“You promise to spank me with a rolled up newspaper
if I hit the button again, Mr. Peabody?”

A Dogsbody and his Peaboy.

Grave Trouble.

Primal Fear time!

One actor, one location, one goal: get me the hell outa here! An ingenious piece of filmmaking! Taken as a thought experiment, as a Hitchcockian mystery, as a suspense thriller, as an intense gutshock drama, BURIED – to borrow from a breezy Clint movie – will turn you Every Which Way But Loose.

Ryan Reynolds is Paul Conroy, who wakes up in a coffin with a cigarette lighter, a cell phone and a pen-knife. Uh-oh…

That’s it! That’s all there is to this movie You’re thinking I must be exaggerating; there must be flashbacks or cutaways or some kind of prelude scenes to show us how Conroy ended up in the coffin. Nope. We are as discombobulated as he is, and only learn snippets of information as they come to him – via cell phone dialogue with outside parties.

With such limited space, movement and action, it seems unbelievable that this movie has so much space, movement and action. Written like a knife edge, directed like a freight train, edited like a cobra strike, the film has nowhere to run, no one to turn to and nothing to support it, except itself. And we are held as captive as Conroy by its throat-gripping execution.

BURIED is all Ryan Reynolds. Every frame is his – even the pitch dark ones. For anyone who may have doubted his worth as a dramatic actor, let alone a leading man capable of doing more than just showing off his biceps and abs, this is the commanding role that all actors salivate over, and the magnetic performance that they wish they could pull off.

Written by Chris Sparling, directed and edited by Rodrigo Cortes, the last thing we expect from this single-themed movie is an indictment against bureaucratic incompetence, corporate stonewalling and political cowardice – yet as Conroy tries to phone people who may be able to help him (government, military, friends), those are the aspects that stultify his chances of escape; like every worm-tongued government venture, instead of taking steps to progress a resolution, no one wants responsibility for his situation and liability is out of the question.

We discover Conroy is a nondescript contractor in the Middle East and was kidnapped and buried for a ransom, his kidnappers contacting him on the phone and demanding 5 million from the U.S. Embassy “by 9 pm tonight,” an hour away. (Oh no! Don’t tell me I have to deal with a government department! Just kill me now.) Also in an hour, the oxygen runs out. And the movie is playing out in real time. Claustrophobia, desperation, and not a single opportunity to flex those abs.

BURIED shows us how far we’ve come with our methods of communication – that is, not one step forward since the invention of the telephone! Though everyone carries a PMD (personal media device), we still can’t get in touch with anyone when we need to. Everyone has voicemail, yet no messages get through. Though their intent was to bring people closer, PMDs isolate us more than ever. (At one point, Conroy gets through to one of those fakeout answering machines: “Hello… How’s it going?…. fooled you!…” Do you people know how that makes us want to nail your hands to your heads? It’s run its course! When answering machines were new, maybe… but now? Stop doing that! Just stop! Or there is another option: if you still find them amusing, throw yourself off a building.)

But this is the least of Conroy’s problems. The contractor bureaucracy where Conroy is a tiny cog is a part of the military industrial complex that has become so vast and dystopian that one small cog that slips out of sync cannot be retrieved. His contractor agency actually calls Conroy (the oily voice of Stephen Tobolowsky) as if they are ready to execute a rescue, but we discover in rage and frustration as volcanic as Conroy’s that the company terminated him that morning so that they could wash their hands of the situation. Then Tobolowsky plays Conroy a recording of the terms of the contract! If ever anyone needed the Stallone “I’m coming for you” treatment…

We feel Conroy’s heart fall and fall further as each phone call plunges him deeper into despair and feral terror. Even the ransom being paid is no guarantee of survival, because there is nothing in it for the kidnappers to release him after they receive the money. Clawing your fingernails on the sealed lid is all the tangible hope you can muster, as irrational as it is…

A British voice recurs in Conroy’s calls (Erik Palladino), who seems authoritative enough to launch a rescue. But even his oily voice has an edge of corporatism and callousness, as he calmly explains to Conroy why the media should not be alerted to avoid an international incident.

