Category: Reviews

I saw The Last Samurai on Tuesday — the new one, not the 1990 one, although I gotta say that one looks interesting. John Saxon and Lance Henriksen together again! But I digress.

Not particularly to my shame, I am a Tom Cruise fan about fifty percent of the time. I think he can be a superb actor; I also think that he spends at least half his movies chewing scenery. You just never know. This time around, he bothers to act rather than over-emoting, and that means that a fairly typical movie about Americans encountering a different culture gets to be better than it should be. That, plus Ken Watanabe, who makes a huge difference as a credible intelligent rebel lord.

Now, the end of the movie sucks big fat rocks. Seriously, do yourself a favor and walk out after the clear emotional climax. You’ll be happier that way. But up till then it’s a really solid understated movie that I liked a whole lot.

I almost passed on Intolerable Cruelty, but it’s been a long time since I missed a Coen Brothers flick and I figured I might as well watch George Clooney emanating suave for a couple of hours. The Coens didn’t write the movie, which means it’s not the pure hit of creative oddness I wanted, but it was still OK.

As Coen screwball comedies go, it’s no Hudsucker Proxy, and as Coen romantic comedies go, it’s no Raising Arizona. I don’t think it was trying to be a screwball comedy, really; there wasn’t any snappy dialogue in the classic screwball sense. It felt more like a casual exercise than anything else.

The acting was perfectly solid, Catherine Zeta-Jones was luscious, and Clooney was great. I didn’t dislike the movie. It just didn’t have the zing you expect from the Coens — no bite.

So, about Matrix: Revolutions…

It was worth ten bucks for me to watch the Wachowskis do cool visual sequences, and I don’t just mean the SFX. They do astounding visual stuff better than just about anyone. Check out Bound sometime, which is an utterly beautifully filmed movie with no special effects at all. Revolutions does not disappoint there.

Plot? Yeah, there’s plot. It’s less unwieldly than Reloaded, and not as complex as one might suspect or expect. But don’t see it for the screenplay.

There wasn’t ever going to be more than one Matrix experience. How could there be? Revolutions is good, even if it isn’t shockingly new.

Bubba Ho-tep ought to have been great. I mean, hey: Elvis, JFK, Texas, and a mummy. What’s not to like?

I think the problem was that the setup creates a certain gonzo expectation, and the movie doesn’t want to be gonzo. The movie wants to be a tragi-comic exploration of old age in a nursing home, with a dark sarcastic twist in the form of the mummy. It works pretty well on that level, but it sabotages itself because, hey — it’s Elvis! Funny!

If Elvis and JFK had been more clearly delusional, that might have helped. However, Bruce Campbell does an absolutely spot-on Elvis. Now, it’s possible to believe that Ossie Davis’ character isn’t really JFK. In fact, it’s pretty easy, because he doesn’t do a very good JFK impression and he’s sort of the wrong ethnicity. Bruce is perfect, though. I couldn’t bring myself to doubt that this old man actually was Elvis, even though the backstory was pretty implausible.

Of course, the mummy was pretty implausible too. There’re those gonzo expectations again.

Anyhow, I still enjoyed it. There are moments of brilliance, both lunatic and otherwise. I really felt for Elvis/Sebastian. It’s just that the setup doesn’t work for the story.

Nobody but Tarantino could have made Kill Bill. Which, if you have a taste for the coppery scent of Tarantino’s oeuvre, is about all the review you need. It helps to have seen Switchblade Sisters.

Um.

OK, so it’s insane grindhouse cinema turned up a few notches. The extended Japanese scenes are an homage to Japanese samurai flicks. The Texas scenes taste like Sergio Leone, just a bit. There’s a touch of blaxsploitation. She’s wearing Bruce Lee’s jumpsuit.

There is no plot. Apparently all the plot comes in the second volume of the movie. That’s OK, because there’s plenty of kickass fight scene in this. There’s also a lot of blood, and by a lot, I mean “more than you think.” Like a lot of other people, I seriously don’t understand how this movie avoided an NC-17 rating.

Four months till the second half is the suck.

You wouldn’t expect a movie about corporate espionage among multinational anime porn to be a bad viewing experience… well, OK, maybe you would. Still, I thought Demonlover was worth my ten bucks. Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep got excellent reviews, and Demonlover stars Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon, so there was potential there.

