The Way of Resting On Laurels, Bro.

James Cameron’s AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER, like its predecessor, AVATAR (2009), will leave you agape at the superbly realized world it envelops you in; will leave you stunned at the scintillating imagination running wild on the silver screen, and yet will have you scratching your head at the lazy screenwriting and banal dialogue, bro.

When AVATAR was released, the parable about Jake Sully the human (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri the Na’vi (Zoe Saldana) meeting cute in 10-foot tall, blue-skinned, frazzle-tailed harmony on the numinous alien moon Pandora was such a wondrous cinematic cultural shift, that we let slide the unoriginal story, bad acting, cheap exposition, and cliché plot points. This sequel is made with much less wonder, much less inspiration, and much more cash. Yet all the cash in the world does not make up for much less story. There’s a helluva lot of copying-and-pasting going on from AVATAR…. Oh, and James: 1996 called and said to dial it down with the teen slang, bro.

Still, the worst offense/conceit of this movie is writer-director Cameron (and screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silva) shamelessly using the SAME VILLAIN from the last movie – even though he died. Over a decade in pre-production and they couldn’t come up with a new Big Bad?! Instead, vomiting out a clunky backstory of Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) having transferred his consciousness into an avatar, a move that reeks of doing your homework on the day it’s meant to be handed in.

When you can’t think of a good villain, just re-use the dead one.

And blue Quaritch still has a hard-on for ex-marine Jake, who has committed to Pandora, and is fully avatar now, with Neytiri by his side and a clutch of half-breed kids—[record scratch]—immediately a thousand questions: Didn’t Jake have to mind-link to his avatar from his human body? How is he totally inside his Na’vi catboy now? Did that Eywa mother-tree do this? And why is Quaritch pursuing him? Jake led the resistance during the first movie, but now he has fled to the Sea People and is zero threat to military ops. Even if Quaritch just wants revenge for Jake killing Quaritch’s human body, aren’t Quaritch’s superiors aware of the resources he is squandering chasing an enemy that isn’t active anymore? How is this even the plot? As Drax might say, “WHY is this plot?”

Sigourney Weaver: spent her life fighting aliens. Now – IS one.

I thought maybe the character journeys might provide some substance, but Jake’s journey is a simple realization that his younger son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) has become a man (the most touching moment in the film is when Jake acknowledges his son as a warrior like him, but through a more compassionate trajectory: “I see you”); Lo’ak’s journey to manhood sees him do what he believes his warrior father would do, and yet gets his older brother Neteyam killed (Jamie Flatters); enigmatic eldest girl Kiri (voiced by Sigourney Weaver) grows to embrace her powerful link to the mother-tree; Jake’s adopted human child Spider (Jack Champion) learns his father is Quaritch, and goes through a strange Manchurian period where he is captured and sympathetically groomed by Quaritch – which ultimately doesn’t lead to anything interesting, except for Spider surreptitiously rescuing Quaritch from drowning when Jake leaves him to die, thereby guaranteeing a boring return of Quaritch in the next film.

Quaritch himself almost arcs to being a father-figure for Spider (but it’s a very, uh, watery payoff), and both Jake and Neytiri seem like afterthoughts, shunted to the background while their kids create all the conflicts in the story by disobeying their parents at every turn.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER is made to flex muscles no filmmaker needs, to tell a story every filmmaker has told. Can I have a little plot to go with my advertisement for a special effects suite of tools?

Cameron goes through the same beats he did in AVATAR, but this time, the focus is on Jake’s kids discovering a brave new world: “If you want to live among us – you have to ride these things and connect your ponytail and learn the ropes and–” It’s a fish-out-of-water tale again – IN WATER. And now the romance beat is Jake’s son Lo’ak having a tween Way of Wetness with the Sea Chief’s daughter (voiced by Bailey Bass – coincidence that she’s named after a fish?!).

Edie Falco is General Hardass, with the new mission: “Earth is dying – tame this frontier, pacify the hostiles, and make Pandora the new home for humanity.” Copy that. And General, can you tell me why Colonel Quaritch wants to commandeer a gunship, 20 mech-suits and a million rounds of ammo to fly to the other side of Pandora and hunt some fugitive? Does he know that whole transferring-consciousness app cost a billion dollars? So that WE could utilize his expertise for THIS unit – not for him to run off and play Tommy Lee Jones! Get that insubordinate, wasteful asshat back here!!

Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet are the chief and wife of the Sea Na’vi, with Maori-like markings on them, with Maori Curtis breaking out the haka war dance with his troops at one point! (The detail of the Sea Na’vi having evolved flattened tails and forearms is a nice touch.)

In the last film, the unobtainable substance was called unobtainium (again, the balls on Cameron to just smash this idiocy in our faces); here, the unobtainable substance is amrita (no idiotic etymology this time?), harvested from the brains of Pandora’s “whales.” Brendan Cowell is the whaler and CONCHORD Jemaine Clement is his reluctant adjutant – very cool in this empathetic role, but I’m wondering what the hell accent he’s trying to do. (And WHY is this sub-plot?)

THE WAY OF WATER lacks for nothing in visual hedonism – James Cameron has won another victory with his cutting-edge tech and special effects mavens, and Cameron knows how to stir our base limbic instincts with notions of good and evil, displaying them simply and purely; there’s even a little tribute to his greatest triumph – TITANIC – as the giant crashed gunship fills with water and tilts sideways with our heroes trapped in it… but the devil’s in the details: I wonder how Jake has all his military tech still operative; where is he plugging in to recharge all his comm batteries and cameras on a moon with no electrical grid? And how much stolen ammo do his human friends supply on the down-low? I mean, he’s got machine guns, bazookas, unending rounds…

Oh, fishy fishy fishy fish! And it went… wherever I… did go…

And the biggest flaw of all in this wannabe epic battle movie: Why did all the Sea Na’vi disappear during the final battle? Jake is with Sea Chief and his tribe as they face down Quaritch’s gunship. Then they all charge. Then we find ourselves exclusively following the fates of Jake and Neytiri as they rescue their kids from Quaritch and his military avatars – but there is no background battle to be seen between the military and sea people. They just – disappear! I thought there would come a moment where the enemy has the hero dead to rights – no way out – and from offscreen comes the Sea Chief’s spear. Nope. No cutaways, no mentions. Nothing.

WHY is this plot?

