The Cue Card

Maybe it seems a bit surprising that “The Expendables” ($35 million) beat out “Eat, Pray, Love” ($23.7 million) this past weekend at the box office – just because the place was packed to the gills even a half hour before the show. Gosh weren’t there more chicks there than Lilith Fair? And besides how many weeks was Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir on the bestseller list anyways …. like forever? I mean Sly’s “Expendables” looks from clips rather expendable, doesn’t it? Bunch of action-guy old farts. Sure, give me the animated “Super Friends” any day; you know, Aqua Man, Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman and Robin etc. (Especially Aqua …) But Sly, Arnold and Willis? — oh I’ll take a pass.

Anyways, “Eat, Pray, Love” was not really a painful affair, guys. It was quite entertaining to a point. I sat in an aisle where a number of women were heard to say they had read part of the book but not the whole (whiny) thing. I had read part of it too and I really did mean to finish it. Anyways, Julia Roberts does a good job as “Liz,” and the cinematography of Italy, India and Bali were quite fetching. I guess I liked Italy and India but started to tire around the Bali part. Perhaps, I admit, James Franco early in the pic did more for me than Javier Bardem near the end; I know that’s not the popularly held view among women in the age group of the book’s fanbase, but it’s sort of true. After all there’s good reason the young-ish Franco was on “General Hospital” and why Sean Penn kissed him in “Milk.” Think about it.

Anyways, the “E, P, L” soundtrack is a pleasant surprise. Two Neil Young songs! Two Eddie Vedder songs! One Sly and the Family Stone, and one Marvin Gaye! When you hear “Heart of Gold” come on during the movie – it’s just awesome.

I know some critics have clobbered “E, P, L” for being whiny, priviledged, soft, simplistic, self-absorbed etc. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it “torture” to watch. I could think of other movies much more tortuous. I’m sure it wasn’t as full a picture or as witty as the book. But the movie followed the remnants: a women’s journey after her painful divorce. Like the book, I found some authentic substance and some good chick flick escapism to it.

Inception is definitely the blockbuster action thriller of the summer, and is raking in at the box office, especially with the Gen X’ers etc. It’s built around the clever plot of an undercover gang who wire themselves up to people sleeping in order to get into their unconscious minds (their dream space) to extract and plant information. The movie looks and plays out pretty cool and the visual effects are great. Leo DiCaprio, and especially Marion Cotillard, are effective as the married couple in dream limbo.

It’s quite an involving, semi-complicated movie, where paying careful attention helps, while you try and figure out what’s going on. It’s not That difficult, but it keeps you working at it. I was trying to listen intently but found some of the dialogue drowned out by the pounding background music. And half way in, I started to daydream about my stay at the beach and what else I had to do, and sooner or later I realized I wasn’t concentrating about the movie anymore, and had missed a couple of scenes. But the movie goes on for so long, it doesn’t seem to matter. The pounding continues! And the ending and dream finally, finally come around. Awake, I say, let me out of here.

So what did I think I’d get out of it “Splice” — the movie about a biotech experiment gone awry? Was it that I thought this lab-manufactured creature was good for a summer scare? Or that it would be an escape from everything on the mind?

True, I don’t normally see many of these kinds of flicks. But my spouse helped narrow it down among choices and I thought it might be fun to be scared with some alien type creature or a test-tube deviant. The local newspaper gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I repeat 4 out of 5 stars. And after all, hadn’t I seen and liked the sci-fi movie “District 9” with the prawn-like creatures forced to live in slum conditions on Earth? I could handle seeing the prawns!

I was aware too that the talented Canadian actress/director Sarah Polley was in “Splice”; she had been heralded as far back as 1997 for her performance in “The Sweet Hereafter” and even directed Julie Christie(!) in 2006’s “Away From Her” (yes that Julie, the one and only LAR-a from “Docter Zhivago”). Both Polley’s films are sad along with her other tear-jerker film “The Secret Life of Words” with Tim Robbins in 2005. Good luck seeing that without a Kleenex. But alas, what held her to this DNA scare flick? Wasn’t she Oscar material? I didn’t realize Adrian Brody was in it, too. I haven’t been moved by a performance of his since 2002’s “The Pianist.”

