Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Lawdogs.

Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are THE HIGHWAYMEN, two old detectives past their prime, hired by the Texas Governor to join a manhunt – for Bonnie and Clyde. Ah, connection to popular culture! But this ain’t your granddaddy’s BONNIE AND CLYDE from 1967 with sexy Faye Dunaway and sexier Warren Beatty – we’re not gonna fall in love with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow here – we hardly even see them – this is a tribute to the lawdogs who brought them down.

Set in 1934, when wiretapping and two-way radios were brand new, Costner and Harrelson play two real life Texas Rangers who really did hunt the pair. Costner is Frank Hamer – the most celebrated Texas Ranger in history – brought out of retirement because he has a particular set of skills. Harrelson is longtime partner Maney Gault, who gives us a chilling description of Frank’s skills, as he relates a story of how he and Frank once brought down a Mexican gang by Frank NOT following lawful protocol and NOT giving them warning, just shooting to kill. That’s the outlaw skill the state wants from him.

Kathy Bates is the Texas Governor. The great John Carroll Lynch is chief of police. At the time Hamer and Gault were called in, Bonnie and Clyde had been fugitives for two years, elevating their bank robberies to a murder spree including cops. With the governor and chief of police at wits’ end, when giving their orders to Hamer and Gault, they both leave so much unsaid about stepping outside the law – wink-wink – the only thing separating them from mob bosses are their cheaper suits.

I’m the dandy highwayman you’re too scared to mention / I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention…
— Adam Ant, “Stand And Deliver”

I like the twist on the title – because highwaymen usually means outlaws; in this case, these off-the-book detectives are literally driving the blacktop of rural America, pursuing their prey with a single-minded purpose, illegally crossing state lines out of their jurisdiction, which made them… uh, outlaws.

Best scene in the movie is when Hamer meets Clyde’s father, Henry Barrow (William Sadler), and we realize it’s not just about the hunt – it’s about a man coming to terms with his particular set of skills. Barrow implores Hamer to go easy on his son, because Clyde “wasn’t born with a dark soul,” showing Hamer a picture of the boy, saying it was just “one turn on the trail” that damned him – when he stole a chicken as a boy, with the cops on his back ever since. And Hamer, well, it’s a good thing he’s Kevin Costner because only Kevin Costner could turn the empathy tables on Barrow and tell his own sob story of wanting to be a preacher, including the “one turn on the trail” that damned him to a life of hunting people for the law. And Costner is so damn good at turning our sympathies that Barrow ends up begging him to kill Clyde and himself and his wife! Man, Costner: what an actor! Anything he does in his older years is just magnificent. Where does he go in his head to be so compelling?! He just has to be onscreen with that face – just BE that face – and I start weeping with the gravitas and empathy – Kevin, shoot ME, shoot ME!!

Authentic old-world cinematography, set dressing, costuming, with a climax so explosive, and a final death parade so chilling, it will compel you to look up exactly how Bonnie and Clyde were actually taken down. Amazingly – it’s all true!

Da-diddley qua qua…

END

Stumbling drunkenly.

Tiresome sequel to an iconic movie. ARTHUR 2: ON THE ROCKS is, like its title, uh…

Dudley Moore returns as Arthur Bach, the millionaire who loves a tipple at all hours of the day. He’s not an alcoholic, he’s a drunk. He’s still lovable, but just barely, and his hijinks are producing in those around him television sitcom reactions rather than big screen comedy.

Five minutes in, and Arthur’s wife Linda (Liza Minelli) is talking adoption (because she can’t get pregnant). You know you’ve just lost every single male in your audience, don’t you, writer Andy Breckman and director Bud Yorkin? Relentless, the filmmakers plough on, every single word out of Linda’s mouth from now until movie’s end baby-talk, baby-wallpaper, baby-names, baby-nursery, baby-toys, and I jumped out a window and ran screaming down the street. Like every red-blooded male.