Then we see Jake burying his eldest boy at the Sea Na’vi graveyard, as a casualty of war, while the Sea tribe all watch – waitaminute! – Jake’s son was the only casualty in the battle? Didn’t any Sea people die valiantly defending their homeland? Oh, that’s right – they all just buggered off home when they figured it would take too long to render them in the background if they wanted a release date for Christmas…

Jake ends the film stating: “This is where we make our stand,” and, like the end of the last film, in closeup, his eyes open. But… has the AVATAR series devolved to The Jake vs. Quaritch Show? This time it was Sea Na’vi. In III, is Jake going to flee to the Desert Na’vi, and kill Quaritch there, only to have him resurrected again from an endless supply of clones? And in IV, do we meet the Plains Na’vi? With Quaritch once again killed and surviving for no reason? And in V, does Jake lead Quaritch on a wacky cat and mouse game with the Nakatomi Tower Na’vi?

Yippee ki-yay, bro!

PAPYRUS!

END

Teddy Fuxspin.

That dirt-talkin’ beer-drinkin’ pot-smokin’ bad boy bear is back in TED 2 – badder, bolder, drunker and… seriouser?

Seth MacFarlane makes the sequel to his R-rated TED (2012) even more R-rated. My biggest fear with this followup to the highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever was that the studio would castrate raconteur MacFarlane; that someone would wear him down with money and political favors and handjobs, but thankfully, writer-director MacFarlane and his co-writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild were allowed to steer into the curve. Rainman definitely into the curve…

Teddy bear Ted (voiced and motion-captured by MacFarlane) and his new bride Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth, the Perfect Woman: curvy, blonde, foul-mouthed and white trashed) decide to have a baby for the best of reasons – to stop arguing in their jaded marriage. With the help of his human pal John (Mark Wahlberg, as sassy as ever), Ted tries to find a sperm donor, but then a greater obstacle arises. To qualify as a parent, Ted must prove he is a “person” in a court of law. Enter love interest lawyer Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) – who loses the case! When he is declared nothing but “property” Ted is targeted by the perverse Donny (Giovanni Ribisi), who wants to take him apart to discover his life essence and mass-market it.

Yes, under all the swear words and jizz jokes and genitalia references, there’s an actual story.

TED 2 is awash in guffawing humor. Even with pacing and tonal problems in its courtroom scenes, hold it up to any so-called American comedy and it will wipe the floor with it like a dirty jizz-rag (sorry, just caught up in the Ted ethos). A riotous mix of lewd humor (“There are no chicks with dicks – only guys with tits!”), smartass punches (“You’re covered in rejected black men’s semen. You look like a Kardashian!”), and internet searches that bring up black cocks. Always black cocks.

Setting a blistering pace with the raunchy gags, and creating an easy chemistry between Ted and John (who is relegated to an almost supporting role here), MacFarlane then stretches his welcome by tackling social issues. While Ted is trying to prove his personhood in court, the cheeky tone is lost, even though Ted is given lines to try to keep it light: “I’m standin’ up for me, and I’m standin’ up for the homos!” But why is Ted’s case being analogized to civil rights and being litigated seriously? This courtroom scene is merely a “beat” that the movie must hit that will set up the comedic situations to follow; that beat being: Ted Is Found to Be NOT A Person – but it is laboriously arrived at, with “soaring courtroom speeches” on the “gift of human rights” and even some Mark Santorum straw man arguments, like “Does your dog deserve human rights? Your toaster?” MacFarlane tries (unsuccessfully) to analogize Ted’s predicament to slavery and gay rights. Uh, no. We find ourselves unwillingly and unnecessarily entrenched in a “courtroom drama” as if this was the point of TED 2! I’d rather be back in Tom Brady’s bedroom with Ted and John, trying to steal sperm from Tom Brady’s golden cock.

Once TED 2 wraps its courtroom scenes, it extricates itself from quicksand and moves back to its welcome filthy banality.

Patrick Stewart narrates again, Sam Jones is Flash Gordon again, Patrick Warburton is a big gay galoot again, Giovanni Ribisi is sinister again… the only person not again is Mila Kunis (who couldn’t participate because – coincidentally – she was having a baby!); written out unceremoniously as John’s divorced ex-wife.

MacFarlane uses the bond he forged with Liam Neeson on A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014) to pull a favor on a droll Neeson cameo. John Carroll Lynch is a CEO of a toy company trying to steal Ted (there’s a giant TRANSFORMER model in his office – a wink to Wahlberg?), and Michael Dorn worfs all over Warburton as his gay lover.

Morgan Freeman is a power lawyer who argues that Ted IS a person because he has “an ability to understand complex emotion and a capacity for empathy…” Either that, or he’s a chimpanzee. There’s even an orchestra swell! Again, the legal scenes detract from the love story subplot of John and “Gollum-eyed” Samantha, or the silly gags referencing THE BREAKFAST CLUB, JURASSIC PARK or CONTACT.

Wahlberg lets loose a comedic side we’ve never seen before, even in the original TED. We’ve seen him grow from the blank-faced punk in FEAR (1996) to a true comedy force in DATE NIGHT (2010) and THE OTHER GUYS (2010), where he stole the thunder from professional comedians Steve Carell and Will Ferrell). Now he’s just bodyswerving into it, working that usually blunt “pushing-his-words-out” style to his advantage. (Before this feature, they ran the trailer to DADDY’S HOME (2015), re-teaming Wahlberg with Ferrell in another ridiculous comedy where Wahlberg is effortlessly stealing Ferrell’s scenes.)

Reminding us of Stewie (from FAMILY GUY, another of MacFarlane’s creations), Ted trips the light fantastic with a troupe of 100 real life tightly choreographed dancers, in an incredibly detailed, old-school dance sequence (a la Gene Kelly). The complaints over this sequence being overlong or boring are irrelevant; firstly, it serves as background to the opening titles; it’s funny and cute and technically amazing and give these artistic things their due, you impatient, pointless e-generation!

I’m still at a loss, though, how Tami-Lynn can “love” this bear with a woman’s urgent love. Even if she loves him in a toy-ish way, she’s actually expressing her love in a groin-ish way – kissing him on the lips and alluding to sexual congress. But what do they do after kissing on the mouth? Is he inserting his arm to gratify those adult human urges?

If Ted can’t keep you satisfied, oh glorious Tami-Lynn, remember, my whole body is shaped to please…

END

If you go down to the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise…

WHAT A CUTIE! I want to hug him and kiss him and pet him and sleep with him in my arms. And the teddy bear’s pretty cute too…

TED (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) is a teddy bear who is raunchy and foul-mouthed, filthy-minded and immoral, a lecher, a pot-smoker, a hedonist and a sex addict. And Mark Wahlberg is pretty cool too. When John Bennett (Wahlberg) was a little boy, he wished his teddy to life and it came true, because – so narrates saucy Patrick Stewart – “there’s nothing more powerful than a young boy’s wish… except an Apache helicopter…”

Now Ted and John share an apartment, and a love of pot, a hatred of thunder, and a man-crush on Sam Jones from FLASH GORDON. The fame that would accompany a real talking teddy bear is quickly addressed, and explains how the populace takes Ted for granted now  (“No matter how big a splash you make in this world,” narrates the game Stewart, over shots of Ted doing the talk-show circuit, “eventually nobody gives a shit.”). And through all Ted’s dalliances with hookers and celebs, 35-year-old John has somehow retained a relationship over the past four years with Lori (Mila Kunis).

