B Plus Movies

The name George Romero is most often associated with the shambling hordes of the undead, being one of the men most responsible for the modern vision of the zombie due to films like Night of the Living Dead, its sequels and their remakes. It would be easy to forget that he did other work that soaked less into the public imagination.

For instance, knights jousting on motorcycles as in Knightriders.

Knightriders starts with Ed Harris as the head of a sort of roving Renn Faire, featuring the aforementioned motorized violence. Harris’ character attempts to run his kingdom in the style of Arthur which often comes at odds with the day to day practicalities. It also comes to odds with one of his knights played by Tom Savini.

The story revolves around Harris’ attempts to keep his band together while simultaneously trying to face a world that has little time for idealists. Along the way he must face a corrupt cop, dissent from his own people and ultimately, his own fear.

The only caution I give is that this isn’t an action movie. It resonates more with films like Billy Jack, hippie epics about being misunderstood in a creul world. It’s a movie that is about ideals which, thankfully, never gets preachy about them nor uses them to club the audience over the head.

The acting in this movie saves it from being merely a campy gimmick  and elevates the whole film to a level befitting it’s epic roots. It is very much a tale of man vs. world, sometimes that world being his own. Totally realistic and very much relatable, Knightriders is a pleasant reminder of the talents of Romero, Savini and Harris as well as perhaps a cautionary tale from the early 80’s, a decade in which comprimise became overly fashionable.

Knightriders is B+ all the way.

I studied the martial arts for a couple of years formally and have had an interest in them all my life. The grace, power and majesty of a person well trained to do extraordinary things is something to admire regardless of what those things are. When the thing is turning an opponent into a crumpled ragdoll who should be reviewing his life choices while his bones knit, that’s just bonus.

The glory of the martial arts is something that many have tried to convey on film.  When it’s done poorly, you see a few guys beat up on other guys in over extravagant or lame fashion and hold that action up like it’s enough to keep you in your seat for 90 minutes. When it’s done well, you get something like Redbelt.

Redbelt focuses on Brazilian Jui-Jitsu instructor Mike Terry (played by the amazing Chiwitel Ejiofor of Serenity and Love Actually). Terry takes his art seriously and sees it as a way to a better life as much or more than a way to dismantle his fellow man. His school is barely hanging on financially, partially because of his idealism which sits none too well with his wife and business partner.

Terry stops a bar fight and in the process impresses an action movie star, a situation that leads to some lucrative possibilites for Terry and his wife. The light at the end of the tunnel, turns into an oncoming train and Terry finds himself forced to do something he did not want to do: Enter a Mixed Martial Arts tournament, which holds the promise of a full purse and the end to his financial difficulties but also tests his resolve as a man and a warrior. Whether the tournament will be his triumph or downfall is the question driving the whole story.

Redbelt is not your standard kung fu flick (aside from the fact that the main character doesn’t practice Kung Fu, but a form of South American wrestling). It’s not a martial arts film, but a drama that happens to include martial arts. If taken from this perspective, it’s a moving and powerful movie but unfortunately not a perfect one.

The movie’s pacing is a bit odd. The first two thirds of the film is basically the set up, which gives us a great deal of time to get to know the characters but at the same time makes us wonder if they’re getting to a point. Also, while much of the interactions between characters is vibrant and realistic, many passages of the dialogue (especially when it turned to direct plot exposition) seemed if not forced then a little too plain.

Terry as a character is very morally black and white, but the villians are also black and white and have little problem saying it, up to almost directly coming out with “Yes, I’m a villian. Here is how my villiany works. Here is why I think you will not be able to overcome my villiany.” With a character built on principle, this makes him seem more iconic. With a villian supposedly corrupt and double dealing, it comes off as simplistic.

These sticking points aside, Redbelt includes some wonderful acting, delivered with integrety worthy of the characters being portrayed. The action in the film is very realistic, virutally without embelishment. The story is honest, forthright,  and subtle; a tale of a knightly crusader in an environment hostile to his very nature, yet never overcoming him completely.

This movie had a host of real fighters in it, from MMA champion Randy Couture  to Guru Dan Inosanto, a man who has been a respected name in martial arts for over 40 years. The movie at times seems almost directed at the martial artists in the audience more than the average moviegoer, but never inaccessable to anyone. It’s a story about being true to one’s self, and that is something you never have to throw a punch to relate to.

