Underworld Evolution

Underworld: Evolution (2006) 48 (Metacritic: 36)

Some thoughts on the Underworld series:

I've seen Underworld 1 and 2 now at minimum two times each. Why? Because I fall asleep in the middle each time I watch them. Cinepastette has the same problem with The Matrix, much to my chagrin. Something about these movies has a soporific effect on me, and I have no idea why.

I liked the original Underworld a lot more as I recall. I'd probably put it around a 70, but I'd need to watch it again... awake. But I recall having a similar reaction to the first chapter of the series that I did while watching the first half of U:E. Werewolves fighting vampires = awesome. And Kate Beckinsale in general = awesome. The opening action sequences are flat-out cool as hell and surprisingly raw and gory, but then the plot kicks in. Whoo boy.

Why in the world is this series so complicated? Vast conspiracies abound involving characters we've never heard of before. Then there's some kind of half-hybrid twin immortal thing going on, and Derek Jacobi is somehow involved, and Scott Speedman has to kind of die or something. I mean, Jesus. When you need a five-minute soliloquy to explain what the hell is going on in the middle of an action movie, your story is too convoluted.

It's obvious that (kind of like The Matrix) nothing was really planned for the second (or third) installment, and creator/director Len Wiseman had to create a whole new onion to make this second effort appear deeper and more life-threatening than the first. Blade 2 is the perfect blueprint of how to extend a franchise when the mythology is used up in the first film. You don't look back into a secret past and create another layer of story encompassing the first film. Instead, you push the story forward in a completely new direction. I have no idea how they can sustain this series for the reported next three chapters.

There are two really amazing stories from of the Underworld saga. Wiseman stole Beckinsale from Michael Sheen during the first film, and Sheen returned to make the third. That's a great break-up. Plus, the screenplays were written by Danny McBride, who played in Sha Na Na and starred as Kenny Powers. OK. There are really three Danny McBrides.

Jesus Is Magic

Jesus Is Magic (2005) 62 (Metacritic: 63)

Sarah Silverman is what I term a “rep” comedian. She’s someone you go see because of her reputation, as opposed to going to see her do some famous bits. Like Dave Attell and Patton Oswalt (and many comedians these days), Silverman’s comedy is part storytelling, part acting. While, Oswalt appears to be simply be himself on stage, both Silverman and Attell essentially play versions of themselves. The two of them are also particularly adept at using irony to complete a phrase or segment either by introducing a completely unforeseen element into the ending or by pulling a complete non sequitur out of thin air. It can be cheap, but it’s effective.

Attell clearly resembles his tubby, boozy, sleazy-but-fun persona, but Silverman’s success comes from playing a character not unlike Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm or Stephen Colbert. You know she’s probably not a cold, bitchy, self-centered, dimwitted, quasi-bigot in real life, but we never get to see the real Sarah Silverman. Even in public situations, she’s doing something like “Fucking Matt Damon.”

Silverman’s shtick hinges on one crucial conceit. A pretty, Jewish girl says horribly crude things but gets away with it because she flashes a cute smile and plays it off with infectious, infantile naïveté. She feeds off the “hottest comedian” tag quite often, and her male fans really eat it up. However, like many women in male-dominated professions, she’s really just hot by proxy. It’s kind of like Danica Patrick being the hottest Indy car/NASCAR driver. Are both women attractive? Sure. Are they Scarlett Johansson, Bar Refaeli, Emmanuelle Béart (pre-lip disaster), Ingrid Bergman, or Grace Kelly hot? (Hello, page views!) Not in the least.

In Jesus Is Magic, we can finally wipe the fanboy drool clean. Director Liam Lynch turns Silverman’s one-woman show into a quasi concert film with musical numbers and video asides featuring her sister, Laura, and Brian Posehn. (These appear to be the inspiration for her brilliant sitcom, “The Sarah Silverman Program.”) Because as it turns out, Silverman’s comedy works extremely well in scripted situations, but it can be extremely uncomfortable to experience firsthand. Now, there’s nothing inherently bad about comedy that’s discomfiting, but when she continually tosses off cracks about Nazis, sexual assault, racial slurs, and whatnot, her act ceases to be shockingly funny and just becomes icky. At times, it feels like Lynch has to pan the camera to the audience in near-embarrassment to prove to us that indeed people actually are watching this and laughing.

However, just as we’re shifting around on the couch and looking at the ficus and wondering how long the DVD actually is, we cut away from the stage for music videos for “You’re Gonna Die Soon” and “German Cars” and suddenly, her act works again. In the latter, there’s a very meta moment where Silverman sings about how marginalized groups empower themselves by embracing the worst slurs against them. (Sounds dry, I know, but it’s not.) Then, she drops an N-bomb in front of two black guys—who at this moment really stand for all of us in the audience, regardless of our race. The song stops, they stare her down, then start laughing with her, then stare her down again while she twists a bit for laughing too long. It’s a huge, uncomfortable mess that sums up racial issues succinctly and hilariously, and it’s the only time we ever see her react with trepidation to what she’s saying. (This could also be related to another joke about blacks and the Chinese.) Just like in real life, we want to be able to laugh together and take the power out of these stupid words, but we’re just not there yet. Fortunately, this is Silverman’s movie, and she has an out. She turns to the camera and sings, “Cha cha cha!” Because that’s the only possible way anyone could get out of it.