Not before I witnessed Kathy Bates as an adoption manager, in easily the worst performance of her career. You call that acting? I call it Misery…

Then Arthur is bankrupted by his nemesis Burt Johnson (Stephen Elliott), the only way to recover his fortune being to marry Johnson’s vindictive daughter Susan (insipid Cynthia Sikes replacing insipid Jill Eikenberry from the last movie).

Arthur refuses the marriage proposal, and he and Linda try to brave the poverty and get jobs. They try moving to different hovels, but Burt Johnson is dogging their every move and thwarting all their efforts. Just when things are looking their worst, Arthur and Linda get a surprise visit from that terrible actor from the adoption agency – and all hope of a baby to brighten their existence is dashed. When they break up, Arthur ends up in a hostel.

Every element that made ARTHUR a spirited adventure is leached from this plodding, confused thought experiment. Even Arthur’s imperious, imposing butler/father figure Hobson is dead (Sir John Gielgud in the last movie), replaced with a humorless patsy in the form of Paul Benedict as Fairchild. And the supporting cast all prove they’re willing to say anything to pick up a paycheck.

In the hostel, at the film’s lowest ebb, it is suddenly defibrillated uproariously with the appearance of – Sir John Gielgud as Hobson’s ghost! The filmmakers were probably kicking themselves that this character died in the last film, because as soon as Gielgud’s commanding presence is onscreen, ARTHUR 2 springs back to life. Alas, too little, much too late.

Worst of all, the message this movie is trying to convey – that you don’t need money to be happy – is undermined in exactly the same way that ARTHUR’s message was undermined – by having Arthur reclaim his fortune almost magically AND by having that bad actor deliver an adoption child AND by having Linda announce she is pregnant as well! Oh, it’s such fun how everything always works out when you’re rich and in love and drunk and can’t write a good screenplay.

END

The Road To Nowhere leads straight through Suburbia…

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
— Henry David Thoreau.

Leo and Kate–together again! For those emotionally trigger-happy TITANIC fans who thought REVOLUTIONARY ROAD would be a reteaming of their favorite star-crossed lovers to recapture lachrymose memories (like the manipulative reteaming of Hanks and Ryan time and again to retread the same mindless romcom ground), this movie’s first scene should dispel any of those flighty notions: Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as husband and wife at each other’s throats, arguing like the best of us in real life, their confrontation almost degenerating to physical violence.

Tonally diametrically opposite to their weeping willow roles onboard the RMS Titanic, we meet the marriage-challenged Frank and April Wheeler (Leo and Kate) in 1950’s Connecticut, living in an average Middle American suburb on Revolutionary Road, her dreams of being a successful actress slowly dying in cruddy stage plays, his dreams of migrating to Paris being quashed by financial reality.

I must admit to initially bracing myself to cringe throughout REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, expecting implausible promises of eternal love wafting like indiscriminate farts across a landscape of painfully pretty pusses. But we soon realize this is not a lank romantic excursion into platitude land. This is what would have happened had Jack and Rose lived to kiss dry land. Whereas marriage and settling down is usually regarded as the goal that young couples strive towards, when this couple achieves that goal they realize it is more nightmare than dream.

Of course, we’ve encountered many films from all eras that feature dissatisfied people, especially in more ambitious European cinema. But 1950’s Americana has always been a Norman Rockwell haven, where the very rut that would define later disenfranchised generations was promulgated as the highest aspiration for young dreamers: settling down in suburbia, white picket fence, aproned housewife, cubicled husband, two-point-five kids, the dog, the car, the neighborhood barbecue, the weekend hammock…

In movies made in the 1950s, all those innocent, soft-focused American 35-year-old “young lovers” tilted at nothing else, because all the entertainment media, the church and the agrarian communities were spinning the state of marriage stagnation as THE goal. But Frank and April are constantly trying to find ways out of this endgame. Because they’re bored. Because they’re human.

Is REVOLUTIONARY ROAD the first “1950’s revisionist” romantic movie? From the 1961 novel by Richard Yates (screenplayed by Justin Haythe, directed by Sam Mendes), Frank and April could be the first realistically portrayed couple of the 1950s since American movie-making began! Leo and Kate pull out all the stops with nerve-raw performances that make us wonder how they ever came out of this as friends.