I wanted to love this movie and I do, but as a reviewer I cannot say that it’s flawless. Redbelt is transparent, which lets you see it’s misses easily, but it also keeps it’s high points undisguised. As a result, it get’s a B from me. I would recommend this movie to anyone who’s stuidied the martial arts, anyone who has felt the practical infringe upon principal and anyone that hopes that at the end of the fight, skill is still required to take home the prize, but just as much it requires heart.

Modern art often baffles me. I look at finished work and my eyes flow over the canvas without finding anything to hold my attention while the voice in my head says “nice background, but when will it be done?” I can’t deny the value of modern art or that it is a legitimate movement or even that there is value in pushing boundaries and breaking rules to make people redefine their perspectives of what art is and can be.

Some of that rhetoric is in place in the 1996 movie Basquiat.

The title character of this biopic, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was an influential artist in the 1980’s and a contemporary of Andy Warhol. He started as a graffiti artist, then went on to be a musician and then later became not only a notable painter, but an influence to other artists for years to come and likely years into the future.

Julian Schnabel directed this movie, a fan of Basquiat’s work, and attempted to tell the story of this figure’s work.  The tale is a fairly classic “poor boy makes good” tale, starting with Basquiat living on the streets in New York and rising quickly to the status of the art elite. Jeffery Wright plays the artist, his performance making Basquiat seem an etherial character, two seconds out of sync with the rest of the world and because of that distance, he’s granted magnificent perspective. The character is not without faults, appearing selfish one minute and tragically naive the next, but for the most part he comes across as a haunted genius, a waif and tortured visionary.

The problem is that this is apparently not the Basquiat that his friends and family knew.

I normally don’t read reviews before I write them, but I did go looking for comparisons between Basquiat and the movie’s namesake. From critics to Jeffery Wright, there is a consensus that this movie is less history and more interpretation with just a bit of the director’s ego thrown in. This doesn’t rob the film of entertainment value but it does mean that one should not take it as the source of all truth about Jean-Michael Basquiat. Basquiat’s actual paintings aren’t even in the film, as his family would not give the director license to use them.

The film is largely pushed along by the fantastic characters such as David Bowie portraying Andy Warhol and Michael Wincott playing a flamingly gay art critic named Renee Ricard.  There is a great deal of powerful acting in this movie though the story lags in places. When we get to the predictable descent portion of the film, the director wants us to feel sorry for Basquiat which in some ways seems to contradict the feel of triumph and innovation we’re presented with in the beginning.

Whether you like modern art or not, Basquiat is a film worth watching though it must be taken as a seperate animal from the person upon which it is based. Basquiat gets a C from me. The art, however, gets a lightning bolt and tab from a soda can. The fish.

The problem with biographies is trying to remember that they are not documentaries. They are tales of specific people, dramatized as to be entertaining, as opposed to direct reporting of facts or moment by moment history. If told well, then they can make an interesting story out of even the most dull or familiar subject. If told poorly, it doesn’t matter how interesting the subject of the biography is… we won’t be interested.I figured this out while watching the Oscar nominated film Kinsey.

The Dr. Kinsey mentioned in the title did absolutely groundbreaking work on sexuality. That his work was revolutionary can hardly be debated, but Kinsey isn’t concerned with how important the doctor was. The question is can his life be made dramatic?

And the answer would appear to be yes.

Kinsey follows the title character (played by the outstanding Liam Neeson) from his boyhood through his career. The Kinsey of the biography is both detached from and immersed in his subject and the story gives no small amount of emphasis to how his pursuit affects his home life and relationships, his reputation and his character. While much is said about his work, the man too is displayed, some times at the forefront and sometimes in the spaces in-between the discussion of the science.

The star power in this movie considerable and every member of the cast gives an outstanding performance. Every award this movie has won or for which it has been nominated (including Golden Globes and the aforementioned Oscar nod) it comes by honestly. Laura Linney is approachable, sexy and dignified as the wife of Dr. Kinsey, a participant in his research. Peter Sarsgaard plays Kinsey’s student and assistant, a man who eventually becomes his lover. Other actors include Tim Curry (as a professional adversary), Timothy Hutton and Chris O’Donnell (also working alongside the doctor), and John Lithgow (Kinsey’s repressed and oppressive father).