The sitcom character Sarah Silverman works where the stand-up character Sarah Silverman doesn’t because I just don’t want her to exist in my world if she’s never going to stop playing it straight. And that’s a serious problem I have with Colbert. Sometimes we need to know that you’re just telling jokes, even if we “get it.” Inside a TV episode, Silverman can be racially insensitive, call Nazis cute, and offend the elderly with a wink and a smile, and not even have to break the fourth wall for us to understand that it’s all a joke. But if her public persona never wavers or shows us what’s behind the act, how can we ever be sure she doesn’t actually feel these things? Like the two guys in the video, we’re laughing along with you for a while, Sarah Silverman (whoever you are), but when we stop laughing, we need to see you squirm.

Overnight

Overnight (2003) 46 (Metacritic: 60)

Is Troy Duffy a metaphor for the 1990s? That may be a bit generous, but it certainly fits his the size of his id. But despite being a bad movie, Overnight offers some historical perspective regarding that period of time. More so than I can ever imagine it having at its release in 2003.

I’ve never seen Duffy’s Boondock Saints, the $15 million Harvey Weinstein spec script that made a transplanted Bostonian from West Hollywood bartender into an entertainment megalomaniac. But in this day and age, it’s amusing to look back at the first Dot Com boom and equate it with Harvey Weinstein’s egotistic jaunt through the end of Miramax 1.0. Americans were rich, and the money flowed freely to people and companies with no thought about who they were or what talent they had or what they could actually produce. For Duffy, the dream came crashing down somewhat, but at least he got his movie made. As for the rest of us, well…

As a “warts and all” revenge documentary, Overnight is ultimately fairly tame. Like an early version of Entourage, Duffy drags his friends into his new Hollywood oasis with him. And they totally buy into it. They’re his bandmates. They’re his drinking buddies. They’re his barmen. (Harvey bought his bar in the deal.) And they’re his documentarians. At least, I think Smith is/was his friend. Montana seems like a hired gun. But if the footage here is the worst they got of him on camera, all they’ve done is prove that he’s an asshole, which is hardly a groundbreaking True Hollywood Story. And so what? He paid their bills. All they could come up with is a disjointed hatchet job that probably would have been better if, like Harvey, they had given Duffy final cut. I think when Duffy essentially fires the pair from filming his life, he yells at them that they suck. It’s clear from the final product that Duffy’s right.

So, aside from signing a $15 million deal to write and direct his first ever film project (think about that in 2009 terms), Duffy is allowed to score the soundtrack with his band, which includes his brother (and we all know how well bands and brothers go together). It’s not half-bad post-grunge rock, and Duffy’s an able guitarist. But the top-selling records of 1997, 1998, and 1999 were from the Spice Girls, the Titanic soundtrack, and the Backstreet Boys. As we all remember, it wasn’t a good time for mainstream rock and roll.

Yes, I get it. Troy Duffy is a big jerk. But who’s laughing now? Harvey’s nearly out of the movie business. His Miramax brand, which he sold to Disney, is essentially dead. Messrs. Montana and Smith have four combined other credits to their IMDB names. But several months ago, I saw a trailer for Boondock Saints II: Boondock Harder. In his own way, Duffy is kind of Web 2.0; back again for another go-round, while the forces that created his rise are lying in ashes.

Gone Baby Gone

Gone Baby Gone (2007) 73 (Metacritic: 72)

Editor's note: Well, I waited a long time to begin this site, but it's finally happened due to A) moving B) having some time to watch the Netflix again. Ironically, this first film is way down on the Queue, but I just hooked up the Xbox360, and wanted to try Netflix streaming. It was excellent picture and sound for the most part, but there was some jerky motion in a lot of panning shots that looked like dropped frames. I'm definitely curious to see how it performs on the incoming HDTV.

I don't know how closely Dennis Lehane's words hew to Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard's script, but it's easy to see how Lehane could write for The Wire after hearing the dialogue between Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck), Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) and the denizens of Dorchester in South Boston. As they investigate the disappearance of Helene McReady's (Amy Ryan) daughter, Amanda, the film also jogged my memory of Michael Patrick McDonald's All Souls, which I finished reading a few months ago. (Soon to be a major motion picture as well.) Street toughs, drug dealers, police. There is some hilariously profane and scary stuff being said during this film. I recommend having your in-laws walk in during the near bar fight if you want to get a blush out of them.

I would guess that many people were surprised by Ben's skilled direction in the same way that others were similarly impressed by George Clooney's debut in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (myself included). Assembling a good cast with a good script certainly helps. His tabloid past aside, the guy's clearly got some talent. Loved you in Phantoms, dude.

