Junto Boys

MARCH/APRIL MOVIES

I don't hand out the coveted Stamper (+) this month. I think my expectations were too high.

THE LONGEST YARD (1974) – I saw this as a kid, but after Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper and the other good ole boy films. It’s a comedy early on with some of the same kinds of scenes, but Eddie Albert’s warden character is a lot more serious than the way they try these things today. It sets up the movie as the smart-ass versus the bad-ass as Burt Reynolds glib manner puts him deeper and deeper into trouble. The basic plot is Reynolds was once a pro-bowl quarterback who punches a few cops and winds up in the pokey. He plans on doing his short stretch with minimal effort. Eddie Albert wants Reynolds to help him coach his football team of prison guards. After one thing and another Reynolds puts together a team of inmates to give the guards a warm-up game and that game becomes the resolution to the film. Seeing it today, I realize that it’s not as realistic as I once remembered, but it’s certainly one of Reynolds better roles and films.

EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU (1996) – Only Woody Allen could make a 30s musical with modern day actors and locales. He puts together a great cast with Goldie Hawn, Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton joining himself and frequent player Alan Alda. You even get young Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts for good measure. The movie centers around the conventional romance between Barrymore and Norton and how bleeding heart Goldie Hawn helps get hoodlum Tim Roth released from jail. Of course, Roth proceeds to woo Barrymore away from Norton, much to even the bleeding hearts dismay. Lucas Haas plays the son of Alda and Hawn who is a staunch conservative to the surprise of both parents, luckily it turns out that he has a brain tumor that is causing this. Roberts is Allen’s love interest. Though he has a few sparks with ex-wife Hawn too. The plot is silly, but the song selection is great. The title comes from a tune the Marx Brothers used as a running gag in MONKEY BUSINESS (1932). We even get a scene of guys dressed as Groucho doing a number on New Year’s Eve.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965) – John Le Carre as an author is a great representation of a liberal democracy so assured of itself that it allows contrarians to question the legitimacy of the cold war and western intelligence gathering techniques. I wonder if it ever bothered Le Carre that Soviet Writers attempting to make the same moral equivalence would have wound up in the Gulag? Here Richard Burton plays a British spy that pretends to go off the reservation in order to be recruited as a double agent. He winds up in the East Germany where an ex-Nazi and a Jew have their own inner-communist political battle that Burton becomes a part of. Le Carre’s point seems to be that we’re no better than them because we’ll use ex-Nazi’s as our agents inside East Germany even if those Nazis are trying to kill Jewish commies. I appreciate the efforts that a Le Carre must labor in order to make the Soviets our moral equals, but it’s mischievous to convolute such a plot while ignoring what a Soviet writer like Solzhenitsyn went through for expressing the reality of the USSR. I can imagine the fun that Le Carre had preaching the people’s paradise as he sat in his quiet English garden.

CONSTANT GARDNER (2005) Hey, look. Old Le Carre is back post cold war with a story about “evil” corporations. Now let’s remember that Le Carre spent a career equating us with the Soviets, a regime that killed people wholesale at a much greater number than the Nazis. But at least they weren’t making a profit. Now, I think I read the book was actually about the tobacco industry or some other liberal hobby horse, but since pharmaceutical companies have really yet to take their knock in Hollywood, this story was re-made so that their good acts wouldn’t go unpunished. Despite the politics, I was ready to give the movie a chance because Ralph Fiennes is always good and Rachel Weiss won the Oscar and I would have enjoyed a suspense film if at least the action was pulled off properly. But this movie was as thin as the soup that Stalin served the prisoners. Fiennes who can play alpha male or doddering fool gets to be the fool here and we get to think his hippy wife (Rachel Weiss) married him just to further the “cause.” It’s told in flashback, despite Syd Field’s warning, with Fiennes using the past to try and figure out if Weiss’ death was foul play. I suppose the conclusion of the film is just another chapter in how the little guy is punished severely and the big boys are given just a mild scolding. But the biggest mystery is not what happened to Weiss on screen, but off. I can’t figure out why she was even nominated, let alone won an Oscar for this routine performance. Can anyone name even an eye twitch or chin shift that Weiss hasn’t already shown us in ABOUT A BOY, THE MUMMY or ENEMY AT THE GATES? They show her naked pregnant, but it had to be makeup because she’s currently pregnant. Was that so daring that it was worth an Oscar or did they just love it that Merck was taking it on the chin? Now you’d think that a group such as Hollywood that probably uses VIAGRA like Pez might find some sympathy with Pfesier or maybe they blame such companies for their own addiction. Poor oh Amy Adams that gave a really plucky performance in JUNEBUG, one that should be longer remembered. Anyway, I’m 0-4 with Le Carre. I first saw the RUSSIA HOUSE with Connery and Pfeffier and it was a yawn. I rented the BBC mini-series “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and there wasn’t much entertainment value there either. Maybe Le Carre is just a rightwing hoax masquerading as a progressive in order to see if liberals will applaud even the thinnest attempts at entertainment if they’re in the name of “the cause.”