For every LEAVE IT TO BEAVER household in the nostalgic ’50s, surely there must have been perceptive, questing humans like Frank and April, who felt there was more to the quality of life than obeisance to the repressive Industrial Age existence foisted upon them; their quiet desperation inciting them to rebel against the contrived conventions of BEAVER-type propaganda. And Hugh Beaumont.

April even rages quite explicitly, “Look at us – we’re just like everyone else! We bought into the same ridiculous delusion – this idea that you have to resign from life and settle down…” She considers her life a derailing of dreams, rather than acquiring of them.

And Frank and April’s arguments do not spring from soap opera templates – they arise out of nowhere, as in real life, they go nowhere, as in real life, each protagonist just trying to convince the other to selfishly follow their course, as in real life. The couple’s best laid plans are waylaid by pregnancy, by jobs, by affairs, by differing ideals of happiness.

Kathy Bates (who co-starred with DiCaprio and Winslet in TITANIC as an annoying old lady) co-stars with DiCaprio and Winslet as an annoying old lady. She foists her mentally-unbalanced son (Michael Shannon) on the couple, but he turns out to be just a person with no verbal inhibitions (in other words, truthful – what “civilized” society cannot comprehend, so deems unbalanced), who becomes a loudmouth conscience for the couple.

The movie’s stinger is a biting commentary on how to make a marriage last into its autumn years: Kathy Bates and her husband sit around a hearth, he reading, she yapping. When she starts nagging about the Wheelers, her old husband surreptitiously turns down his hearing aid; we see him in medium closeup, his face an ambivalent stare, as we hear her nagging fade down to silence. Is this it? Is the movie telling us that to make a marriage “work” (which, we presume, means to stay married past the point of caring) we must tune out the other person? And if it is, what a horrifying, claustrophobic existence! Gentlemen, if you are partnered right now, even at the most platonic level, you know that you “tune her out” at every opportunity just to stop your head from exploding with inanity. Imagine doing that for 30, 40, 50 years…

The nuclear family ideal is so ingrained in Middle American culture that when Frank and April tell their neighbors they are planning to move to Paris, with April supporting the family instead of Frank, they cannot process the information. They are so inculcated by societal strictures that outwardly they smile and say “That’s nice!” while in private they dismiss Frank and April as lunatics.

Wait till Hugh Beaumont hears about this!

END

The Day Keanu’s Face Muscles Stood Still.

Keanu Reeves elevates his One Facial Expression Method to new levels of expressionlessness in this wooden remake of the 1951 film.

Klaatu Cucumber
(expressionless)

Though excellent concepts are broached in both THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL films (1951 and 2008 versions), both films are ruined by their gutless denouements, failing to follow through on their stances of the human race not being worthy of continuing existence.In 1951, Michael Rennie, as alien Klaatu, landed in Washington in a glowing cardboard flying saucer; in 2008, a gaunt Keanu Reeves is Klaatu (which in alien language means, “OMG, he’s sexy AND mysterious!”), who lands in Manhattan in a spectacularly-visualized translucent sphere. Upon exiting his vehicle, he is shot, which precipitates the appearance of his bodyguard, Gort.

In 1951, mechanical man Gort was a foam rubber, eight-foot automaton who dumpled from side to side like a mummy – nothing you couldn’t outrun or outlaugh; in 2008, Gort thunders out as a 50-foot war machine, black metallic steel-flecked texture, Iron-Man-meets-the-Balrog, super conductive, super destructive.

Yes, the “effects” of 2008 elevate this movie above the original, as does the updating of social mores, better acting and “realism” – but let’s not talk of “realism” for either movie, as the English-speaking, oxygen-breathing, bipedal, humanoid, physics-bending Klaatu contravenes any discussion – suffice to say, 2008’s remake is not as cringe-inducing or naive as the 1951 original. The intriguing first act, fraught with scientific exposition, is where this EARTH STOOD STILL shines.