There were moments in this movie that made me feel warm and fuzzy, others that made me feel tingly and at least one that made me misty eyed. Where Dr. Kinsey is seeking answers to questions of biology, the actors tell an emotional, moving story. The drama of their situation breathes life into the raw data and statistical analysis that became Kinsey’s books, putting it in a framework of time and place.

The only warning I would give the viewer is that this movie is not for the squeamish. It has more erotic moments than many pornos, more nudity (male and female) than some locker rooms and discussion of sex in both clinical and colloquial terms in virtually every scene. These elements, while at times titillating, never distract from the story but rather are an essential tool in the telling of the narrative. In fact, the on screen sex, deglamourized and very realistic, connects us to the characters in ways that feel intimate; ways that not so much just tell us their story but also involve us in it.

The reason I was willing to review Kinsey was because despite superb acting, engaging direction and honest visuals the subject matter alone of the film may push it to the fringe of cinematic experience. Like the title character, this film is uncompromising in its honesty and boldness, and honesty tends to either strongly endear or strongly repulse those who hear it.

Those seeking out this movie for sex scenes alone are likely to be disappointed. Those seeking it for the history are likely to be scandalized. The audience for this movie is small, but those willing to dive head first into Kinsey will be rewarded with a stimulating and poingant tale about amazing moment in the science of human sexuality and the people that made that moment happen.

While I doubt the cast and crew need another award to prove that their movie was amazing, I never the less add a B+ to its list of honorifics. Kinsey is not a movie about sex, but about a man. I give it my highest mark because in introducing us to that man without flinching, this movie made me care about him and his world, not just the mark he left on the study of one small part of it.

When I was a kid, I never understood why the Oscar always went to the biographies over the sorts of films that I liked. I didn’t understand what went into Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi or F. Murray Abraham’s skillful work as Salieri in Amadeus. Besides, those movies didn’t have explosions or swordfights or superpowers or anything that I understood to be special effects.

Perhaps I’d have developed an apprecation at a younger age if I’d seen more biographies like The Libertine.

The Libertine first came to my attention because it was to feature a guy-guy kiss with some actor and the always entertaining Johnny Depp.  It was enough to make me wonder what sort of film it might be, enough to make me record and watch it, even if, alas, the scene was cut. What wasn’t cut, however, was the great deal of guy-girl kissing that went on, along with far more explict sexual themes, fighting, drinking and general examples of bad behaviour.

The movie’s subject is John Wilmot, The Earl of Rochester, who was a poet in the 17th century and a notorious scoundrel. The first scene is Rochester, played by Depp, staring straight into the camera and explaining that we will not like him, that’s okay and that despite that we’ll want to sleep with him and that’s okay too. Thus the tone is set for a tale of drama, debauchery and tragedy.

Not a light hearted picture by any stretch, it does feature some fine acting and some truly beautiful sets. In addition to the excellent work of Depp (even if he is using much the same accent he uses for all English charcters of his), there is some fine work by John Malkovich as King Charles II. The film is blatant and honest in its storytelling, exposing us to both the good and bad in the characters and doing so honestly, allowing us to make up our own minds with a minimum of bias.

The pacing of the film is good and the majority of the interactions between the characters are very believable, though there’s a climactic scene that takes place in parliment that seemed a little forced to me. That said, there’s little in which to be disappointed where the story is concerned. It’s not a happy tale but it is an understandable one.

The Libertine presents John Wilmot as a sort of 17th century James Dean, a rock star amongst poets, reveling in his wantoness and imperfections while, able to let you know up front that he’s a horrible person, use that fact as an attraction and when the truth of it comes to pass then simply ask what it was you expected. His story is one worth hearing, either as entertainment or warning, and the version of it that was brought to film presents it in a way that is very pleasing to the eye.

The Libertine gets a solid B+. Even if it could have used more explosions. But then again, so could have Gandhi.

 Being a white male in 2009 America, I occasionally feel uncomfortable. To some, I’m the enemy, lumped in with oppressors, exploiters and opportunists. And sadly, growing up in deepest, darkest South Carolina, I understand where some of the stereotype comes from and have seen all too closely the reality of bigotry and a sense of misplaced entitlement based upon race.