WALK THE LINE (2005) –I haven’t been out to a movie since last June and the movies like this I would have normally seen at release are starting to trickle into NetFlix. Of all the things I read about this movie, the most obvious point I never heard. This is simply a movie about Johnny chasing June all over creation until she consents to marry him. Even the obligatory childhood scene has J.R. (Johnny) listening to ten year old June on the radio singing with her family. The music is there, of course, and we even get an Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, and I think a Carl Perkins along for the ride. I can’t fault the Academy for giving an Oscar to Witherspoon, she plays it with an array of emotions, distractions and conflicts while being strong and feminine. It’s the exact opposite of Rachel Weiss’ one-note effort in GARDNER. Jaquin Pheonix doesn’t look like Johnny Cash, but he is such a likable actor and so committed to any role that you certainly forgive this pretty early on. Trish noted how mean Cash’s father (Terminator II ala Robert Patrick) is portrayed and I told her that Johnny is really nice about his father in the auto-bio saying they were tough times and he had the strain of trying to feed his family during the depression. Patrick gives a really strong performance as the old man, especially if you saw his turn a couple of years ago on the Sopranos as an everyman who gets into gambling debts with the mob. The movie was about what I thought it would be, a standard enough biopic that rises above the genre with good music and strong performances.

SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005) – The Squid and Whale is a horrible title and heavy handed symbolism, but the film plays much more nuanced. I’m a big fan of Noah Baumbach’s debut effort the 1995 comedy, KICKING AND SCREAMING. While that was his part autobiographical look at college life, this movie goes further back into childhood and explores the breakup of the marriage and the effect on the kids who witness it. Laura Linney was a great choice for the mother, because she has that pretty and yet plain quality simultaneously. She becomes whatever her facial expression is. Jeff Daniels is one of those overlooked second-tier actors that can usually find an interesting thing about any character with nonverbal reactions. I always think back to his portrayal as Joshua Chamberlain in GETTYSBURG. Chamberlain was the least interesting character in the book and yet Daniels makes him the equal of Longstreet and Lee. In this film, Daniels is the professor once up and coming that drifted into has been or never was. Laura Linney is the wife that becomes a writer under the shadow of Daniels and a more successful one. If the competition between writers wasn’t enough, Linney’s constant cheating makes him even more bitter and vindictive. The opening scene has the couple playing doubles tennis with their two kids. Daniels tells his oldest son to take advantage of his mother’s weak backhand and the match is won with three straight points hit to her weak side, one of which hits her person. You begin thinking Daniels is a creep, but when you learn that he has been living with her cheating you are more sympathetic. But then Daniels behaves terribly toward the kids and you don’t know who to root for. The point, I guess, is that it’s hard to know whose fault these things are, which lets everyone off the hook in the end.