The movie is screenplay gold; for a screenwriter tutor wishing to convey how to tell a story with words alone, BURIED is truly the high water mark. And none of it seems like exposition. From dire conversations alone, we get the whole picture; no need for any of those other filmic devices (narration, flashbacks, cutaways) which even the best directors have been known to abuse (cough-Ron Howard!).

Not for people who get nauseous at the thought of enclosed spaces. Or Ryan Reynolds.

END

When Roommates Go Tribade.

A luscious woman is terrorized by a boxy woman. The boxy woman adopts the sexy woman’s hairdo, borrows her clothes and gives the sexy woman’s boyfriend a hummer. Terrifying, isn’t it? Really, guys, do any of you care?

But seriously, who wouldn’t stalk Bridget Fonda? In this psychological thriller, she’s the luscious Allie, the SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, stalked by boxy Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was once carnally delicious – FLESH AND BLOOD, 1985 – but has never again attained that “I’ll take you, soldier!” sluttishness).

Square-jawed Allie has just broken up with her cheating boyfriend (Steven Weber) and needs a roommate to help with the high New York rent, so runs an ad, broadcasting her SWF status. Hedy moves in on the strength of her down-to-Earth compassion.

Then everything gets pear-shaped (and I’m not talking about Bridget’s bottom). And that’s before Allie’s boss (Stephen Tobolowsky) tries to rape her pear shapes…

Ladies, if there’s a lesson to be learned from this movie, it’s: Don’t Trust Men. Oh, and don’t trust women either. Matter of fact, the only trustworthy person in this movie is the gay guy (Peter Friedman).

It’s a pity Fonda stopped acting after 2002, because her penchant for going bottomless was much appreciated by the male populations who loved pear shapes.

END

Going and coming across time.

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time… He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between… he has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.
— Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Everything we learned from Michael J. Fox is wrong! You don’t need a DeLorean to travel through time – just a nice butt and the right genes.

Forget that THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE has that unctuous “romantic” tag on its ear, like some rhinoceros lumbering through the predictable pabulum jungle; despite its whispery trailers with jangly poetry-slam guitars and pillow promises that couldn’t possibly be kept, it is an entertaining, intriguing tale of a man who involuntarily travels back and forth in time, whose major problem is not, it would seem, holding down a job or keeping important appointments, but rather that it puts a crimp in his Nookie Schedule.

Despite its title, it is about the Time Traveler, not his wife. We wonder how she fits in as the subject matter when all she does is be cute and get cuter.

Eric Bana is Henry, whom we meet as a ten-year-old in the back of his mother’s car just before they have a head-on collision. He disappears out of the car and reappears on the street, naked, watching his mother die in a Pretty Orange Explosion worthy of John Woo.

Suddenly, Man-Henry appears to Boy-Henry and tells him he is a time traveler. “I am you from the future!” How many times have we heard THAT before when a nice young man wanted to touch us where the judge said it was “statutory something”?

Adult Henry meets Clare (Rachel McAdams, gloriously cute) and she tells him that she has known him since she was a little girl – when he popped out of the bushes naked and asked for her picnic blanket to cover himself. Again with the risqué advocacy that encourages little girls to talk to naked men in blankets.

Clare grows up to be Spinner of the Year (with a tramp stamp to prove it) and the titular Time Traveler’s Wife. She and Henry spend endless hours staring into each others’ eyes and double-dating with Clare’s friends Clarisse (Jane McLean) and Gomez (OFFICE SPACE’s Ron Livingstone), who become close enough to learn of Henry’s anomaly. And only Ron Livingston can pull off that casual amazement so effortlessly.

Makes for some humorous moments, like Clare and Henry’s wedding, when Henry disappears, only to reappear as an older Henry to marry Clare, then reappears later as his Original Self for their first dance. Then he disappears on their wedding night.

That’s when it starts to get real for Clare. No matter how many whispery promises and jangly poetry-slam guitars, this has GOT to get tiresome after a point. Sho’ nuff, it does. Couple of years later: “Do you think I want this life?! A husband who disappears without warning? Who would want that?!” Well… YOU wanted that, honey! It’s not like he volunteers for service in Iraq – he can’t help himself, the poor guy.