It keeps shining through the somber exchange between Klaatu and presidential spokeswoman, Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates), understating the superiority of unknown worlds beautifully:

Jackson: Do you represent a civilization?
Klaatu: I represent a group of civilizations.
Jackson: Where is this group of civilizations?
Klaatu: All around you.

Klaatu: Do you speak for the entire human race?
Jackson: I speak for the president of the United States. Now please tell me: Why have you come to our planet?
Klaatu: ‘Your’ planet?
Jackson: Yes, this is our planet.
Klaatu: No. It is not.

Oh, snap!

Then screenwriter David Scarpa pulls away from Edmund H. North’s original screenplay (from a story by Harry Bates), making Klaatu an environmentalist, giving new meaning to Little Green Men: “This planet has reached a Tipping Point” (trademark, Al Gore); “This planet can’t be allowed to perish” (trademark, Al Gore); “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives” (trademark, Lex Luthor).

And everything shiny goes dull and everything dumb gets dumber.

Tasty spinner scientist, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), befriends Klaatu and aids his quest to communicate with someone intelligent – that would rule out everyone from the military all the way down to the White House janitor; below the janitor, this would include the president and his cabinet, all the way down to the pets.

That’s where Monty Python steps in – Helen takes Klaatu to visit John Cleese (in an excellent cameo as The Smartest Man in the World – sounds like a Python sketch, doesn’t it?), who argues against humanity’s destruction by imploring Klaatu, “At the precipice, we change.” (Both John Cleese and Gort have way too little screentime.)

Cleese’s importuning counts for nothing, as Klaatu has an insider – James Hong (BALLS OF FURY, 2007) – an alien sent to Earth 70 years ago who has lived among us, studying our proclivities, who reports that – (we can smell it coming a mile away! The insufferable “Humans are warlike – BUT NOBLE” moment) – who reports to Klaatu that “Humans are warlike  – BUT NOBLE.”

‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky… and vomit.

You egregious wimps! Just once I’d like to see humans pay for their pompous arrogance! But how’s that going to happen when humans make the films?

In 1951, Michael Rennie very clearly said: “it is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder.” Which means: only when Earth extends its belligerence off-planet will those “intergalactic police” step in and bring peace by… er, force.

In 2008, Klaatu’s intergalactic police are simply whining greenies, even though the ORIGINAL message could have served more potently in this age of human intergalactic endeavors (with our spaceships, probes, and terraforming equipment being sent to the planets, stars and other galaxies).

Instead, all the translucent globes that land serve as “arks,” transporting animals off-planet. Whereupon the plan is to then decimate the Earth, including humankind. What kind of a fertile land will that leave behind for the animals to return to? Not sure – but I do know that Jennifer Connelly could use my anal-probe.

Gort (whose ker-ray-zee 1950s-monster-name is a “scientific” acronym in the remake: Genetically Organized Robot Technology) disintegrates into trillions of little CGI insectoids who ravage the landscape, decimating cities like locusts. How can Klaatu-Keanu say the human race is “killing the planet,” with a straight face when Gort’s insectoids are doing the same thing? (Well, I guess when you don’t have facial acting muscles, you can say anything with a straight face…) And why are they eating buildings anyway? Giants Stadium is not “the human species” – but it makes for a spanky movie trailer.

To cap off the gutlessness and stupidity, Kleaanu has his “humans are a noble species” epiphany – as we knew he would – and sends out an electromagnetic pulse (we presume) that destroys the insectoids and brings on “the day the earth stood still” as it cuts all electricity, stops all traffic, boats, factories, etc. And lets the humans live. As he rises quietly into the cosmos to go green up another bunch of dweebs.

It is amazing the same paranoia exists in 2008 as it did in 1951; call it Cold War, call it Terrorism, the human species still trembles like lemmings at anything remotely “alien” – the opening scenes where the army surrounds Klaatu’s spaceship read exactly the same in both movies: grunts with itchy trigger fingers, supposedly the toughest humans on the planet, brown their panties at the first sign of “different” and start shooting arbitrarily. Then when the alien reacts in self-defense, the army accuses the aliens of attacking first. Sound familiar?