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (2005) – Making my way through the list of 2005 award winners brought the acclaimed George Clooney offering. Clooney decided to shoot the film in that period black and white to resemble the way we may have seen clips of Edward R. Murrow on TV. The point of the movie is to drive home for the umpteenth time that Joe McCarthy was a louse and he nearly ruined America. Thankfully, Clooney assumes we already know this about McCarthy so here we simply see Murrow take issue with wild and unsubstantiated statements made by McCarthy. It was a hell of an idea that Murrow had, really. I suppose Clooney was dismayed that John Kerry’s many misstatements about his war record weren’t fully covered during the 2004 campaign and he wanted to remind the press that they have duty to uncover the real record. When McCarthy claimed that 200 people in the state department were agents of the Soviet Union, I kept thinking about John Kerry claim that he was on an illegal mission to Cambodia sanctioned by the Nixon Administration during the Christmas of 1968. It was seered in his memory, was it not? Where was Murrow to ask Kerry why President-elect Nixon wielded such power? Good job, Clooney, you made your point well. My favorite part of the film were the nuances that captured the flavor of 1950s culture and corporate life. That Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. must pretend not to be married in order to retain their CBS jobs provides a few laughs. The smoking commercials add nice flavor as well. The shame of Joe McCarthy is that he has become the goat that the Left uses to stain the entire anti-communist era in America. It’s the equivalent of summing up the whole Civil Rights struggle based on Jesse Jackson’s race-pimping and corporate shakedowns. Every big cause has its opportunists and that the Left continues to return to McCarthy would suggest that he was the last powerful man to try those tactics when they themselves have learned to use them oh so sweetly. If Clooney must make a point about the red scare, I’d like to see him tackle the Chambers/Hiss case which was actually a much bigger deal back when the intelligencia pegged Hiss as an innocent man. That outrage has quietly faded since the release of the Venona Papers. Coincidently, the release of the Venona Papers showed that McCarthy's claim of numerous communists in the state Department was just about right although he never knew it. It's to Clooney's credit that he'd let the real McCarthy speak. Clooney's issues with that aspect of the cold war are honest enough that he doesn't need the Randy Quaid to play up all the caricatured aspects that the Left would have loved. The result was that we were able to decide how much of a menace he really was and the real McCarthy hardly seemed dangerous compared to the monster we always hear about. He seems about as opportunistic as any current guy on Capitol Hill. It's a shame that Clooney is mired in bugaboos when he is such a talented and engaging screen personality with a great eye for directing. Movies last forever while fashionable causes gently fade away. I, for one, am glad that Cary Grant didn't spend his time making a film about FDR's court packing scheme or his supposed foreknowledge of Pear Harbor.

UP AT THE VILLA (2000) – What’s Sean Penn doing with all of these ex-pat Brits living in Tuscany? They needed a tough rouge that’s what. Kristen Scott Thomas spends the movie with other men to simply keep herself from Penn. Therefore we have to wait the whole movie to feel like Penn “earned” her when we really know he had her at “ciao.” Early on we get to see some Florentine exteriors, and all through we see some countryside shots, but you get the feeling that a London soundstage hosts the most. Derek Jacobi turns up as the flaming Brit all bitchy like heroine’s generally flock to. Edward Fox plays the too old suitor that Thomas should and won’t marry. Anne Bancroft plays a princess of some sort all full of eccentricities and gossip. Without giving away the plot, Thomas denying the rogue Penn sets her on a course that only Penn can rescue her from. There’s a nice shot early on from a church across the Arno River that Trish and I found last year. That probably had more to do with us finishing the film than anything else. It was all based on a novella by M. Somerset Maugham of Razor’s Edge fame.

TUCKER (1988) – I was suckered into Tucker when I saw it in the theatre. It has a funhouse style and some winning performances from the likes of Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau. But looking back, the style is really a subtraction to a bio piece, but I suppose it was necessary when the bio part if so removed from reality that reviewers might point it out. History sees Tucker as more con man than visionary, while Coppola portrays him as a victim of corporations and crooked politicians. You’re allowed to, I think, when anyone is the “little guy.” Now I’m not trying to be too harsh on what is a fun movie, but I’m just mad at myself for falling for the mythology the first time around.
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If I had to name the top 3 of the month they would be:

SQUID AND THE WHALE
WALK THE LINE
EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU