Junto Boys

MOVIES SINCE JULY Part 1

I have such a backlog that I will release in portions.

LONG WAY ‘ROUND (2005) Documentary about Ewan McGregor and pal Charlie Boorman (son of direction John Boorman) riding their motorcycles from France to the New York city heading through some of the most desolate counties of Asia along the way. The journey is broken into episodes for British TV and runs around 6 hours total. They encounter a lot of unforeseen problems like roads that don't exist and no bridges over strong rivers. They get to eat a lot of nasty food and grow beards. When they fly from Siberia to Canada and get to shop in a real store you remember why the rustic loses its charm after a short period of time. Boorman and McGregor both come off a decent guys seeking adventure and it was compelling throughout.

LAUREL CANYON (2002) - I’ve come to think that Christian Bale is one of film’s finest modern actors. I can’t name a bad performance and he usually seems to lift the material he’s in. So I decided to that I reached back to see this one despite mixed reviews. Bale’s mother (Francis McDormand) is a record producer in Los Angeles and we learn that Bale escaped that life to study medicine out east and to become an adult. At the beginning of the film he and his fiancée (Kate Beckinsale) travel back out to L.A. so that he can take an internship and Beckinsale can write her Doctoral thesis. They plan to stay in McDormand’s vacant house in Laurel Canyon, but they arrive to find that mother has given her primary residence beach house to the ex boyfriend, so everyone gets to stay in the Laurel house like a big family, and that family includes the band that mother is currently producing. A couple of love triangles are introduced and nothing exciting really happens. It feels like a typical TV show that isn’t quite interesting enough to love but not quite bad enough to turn off.

3:10 to YUMA (2007) - Bale again as a poor rancher and disabled Civil War veteran. It’s a remake of the a 50s film that I haven’t seen with Van Heflin and Glenn Ford. The movie begins with Bale's money problems and the understanding creditors burning down his barn. The family shoos out the cattle and the next day is spent retrieving them. During that quest, he happens upon Russell Crowe and his band of rowdies robbing the stagecoach. After they vamos Bale drags the lone survivor Peter Fonda back into town where they easily capture Crowe. That’s the easy part. The tough part is getting Crowe several hundred miles to the train station and on to jail while trying to allude Crowe’s gang. Bale tags along to make money to save the ranch. As the journey goes forward a bunch of the posse members taunt Crowe and he kills them with whatever tools possible. Bale doesn't like Crowe but he's respectful enough that Crowe begins to admire him anyway. I guess Crowe longs to be an honest man married to an honest woman. It’s kind of a funny throwback to the movie device where gunslingers were so fast and accurate that they were untouchable. I don’t think I have seen that approach since UNFORGIVEN won best picture.

HOT FUZZ (2007) From the guys who gave us the underrated SHAUN OF THE DEAD, this time our hero is an man-of-action cop exiled to a sleepy English hamlet. But all is not what it seems. There are some real laughs here, a couple of twists, some decent action, and like their last effort much gore for the sake of gore. You’ll see a lot of faces you’ll recognize from other British movies and TV shows. The consensus at work is that this is better than Shaun. I don‘t know. I think the newness of Shaun was part of the charm. I probably needed to see this first to like it better.

HITCH (2005) - I was ready to skip this, but Will Smith was so good in PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS that I dialed it up. The charm of Smith and Kevin James carries the movie pretty well because the plot is standard enough fare about being true to one’s self and while winning over women. Typical vehicle movie that doesn’t offend.

SYLVIA (2006) - Gwynneth Paltrow plays the clinicly depressed poet Sylvia Plath. I know so little about poetry that I figured this thing to take place in 1890 and was surprised to see motorcars. It turns out that she lived in the 1950s. Typical biopic of troubled genius with Paltrow doing that pouty dowdy thing she does when she slouches and frowns. It has good stretches here and there and then parts that make you uncomfortable. You’re not missing anything if you skip it.

APOCALYPTO (2006) - Mel Gibson has made a movie in a foreign language in the jungle with no recognizable actors and yet it feels as Hollywood as a Tom Cruise picture. The first scene with the hunting party felt authentic enough, but once they got back to the village, Gibson’s sense of humor made the movie seem contemporary. The chases in the jungle built good tension like in a Lethal Weapon movie. It’s violent sometimes for good purpose and other times simply to shock the audience. That savages will sever a guy’s head is not a surprise, but the joy in which these heads are lopped off seemed to be Gibson’s sense of humor more than anything else. The expected approach in a movie like this is to show the noble savage ruined by progress, and although our hero is noble, there are plenty of other savages that could use some good old fashioned imperialism to straighten their butts out. I don’t think he gained anything with the foreign language and it probably cost him a good deal of his audience. Between the way he makes movies and things he says in public, Gibson seems to be more eccentric than we ever knew. What will he do next?

WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2003) -A documentary on the 60s radical group that exploded buildings to protest the war in Vietnam and to protest other social causes that were too slow for their wills. The filmmakers interview the survivors of that period all walking freely in our midst. The work is mostly a straight history that shows archival news coverage and uses the participants interviews to fill in the blanks. It’s an interesting history and occasionally one of the aged hippies would reflect on the nonsense of it all, but I was surprised at how unrepentant some of them were. The documentary sort of skirts the specifics of why these people aren’t in jail now saying that the FBI used illegal tactics to catch them and therefore they were hard to prosecute. The expected thing would have been to show the participants at the end with the amount of jail time they received and their current occupation. Usually I’m happy when I don’t get the expected ending, but in this case I think it was necessary and missing.

STRANGER THAN FICTION (2006) - I don’t get Will Ferrell. He is supposedly funny and makes a living at it by playing two characters, the milquetoast coward and the clueless braggart. Didn’t Bob Hope already do this and more effectively? I don’t mind Ferrell much as a supporting player or in a cameo, but they annoy me too often by casting him as the lead. Of course, it may be that my avoiding his films has kept me from appreciating the real genius in the ones I miss. Maybe the NASCAR spoof was the LAWRENCE OF ARABIA of modern comedies. Stranger than Fiction purported to be a real story with humor rather than a cartoon with plot points. They cast Emma Thompson and Maggie Gyllenhall and they both demand to see scripts with characters and situations that people could actually wind up in. Although this is a fantasy farce it still seems more grounded than someone hiring that over the top Will Ferrell to anchor the news. The premise is that Ferrell is not a real person, but a character in a novel by Thompson that becomes self aware as he somehow hears Thompson’s words describe his every action. Gyllenhall is the love interest that cowardly Ferrell pursues in the book. Funny enough idea, but Ferrell’s self discovery becomes tedious as he hears his every move read by Thompson to the point of my annoyance. After we get past the initial slips, the movie isn’t all that bad, but it could have shined brighter with Steve Martin or Dana Carvey in the leading role. I won’t spoil the resolution except to say that Ferrell somehow winds up in a literature professor’s office who is watching an interview with Thompson so that Ferrell can discover that Thompson is the voice in his head. So how does that even exist in Ferrell’s world unless Thompson had written it in her universe? It really gives you added respect for a movie like PLEASANTVILLE that combines these fantasy elements while staying within the logic of that universe.