I pretty much liked the first half. Chloe Sevigny was tremendously callow, and whether or not her character was meant to be played that way, her performance left me cold. The rest of the movie was fine, though. Very stylish, shot in blues and greys in a kind of 70s futuristic aesthetic. The plot was nicely tangled.

In the last hour or so, the movie went seriously downhill. The final shots struck me as deeply non-profound, despite being set off from the rest of the film in style and tone. But the message didn’t live up to the stylistic flourishes. Further, there wasn’t any tension after a certain point. The resolution came about halfway through the movie, and everything afterwards was just an extended version of the “ten years later” epilogues common in bad 80s teen comedies.

Good concepts. Bad execution.

George Alec Effinger fans will want to be making their way to “Golden Gryphon Press”: and picking up a copy of Budayeen Nights. Nine pieces of fiction, all set in the world of Marid’s Budayeen. Four of them are Marid stories, including one which is just the first two chapters of the never-finished fourth Budayeen book. One of them is the first few pages of what would have been the last Budayeen book. One of them is a Honey Pilar story, and it rocks.

Barbara Hambly wrote the foreword, and introductions to each story. Her anger and her love for George are both evident; the love in stronger measure.

The NBC version of Coupling is incredibly bad. I know, everyone said it was bad, but I wanted to see for myself. I lasted about five minutes before screaming in horror and deleting my TiVo season pass.

The sad thing is that it uses the same scripts. It practically uses the same sets. But the acting — it’s like Shakespeare performed by earnestly dull high school students. Not that the original Coupling was Shakespeare, but the American cast isn’t really up to the standards of high school students either.

22 episodes? NBC bought 22 episodes? Did they buy a blindfold and ear plugs before looking at the pilot?

Quicksilver is so damned big. My god, it’s big. It’s 900 pages, and it’s really really big, and it’s the first volume of three.

And it’s Neal Stephenson, so you know it’s going to be even more wordy than that.

I’m about halfway through, thanks to an early shipment to a bookstore which will remain nameless. The book’s divided into thirds, more or less. The first third is Daniel Waterhouse’s story, which can in no way be considered to have a plot. Halfway through the second third, one character mentions the picaresque genre, in which a random character wanders through an interesting landscape without direction. That would be the first third of the book. Just to put a cherry on top of it, the story opens quite late in Waterhouse’s life, and then proceeds to tell us all about his earlier history in flashback. So no tension, unless you count the pirates.

Fortunately, the second third has characters who are actually going somewhere and experiencing difficulties getting there. I have hopes for the third portion. I note with some interest that all the characters mentioned on the bookflap are from the first two sections. I’m wondering if anyone has actually gotten to the third bit.

I’m also enjoying the hell out of the monster, of course. Stephenson is nothing if not informative, and the book is a prime example of what transfictionalism might have been if it had been invented centuries ago; it’s geek SF, just like Cryptonomicon, except that the geeks are seventeenth century mathematicians and alchemists. It’s utterly delightful. I love it.

Just it’s a good thing that I’ve already come to terms with the knowledge that Stephenson is not wedded to traditional narrative structures.

Bravo finished showing the first season of The West Wing, which seems like as good a time as any to talk about it.

I’m gonna keep watching, and I might even buy the DVD set. When you get right down to it, Aaron Sorkin knows how to write really good dialogue, and he knows how to pluck the heartstrings. The closing moments of "In Excelsis Deo" are really drop dead beautiful and touching. I care about the characters, too.

On the other hand, in some ways I almost feel like Sorkin cares too much about these guys. The staffers have their flaws, so that’s OK, but Bartlet is just too perfect for my tastes. He always knows what’s going on in everyone’s life, he’s fatherly, he cares, and he’s incredibly smart. The one big flaw Bartlet has during the first season is letting politics get in the way of his ideals, and he conquers that before the season’s done.

Sorkin knows Bartlet needs problems, so he gives him one, but it’s an external issue — an affliction that is in no way Barlet’s fault. Thus, he gets his dramatic tension and eats it too, as it were.

Fortunately, I’ve got House of Cards to sate my desire for a little more cynicism in my political theater. It’s a nasty, nasty piece of satire starring Ian Richardson as Tory MP Francis Urquhart, Chief Whip of the House of Commons. (Random BBC connection of the week: Susannah Harker, who played Dr. March in Ultraviolet, co-stars as a young political reporter.)

I started out being amused by Urquhart’s nasty little intrigues and his asides to the camera, but by the last episode of the first miniseries, I was horrified. Excellent management of mood.