From a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, directed by Robert Schwentke, executive produced by Brad Pitt, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE moves fast enough that we don’t consider too many time anomaly questions. In early dialogue Henry establishes he has tried to change events, but they happen anyway. And the movie engages in only marginal scientific dabbling, connecting genetics to time travel, giving Henry’s condition a formidably silly name – chrono-impairment. (Milk shooting out of nose stifling a giggle.)

They birth a creepily cute time traveling kid, Alba (played by Tatum and Hailey McCann at different ages) and the movie departs from Romantic Movie Protocol by foreshadowing an inexorable tragic end.

But with Henry always traveling back and forth in time, we are left with future hope for snatches of happiness.

And at last we figure the reason for the Time Traveler’s Wife – with her snatch of happiness.

END

On The Road To Nowhere.

There is only one good thing in WILD HOGS: Peter Fonda. And he’s a cameo ten minutes before the end.

Naif director Walt Becker helms this listless, laughless tale of four suburban friends pushing middle-age crisis who hit the open road as wannabe bikers to taste “freedom” and come smack up against real bikers and get their asses kicked, learning the obligatory life-lessons about friendship, loyalty and how to take an ass-kicking.

John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy are four solid friends, Sunday riders who decide to hit the open road on their weekend machines to alleviate the boredom of their suburban existences. Unfortunately, it does nothing to alleviate OUR boredom.

Calling themselves Wild Hogs, due to Allen’s wife having sewed the patches onto their leathers, they eschew their safe coffeehouses (where every faux biker pretends toughness before discussing chamomile and chiffon) for the dangerous freeway, where bugs, crows and curbs are their greatest enemies….

The banal gay gags and indolent plot come to a screeching halt when the four come across a real bike gang called the Del Fuegos, led by Ray Liotta, who send them packing. Travolta accidentally blows up the Del Fuego bar, which brings down a vendetta on the four Sundays. Trying to hide in a small town, they are discovered and get the aforementioned chamomile kicked out of them, with Travolta overacting enough for Charlton Heston to call and tell him to dial it down to a 7.

Just as Liotta is about to deliver the justifiable and wholly welcome killing stroke on our Sundays, warning them “Stay off the road! It’s my highway!” Peter Fonda, as an O.G., thunders up and saves the necks of the Sundays, rasping at Liotta, “It’s MY highway!”

And everything is cool. And that’s all I want to remember of this joyless joyride.

END

The Reverse Genius Principle.

9) And that’s when we realize we could never be sure of anything to begin with.

8) When Leonard eventually thinks he has found his wife’s killer, eleventh-hour reveals shock us with the possibility that his whole crisis may be nothing more than delusion.

7) Editing MEMENTO must have been like navigating inside Las Vegas hotels with no watch or compass: sex and drug distractions, deprivation of day or night, no signposts or exit signs, and of course, nauseous on cheap shrimp and hairy tequila. Untold credit to editor, Dody Dorn, for shuffling the deck as confusingly as possible, yet weaving the tale as tightly as a sanitarium wicker basket.

6) But every few minutes, the movie twists back on itself, each flashback a segment of Leonard’s life that happened just before the segment we have just seen – and with each flashback, we realize just how wrong Leonard is about who his friends are, his past life, clues to the killer, his quest in toto. By about the fourth paragraph we realize: this piece is running backwards.

5) From Jonathan Nolan‘s short story, Memento Mori, we meet Leonard mid-investigation, slumming it in a cockroach motel, having lost his job as insurance consultant, looking disheveled (as Pearce can do so natchelly), and optimistically on the trail of the murderer; hanging with gregarious Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), and involved with hot bod, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), both of whom seem to be aiding Leonard catch his killer.