Ben does receive tremendous benefit from frequent Michael Mann editor William Goldenberg. The montage and cuts throughout the early narration reminded me of Soderbergh's Out of Sight, like I'm removed from the environment as a viewer precisely at the time when I'm supposed to connect with these characters. I suppose one could see some symbolism in that Casey and Monaghan are "the inside view" to a neighborhood that traditionally avoids contact with the police (aka outsiders), but that may just be good fortune.

Ben directs his brother into a really enjoyable performance that is both subtle and sledgehammer. You can see him twitching with fear in the early bar scene when he and Monaghan are threatened. And his skull pop to the criminal on the way out reminds me of the Adam Goldberg fight from Dazed and Confused, something he would have done if he had won. Patrick is a scared guy who looks young and is in way over his head, but you can see the confidence building in him to the point where he shoots the pedophile during the raid on the parolees' house. Of course, his moral absoluteness is damned near agonizingly painful. Returning Helene's daughter is clearly the stupidest thing anyone could do, and he's willing to throw away a hot Michelle Monaghan to do it? That's a little much. It does give us the great ending, though, where he's 99% sure that he's made a huge, life-altering mistake. But his gaze also shows the 1% of him that sees her turning out like him and escaping the many traps contained in both the neighborhood and within her family. Of course, the irony is will she hate her uncle later for trying to free her from her mother, or for not succeeding?

There's no denying the tremendously despicable Amy Ryan here. (My friend MD'A rated it his second favorite performance of the past decade.) But she disappears for so much of the film that I was expecting a bit more, considering all the hype about it and the Oscar nod. I would have liked to see her reaction (or obliviousness or jealousy of the media attention) to the news of the other missing child. She couldn't be further from Beadie Russell in The Wire, but it is another fantastic performance that hits you in the gut. And speaking of The Wire, poor Michael K. Williams (bit part as a detective) has it worse than Mark Hamill ever did. He is never going to live down being Omar Little.

There is a serious breakdown that happens just before the final act that really disappointed me, though. I was fairly convinced that Amanda had been placed in a secret home for her betterment, but I didn't expect the first flashback re-enactment of the botched ransom drop to be a lie. And having the ultimate truth revealed in a second flashback later upset me as a viewer. It seemed fishy that Ed Harris (the prototypical morally righteous, but legally flexible police) would be so reckless with the girl's safety over a bag of drug money, especially after he makes the drunken reveal on the steps to reinforce that he would do anything to protect a child. I also have no idea why chief Morgan Freeman would go along with this plan. The voiceover makes a point of informing us that he resigns at half retirement pay because of the scandal. Was he in for a cut of the money? Why not just retire and take the kid without all the hullabaloo? Or at least find a better way for her to "die" publicly. And why this girl in particular? Perhaps there's more to the Morgan Freeman character in the book, but there is really no explanation or motivation for why this particular plot was hatched in the first place. It's a great yarn on the surface, but glossing over these characters' motivations hurts the effect of the film. But that probably would have added another 20 minutes to the movie, so...authors just need to write shorter novels, I guess.

I really enjoyed Mystic River, and I liked Gone Baby Gone quite a bit, so I guess I should read some Lehane. At least the book Queue isn't quite as long as the Netflix one. Ben has done admirably with his first two films so far. Perhaps he's aiming to be the Barry Levinson of Boston. How about trying a comedy next?

Since I'm new to the 100 point scale, I was pretty shocked to see that my score was one off of the Metacritic average. I'm curious to if that will continue.

The How

It's simple, really. My score on a scale of 100 (begrudgingly, but seemingly necessary) compared with Metacritic (my preferred aggregator) followed by a review. My tastes run from classics to genre films, with a healthy dollop of art house, foreign and documentary thrown in the mix.
Here's how my scale of 100 works. And I'm coming up with these off the top of my head:

90-100: An unparalleled masterpiece (ex. Lawrence of Arabia 100)
80-90: Truly exceptional (ex. Fight Club 90)
70-80: Really good or noteworthy (ex. Evil Dead 80)
60-70: Nobody's perfect (ex. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 70)
50-60: A really nice scene or two (ex. Sicko 55)
0-50: Degrees of loathing (ex. Halloween: Resurrection 20)

The What and the Why

So. MD'A and I were having lunch recently, and we both had a laugh at the length of my Netflix queue. (I'm currently still in early 2006). A discussion of film criticism in general led me to an interesting idea. The traditional critic reviews each film as it's released, either in previews or day of. (At Time Out New York, I was the occasional "Saturday Morning" film critic who went out to see the films studios refuse to preview.)

These days, that release date may be the culmination of months of studio-created hype and/or major marketing campaigns. Why not take my particular situation (every month or so, I add every new release of interest to my cue, whether I've seen it or not) and use it to revisit these films out of the context of their studio-imposed release. Will they have aged terribly/well in a short time? Were they more favorably reviewed because of the festival they appeared in or the time of year in which they opened? I think I've already pre-loaded the gist of my first review.

I also wanted to be a little fancier and call this blog Cinepaste, but I realized it would look like Cine-paste.