Written and directed by Seth MacFarlane (FAMILY GUY, AMERICAN DAD), TED is one of those relentless comedies that latches onto your jugular and refuses to be shaken off. Ted’s mouth runs like an exploding sewer, and his cuteness makes up for any non-pc banter that might offend the lesser-hearted; Patrick Warburton as a closeted workmate; running gags on Tom Skerritt; Ryan Reynolds cameos as a gay boyfriend (“that Van Wilder-lookin’ guy”); Jessica Barth as Ted’s trailer-trash squeeze (as Tarantino might be inclined to ask directors who hire hot chicks, “Did MacFarlane TAP that?); Joel McHale (THE SOUP) playing his sardonic SOUP card; fart jokes, dick jokes, scat jokes, smoking, drinking, drugging, prostitution. Bring the kids.

On their fourth dating anniversary, Lori is expecting a proposal from John, which (in her eyes at least) would indicate he is accepting responsibility as a man, rather than remaining (in her eyes at least) in a state of arrested development due to Ted’s ubiquitous presence and bad influence. To allow John to move on with his life, an ultimatum to Ted: get a job (which would definitely cut into his weed-smoking and hooker time).

“You think you got what it takes?” asks the grocery store manager (Bill Smitrovich) in Ted’s job interview. Ted replies, “I’ll tell you what I got: your wife’s pussy on my breath” – and gets promoted.

Meanwhile, an eccentric Ted fanatic (ominously funny Giovanni Ribisi) is stalking Ted to steal him for his own spoiled son.

Wahlberg’s man-pecs might be self-admittedly delicious, but his acting style still makes us think he’s pushing his voice forward against the wishes of his diaphragm. Funnily enough, in TED, it works! I like the guy as a person – he seems very sincere and a loving family man and great businessman – but no one’s going to accuse him of Thespianism any day soon. Sometimes that One Demeanor/Pushing Air vapidity works uproariously (THE OTHER GUYS, THE DEPARTED), and sometimes it just looks out of place (PLANET OF THE APES 2001) or fails miserably (THE HAPPENING). But he gets to dust off his “Bahston” accent here once again (while Ted sounds suspiciously like Peter Griffin from FAMILY GUY. He denies it though).

Then John and Ted meet Sam Jones (aka Flash!) and we realize how good an actor Mark Wahlberg really is! Bonus – upon meeting Flash, Queen songs start littering the soundtrack. (Queen composed the score for FLASH GORDON.)

Seth MacFarlane’s excellent directorial skills go unnoticed in TED due to the subject matter and content. Keep in mind, this is MacFarlane’s first feature film, and the finished product is so polished and powerful, it seems like he’s been doing this for years. Not only that, he’s writing, voice-acting, and working with CGI (Ted will hate me for telling you this, and will deny it profusely, but he is 100% CGI). MacFarlane keeps the tone upbeat through all the filthy action, and even when it gets dark, his writing keeps comedic tidbits and cultural refs flying at us from every direction – left field, right field, like a bolt from the sky and like a kick to the balls. Bring the kids.

END

Going Postal for ‘Pocalypse.

Not another apocalypse! This time, Kevin Costner’s to blame. Hey, wasn’t he responsible for the apocalypse in WATERWORLD as well?…

I hate the word ‘apocalypse’ – not the word itself, which is very… uh, apocalyptic.. but its misunderstanding and its consequent misuse. It means, literally, a “lifting of the veil” or “revelation” but because ‘Apocalypse’ was used to describe revelations made to biblical characters showing the end of civilization, the word has become synonymous with End Times, pestilence, Mad Max, and Republicans.

And the end of civilization in THE POSTMAN means the mail service is down.

Now I don’t want to lambaste this film simply because everyone else is doing it. After his sweeping classic, DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), Kevin Costner has suffered much unwarranted scorn (like M. Night Shyamalan) for his successive product not measuring up to his outa-the-gate offering. But THE POSTMAN, though aiming at epic and falling short, is a well-made movie (directed by Costner, deviating from David Brin‘s novel of the same name, screenplayed by Brian Helgeland), with a message of redemption for “society” as a concept (that sometimes tips into syrup), solid performances (though a little arch at times), and delivering lots of those sexy, edgy thrills that the practice of mail delivery is renowned for.

In this (retch!) apocalyptic future, where the United States of America has become a dim memory and scavengers and warmongers rule the forested wastelands of what looks like Utah, a nameless drifter (Costner) takes shelter in an abandoned mail van and uses a dead postman’s clothing for warmth. He finds a sack of letters and decides to “deliver” them to the nearest town, cooking up a story about a rebirthed society coalescing around this government service, intending only to gain the short-term trust of the townsfolk for food and shelter.

Many jump cuts later, The Postman, as he comes to be known, is delivering letters hither and thither, unknowingly inspiring others to do the same, and actually coalescing a rebirthed society around this government service.

This re-uniting of the dis-united States causes grief for the resident warlord, General Bethlehem (Will Patton), who has exploited the fractured society by amassing an army of slaves bound by his Ape Law, now finding hope and defiance growing amongst the outposts he raids. Matter of fact, the Postman spent the whole first reel under Bethlehem’s heel, who called him “Shakespeare” disparagingly for being well-read and intelligent enough to stand up to Bethlehem. It is after his escape from Bethlehem that the Postman finds the mail van.

Like WATERWORLD, THE POSTMAN is brought down by a woman. As Jeanne Tripplehorn turned WATERWORLD’s nomad from a combination of Eastwood and Mad Max into a jerk who couldn’t control his chick, so too does Olivia Williams turn Costner’s Postman. He meets her at an outpost, where she asks to be impregnated by him – with the approval of her husband (Charles Esten). (Now there’s one benefit of the ‘apocalypse’ – sterile males with hot chicks, who need the sperm of us virile man-breeders.) Husband is then conveniently killed by a screenplay flow chart, so that she can begrudgingly tag along with the Postman and whine about his journeys like a real wife.

In WATERWORLD, I liked Costner’s “Mariner” in the first act; a man of few words and dynamite action, a self-sufficient loner who shunned society yet didn’t take shit from it. The same arc of that selfish loner (someone say sel-“fish”?) was created for Costner’s Postman: Hard Guy outlaw assimilating back into Humanity through the warmth of Woman. Yeah, I read that screenplay manual too, but we need this plot development like we need a chick who won’t stop talking during sex.

