Sunday, November 04, 2007 Rant Archive
MARTIAN CHILD is the kind of heart-warming film that typically gets bad reviews. Quite frankly, deservedly so. These movies substitute emotion for plot and logic and hope when viewers’ tear ducts turn on their brains turn off.
To which I say, why not? What’s wrong with happy endings? What’s wrong with overcoming adversity? What’s wrong if your eyes mist up every once in a while when good things happen? What’s wrong with Frank Capra?
If you enjoyed REMEMBER THE TITANS or WE ARE MARSHALL, you’ll certainly enjoy this picture. Absent the athletic teams, it’s in the same inspirational tradition. In fact, it might just as easily be called We Are Martian.
David Gordon (John Cusack), a recently widower, was something of an odd ball as a child, the kind others always picked on. But he channeled that energy and became a successful science fiction author. In a television interview about his best seller, he admits he is one of the characters in the book. But not the protagonist. David thinks of himself as the creature.
Sophie (Sophie Okonedo), head of a group home, invites David down because she thinks there’s an orphan perfect for him. His name is Dennis (Bobby Coleman), and it’s hard to understand why she picked a single dad to look after a boy who spends every day in an appliance-sized box marked “fragile” and “handle with care.”
Perhaps it’s because Dennis claims to be from Mars on earth for a temporary fact-finding mission. David’s sister, Liz (John’s real-life sister Joan Cusack), warns him against it. Harlee (Amanda Peet), his dead wife’s best friend and now David’s buddy, urges him to go ahead.
So, I saw SPIDER-MAN 3 this summer. I was all jazzed about seeing this sequel because I really enjoyed SPIDER-MAN. I thought SPIDER-MAN 2 wasn’t so bad, so the third installment has to be just as entertaining, right? Wrong.
Now, five months later, I thought I’d give the movie another try. Who knows, maybe I was just having a bad weekend. Well, no. SPIDER-MAN 3 is still the worst of the trilogy and by far the most boring. I was entertained for approximately 20 minutes, and I think a good ten of them were during the first fight scene between Harry as the Goblin (James Franco) and Peter (Tobey Maguire) sans his Spidey suit.
Most of the movie felt forced and far longer than its actual 140 minute running time. Nothing can kill a movie like your good guy going bad. What doesn’t help is your good guy going bad and wearing eyeliner while sporting a really bad Emo haircut. The bad boy strut down a crowded New York street, though, is quite hilarious.
Not so hilarious is the terrible script. If this movie had been about 45 minutes shorter, I think it may have gotten a little less confused. The action scenes are great—far better than the first two put together. The love triangle (or square, rather) is OK. The slapstick comedy parts are decent, but the balance among the three gets pretty rocky.
No matter how weak the script, SPIDER-MAN 3 definitely looks incredible on Blu-Ray. If you are going to rent it, and you or your friends have a Blu-ray player, watch it this way. Even the boring stills gallery looked amazing.
A good movie grabs you by the guts. A very good movie grabs your brain. And a great movie does both. AMERICAN GANGSTER is great.
It’s a suspenseful action- and violence-packed film. But it’s also a morality play that takes place in that gray area where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad and right from wrong.
On the one had, you have Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a real-life drug dealers who flooded Harlem with cocaine in the early 1970s. On the other, you have Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the cop who brought him down. Ironically, they have more in common than not, including Horatio Alger pasts and single minded determination to succeed.
The first time you see Lucas, he puts a match to an enemy he’d doused with lighter fluid and then pumps several bullets into him. Later, in the middle of the day on a busy Harlem street, he cold bloodedly murders a competitor. Lucas just puts a gun to the man’s head, fires and calmly walks back to the restaurant where he’d been eating to finish his meal.
Clearly, Lucas is evil incarnate. But there is something else almost admirable about him. He built a large business from scratch by supplying a better product at a cheaper price. He cut the middleman out and created an operation that could easily serve as a case history for the Harvard Business Review. And he did all in the face of potentially lethal competition.