…must remember not to forget…

4) Leonard’s last “new memory” was the murder of his wife. During the scuffle with his wife’s killer, a blow to the head caused his memory faculty to shut down. Whether this is truly biologically possible (if you cannot make new memories, how do you even shop for food and water or pay the rent?), for the movie’s purposes, it means Leonard must piece together clues to his wife’s killer through copious notes, tattoos on his own body and Polaroids. But the truth will forever elude him and the clues that lead to the killer are mere wraiths, the products of his own “selective” reasoning.3) The harder you strive for something, the harder it is to grasp. But what you care least about – or that you were never striving for – falls into your lap. Some call this the path of least resistance, but it’s actually called The Reverse Genius Principle. And Leonard – all ephemeral ideas and misplaced action – is a Reverse Genius in full throttle.

2) Guy Pearce is the memory-challenged Leonard, who is trying so hard to move forward – to find his wife’s killer, but unable to create “new memories” to retain info – that he ends up moving backward. Thusly, writer-director Christopher Nolan has crafted a film where the clues to a murder fall neatly OUT of place. Backwards.

1) MEMENTO opens with a killing. We don’t know why. We don’t know who.

END

Flat Cat.

Although Bill Murray (who voices Garfield) is truly a real-life simulacrum of the smug, under-enthused comic-strip cat, his intrinsically entertaining “character” was – dare I say it? – Lost In Translation (shout, but don’t hit) somewhere between the vapidity of the script and the orange computer blips representing the eponymous feline in GARFIELD.

Garfield’s master, Jon (Blandness, thy name is Breckin Meyer), is a card-carrying cat owner who is bequeathed a dog, Odie, by his veterinarian (a stunningly one-dimensional Jennifer Love-Hewitt, whose boob job long ago outpaced her talent and credibility), which he accepts unconditionally because he is googly-eyed over her.

Garfield’s eminence is threatened when Odie snuggles indoors with Jon, while he is seemingly forgotten outdoors. Garfield tricks Odie outside, who promptly gets lost and then kidnapped by The Villain (Stephen Tobolowsky). Through cartoonish adversity and plot contrivances which could only be seriously entertained by fourteen year olds (including Garfield staging a Great Escape from an animal shelter and hijacking a train, no less), Odie is rescued and subsequently “befriended” by Garfield; the inane boy gets the tepid girl, the lukewarm Villain gets his comeuppance and everyone lives sappily ever after.

This is not a “bad” movie – it is simply devoid of a soul. The human protagonists who meander around Garfield’s universe inhabit a world where “middle ground” is as wide as Texas; even The Villain seems as sinister as apple pie – gone cold! (Large organ chords!)

I hate Salad Days!

As if to presage the apathetic essence of the whole film, an early scene involves Jon coming home with four lasagnas, entreating Garfield not to eat them all, which Garfield promptly does. Instead of enforcing any kind of retribution/ punishment/ deprivation, or even a stern finger-wagging, milquetoast Jon makes some kind of insensately obvious statement along the lines of, “Did you eat all the lasagnas, Garfield? I told you not to” (exhorted with such impotence that one can’t even visualize inserting an exclamation mark after the sentence), and then they leave for the vet and the next syrupy, substance-less scene.In deeming this movie “for kids,” is it not enough that all emotive impact and any semblance of real human emotion is leached from the script until a bloodless husk remains; must any and all “messages” which concern retributive connotations also be excised to portray a world where nothing is ultimately “wrong” enough to warrant punishment or even concern? How noble to raise our children with the notion that Disobedience has NO REPERCUSSIONS.

The film suffered as a whole with the problem that Garfield was just not “cute.” What drew me to Jim Davis’s hilarious cartoon strip decades ago, was that every character is laughable by their appearance alone. The creators of this computer cat forgot the primo rule regarding cartoon heads: the bigger they are in relation to the character’s body, the cuter the character becomes. Garfield’s head was too small – or rather, his body was too overweight to be comically cute. And by making Nermal (The World’s Cutest Kitten) and Odie (a flummoxed, witless, balloon-animal-bodied puppy) “real-life” animals for the movie, Garfield effectively had no other “cute” entities to play off, and seemed at times misplaced in this world where everything was “real” except him.

Ironically, in this film, even Reality was nowhere near real…

END