James Russo is Bethlehem’s right arm, and Larenz Tate becomes the Postman’s right arm. Giovanni Ribisi is a stir-crazy soldier-slave in Bethlehem’s army, and Daniel von Bargen is a Sheriff who realizes that the Postman, even if he is lying, is a catalyst against the tyranny of Bethlehem. And the music of James Newton Howard makes THE POSTMAN tear-jerking in all the right places.

Maybe THE POSTMAN would have fared better had it been released into a society where people actually regarded MAIL as a viable form of communication. Granted, at this movie’s release in 1997, social media was not a patch on what it is in 2013, but e-mail had become quite prominent and was exponentially wiping out paper letters faster than the dodo.

And THE POSTMAN’s legacy can only fade faster as we gallop through the age of Instant Data Transfer, facebook, twitter, iPads, iPhones, skype and holograms… For we realize that the major disconnect in THE POSTMAN is that a technological society able to wipe itself out, would have been at such a level of technology that letter-writing would have been defunct anyway, at the least, reserved for grannies and Luddites not at society’s forefront and who would not survive an apocalypse in the strictest Darwinian sense – they would be wiped out by more computer-savvy organisms who would not reap the benefits of letter-writing. (Matter of fact, to prove my point of this 2012 society’s low regard for outmoded forms of contact, the telecommunications company Von-Age is running an ad where a character says, “Letters and emails are all thrown away – but a conversation lasts forever.” It’s a totally wrongheaded statement, of course, but it’s marketing to the new age of dunderheads who think learning to play piano on a phone-pad’s keyboard simulation is learning to play the piano.)

Thus THE POSTMAN leaves us adrift with no sense of time or place.

And its attempt to place itself is also weird: The Postman fibs that the new president’s name is “Richard Starkey.” Now correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t The Beatles conquer the universe? So how does The Postman get away with his ruse? And if he is of an age where he knows The Beatles’ drummer’s original name, all those people around his age would also know it. Heck, he even meets Tom Petty as Tom Petty, which means this is set in a future when Tom Petty is still alive, like maybe three weeks from now, and I don’t think the legacy of The Beatles is going the way of Buck’s Fizz any time soon. Now if he had named the president Herman Rarebell, maybe I’d buy it. Not too many hillbillies know the drummer of The Scorpions.

The final battle between Bethlehem and the Postman is resolved in that silly manner where the good guy displays his integrity by not killing the bad guy, but then the defeated bad guy pulls a weapon on the good guy and has to be shot down by someone else. Which only proves that if that someone else was not there to save the good guy, the good guy’s stupid decision to be honorable would have gotten him a bullet in the back.

And the final run of the Postman as he picks up a letter on horseback from a blond American child is 100% proof German cheese festival.

It’s all these silly little details that have caused most critics to stamp this movie: Return to Sender.

END

Phoenix rising from the hashes.

Remake of the classic 1965 Robert Aldrich film of the same name, John Moore directs this FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX with a slick, severe spank, yet fails to conjure the tension and desperation of the original. We can pinpoint the exact moment it fails: OutKast – Hey Ya! Yes, that Hey Ya! – that song you can never get out of your head once you hear it. In the middle of the Gobi Desert, while their lives hang in the balance, the full crew of a downed airplane get jiggy with an iPod playing Hey Ya! It sounds ridiculous on paper – and reads twice as ridiculous on film.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the song, but it’s the only piece of source music amongst the otherwise tension-soaked soundtrack; inserted at a point where the marooned passengers unite psychologically as – heh heh – outcasts (Ohhh, I get it! These filmmakers are so clever-clever!). And the marooned strangers from all walks of life collectively shake their moneymakers and laugh and joke and dance and hammer in unison like the Seven Dwarfs and I feel dirty even describing it.

And this sequence takes us so far out of the movie that it makes this phoenix look like a dodo.

Other than that singular out-of-body moment, Lukas Heller‘s original storyline is intact, of the clutch of motley characters crash-landing in a desert (Gobi instead of Sahara) and rebuilding their plane to escape, under the tyrannical auspice of one of the passengers who claims to be an aircraft designer. Also retained is the mighty climactic twist of exactly what type of aircraft designer he is… Which means that all the good aspects of the movie are someone else’s ideas. This PHOENIX has exemplary production values, so all they had to do was Not Add Dumb Stuff. Or OutKast. Guess everyone didn’t get that memo.

Dennis Quaid is Captain Towns, the rugged all-American pilot; Tyrese Gibson, his first mate. Their passengers are a group of oil-riggers and civilians from an oil rig shut down by corporate decree. Miranda Otto (RETURN OF THE KING) is a bit too slight of frame and feminine of nature to be believable as the chief rigger (more like Equal Opportunity Casting; just a little too slim and milky-white to be here without the threat of gang-rape – I mean, what more excuse are you guys waiting for?); Jacob Vargas represents the Mexican contingent; there’s the Irish guy (Scott Michael Campbell), the gangsta (Sticky Fingaz), the Middle Eastern guy (Kevork Malikyan, pandering to that new demographic that rose to prominence after 9/11) and even the Corporate peacock (Hugh Laurie) who understands Middle Eastern languages and golf.

And Giovanni Ribisi creates the most memorable character in Elliott the ambiguously-Euro “aircraft designer,” with his overbearing principles, pragmatic nerdism and ducky voice. It’s the best performance of the film. Every time he says, “Captain Towns” in that adenoidal bleat I’m laughing. His alpha struggle with Quaid is the sole reason this movie has any legs.

In the 1965 PHOENIX, James Stewart’s crew experienced psychological and physical hell to build their escape vehicle. Apparently that’s not enough in 2004, where the unnecessary drama of crazy Mongols has to be added, with a silly ticking clock chase sequence to put a Hollywood cherry on top of the climactic takeoff. Pandering to the demographic that needs all that superfluous silliness, there are explosions and a gun fight (and I’m sure there would have been a polar bear battle if idiot execs had their way), and when Fingaz wants to attempt walking across the desert, the crew describe the terrible things that could happen to him and show us the fantasy visuals like some kind of ’80’s music video. Have they forgotten we viewers have an imagination?

Ducky Ribisi maintains, in that adenoidal whine, “My plane will fly! My plane will fly!” This movie doesn’t.

END

A Spielberg fantasy done horribly right.

What if the United States Military actually possessed a shred of decency and humanity? Shyeh! What if.

In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the people who type the “Sorry Your Son’s Dead” letters for the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die notice that three letters are addressed to the Ryan family of Anytown USA. Seems three brothers have been killed in the name of assuaging the small-penis insecurities of the American government. There is one more Ryan boy presumably still alive, and the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die now send America’s Favorite Son, Tom Hanks, to snatch the last Ryan from the belly of the beast, intending to send him home honorably. Shyeh! What if.