But here they both were in “Splice,” playing a scientist couple who go over the bio-ethical line to make a part-human, part-creature species in the race to solve diseases. They and viewers should know better! It’s no use! The scientific egos and calamities! The lab concoction too often than naught goes amiss or falls on the floor. Then all hell breaks loose. Didn’t they see “The Fly” from 1986? … where Jeff Goldbloom grows some mean back hairs and starts to buzz after dabbling around on a science experiment. Apparently they didn’t because Dren, their beloved spliced DNA creature, made in secrecy, sends them a bit over the edge. Dren, Dren, Oh Dren …. !

But this movie lacks opportunities of intrigue and suspense. More disturbing and creepy than truly scary and riveting, “Splice” throws together a little bit of everything: gils, wings, tails, stingers, co-mingling species and biotech companies with nefarious aspirations, even a sequel tie-in; it’s a slippery ride but comes off a bit too loopy without enough spine.

The football movie “The Blind Side” continues to rake in at the box office. At last look, it had passed the $225 million mark and was still going strong, long since its Nov. 20, 2009 release. It’s quite the small-movie phenom of the year, fueled by its amazing and true rags-to-riches story and its evangelical backing. About a big African American kid, one of 12 in his family, whose early years are horrific growing up on the rough side of Memphis, with a crack-addicted mother, and a father he doesn’t know. In and out of foster homes, “Big Mike” is intermittently homeless and sleeping on the couches of acquaintances when he can, one of whom takes him to a private Christian high school, which enrolls him on the athletic coach’s word. On a snowy night, walking back to school in shorts, Mike catches the eye of a rich white family that takes him in and helps him with school and to play football. He comes to play left tackle, protecting the quarterback’s “blind side” with such skill and power, that he draws the attention of college coaches who come clamoring to have him play.

The movie is a feel-good experience, with a wholesome view of the family and life that adopts Mike. Sandra Bullock, as the no nonsense mom who shepherds Mike, and country singer Tim McGraw play the parents. It’s definitely a good, strong character for Bullock, who plays it well. The movie is enjoyable, combining nice family and sports scenes in Mike’s rise out of his circumstances. Though I found it rather sugary, and a bit Disney like, it still is an inspiring a story. It seems Mike is made a bit simplistic in the movie, docile with a low IQ, and parts of the gritty stuff and prejudices seemed airbrushed lightly over. Still the photos of the real people at the end of the movie lend to its strength as a true story; that Mike Oher went on to play offensive tackle this year as a rookie for the Baltimore Ravens is amazing. See this recent New York Times story.

Interesting to note, Oher said he mostly liked the movie but said his character was portrayed as too stupid and his football skills were misrepresented in it though he didn’t elaborate. (He did go on to make the Honor Roll at Ole Miss a couple times.) Oher doesn’t seem to care a lot about the fuss over “Blind Side,” which was based on the 2006 bestselling book by Michael Lewis. Apparently the film’s budget was a mere $29 million, which Sandra Bullock took a pay cut for and agreed instead to receive a percentage of the profits. Seems like a bright idea now.

Of course, I had to see “The Road” because of the intriguing Cormac McCarthy book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Most seem to know what it’s about: a father and a son trying to survive after some unknown apocalyptical disaster has gutted civilization. The father and boy are on a road going south to the coast, where presumably they might find more food and have a better chance at survival. But along the way there are roving bands of bad guys the father and boy try to avoid, who take prisoners and eat people to get by. It’s a world reduced to savagery and a food-to-mouth existence, where the boy worries if they are still the “good” guys who won’t resort to cannabalism, and his father assures him that they are, that they’re “carrying the fire.”