To some extent, that’s why I felt myself laughing one minute and wincing the next at CSA: The Confederate States of America.

Done as a fictional documentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America is an alternate history in which the South won the American Civil War. We are given news clips, scenes from fictional films and commentary by a pair of “scholars” detailing a United States in which slavery remained legal to modern times and the Stars and Bars replaced Old Glory. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the commercials, about half of which show products that were at one time sold in America and that feature slave imagery in their marketing.

The film takes its inspiration both from real events of the civil war and moments in history and blends them with a healthy dose of conjecture to craft its setting. The TV show Cops is replaced by Runaways, where cops catch escaped slaves. America didn’t enter into World War I, but did invade South America. Hitler was an ally and when JFK won, it was on an anti-slavery platform.

CSA: The Confederate States of America asks more “What if?” rather than stating ”Could have been”. At times, it’s a cautionary reminder of just how recently America was just fine with slave labor and at other times, it’s a parody of the attitudes that keep bigotry alive today. Not faint hearted, it embraces its suppositions and follows them to their logical conclusions even when it requires being patently offensive.

CSA: The Confederate States of America isn’t exactly the sort of film you just pop in because you’re bored. The N word gets said quite a lot and there are many comedic scenes that are hard to laugh at because of the injustices they use as gag material. That aside, the acting in it is done well, even if sometimes the actors seem about to burst out laughing while reciting the more ridiculous claims once really voiced by whites about blacks. The cinematography is stripped down, as suits the film’s premise and stands in stark contrast to the fake movie clips and news reels combined into the narrative.

CSA: The Confederate States of America gets a B from me, even if it made me nervous and ashamed to watch it: nervous because of the truth of it and ashamed because the truth was about people and places I know well. One would hope that we’ve moved on as a country from the time that we accepted the sale of one human being to another, but if we ever underestimate how important it was that we left that behind or how far civil rights have come, then its movies like this that in their simplicity and frankness serve to show the dark paths we could have traveled.

I don’t normally review movies that were made on any sort of three digit budget or major ad campaign. But today, I feel I need to make an exception for a film that belongs in the B+ Catalog mostly for its subject matter, the stuff of geek discussions for decades. The source material, a ground breaking comic mini series that later was collected as a graphic novel, was called unfilmable and even by the most rabid fans was something that was thought to be best left to a cable serial and even then could only be expected to be presented in some watered down form.

I’m talking about Watchmen.

Describing the plot of Watchmen  is difficult because in its shortest explanation, it’s misleading and any description that does it justice is better given by just handing someone the book. Trying to meet these challenges in the middle, I’ll try to summarize thusly: The Watchmen are a group of superheroes, only second group of their kind in a world very much like our own, at least up until the 1940’s in which the first group of superheroes became active. The Watchmen are mostly retired, forced to hang up their masks by an act of congress outlawing costumed vigilanttes.  The members include:

• Nite Owl, a gadgeteer and idealist.
• Silk Spectre, a second generation crimefighter.
• The Comedian, who goes on to work black ops for the government.
• Rorschach, a nigh-psychopathic crusader who refused to retire.
• Dr. Manhattan, a former physicist given godlike powers who works for the government on scientific projects even as he slowly is losing touch with his humanity.

In the first few minutes of the story, the Comedian dies. Rorschach investigates and starts tracking down his former team mates to warn them someone might be targeting heroes. As the members of the team come to grips with both who they are and who they were, a plot unfolds that may be either the key to ending… or starting… world war III.

The world of Watchmen is a rich one and has a steep learning curve as we must accept in a glance that it’s the 80’s, Richard Nixon is still president and that America won in Vietnam. The director does an excellent job of summing this up in the opening credits, one of the best cinematic sequences of the film,  but still there’s a lot for the viewer to take in with only a short mentions and glances to convey it.

The story, too, has a steep learning curve. This story doesn’t hold back or pull punches, presenting to us an attempted rape, graphic consensual sex, gruesome violence, nudity both male and female, all of which is used to immerse you in a time and place of moral greys, devoid of easy choices.