“I’m Ryan and so’s my wife!”

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is the war movie by which all other war movies will be measured – not for its implausible premise (written by Robert Rodat) and typical propagandistic slant, but for its revolutionary depiction of battle scenes, more brutal than any ever committed to film. Visceral. Nightmarish. Incendiary. Words cannot do justice to the ferocious spectacle and gutshock aftertaste of the opening Normandy invasion.

After the surety of hand he displayed with disturbing violence in his Holocaust epic SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993), director Steven Spielberg turns his camera on a very American World War II story.

We meet the Yanks stepping onto the beach at Omaha, the sea more blood than brine, in a frontal assault on the Normandy coast that is going horribly wrong, as the German fortifications on the shoreline mow them down ruthlessly. Steel crossbeam obstacles called “hedgehogs” stick nefariously up from the sand in the low tide; planted to mutilate the undersides of boats as they attain the shore – if the tide had kept the hedgehogs hidden underwater – now they ironically provide the only cover for the American troops in a searing firestorm.

During this blood and bone tempest we meet Captain John Hiller (Tom Hanks) trying to stay alive yet move his troops closer to the German machine gun nests and take them out. We are in the crucified heart of the battle, blood on the camera lens, rain dirt muddying the view, machine gun rounds slamming and pinging past like fireballs, gray-green desaturated filmstock and a lens flare sheen around the film edges; internal body parts, severed limbs, ear-numbing explosions; a grimy, hellish, embracing maelstrom of frenzied death.

Spielberg and longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski capture what has never been captured in depictions of battle – desperation, futility, the overwhelming randomness of slugs whizzing by and claiming lives, medics wasting morphine stabs on dying soldiers; confusion and screaming, bodily fluids and exit wounds, intestines mixing with mud – simply the most authentic Cinematic War we have ever seen.

Battle visuals in RYAN are so disturbing that in 2002 when the call to arms came from the gutless warmongers Bush-Cheney, it’s a wonder anyone answered it at all – which only shows what a bunch of mugs the American armed forces are, or anyone infused with the erroneous attitude that military might is a political problem-solver.

Hiller’s mission to Save Private Ryan is painted as a spark of humanity illuminating the gross inhumanity of war. YET. The high command’s decision to send a son home to his grieving mother can only be for one reason – not moral, ethical or humane – to make a future politician look golden.

Spielberg’s Omaha Beach: if it were any more real, it would be real.

Hiller’s ragtag squad consists of Tom Sizemore (scrappy adjutant) Edward Burns (cynic looker), Giovanni Ribisi (the doc), Barry Pepper (holy sharpshooter), Adam Goldberg (resident Jew), Vin Diesel (goombah muscle), and Jeremy Davies (scaredy cat gopher Upham). And each man is created whole, as we discover whenever characterization sets in during quiet time.

And even that quiet time is starkly disturbing, poignant, heart rending, accompanied by a majestic score by Spielberg longtime composer John Williams. This is not your John Wayne/Richard Widmark grimacing melodramatic characterization; the characters in RYAN are drawn in true blood, every bad decision, every disconsolate look, every unsolvable moral conundrum, scarring straight to our all-too-human guts.

Captain Hiller feels every bladed inch of the Shakespeare axiom, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (Henry IV). He is the victim of one bad decision after another, not all his fault, but for his shoulders alone to bear. Each man who dies under his command takes him “one step farther from home.”

Very cool to see Paul Giamatti, Dennis Farina and even Ted Danson in small key roles. Be sure to watch for Nathan Fillion (soon a cult fave in FIREFLY!) as the tearful wrong Ryan… And when Hiller’s troop does find the real private James Ryan – he is Matt Damon, acting the hell out of the Concerned Face chapter of the Acting for Male Models handbook.

Though Hiller’s men grew to resent Ryan during their search, now they realize he is as confused and human as the rest of them, and though he’s getting a free pass home, his principles don’t allow him to desert his post or his brigade.

To climax the movie – another skin-searing battle sequence. Spielberg is now just having the time of his life: his crew have the formula down and we are once again struck speechless by the construction of the onscreen blitzkrieg that makes all other skirmishes on film look like Monty Python’s Batley Townswomens’ Guild Battle of Pearl Harbor.

Chilling – as Goldberg’s Jew struggles with a German and is stabbed slowly, deliberately; regretful – as Davies’s scaredy-cat Upham could’ve stopped the stabbing if he had just had the guts to run up a stairway instead of tearfully ascending in fear; twisted – as Pepper’s holy sharpshooter prays while he snipes that his lord keep his hand steady and his eye keen, “You are my tower, you are my shield” (which should be a morbid contradiction for Christians, that they will instead find reassuring – that “god” is supposedly on their side); disturbing – when Ribisi’s doc is mortally wounded and he stutters instructions on how to “operate” on him, even as his liver is mutilated and the last of the morphine is stabbed into his leg as he expires; amusing – as Sizemore is shot and is more pissed off at his gun jamming than at being shot; ultimately tragic – as Hiller’s dying words to Ryan convey his confidence in the unproven worth of humankind, and a simultaneous indictment that Ryan could never hope to live up to: “Earn this!… Earn it.”

For a movie that stands helmet and shoulders above all other war movies for battle realism coupled with solid characterization, it is a shame RYAN’S premise is so godawfully maudlin.

For closure, a general narrates a letter written by the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die, to Ryan’s mother on how the army is soooo generous for sending James Ryan home, misusing Lincoln’s words about her other sons being sacrificed on the “altar of freedom,” and generally making our flesh crawl with platitudes, euphemisms and shallow commiserations.

The overarching duplicity and mendacity of America’s involvement in WWII will be missed by everyone who regards these men as heroes (simply for dodging death and causing death, all in the name of a freedom which could have been retained by not entering the war in the first place). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – much like George W. Bush declaring he was uninterested in empire-building – was voted into a second term by declaring he would keep America out of foreign wars. Which means the will of the people was AGAINST involving the United States in Japan’s invasion of China in the late 1930s. Yet as soon as he entered his second term, FDR set in motion schemes for entering the war by any means possible, including antagonizing Japan to force the United States into conflict. FDR’s oil and steel embargoes on Japan were the last straw, and America suffered FDR’s infamous “date which will live in infamy,” December 8, 1941 – Pearl Harbor – the greatest excuse for Warmongers to Send Sons Off To Die. You see, if FDR had actually stuck to his anti-interventionism/anti-war policies (which was the will of the American people) he could have saved not only private Ryan, but also Captain Hiller, adjutant Sizemore, medic Ribisi, private looker, private Jew, private goombah, private holy sharpshooter, and the whole godforsaken American army, navy and air force.

But that would entail America actually possessing a shred of decency and humanity.