People consider the 1951 version “revolutionary” for its message. It is not – every ’50’s B-movie during the Atomic Age/Cold War soapboxed about “The decision of destruction or salvation rests with humans themselves.” Likewise, this 2008 version is as gutlessly pc as any prominent fad media these days soapboxing on “green or die.” As the ’50’s had to include their movie staple of Alien Carrying Earth Woman, the ’08 bows to its New Staples of the green message, American firepower coupled with inferiority complex, and annoying insectoid CGI (how many modern movies contain CGI insectoids for no reason? KONG 2005, CLOVERFIELD, LOST IN SPACE).

In 50 years, they will laugh at 2008’s THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, as we laugh at the 1951 version – they will laugh at our ’08 social mores, laugh at our computers, at “tipping point” references, at the CGI insectoids, at the mixed messages…

As for the boy of wood who somehow made a career out of “acting” – Keanu – one person will not be laughing at him. Pinocchio.

END

The King Of The World meets The Bitch Of The Sea.

Let’s get one thing straight before we embark on this perilous journey into Hollywood History: the only “truth” in this movie is that the RMS Titanic did sink in April 1912 and that Leonardo DiCaprio is prettier than Kate Winslet. Everything else in James Cameron’s TITANIC is marshmallow fancy.

The movie opens in the modern day Atlantic, with a Titanic salvage crew helmed by amiable Brock Lovett (a sun-dried Bill Paxton), who haul surfaceward some very intriguing artifacts. 84-year-old Rose (Gloria Stuart) claims she was a Titanic passenger on its fateful voyage, so is brought aboard Lovett’s vessel to provide information.

In a cheeky foreshadowing of the breath-hammering visuals to come, Lovett’s crewmate outlines Titanic’s death throes, aided by computer graphics (I would hazard a guess that these are the selfsame graphics that the actual movie used as storyboard for its final visuals), before Lovett asks Old Rose for a firsthand account of the RMS Titanic and she, in a rheumy Percodan haze, starts relating a chick flick with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

DiCaprio is Jack Dawson from steerage class and Winslet is Rose DeWitt from first class, and their steamy love affair involves promising each other “too many children” and “riding on the beach every morning,” amidst heavy breathing, slow motion and inconsiderate icebergs.

Cucumber Iceberg Salad

And lurking below the Chick flickiness, the film’s actual premise: White Pride, sautéed in eleven million gallons of seawater.

The Chick Flick is that strange, invented Hollywood animal where everything is implied but nothing ever happens between two people supposedly awash in pheromones for each other; where a slow motion embrace and rough breathing suffices for actual sex; where Great Love supposedly flowers between two protagonists after only one flesh encounter, implying that the encounter is the sealant to their monogamy (when in fact, it is the proclivity of humans to profligately mate with as many partners as possible).

Conforming to chick flick rules – where the “lovers” base their Great Love on mere wisps of experience (in TITANIC’s case, one drunken night of lewd sketching, empty promises, backseat sex and lots of giggling) – we will never witness them experiencing the undulations of connubial life; how resolute is her desire to live plainly?; how many children are too many children?; her shopping, his drinking, her parties, his body-shaving… If they plan on riding on the beach every morning, how long will their Great Love last when she starts nagging him to start supporting her spoiled rotten existence with actual income?

Old Rose’s narration is the anomaly that eats at this film’s veracity: though we humor her spinning a tale of irrelevant romantic rhetoric, when it comes to events outside her sphere of experience (such as private meetings between the captain and crew), she relates them as if omniscient (if we are to regard all the film’s action aboard Titanic as her testimony). Even the iceberg impact is comprehensively covered from all angles (from the lookouts, to the bridge, to the engine room, captain and crowd) by Old Rose’s “flashback.” Not bad for someone who was backseat bonking her body-shaved boy-man at the time.

Old Rose laments that she “doesn’t even have a picture of Jack.” Maybe that’s why she remembers him as staggeringly beautiful as Leo DiCaprio.