Watchmen provides a counterpoint to the ugliness in its world with very human characters with very understandable motivations, from Nite Owl’s struggle to overcome the mediocrity in his life as a retired superhero to a former supervillian struggling with the fact he’s dieing of cancer. The people we meet are extreme personalities, but their outlook seems appropriate given the extremes of the world in which they live. If you watch this movie, you will not like all of the characters, but you will get where they are coming from.

Visually, the movie is amazing, lifting images straight off the page and setting them in motion. The gritty streets, spotless boardrooms and warm-but-dull apartments each move the story along as much as the dialog, the plot or the more spectacular effects. Watchmen is  as much an experience as a piece of cinema, something you must more surrender to than watch.

I was a fan of the book well before I saw the movie and while I was in the theater, this let me overlook some of the movie’s flaws. A couple of weeks later, I can see the holes in the work, from simple things like a character producing a gun that they had no reason to have to the moments in the dialog (mostly from Silk Spectre’s mom) that were not delivered as convincingly as they really could have been. There are moments whose signifigance goes unexplained, places where the pacing could be better and scenes where we get close ups when a short glimpse would have served just as well.

Watchmen is proving to be a commerical failure, which is sad because it’s a bold experiment and as edgy as movies get. It rivals Sin City and Pulp Fiction in it’s willingess to point you towards the unthinkable and not flinch. It rivals The Dark Knight in making the superhero acessable and real. It will be a movie that might be remembered for its brave choices if it is not overlooked for its spectacal.

For all its successes and all its failures, I give Watchmen a B.  I’m not sure I’m ready to go back into the theater and watch it again, but I will be waiting eagerly for the DVD release and the eventual, inevitable extended cut. This is not a movie for everyone but is more than just a movie for the comic book geeks like me. It’s B movie subject matter with an A list budget and a script that I won’t even try to rate, because I don’t feel up to juding the classics.

American film makers crib a lot of notes off of the works of other cultures. Reservoir Dogs, which starts with a bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong has a lot in common with the Chinese film City on Fire, which towards the end has bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong. Even the film giant that is Star Wars bears a remarkable semblance to the Japanese film The Hidden Fortress. And as you might not have heard of the Asian films I just mentioned, it goes without saying that the Asian inspiration for films in the states doesn’t always get the mention it deserves.So imagine when I found out that when I thought I was recording Nic Cage’s 2008 movie Bangkok Dangerous I was in fact recording a Thai film called Bangkok Dangerous.

A little internet research and found out that Cage’s film was a remake of the Thai movie I’d found on cable. I was happy either way, as the 2008 movie got mediocre reviews but this one I had no warnings about to influence my opinon. So what did I find?

Bangkok Dangerous features a deaf and mute hitman named Kong. He lives a simple life, drinking beer and eating food from street vendors and supporting his best friend Joe, a semi-retired hitman who has to let jobs pass because he took a bullet through the hand. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Aom is their go between, meeting Kong and Joe at a seedy strip club to hand them their assignments.

The movie takes a lot of efforts to explain to us who these people are, what their life is like and how a deaf kid got into the business of killing people for money. The blood spatters and moral grays are juxtaposed against a believable innocence in Kong’s personality, most apparent as we see him fall in love with someone completely outside his usual world. This part of the movie moves a bit slow, but does a good job of making us care about the characters without letting us forget that they are criminals and thugs.

But this is the sort of story that doesn’t move along until something goes wrong.

Aom gets a lot of unwelcome attention from a brutal member of the gang. Joe kills the wrong person. And eventually, Kong has to turn his guns on those who employed him.

I’ve seen more dialogue in some restaurant menus than in this film, but that didn’t hurt it. The director told the story through images and subtleties, taking the full advantage of the visuals to tell us a visual story. Facial expressions and lighting take the place of plot exposition, helping us identify with a main character that lives without sound.

The images we’re shown help accentuate the fact that this is in no way a happy film, sometimes generating disgust and horror with a glimpse in ways other movies do with broad panoramas. One character is the victim of a rape, which we’re shown at first in flashes, a technique that communicates the chaos of the moment so that when later we see it plainly it almost seems redundant.