Shyeh! What if.

END

Small time crooks painted larger than the criminals in any given corporation.

An insipid telling of the fast life and crooked times of America’s first Public Enemy Number 1, John Dillinger.

PUBLIC ENEMIES makes all the right moves, with all the right stars wearing all the right hardguy overcoats, but it somehow lacks grip.

Set in the 1930’s Chicago crimewave during the Great Depression, movie opens with John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) breaking his pals out of jail (back in the day when a hoodlum could pose as a guard bringing in Dillinger, then both take the jail by storm – an idea obviously stolen from “a long time ago” when a wookiee infiltrated a Death Star prison the same way).

Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is the lawman assigned to bring down Dillinger, using all the new-fangled technological methods like telephones and cars. Billy Crudup is heinous warlock J. Edgar Hoover, who started the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so that police could chase bad guys like Dillinger across state lines. And so that he could jack off over the private lives of homosexuals.

From the book by Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, directed by Michael Mann (LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE INSIDER), PUBLIC ENEMIES dutifully goes through the paces of Dillinger’s bank robberies (back when it could be done with three men in hardguy overcoats, big hats, and a getaway car with lots of posing space on the running boards) and just as dutifully shows Purvis chasing Dillinger with his coterie of Keystone Cops. Neither Depp nor Bale create anything memorable with their characterizations, dialogue or posedowns on running boards.

PUBLIC ENEMIES makes the same mistake as AMERICAN GANGSTER – it makes the criminal too sexy to envision as an anti-social thug. Dillinger was notoriously popular and a charmer, but the man was also a sociopath. In a scene lifted from one of Dillinger’s real life breakouts, he uses a plastic gun and manhandles each successive guard past each gate in such a way that none of them discover his ruse until he raids the gun rack for real guns. A man with that kind of force of will and resolve would have something really dangerous inside him that would override his charm. To look upon a man like that in real life would be to fear him. Yet we movie maniacs only glean the guy we wanna party with. While J. Edgar Hoover declares Dillinger the very first Public Enemy #1, the rest of the world is declaring him The Sexiest Man Alive.

Dillinger’s heyday was in a transitional age, when physical bank robbers like himself were slowly being overtaken by virtual bank robbers. Phil D’Andrea plays a mob bookie whose telephone exchange brought in as much during a day as Dillinger could steal from one bank. Which should make one rethink the title of Burroughs’s book – America’s Greatest Crime Wave was, in fact, not during the early ’30s, it is now: AIG, Lehman Brothers, The Ku Bush Klan and the Savings and Loan Scandal, et al…

Dillinger’s friends – scattered around the country in safe houses and brothels – deserted him as the heat was turned up under him. The world crept away from Dillinger in the space of a short lifetime.

Dillinger takes a floosie (Marion Cotillard) as his squeeze and she seems to relish the life of worry of a gangster’s moll. We never really connect with her until the film’s last moments when Dillinger sends his last words, “Bye bye, Blackbird.” Delivered by Stephen Lang, in a small role that packs that last emotional punch.

His final moments, Dillinger watches Clark Gable in MANHATTAN MELODRAMA delivering sage advice from the screen, “Die the way you lived – all of a sudden – don’t drag it out. Living like that doesn’t mean a thing.” It was exiting this theater that Dillinger was shot and killed by authorities, at age 31, just one short year after he was released from prison.

After spending nine and a half years in jail (from 1924 to 1933, from age 21 to 30), it is a wonder how Dillinger’s rep grew so fast into the blaze of glory it would become. And he went out the same way he lived: sexy as Jack Sparrow.

END

Electra Glide in Jungle Cat Blue.

For the protection of the good, for destruction of evil, and for the establishment of righteousness, I come into being from age to age.
— Lord Krishna, avatar of Vishnu, The Bhagavad-Gita.

Forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those
Who trespass against us…
— Yeshua, avatar of Elohim, The Lord’s Prayer.

Hubris. Conquest. Destruction. Hell. Humility. Harmony. Renewal. Paradise.

Frank Zappa once said, “Writing about music is like tap dancing about architecture.” And there’s no way to describe James Cameron’s AVATAR without a lot of tap dancing.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be satire. If it weren’t so expensive it would be laughable. If it weren’t so irresistibly watchable it would be golden trash.

hubris

Ah, which hubris to talk about first? The hubris of writer-director Cameron for foisting a story as old as the hills (or at least as old as Kevin Costner) on a demographic whom he is sure has never seen DANCES WITH WOLVES, 1990 (but might be familiar with the 2009 SOUTH PARK episode, Dances With Smurfs)?; the hubris of the human race in 2154, strip-mining Pandora,* a verdant moon four light years from Earth, for a mineral called “unobtanium” (presumably named by a geologist who had no imagination on how to mine it, sell it or even think about its utility), and callously wiping out the indigenous Na’vi species to obtain it?; the hubris of Cameron utilizing his own all-new patented King-Of-The-World motion capture technology to turn real life actors (who perform the whole movie anyway in their sensored jumpsuits) into Na’vi cat-toons, Because He Can, at a cost which could wipe out hunger in at least two Third World countries?; or the hubris of we the audience by going along with Cameron’s subtle demeaning of the Na’vi race by blindly taking it for granted they are so unsophisticated that they would accept an impostor into their midst whom they know is nothing more than a ventriloquial figure for a human? If the American Natives took blankets in exchange for land, I guess ALL indigenous peoples are that gullible…

Speaking of ventriloquial figures, Sam Worthington (as paraplegic jarhead* Sully) captures that wooden acting idiom that up until now was purveyed unchallenged by Christopher Reeve as SUPERMAN. Worthington’s got a great career ahead of him as a plank.

conquest

Pofftiri

Exposition dialogue is tiresome, as Cameron rationalizes the financially-unsound concept of military avatars – Na’vi creatures mixed with human DNA, mentally controlled by humans, mingling with the forest-dwelling Na’vi for the purposes of… something something metaphor something. Totally unnecessary, cos if the big bad military is going to forcefully strip-mine Pandora anyway, why bother snowjobbing the natives as avatars or negotiating a peaceful exodus? Insofar as avatars giving the humans the ability to study geology or the ecosystem, the humans can do that in helmets without resorting to turning blue. But the avatars give Sigourney Weaver excuse to reprise her Dian Fossey from GORILLAS IN THE MIST and walk amongst the natives with barely any clothes on.

Sully neural-links with his ten-foot, blue-skinned cat-person through a MATRIX-like fusion of non-science, whereupon he experiences the euphoric use of his legs again. And a nice piece of tail. And if that isn’t incentive enough to betray your own species, cue the sexy naked cat-chick, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) – a nice piece of tail – who, even though an alien, sports pert tennis ball ta-tas in a disturbingly anatomically-correct position on her chest, and who rides her bird-thing in a demonstrably human sexual position – and it’s homo who?