It’s a pity that writer-director Cameron leaned so heavily on the vapid love story as this movie’s propeller (basically expanding the Robert Wagner subplot from the 1953 film of the same name, directed by Jean Negulesco), as the rest of the film is a chest-clenching stunner.

The grandeur of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic is beautifully captured in its restored filmic incarnation. Costuming, characters and exterior shots are paid the utmost detail – although it must be said that, historically at least, DiCaprio’s character was probably treading a time period more acquainted with the use of recreational drugs with his yells of “Woooo!” from the ship’s prow. His friend, Fabrizio (Danny Nucci), didn’t help with the authenticity; Nucci is about as Italian as a Domino’s Pizza, sporting the absolute worst “Movie Italian” accent of all time – the exact same accent my friends and I would adopt in the schoolyard when we were “pretending to be Italian.” Winning their tickets in a card game, Jack and Fabrizio are overjoyed even in their steerage quarters…

…Whilst above the water line, onto the first class decks desultorily rambles young Rose, with her demanding mother (Frances Fisher), stormy fiancé (Billy Zane) and luggage enough to kill three pack-elephants. Elbow-gloved and triple-corseted, she remarks via voiceover, “To me it was a slave ship, taking me back to America in chains.” Try telling that to an African-American, honey, in your big feathery hat and frothy bloomers.

Meeting Jack during a spoiled brat suicide attempt, Rose is drawn to his vagabond swagger and hairless torso, falling for idiot lines like, “You’ve got a fire inside you and I’d hate to see it go out.” (Cameron let George Lucas write that one.)

Film only communicates to two of our five senses. It does not communicate “smell.” It is one thing to be physically attractive at a distance, but the super-privileged have a way of “de-odorizing” themselves that is wholly alien to the super-poor. Hence, no matter how much prettier Jack is than Rose, as soon as she stood downwind of his below-decks stench, the romance would have come to an earthy halt (retching optional).

For saving Rose’s life, Jack is invited to sup with the pinky-raisers, who look down their noses at him while he blathers about his itinerant lifestyle as if it was a blessing. Kathy Bates is somehow here as a social bridge between the upper and lower classes. Living the devil-may-care bum’s life of cobbling his sustenance from whatever rat-brained scheme comes along, and literally not knowing “where he’ll be sleeping the next night” may be a romantic notion if Jack is a successful writer or an independently wealthy traveler – but not if he is, in fact, a REAL BUM. Which he is.

An ocean liner has to sink before Rose lets go of this vagrant (whilst staying in Spoiled Byoch character by selfishly hogging the one floating plank in all of the Atlantic).

A well-made, mind-numbing romance this cheesy usually scores low – but Cameron gains his cucumber points purely due to his magnificent boat-tipping.

The climax of TITANIC is a startling visualization of an historic event which no one alive on Earth today saw first hand. Drawing from the latest forensic knowledge, combined with the physics of the process, Cameron places us directly on deck during his nightmare vision. We see the situation mount, from berg impact and apathy, to incredulity and ultimately panic, capturing the violent and colossal majesty of the ship breaking in half and pulling its aft section downwards vertically.

The death throes of the RMS Titanic are astounding in their realism; we cannot help but compare the final scenes of both Negulesco’s 1953 TITANIC and Roy Ward Baker’s A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958), with its wholly inaccurate, romantic portrayal of the doomed passengers aboard the black-and-white Titanic singing nobly together as their ship slipped away under them at a 45 degree angle. Not only is collective humanity never that level-headed, the physics of the sinking process was entirely ignored in those films.

With humanity onboard Cameron’s boat ignobly screaming and selfishly grasping and punching and shooting and falling violently onto propeller blades, with smokestacks crushing passengers, decks splintering, cables whiplashing through foaming brine, and the final cataclysmic submersion at a vertiginous ninety-degree angle, Cameron’s TITANIC is – titanic!

If even for a brief, awe-inspiring moment in time, it’s good to be the King of the World.

END