More morality tale than popcorn flick, Bangkok Dangerous is not an easy movie to watch, but once you commit to it, it brings you into the streets of Bangkok fully and surrounds you with the world the director wants to show you. Sometimes a little slow, sometimes going too far with interesting camera angles, it’s not a perfect film but something that a fan of Asian, Noir or even just gritty cinema can enjoy. For its flaws, it rises only to a B rating in my scale, but a B I give without reservation to a movie I never expected. 

I’ve ranted before about how I hate trailers. The people who decide what gets edited into trailers should get a nail hammered into their leg for every spoiler they include and a railroad spike for each minute of footage from the film’s climax.  I’m not sure that people who make misleading DVD cases are any better.

Thankfully, their efforts did not keep me from enjoying the movie Bound.

Bound was done by the Wachowski brothers before they had Keanu Reeves talking about spoons. It’s very stripped down film, most of the story taking place in apartments in the same building. And if you just judged it by the cover, you’d think it was about lesbians bondage porn.

Spoiler alert: It’s not.

Bound starts with Gina Gershon playing an ex-con trying to catch a break and start her life over. She takes a job as a handiwoman in an apartment that turns out to share a wall with the apartment of a member of the Italian mafia. The mafioso’s girlfriend, played by Jennifer Tilly, makes some subtle advances towards Gina Gershon’s character. Turns out the relationship between Tilly and her beau, played by Joe Pantoliano, is bitter and bad. Tilly wants to escape it, Gershon wants to help all they need is the means.

This is where the money comes in. A lot of money. And because of that, it all goes down quick. No pun intended.

There’s a lot to like in this crime drama. Tilly does an excellent job of keeping the audience guessing at her true motives and allegiances. The direction and cinematography works impressively toward establishing a mood of isolation and suspense. The writing keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering how it’s all going to go and the other actors in the movie give outstanding performances.

And yes, there’s a lesbian sex scene. You’re welcome.

For the sake of balance, I want to say something bad about this movie but I can’t. It’s not life changing by any means but failing to change my perceptions is not a flaw. There’s some violence, some sexuality but the Wachowski’s manage to make it part of the story rather than trying to turn it into the story, the result being that things like the lesbian relationship in the movie become plot points than exploitative stumbling blocks.

All around, this is just a solid film.

Whatever you do though, don’t go look at a trailer for this movie before you see it. The theatrical trailer gave away just about every climactic moment in the movie that involved Tilly or Gershon. If you want to see Bound, do it with no more warning than what you see above.  Rent it, buy it, queue it up on Netflix but walk into it as blind as possible and you’re likely to walk out loving it.

I did and I give it a very, very solid B+.

Biopics on musicians tend to go in a pattern: Young talented artist comes from nothing, deals with unscrupulous execs, makes a name, fights an addiction or fights becoming a jerk, then it all comes together in some sort of over-arching message. It’s been tried and true since movies about Elvis and Loretta Lynn.

This patter is cast utterly aside by the movie I’m Not There.

I’m Not There is about Bob Dylan, an examination of his life and work, spanning from childhood up to the seventies. The story is broken into six storylines and in each storyline, Dylan is portrayed by a different actor.

In one, Christian Bale protrays the idealistic and firey Dylan who shocked people with contreversy. In another, Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan who made thousands of hippies feel betrayed by going electric. In another, Heath Ledger shows him as a man just trying to deal with love and a wife and kids. Each part is distinct and powerful, complete in and of itself.

The movie delves not just into Dylan as an artist, but as a man trying to find himself; establish an identity rather than having one attached to him. By splitting him into pieces, the director is able to show him as a whole person.

Parts of the movie work better than others: The strongest is the “Jude” storyline, the one played by Blanchett. The most confusing one is Richard Gere’s bit in which he plays Dylan in self imposed exile and in which the story becomes even more allegorical and surreal. The opening storyline where Dylan is played by a young, African-American boy is good, but it pales in comparision to the angry take on Dylan in the “Arthur” storyline, which appears to be an interrigation and confession, tying the storylines together.

Bob Dylan is the very definition of what it means to be an influence. Seeing him brought back to earth by a little acid trip of a film is enlightening and engrossing, even if at the end you feel just a touch confused on some of the details. For the confusion, I give I’m Not There a B but still recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Dylan’s music, the artists who have been inspired or performed songs by the man or for that matter anyone who has had the luxury of being able to ask “Who am I”.