The tail only makes it hotter.

Borrowing all its conquest metaphors and analogies from Mel Gibson’s THE BOUNTY, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE NEW WORLD, FERNGULLY, Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the Bush Fake War On Terror, AVATAR’s unsubtle shovel to our heads is expressed in the military’s vernacular: The Corporation Guy (Giovanni Ribisi) calls the natives “blue monkeys” (uncomfortably close to “sand monkeys”); they speak of “winning the hearts and minds” of the natives and “shock and awe” (one of the stupidest, if not THE most idiotic name for an initiative in the history of warfare).

Though Sully is with the science team, the mantastically pumped-up Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang; he was Ike Clanton in TOMBSTONE) sequesters him as a double agent, to report tactical weaknesses in the Na’vi stronghold.

Corp Guy: “When people are sitting on shit that you want, you make them your enemy.” Ah, so that’s why Amerika hates sand monkeys! Sitting around with their thobes and burqas and wrong religions – all over Amerikan oil!

destruction

Sully has way too much fun being taught the Omaticaya tribe’s ways by Neytiri, in a montage which screams upcoming unsafe sex scene.

Even under all those computer pixels, we recognize majestic Wes Studi (from MOHICANS) as the Omaticaya Chief. Laz Alonso is scowling Tsu’tey, Neytiri’s bf, who doesn’t seem half as piqued as he should be for his catwoman humping what is, in essence, a showroom dummy. (Sam Worthington on the other end of the pixels only exacerbates the analogy.) And in any Cameron flick, where would we be without the perfunctory human female warrior? Ripley’s busy being a scientist, so Michelle Rodriguez fills those sports bra shoes, all tank top and trash talk.

By the time Sully plonks Neytiri on a bed of luminous lichen, his alliance with the natives is sealed. He fights on the side of the Na’vi when Quaritch comes a-calling with his giant helicopters, and what must be spectacular coffee, for him to be sipping it constantly while in heated missile strikes.

Quaritch commands, “Preemptive war is the only way; we will fight terror with terror.” And this, my jungly-jungly friends, makes me laugh in joy. For you see, the legacy of George W. Bush has at last found expression, in society and in art; the Bush Doctrine (that thing Sarah the Imbecile had no clue about) has become shorthand for greedy, anti-environmental, fascist douchebags!

The military chop down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring, making the Na’vi wish they’d invented fire insurance.

hell

In the movie’s greatest irony, Quaritch keeps calling Pandora “hell” – when it is actually a paradise – as he BRINGS hell to Pandora with his gunships.

Thereby forcing the Na’vi to stoop to human methods of warfare; in essence, “fighting terror with terror” – because the filmmakers possess only limited “human” imaginations, and cannot conceive of battling military might other than by making two wrongs make a right.

Sully rallies tribes from other zip codes to partake of his patently human aggression tactics. Y’know, for a peaceful race, they’re surprisingly easy to rally to war. If Sully was a thinking man, I’d warrant he stumped with the rousing “2002 Bush-Cheney State of the Union Outright Lies” speech. But then again, jar Sully doesn’t think too much about anything. Except Neytiri’s tail.

However, Cameron gets away with Pandora’s retaliation aggression because (as John Dunbar realizes in DANCES WITH WOLVES) “This had not been a fight for territory or riches or to make men free. This battle had no ego. It had been fought to preserve the food stores that would see us through winter, to protect the lives of women and children and loved ones only a few feet away.”

humility

How To Train Your Ikran

The Na’vi mind-meld with the wondrous creatures on Pandora through tendrils in their ponytails. A major initiation for Sully involves melding and riding a bat-bird thing called Ikran. Zenith of the bat-birds is a big red thing that legend says only a few Na’vi have ridden. Cue daring assault on big red thing…

The literal tree-hugging message of AVATAR is that the flora and fauna on Pandora is a hive mind, each organism communicating with the living planet. The Na’vi “worship” Eywa, a force represented by their giant treehouse. Cameron circumvents a major tribal problem in establishing the science behind the hive mind: electrical synapses indicate the trees communicate like humans – via the blogosphere. So when the natives “pray” for tree tendrils to revive someone, though it may look superstitious, we realize it is not “faith-based magic” (like all Earth religions), but result-based reality.

harmony

After months in his blue form, Sully wakes in his Matrix-chamber lamenting, “out there is the true world and in here is the dream.”

Carl Sagan comes to mind when we meet Pandora’s symbiotic wildlife, evolution serving the hive mind by developing the tendrils (or “feelers”) on most large animals and the Na’vi, for harmonious interaction. One of Sagan’s most famous speculations was how helium-based organisms might interact in Jupiter’s gaseous ecosystem. The wealth of creativity and inventiveness put into Pandora’s six-limbed analogs of predators, horses, scavengers, pachyderms, luminous jellyfish-things wafting on air, would have thrilled the turtleneck off Sagan.

renewal

Sully rides the big red thing into a war council and makes Neytiri’s blue bits pinker. He calls for WAR WAR WAR and she tells him, “The Tree protects only the balance of life.” Nevertheless, Pandora/The Tree throws its organic might against the military’s Republican death panels in the final tragic battle. So much for tree-hugging.

Today is a good day to die.

But unlike death on Earth, which is muddied by religionism, death on Pandora is an obvious go-around, thanks to the Tree of Holiday Lights, where the essence of life can actually be downloaded like Microsoft Office Word. Even on Earth, there is an obvious transfer of matter and nutrients in a circle of life, but somehow that circle gets intersected by a magic spirit with a beard and 82 virgins and the River Styx and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

paradise

Today is a blue day to die!

So why bequeath this unoriginal, scientifically-contrived tale such high cucumber ratings? Because it is done with a surety of hand, a certainty of concept and a gleeful whoop of entertainment maximus. The script moves the story at such a clip we barely notice the dearth of plot and, to tell the truth, the science is adhered to more closely than most sci-fi actioners.

From magnificent spectacles to the tiniest minutiae, every dollar of the 300 million budget is up onscreen, in a vibrant, coruscating panorama; in James Horner’s epic score (then again, thundering choral ululations would sound epic even under a Will Ferrell movie); in the phenomenal sound design; the fierce military constructs; in the incredibly detailed creatures and shimmering, breathing jungle; in the fakest of naked ta-tas that look so real, I’m sure thirteen-year-old boys are having unbidden accidents with their Ikrans.

With the undoubted impact AVATAR has on first viewing, people have dusted off one of his old sobriquets and are calling Cameron “king of the world” once more. But which world? AVATAR’s most impressive achievement is Pandora itself as an integral character; on its orbital position as a satellite of the large planet that dominates its sky; on its implied ecosystem that pulses from the screen in mind-numbing detail.

