, who nominally works in the motor pool when he isn’t profiteering in the black market, is assigned as Geismer’s driver.

Brandt’s husband Emil (Christian Oliver) supposedly dies a year or two before though other than Jake no one seems to believe it. And everybody in positions of power want to get their hands on Emil. Even his wife wants little more than to get out of Germany as long as she can get Emil to safe (i.e., American) hands as part of the trade. TPTB don’t care about her but for sure are not willing to see the husband, who was the right hand of the scientist at the heart of the Nazi rocket program, captured by another power. This puts Geismer into danger since he, of course, cannot resist trying to save the one woman he apparently ever loved.

For me Good German was Soderbergh and Clooney making another throwback flick. Where the Oceans trilogy recaptured the Rat Pack magic and formalized Clooney as the (non-singing) Sinatra of the new millenium, here they went, reasonably  successfully, for the Howard Hawks and Cary Grant mantles.

The script by Paul Attanasio, from Joseph Kanon’s novel, was also quality stuff, not surprising since Attanasio also wrote Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show and was showrunner of one of my favorite TV series, Homicide: Life on the Streets. Although the politics were surely revisionist, the plot, pacing and dialog were reminiscent of some of the best ’40s war noir efforts like The 39 Steps and Notorious.

recommended

Hollywood used to turn out political potboilers on a regular basis but after Watergate and All the President’s Men the studios got all serious. Movies like The Insider and Syriana play it on the straight and serious and films like City Hall (1996) are rare throwbacks, dramas that run on melodrama and depend on ripping the innocence away from a key character who should already know better.

In this movie that character is New York City Deputy Mayor Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), a good old Louisiana boy who moved from Washington to work for Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino) after an inspirational day of testimony on the Hill. Back home in Faraday, he explains at one point to lawyer Marybeth Cogan (Bridget Fonda), politics was a disease every boy caught and Calhoun had a particularly bad case. Bad enough to believe that he could take Pappas to the White House in short order.

The reality the gets in the way is a Homicide detective off the radar taking a meeting with a small time hood–whose uncle is very much the mafia capo–and rather than talk the two trade bullets on a busy Brooklyn street corner. That wouldn’t be so bad, even though both men ended up dead, except that a six year old boy, being walked to school by his blue collar, black father, takes a stray round and also dies.

In the firestorm it turns out that the hood should have been upstate in prison except the mayor’s old law partner (Martin Landau) inexplicably signed off on a probation deal. Calhoun and Corgan, representing the deceased detective’s widow, dig deep and track the corruption through Brooklyn councilman/party boss Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello).

More people die, though not anyone we really care about. The romantic tension between Cusack and Fonda though obvious never gets any energy. Pacino is terrific at playing characters like Pappas, serene on the surface but letting us know with a metaphorical wink darkness lurks nearby. Aiello is smooth to the end but seemed more excited during the scenes he got to sing snatches of show tunes with an old waiter than where he had to be the greasy pol.

The script originated with with Ken Lipper, a Wall Street exec who spent a few years as a New York Deputy Mayor (and in 2002 had his own financial scandal), and longtime journalist Nicholas Pileggi (who’d previously written the books that Goodfellas and Casino were based on) and then was worked over by Hollywood vets Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Flamingo Kid, Scent of a Woman) and Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast). With all that greatness and experience, well, I expected more and frankly I don’t blame the cast except Aiello and he has a relatively small part.

A possible clue is that City Hall was directed by Harold Becker, whose career rarely rose above the above average: Paul Newman in Malice, Pacino and Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, and the then very young Tim Hutton, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise in Taps. IMDB says this has a run time of 111 minutes but 50 years ago the studio would have cut at least 15 minutes of flab.

recommended

This was a highly regarded movie that I should have been eager to see once it hit cable but due to the subject matter, the brutally insane Ethiopian dictator Idi Amin, I was reluctant. Despite giving The Last King of Scotland a 4, which is pretty rare for me, my misgivings were correct.

The film filters our view of Amin through a young Scottish doctor (played by the terrific James MacAvoy) who sees a few years working at a clinic in the boonies of Ethiopia as a lark and an escape from his dour, domineering physician father. Unfortunately for him he meets up with Amin (Forrest Whittaker, who won last year’s Best Actor Oscar) in the days after the 1970 coup that bought him to power and Amin, who was after all literally insane, saw something he liked. Not knowing any better Garrigan reluctantly accepts an offer to be the President’s personal physician.

Up close he learns the truth, never more clearly than the time he gets back to his apartment to find it tossed over and his UK passport gone, replaced with a Ugandan one. Amin never asks permission for anything and always assumes everyone wants whatever he wishes to give them; his reign was brief–though not brief enough for the more than 300,000 countrymen killed in those nine years–as even the strongest supporters were unable to stomach the man’s increasingly horrific behavior.

Kerry Washington (Ray), David Oyewolo (who was also excellent in HBO’s 5 Days and BBC import series MI-5) and Simon McBurney (Golden Compass) have key supporting roles while Gillian Anderson, demonstrating the freedom starring in a TV series for 10 year can give an actor, has a nice cameo as the frustrated, sexy wife of Garrigan’s clinic superior.

I think part of my attitude has to do with the way director Kevin Macdonald and writers Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock slowly remove the veil from Garrigan’s eyes. At first (like many others) he thinks Amin is a strong man of the people who can root out the corruption of the previous regime, which is why the doctor decides to take the job offer, and LKoS has may laugh-provoking scenes. Even after many others have come to see the truth he still doesn’t. Finally the truth slaps him in the face, at which point he barely escapes with his life and even that costs a friend his life.

recommended