The movie is a somber affair. The wife, played by Charlize Theron in flashbacks, decides life post-apocalypse isn’t worth living and does herself in before their journey (no great secret if you’ve read the book). Viggo Mortensen, as the father is looking old and scraggily in this, but is excellent as is the boy played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. The cinematography is especially affecting, with scenes of an ashen, dead landscape, where rotting trees split and fall in deafening crescendo, and broken-into cars and houses are left by the wayside. The area around Mount St. Helens serves as a haunting backdrop to the film’s shots of a post-apocalyptic world.

The movie follows the book to a tee. I was sure they would mess with it, but even the ending is like the book’s. Because of the book, I knew where the scary parts would be. The movie seems much more scary than depressing. God the cannibals! You’ll never want to go down into the cellar again. Why does Viggo do it?!&%! Run for Christ sakes!

The Washington Post and L.A. Times pretty much clobbered the movie (the N.Y. Times a bit less so). The Post’s Ann Hornaday called it a “thin, hopelessly mannered story” — “one long dirge … marking the death of hope and the leaching of all that is bright and good from the world.” The L.A. Times’ Kenneth Turan said it was good at horrifying and depressing us but had little else to offer. I thought it faithful to the book and was a pretty affecting tale, a warning of sorts about nuclear annihilation. It reminded me a little of the 1983 TV event, “The Day After.” It also had redemptive qualities in the bonding of the father and son, and in the overall fight between good and the forces of chaos and evil. The struggle to get to the sea and the ending there are subtle but compelling. It might not be an Oscar contender, but “The Road” is no slouch of a movie.

ps. Watch for Robert Duvall as the old nearly blind man they encounter on the road (barely can tell it’s him), and thankfully Guy Pearce comes in at the end. I can’t help but quote from “The Road” these days in asking, “Are you carrying the fire?”

This is sort of one of those crazy summer movies you go to that’s a bit suspenseful and ridiculous but you can’t help liking the scary action all the same. It’s about a couple who celebrate their honeymoon by backpacking to a remote beach on the island of Kauai. Everything seems fine until they hear from some hikers about a double murder of a newlywed couple back in Honolulu and they consider turning back. But they decide to go on and end up joining another couple along the hike whose weirdness in time makes them question if they’re the murderers. Without giving too much away, things get pretty nutty after that. And the ending, itself, is pretty laughable (not sure it makes a lot of sense). But still the action shots of the two athletic couples on the tropical Kauai are hard not to see through. Actor Steve Zahn is the only one I really recognize of the bunch. The film apparently was shot in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Kauai, and despite all its murderous villainery, makes you want to go hike the tropics after seeing it.

“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug,” states a quote from war correspondent Chris Hedges at the beginning of “The Hurt Locker.”

The action-packed war film set in Iraq in 2004 is a hair-raising adrenaline rush that follows three members of Bravo Company’s bomb disposal unit as they work to defuse a series of IEDs, or roadside bombs, in the streets of Iraq, all the while trying not to be picked off by insurgent gunfire.

There’s Spec. Owen Elderidge (Brian Geraghty), who’s a bundle of nerves and seemingly out of his element, and Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a professional who follows protocols and procedures in the best hope of getting out alive.

Then there’s Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), a replacement to the unit’s previous bomb-technician leader who is killed in an explosion. James comes off initially as a cocky bastard considered “reckless” by the others and hell-bent on a death wish. But he also has what it takes to disarm even the most sinister bombs, and in time a more caring side of him comes through.

The film follows the threesome unit as they start a 38-day rotation on a handful of nerve-racking missions, wherein James’s disengaging of bomb wires is undoubtedly the scariest moments to watch. Renner gives a gripping performance as Staff Sgt. James, the risk-taker and adrenaline junkie whose disregard for protocol rubs the others raw.

“The Hurt Locker” is a powerful film due to its authenticity and its script. Written by journalist Mark Boal, who was embedded in Iraq with a bomb squad, and shot close to the Iraq border in Jordan, the film plunges viewers into feeling what war is like, and the risks soldiers take. Except for small roles by Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pierce, the other actors in it are relative unknowns, and don’t distract from the film’s realistic war story and look. I found “The Hurt Locker” quite intense and effective, but for those who don’t care for men and war films, it’s perhaps not meant for everyone.