We can quibble over trivialities, but even if this straightforward story was simply a façade to show off Pandora’s biology, it is a roaring success. Quite apparent the filmmakers worked hard to envision a plausible ecosystem, rather than a world where one big monster existed in a biological vacuum. (In those movies, the brain-scarring action has to be poured on so thick that we don’t stop to think what that monster eats and how it mates and what it does when it’s not chasing the stupid humans.)

Peter Jackson’s WETA Digital, Skywalker Sound, ILM, Stan Winston, motion capture technology by Giant (INCREDIBLE HULK), among others – the best of the best worked on this movie. It shows.

pandora’s jarhead

The Na’vi have an intimate greeting, “I see you,” meaning, of course, metaphorically. Not surprisingly, AVATAR opens and closes with shots of Sully’s eyes opening – at the start, he wakes stupid, just a jarhead on a cryogenic ride; in the final frames, he opens his eyes as a god; he is whole, wise in the ways of blue tooth, subsumed by the hive mind. He is Pandora’s Jar.

Making the most wondrous thing about Pandora the fact that it could actually educate a jarhead.

It is couched as a happily-ever-after ending, but I beg your indulgence in deeper metaphor: Sully is still originally human, carrying all the baggage that goes with being a Marine, a cripple, a man. In subsuming him unto her bosom, have all the evils of the Earth now been loosed on Pandora?

END

Those scruffy longhairs are in town! Lock up your daughters!

That Thing Done Well is a Thing of Beauty Indeed.

Snappy and exhilarating, THAT THING YOU DO! focuses on the rise and fall of a one-hit wonder pop group ensconced in British Invasion-era America. Full credit to writer-director Tom Hanks for crafting an entertaining vehicle in which he stars, that he is not the star of – instead making the music, the heady innocence of the era the star.

Poffy Krupa

The Wonders are drummer Guy (Tom Everett Scott, oozing pleasant-ville like a born-again looking for donations), bandleader Jimmy (intensely focused Johnathon Schaech), guitarist Lenny (Steve Zahn, also pleasant – but unbalanced in that non-threatening way we term “kooky”), and a nameless bassist (Ethan Embry, a wisp of effete lower end). Rounding out the troupe is Jimmy’s unappreciated girlfriend, Fay (gorgeous Liv Tyler).

After a few live appearances and an indie single, The Wonders “make it” (see how easy it is, starving musicians?). In turning them over to Play Tone, a major record label, The Wonders’ first Garage Days manager, Phil (Chris Ellis), portrays a simplistic, “noble” approach – “My bird-doggin’ is done; Play Tone’s gonna take care of ya” – failing to mention that major label interest must have involved buying The Wonders’ contract from Phil for a price he couldn’t refuse. When Guy expresses how easy it seems, the label rep Mr. White (a high-foreheaded Hanks) smoothly purrs, “Well, papers will have to be signed and you’ll have to get me the master tapes…” Suddenly Reality is served – you could almost see the horns growing out of White’s high forehead.

Hanks doesn’t serve up too much of this meat, and by concentrating on the end-result of all the bureaucracy and hard work – the gigs – we are given a skewed view of this rock and roll “job.” Seems like it’s all just fun, but there are as many rockers who attest that they “hate their job,” as there are desk-jockeys nine-to-fiving. When it’s your primary income, it’s your Job – simple. And any job done well will elicit fun. Any job where you cannot cope, becomes not fun.

THAT THING YOU DO! dabbles very uneasily in the business end of the music business: Chris Isaak (as Guy’s uncle) records their single, That Thing You Do, in a church in one take, Phil gets it on the radio within one week, and while they’re on tour, Mr. White signs them and suddenly the record is howlin’ up the Billboard charts. How? Scene Missing. Hanks drops clues, but the dots are never joined – which might be construed as treating an audience as “intelligent” – whoa!, let’s not go overboard…

The band guys are perceived as financially “well-off” by movie’s end, but a debut artist selling one single – even to Number One – cannot possibly recoup any of the money that the record label advanced to duplicate, promote and distribute the single nationally. As most veteran artists will attest, they had to wait for their fourth or fifth album (not single) to put them in the black fiscally. And The Wonders ultimately reneged on their contract, which meant that any advances assigned as living expenses on tour would suddenly dry up. It’s an intimidating, debilitating legal situation that ensues – but the film sidestepped all this in favor of cute guys, boppy songs and matching suits.

The crowning glory of this movie is undoubtedly its synchronized soundtrack. Very few movies (including monumental, award-winning productions like AMADEUS or IMMORTAL BELOVED) pay this much attention to ensuring that musician’s manipulations on screen match the audio soundtrack, except maybe (THIS IS) SPINAL TAP. (Of course, movies about real musical artists don’t enter this assessment: WOODSTOCK, GIMME SHELTER, THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME, etc. – although the Zep movie has its mighty share of non-sync passages.)

When the EDDIE & THE CRUISERS movies surged into cinemas in the 80s, I was humiliated at the lack of savvy the filmmakers exhibited in their portrayal of the rock and roll milieu. A major musical flaw was the set-and-forget production value for all the songs, making them sound exactly the same, as if they were all recorded in one place at one time, with one overall mix – which is what was actually done, of course – but to bring some credibility to the movie, the producers should have assessed the circumstances for each scene and mixed the music accordingly – which is what Hanks and his audio personnel intuitively did for this movie.

Every single time The Wonders perform their eponymous hit, the sound is mixed to reflect the type of stadium, bar or studio they are in; every single onscreen frame of the actors-playing-musicians is synched – Hanks specifically made his principals take instrument lessons before filming began – down to every single beat of drum-fill on screen being accounted for, down to the guitarists changing to correct chords in correct positions in sync with the audio! If Hanks was brave enough to cast Liv Tyler (daughter of Rock Royalty, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith), he must have had heady confidence in his team of editors and sound engineers, for to fail at putting across the “musicality” of this movie (with Steven’s progeny willing to be involved in it) would not allow Hanks to show his high forehead in public ever again.

Of course there are minute flaws, but none worth mentioning here. There are too many trinkets to keep one sated: Guy’s fastidious father (Holmes Osbourne), Jimmy’s fascination with punning the band’s name (spelled initially as “One-Ders” and subsequently mispronounced “Oh-NEE-ders” continuously), the well-drawn band personalities (the “talented one,” “smart one,” “quiet one,” “zany one”), cameos from Peter Scolari (Hanks’s old Bosom Buddy), Rita Wilson, Alex Rocco (Moe Green in THE GODFATHER), Kevin Pollak; the subtle romance between Guy and Fay, who are not actually an item until the last few frames of film…

…and you’ll never be able to get that damn song out of your head!

END